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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
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? You’ve had one successful exit. You’re in a financially comfortable position. You’ve built a second company that is also bootstrapped and very profitable. You’re still fairly young. What do you want to do with your business? How are you thinking about your choices and options now? Fred
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What are the milestones of this business? By how much did it scale? How fast did it scale? What kind of strategy did you follow to make it grow? Fred Hsu: What we wanted to do at first was to basically get a good sense of the market and establish a few key
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: In 2009, you were out. What did you do next? Fred Hsu: I moved out of LA. I married and had two kids. I raised them for a couple of years and got the entrepreneur itch again. Then in about 2010, I met up with an old college friend called Kai. He was
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How many people did you need to make this equation work? Fred Hsu: We had a peak of about 225 employees across three or four locations. Sramana Mitra: What function required a lot of people? At some level, it sounds like if you’re doing all this by technology, it’s not probably that people-intensive
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Is this the company that you’re running now? Fred Hsu: No, that company was actually called Oversee. It had started around 2000. It was completely bootstrapped. Our first investor was my mom. She helped us buy our first server. That company grew from zero to eventually $230 million in annual revenues from 2000 to
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Fred has bootstrapped two companies with huge amounts of revenue. The first, he sold to a private equity firm. The second, he is still running. Amazing story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s get started at the beginning of your personal story. Where
Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to VCs, you had proof of concept, plenty of customer feedback, and you were a proven quantity as far as the VCs are concerned. I imagine raising money was not very difficult. Ron Bianchini: Right. I loved our Series A round. We basically went back to Menlo and
Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 6)
Ron Bianchini: Because of the incredible offload ratio, we’re able to build a clustering flash-based product that gives you some incredible performance levels. You can put that in front of a disk-based product, ideally a clustering disk-based product, and build out a system that gets the performance of flash with the cost point of disk. Sramana Mitra: