Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: By rolling out your software in a risk operation that has such large numbers of manual labor, how many people can you replace with the software?

Gurjeet Singh: At this point, the banks are not talking about replacing people. They’re worried about capturing risk. They are more interested in making sure that they capture every last bit of risk and prove to the regulators that they are doing everything possible to account for anti-money laundering and to stop it in its tracks.

Sramana Mitra: As the founder of the company, what is your assessment? Can this be completely automated?

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Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 1)

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

John and Jive have executed steadily over the last decade and have built a kick-ass company. Read on!

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

John Pope: That’s a good place to start because where we come from, how we’re raised, and the early environment really shapes the way that we look at things and determines what type of an entrepreneur we’re going to be. I am from the Tacoma, Washington area. My family moved around a bit. I was the oldest child. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How were customers finding you?

Gurjeet Singh: Just through media. The launch in January was such a huge event. There was a lot of media and buzz around it. It felt like it was a pretty successful time, and it definitely gave us a false sense of complacency.

What we realized was while we could sell across these verticals for various use cases, it turned out to be very difficult to be able to train a sales force to sell across all these use cases. It was difficult to train a bunch of people who had made their >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s my question. What was the monthly recurring revenue when you raised the money?

Mikita Mikado: When we raised $600,000, we were around $30,000 monthly recurring revenue.

Sramana Mitra: This was for the new product?

Mikita Mikado: It was for the old product, but I was selling a division of the new product.

Sramana Mitra: They thought that you would be able to switch the clients over to the new product. That was the thought process of the angels? >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, grants and some consulting projects kept you going for a while. What happened next?

Gurjeet Singh: Yes, those were very lean days. My co-founders had done well enough that they could easily live without a salary for a long time. I was the only one, as the immigrant, who had to be paid a salary. I took the bare minimum. We didn’t spend a whole lot. We actually had a bunch of money in the bank that we didn’t spend.

Over the years, we ended up meeting somebody at the FDA and they introduced us to some people in  >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the scope of what you’re talking about overlaps with all sorts of existing products like DocuSign or EcoSign. How do you position in this general ecosystem?

Mikita Mikado: I find that the space is quite similar to the CRM space. There were lead management products and sales compensation products. There were a lot of pieces till Salesforce emerged. What we’re looking to do is a commerce platform for businesses to transact deals.

Signatures is part of our product. It’s a really nice feature. People get a lot of value by using electronic signatures, but it’s not what >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi (Part 1)

This is a very interesting conversation about technology from Stanford being commercialized in financial services and healthcare, addressing very specific use cases in risk and other domains.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Ayasdi.

Gurjeet Singh: I’m one of the co-founders and Chairman of the Board at Ayasi. I’m a mathematician and a computer scientist. I grew up in Delhi, India. I ended up working at Texas Instruments as a chip designer for about a year. I made my way to the US >>>

Bootstrap First from Belarus, Raise Money Later from Silicon Valley: PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the spec that you came up with for PandaDoc?

Mikita Mikado: It’s a commerce platform. That’s what we wanted to do. We were building a B2B commerce platform – a place where companies make offers, send them to buyers, and collaborate on those, agree on terms, execute on terms, sign, and then transact large sums of money. By large sums of money, I mean anything that needs paperwork. If you think about it, the bulk of the world’s economy is still run by paper. That’s the type of deals we want to digitalize and move to the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it’s a two-sided marketplace. Who were the early adopters of this? You said you

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