The Startup Velocity Question: Is it the Product?

Product and Technology are not the same. 

While technology failures are difficult to recover from, product issues can be addressed.

Often, once a startup starts to engage with the market, it develops a more sophisticated understanding of the market’s needs. Features, functions, integrations, APIs – a lot of input comes into the company through customer immersion.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to a Public Unicorn using Services

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Bootstrapping with Services is a tried and true strategy, including for building Unicorns. In our 2012 story, Alteryx Executive Chairman Dean Stoecker talks about raising a Series A with $10 million in the bank. Today, Alteryx is a $3+ billion market cap public company. Dean bootstrapped with services early on, and then raised VC money.

Sramana Mitra: Dean, let’s start at the beginning of your personal story. What is the context for your entrepreneurial journey? Where are you from?

Dean Stoecker: I grew up in a family business in Colorado. I would sit around the table every day and hear about the trials and excitements of owning a business. I went to school at the University of Colorado. I had the opportunity to travel the world through a program called Semester at Sea. That was where I got the idea that I wanted to have my own business. After I graduated, I moved to California and got involved in the information business.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Unicorn Startups

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

While it doesn’t happen that often, Bootstrapped Unicorns do exist.

My 2014 Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, has a whole section on this topic. You can read an excerpt on my blog titled Bootstrapped Unicorns. In this piece, I discuss three companies, Zoho, eClinicalWorks, and Veeam, that have bootstrapped to about a billion dollars in revenues.

Revenues NOT valuation.

That puts their valuations in the five to ten billion range or beyond. So they are Unicorns (billion dollar valuation) many times over.

You can also read an interview with Sridhar Vembu of Zoho here that describes the early journey of the company: Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

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Startup Ecosystem in Kolkata: Lack of Big Ideas

Join us on Thursday, July 20, at 8:30 p.m. IST / 8 a.m. PDT for a special roundtable program: Brainstorming on Eastern India Startup Development. Come share your perspective, sign up to Speak and we will accommodate as many as possible with a few minutes to talk, register here. In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here.

Unicorn chasing VCs are looking for big ideas.

Their philosophy: Go BIG or Go HOME.

My philosophy: PLEASE DON’T GO HOME.

There are many more $5M, $10M, $20M ideas out there than billion dollar ideas. 

12 Investors Discuss Unicorn Mania via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Right now there is a lot of capital in the startup investment system. Investors managing a good amount of money have to think of an investment thesis where they can really get returns. One of the observations I’ve had is that if everybody is chasing Unicorns, it’s not going to work, because there aren’t that many Unicorns. Unicorns, by definition, should be rare. Right now, we have a lot of pseudo-unicorns because a lot of artificially-bloated companies have come into the market. In the private market, there are tons of artificially bloated pseudo-unicorns. This aggressive goal of trying to invest in Unicorns is not going to end very well. There’s going to be a lot of casualties in the process.

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Unicorn Startup Founders Discuss How They Did It In Podcasts

We have been watching the Unicorn phenomena very closely over the past few years, as you can see in my series Billion Dollar Unicorns and From Unicorn To Unicorpse. Entrepreneurs looking for some genuine inspiration and advice from startup founders who have built their businesses up to Unicorn levels should have a listen to the following 30-minute podcast interviews. As the name suggests, Unicorns are rare, but they do exist.

Amit Gupta, Co-Founder of InMobi, knowing my aversion to ‘Valuation Without Revenue’ Unicorns, starts off by telling us that InMobi’s valuation is firmly anchored in revenues. He goes on to discuss InMobi’s strategy for going global, and highlights the unorthodox nature of the journey.

Daniel Cane, CEO and Co-founder of Modernizing Medicine, has followed a unique and tremendously effective strategy of raising equity crowdfunding from his customers, about 100 of them, and reflects on how well it has worked for him.

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10 Founders On How They Built Their Unicorn Startups In Podcasts

Entrepreneurs looking for some great advice and inspiration from some super successful Founders who have each built a Unicorn company from the ground up, should have a listen to these 30-minute podcast interviews.

Daniel Cane, CEO and Co-founder of Modernizing Medicine, has followed a unique and tremendously effective strategy of raising equity crowdfunding from his customers, about 100 of them, and reflects on how well it has worked for him. Modernizing Medicine is Daniel’s second Unicorn and has recently crossed $100 million in revenue.
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A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about funding?

Peter Gassner: We had funding from angel investors. We started off with $3 million. Then we said, “This is good, but we need some funding from outside. We were looking for validation and professional funding, and the things that a VC could bring.” We raised $4 million. We thought we needed the money, but it turns out we didn’t actually need that money. We never actually dipped into that $4 million. The sales came faster than we thought. I didn’t know what I was doing there, and I got lucky.

Sramana Mitra: How did Emergence find you? At that time, Emergence was just starting to evolve. I’ve known them for a long time. I’m friends with Brian Jacobs.

Peter Gassner: There’s a funny story there. We were raising funds in 2008, which wasn’t the prime time for fundraising. We said, “We’re doing this industry-specific thing.” We’re building on Salesforce. The prevailing wisdom from all the VCs was, “That’s a very small market. You’re building on >>>