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Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about your thinking around that. It sounds like there’s a philosophy around being self-financed. You must be getting lots of calls from private equity all the time.

Faisal Husain: Yes, we’ve been getting calls for several years. I have met all of them and am on fairly good terms with them. In one or two cases, I’ve even gone down the road of bringing an investor on board. Twice now, I have walked away from the altar. First of all, capital is a business need. As a business that is profitable and is generating cash flows, we do have a source of capital that we use for our growth. On top of that, we have been working with developing good relationships with banks. I can always use more capital.

As a person who has built up his business and brought it to $300 million by myself, I’m hesitant about outside ownership in the company that is only in it for short-term financial gain and doesn’t really care about the soul of the company. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 1)

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

There’s a lot of controversy around whether virtual teams scale. Taso Du Val has scaled a sizeable business using a virtual team. Read on to learn more.

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

Taso Du Val: I grew up in Massachusetts and Westchester, New York. I’m a high school dropout who started Toptal at the age of 25.

Sramana Mitra: What was going on in your life around 25 that led you to start Toptal? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you leave Summit to do this?

Vincent Yang: I left Summit in 2012. I didn’t start the company back then. I actually went to Stanford Business School. I already had the idea. We raised some angel money. It was in Stanford where I started the company. We hired a bunch of Stanford Ph.D.’s in the neuroscience team to help us write very sophisticated algorithms. We hired a natural language processing expert to analyze companies. That was the turning point from having the idea to making things happen.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2014?

Vincent Yang: We started in late 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise on which you raised the angel financing? What was the business that you told your investors you were going to build? >>>

Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where is your team? Is it all in New York?

Faisal Husain: We started out of New Jersey. We had a development center in India from day one, because almost all of our clients were interested in leveraging the global delivery model to manage the cost in these projects.

To your question about what things we did strategically, we invested in professional sales. We also made a strategic decision not to raise money >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2009?

Vincent Yang: That brings us to early 2010.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens next?

Vincent Yang: Then, I moved to Palo Alto. When I was in JP Morgan, my main job was to analyze companies. In particular, I developed a mathematical model to analyze public companies. It’s very funny. Investment banking is much like the military. If you’re a junior, nobody cares about you. You basically follow the order. For me, it was very interesting because before investment banking, I was actually a CEO. I was not a fit at all at JP Morgan. I remember in the first week, I was telling the partner, “Let me source a couple of deals for you.” The partner looked at me and said, “Now, this is what I want you to do. You just do PowerPoint.” I repositioned myself. >>>

Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you did a bunch of e-commerce systems at a couple of hundred thousand dollars a pop in the early days of the company. What’s the next major milestone? How long did it take you to get to a $100 million in revenue, for instance?

Faisal Husain: We started in mid-2001. We did about $400,000 in revenue. We reached the million dollar mark fairly quickly. In the third year, which was the second full year we had, we did about $2.8 million in revenue. Then we did $5.5 million. We grew extremely well in 2004. The next year, we did $14.4 million.

Sramana Mitra: All this was still in the same business model? You were still building e-commerce systems in a services mode? >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 7)

Dave Terry: Our competitors were historically Concur and the big ERP players who have their own shallow apps and then some of the older generation products. While they aren’t out there actively selling, they are supporting their own customers and attempting upgrades. In that market, the older vendors are beginning to be dismissed by most of the market. IBM, even in the last summer, decided to sunset their product. They’ve formally come out with an announcement. All of those customers are rapidly making a change. We’ve been very fortunate to convert a number of very large IBM customers. >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 1)

I did a company in the sales lead generation and qualification space using Artificial Intelligence back in 1998. We were very, very early. It’s exciting to see the movements in the space, and how EverString is succeeding almost 20 years later.

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

Vincent Yang: I was originally born and raised in China. I was born in Shanghai. I went to college in China. When I was studying in high school, I was very interested in mathematics. I was one of the few students in high school who didn’t go to any class for help in mathematics and computer science. Obviously, right after high school, I selected mathematics as my undergraduate. I went to one of the top universities in China and studied mathematics.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you finish university? >>>