Master Bootstrapper with a Billion Plus in Exits: Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi and Flock (Part 1)

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

Bhavin and his brother Divyank have bootstrapped Directi, a portfolio of Internet businesses over the last ~20 years. In 2014, they had their first $160 million exit. In 2016, they had a second $900 million exit. It’s a very interesting story of masterful business acumen and disciplined fundamentals-driven execution. Not a penny of external financing involved, by the way.

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?

Bhavin Turakhia: I was born and raised in Mumbai. My parents are originally from there. I went to school there. In many ways, the seeds for my entrepreneurship career were largely sown there. I remember in 1989, I was in the sixth grade when the school installed their very first computer room. I’m talking >>>

Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 1)

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

WalkMe’s vision is to make software understand humans, rather than the other way around. Rafael discusses the growth story of a company that is driving significant innovation in mobile and web user engagement.

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?

Rafael Sweary: I was born in Tel Aviv and grew up in Tel Aviv. I was an entrepreneur at a very early age. In elementary school, I >>>

Bootstrap First to $10 Million from Australia, Raise $25 Million Later from the US: Ashik Ahmed, CEO of Deputy (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you choose to raise your $25 million financing from? In Australia?

Ashik Ahmed: Funny story was that every morning, we’d wake up and there’d be an email from some VC. I wanted to focus on growing the business as opposed to getting interested in VCs. In mid-2006, we realized that our product has product-market fit. We have saturated the partnership model but we’re limited by how much our partners are getting. We need to grow the business.

The other thing was, even though we didn’t plan for it, something unreal happened. All of a sudden, we have enterprises with >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Arizona: Heidi Jannenga, Co-Founder of WebPT (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you fantasize about? Are you now trying to take the company public or do you want to do some sort of an acquisition? Now that you have private equity in there, you have to do exit.

Heidi Jannenga: Yes, we have to do exit, but that was one of the other things that we love about Battery. They are patient investors. They don’t have a playbook of three to five years. Their average is quite a bit higher than your average PE firm. We are thinking about opportunities for exit. We fantasize about being a hundred million dollar company by 2020.

We’re going to have 50% market share. We’re going to grow through acquisition. Inevitably, what we think is most likely going to happen as an exit for WebPT is one of two things. One, we are going to be the platform company in which Battery brings on, through acquisitions, other disciplines so that we become more >>>

Bootstrap First to $10 Million from Australia, Raise $25 Million Later from the US: Ashik Ahmed, CEO of Deputy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When did you start the Gusto partnership?

Ashik Ahmed: That was between late 2013 and early 2014.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in 2014? How would you attribute that to Xero, Gusto, and your direct selling efforts?

Ashik Ahmed: The challenge with partnerships is that, at the start, you get a very good escalator. But then you reach an altitude where you can’t go any higher because you’ve have milked every customer from that partnership. At that stage, we were definitely >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Arizona: Heidi Jannenga, Co-Founder of WebPT (Part 6)

Heidi Jannenga: One big lesson that we learned was that valuation is important, but it’s not the most important thing. The terms of the deal are the most important. People can give you valuation but at the end of the day when it comes to the contract, it’s really about the terms. Even on a minority deal, they can put in terms in there that feel very much like a majority owner. You lose a lot of control, potentially, if you’re not watching the terms.

We went down the aisle with two companies, got starry-eyed with valuation, but at the last minute, we took a deep breath and said, “We’re not sticking to what we said we were going to do here.” We walked away at the altar and did not go through with the deal. It was one of the best decisions that we’ve ever made. We went back to the grindstone for six months and several companies came back to us saying, “Are you sure?” We probably had, at least, 40 to 50 >>>

Bootstrap First to $10 Million from Australia, Raise $25 Million Later from the US: Ashik Ahmed, CEO of Deputy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: From a customer acquisition point of view, how did you go to market?

Ashik Ahmed: It was really, really hard. We spoke to a lot of customers. In the second round where we went for anyone can just sign up, you don’t need to get the word out. Back then, I don’t think we even understood the M of marketing. One of the other things we realized is that we do quite a lot of time and attendance but we don’t do payroll.

There was this company called Xero which was growing very fast in Australia. They do accounting and payroll. We built and did integration. Most of our customers used to say that it took them a day or two to do payroll. We took it down to one minute. You just >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Arizona: Heidi Jannenga, Co-Founder of WebPT (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us about the hiring of this CEO. What was the process that you followed and how did you decide who was the right CEO for you? This is a very difficult and challenging exercise to bring in an outsider to replace the founders.

Heidi Jannenga: I want to be very clear that it was not to replace. We made that very clear through our hiring process that this was not a replacement. This was an addition to our team. One of the emotionally-intelligent decisions that we made was understanding what our strengths were and what we were missing. Through the hiring process, we didn’t want to replicate either one of us.

We wanted to adjunct to our strength with the piece that we felt was missing. That missing piece was a process-oriented, metrics-driven kind of person which neither of >>>