The Accelerator Conundrum: Impact on Global GDP

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus

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Forbes Column 08: Bootstrapping, Montana Style

We have just started publishing The Montana Mogul, an interview with RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte, who has bootstrapped an over $100-million-a-year public company headquartered in Bozeman, Montana.

Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 13)

SM: What does it cost to buy a SuccessFactors solution? LD: It ranges. We have multi-million dollar deals. We just told Wall Street (because we want to ensure they know we have a good future so we did something we normally would not do) that in the first 5 weeks of 2008 we did a

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 13)

SM: What is your take on the Street’s understanding of how to analyze SaaS companies. Why are SaaS companies down so much? MG: It is coming around. I think SaaS gets put in the same bucket as tech. Right now there is a lack of visibility and understanding of how the future is going to

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 12)

SM: How many engineers worked on the new product? MG: We don’t break out how many engineers work on what products. SM: The reason I am asking that question is more intelligent than it sounds. SaaS companies have a big operational overhead to come to market and get established, but then additional products are not

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 9)

SM: What is your growth strategy? CL: Growing a network is pretty straightforward. You build out the sales team and you add more publishers. We plan to continue on these core aspects while establishing more specialization, new products and barriers to entry. We have plenty of room for growth both in publisher audience base (there

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Online Travel and Orbitz, Expedia, Priceline

I wondered earlier if Priceline (PCLN) would reach its all-time dot.com high of $104/share ever again. The company not only reached the target but exceeded it, and is currently trading at $120/share. Priceline recently posted earnings for Q3 totaling $104.4 million versus $48.8 million in the same period a year ago. Excluding one-time items, Q3

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Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 11)

SM: I was reading an article about how a lot of startups are using credit cards to finance their early days. American Express is a very common way of financing startups, and I have used it myself. JH: Rene used to use that as well. It was a big day when he got his name

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