categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
entrepreneur journeys
Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Britt, get us to the point where you launched Dow Janes. How did you get yourselves off the ground? Britt Baker: It’s the fall of 2019. I have another job at that time that I decided was not my passion. I’d be going to dinner parties and cocktail parties and everyone would ask
Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 1)
Facebook gets a tremendous bad rap for its many nefarious side effects. Numerous small businesses, however, have been possible because of Facebook’s incredible Ad engine. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What is the story leading up to this? We’ll
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the other side of the business. What go-to-market strategy did you go with that? Scott Sellers: The product is called Platform Prime. It is based on open source technology. It’s the same OpenJDK that the open-source Zulu comes from. To that, we add proprietary elements that make it better. It
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: The open-source was a commercial open source business model where the free product was lead generating for a subscription-based offering? Scott Sellers: Right. We still have free downloads of the open-source software. We encourage people to use it in an unrestricted manner. The business monetization model is selling commercial support services, which include
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: From 2002 to 2008, you already had a lot of VC in the company. It’s already six years, so the VCs are starting to get antsy. How did you handle that? Scott Sellers: It was one of the most challenging aspects. We needed to change our investor base. The current investors had invested
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get the first product out? Scott Sellers: It always takes longer than you think, especially in the world of hardware and chip design. The first product was released in the early part of 2005. It was a good solid three years. Sramana Mitra: Did you have
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How did you spin the Java story? Scott Sellers: The other two founders worked for a company called Shasta Networks. This was in the late 90s. It was a cable and DSL model termination system. They built an appliance to do this. They put together the hardware and wrote a ton of software
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What was your role in that founding team? Scott Sellers: I was in the hardware engineering team. I managed the team and did a lot of coding and Verilog to do the chip design. We did all of our backend chip design in-house. I sat on the Board and raised money. It’s always
