categories
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 a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 5)
Sramana: When did you start hiring people? What year? Gaurav Khandelwal: I hired the first three in February of 2010. That year, we hired 22 people, all in Houston. Sramana: Where you at in terms of revenue in 2010? Gaurav Khandelwal: In 2009, we doubled our revenue from 2008, and in 2010, we tripled our
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 4)
Sramana: Who were you going after in terms of clientele? Gaurav Khandelwal: In the beginning, I was going after companies that had an appetite for innovation. Primarily, they were small and medium businesses. I often ran into entrepreneurs who were looking to build their ideas into the next big thing. This was happening in 2008
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 3)
Sramana: What specifically did you do when you launched ChaiOne? Who was your first customer? Gaurav Khandelwal: I was dating a girl at the time who is now my wife. She was working at Microsoft and called me on a Friday night frantic. Her boss needed something done by Monday morning and it was something
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 2)
Sramana: Paying off all of your college debt is not a bad exit from your first company! Gaurav Khandelwal: I agree that it was very timely. It also gave me a taste for entrepreneurship. After I graduated, I went to work for a consulting firm in New York. I quickly found out that I could
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is an interesting strategy discussion about a company that is doing substantial revenue based on services, has productized a piece of its services business that is also generating over a million in revenue. Where next? Sramana: Gaurav, let’s go to the beginning of your story.
Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 7)
Sramana: Can you give us some use cases as examples? Adam Singolda: One example that I really like is Ancestry.com. It is a brilliant example of the future. Today 70% of the $110 billion in advertising are ROI performance-driven spends. The likelihood of that changing is very small. Ancenstry.com offers subscription services and they are
Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 6)
Sramana: At what point did you find your product market fit and business model? Adam Singolda: In December of 2011. At that point, we felt we had the best engine in the world to predict what content people like to consume next. Most companies have 20 or 30 algorithms they will apply to do some
Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 5)
Sramana: What was your next milestone after 5min? Adam Singolda: Our next goal was to attract big brand publishers. The problem was that I had no idea how to make money. We could not make it scale to the point of relevancy to big businesses. That is when I decided to leave the tech side