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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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
virtual company
Building a Virtual Company to $20 Million: Rob Cheng, CEO of PC Pitstop (Part 2)
Rob Cheng: I got to know Ted very well throughout that period of time. Ultimately, I introduced him to my friend in Colombia. They started to do business together. Another thing that happened that was very interesting was that Texas Instruments decided to go and stop the production of the PC. I’ve become friends with
Building a Virtual Company to $20 Million: Rob Cheng, CEO of PC Pitstop (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course. Rob figured out the joys of virtual companies back in 1999. Today, he runs a 65-person virtual company that makes $20 million in revenue. Wonderful story. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,
Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: How did your VCs react on the topic of a virtual company? Fred Plais: This divides people a lot. The world is changing. People are starting to buy the story more and more. We need the same engineers at Google today. We’re doing some complex things on cloud. It requires some extremely experienced
Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Your first financing was US financing? Fred Plais: It was financed by French and Finnish VCs. It’s difficult when you’re pivoting. You get a business that’s not going that fast anymore and you get another one which is picking up. You need to reinvent everything. Financial investors have a timeline. They’ve been supportive.
Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing model for this product? Fred Plais: It’s a yearly subscription which includes the old product. You’re getting your hosting part of the subscription but you also get all the DevOps workflow that comes with this. For a price starting at $15,000 per year, you get hosting capabilities, 24/7 support,
Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: In 2015, you decided to create this cloud stack. Then you started getting traction with other customers like Magento. How did you get to that? What gave you the idea of building that stack? Fred Plais: We were involved in several e-commerce projects where things were failing because of DevOps. It was always
Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: We’re going to need to double-click on that. What do you actually provide? My understanding is that Magento is a hosted e-commerce platform. Fred Plais: Exactly. When you take a look at what a development team on the web is, you’re going to have 3 to 4 people that are managing the servers.
Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s take that on a more granular basis. What year are we talking when you decided, two years in, to give up? Taso Du Val: That was probably around 2012. In 2012, we said, “Maybe we should figure something else out.” That was two years after we started the company. Sramana Mitra: Who’s
