Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You grew up watching that way of life or owning your own business. That’s very common actually. I’m also an entrepreneur’s daughter. It makes that very big difference.

Don Mal: I used to help my father in different roles. When I turned 16, I actually got a job selling insurance to fishermen. There is a company that sells accident insurance to fishermen. They hire kids in school. I got this job where I drove to the fishing docks.

As fishermen used to come in with their catch, I would sell them a $10 insurance policy that would protect them if they lost an 

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions (Part 1)

Don grew up in a small island off the East Coast of Canada, and has built a capital-efficient business leveraging some key strategic assets. Very instructive interview.

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

Don Mal: I was born in India and immigrated to Canada when I was seven years old. We moved from Northern India to a small >>>

An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s pick a couple of how’s in what you have done where we can draw some lessons from the trenches. You pick from your journey where you can throw the maximum light on how you’ve done what you’ve done.

Chris Miglino: I’ve been relentless. That’s what helped me be successful. One thing that’s very unique in the advertising technology business is that it’s constantly evolving and changing. You’re always building tools that are ready to change the second you bring them to market. We’re always adapting and building new tools all the time. Having really good products in the pipeline and having those ideas in place that are putting forward the newest product is what’s helped us be successful. >>>

An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look back on that journey, what strategic levers did you push that were particularly good?

Chris Miglino: You can walk into any ad agency in 2008 and 2009 and just say you have something on Facebook. They would throw money at you to test it out.

Sramana Mitra: To understand what was going on.

Chris Miglino: Yes. $100,000 here. $200,000 there. We were very active in selling social interactions to the brand advertisers. >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do this company for? What kind of metrics did you reach during that period?

Aviram Jenik: We started in 1999 and we still do this today.

Sramana Mitra: This is Beyond Security?

Aviram Jenik: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Then let’s talk about the inflection points. From 1999 to after experimentation with 

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An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you sold?

Chris Miglino: I went back to trading again. I updated the algorithms and started trading again. I took one of the top sales people at the company that we had sold and we started Social Reality together. We started Social Reality under the premise of selling ads for, what at that time was called, causes on Facebook.

It was a very large Facebook application. It was owned by a guy by the name of Joe Green. It was a partnership between Joe and Sean Parker. We were selling all the ads inside this application. We were generating revenue for this app. We started selling ads >>>

6 Podcasts of Successful Startup Founders Sharing E-commerce Strategies

Can you still build e-commerce companies? Yes, niche e-commerce can still work, but you must differentiate. Entrepreneurs interested to learn how e-commerce and online startups are succeeding today should listen to these 30-minute podcast interviews with six startup founders who have managed to build quite profitable businesses.

Tom Fallenstein, President and CEO of Fun.com – Tom has built a niche e-commerce company up to $55 Million in revenue with no outside funding from rural Minnesota. He discusses his organic growth strategies, and how his company has impacted a rural eco-system profoundly by creating a large number of jobs.

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A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You were open to all the vulnerabilities.

Aviram Jenik: Correct. That gave us the opportunity to do this security check for you. If your severs are out there in the Internet, we can also tell you if you’ve got all these problems. We started offering that as a remote. What’s funny about this is, this whole process was something that we stumbled into and we didn’t think was a big deal. We saw it as a temporary thing. We’re still selling that service today.

Sramana Mitra: Wow. >>>