Featured Videos

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is from VCs or angels?

Manmeet Singh: It was angels but most of these angels were working as partners in large VC corporations. They go personally to these conferences. They came by my booth, saw my idea, and asked me, “How many people?” I told them three. They were interested and asked me if I was looking to raise money. They asked me to come in to demonstrate the idea and product. I did that with one more guy. They agreed to fund it. They had checked my past experience. They liked that I was working at a large enterprise and I had done two more startups.

Sramana Mitra; All this is happening in 2008 or 2009?

Manmeet Singh: That was Oracle OpenWorld 2008. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The movement right now is very much in favor of Elance. oDesk is more our platform but it’s the same concept. The only way I can run the company is because of what you’ve invented. However, I have always been a bit early in things. I did a fashion company in 1999. That was completely way ahead of this time. We did not survive the dot-com crash. Timing is a concern for a lot of people who are trying to get it right. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Jodie Fox: We went live in October 2009. The idea started to come together at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? Did you self-finance it? How did it all come together?

Jodie Fox: We bootstrapped for the first two and a half years and we put our own money over a period of a year. Each left their full-time jobs to work on the business.

Sramana Mitra: All of you quit your jobs to go full-time with the business?
>>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 2)

Manmeet Singh: I started thinking of better ways to secure data. That’s when I started thinking about data masking. Data masking can keep the data relevant and useful for non-production, and in certain cases, production environment also and take the personal PII and PCI values out of it. I found a couple of people who shared the same ideas and we started this company.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of getting the company going, you said you raised $900,000 in the beginning. Before you raised the money, what did you do to validate? Did you have a set of early customers, or at least, a customer discussion? What was the validation process like?

Manmeet Singh: That’s a good question. My validation was my consulting group. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What in your background made you think about Elance?

Beerud Sheth: I think it’s actually connecting a lot of dots for me.

Sramana Mitra: It’s always easy to connect dots when you’re looking back.

Beerud Sheth: We actually approached it that way. As an Indian, you know that there are millions of talented people in India and around the world. This was enabling people to meet each other and find freelancers anywhere in the world. As a Wall Street trader, I knew that you create marketplaces when you take illiquid things and make them more liquid. Services are generally highly illiquid. Enabling the technology part was due to the Computer Science background. Lastly, it was just a point in time where a lot of focus was in the commerce of goods, but the commerce of services is actually a bigger part of the GDP of the economy. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 1)

Mass customization has been the holy grail of the fashion industry ever since the Internet was born. Jodie Fox discusses why mass customization is so hard, and how her company is scaling a business that offers custom shoes.

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

Jodie Fox: I was born in a small country town in Australia. I was raised by a Sicilian mother and an Australian father. I was the first person in my family to go to university. Both my parents came from very humble backgrounds and worked really hard so that my sister and I could have a good education. It was very challenging to decide what I wanted to study. I was torn between my more artistic side and my more academic side. >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 1)

I have never seen a company raise so much money from so many angels. It is far from standard practice in the industry, but Manmeet did it! Find out how…

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from and where were you raised? Give me the back story of your entrepreneurial journey.

Manmeet Singh: I’m from New Delhi, India. I did my education back in India. In about a year, I came to the US as a programmer for HCL. Since then, I’ve been in the IT field, working for large companies. In 1999, I made a move towards startups. I learned how >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 1)

Beerud Sheth founded Elance back in 1998. At the time, the concept was new and path breaking. Today, with freelancing becoming a gigantic part of the global workplace, the company is playing a massive role in matching businesses with service providers. You can also read our interview with Fabio Rosati on Elance’s evolution.

Today, Beerud is on his second company, Webaroo, which in turn, is on its second mobile messaging product.

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