From Zero to a Market Cap Bigger than General Motors: Keith Krach, Founder of Ariba (Part 1)

Ariba was the first B2B internet company in history. In this interview, we go back through one of the iconic ventures that shaped Silicon Valley, paving the way for much that came later.

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 circumstances?

Keith Krach: I was raised in a small town in Ohio right outside of Cleveland. My father had a five-person machine shop in the good times. It was just me and him in the tough times. >>>

Concept Financing for a Fat Startup: Tomer Shiran, CEO of Dremio (Part 2)

Tomer Shiran: Somewhere in the company, we have some data about our customers and business, but we don’t have that ability to ask questions and get an answer because the data is in so many places and it’s in various different structures. It really requires a lot of engineering effort to do anything with it.

The user that has the need to answer this question don’t have the necessary skills or the access to be able to do that. That was the premise. It was to see if we could solve that problem. It’s not, by any means, a new problem but one that companies have struggled with for a very long time. We thought that that provided an opportunity to do something very different from anything that had been done before in the world of analytics. >>>

Concept Financing for a Fat Startup: Tomer Shiran, CEO of Dremio (Part 1)

Yes, concept financing still happens from time to time, especially for fat startups, but you need to have deep domain knowledge, and strong investor relationships, to pull one off.

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

Tomer Shiran: I was actually born in Israel. At the age of one, I moved to the United States so that my dad could do his Ph.D. at Stanford. I spent the next 10 years living in the Bay Area. This was early 80’s. I was on Stanford campus most of the time. Then, we moved back to Israel when I was about 11. I then went through middle school and high school there. I did my military service and undergraduate at the Technion. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: Under30Experiences CEO Matt Wilson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How has you blog content strategy changed as you morphed from writing about entrepreneurship to travel?

Matt Wilson: We ended up selling Under30CEO.com. We then decided to completely break off into a new content strategy and into a completely separate business. It was time for us to move on. I was running Under30Experiences and Jared O’Toole, my partner, was running Under30CEO.

We had to make a decision. Do we want to have two smaller companies or do we want to do one thing really well? We were able to sell one company and invest the money into the second company. We struggled for a long time, we were just two guys who were running a website and living at home with their parents. Luckily, our website has lots of things to buy now.

Sramana Mitra: If you’re good with content and if you can use content marketing to market something that you’re actually 

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Bootstrapping to $5 Million: Under30Experiences CEO Matt Wilson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How many people come on these trips?

Matt Wilson: Usually, 18 people and a trip leader.

Sramana Mitra: In one year, how many of these trips are you orchestrating?

Matt Wilson: We did 250 this year.

Sramana Mitra: You are leading 250 trips? That means you’re traveling all the time. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: Under30Experiences CEO Matt Wilson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do when you came out of college? Did you start a company right away?

Matt Wilson: I had a few job offers, but I was just not interested in going in that direction. It just didn’t sound appealing to have to show up somewhere from nine to five just to answer to someone and work to make someone else’s dreams come true when I could make my own dreams come true. I moved back home to this small town I talked about.

With the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, we could be surrounded by smart, young, and innovative people online. We started a website called uner30ceo.com. It has been acquired twice since we started it. We started a media site for entrepreneurs. We had meetings >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: Under30Experiences CEO Matt Wilson (Part 1)

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

Matt has built a fan business using content marketing to sell travel experiences to a millennial demographic. Very cool!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Matt Wilson: I grew up in upstate New York. I grew up in a little tiny town called Stormville New York. It’s about 60 minutes outside of New York. It’s not really that close to the city where there was much happening yet. It wasn’t extremely rural. I just started being an enterprising young man whether it was mowing lawns or picking golf balls out of the local ponds. Selling them on eBay was my first online business. That really ignited the >>>

Bootstrapping with Services from Michigan: Amjad Hussain, CEO of Algo.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the team in Detroit?

Amjad Hussain: Our total team size, including engineering, data science, and implementations, is a little over 50 people. We do not have any subcontracting or offshoring going on. Since we live in a very competitive and global landscape, we have to work in a very efficient manner. We have found several recipes of how to work together effectively so that we can compete globally.

Sramana Mitra: I have a couple of questions on that. How many customers do you have today?

Amjad Hussain: Because we go deep and wide and have these very long-term customer relationships, total number of customers is not a big list. We have around 20. >>>