Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 1)

Ukrainian entrepreneur Vladimir Gendelman started as a solo entrepreneur in Detroit and has bootstrapped a $5M+ niche e-commerce company.

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

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about events? Is that something that you’ve done in those marketplaces?

Stan Markov: Yes, we haven’t been to a Microsoft of Google event. We’ve been to the AWS ReInvent and exhibited there. We’ve also been to the KubeCon event. It’s a great audience and a great source of leads.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how things evolved now that you have some money and have a team together. How are things going in 2018 and 2019?

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the VMWare Marketplace. How many VMWare admins are on the marketplace?

Stan Markov: It’s not the biggest source of leads. If I compare it to the AWS Marketplace or the Azure marketplace, VMWare Marketplace is not as popular. It’s one of the ways to get to either VMWare or third-party products.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: They invested because the five of you had deep domain knowledge. This is a very desirable team.

Stan Markov: In addition to that, we had all the certificates. I was the first one in the entire IBM to get the highest VMWare certificate – VMWare Certified Design Expert. Only around 300 in the world have it.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How is Runecast positioned? What is the go-to-market?

Stan Markov: We started developing the MVP in 2014. We launched at VMWorld in San Francisco in 2015. At that time, our product was oriented towards VMWare vSpheres. It was proactive troubleshooting but also security hardening. It was a lot on the IT operations and configuration management side.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 1)

Stan and his four co-founders have built a wonderful business from Brno in the Czech Republic. A lot of Bootstrapping by Piggybacking principles have been applied to gain leverage.

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?

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Regional

At 1Mby1M, we welcome entrepreneurs from all over the world and our courses include case studies of entrepreneurs across different regions.