Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 4)

Sramana: What were some of the early keys to success? What did you do right very early on that led you to have a successful business? Dan Roitman: I was fortunate in one key aspect. Very early on I aligned myself with thought leaders. In 2001, after I found out that we would have to

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Letting Customers Design The Product: Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Adam Miller (Part 6)

Sramana:Where you able to use those contracts to obtain working capital financing? Adam Miller: We did two things. Our CFO, Perry Wallack, and I became obsessed with a metric called operating profits also known as operating yields.

Outsourcing 2.0: oDesk CEO Gary Swart (Part 5)

Sramana: Tell me more about the work management portion of your platform. Gary Swart: The management portion is also interesting. We have a lot of customers in the U.S. who are hiring onshore workers. Hiring onshore workers is tricky because companies would like to assume everybody is a contractor, but the IRS would like to

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Outsourcing 2.0: oDesk CEO Gary Swart (Part 4)

Sramana: Tell me more about the demographic and psyche of this community that you have created. Who are your contractors? Are they small companies or freelancers? Gary Swart: We are favorable to individuals. I think of them as remote workers. These are people who do not look for a different gig every day.

Outsourcing 2.0: oDesk CEO Gary Swart (Part 3)

Sramana: How did you go from leaving Intellibank to being the CEO at oDesk? Gary Swart: In the process of raising money at Intellibank I ran into Greg at Sigma, who told me that they liked me but not Intellibank. Sigma then asked me to come run one of their companies. That is why I

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Outsourcing 2.0: oDesk CEO Gary Swart (Part 2)

Sramana: I just hired somebody on oDesk, and the way I structured the project it paid a fixed amount for a project to transcribe 30 interviews. It is staff augmentation, because I need that flexible resource to be able to augment my staff. Gary Swart: You can use it that way; however, the genesis of

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Outsourcing 2.0: oDesk CEO Gary Swart (Part 1)

Sramana: Hi, Gary. Would you begin by talking about the genesis of your story? Gary Swart: Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis, two Greeks, wanted to work together. Odysseas had co-founded Intacct, which was an accounting company, and he had always wanted to hire his friend, Stratis, who lived in Greece.

Addressing America’s Healthcare Human Resource Shortage: DeVry Inc. CEO Daniel Hamburger (Part 6)

SM: Give me an overview of DeVry Inc. businesses from a revenue point of view. DH: Last year DeVry Inc. did $1.46B in revenue. $989M of that was DeVry University including Keller Graduate School of Management. Our medical and healthcare segment, which includes Ross, Chamberlain, Apollo College and Career Western College, reported $363 million.