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An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 2)
Sramana: Essentially you wanted to execute on a business strategy that was already proven as a way of reducing risk. How did you get yourself off the ground? Curt Keller: It would have taken a lot of money to do all the programming in the U.S. I made a conscious decision to find good resources
An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Curt Keller is the founder and CEO of Benchmark Email, a global email marketing services company. After buying his first business in 2000, Keller grew Benchmark Email from a small operation with a handful of employees to a multinational company offering email marketing services for English,
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Google made a tricky situation work. Paul Doscher: They also held to a hiring standard that was not heard of before then. SM: The real issue is that power struggle. They had a mature understanding between Eric, Larry, and Sergey about how the power was going to be shared. Mark Zuckerberg had a
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 6)
Sramana: The problem with young founders is that they do not know what they don’t know. Paul Doscher: That is exactly right! Sramana: I was in that category. When I was going through that process, there was a big limit to how much I knew. Paul Doscher: When you face that situation, you can deal
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 5)
Sramana: It sounds like the first two scenarios were pretty much exact opposites of each other. What was the third experience of replacing the founder as CEO like? Paul Doscher: The third scenario was, unfortunately, a bit of a train wreck. A new CEO role was mandated by the board. There was no passive-aggressive behavior
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 4)
Sramana: How many times have you replaced founders as the CEO? Paul Doscher: Three times. Each time I have been a CEO, I have replaced a founder. Sramana: In each of those three scenarios, what was the situation you came into, and how did you both navigate the scenarios? Paul Doscher: The first situation was
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 3)
Sramana: What is the genesis of Lucid? What was the premise of the company? Paul Doscher: Lucid Imagination is the commercial software company that supports and sponsors the Apache projects Lucene and Solr. They are the leading open source technologies around enterprise search. The company was founded in November 2008 by some of the original
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 2)
Sramana: Where were you located when you worked at all of these companies in the Northeast? Paul Doscher: I moved to the West Coast after Business Objects. I became a vice president at Oracle for a $400 million business unit. I was traveling a lot and living a bi-coastal life. I still had my sons