Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped an Employee Engagement Platform

I am always thrilled to do stories of pioneering entrepreneurs building technology startups in remote locations. Vantage Circle Co-founder and CTO Anjan Pathak brought us into the nascent scene in Guwahati, in the northeast Indian state of Assam, when we spoke in 2023.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Anjan Pathak: I was born in a small town in North East India. It’s about 50 kilometers from Guwahati. I spent my childhood there. I studied in a very small school.

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Best of Bootstrapping: FinTech Founder Bootstrapped with Services

George Anderson, Founder and CEO of Ninth Wave, offers another case study for our very popular Bootstrapping Using Services series. Here is our conversation from 2021.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

George Anderson: I was born in Long Island. I found myself in technology by accident. My first job was through a referral from my family. My father sent me for an interview. I got a job working for an analytical laboratory in New Jersey.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $5 Million First

Founder CEO Josh Millet had bootstrapped Criteria to almost $5 million in revenue before raising funding.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Josh Millet: I was born in Toronto, Canada. I have dual citizenship of US and Canada. I came to the States for school 20 years ago and have been here ever since.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Footwear E-Commerce Startup

To succeed in e-commerce today, you need to look for unserved niches with unique products. Learn how KURU Footwear Founder Bret Rasmussen bootstrapped an e-commerce startup from Utah.

Sraman a Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Bret Rasmussen: I was born in Utah, but my parents quickly moved to Indiana. We actually lived a few years in Italy until I was about eight or nine years old. Then we moved to Taiwan and then back to Indiana. I graduated high school in Texas and then I went to college out west here in Utah. 

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Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Now, you raised your seed round on an IP-led hypothesis or plan.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Lean and Niche E-commerce Venture

This conversation with Modded Euros Co-founder Sean Dawes from 2019 is a comprehensive discussion on how to bootstrap a niche e-commerce venture with a lean team and effective use of inventory financing. You can listen to the podcast interview here and watch the interview here:

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?

Sean Dawes: I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I haven’t gone too far away from my hometown as my company is based out of West Chester, Pennsylvania, which is 20 or 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia.

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Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Right, you’ll learn as you go along. But there will be these three buckets, I think, even when you are a $100M or a $1B company. This is going to be the structure of your company. So the question then is, what is the distribution?

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Feroze, there are a few things that come to mind as I’m listening to you. First and foremost, you talked about delivery constraints and supply constraints in terms of the expertise that give you this moat. You haven’t talked about domain knowledge.