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From $3 a Day to Successful Entrepreneur: Tomas Gorny, CEO of Nextiva (Part 1)

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

I see so many people making excuses for why they are not successful – discrimination, fate, luck, all external factors. Read Tomas Gorny’s story. I hope it will give you some perspective and some attitude adjustment that hopefully propels success.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with your background. Tell us where you are from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of background.

Tomas Gorny: I was born originally in Poland. I lived there for 14 years. It was a communist country. Poland didn’t have middle-class families at that point in time because everybody was relatively poor. At the age of 14, I moved to Germany where I spent another six years. Then at the age of 20, I moved to the United States.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 1)

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

Much is changing in the world of education. Universities are becoming large scale providers in online learning. Arizona State University is at the fore of this trend, running one of the largest business programs online.

Sramana Mitra: Sher, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to what’s happening at the Business School at Arizona State University.

Sher Downing: The W.P. Carey School of Business, which is at Arizona State University, is one of the largest business schools in the nation. This year, we have around 11,000 students in various business tracks that are both face-to-face as well as online. We also have some pure online degrees that we are doing across the globe. We focus on developing the ideal that business is personal. We want people to come out of our school with a real sense of entrepreneurship and ability to do a lot of different things in their lives. >>>

Bootstrapping a Robust SaaS company from India: Rategain CEO Bhanu Chopra (Part 5)

Sramana: What year was it when your OEM partnership went south?

Bhanu Chopra: In 2010 and 2011, there were a couple of major products that were contributing significant revenue to us. Our partner bought all of our competitors during that same time-frame, so we had to make some transitions in order to survive, and it took us about 2 years to do that. The revenue did not diminish immediately because it took them a couple of years to transfer all of their clients away from our platform. We had to restart our focus on the hotel segment. >>>

Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much business are you doing in China? What percentage of your revenue comes from China right now?

Peter Mann: This year, we’re planning to do $10 million. I would say 40% would be in China this year. >>>

Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 2)

Peter Mann: Shortly after that, the Gulf War began and so we were sent over the Red Sea for about six months. That was a changing event for me. I got married a year out of college. We got married very young. I missed the last six months of the pregnancy and I missed the birth. I didn’t actually find out he was born until a day or two after because we didn’t have Internet.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking of when you got back from the Gulf War?

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Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 1)

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

Peter Mann started Oransi as a B-to-C e-commerce company. Today, 40% of his $10M revenue comes from China. This is the kind of company America hopes to see more of – selling American products to international consumers.

Sramana Mitra: Peter, let’s start with your background. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background leads up to your entrepreneur story?

Peter Mann: I was born in Syracuse, New York. I lived in the same house till I was 18 and went off to college. My father was a mechanical engineer. He was a manager at General Electric. He comes from a time when people worked 40 years in a company and then get their retirement package. He was also a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Syracuse University. We were heavily involved with the university. I grew up around a university atmosphere during my childhood.

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The Best Part of Being the Boss: Offering Balance

The motivation for Steals.com came to Jana Francis right after she had a daughter, her third child, when she had to head back to work in the sales management team for a dotcom at the end of her maternity leave. She realized she was a smart, capable woman who could work from home. Once she started thinking along those lines, the ideas started to flow.

Jana was always the one you could count on for online shopping deals – her friends called her the dotcom princess. But when it came to online shopping in the baby space, she was disappointed. There was no website that would tell you the story of the product, why you would want it, and what problem it would solve for you. She developed a burning fire to create a new kind of website that would launch new steal deals every day – a steep 40% to 80 % discount on premium baby products.
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Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 7)

Sramana: I would imagine you are using the private label strategy to drive margins up, correct? That is one of the levers that you can push.

Tony Ellison: Yes, that is correct.

Sramana: What categories offer you the best levers for your private label strategy?
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