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
Built to Enjoy: Aptify CEO Amith Nagarajan (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Amith Nagarajan co-founded Aptify in 1993. Aptify provides association and membership management software and solutions globally. Prior to founding Aptify, Amith worked in the R&D laboratories at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California. He graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, with a
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 7)
Sramana: Let’s talk about strategic partnerships. What kinds of deals do you look for? Alon Maor: This is an interesting point you are bringing up. A startup should always consider strategic partnerships because it is very difficult to know what the best channels into the market are. Strategic partners can help you get into the
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 6)
Sramana: You hired two sales people to do market discovery, or essentially to develop a list of 100 potential customers. Talk to me about the characteristics of these two sales people? Typically they need very precise tools to sell. Early stage sales is not quite as clear and this takes a different type of sales
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 5)
Sramana: You were starting your company in Israel and you talked to Silicon Valley VCs. What requirements did they put on you? Alon Maor: They did not put any location requirements on us. We had the philosophy that if you want to build a global company, then you can have a top-level engineering and product
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 4)
Sramana: You went to market with 15 carriers. At what point did you start getting them to pay for products? Alon Maor: We got them to start paying once we had the initial product. That means it had to be a carrier-grade product. They will evaluate the product in a lab. We had a few
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 3)
Sramana: These days investors do not fund concepts. They only fund businesses. That means there needs to be customers buying a product. Alon Maor: In our case, since we are approaching the carrier space which is a large software-based capital intensive project, the incubation we did was through 15 worldwide carrier references. We had endorsements
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 2)
Sramana: One of the big problems that we see in big startup teams is that people just meet and try to do a startup together. That’s like getting married after a one-night stand. It’s a disaster. Alon Maor: What I found out about the team is that it is all about the people. You have
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Alon Maor is the CEO and co-founder of Qwilt, a company that builds products to allow network carriers to create a universal video fabric without interruption or changes to content provider or network infrastructures. Prior to Qwilt, Alon oversaw the development and operations of the Service