How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 7)

Sramana: How did the business ramped up from 2005 through 2010? Nick Balletta: We have quadrupled revenues during that amount of time. Our revenues are north of $20 million.

How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 6)

Sramana: After you reacquired the company in 2005, what were the strategic steps you took to build the business?   Nick Balletta: In 2005 we had to make a couple of key decisions. We had a couple of different platforms because of the various machinations of the company. We decided to make a concerted effort to

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How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 5)

Sramana: In 2003 you reacquired the company. Had everything dwindled, or did it still have customers?  Nick Balletta: Yes, it still had customers. Morgan Stanley and Goldman are both still customers. When we dumped the company into a public shell, we ran it public for a year and a half. It was an undercapitalized technology

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How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 4)

Sramana: What was the process of building NextVenue? Was Goldman your first customer? Nick Balletta: CNBC was technically our first customer because we had a take back agreement with them. Morgan Stanley and Goldman were the first who clients we had.

How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 3)

Sramana: What was the story behind iBeam? Why were they so interested in acquiring your company? Nick Balletta: iBeam Broadcasting was involved with media entertainment. They had a similar concept as Akamai with an edge cache network except instead of using terrestrial distribution they used satellite distribution. When they write the book on Silicon Valley

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How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 2)

Sramana: What was your strategy to grow since you were undercapitalized and were not finding an abundance of investors?  Nick Balletta: A former colleague of mine at MFS Communications named Doug Hickey was the CEO of a Global Center which had a similar business model but they were on the west coast. Global Center was

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Child Entrepreneur David Koretz, Now CEO of Mykonos Software (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What did you charge Bertelsmann for that deal and what does your product cost today? David Koretz: We charged them very little because we really wanted the reference. Our product is an enterprise product. We start at 25 thousand dollars and it can range up to 150,000 dollars. Large organizations may have multiple

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How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Nick is CEO of TalkPoint and a pioneer in the fields of unified communications and interactive webcasting. Nick launched his first company, Voyager Data Networks, in 1996 and sold it two years later. Prior he was the founder of NextVenue, a joint venture among Microsoft, NBC,

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