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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
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 6)
Sramana: I assume that because you are a private company with a strong track record, you are a profitable company? Sabrina Parsons: We have been profitable for quite some time. There were some building years when Tim first started the company but for the past 10 to 15 years we have strong track record of
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 5)
Sramana: Did you take a revenue hit from 2007 to 2009? Sabrina Parsons: We took a small hit, but it was not that much. We really focused on our core strengths online. We did not start building the new SaaS application at the time that we wanted to simply because we did not have the
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 4)
Sramana: In 2001 the market crashed, which impacted a lot of businesses. What did you do when you saw the trend annual revenue increases for your business stop and move the other way? Tim Berry: I waited too long to do anything. We dropped five salaries on the same day a few months later. I
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 3)
Sramana: How were customers finding you? How did you generate all of those downloadable sales? Tim Berry: At that point it was a nice convergence of retail and web. We were buoyed by good reviews in magazines like PC World, Entrepreneur, and Inc. As the web grew, those reviews became links. We had a full-time
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 2)
Sramana: When did you actually start making a real business out of the software? Tim Berry: This really is one of those “darkest moments before dawn” stories. By 1994 the template business had failed in retail. We had a $250,000 liability for returns. We had boxes and boxes of software coming back to us, and
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 1)
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software, and he is also the originator of plan-as-you-go business planning. He writes at Planning, Startups, Stories, one of the most popular small business blogs. Sabrina Parsons has served as the CEO of Palo Alto Software since 2007. Prior to this role she co-founded a
Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 7)
Sramana: Where is your inside sales team located? Pallav Nadhani: They are all in India. Most of them are in Bangalore, although some of them are in Calcutta. Sramana: How has your team evolved and shifted over the past several years? Pallav Nadhani: One of our biggest challenges is that it is very hard to
Bootstrapping Zero to 7M from Kolkata: FusionCharts CEO Pallav Nadhani (Part 6)
Sramana: You said you changed your pricing and started going after mid-sized and other larger customers. How did you manage that process? It can be tricky to change pricing. Pallav Nadhani: We started at $15 and the next year we moved it to $35. After that we went to $99, $250 and finally $500. In