Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 1)

Ron and Ricky have built a luxury mattress brand online. Learn how.

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?

Ricky Joshi: I’m from Columbus, Ohio and went to Dartmouth for undergraduate. I went on to get my MBA from Columbia. I dabbled in various entrepreneurial activities and worked in the agency world as an Internet guru in IPG. My big claim to fame was sourcing and leading our investment into Facebook in 2006. I managed a $10 million business development deal there. I ended up creating my own agency and becoming a co-founder of Saatva. >>>

A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many private jet operator companies are out there?

Jonny Nicol: In the US, there are 3,300 private jet companies, which have a thing called 135 accreditation. That’s a legal FAA requirement to be a charter company. We deal with only 500 of them because we want to make sure that we’re only dealing with the very best companies.

Sramana Mitra: Globally, how many companies are we talking? What is the total number of players?

Jonny Nicol: In Europe, there’re 1,300. We’re probably talking around 7,000.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a relatively fragmented market and you had to pull all this into your system to be able to operate with all of them. >>>

A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How many people were on the team at this point when you were going through this?

Jonny Nicol: Six months earlier, there were 16 people. I actually let people go before we ran out of money, which was painful. Then there were eight of us. It wasn’t actually the case that they could work completely for free, because I still had to pay some bills. Everybody came to me with a number they absolutely had to have to pay rent. Most people were using their savings.

It turned out that we needed at least $60,000 to keep the company going. I went to my bank who’ve obviously seen me through this journey as an army officer rather than an entrepreneur. They said, “We’ll give you this loan unsecured.” That was a personal loan to me. I went out and we got through. I got a phone call for Citizen >>>

A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me summarize here. You got about $800,000 from these hedge fund guys. Let’s call it angel financing. What year was that?

Jonny Nicol: It ended up at $1.6 million. That was 2013.

Sramana Mitra: You had already run this company with your own money for three years before you got the angel financing?

Jonny Nicol: It started in 2011, so it was for two years. >>>

From Solo Entrepreneur to $65 Million in Revenue: Brazilian Entrepreneur Daniel Scandian, CEO of MadeiraMadeira (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you need to a raise more money or are you planning to now keep growing organically?

Daniel Scandian: Now, we are breaking even. Last year, we achieved $65 million in revenue and we plan to reach around $150 million in 2017. We are cash flow positive now. Just now, we are building another business plan to talk with some new investors. Now it’s more of an option. We don’t need the money to grow, but we have some opportunity in Brazil to expand into other categories and also to invest more in technology.

Sramana Mitra: This whole $65 million going to $150 million is an entirely Brazilian market-facing business?

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A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there a convenient way to get the database of all the private jets’ flights just like an online travel agency for commercial flights can access such a database? Is there an equivalent of that database available somewhere or did you have to create that?

Jonny Nicol: I had to build it from the ground up.

Sramana Mitra: That is one of the key differentiated value that you created.

Jonny Nicol: That’s correct. It was highly fragmented, and it was very difficult to get all the data needed. So we had to build it. It took me four and a half years. I never heard of R&D taking so long. It was brutal. There were two big challenges. >>>

From Solo Entrepreneur to $65 Million in Revenue: Brazilian Entrepreneur Daniel Scandian, CEO of MadeiraMadeira (Part 4)

Daniel Scandian: We realized that that process was the same that should work in Brazil. Of course, the software was a little bit different, but the workflow was quite the same. We were lucky for them to open to us. We went to Brazil and started building a software. The Brazilian market is much more complicated than the US market. We started to build our software in the beginning of 2013.

We thought that we could finish the first phase of the software in a year and a half. It actually took more time. It took us three and a half years to finish building the software. That period of time was very difficult to explain to our investors as to what was going on. We were asking for more money to finish. That was real complicated.

Sramana Mitra: They weren’t sure you knew what you were doing.

Daniel Scandian: Yes. We convinced them to make another investment in the company.

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A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Jonny Nicol: I got a one-year work clause where I was still on-call and working, but, in reality, I was not going to work. Instead, I used my pilot license which I got from the military to do some freelance piloting. I had three jobs. I was an air display pilot, air ferry pilot, and I flew private jets. That was the birth of my current company. I realized that there was an opportunity, not just to make it easier for rich people to book a private jet, but also to change the way people travel.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this company off the ground? >>>