Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you in terms of revenues?

Frank Sheppard: Last year, we did $21 million. Over the last two years, we’ve grown 20% and we’re projected to grow 20% this year.

Sramana Mitra: Current business is growing at about 20%. How profitable is your business? Do you put a lot of profit into growth? What’s your philosophy in managing?

Frank Sheppard: We always run the business profitably but the majority of our profits are reinvested into the growth of the company. It’s an exciting time. Our goal right now, as we share with our pharmacy customers, is to invest in the development of the tools, parts, and pieces to make them successful. We are, for all intents and purposes, reinvesting almost every dollar. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 6)

Frank Sheppard: The other part of it is the reorganization of pharmacies. Traditionally, pharmacies are focused on filling prescriptions and are very reactive to patients coming in for that purpose. We’re doing things to make a lot of pharmacies more proactive, so instead of waiting for patients to engage them, we’re trying to find ways to enable them to proactively manage their workload. That’s one of the things that pharmacists, in particular, are always excited about. They can control what’s happening in their pharmacy. It, ultimately, opens up enough time for them to be very active to their patients. We’ve turned the model upside down. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I want to probe that a bit before we go beyond 2010 to the new mode. Let me just get the benchmarks on the 2005 to 2010 when you started focusing on patient reminders. What did that do to your business in terms of growth? Where were you in 2010 for instance?

Frank Sheppard: We continued to grow. After 2005, we climbed to being in the $11 million to $13 million range.

Sramana Mitra: So in 2010, we’re talking about a $12 million dollar company. What was the product strategy? When you were talking about trying to change patient behavior, what drives change in patient behavior? What have you learned about the market? >>>

 Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How fast were you able to course correct on that? I imagine that when you saw that things were not working out, you fired the CEO. When did that happen?

Frank Sheppard: Late 2003, I believe. We were probably short of bankruptcy, but like all good entrepreneurs, we were too stupid to do that. It took us probably 18 months to get fully back. By 2005, we were back to a very healthy and well-run company.

Sramana Mitra: The business went back to your original pharmacy solution?

Frank Sheppard: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level in 2005? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 3)

Frank Sheppard: At that time, my spouse was still with IBM, working in the retail division. She just saw some opportunity there. We agreed to bring her on board in late 1995 to see if she can develop a lot of what we were doing for the telecom industry. We were able to do that very effectively.

Our idea in late 1995 was to take a lot of the telephone automation stuff that we were doing and apply that to retail. The first place that we started doing that was with the pharmacy line interactive voice response (IVR) solution. When you call a pharmacy to refill a prescription, the system that would answer that call is what we developed. Our intent was to focus on using that as way to go into retail. What we found when we got into pharmacies is that it was a wonderful niche. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given the numbers you’ve quoted in terms of houses sold, it seems to me that you should be ready to go public at this point. Is that part of the thinking? Why or why not? What’s going on from an exit point of view?

Jake Seid: Our goal is to build a big company. We just raised money from Google, pretty recently, relatively speaking. We think there’s a lot of opportunity to continue to build value in the business without being a public company right now. The things that this management team is excited about is that we’re a market leader. It’s a massive market and there’s deep barriers to entry. We can be a public company. We have the core ingredients. We were just talking about it before this call. There’s a variety of reasons why private companies aren’t rushing to go public today.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a pain to be a public company.

Jeff Frieden: It’s sad, by the way. Jake articulated that very well. One of the things that I can’t toss out is our GMV was around $7 billion last year. It’s a pretty exciting number for us to hit. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You basically had a project within IBM that IBM didn’t want to pursue. You wanted to pursue it and, with IBM’s blessing, you spun it out as a separate company?

Frank Sheppard: Correct. IBM had no part in the founding of that company except to say yes. It was a very original project.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing that out of North Carolina?

Frank Sheppard: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that project? You had a customer also that wanted you to build that solution for them, correct? >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are the real estate agents part of this marketplace or are you working with buyers and sellers, and the brokers are out of the picture?

Jeff Frieden: The brokers are in the picture.

Sramana Mitra: The people who are actually handling the transactions are still the brokers.

Jeff Frieden: We go directly to the owners of the real estate, and they may have a broker that they like. Or if they don’t have one, we will help them select one.

Sramana Mitra: How do you position vis-à-vis these other real estate sites? >>>