A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What year did this restructuring happen? Bassel Ojjeh: This was in 2014.  Sramana Mitra: LigaData really comes together in 2014. What happens next? Bassel Ojjeh: My biggest focus continues to be profitability. Last year, I was reading something when it struck me, “You want the freedom to innovate and you need to be

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A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Bassel Ojjeh: We got our first few customers. We wanted to counter what the software industry is used to. We went open source. The goal was ubiquity. What we found out fairly quickly is, if you’re selling to traditional companies, they’re not used to buying open source software. It became

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A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who were buying at this point when you were doing this company in the early 2000s? Bassel Ojjeh: I left Yahoo in 2009 and started what I just mentioned to you. That was from 2009 to 2010 onwards. Financial industry, banking, and mobile operators were buying at this point.

A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 2)

Bassel Ojjeh: Backing up, what’s really important when I started my career at the database company in Ohio was coming in and saying, “We’re working out of someone’s house.” At that time, we shipped products. You put it in the box and put it out the door. We had to stop whatever we were doing

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A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Bassel is a serial entrepreneur in the data world and talks about his exciting startup journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?