Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Greg Besner, CEO of CultureIQ (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your situation, having worked in finance, very often, there tend to be good friend investors. As angels, they act as friends and family angels. I love what you said that you raised money from your customers. It’s something that we’re talking about from a methodology point of view.

We have done a few case studies of entrepreneurs who have basically raised money from their customers, which is a fantastic way to raise money because not only do you get the customers in as investors and promoters of what you’re doing, you’re also getting actual revenue into the company from these customers. Across the board, >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Greg Besner, CEO of CultureIQ (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after Wharton?

Greg Besner: I ended up going to Goldman Sachs. At first, it felt like a disappointment that I wasn’t starting a company. Although I was doing entrepreneurial things, I was not pursuing entrepreneurship full-time. I’m still happy I did go to Goldman Sachs for a few reasons.

Firstly, it was an incredible culture. I had no financial services background before being recruited to Goldman Sachs. The fact that they trusted their culture and their training and that they would recruit me was really amazing. The training was really incredible. It was the first feel of how culture could be so powerful for business. I’m sure you’re familiar with Fortune’s 100 best >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Greg Besner, CEO of CultureIQ (Part 1)

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

Greg has built three businesses and shares our philosophy of capital efficient entrepreneurship. Read on to learn more about his journey.

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?

Greg Besner: I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which people think of as a small casino town although there were no casinos there at that time. My father was a taxi driver for 38 years. My mother was a housewife until the casino industry started in >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What strategic moves are worth discussing in your business-building process that people can learn from? What are some of the moves that you’ve made that have really worked or have not worked? What can we learn from that?

Rizwan Kassim: One of the most interesting points of a prepaid model is you effectively get a float. If someone pays for wireless service on January 1st, its cost is paid later in the year. You get a float from your subscribers and that’s allowed a certain amount of growth as long as you continue growing. You don’t need much capital. That was a huge >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Pinpoint for me the strategy for growth.

Rizwan Kassim: First was having the right distribution. This is a business that was about distribution.

Sramana Mitra: What was the distribution strategy?

Rizwan Kassim: These cellphone shops are used to getting screwed by the carriers. Sometimes they don’t get paid commissions. Sometimes they don’t get treated well. We had the ethics of doing right by the dealer. We always pay >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to understand this. At the end of the day, the value proposition that you were offering was international calling at affordable rates from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world.

Rizwan Kassim: No, it would be their US cellphone service. Instead of using Verizon or AT&T, they would use Ultra as their phone service. Many of the people who are calling internationally are also first-generation immigrants. We entered a marketplace that exists already. It’s called the independent wireless channel. ABC Wireless sells a number of >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 4)

Rizwan Kassim: There’s also a term in telco called breakage. If you sell 500 minutes to someone at two cents a minute, they don’t necessarily use all 500 minutes. That helps with forward pricing. We spent a lot of time on what sort of message communicated best with first-generation Indians. We used people we knew. This was the time when A/B testing was considered new technology.

Sramana Mitra: Why did you decide to move on from this business or put this business on lower gear? It sounds like you switched gears to something else. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We should probably step through that. That’s your first technology entrepreneurship, right?

Rizwan Kassim: That’s the first one that hit any sort of scale.

Sramana Mitra: You started that in the 2006 to 2007 period?

Rizwan Kassim: The company was founded in 2006. >>>