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Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the structure of how you would do this buyout? What proposal was on the table and how did you do the financial engineering of this buyout?

Adam Schwartz: It was somewhat complicated actually. In all honesty, my partner Josh orchestrated it because he was already at IAC. Effectively, IAC owed Josh money from his previous deal. The way that we worked it out, in part, was that in exchange for the money that was owed, we would get the business out.

Sramana Mitra: Did Josh own most of the company? What was your deal?

Adam Schwartz: At that time, Josh owned most of the company and I had a a minority equity stake.

Sramana Mitra: You went to work for BustedTees basically. >>>

Cross Border E-Commerce in Africa: Mall For Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 1)

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

We covered Mall for Africa some time back in TLEC. Here we trace their entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Chris Folayan: I’m from Nigeria. I was born and raised in Nigeria. I came to the United States for college. Everything prior to college was done in Nigeria.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you come to the US for college?

Chris Folayan: I came to San Jose State University. >>>

Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the company grow? How far did you get?

Adam Schwartz: It’s a while ago now, so it’s hard to remember exactly. I worked on it from 2009 to 2011. We definitely had thousands of SKUs of textiles and we’ve had hundreds of suppliers and thousands of designers who were using this site. The sample business of it was good. We were selling a lot of samples. That was happening a lot. They came through.

We went through two major iterations at that time. We played with subscription-based model and others. It takes a while just to get the product to a place where it’s something other than an MVP which probably happened for us a year in. Maybe, even later than that. Then you say, “It’s something more than an MVP. Is it any good?” >>>

Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 2)

Adam Schwartz: While all this was happening, the woman I was working with had some interaction with that PR agency. After exhanging ideas, we came upon the pain point of being a sustainable fashion designer. There was a sustainable fashion movement. A lot of people in fashion wanted to make sustainable choices, but everything that came after making those choices was difficult, specifically, sourcing the actual textiles sustainably. If we can be a resource to fashion designers and brands around how to and where to source the textiles that they need to create their stuff, that would be an interesting business. That would reduce some of the friction to helping the fashion industry become more sustainable. We started that company together. It was called Source4Style. It was a B2B platform where fashion designers could source and actually purchase textiles from suppliers around the world in varying degrees of sustainability. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? How big is this company? Where are you going from here? What does the market landscape look like?

David Stubenvoll: We’re 115 people. We’re north of $20 million in revenue. We introduced a number of new products. Up until last year, all we sold was Wowza streaming engine. We sold it in a number of different ways but that was our only product. Believe it or not, we have 19,000 customers worldwide. We deliver well over 350,000 hours of live content a day. That’s actually just on the transcoding side. >>>

Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 1)

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

In building a business, savvy entrepreneurs always look for that moment when the  business hits an inflection point, and you actually understand what levers are driving that growth. Adam’s story captures his long search for this coveted point and his eventual discovery.

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

Adam Schwartz: I’m from Massachusetts. I grew up about 30 miles northwest of Boston right along the 128 tech route there. I was raised in a small town. Actually, the technology in the Boston area is what brought my family there. My father was in semiconductors. That always had an influence on me, but I grew up in a serene forest-like place.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve lived in that area. I went to Smith College for undergraduate. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, your main customer acquisition strategy was through this newsletter and the community that you had gotten yourself into, or was there any other kind of customer acquisition strategy in swing at this point?

David Stubenvoll: It was an email mailing list. It wasn’t a newsletter. We also attended trade shows. By late 2007, we started doing some keyword advertising. Even early on, we went to shows like IBC and NAB. We were completely inundated at those shows. In December of 2007, we went live on Amazon Web Services as well.

Sramana Mitra: How was the business tracking at this point? What were the revenue metrics that you were hitting? How were you growing and was there financing involved? >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 5)

David Stubenvoll: What we found out was that a lot of people felt the same way about that media server product. People started to beg to buy our server. In August of 2006, we decided to turn this into a media server software company. That resulted in, what is today, Wowza Media Systems.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a significant pivot.

David Stubenvoll: It was a big pivot for sure.

Sramana Mitra: When you were getting these pings from people who wanted to buy your media server product, were they outlining what they were willing to pay to buy that product? Did you have a sense of what the business model and the pricing model would look like?

David Stubenvoll: There was a very strong incumbent product in the market. We were able to look at their product. My theory has always been if you want to >>>