Featured Videos

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 3)

Frank Sheppard: At that time, my spouse was still with IBM, working in the retail division. She just saw some opportunity there. We agreed to bring her on board in late 1995 to see if she can develop a lot of what we were doing for the telecom industry. We were able to do that very effectively.

Our idea in late 1995 was to take a lot of the telephone automation stuff that we were doing and apply that to retail. The first place that we started doing that was with the pharmacy line interactive voice response (IVR) solution. When you call a pharmacy to refill a prescription, the system that would answer that call is what we developed. Our intent was to focus on using that as way to go into retail. What we found when we got into pharmacies is that it was a wonderful niche. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given the numbers you’ve quoted in terms of houses sold, it seems to me that you should be ready to go public at this point. Is that part of the thinking? Why or why not? What’s going on from an exit point of view?

Jake Seid: Our goal is to build a big company. We just raised money from Google, pretty recently, relatively speaking. We think there’s a lot of opportunity to continue to build value in the business without being a public company right now. The things that this management team is excited about is that we’re a market leader. It’s a massive market and there’s deep barriers to entry. We can be a public company. We have the core ingredients. We were just talking about it before this call. There’s a variety of reasons why private companies aren’t rushing to go public today.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a pain to be a public company.

Jeff Frieden: It’s sad, by the way. Jake articulated that very well. One of the things that I can’t toss out is our GMV was around $7 billion last year. It’s a pretty exciting number for us to hit. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You basically had a project within IBM that IBM didn’t want to pursue. You wanted to pursue it and, with IBM’s blessing, you spun it out as a separate company?

Frank Sheppard: Correct. IBM had no part in the founding of that company except to say yes. It was a very original project.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing that out of North Carolina?

Frank Sheppard: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that project? You had a customer also that wanted you to build that solution for them, correct? >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are the real estate agents part of this marketplace or are you working with buyers and sellers, and the brokers are out of the picture?

Jeff Frieden: The brokers are in the picture.

Sramana Mitra: The people who are actually handling the transactions are still the brokers.

Jeff Frieden: We go directly to the owners of the real estate, and they may have a broker that they like. Or if they don’t have one, we will help them select one.

Sramana Mitra: How do you position vis-à-vis these other real estate sites? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 1)

Frank and his co-founders have built a sizeable bootstrapped business in North Carolina. Read on to learn what has worked for Ateb and what you can learn from them.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where do you come from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Frank Sheppard: I was born in Florida but I was raised in Atlanta in a typical middle-class suburban environment.

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

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The entity that you sold to private equity was still REDC?

Jeff Frieden: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: You bought the Auction.com domain name and rebranded your original entity as Auction.com?

Jeff Frieden: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It seems you’re doing hybrid auctions but you’ve expanded from residential distressed properties to commercial distressed properties. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were still focusing only on real estate?

Jeff Frieden: Only on real estate. Then the market crashed in 2007. We were able to pivot very quickly to help out institutions like large banks that had a tsunami of foreclosures coming in when the market blew up. In 2007, we held our first ballroom auction during this crisis up in LA of 350 homes for Bear Sterns. There were 6,000 people. We ran half a million to a million dollar media campaign. We had this hybrid technology that we had built ourselves. We went on to build our own technology offshore. We started to play with doing it without the physical auction. All online.

Obviously, that grew very quickly because of the tsunami of foreclosures. Since 1983, I had started investing in commercial real estate in Orange County. If I made money, some would go into the bank, some would go into the stock market, some would go into my business, and a lot of it would go into buying commercial real estate. >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 6)

Jamie Tedford: Acquisition was strategically important for us because it completed what we thought was an important part of our story and what the market was telling us, which is that brands and agencies wanted to work from one platform. There’s this converged media phrase that had taken hold at that time. We really believed it and started to see our customers asking for it. The idea was we wanted to be able to take a piece of content from conception and approval to the analytics around that piece of content and follow back up to the ROI of that piece of content.

Sramana Mitra: What are your assumptions around that? Are you producing that piece of content or is that content being produced and marketed through your platform but the agencies are producing the content? >>>