An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you sell for stock or cash?

Chris Miglino: We sold for stock. We were fresh out of school. This was the first big business transaction that we had done. We had learned a lot about the stock market. We owned a lot of stock in this company that was having a very successful run on the NASDAQ exchange. The stock came out at $7 a share. It went to $3 and then to $65 over a two-year period.

Sramana Mitra: Did you sell at the right time? >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 4)

Aviram Jenik: As time passed, there were little engines on the customer side. Java became popular and started replacing what we were doing. The Internet became faster and faster. We shifted towards remote support for something like a printer driver stopping to work. Anybody who had a computer in the second half of the 90s will have a memory of something like this happening. You install a driver. It doesn’t work. You reinstall. You call support. It was frustrating.

Such driver issues and software compatibility were very big issues for a lot of companies. We adjusted our remote engines to do technical support. Instead of calling HP and spending an hour on the phone, we give them instructions. We had an >>>

An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino (Part 1)

If you think venture capital is the only path to funding companies, you are, obviously wrong. Chris talks about a whole other world of OTC.

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?

Chris Miglino: I was born in Statten Island, New York. My parents grew up in the Lower East Side. My mom grew up in >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You knew that you needed to move out. You didn’t know where to move out to.

Aviram Jenik: Exactly. It’s not that we had a brilliant idea at that time. We just thought, “Education is nice, but it’s not big enough. This new market that’s coming is huge.” Our engine was like a Java applet. They were little engines that you could give instructions to to do stuff over the Internet.

With the education software, we would use them to tell the engines what to show the students and how the course would look like. That fitted the Internet well. At that time, Internet had a limited bandwidth. There was not a lot of information that you could transfer over a dial-up connection. >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The reason why professors want to see how you are proceeding is because they can’t partially mark you. If you’re going in the right direction and somehow made a mistake and got the wrong answer, they can still give you partial points for how you were moving. That’s, I think, the thinking behind showing the steps.

Aviram Jenik: I totally agree with you. Here’s what we teach students when we do that. Number one, the professor has a problem. The students have to change their way of doing stuff. The second one, which is more problematic is, if you do your way correctly and reach your own conclusion, it’s not okay. When you do anything practical in life and if you reach the wrong result, >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 6)

Jared Shusterman: Quite frankly, a lot of these guys don’t trust the bigger brands that they sell. The number one game changer here in helping these guys was to be cooperative and, in effect, reap the benefits of that cooperation. It then came down to funding. We put a stake in the ground even in our industry around making sure that we are, by far, the best in helping manage and spend the funding that’s coming from the brand down to the local partner.

It has allowed us to position ourselves particularly for the client profile that I described. I described three things. They sell to an independent sales channel. Two is, they have a comprehensive set of marketing tactics that the channel partner uses. The third is >>>

A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 1)

Going against the grain of Venture Capital mania, in 1999, Aviram started his second bootstrapped venture. 18 years later, he is still running it. Happily!

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?

Aviram Jenik: I was born and raised in Israel. I moved to California about 10 years ago. I spent most of my adult life in >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Can you sketch for us a bit of the progression of the business? How many brands did you book as customers in 2006? How many in 2007 and so on?

Jared Shusterman: I don’t know the exact number. Today, we’re a little over 60 brands that are powering over 60,000 or 70,000 channel partners. Early on in 2006, we learned a lot under the new model. In 2009, we decided to launch again. This time, we reused a lot of the data tables and structures.

In 2011, we launched it with all the learnings and made sure that the architecture was modeled correctly. From a client standpoint, >>>