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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to a bit more of a chronological story. I understand the philosophy of how you built the company. It’s very interesting what you can do today in terms of really doing these kinds of testing on all marketing exercises at a very dramatic level. Today’s world allows you to do things that it didn’t allow earlier on. It’s really extremely effective if you have the mental bent to be able to do it in a rigorous scientific mathematically-oriented way. Talk about some of the strategic things that you did in the course of 2007. What were the inflection points? I get it that you were growing at 100%. What were some of the strategic moves?

Andrew Filev: A lot of it comes down to the product. Over the years, we had completely rewritten the product. We didn’t put the business on hold for a year. It was more of a gradual rewrite. I think, right now, every single piece of code that we have has probably been rewritten. Over the years, we’ve always interacted very closely with customers and got their feedback both at mass and individual levels. We wanted to understand how they run their businesses, what challenges they’re seeing, and how we can be helpful for them to resolve those challenges. Doing that continuously over the years, we’ve learned a ton. That got reflected to the product a lot. >>>

INDEX: Award — Show Me the Money

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Announcement of the INDEX: Award is much more than a loud rally for promoting high-impact and beautifully formed design solutions. The Index Award is backed by the largest monetary design award and guides the most promising finalists from design solution to business opportunity, with $460,000.00 currently distributed among five winners, PEEK Retina, Duolingo, Tesla Home Battery, Ocean Cleanup Array and Sky Green.

Startups valued at over one billion dollars are called ‘unicorns’ and chasing them is a futile pursuit, which raises the question, – might one’s odds of gaining membership into this exclusive club be increased by being a Design Driven Startup? >>>

Peruvian Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Belisario Rosas, CEO of WEI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You have chosen to grow it to a substantial level with profits. What do you want to do with this company? Is it something you’re looking to sell? Do you want to continue running it forever?

Belisario Rosas: Continue it. We run the company like a family business. We want to be one of the best places to work at. We’re very employee-friendly. We should be applying for those best places to work for, but we don’t want to have a just a plaque. We want to live it. I feel that we live it. Just trying to fill it with more people is not our goal. We want to keep it under control. I would never want to be in a company where I do not know every single one of my employees.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company now in terms of employee size?

Belisario Rosas: We’re about 100.

Sramana Mitra: Are they all in Montreal? >>>

Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You were providing the management tools on the transaction but you were also making those connections.

Peter Lehrman: Yes. At the core of Axial is a search engine that looks at the data related to the company that is raising capital or is for sale. It looks at all the data that is uploaded by either the entrepreneur or by the entrepreneur’s investment banker or business broker. Then it renders a filtered list of recommended private equity buyers, lenders, and corporate buyers. It creates a specialized curated list of recommendations based on all the data we have from different sources of capital. The entrepreneur who is deciding to raise capital or the investment banker who is acting on behalf of the entrepreneur can then select which of those people or organizations they want to reach out to and connect with. That entire portion of the process happens on Axial. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I understand that you constantly test and experiment but there must have been some kind of institutional truths that were emerging in terms of your pricing and business model?

Andrew Filev: One of the big things that we found is this switch to packages in the SMB digital space. We tested and we’re like, “Wow! This is great!” Another interesting observation that we learned pretty quickly is to optimize for the right things. One example is credit card trials. Back in those days, most companies required credit card trials. You could remove that, which would absolutely improve their conversion from being visitor. But then people are less committed. Fewer of them convert from trial to paid account.

When you’re testing like that, you have to optimize throughout the conversion. It’s not just the first step. If you’re just looking at the first step, you’re being short-sighted. There’s a similar example that runs much deeper in how the market operates. If you remember online marketing, the whole dot-com bubble burst around their revenue model of advertising, which was CPM model. The big revolution that Google came up with was cost per click. Everybody was excited. >>>

Design Driven Startup Cultures

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Startup hubs are popping up like mushrooms across the world, each with its own culture, competitive advantages and opportunities for creating unique businesses. What might these hubs learn from each other to dial up their performance?

To answer this question we spoke with professionals in Copenhagen, Seoul and Los Angeles, analyzing their work and home cultures, risk-attitudes and other cultural characteristics. >>>

Peruvian Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Belisario Rosas, CEO of WEI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did you have that tendency of trying to do it all before this change happened?

Belisario Rosas: Very much. I was buying. I was selling. I was doing everything.

Sramana Mitra: You were running a substantial revenue company but you did not have any executive team?

Belisario Rosas: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. The next thing that you did was to introduce a layer of executive teams.

Belisario Rosas: That is correct. I was also delegating. Like I said earlier, I was pretty much into micro-managing. I was learning how to make others do it and concentrating on more of a strategic view of where we wanted to take the company and how we wanted to grow. I would say that was the >>>

Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of traction did you see? With that industrial manufacturing concentration, what kind of traction did you see in the beginning?

Peter Lehrman: Very quickly, we had customers willing to pay us a couple of hundred dollars a month on the demand side. The private equity community was ready to pay – not particularly a high price – for a service offering that would help them find investment opportunities more easily and more quickly. We saw that traction in the first couple of months. On the broker side of the platform, in the first month, we probably had 20 or 30 transactions that brokers had uploaded to the platform and began to make available.

We weren’t the first business to begin developing an online platform for brokers to sell companies. We think we’re best-suited for middle-market businesses. There were a lot of listing sites that were predecessors to Axial. Those listing sites tend to work very well for local businesses like >>>