Best of Bootstrapping: Founders Bootstrapped Using Services from Atlanta

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

Adding to our roster of Bootstrapping Using Services case studies, here’s my conversation with PMG.net Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles from 2015.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Tell us a bit about where you come from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of background.

Robert Castles: I was born in Columbia, South Carolina. I spent the first half of my life there through to college. I have always been interested in technology as early as I can remember. When I was 11 years old, I begged my father for a Radio Shack Color Computer so that I could take it home and learn how to program. This is while all my friends were looking for baseball mitts, which I also like. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for that computer, which I got.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Unicorn First Using Services from Utah

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

Our tried-and-true mantra of Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later rings throughout Dave Elkington’s story. As the Founder of InsideSales.com, he used services to bootstrap a Unicorn that had raised close to $140 million in VC funding when we spoke in 2015. Revenue was scaling 100% year over year then. InsideSales.com became known as XANT and was acquired by Aurea Software in 2021.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Dave Elkington: I grew up in Utah. I went to school here. My parents are both school teachers and worked for the state and federal government. It was a little bit atypical. My dad was a rancher growing up in Idaho. My mom is from Canada. When people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them I wanted to be a millionaire. They would ask why. I’d be like, “Not for the money, but purely for the sake of accomplishment of being able to do that.” I went to school locally. My education is a little bit eclectic. I have an undergraduate degree in Philosophy. I also have minors in Hebrew, Japanese History, and Business. I also studied, for about a year, in Israel. I decided I wanted to go get some international experience and I had family in Israel. I dropped out of school at BYU and applied to the Hebrew University. I got accepted and transferred credits. I did that for a little over a year, dropped out of school, and applied to BYU. I got re-accepted and then finished at BYU.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Product Using Services First

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

Here is yet another case study of a services company successfully bootstrapping a product, then raising Venture Capital. Here is my conversation with Bill Moschella, Co-founder of Evariant, from 2015. Healthgrades acquired Evariant in 2020.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of your entrepreneurial story?

Bill Moschella: I was born and raised in Connecticut. I attended college at Berklee and eventually got my degree. What I was passionate about all of my life was music. I went to music school and graduated with a music degree. I left college playing music in a band and opened up a recording studio. I never really had a job. I was always playing music. I was running bands. I found that I had a passion for the engineering side of music so I opened up a recording studio. I took all the money that I saved up from gigs.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services First, then Raised Capital to Exit

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

Chuck Bloomquist bootstrapped a security company using services all the way up to $16 million in revenue and then raised private equity capital to develop a platform product. Since we spoke in 2015, InteliSecure was acquired by Proofpoint.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What kind of background leads up to this story?

Chuck Bloomquist: I was born in El Paso, Texas. I spent most of my youth living in the Pacific Basin. After we moved out of Texas, we moved to Wake Island. Then, we went to Hawaii and lived there for a year or so. Then, we moved up to Alaska and the UK. I came back to Texas for college. I then migrated to Colorado.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped First Using Services to Exit

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

Conversocial Co-founder Joshua March first built a digital marketing agency around social media before identifying the product opportunity for Conversocial. Here is our conversation from 2015. Verint acquired Conversocial in 2021.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of background?

Joshua March: I grew up in a relatively small town in England, a few hours outside of London. It’s called Malvern, Worcestershire. It’s famous for classical music composer Elgar. It has beautiful hills and countryside. It’s a lovely place to grow up but not completely exciting from a business perspective or the perspective of a 16-year-old.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services from London to Exit

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

Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services coverage, we bring you HighQ Founder CEO Ajay Patel’s story from London in 2014. Thomson Reuters acquired HighQ in 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Ajay Patel: I was born in London about 42 years ago. I’ve lived here all my life. My origins are actually Indian. My father is from India and my mother was born in Fiji, but she’s of Indian descent.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services While Navigating a Recession

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

Rik Chomko, now CEO at InRule, and his team had to navigate a long journey, including a recession that disrupted one of their key customer segments dramatically. Read our interview from 2014 to learn how they survived.

Sramana: Rik, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you raised? What kind of circumstances? Give us some of the back story.

Rik Chomko: I was born in the Chicago land suburbs and grew up there. My dad introduced me to computers at a very early age, which was way back in the 70’s, mostly because that’s what he did for a living. He’s one of the first people, I think, that jumped on to the information technology bandwagon. He would bring home phone systems and couplers so that we were able to link into the VAC system or the mainframe system running at his company. I had a twin brother and we used to just get up there and play games. We thought it was the neatest thing in the world, and that kind of got me started. As I grew up, I did other things but computers have always been a core interest and one of those things that I would like to sit down and play with.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with Services to $175M

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

There is, of course, a myth that you cannot build a large company by bootstrapping. What a total pot of crxp! Meet TEOCO Founder CEO Atul Jain, and have your preconceptions checked and readjusted.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where were you born, raised, and educated? Tell us a bit of the backstory of your current entrepreneurial story.

Atul Jain: I was born in Kanpur, India. I was born in a lower-middle class family. My father was an engineer in PWD. I am the youngest of three children. The eldest is my sister Manu Jain and I have an elder brother Naveen Jain. At the age of eleven, I received a merit scholarship from the Government of India to study in a residential school. After I finished high school in 1976, I studied at the Indian Statistical Institute and graduated with a Bachelors and Masters in Statistics. My goal and dream all along was to be a Professor, so I came to the US to do a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois. I did my research in probability theory in the field called Brownian motion. I completed my Ph.D. and got caught up in a game of cards called bridge. Five years later, I realized that my life was going nowhere and my career was going nowhere.

I decided to get a job. I went to the Silicon Valley and got a job with a company called Teknekron Corporation, the parent company of TIBCO. I started there and eventually ended up in the portion of the business that is known today as TIBCO. At that time, it was known as Teknekron Software Systems. Vivek Ranadive was the lead entrepreneur of that company. He had convinced me to move from Teknekron Corporation to Teknekron Software Systems. I then moved to Palo Alto. At that time, it had less than 20 employees and I was one of them. I started with them in late 1988 and left the company in early 1995 to start TEOCO. I was with the company when it was a tiny little company serving just the financial sector.

Sramana Mitra: When you started TEOCO in 1995, what was the premise? What did you see and what did you want to do with this company?

Atul Jain: I just wanted to prove to the world that you don’t have to be mean to succeed in business. Most companies were built on the premise that we have to worry about clients first and then at times, we worry about employees. I wanted to reverse the model. I created a business model based on the concept of alignment with employees, client, and community. At that time, I used to say that if we take care of our employees, they will take care of our clients, and that will take care of the business.  I wanted to focus on creating joy and a certain degree of alignment. I wanted to invert the pyramid. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know what industry. I just wanted to build a business on a set of values and principles.

Sramana Mitra: How did that evolve? How did you get yourself going?

Atul Jain: When I started the company, I was based in Northern Virginia. I had come here for a project for TIBCO with a company called Mobil Corporation. Then I sold them a project on behalf of my previous company and I was working on that project for two and a half years. Then I decided to leave and find a client.

Almost always the first person that gives you your first break is somebody who knows you. My first break came from Mobil Corporation. They gave me an opportunity to serve them, because I knew some of the people there and had a good amount of expertise. Initially, I was just doing some consulting work for them. I understood that I wanted to build a business with some intellectual property but I had no capital. I started with $2,000, and that’s all the money I ever put into the business.

Sramana Mitra: You got a service contract with Mobil Corporation?

Atul Jain: They bought my consulting services, yes.

Our conversation continues here.