Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 1)

This is a terrific story of bootstrapped entrepreneurship in EdTech. The company also has a great PaaS strategy.

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

Capital Efficient Startup, Venture-Scale Growth: ShipMonk CEO Jan Bednar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You had a bit of cash that you could start ShipMonk with. You didn’t need to look outside for seed capital. 

Jan Bednar: Exactly. I already had one year for free on the warehouse. Everything else was set up within the warehouse. I was doing a lot of it myself along with my girlfriend. Other than that, very minimal capital investment.

Capital Efficient Startup, Venture-Scale Growth: ShipMonk CEO Jan Bednar (Part 1)

Jan has built a tremendous company with very limited capital infusion. Love the strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? Where were you born, raised and in what kind of family background? 

Entrepreneurship in Heavy-Duty Technology: Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re positioned as a middleware? 

Yuval Rooz: Exactly. That plays very well in the market. 

Sramana Mitra: You did this repositioning in 2018? 

Yuval Rooz: Yes. 

Entrepreneurship in Heavy-Duty Technology: Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, did you have outside financing? What is happening on the financing side?

Yuval Rooz: We only raised funding from some of the early investors and friends and family. 

Sramana Mitra: How much money was in the company?

Yuval Rooz: I think in the early days we brought in $2 million to $3 million.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Houston: Onit CEO Eric Elfman (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Was it an all cash acquisition, cash in stock, or pure stock?

Eric Elfman: I’d like to think that we did what K1 did for us. It was a mix of cash and stock. I needed their founders on board. 

Sramana Mitra: What is COVID doing to you?

Entrepreneurship in Heavy-Duty Technology: Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz (Part 4)

Yuval Rooz: For the past five years, we’ve been developing an open-source language just to describe the interconnected application. The second component of our product is compatibility. When you want to run these applications, there are all kinds of technologies that you can run it on.

Let’s take the analogy of Java language. You can use Java in different databases. You just need to install a driver depending on which database you use. We have similarly developed all these drivers to our language for different technologies out there.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Houston: Onit CEO Eric Elfman (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You did a private equity deal in 2018 with the $16 million trajectory?

Eric Elfman: Yes. We did that deal in November of 2018. We were at about $14 million when they closed, but we had a clear sight to $16 million by the end of the year.