Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 4)

Rich Waldron: Deep down, we weren’t that passionate about solving email. Email wasn’t a thing we had a problem with. We were being pushed to think through how you want to spend the next 20 years of your life.

Some of the bad traits from Europe that we’d picked up is pitching ideas that we thought would get funded and would perhaps lead to a quick exit than being something that genuinely moved you.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 3)

Rich Waldron: There was one person who really liked us. The reason was, as a team, there is a clear CTO, a business person, and a product/CEO type. We had an interesting balance of skill sets. We were technically savvy. We were able to produce and build the things that we wanted to.

Even if our idea wasn’t necessarily in the right ballpark, we had real determination and a scrappy culture about us. They liked the fact that we weren’t prepared to quit. We kept plowing on.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later to $120M from Colorado: Madwire CEO JB Kellogg (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2019?

JB Kellogg: We built the third version and released at the end of 2019. We’re excited about that because it truly makes us more of a technology company than we’ve ever been. Now we have do-it-yourself (DIY) functionality, and not just do-it-for-me (DIFM).

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: IntelyCare CEO David Coppins (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You expect people to be trained at a certain level to be part of your pool that you staff with. What is that qualification that you’re looking for?

David Coppins: We employ Registered Nurses (RN), Licensed Vocational Nurses (LVN), and nurse aids. Each one of them has their own objective certifications. Beyond that, we require that everyone have at least one year experience working in long-term care.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: IntelyCare CEO David Coppins (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you think is going to happen? We are, on the one hand, over 30 million people in America that are unemployed. This could go up. At some point, it will come down. For the foreseeable future, there’s going to be tremendous unemployment in the system.

Then there are certain segments and sectors in the economy that are getting absolutely massacred. Retail is getting massacred. Restaurants are getting massacred In fact, a lot of women are losing their jobs. Do you foresee that there is going to be a retraining of this workforce into clinical workers?

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me in a bit more granular form what was going on. What kind of web development were you doing? What was the product idea that you were noodling with and then building?

Rich Waldron: In hindsight, providing services alongside product development was really important. We got a crash course in having to manage our own finances.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later to $120M from Colorado: Madwire CEO JB Kellogg (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level in 2014? What was the split between product and service?

JB Kellogg: $20 million at that point. The mix was somewhere around 20% product and 80% services.

Sramana Mitra: Was it still bootstrapped?

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 1)

Rich is building an authentic tech company from London and while the company could have become a so-called Unicorn by loading up on liquidation preferences, they have chosen not to do so. Excellent story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?