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A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were the implications on your team? What did you need to do to scale from a team point of view?

Todd Dunlop: One of the things that we always did was try to figure out how to get the best professional services. Very early on, when we went from four people to 80, we brought on an amazing HR person who helped us find those people. We lived in a university college town. That’s where a lot of our recruitment went, and we were hiring on the attitudes and ability. Especially in this town, there was nobody who had any experience.

Sramana Mitra: How big did your team grow to? >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Chris Grandi: 2001. At the end of 2001, I was essentially committed to taking off six months to figure out what I was going to do about starting my next company. Despite not making money in that first entrepreneurial endeavor, I was committed to starting my own company. As I started that process, I connected with this IT services company based out of Boston with a business model that focuses on providing IT services to hedge funds. They had a West Coast operation that was not very big. They hired me as a consultant to step in and take a look and figure out how to make it better. I spent three months doing that and realized that I liked it. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take that story chronologically. You started that in 2004?

Todd Dunlop: Yes. We always talked about how we got started. It was sort of bootstrapping.

Sramana Mitra: You said AdWords was just coming on. You essentially helped companies understand AdWords and market through AdWords. That’s what you were doing?

Todd Dunlop: We were essentially arbitraging it where we would say, “If you pay us $10 per lead, we’ll go out there and drive the traffic.” We started as performance-based search marketers and grew the company. That’s how we discovered early on how we were going to finance this company. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next move after Maxim?

Chris Grandi: I took a pretty divergent turn. I thought that maybe I wanted to be in Wall Street. I joined the Goldman Sachs Associate program out of Harvard Business School and joined their fixed income group. I was an associate in that group specifically focusing on high-yield debt and bank loan debt. It’s essentially high-yield financing to companies. I was there for a very short period of time. I was very thankful that I got the opportunity to work on Wall Street, but I realized technology was in my heart. Also, the timing of this was 1998. That was the first Internet boom. At that point, a friend and I had a business idea to start an Internet company. I decided not to go back to Wall Street.

Sramana Mitra: What was that company?

Chris Grandi: We had conceptualized this idea of people using the Internet for online invitations. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner (Part 1)

Most serial entrepreneurs have figured out certain unique ways in which they operate. In this story, we get to learn about Todd’s process.

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

Todd Dunlop: I was born in Montreal but I grew up in the suburbs just outside of Toronto. I have grown my entrepreneurial journey from my lawn maintenance business back when I was a kid and evolved that to where I now live which is on the most western part of Canada.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do all your schooling? >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 1)

Chris had significant domain knowledge in the hedge fund industry. He has self-financed a successful company offering to secure virtualization services to the segment with high service levels.

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?

Chris Grandi: I was born and raised on the East Coast outside of Washington DC, and I grew up in suburban Maryland. For university, I went to the West Coast and attended UCLA. I then continued on to graduate work. I got my MBA from Harvard Business School. I moved out to San Francisco, California where I’ve been for approximately 20 years. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Have you bootstrapped your company all the way or have you raised money along the way?

Taso Du Val: We raised a really small round for approximately $1.4 million with some really great individuals. It was a seed round, so it was not a priced round. We still consider ourselves a bootstrapped startup. Hence, we only did everything off of convertible notes. That was about two and a half years into starting the company. It was a very different experience relative to a lot of other companies. We’ve only taken a seed round.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what the philosophy is behind that decision. That’s definitely a contrarian philosophy. We are very supportive of bootstrapped entrepreneurs. We’ve probably been one of the biggest supporters of that philosophy. Tell me more about what is your thinking. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll just benchmark it by saying oDesk, for instance, charges 10% of the contract value. Tell me what the additional value is that you’re adding to the process.

Taso Du Val: We screen all of the individuals for you. Not only for our network but also for your specific request. There are many layers of screening. There are many individuals involved in that screening process. There’s very little automation in our screening processes. We’re able to not only look at our network and screen everyone so that they can get in, but we’re also finding the perfect individual and contracting them out to you in an on-demand style.

We only give you one or two people when you post a job. It’s almost always the right person every single time. Our average job post to client ratio is 1.7. That means for every 1.7 person that we give you, you’re going to accept them. That’s an incredible metric that no one in the world can match. World renowned staffing companies  probably have a ratio of eight to one. People don’t even believe it, but that’s actually what we do. >>>