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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you were going through this whiteboarding process of what your vision of what the company wants to be when it grows up, what was the financial situation of the company?

David Karandish: We were profitable. We were generating revenue. We were small, but we were doing each of those and we realized we were going to have to adapt and evolve. At that time, we didn’t have any registered users. We didn’t have any of our own unique content. We didn’t have any direct advertisers.

Sramana Mitra: If you could acquire something, the process would go a lot faster. That’s fully understandable. To be able to go acquire a major property, what kind of revenue levels were you going out to do that with? >>>

Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 1)

Mass customization has been the holy grail of fashion e-commerce for the longest time. Meet Kyle Vucko, CEO of Indochino, a men’s fashion company that has cracked the code.

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

Kyle Vucko: I grew up in Victoria. It’s a smaller town on the west coast of Canada. I ended up going to the University of Victoria where I met my good friend Heikal Gani, who is my co-founder. >>>

Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the intellectual property that you bought? From whom did you buy it?

Atul Jain: It was a one-person entity. I hired a person that had a bit more telecom knowledge than I did. I asked him about what I could build and he talked about doing something in the billing reconciliation system. I said to him, “Is there something that I could buy as a starting point.” He told me that there was this one guy who had an intellectual property. I bought that and found out that it was incomplete and didn’t have a back-end. We bought a little something that didn’t quite work as a standalone.

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A plan did not exist at that time?

David Karandish: Answers.com was not a parallel path. We acquired Answers.com in 2011. Around 2008-2009, we did a white boarding strategy session. We brought some of the key management team members in and asked them, “If we were going to build the ultimate Internet company, what would that look like?” We checked off a bunch of items. A great brand that consumers recognize and lots of high-quality content. The content would be unique, stuff you can’t find in other places. Ideally, that content would be increasingly from users and it would capture the voice of consumers. >>>

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 1)

You would think question and answer sites are hard to monetize. Read how David Karandish built Answers.com to be a profitable $200M+ company … Note, the much-hyped Quora doesn’t monetize at all yet.

Sramana Mitra: David, let’s start with your background. Where does your story begin? What is the back-story to the Answers.com story?

David Karandish: I was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri. I went to Washington University in Saint Louis and studied computer science and entrepreneurship. While I was in high school, my friend Chris and I started working together on a bunch of entrepreneurial ventures. We did that through college, graduated with a degree in Computer Science, and then ultimately started this current company. >>>

Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were you consulting on?

Atul Jain: I was helping them build a system for oil trading. I had developed a certain amount of expertise in doing that, so they were happy to get my expertise to help them figure out how to go about building an integrated oil trading system. I told them upfront, “I’m not doing this to be a one-man shop. I have a clear goal of building a team of people so if you don’t feel that you want to give me additional opportunities, please tell me upfront. Because if you take me, you’re committing to me that you will give me additional opportunities to begin building a team and a company.”

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 1)

There is, of course, a myth that you cannot build a large company by bootstrapping. What a total pot of crap! Meet Atul Jain, and get your premises checked and readjusted.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where were you born, raised, and educated? Tell us a bit of the backstory of your current entrepreneurial story.

Atul Jain: I was born in Kanpur, India. I was born in a lower-middle class family. My father was an engineer in PWD. I am the youngest of three children. The eldest is my sister Manu Jain and I have an elder brother Naveen Jain. At the age of eleven, I received a merit scholarship from the Government of India to study in a residential school. >>>

Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 7)

Sramana: In terms of completing the story, bringing us up to 2014, there are few interesting questions I would like to ask. What are some of the other major strategic moves that you made?

Brian Requarth: Let me summarize one thing, say financing. I organized the financing in several buckets. After pooling from friends and family, in the first external financing, my investors were Simon Baker, Greg Waldorf, Shaun Di Gregorio—all these people have very deep understanding of the operations of a real estate portal.

Sramana: So you went after domain investors basically and they did not mind investing in an international company? >>>