From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s we?

Aparna Dhinakaran: I went through YC with my brother.

Sramana Mitra: What’s his background?

Aparna Dhinakaran: Also computer science. We jumped in and did YC. I recommend this to entrepreneurs. If you get into YC, it’s absolutely worth it. For it is for a first-time entrepreneur, there are two things that you need to focus on. One is building the product and then selling the product. They just focus on how do you remove every other noise. That’s the focus of that entire program.

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So did you quit Uber?

Aparna Dhinakaran: The reason I left Uber was to go to a PhD program. No one in my family had ever gone through higher education. When I had applied to Uber, I had an offer from a PhD program in Computer Vision. I had a ton of debt, so I had to first go to work for a couple of years. I’m really glad I did because nothing beats real-world experience. I left Uber to do a PhD at Cornell.

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 1)

We have a huge audience of developers, engineers, and programmers who want to transition to becoming successful entrepreneurs.

This conversation explores the journey of such a developer. Fantastic story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What kind of circumstances?

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in the second round?

Jonny Grubin: Probably about £300,000. In total, we raised about £900,000.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I love capital-efficient businesses.

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: 2014 and 2015, more of the same?

Jonny Grubin: Our focus and what I had built this business around was gifting samples to a friend. We were doing well with that. There was nobody else in the space. Brands loved it. We were on a pretty exciting trajectory. We had a lot of brands come to us saying, “We want to be able to sample in other ways. We don’t do it through just a gifting experience.” It was only down to my stubbornness that we focused solely on gifting for so long.

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much did Avon pay you?

Jonny Grubin: They paid me £1,000 which seemed like a huge amount of money at that time. It was about validating it all. We were still very much bootstrapped. I didn’t want to be greedy. I need to charge them something. A thousand pounds seemed like a fair price and it seemed like I could map out how to get to breakeven in a short period of time.

Sramana Mitra: What happened after that? How did you go about building on that concept?

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did your friend put in?

Jonny Grubin: He put in £45,000, which for me felt like a huge amount of money.

Sramana Mitra: What exactly where you able to prove in that MVP? I’m so used to constantly working with people’s pitches. As you were speaking, one thing that struck me is you almost have two ideas in there. One is this idea that for people in urban areas where theft is higher and there’s no safe space to leave something. That is a real delivery problem.

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 3)

Jonny Grubin: I wrote to a couple of friends and we launched an MVP. People couldn’t do anything with SoPost, but it allowed me to test the concept. In December 2012, we launched a website where you could sign up with your email address. You could add some delivery addresses and create a schedule, but you couldn’t do anything off the back of it.

Sramana Mitra: You said you worked with a couple of friends. You also had this paycheck that was still going when you started this company. Can you take me to that very beginning before you launched an MVP when you decided to restart? How long did you keep that other job?