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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
Sabrina Parsons
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 7)
Sramana: What are your thoughts on the family ties with the business? Sabrina Parsons: My husband works at the business, and I agree that you have to keep business and personal relationships as separate as possible. One of the things I love about the family business is that I feel it allows me flexibility in
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 6)
Sramana: I assume that because you are a private company with a strong track record, you are a profitable company? Sabrina Parsons: We have been profitable for quite some time. There were some building years when Tim first started the company but for the past 10 to 15 years we have strong track record of
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 5)
Sramana: Did you take a revenue hit from 2007 to 2009? Sabrina Parsons: We took a small hit, but it was not that much. We really focused on our core strengths online. We did not start building the new SaaS application at the time that we wanted to simply because we did not have the
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 4)
Sramana: In 2001 the market crashed, which impacted a lot of businesses. What did you do when you saw the trend annual revenue increases for your business stop and move the other way? Tim Berry: I waited too long to do anything. We dropped five salaries on the same day a few months later. I
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 3)
Sramana: How were customers finding you? How did you generate all of those downloadable sales? Tim Berry: At that point it was a nice convergence of retail and web. We were buoyed by good reviews in magazines like PC World, Entrepreneur, and Inc. As the web grew, those reviews became links. We had a full-time
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 2)
Sramana: When did you actually start making a real business out of the software? Tim Berry: This really is one of those “darkest moments before dawn” stories. By 1994 the template business had failed in retail. We had a $250,000 liability for returns. We had boxes and boxes of software coming back to us, and
A $14M Bootstrapped Family Business in Eugene, Oregon: Palo Alto Software Founder Tim Berry and CEO Sabrina Parsons (Part 1)
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software, and he is also the originator of plan-as-you-go business planning. He writes at Planning, Startups, Stories, one of the most popular small business blogs. Sabrina Parsons has served as the CEO of Palo Alto Software since 2007. Prior to this role she co-founded a
