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
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the 2004 timeframe when you were leaving this company. When you left, what did you do? Ben Hodson: I had the entrepreneur bug. I was saying, “Oh my gosh, I really want to do another company, but I need to find a problem that I believe in and care
Navigating Multiple Product Pivots: Jebbit CEO Tom Coburn (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What did you do after the pivot? Tom Coburn: We try to not talk about 2014 to 2015 because they were very hard years. I remember the Board meeting at the end of 2013 where I said, “We have $1.7 million in the bank. We need to pivot this idea to something different.”
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Did you get the funding first before building the product or vice versa? Ben Hodson: We built the product for the funding. It would not have gotten the funding if it weren’t for the product and the first customer. We had been raising money for a year and a half. I have probably
Navigating Multiple Product Pivots: Jebbit CEO Tom Coburn (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You were recruiting college students. When a brand wanted to do market research, they’d come to your site and you would not only provide them with software to run their surveys but also provide the focus groups. Tom Coburn: Yes. When Dharmesh invested, we were a couple of thousand dollars in revenue. We
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 2)
Ben Hodson: Later, that code ended up evolving into something that could auto-rekey those servers without ever having any downtime. We dubbed it Encryption Management. We hadn’t come up with all of that at the time when we were doing this business plan competition, but that was the seed of that idea. The business plan
Navigating Multiple Product Pivots: Jebbit CEO Tom Coburn (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Where did the $250,000 capital come from? Tom Coburn: Our first investor was Dharmesh who’s the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. Sramana Mitra: I just spoke with Dharmesh this morning. You met Dharmesh through Highland? Tom Coburn: No. We’re very thankful to Dharmesh for being our first investor. That spurred a lot of
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ben Hodson, CEO of JobNimbus (Part 1)
Ben is a serial entrepreneur with a long experience in bootstrapping and fundraising. Read on to see how he has navigated his journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?
Navigating Multiple Product Pivots: Jebbit CEO Tom Coburn (Part 1)
Tom discusses a very important aspect of building a product company: pivots. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Tom Coburn: I was born in a suburb outside of Boston, Massachusetts. It’s where the Boston Marathon
