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 to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You were getting ready to start something else, but you wanted to develop some sales chops. Where did you do that? Jeremy Swift: I actually told this mentor that he’s crazy. I spent the next year or two warring against that. I finally came back around and this mentor said, “You got to
Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 2)
Jeremy Swift: I worked full-time during the day. I started waning on college. I was talking to advisors and told them about it. An advisor in the Comm department and another from the business department both sat down with me and said, “We understand your personality and what you’re interested in pursuing. We’re going to
Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 1)
A very effective way to dance the entrepreneurial Waltz is to do a bootstrapped company first, sell it, and then do another with a more ambitious agenda. Jeremy’s journey is a great case study in this method. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,
From Teen Student Entrepreneur in Australia to a Mature Global E-commerce Entrepreneur: Mike Rosenbaum, CEO of Spacer (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What are the metrics? How many buy side and how many sell side do you have? Mike Rosenbaum: We have over 50,000 locations across Australia and over 200,000 members on our platform. In the US, we have over 10,000 locations now. It’s growing rapidly. The key thing for us is to keep balancing
From Teen Student Entrepreneur in Australia to a Mature Global E-commerce Entrepreneur: Mike Rosenbaum, CEO of Spacer (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What worked? Mike Rosenbaum: It’s hard to say when we started getting product-market fit. Over time, we just got better and better at targeting the right customers whether that was through Google or Facebook or offline channels. Eventually, it was word of mouth. Now, most of our new supply is people telling other
From Teen Student Entrepreneur in Australia to a Mature Global E-commerce Entrepreneur: Mike Rosenbaum, CEO of Spacer (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Did you launch with your own money? Mike Rosenbaum: We made a lot of mistakes as well. We did okay. I put in some of my money. I had a new co-founder, Roland. He came from private equity background and had a very complementary skillset. He was more of a finance and strategy
Validating B-to-C Business Ideas and Building to $40M Run Rate: Shaunak Amin, CEO of SnackMagic (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2020 when the pandemic hit? Shaunak Amin: At that time, we had two hubs. We had plans to open up five more. Then in March, nobody was in office. That business went to zero overnight. It was unfortunate. I remember it was the second week of March. We said we
From Teen Student Entrepreneur in Australia to a Mature Global E-commerce Entrepreneur: Mike Rosenbaum, CEO of Spacer (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What about customer acquisition? When you’re selling on eBay, eBay provides the foot traffic. Mike Rosenbaum: It was the early days of e-commerce. There was a much smaller number of people shopping online. We had built this large database off eBay which we used to sell direct. We would send emails to them.
