Serial Entrepreneur Bootstrapping Three PropTech Ventures: LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you sold the company in 2007, what were the metrics?

Jason Hayes: The value of the entire portfolio was in the region of $200 million. Revenues were approximately 10% of that. There was probably about 70% loan to value. I sold it to a London hedge fund. I remained with the company for a couple of years in an advisory capacity. At the same time, I was busy building my second venture ,which was Propertyandhomes.com in California.

Best of Bootstrapping: Organically Bootstrapped to $200M

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Founder Jorn Lyseggen started Meltwater in Norway and, when we spoke in 2015, had scaled the company organically to $200 million. Fascinating journey!

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

Jorn Lyseggen: I was actually born in Korea. I came to Norway as a very small child. I was three years old. I actually grew up in a little farm in the middle of a deep, dark forest in Norway. You drive for hours into the deep, dark forest and then suddenly, there’s a small opening. Then, you come to a little village with 168 families. One of those families is mine.

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Serial Entrepreneur Bootstrapping Three PropTech Ventures: LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes (Part 1)

Jason has worked at the cusp of real estate and digital marketing for 35 years and built three successful ventures. All of them are bootstrapped, organically grown, capital efficient businesses.

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

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Significant Software Company to Exit

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When we spoke in 2015, Emagine CEO Dave Peters had managed to bootstrap a significant software company from Australia. The focus was on TELCO churn management, and the customer base was primarily Australian, Asian, and African. Read this interview to learn more of the nuances. In September 2017 Emagine was acquired by Comviva.

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

Dave Peters: I’m Australian. I grew up in a little town of 8,000 people, about five hours west of Sydney. It was a farming community and my father was an Anglican minister. That’s a pretty unlikely starting point for an entrepreneur.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Co-founders Bootstrapped with Angel Money

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Building businesses has become cheaper by several orders of magnitude. When we spoke in 2015, Co-founder Josh Levy and his team took just over $2 million in angel financing, and had built a profitable business in New York. For those entrepreneurs facing the Series A crunch, this is an important story to follow. You will do fine if you have patient angels, and just use their investment to bootstrap to profitability.

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

Josh Levy: I was born in New Jersey. I went to high school in New Jersey. I went to the University of Maryland for college where I got an undergraduate degree in Finance. I also did a minor in entrepreneurship. I now live in Brooklyn. BeenVerified is headquartered in New York City. I’ve been on the East Coast my whole life.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped First Venture, Raised Money for the Next

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

As a variation on our ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’ theme, we also see many entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped a first company (or business), and then gone onto venture-fund a second. Christian Chabot built Tableau Software in this mode. Sridhar Vembu built Zoho. We have numerous examples of this tried-and-true path. Something to consider for first-time entrepreneurs chasing venture capital and Unicorns. Since speaking with cVidya Founder Alon Aginsky in 2015, cVidya was acquired by Amdocs in 2016.

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

Alon Aginsky: I was born and raised in Israel. After completing my army duty, I found myself in New York as a young entrepreneur trying to make it. Luckily, I was able to pick an opportunity and start a company in the area of call accounting that later became billing for small operators. That company that I started was a one-man show in the Empire State Building. I managed, after seven years, to take it public on NASDAQ.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped While in School, Raised Money Later

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

True to our mantra, Co-founder Mark Newman bootstrapped HireVue to $1M in revenue before raising the first funding. When we spoke in 2015, the company had raised a total of $92 million, and was doing $30 million in revenue. Excellent case study to study!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances.

Mark Newman: I was born in Northern Canada, about 400 miles north of Toronto, in a small town called Timmons. I was a mining industry brat. My dad designed and built the copper smelters. He was a chemistry and metallurgy nut whose favorite thing was taking rocks and turning them into solid bars of something. Living up there, you were able to be blissfully unaware. You live in a small little town. You had chances to go to lakes and kick through trees.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services to Exit from North Carolina

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

Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard and his co-founders had built a sizeable bootstrapped business in North Carolina when we spoke in 2015. Read on to learn what worked for Ateb and what you can learn from them. Ateb was acquired by Omnicell in 2017.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where do you come from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Frank Sheppard: I was born in Florida but I was raised in Atlanta in a typical middle-class suburban environment.

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