Bootstrapping an Online Education Company to $12M: Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard (Part 3)

Sramana: Once you realized your business was not making a revolutionary change, what were your first reactions and steps? Aaron Skonnard: The most immediate was a feeling that I did not want to continue doing what I was doing. I did not want to spend the rest of my life doing something I had lost

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Bootstrapping an Online Education Company to $12M: Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard (Part 2)

Sramana: Let’s trace the journey of your company. When did you start your first company? Aaron Skonnard: Coming out of school I worked as a programmer for three years at larger companies. I worked at Microsoft, 3M, and Intel. I worked for those companies as a developer before I found a smaller company in Utah

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Bootstrapping an Online Education Company to $12M: Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Aaron is a co-founder of Pluralsight, where he serves as the chief executive officer. Aaron has spent years developing course materials and teaching professional developers throughout the world. He has presented at many popular developer conferences like PDC, TechEd, and VSLive! Microsoft recognized Aaron as an

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Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 7)

Sramana: How much capital has gone into this company? You spent $100,000 to launch. Did you have to add more capital? Mithun Sacheti: We did. We had to put in some capital to launch and then periodically added more. In 2011 we got funded by Tiger Global.

Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 6)

Sramana: Essentially you are walking a tightrope with your messaging. People need to know that you have the best price, but they can’t be perceived as being cheap for shopping at CaratLane. Is that fair? Mithun Sacheti: Yes. I think we will hit the best price solely because of the number of vendors we have.

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Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 5)

Sramana: By 2009 you had started going deeper into the supply chain and were reaching cutters directly. How did 2009 end for your business? Mithun Sacheti: We ended at around $3 million in revenue. We had around 90,000 diamonds listed at that point. We had really developed our international pipeline by then. If at any

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Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 4)

Sramana: What kind of capital requirements did you have to get the business launched? Mithun Sacheti: We budgeted $500,000 between the two of us. We were determined to launch the business once we had spent that amount regardless of where we were, and determined that once we had spent that amount, we would sit down

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Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 3)

Sramana: How did you go about developing your diamond aggregation pipeline? Did you primarily rely on your family’s history and contacts? Mithun Sacheti: Aggregating diamond suppliers in India alone was not enough. We needed to be everywhere. We had to go deep and get inventory from Hong Kong, Israel, New York, Antwerp, and Bombay. Those

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