Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 2)

SM: Did you raise money to start this venture? GG: We did, but we did it backwards. We poured in our life savings to start the company. We worked out of our house for 9 or 10 months and got the company to be profitable while taking minimal or no salaries.

Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 1)

There are plenty of job search engines out there. So what makes this one an interesting story? It’s their innovation (the first to use the new LinkedIn API), their ability to reach localized job markets (over 30,000 cities), and all while delivering a customized user experience. This is the direction that successful vertical search engines

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Travel Ad Network Raises Series A

Travel Ad Network (TAN), the largest vertical ad network in travel, just closed a $15 million Series A round of financing led by Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and individual investors. And what a Series A it is! $50-$75 Million valuation, estimated in my deal radar post and commensurate with the trends in the industry set

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Your Virtual Travel Concierge Has Arrived : Mobissimo CEO Beatrice Tarka (Part 6)

SM: Could you describe how you go about putting together a team? BT: In my two prior ventures I built strong management teams, sometimes through trial and error. This time I knew what I was looking for in terms of not only experience and background, but in character and personality. You can have the best

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Your Virtual Travel Concierge Has Arrived : Mobissimo CEO Beatrice Tarka (Part 5)

SM: Where are you at now in terms of revenue, profitability, and traffic? BT: The Mobissimo.com site has been operating for three years. We’ve been open to the public since November 2004, and we’ve generating revenue and been profitable since June 2005.

Your Virtual Travel Concierge Has Arrived : Mobissimo CEO Beatrice Tarka (Part 4)

SM: What is your TAM and how do you calculate it? BT: According to Henry Harteveldt Forrester Research’s travel expert, the online travel market represents the highest growing proportion of the overall travel market. Online travel is also the most lucrative. PhoCusWright says that online travel spending reached nearly $100 billion in 2007.

Forbes Column 08: Bootstrap Yourself

My new Forbes column Bootstrap Yourself highlights Silicon Valley’s hottest new trend, Bootstrapping. Great bootstrapping case studies I have covered are Sridhar Vembu, Frank Levinson and Jerry Rawls, Cree Lawson, and Beatrice Tarka. Sridhar, Frank and Jerry did it almost without any outside money, while Cree and Beatrice have done it with very small rounds

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Your Virtual Travel Concierge Has Arrived : Mobissimo CEO Beatrice Tarka (Part 3)

SM: What is the value proposition of Mobissimo? BT: We find the cheapest airfares and we find the best international fares. To synthesize, we simplify the search process by querying multiple Web sites in real time and deliver information that is highly valuable to the user. We make it easier for people to travel.