Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Planon to $100M from The Netherlands

Pierre and Fred Guelen have bootstrapped Planon, a very significant company from The Netherlands, using the bootstrapping using services principle. Read on and learn how.

Sramana Mitra: We’re going to start at the very beginning of your personal journeys. One of you please start by telling us where you’re from, where you were born, and in what kind of background, and then we’ll do the same thing with the other person.

Pierre Guelen: I’m the CEO of Planon group. Fred is my brother. We were born in The Netherlands in a small town near the German border. We were raised in an entrepreneurial family. My father owned a large building company. He was already the fourth generation in that building company.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture

I’ve always been bullish about niche e-commerce. Here’s the story of an entrepreneur who has successfully bootstrapped a company in high-end light fixtures, Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese.

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?

Steven Annese: I’m a child of an Italian immigrant. I was born in New Jersey. It was in the 70s when most of the Italians migrated.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Ukrainian Entrepreneur Bootstraps to Global Scale

This is a fascinating story of a Ukrainian entrepreneur bootstrapping her CRM Software company to global scale. We’re thrilled to bring you Creatio (formerly BPMOnline) CEO Katherine Kostereva’s inspiring and super intelligent entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get going. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? Let’s go to the very beginning of your personal journey.

Katherine Kostereva: I was born in Ukraine. Since childhood, I’ve been traveling a lot and visited many countries worldwide. I graduated in 1999 with a Bachelors in Computer Science. Shortly after that, I got my MBA. Even from high school, I was obsessed with technology. I was thinking of the ways to transform business through technology. Technology has always attracted me.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping and Managing a Successful Pivot

Oomnitza CEO Arthur Lozinski talks about an excellent pivot that is quite enlightening.

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?

Arthur Lozinski: Both my parents were from the Soviet Union. I was born in the Soviet Union in a country called Latvia. It was in 1989 right before the wall fell. Both my parents grew up in the Soviet Union. There is a quote by Napoleon Bonaparte that says, “If you want to understand a man, you have to understand where he was in his 20s.” My parents grew up in communist Russia and my upbringing was influenced by that. Education was really important. I grew up in Germany. My parents emigrated to Germany when I was a small child and then we moved to the Silicon Valley just before high school.

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Managing a Successful Pivot: Oomnitza CEO Arthur Lozinski (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise this year?

Arthur Lozinski: We raised $12.5 million. 

Sramana Mitra: What metrics did you raise on?

Arthur Lozinski: We believe that we have a massive market. We have tons of customers who agree. We are growing at a nice rate. We think that the market opportunity is growing. There will be only more computers in the world and not less.

Best of Bootstrapping: Rukkus CEO Follows Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later Strategy

“My journey was as unexceptional as you can imagine,” says Rukkus CEO Manick Bhan, in describing how he got to $1 million annual revenue rate in transactions before raising financing. Read on for the whole story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by going back to your very beginnings. I want to hear about where you were born, raised, and in what kind of background.

Manick Bhan: Both my parents come from Kashmir. They raised me in Baltimore, Maryland. That’s where I was born. I’ve grown up mostly in the United States. In the very early days, I liked to take things apart. When I was nine, they bought me this bicycle. The first thing I did was I opened the whole thing up. I took out all the screws and basically dismantled the beautiful bike. They were a little horrified about it because it was a birthday present. This has been pretty constant in my life. I like to take things apart and figure out how they work.

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Bootstrapping Using Services, Managing a Successful Pivot: Oomnitza CEO Arthur Lozinski (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You said that this was a fast transactional sale that was solving a big problem. Can you succinctly summarize what the problem was that you were speaking to and successfully closing deals on?

Arthur Lozinski: The way that the companies were thinking about this problem was like checking a box. You work in IT, so you need to know where your connected devices are. It was rudimentary and transactional. We didn’t know how to articulate it then, but what we know now is that knowing where your devices are is a security measure and a compliance measure.

Best of Bootstrapping: Codesigned CEO Bootstraps Using Services

We continue our coverage of bootstrapping using services with Codesigned CEO Jake Weaver.

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?

Jake Weaver: I’m from a very small town in the middle of Missouri in the Midwest called Lynn Creek, which had a population of just 289 people. It’s nowhere near any of the tech industries today with the farming and vacation towns. There’s not a whole lot of business there. 

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