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Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Tell me more about the business itself. First and foremost, who were the people involved when you got this off the ground? You mentioned your co-founder. Where did he come from? How did you meet him? Where do you know him from?

Ricky Joshi: There are basically three co-founders of the company—myself, Kris, and Ron. I actually hired Kris at Craigslist. We also had a startup that we were incubating. I just knew that Kris and I would be working together. Kris is one of the smartest and most disciplined persons I’ve ever been around. It’s interesting because oftentimes, you have these people who are famous and have these brand names. Kris definitely has that spark.

Sramana Mitra: What is his background?

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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is not unusual. First time entrepreneurs start with very vague ideas with what they’re going to do. When I started my first company, I was a graduate student at MIT and I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t have a good idea about what I was going to do. Can you talk us through the process of how you navigated your way? Once you started, what happened? What did you do? How did you get your bearing?

Alicia Asin: We started thinking about doing projects in wireless sensor networks.

Sramana Mitra: These would be custom projects? You would do contract software development?

Alicia Asin: Yes. We thought about being a solutions provider. From the very beginning, we had a very clear vision that we wanted to be a global company. We thought that, from a scalability point of view, being a solutions provider and working project >>>

Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing lead generation for online stores, but the revenue models changed.

Trevor Traina: Correct. Instead of expecting the brands to pay us for consumer choice data, we let the retailers pay us for qualified leads.

Sramana Mitra: That has become the standard business model for that part of the ecosystem—comparison shopping.

Trevor Traina: Very much so, but at that time, it was not the standard model. We ended up taking up $5 million in VC money.

Sramana Mitra: Who was the investor?

Trevor Traina: The lead investor was called Media Technology Ventures. We took money from GE Capital and Intel.
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Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the dysfunctions of the industry? Why does that industry warrant starting a new company?

Ricky Joshi: You basically had four manufacturers who controlled 81% of the market. Majority of them were public companies. The average margins of manufacturers is around 40%. On top of that, you have distribution companies that take a percentage of the profit. Then you have retailers, which are also public companies. At the end of the day, a mattress that costs $500 would go to retail for $3,500 or more because of so many parties involved. We cut all that out. We’re not branded manufacturers. Because of the structure of the industry, you end up in a situation where there’s benefit to collusion. Different retailers will request proprietary products. What ends up happening is they’ll just change the stitch and call it a proprietary product.

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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 1)

Spain, as you know, is in a terrible economic mess. Entrepreneurs like Alicia are vital to the country’s economic future. She has built a steady, cutting edge technology company with 60+ people from Zaragoza. Impressive!

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your beginning. Where were you born? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Alicia Asin: I was born in Zaragoza, Spain. I went to the University of Zaragoza. This is where I met David Gascon my co-founder. We founded Libelium. We’ve been always tied to the same location. In fact, starting a new business gave us the motivation of staying in our city. It was like a rebel act of saying, “It has to be possible to be high tech in a city like ours.”

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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the business idea that you were playing with at that point?

Trevor Traina: The business became Compare.net.

Sramana Mitra: Comparative shopping online?

Trevor Traina: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking about now?

Trevor Traina: 1996.

Sramana Mitra: What happened? How did that go?

Trevor Traina: At that time, all of the web tools were focused on price comparison. It was the era of the shopping box.
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Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 1)

I have spoken with many VCs who are looking or e-commerce companies that can scale at venture pace, which is hard to achieve. On the other side of the spectrum, however, the bootstrapped e-commerce companies are going gangbusters! Saatva is one such and a terrific company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with your personal back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Ricky Joshi: I was born in Columbus, Ohio. I went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. I was very involved in the entrepreneurial scene there. I actually helped start the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network, which is now the flagship entrepreneurial program at Dartmouth. I started my first company at school. >>>

Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about what made that a successful transition? What did you do as a founder? What did your new CEO do as the incoming CEO? Obviously, it has been a successful transition since you’re working with this person for a while.

Ross Mason: A few things. Bringing someone new in is always a risk and a challenge. It’s not just the CEO but it’s the team around the CEO as well that really matters. He used to work at SpringSource and the CEO of SpringSource was a friend of mine. This was an open source company around the Spring framework that had a pretty good exit. Rod, the CEO at SpringSource recommended Greg. >>>