Bootstrapping to $8 Million in 3 Months During the Covid Crisis: Cuver CEO Ammar Amdani (Part 1)

This is a superb story of COVID-era entrepreneurship. Uplifting and thrilling!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The organic pull really drives the business? 

Mareza Larizadeh: The great majority of our active subscribers have joined organically. They have either heard about us or their friends have invited them to join the platform.

Sramana Mitra: How did the revenue land? It was bootstrapped mode going from 2012 when you started this?

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the kind of experiences and the kind of people who started gravitating towards your platform, making this a financially viable business. 

Mareza Larizadeh: We started partnering with mom-and-pop shops to drive customers their way. We would structure offers. A dinner offer or a brunch offer for example, which we would then sell on our platform with an added perk which generally was a discount for the price.

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the genesis of the new company. 

Mareza Larizadeh: I’ve been coming to New York for a couple of decades now. When I graduated school, I spent a lot of time here for my job in early 2000’s. I was here a lot in the late 2000’s for my old company. I love the city and I wanted to do something that was based here. It was closer to London as well.

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did that grow?

Mareza Larizadeh: It went surprisingly well. We turned the shift around overnight. We had a lot of opportunities on the platform. We went ahead and built something that had 80% of the job description without giving away which company was recruiting.

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you reach those people?

Mareza Larizadeh: Andy and Mark served on my board for a few years. I met them at Stanford business school.

Sramana Mitra: They were teachers?

Mareza Larizadeh: They were lecturers there. 

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 1)

Covid has come as a nightmare for many entrepreneurs. Here’s a story of one in New York, coping with the perfect storm of being in the epicenter of the pandemic and in the hospitality business, the worst hit sector of the economy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start from the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born? What kind of background did you have?

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey in Real Estate Tech: Cloud CMA CEO Greg Robertson (Part 7)

Greg Robertson: We usually sell about the seven-year mark. We had a hit product called Cloud CMA, our flagship product. There are about 1.3 million realtors in the United States. We have site license of about 500,000. Those subscribers trade over 260,000 CMAs a month.

To put that in perspective, about 5.5 million homes are sold in the country every year and so far they’ve generated close to 16 million reports. It’s been a great ride. At seven years, we kept going and now we’re at this different phase than where we started .