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HOT TOPICS
- 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
Bootstrapping Using Services to $15 Million in Venture Capital: Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq (Part 6)
Sramana: The bottom line is that you still have a lot of marketing to do to educate enterprises about the transformations you enable. Mohammed Farooq: Yes, we do. Last year, we had a lot of work to do in this space, and this year, we are finally getting closer. People are starting to understand how
From $3 a Day to Successful Entrepreneur: Tomas Gorny, CEO of Nextiva (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: You had web hosting, email, domains, and you had a suite of widgets that people need to build and host a web business. You were doing it all for a flat price at $7.95 a month. Tomas Gorny: That’s correct. The magic was really in the last statement. The control panel and the widgets
Bootstrapping Using Services to $15 Million in Venture Capital: Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq (Part 5)
Sramana: Let’s talk about your financing strategy. You raised a round in 2012 and another in 2013. How many customers did you have by the time you raised your first round? Mohammed Farooq: We had three customers. Texas was our largest customer because they had six different agencies, so it’s almost like we had six
From $3 a Day to Successful Entrepreneur: Tomas Gorny, CEO of Nextiva (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You had $6,000 in the bank and you used your American Express credit line and started a web hosting company. How did that work? Can you talk a bit more about the early journey of that company? Tomas Gorny: I bought two servers. I was very technically oriented, so I installed them and
Bootstrapping Using Services to $15 Million in Venture Capital: Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq (Part 4)
Sramana: You talked about the work that you did for the State of Texas. What work did you do for IBM? Mohammed Farooq: We took the same model and replicated that with IBM for the State of Indiana. Indiana wanted the same thing and IBM needed help. IBM bought our services and the product that
From $3 a Day to Successful Entrepreneur: Tomas Gorny, CEO of Nextiva (Part 4)
Tomas Gorny: We never went bankrupt. We paid off all the creditors. We filed what is called ABC – assignment for the benefit of creditors. After we filed that, we dissolved the company. In 2001, I was left with no money and was in pretty much the same situation when I came to America. Sramana
Bootstrapping Using Services to $15 Million in Venture Capital: Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq (Part 3)
Sramana: What did you do next? Mohammed Farooq: I decided to move back to Texas. My friends from the State of Texas Governor’s Office had called me back. They wanted to transform Texas technology due to health laws, so I took over as the CTO of Health and Human Services. I drove state wide transformations
From $3 a Day to Successful Entrepreneur: Tomas Gorny, CEO of Nextiva (Part 3)
Tomas Gorny: As a result, while I was building my tech business in the web hosting industry, I was doing whatever it takes – valet car parking, carpet cleaning – to survive. For two years, I lived on $3 a day in terms of food allowance. I even remember days when I didn’t have any