Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped and Later Raised Money from Oregon

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  PayRange Founder Paresh Patel did a superb job of validating in a bootstrapped mode and then raising significant venture capital. However, he made some mistakes after the fund raise. Eventually, he course-corrected and has built a wonderful business without further infusion of capital. Excellent case study!

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is an average deal size from your direct customers? Paresh Patel: It’s very skewed. We have customers whose deal sizes are in the millions. We also have deal sizes that are in the hundreds or thousands. We have customers that have more than a hundred thousand machines with us. Then we have

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Paresh Patel: We started to prepare the company for scale. We had just received our Series A. We got $12 million in the bank. I first hired a COO and then a CFO. We opened up a new office. We messed up. We hired too fast and too big. Too

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The form factor of your product was that you would just clip it on a retail machine? Paresh Patel: The design was remarkably simple. It almost works like a thumb drive. You just take the device and plug it into the machine. In three seconds, it could take that legacy machine and convert

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’ve experienced the use case that you described. The gas station around the corner from me doesn’t have any digital payment option. Paresh Patel: That was the problem. The machine only took cash. Sramana Mitra: Do the gas station people attend these kinds of trade shows?‘

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your Ph.D. in? Paresh Patel: It’s also in e-business and organization management. Sramana Mitra: The vending machine company was yourself? Paresh Patel: There were employees. We grew to about 25 employees.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 1)

Paresh did a superb job of validating in a bootstrapped mode and then raising significant venture capital. However, he made some mistakes after the fund raise. Eventually, he course-corrected and has built a wonderful business without further infusion of capital. Excellent case study! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where

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