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Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you leave Summit to do this?

Vincent Yang: I left Summit in 2012. I didn’t start the company back then. I actually went to Stanford Business School. I already had the idea. We raised some angel money. It was in Stanford where I started the company. We hired a bunch of Stanford Ph.D.’s in the neuroscience team to help us write very sophisticated algorithms. We hired a natural language processing expert to analyze companies. That was the turning point from having the idea to making things happen.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2014?

Vincent Yang: We started in late 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise on which you raised the angel financing? What was the business that you told your investors you were going to build? >>>

Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where is your team? Is it all in New York?

Faisal Husain: We started out of New Jersey. We had a development center in India from day one, because almost all of our clients were interested in leveraging the global delivery model to manage the cost in these projects.

To your question about what things we did strategically, we invested in professional sales. We also made a strategic decision not to raise money >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2009?

Vincent Yang: That brings us to early 2010.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens next?

Vincent Yang: Then, I moved to Palo Alto. When I was in JP Morgan, my main job was to analyze companies. In particular, I developed a mathematical model to analyze public companies. It’s very funny. Investment banking is much like the military. If you’re a junior, nobody cares about you. You basically follow the order. For me, it was very interesting because before investment banking, I was actually a CEO. I was not a fit at all at JP Morgan. I remember in the first week, I was telling the partner, “Let me source a couple of deals for you.” The partner looked at me and said, “Now, this is what I want you to do. You just do PowerPoint.” I repositioned myself. >>>

Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you did a bunch of e-commerce systems at a couple of hundred thousand dollars a pop in the early days of the company. What’s the next major milestone? How long did it take you to get to a $100 million in revenue, for instance?

Faisal Husain: We started in mid-2001. We did about $400,000 in revenue. We reached the million dollar mark fairly quickly. In the third year, which was the second full year we had, we did about $2.8 million in revenue. Then we did $5.5 million. We grew extremely well in 2004. The next year, we did $14.4 million.

Sramana Mitra: All this was still in the same business model? You were still building e-commerce systems in a services mode? >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 7)

Dave Terry: Our competitors were historically Concur and the big ERP players who have their own shallow apps and then some of the older generation products. While they aren’t out there actively selling, they are supporting their own customers and attempting upgrades. In that market, the older vendors are beginning to be dismissed by most of the market. IBM, even in the last summer, decided to sunset their product. They’ve formally come out with an announcement. All of those customers are rapidly making a change. We’ve been very fortunate to convert a number of very large IBM customers. >>>

INDEX: AWARD — Funding International Award Winning Design Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Design awards are the design profession’s “stamp of approval” for a wide range of new and classic design related offerings. There are hundreds of design awards, each with its own distinct focus and selection criteria such as business, impact, and culture. The most sought-after awards are the IDEA, Red Dot, IF, Compasso d’Oro, and the INDEX: Award. So, might these design winners offer superior investment opportunities? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 1)

I did a company in the sales lead generation and qualification space using Artificial Intelligence back in 1998. We were very, very early. It’s exciting to see the movements in the space, and how EverString is succeeding almost 20 years later.

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

Vincent Yang: I was originally born and raised in China. I was born in Shanghai. I went to college in China. When I was studying in high school, I was very interested in mathematics. I was one of the few students in high school who didn’t go to any class for help in mathematics and computer science. Obviously, right after high school, I selected mathematics as my undergraduate. I went to one of the top universities in China and studied mathematics.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you finish university? >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2013, you put in this $17 million. At this point, you have about $20 million of external capital in the company.

Dave Terry: That’s exactly right. Then we put that to work in the exact same manner. It was really proportional. We now have even more international sales. We are setting up more of a presence in London. We’ve had customers that were international businesses but they were headquartered in the US with 60 to 70 offices around the world. We were now starting to get into accounts that are headquartered in London, Canada, or Australia. >>>