Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The first customers that you were getting traction with, how much were they paying you?

Tarek Sherif: We tried a couple of different charging models. At first, we thought about a per-patient model. Back then, people were charging per data point. We tried a couple of those and they were frustrating for us.

So when we tried the per-patient model, one of the things that you learn very quickly in clinical trials is, you almost never enroll patients at the pace that you think you will. It’s always slower. So it takes forever to enroll patients.

Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 1)

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

What a wonderful story of an ecommerce company bootstrapping to $12 million from a small town called Horsens in Denmark. All 60 employees work out of Horsens currently.

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

Sebastian Petersen: I’m from Denmark. I would say I had a pretty ordinary background. Both my parents were working in the public sector. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit together with one of my best buddies growing up. We were always together.

Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you decided to get together and start this company. What was the idea? What did they want to do?

It sounds like they brought the technical and domain knowledge about the CRO industry. What did they have? What was in their mind that they wanted to do?

Tarek Sherif: What was in their minds was that the process of running clinical trials was very complex and a very manual process, in particular, how you gathered and managed the data.

Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 2)

Tarek Sherif: Working for a large corporation was a good experience in the sense that I figured out what I didn’t want to do. I came out of there determined to never be in a role where I didn’t have a large measure of control.

As I used to joke about it, I ended up becoming CEO of Medidata, because I don’t like having a boss. But those are defining moments when you learn those kinds of things.

When I left GE, I ended up spending about four to five years working with another gentleman who was running a family office that was investing in the public markets as well as private startups.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Who is the biggest of your partners?

Josh Kamrath: D2L and Cengage are tied right now.

Sramana Mitra: They have course material and you complement that with the video assessment. 

Josh Kamrath: There are two different partners. There is a content partner and what you just described is exactly what it is. They have existing content. Together with Cengage, for instance, we create preloaded assessment and that’s married to the content that’s already existing. It’s a just-in-time type of delivery.

Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 1)

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

We’ve covered Medidata in TLHIT before. This time, we look at the entrepreneurial journey of this wonderful company.

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

Tarek Sherif: What you’d hear in my journey is a great example of the American dream. I was born in Cairo, Egypt. My mother is German and my father is Egyptian. He was a criminologist.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you sell? Selling faculty-by-faculty and direct door-to-door is not a viable scalable model. How did you actually get to market?

Josh Kamrath: To answer your question directly, we were selling direct door-to-door. Then we evolved into selling more enterprise-oriented deals. Instead of going to individual faculty, we would go to directors of technology.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’re avid users of Upwork. We really believe in that whole virtual staffing model.

Josh Kamrath: For a big and long part of our history, we used Upwork to get the first iteration of our products to market. We found some developers in Ukraine. We did a bake-off. I had three different teams do the same project and picked the best team to become our core developers and those guys took us very far away with our products.