Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 2)

Tarek Sherif: Working for a large corporation was a good experience in the sense that I figured out what I didn’t want to do. I came out of there determined to never be in a role where I didn’t have a large measure of control.

As I used to joke about it, I ended up becoming CEO of Medidata, because I don’t like having a boss. But those are defining moments when you learn those kinds of things.

When I left GE, I ended up spending about four to five years working with another gentleman who was running a family office that was investing in the public markets as well as private startups.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Who is the biggest of your partners?

Josh Kamrath: D2L and Cengage are tied right now.

Sramana Mitra: They have course material and you complement that with the video assessment. 

Josh Kamrath: There are two different partners. There is a content partner and what you just described is exactly what it is. They have existing content. Together with Cengage, for instance, we create preloaded assessment and that’s married to the content that’s already existing. It’s a just-in-time type of delivery.

Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 1)

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

We’ve covered Medidata in TLHIT before. This time, we look at the entrepreneurial journey of this wonderful company.

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

Tarek Sherif: What you’d hear in my journey is a great example of the American dream. I was born in Cairo, Egypt. My mother is German and my father is Egyptian. He was a criminologist.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you sell? Selling faculty-by-faculty and direct door-to-door is not a viable scalable model. How did you actually get to market?

Josh Kamrath: To answer your question directly, we were selling direct door-to-door. Then we evolved into selling more enterprise-oriented deals. Instead of going to individual faculty, we would go to directors of technology.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’re avid users of Upwork. We really believe in that whole virtual staffing model.

Josh Kamrath: For a big and long part of our history, we used Upwork to get the first iteration of our products to market. We found some developers in Ukraine. We did a bake-off. I had three different teams do the same project and picked the best team to become our core developers and those guys took us very far away with our products.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 1)

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

Bongo has turned a ~$1M investment into $6M+ in annual revenue with a compelling growth projection in the next couple of years.

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

Josh Kamrath: I was born in Phoenix, Arizona. I lived there until I was 12. Then my family moved to Colorado, which I consider my home. I grew up there and went to college at Colorado State University where I met my wife Josie. She’s from California. I graduated a year ahead of her.

Scaling a Robust Enterprise Software Company from Chicago: FourKites CEO Matthew Elenjickal (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re still selling completely direct? You’re not working with any of the major system integrators?

Matthew Elenjickal: We do. We’re partners with almost every system integrator that you can think of. We work with almost every system integrator out there including Accenture and Genpact .

We work with a lot of big software companies like JDA, Oracle, and SAP. Our solution is integrated into their systems. These are all the different channels that we are working on.

Scaling a Robust Enterprise Software Company from Chicago: FourKites CEO Matthew Elenjickal (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the process of customer acquisition? Where you reaching out to these customers? Were they reaching out to you? What was the inbound and outbound? What was the go-to-market strategy?

Matthew Elenjickal: For those early days, it was still outbound. You go through your Rolodex and some of the companies you work with in the past. You reach out to them and many of them saw the value and signed up. It was mostly outbound, and some inbound of course. But I would say 80% of that was outbound.