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- The Startup Velocity Question
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- Man and Superman
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- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Bootstrapping a Web Hosting Company to $60 Million: Christopher Aker, CEO of Linode (Part 5)
Sramana: Is there any kind of segmentation where you get the most customer traction? You have a fairly sizeable business at this point. What is the distribution of your customer base? Are there any sizing or vertical segments amongst your customer base? Christopher Aker: We track all of that stuff and we compare every couple
Bootstrapping a Web Hosting Company to $60 Million: Christopher Aker, CEO of Linode (Part 4)
Sramana: You launched Linode in 2003. How did the company revenue ramp over time? Christopher Aker: For the first few years, we were constrained by the number of machines we could put online. We still managed to do 200% to 400% revenue growth year-over-year. It is a lot easier to do that when the numbers
Bootstrapping a Web Hosting Company to $60 Million: Christopher Aker, CEO of Linode (Part 3)
Sramana: Did you have any market validation of your new hosting business mode? Christopher Aker: I knew that it was going to work. I was very sure of it. Success by my measure then was maybe $100,000 in revenue a year in managed wordpress plans. Sramana: Were you doing all of this out of Nashville?
Bootstrapping a Web Hosting Company to $60 Million: Christopher Aker, CEO of Linode (Part 2)
Sramana: What were you doing at HealthStream? Were you part of the early team in any way? Christopher Aker: I was a technical employee and I was able to go through the IPO ride while I was there. We did not make any money there. We were the last tech company to go public just
Bootstrapping a Web Hosting Company to $60 Million: Christopher Aker, CEO of Linode (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Chris had many opportunities to raise money along the way while bootstrapping to a $60 million revenue level. Find out why he chose not to. Sramana: Chris, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Tell me where you are from and set the stage for
Bootstrapping Using Services to $15 Million in Venture Capital: Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq (Part 7)
Sramana: You have described an IT organization that is disjointed. You have a new model, IT as a supply chain. How do you actually solve the IT problem? What are you doing for a customer that makes the transition to IT supply chain? Mohammed Farooq: We discover what any of the business units have purchased
Bootstrapping Using Services to $15 Million in Venture Capital: Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq (Part 6)
Sramana: The bottom line is that you still have a lot of marketing to do to educate enterprises about the transformations you enable. Mohammed Farooq: Yes, we do. Last year, we had a lot of work to do in this space, and this year, we are finally getting closer. People are starting to understand how
Bootstrapping Using Services to $15 Million in Venture Capital: Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq (Part 5)
Sramana: Let’s talk about your financing strategy. You raised a round in 2012 and another in 2013. How many customers did you have by the time you raised your first round? Mohammed Farooq: We had three customers. Texas was our largest customer because they had six different agencies, so it’s almost like we had six