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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 1)

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

Birst’s beginnings had many of the same principles that we espouse in 1M/1M, engaging customers in paying relationships early on being the foremost. Today, the company has raised four rounds of venture capital, and is growing fast as a regular Silicon Valley-style pre-IPO company.

Sramana Mitra: Brad, let’s do your back story first. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? >>>

Building a Healthcare Company from Rhode Island: ShapeUp CEO Rajiv Kumar (Part 3)

Sramana: Is that when you started ShapeUp as a for-profit company?

Rajiv Kumar: I got together with one of my colleagues, Dr. Brad Weinberg, who was in the same program as I was. He was a technologist and a self-taught computer programmer. He decided to help me build a software platform that would organize this program. Our plan was to take that software program and make it the basis of a for-profit company which would target HR departments. This was in the summer of 2006. In the fall of 2006, we formally launched ShapeUp.

Sramana: How did you fund the business? >>>

Building a Healthcare Company from Rhode Island: ShapeUp CEO Rajiv Kumar (Part 2)

Sramana: What time-frame are we talking about when you were conceptualizing ShapeUp?

Rajiv Kumar: This was in 2005.

Sramana: That is when social media was starting to get introduced to the world at scale.

Rajiv Kumar: It was. Facebook was created in 2004. The concept behind ShapeUp was less about technology and more about approach. In healthcare, we tend to think that everything is very private. People act in a very similar, guarded way as well; God forbid somebody find out how much I weigh.

We tend to treat health as something very personal when in reality health is something that is very social. If we don’t take a social approach to solving a social problem then we are going to struggle to succeed. The technology became a medium for us to leverage our concept. >>>

Building a Healthcare Company from Rhode Island: ShapeUp CEO Rajiv Kumar (Part 1)

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

You wouldn’t think of Rhode Island as a hot bed of startups. However, a very nice eco-system is coming together, and success stories are emerging. Read ShapeUp’s wonderful journey …

Sramana: Rajiv, let’s begin this story by exploring your background. Where are you from? What kind of environment did you grow up in? >>>

Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 7)

Sramana: Let’s talk about oil and gas as an industry and how it consumes IT. You have talked about the application you are now taking to this industry. What other use cases can you see in that space?

Gaurav Khandelwal: First of all, it is very difficult to get into these companies. The older workforce is retiring and a younger force is coming into play. They are not going to work for a firm that does not have more advanced technologies. As you look at the cross section of needs, a lot of them have business processes that were built in the 1980’s and 1990’s. They have processes in place that were developed in that era. A lot of companies will come in and mobilize those existing processes. We re-engineer the process into a streamlined process. That is where my experience in consulting comes into play. We send designers out into the field and they come back with an experience map. Our team then engineers a solution that is streamlined for the customer. >>>

Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 6)

Sramana: Are you still a services company or have you developed a product now?

Gaurav Khandelwal: We have 55 developers in Houston. We did develop products over the years. Only one product is still active among the products that we have produced in the past four years. Last year, we felt we had learned our lesson in terms of developing products. A lot of the products that we had developed were opportunities that we saw in the market and on which we had our developers work on whenever they had downtime. We realized that is not the right way to develop a product. We are going to keep trying to develop successful products. Today, we have a separate path for the product team.

Sramana: Do you have an active product in the market right now?
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Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 5)

Sramana: When did you start hiring people? What year?

Gaurav Khandelwal: I hired the first three in February of 2010. That year, we hired 22 people, all in Houston.

Sramana: Where you at in terms of revenue in 2010?

Gaurav Khandelwal: In 2009, we doubled our revenue from 2008, and in 2010, we tripled our revenue from 2009.

Sramana: What happened in 2011? >>>

Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: GoGrid is 100% financed by you?

John Keagy: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us more about how you go about building GoGrid. What can people learn from your journey of building the company assuming that we’re taking the issue of financing off the table in this particular case because you have not raised financing? What are the key strategic things that you did and what can we learn from your journey?

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