Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 1)

You would think deep tech AI / IoT startups take gobs of venture capital to build. Read on to see how Tim has built an incredibly capital-efficient business with massive growth potential using grant money and revenues. Superb company! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from, born,

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The entity that you sold to private equity was still REDC? Jeff Frieden: That’s right. Sramana Mitra: You bought the Auction.com domain name and rebranded your original entity as Auction.com? Jeff Frieden: Correct. Sramana Mitra: It seems you’re doing hybrid auctions but you’ve expanded from residential distressed properties to commercial distressed properties.

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were still focusing only on real estate? Jeff Frieden: Only on real estate. Then the market crashed in 2007. We were able to pivot very quickly to help out institutions like large banks that had a tsunami of foreclosures coming in when the market blew up. In 2007, we held our first

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You bought these parcels of land and you ran this auction. What was the outcome of the auction? Jeff Frieden: We made a million dollars in one day. Sramana Mitra: Oh, wow! Terrific! Jeff Frieden: There were thousands of people there betting competitively on this land. It was the 1987 to 1988 timeframe.

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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Internet marketing is your primary channel? Rakesh Gupta: Yes. Sramana Mitra: In terms of segments and where you found the most adoption, what segments are you seeing the maximum revenue from? Rakesh Gupta: After that initial journey into financial services and insurance, what we are finding is that we have a very broad

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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of customer acquisition, what customer base did you go after? There’s a bit of a subtlety in that question. Typically, in data services like yours, you tend to have richer data in one particular area or a few particular areas. What was that segmentation that you went with at the beginning?

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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your thesis on it was that it had to be manually kept up to speed? Rakesh Gupta: No, not manually. It has to be efficiently collected but certainly not in the fashion of crowdsourcing. It’s about collecting it in the right way and verifying it independently. Sramana Mitra: So you verify it other

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