Featured Videos

Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When people show up for the class, what are they buying? When they’re buying tickets to attend these events, are they buying for just the class or the drinks as well?

Dan Hermann: They’re buying a ticket to attend a class. We like to call it an event rather than a class. We have a local artist that leads the event and walks everybody through a painting. When people buy a ticket, they can choose the event from which venue it’s at, what the date is, and what the painting is. You can see all the different paintings that there are to choose from on our website, which is PaintNite.com.

>>>

Disrupting Cloud-Based Recruiting: SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck (Part 3)

Sramana: What did you do after you sold your company?

Jerome Ternynck: I moved to San Francisco because being an entrepreneur in Europe is harder than it needs to be. If you are going to try and solve a big global problem you need to do it from the US or from an area where you have access to a significant market with significant capital.

In my previous company we saw the burst of the market and we were at the very start of it. In Europe our market went from $0 to $100 million in 10 years and we were happy about that. Meanwhile in the US it went from $0 to $1 Billion. The biggest European vendors had revenues of $25 million while the biggest US vendors had revenues of $250 million. At that point it is game over.

I did my first company in Prague and my second from London. I committed that I was not going to do another one from Europe so I moved here with my family. We moved here in 2010 and I founded SmartRecruiters. I am now trying to fix recruiting. That is the heart of what we are trying to achieve. We are building one platform that makes hiring easy for businesses and allows people to find a job in a more effective way. That has been my journey since 2011. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The simple thing is if you give things for free, people just click on it and then move on. If they pay for it, there’s a lot more commitment.

Peter Hirst: Low completion rate isn’t necessarily something that should be critical in relation to MOOCs, exactly because of what you said. People can try it out and see whether this is of interest or value to them. Perhaps, they get value out of a part of it and fulfill an important need for them.

Sramana Mitra: We’re not a free program. We have one layer of free program which is this weekly online mentoring session we do over WebEx. We have entrepreneurs around the world dial-in to that session and use that program. The premium program is a $1000 annual membership fee program. It has got a very rich curriculum with video lectures and case studies. >>>

Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 2)

Dan Hermann: We attended a friend’s birthday party, which was at this painting studio where they were serving beer and wine. Both he and I recognized very quickly that there was a lot of power to the concept, which had a lot of visual implications. We could tell that it was just very social media friendly. It made for a natural camera phone picture and people were posting on their Facebook pages. It just carried very well across social media. We could also tell that it was a lot of fun. Both of us thought that it would just be a fun thing to start.

>>>

Disrupting Cloud-Based Recruiting: SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck (Part 2)

Sramana: Why did you move to the Czech Republic?

Jerome Ternynck: I went there for the market opportunities. France didn’t, and still doesn’t, offer good opportunities for entrepreneurs. There is not much growth there. I went to a market and positioned myself in a market where I can show growth and opportunity. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Online learning is something that you can do at your own time in a very flexible way. That flexibility goes away with that. You’re saying that there’s more benefit in terms of engagement and learning, but there is that other benefit of flexibility that gets taken away from that setup.

Peter Hirst: That’s right. There are certainly trade-offs like that. Although you can use technology to track whether people have watched the videos that you’ve asked them to watch, one of the realities that we have is they will have done the pre-viewing or pre-reading with varying degrees of concentration. In some cases, maybe none at all. In the physical class, one of the things that we find that we have to do is allow time for the people who didn’t really do the pre-work intelligently as others to catch up, and do >>>

Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 1)

Social media is great, but human beings also love to socialize in person. Paint Nite is thriving by tapping into the desire human beings have to ‘hang out’ and do creative things.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with telling our audience a little bit about your personal background. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Dan Hermann: I am now 43 years old. I was born in Boston and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. I attended the University of Wisconsin. I started my first business at the age of 21. That business is a pick-up and delivery laundry service, which I still own today. We’re in six different states. I learned a great deal about operational businesses in that business.

>>>

Disrupting Cloud-Based Recruiting: SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck (Part 1)

SmartRecruiters is going after Taleo and SuccessFactors and intends to disrupt the cloud-based recruiting platform industry. Gutsy and well-conceived, Jerome is executing very well on his vision!

Sramana: Jerome, let’s start by reviewing your background. Where are you from? What are the roots to your entrepreneurial journey?

Jerome Ternynck: I was born in France. I studied finance in Paris at the University of Paris Dauphine. I then went into the army, which was mandatory at the time. I gained my first lessons in leadership over there. I served as an officer in the French paratroops for two years. >>>