categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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
outsourcing
Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: It’s mostly paid search-based customer acquisition – PPC? Peter Mann: That’s how we started. We have a brand that no one has ever heard before. It’s hard to get started and so PPC is the quick way to get up and going. It’s expensive, though. We’re trying to have PR and some other
Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 4)
Peter Mann: Initially, I started with a couple of factories in China and started with those products to get the business started. These were mostly Chinese developed products that I adjusted and branded. It wasn’t really manufactured from the ground-up by us. Shortly thereafter, I started looking at air purifiers. In its simplest form, it’s
Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What happened after Dell? Peter Mann: When I was at Dell, I learned pretty quickly that the culture wasn’t what I was expecting. At the same time, the Internet bubble burst. Dell started going through round after round of layoffs. The morale was low. It was a difficult environment from a cultural perspective.
Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 2)
Peter Mann: Shortly after that, the Gulf War began and so we were sent over the Red Sea for about six months. That was a changing event for me. I got married a year out of college. We got married very young. I missed the last six months of the pregnancy and I missed the
Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Peter Mann started Oransi as a B-to-C e-commerce company. Today, 40% of his $10M revenue comes from China. This is the kind of company America hopes to see more of – selling American products to international consumers. Sramana Mitra: Peter, let’s start with your background. Where
Outsourcing: Ed Cross, Executive Director – Procurement & HRO at Xchanging (Part 7)
Ed Cross: When I was at Pricewaterhouse, I was heavily involved in the area of procurement project consultancy. Exchanges were much heralded and I was very supportive of them but the more I got into them, I observed that they didn’t take off. A lot of them lost ground, went bankrupt, or disappeared. There’s an
Outsourcing: Ed Cross, Executive Director – Procurement & HRO at Xchanging (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: There are some very special exchange offerings in the automotive industry and several other spaces. There are very successful vertical exchanges operating right now doing billions of dollars in transactions. Ed Cross: Probably from the European end, but I see very little activity. It may well be the case that they’re successful in
Outsourcing: Ed Cross, Executive Director – Procurement & HRO at Xchanging (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: I have followed those phases. There is Starbucks doing contract life-cycle management. Then, we have had pretty sizable companies being built in the procurement management systems base like E-vines that now sits inside SAP and several other vertical-focused offerings on procurement exchanges. How do you see that trend evolving? Ed Cross: I wouldn’t want to specifically
