Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 1)

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What a wonderful story of an ecommerce company bootstrapping to $12 million from a small town called Horsens in Denmark. All 60 employees work out of Horsens currently.

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?

Sebastian Petersen: I’m from Denmark. I would say I had a pretty ordinary background. Both my parents were working in the public sector. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit together with one of my best buddies growing up. We were always together.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 6)

Drura Parrish: In manufacturing, margins are spread across a lot of players. In between all those players, there’re different collection fees at every point. On one hand for manufacturing, you’ve got systems for both data and protocols and machines. On the other hand, you have financial systems that still aren’t concrete.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do engineers and designers find you or how do you find engineers and designers to bring on to your platform?

Drura Parrish: Mostly through traditional channels. We really care about our customers, but we’re out talking a lot. This is something that all of us at Xometry deeply believe in. We want to help speed up innovation, centers of profitability, growth, and entrepreneurship, and increase employment.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 4)

Drura Parrish: When you look at all of the beautiful machines that are sitting across the manufacturing floors in the United States, think about how this zooms into the broader trend here. Let’s just say, the greatest e-commerce model that we know right now is Amazon who’s trying to sell things and to get to people’s doors in under a day. But who’s going to make all the things that go to the companies? They put the things in boxes to get to Amazon to put on people’s doors.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the new things that are getting designed and manufactured in America today?

Drura Parrish: We’re still at the cutting edge of automotive and automotive components in electronics, hardware, and mechanical aerospace and all the supply chain that’s going into that.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the geographical scope of your business?

Drura Parrish: When you think about our geographic diversification, it follows along the pockets of industrial production in the United States. So why have suppliers concentrated around where planes are getting made? Why have suppliers concentrated around where automotive companies are assembling and making things? Likewise, our distribution facilities within the e-commerce portion are located where we have the greatest proximity to those distribution points.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 1)

Drura talks about the cutting-edge of American manufacturing and how e-commerce is impacting it. Superb interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Xometry.

Drura Parrish: I’m the President of Xometry Supplies. Xometry is a fascinating company that’s working very fast and at scale to solve one of the biggest problems in the world, which is how do we make more things more efficiently and more profitably across the supply chain.

Bootstrapping a Global E-Commerce Company: SmartBuyGlasses CEO David Menning (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your team now?

David Menning: 150.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of that is in Australia?

David Menning: We actually don’t have any staff in Australia at the present time.

Sramana Mitra: That’s interesting. How did that happen? >>>