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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
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vungle
Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Gaming has been a very big advertiser base for mobile apps. I don’t see any reason why gaming would not be a good reason to go into. Zain Jaffer: Investors were not very keen on gaming businesses. The idea was these games are not sustainable and was a hits-driven business. Our unit economics
Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What happened to the $200,000 worth of pre-orders? Were you able to fulfill it? Zain Jaffer: No. We knew that there was a demand, but we underestimated how long it would take to build the product out. We weren’t able to do anything with that. Customers were asking when this was going to
Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What happened with Gokul? Zain Jaffer: Gokul became a very pivotal figure. When we got into Angel Pad, a lot of people didn’t believe in our idea. It was very disheartening. There must have been at least 10 different advisors who came in and said, “This is never going to work.” Gokul was
Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 3)
Zain Jaffer: Just to set the context, Vungle was recently acquired by a private equity group called Blackstone for $780 million all cash. The transactions closed towards the end of 2019. At that point, we started a company called Vungle and were producing video ads. We didn’t know what to do with these video ads.
Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year was that? Zain Jaffer: That was 2006. I had been highly obsessed with internet startups for the last five years. It’s time for me to really enjoy myself and be a student and not get involved in anything. I needed a bit of a break. The first few nights, I organized
Scaling to a $700M Exit: Zain Jaffer, CEO of Vungle (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a delightful story of a young entrepreneur duo’s goofy journey to a huge exit! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
