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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
From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 5)
Sramana: What were the steps that you took to validate your concept? Who was the first customer you went to talk to who resonated with your value proposition? Roman Stanek: I absolutely believe that as much as you can validate a business model there is no substitution for intuition. The opposite applies as well. If
From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 4)
Sramana: Within the B2B framework, your strategy is to get a close to customer business processes as possible. Do you ask customers what their pain points are and design solutions around them? Roman Stanek: That is exactly what I do. I am definitely a B2B person. You need special skills to be a B2C person,
From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 3)
Sramana: You have mentioned a few of the companies that you have founded. What was involved in going from zero to one million dollars in revenue? What were some of the highlights and strategies you used? Roman Stanek: The first company did not actually reach a million dollars in revenue. This is a great question.
From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 2)
Sramana: You were very quick to realize the ability of the Internet to enable entrepreneurship anywhere in the world. Roman Stanek: In a world with the Internet, you can be an entrepreneur and do whatever you want. This was when I started NetBeans, well before Google. When I told people about stock options, they looked
From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 1)
Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a cloud-based business intelligence platform. He is a serial entrepreneur who founded NetBeans and Systinet prior to founding GoodData. He began his career working as a country manager for Powersoft in 1993, followed by a role with Sybase in 1995. Sramana: Roman, where are you from?
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 7)
Sramana: What is your average deal size for your various target segments? Colin Day: There is a one-time fee and then there is a monthly fee. We can work some on the one-time fee but we are fanatical about the monthly fee. Contracted monthly revenue is a big deal for us and that is where
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 6)
Sramana: One thing I know from personal experience as well as the experiences I have learned about from numerous entrepreneurs is that they understand what types of leads to get, how much it costs to get them, and what it costs to qualify and nurture those leads before converting them. That process is the key
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 5)
Sramana: There is no question that the entrepreneur is the key salesperson for the first 50 or 100 customers. This may vary by the type of product, but in general that is a common scenario. Colin Day: That was true in my case. I never thought I would be great at sales, but I did