Forbes Column 08: Bootstrap Yourself

My new Forbes column Bootstrap Yourself highlights Silicon Valley’s hottest new trend, Bootstrapping. Great bootstrapping case studies I have covered are Sridhar Vembu, Frank Levinson and Jerry Rawls, Cree Lawson, and Beatrice Tarka. Sridhar, Frank and Jerry did it almost without any outside money, while Cree and Beatrice have done it with very small rounds

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Catching Up On Readings: Media Mania

If you have missed these posts from my recent writings, today may be a good time to catch up on some reading: First, in the blogosphere, online media, old and new media, advertising – big changes have taken place. Here is a set of posts from the Deal Radar series that might help you make

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India’s Labor Arbitrage Strategy

It has been an interesting few days of being on the receiving end of tremendous hate mail due to my widely syndicated and (looks like) read and discussed Death of Indian Outsourcing article.

Sridhar Vembu: Silicon Valley’s Unknown Indian

The story of Sridhar Vembu’s innovative bootstrapping. A story all entrepreneurs should understand.

Bootstrapping is One Answer

The VC-Entrepreneur Compensation Disbalance post has generated great discussion. In it, a theme that emerges over and again, is Bootstrapping. You have read a few of my prior writings on Bootstrapping [Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy and Again? and Protect Your Dilution]. There is no doubt at all anymore that bootstrapping is, indeed, becoming sexy again.

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 7)

Sridhar’s thesis around Zoho is to ride on top of the market awareness already created by Salesforce.com, Webex and others around On-Demand / SaaS delivery models for business applications like the Office Suite, CRM, Web Conferencing, Project Management, etc. and simply do a dramatic undercutting based on price. He insists that the amount of Sales

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 6)

Here we begin to explore the current status of Zoho a bit further. Impressive numbers considering there has been no advertising campaigns conducted. The business model is simple – let users try the service for free, when they are comfortable they will migrate over. Afterwards, they compete based on pricing (less than 20% of the

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 5)

Interesting comparisons here by Sridhar between the Zoho CRM and the SalesForce CRM products; while SalesForce has a high focus on sales teams (and one of the best telesales teams anywhere in the world), Zoho is simply looking to take a competitive advantage in terms of pricing. According to Sridhar this shows in the construct

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