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Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 4)

Sramana: Who were you going after in terms of clientele?

Gaurav Khandelwal: In the beginning, I was going after companies that had an appetite for innovation. Primarily, they were small and medium businesses. I often ran into entrepreneurs who were looking to build their ideas into the next big thing. This was happening in 2008 when large companies were not buying and the markets were in turmoil. I found that Houston was insulated from the recession. There was still a lot of healthy demand for technology products and web applications. I worked through incubators who had funded companies. The incubators were great at sending leads. That was the basis for us to get steady revenue. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 1)

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

John spent $200,000 to get to his first million in 18 months with GoGrid. One year from that, the company got to $5 million. Today, they are at over $50 million in revenue run-rate, all organically grown. Read John’s insights on a tightly managed entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: John, let’s start with introducing our audience to you personally. Where are you from? What’s your background?

John Keagy: I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I went to University of California, Berkley. I came to the West to chase gold like the miners did, because Silicon Valley is a great place to forge a career.

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Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 3)

Sramana: What specifically did you do when you launched ChaiOne? Who was your first customer?

Gaurav Khandelwal: I was dating a girl at the time who is now my wife. She was working at Microsoft and called me on a Friday night frantic. Her boss needed something done by Monday morning and it was something the company was relying on. She knew I did stuff with the web and wanted to know if I could help them out. I got on a call with her boss at 10 pm that Friday night and he showed me the problem he was having developing a survey application. He sent me a quote that a third party company had sent him.

I quickly realized that the quote was actually another company’s pricing for a product and that this company had just put their logos on top of it. When I googled the company I found that while they had been asking for $20,000 to do the project I could get the same software online for $80. All I had to do was configure the software. >>>

Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 2)

Sramana: Paying off all of your college debt is not a bad exit from your first company!

Gaurav Khandelwal: I agree that it was very timely. It also gave me a taste for entrepreneurship. After I graduated, I went to work for a consulting firm in New York. I quickly found out that I could not just have that one job, I had to be doing something else. I would do side jobs like building websites. I learned about building a business large enough to fulfill my ultimate dream, which was to build a legacy. I spent the next 7 years working for the same firm doing business transformation consulting. I was working with clients like Johnson and Johnson, Boeing, and other firms of that size. >>>

Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 1)

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

This is an interesting strategy discussion about a company that is doing substantial revenue based on services, has productized a piece of its services business that is also generating over a million in revenue. Where next?

Sramana: Gaurav, let’s go to the beginning of your story. Where were you born? What kind of background were you raised in?

Gaurav Khandelwal: I was born in Kolkata, India. I came to the US for my undergrad. I grew up in a large city and I really wanted to experience something different, so I applied and went to school in a very small town in northern Indiana that was in an Amish community called Goshen College. Different universities come through India and interview students and applicants. That gives students a chance to meet with deans and hear about the schools. I met with several of them and this particular school was very interesting. They had a program that required every single student to spend a semester abroad to graduate. I had never heard of that before. I thought it was fantastic to know that every single student at that school had spent a semester in Indonesia, China, or some other country. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 3)

Benoît l’Archevêque: I’ll give you a very quick example. If I do a search on Italian, red, and car, you see a Ferrari. What we have created is a new dynamic knowledge graph where we only store words once. If I have 500,000 bottles of wine, I’m not going to store the word wine 500,000 times because I have 500,000 different bottles of wine. I will store wine once. I will store red once. I will store the words that are not common to create this other group of products. We were able to build a new way of structuring data. We can now take homogeneous and heterogeneous data and deconstruct and reconstruct in real time. For us, it’s a matter of seconds.

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Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 7)

Sramana: Can you give us some use cases as examples?

Adam Singolda: One example that I really like is Ancestry.com. It is a brilliant example of the future. Today 70% of the $110 billion in advertising are ROI performance-driven spends. The likelihood of that changing is very small. Ancenstry.com offers subscription services and they are able to create engaging, high quality content. They are able to scale with us by offering people who may not know how much they would enjoy searching out their family history content targeted to their interest. Those people find the content very interesting. Even if they do not join, they will show signs of interest such as Tweeting their content. We can then re-target some of those people as well. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Benoît l’Archevêque: It was in 1990. One Thursday morning, I lost my job. That noon, I said, “Nobody else will fire me again in my life.” So I started my own advertising agency that’s still running. People were coming to me with their problems thinking that only advertising could solve them. I was not just changing the advertising model; I was just changing the business model. If you’re not shouting the right message, you’re not going to get any more result just because you’re doing more advertising. It’s important to have the right business model.

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