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HOT TOPICS
- 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
From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 2)
Sramana: You were very quick to realize the ability of the Internet to enable entrepreneurship anywhere in the world. Roman Stanek: In a world with the Internet, you can be an entrepreneur and do whatever you want. This was when I started NetBeans, well before Google. When I told people about stock options, they looked
From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 1)
Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a cloud-based business intelligence platform. He is a serial entrepreneur who founded NetBeans and Systinet prior to founding GoodData. He began his career working as a country manager for Powersoft in 1993, followed by a role with Sybase in 1995. Sramana: Roman, where are you from?
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 7)
Sramana: What is your average deal size for your various target segments? Colin Day: There is a one-time fee and then there is a monthly fee. We can work some on the one-time fee but we are fanatical about the monthly fee. Contracted monthly revenue is a big deal for us and that is where
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 6)
Sramana: One thing I know from personal experience as well as the experiences I have learned about from numerous entrepreneurs is that they understand what types of leads to get, how much it costs to get them, and what it costs to qualify and nurture those leads before converting them. That process is the key
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 5)
Sramana: There is no question that the entrepreneur is the key salesperson for the first 50 or 100 customers. This may vary by the type of product, but in general that is a common scenario. Colin Day: That was true in my case. I never thought I would be great at sales, but I did
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 4)
Sramana: What product were you really trying to sell during that time? Colin Day: We have three products today: Connect for passive candidates, Recruit for active candidates, and Onboard for new hires. Back then, our initial product was an applicant tracking system. It was a front-end, back-end system. On the front end we would manage
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 3)
Sramana: That aligns exactly with the 1M/1M philosophy. That is what we want people to do – get to customers and revenues as quickly as possible. Our belief is that entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues and profits. Financing is optional. Colin Day: We were forced to go that route. If I had not received that call,
Bootstrapping to $40 Million: iCIMS CEO Colin Day (Part 2)
Sramana: It’s funny you mention the need for funding. At 1M/1M we are strictly against that point of view. Ideas don’t get funded. You were operating at a time and in a situation where things clicked, but most of the time you need to turn an idea into a business and the business gets funded.