Bootstrapping from Denmark: Camilla Ley Valentin, Co-Founder of Queue-It (Part 1)

Camille tells a wonderful story of capital-efficient entrepreneurship, including scaling a company born in Denmark that now has 40% of its business in the US.

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?

Camilla Ley Valentin: I come from a creative family. My father was a child TV star back in the 70’s and 80’s, which was when I was born in 1973. At that time, you can imagine that there weren’t many TV stations in Denmark where I’m from. We were part of a mini celebrity family and worked a lot in the entertainment industry. >>>

A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What were the strategic nuggets of building that business? 2012 to now, what were some of the inflection points of the business?

Andrew Rose: One of the early inflection points was that we had to show success.We had to prove to consumers. I’ll give you a couple of indicative examples, and you can imagine how this started the ball rolling. As we got new employees here, they were inclined to check their own insurance. >>>

A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said there was a chicken and egg situation. Can you double-click down on that? How did you address the chicken and egg situation?

Andrew Rose: Part of it was for the early insurance companies that took the leap with us saying, “We’ll come on as your initial insurance companies.” It was that we had to back up the fact that we would go out there and spend millions of dollars on advertising. This was a big leap from those early investors.  >>>

Best of Bootstrapping: Excess is NOT Required for Success

Let’s do a thought experiment.

List all the things you want to do with your life if you had additional resources.

How many of these require additional money?

How much additional money do you need to acquire to afford these things?

How many of these require additional time?

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A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your first round of funding was from foreign investors for $100 million?

Andrew Rose: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: Who were these investors? >>>

A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In what capacity did you start that company? Were you just a regular entrepreneur or were you doing this in an intrapreneurship mode?

Andrew Rose: It’s a bit of both. The UK office provided the capital. I was employee one and I hired up to hundreds from that point. It is intrapreneurship, but it felt much more like entrepreneurship. You didn’t have a safety net underneath you with a corporate structure around you. You have to do everything. >>>

A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We run a lot of intra-preneurship programs. Oracle’s intrapreneurship program is on 1Mby1M. We are very familiar with all that.

Andrew Rose: You know it even better than most. It creates its own opportunities and its own challenges. You’re not necessarily going out and raising money, but you still have all the other corporate dynamics to deal with. I got to learn all kinds of ways that I wouldn’t do things. I certainly learned some ways that I would do things. >>>

A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of job did you get in Richmond?

Andrew Rose: That was my big break from chemical engineering. I had ended up getting a Master’s in Project Management from George Washington while I was with Shell. I started my MBA down there as well. I knew where I wanted to go. The move to Richmond gave me the opportunity to leverage the Master’s rather than the undergraduate degree. So I locked into a job with Capital One. >>>