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Building a Silicon Valley Style Company from Australia: ROKT CEO Bruce Buchanan (Part 1)

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

We don’t hear of cutting edge technology ventures out of Australia succeeding in the marketplace. ROKT is a rare gem, and a fascinating story!

Sramana: Bruce, where are you from? What kind of background do you come from?

Bruce Buchanan: I was born in Sydney. My background is a bit unique. My mother was British and my father was American. I spent quite a bit of time traveling to different places. My two grandfathers were stationed in Australia during World War II. After the war each one of my grandfather’s brought their families to Australia.

I spent a couple of years in the UK going to school and I spent a year of school in the US during junior high. I did my MBA at UCLA and I also worked for BCG in Boston. I have worked in the US and the UK as well, but I am predominantly an Australian. >>>

Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how you bootstrapped. What were some of the components of that bootstrap phase?

Vishaal Melwani: I didn’t know too much about startups. I didn’t know anything about Silicon Valley or raising money. We just knew how to build businesses that were cash flow positive. That was our number one goal. I invested about $100,000 of my own money to get the product going. Scott built all the early site development. For a year, we all worked completely for free focusing on building a great experience online that help facilitate sales. We took $100,000 and I said, “I don’t expect to get this back. This is how we’re going to do this. We’re going to buy a minimal amount of clothing. We’re going to turn this $100,000 into to $280,000.”

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Scaling a Fat Startup: MongoDB CEO Max Schireson (Part 7)

Sramana: It sounds like your thesis is that you want to get adoption and your assumption is that your free customers are eventually going to monetize. Is that correct?

Max Schireson: I suspect that most of them will not. That is OK because a lot of them will. The big banks and government agencies pay. We have built offerings that are compelling to them and that are worth paying for. Revenue has not been our top priority while choosing between adoption and revenue. However, when investors look at the company, they see we have a business model where unit economics makes sense. >>>

Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can we go back to the exact moment when you decided that you were going to do this business? What triggered the idea? What was going on in the industry? What are the dynamics of the founding?

Vishaal Melwani: One of the biggest things that struck me was there’s a need for this. There’s something that is missing. There’s a huge gap in this market. Between the low-end bargain bin like JC Penney and all the way to the higher-end Hugo Boss, there’s really nothing in between. There’s nothing that’s there to give our guy a spark. At that point, it was all about us creating a solution to that. It was around 2007 to 2008 when we first developed this idea. >>>

Starting Unicorn Companies: FireEye

In this series, I look at some of the ‘unicorn’ companies that Aileen Lee with Cowboy Ventures identified in her article, Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups. In it, she offered a list of companies that have had billion dollar exits, and analyzed some of the common threads. We will explore the early stage entrepreneurial jouneys of these Unicorn companies, as well as some others that I know well.

We started the series with Tableau Software and continue on today with FireEye, further elaborating on the general theme of cross-domain innovation.

Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau, says: “They say that the greatest innovations are born from strange bedfellows.” FireEye’s founder Ashar Aziz found his sweet spot at the cusp of virtualization, networking and security, two industries that he had insights into, and that generally, did not talk to each other. “What we do is a combination of very deep system level work in virtualization and operating systems, as well as network-level packet processing,” Aziz says.
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Scaling a Fat Startup: MongoDB CEO Max Schireson (Part 6)

Sramana: When did you join the company?

Max Schireson: I joined just at the beginning of 2011.

Sramana: Did you join the company as the CEO?

Max Schireson: I joined as the President. I did that for a while and then I was appointed CEO.

Sramana: What were the highlights of 2011 to 2014? What were some of the key strategic decisions that you have made and how have they impacted growth in the company. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 6)

Ray Martinez: The trend that we certainly want to see in higher education is the growth of options that will allow particularly non-traditional students in that category between 25 and 64 who are looking to go back to college and complete a degree to advance their careers further. That is a trend that we’ve probably not seen prominently enough but it’s one that I’d certainly want to see more prominently.

We have traditional universities and online universities that are emulating competency-based education which we’ve been doing for 16 years now. That’s a trend that we’ll begin to see more prominently because the vast majority of our students now in post-secondary degree programs is your non-traditional students. It is not your 18 to 22 year old. It is, increasingly, your adult learner that falls into that age category.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us to the question of price of higher education. How do you price? What does it cost to be a student in your program? How do you feel about the whole rising cost of higher education?

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Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 2)

Vishal Melwani: Within a year, we garnered around 180 clients that were some of the world’s top urban wear brands. We ended up selling to a large trading firm within the first year. We sold to a trading firm based in Hong Kong. I was 25 and I had an exit under my belt. I was this guy who was a highly-driven, third-generation tailor who wanted to focus on the product. I took a couple of months off and went to visit my friends who I’d graduated with. They were typical guys who graduated from business school and law school and they moved out to the east coast to get jobs at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. This was the height of the recession. This is around 2008 when jobs were literally just decimated. >>>