Building Multiple Bootstrapped Education Software Companies: Lane Rankin, CEO of Illuminate Education (Part 1)

Lane was first a teacher, then a school and school district administrator. His background is not of a typical tech entrepreneur. However, his deep domain knowledge and relationships in the education field have propelled him to become a very successful EdTech entrepreneur. Great story!

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

Lane Rankin: I’m currently in California. I was born in Seattle, Washington. I have a Bachelors degree in Applied Mathematics and went on to get a Masters in Leadership. I started my first company back in 1999. >>>

Learning From Mistakes: Roy Peleg, CEO of FirstImpression.io (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we in now?

Roy Peleg: Around 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012?

Roy Peleg: I left the previous startup and came up with the idea for my current company, FirstImpression.io. What actually happened is that I decided to completely quit my day job. I did some consulting along the way, but almost 100% of my time was dedicated to the startup. I listened to a lecture by another entrepreneur who found a way to monetize websites by securing the unused page that you see after you download a software. >>>

Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is the business today? Of all these different strategies, which one is generating the maximum revenue?

Martin Manniche: The biggest is Telco. It’s the fastest growing segment for us. As I said, it has really taken the company to the next step. We’re around 300 employee worldwide. Out of them, 220 are engineers. It’s a very engineering-heavy organization.

Sramana Mitra: What is the revenue range?

Martin Manniche: We are a private company but I will say we are between $60 million to $70 million.

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Learning From Mistakes: Roy Peleg, CEO of FirstImpression.io (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It is very difficult to make a success of those kinds of businesses. As you may have been following what’s happening in the online media industry, most of the companies are failing in that space.

Roy Peleg: You’re correct. I would say that revenue was secondary. There were hardly any independent computer websites back then. The next site I made money from. It was in English, so that market was bigger. We were able make a few thousand dollars a month, but it was hard.

Sramana Mitra: I would summarize your startup attempts as probably having been hard because of the business model that you chose to pursue. These business models of ad-supported media sites is not working. Let’s come to what happens after that. >>>

Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 6)

Martin Manniche: The companies said, “We don’t own the industrial design. So the product that we are getting out from our client partners could be the same that our competitors use. We don’t control the software inside it. We are giving a spec, but the software is owned and built by someone else. That means that every product we have will have different software.” The next point they said was, “It takes too long from starting a product until it hits the market. Everything that we do needs to go to the cloud.” That was very helpful, because that meant that we have a place to use our cloud platform. They wanted everything connected.

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Learning From Mistakes: Roy Peleg, CEO of FirstImpression.io (Part 1)

FirstImpression is Roy’s fourth startup. The prior ones had all failed, and Roy candidly discusses how and why they failed. There is much to learn from failures and mistakes, possibly even more than from successes.

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?

Roy Peleg: I was born in a city north of Tel Aviv. When I was 12, my parents separated. When I was 16, I left high school and started my entrepreneur journey. At the age of 18, I joined the army. After getting out of the army, I started a career as an IT manager. >>>

Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 5)

Martin Manniche: During the process of starting an energy management system, we built proof points on smart cities and smart country. We built proof points in consumer to consumer with connected lighting technology. We build integration with connected cars. We then said, “We need to control the home network.” We make them and get it out to millions and millions of homes. Then we needed to control the software that sits in the home for the voice.

Now we control voice, broadband, the ability to have devices commissioned on a managed network, the ability to build and manage services for these operators so it’s not Google or Apple that own the services store and build a different relationship to limit churn for their customers. >>>

Building a FinTech Company in Brazil: Sergio Furio, CEO of BankFacil (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Your core business model is the origination fee business model?

Sergio Furio: We call ourselves an originator of secure loans. That’s where our value add is. If you think about it, a collateralized loan is very complex to originate. If you can create a business that excels in processing the loans for home equity and auto equity, then you have found a good spot.

Everyone loves those types of credit. The volatility of that credit is very low because you have the collateral. Then the investors definitely want to invest in that type of loans. The complexity is building a platform that originates these types of loans with high quality in an efficient way. >>>