Best of Bootstrapping: Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India

Netcore Cloud Founder Rajesh Jain has built a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India. This is an important case study for all the bootstrapped entrepreneurs out there looking for inspiration and methodology to scale.

Sramana Mitra: Alright, Rajesh, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from, where were you born, raised, what kind of background?

Rajesh Jain: I was born and raised in Mumbai and did my schooling there. Then I did Electrical Engineering (EE) from IIT Bombay from 1984 to 1988. Then I went to Columbia for my masters in EE. I worked for two years in the US, and then I came back.

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Best of Bootstrapping: EdTech Unicorn Bootstrapped First from Canada

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

In 2020, D2L Founder CEO John Baker shared this terrific story of bootstrapped entrepreneurship in EdTech.

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

John Baker: I’m based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I was born in a fishing village on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. When I was 22 years and in my third year of engineering at the University of Waterloo, I started a company with the mission of transforming the way the world learns. 

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to a Public Unicorn using Services

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Bootstrapping with Services is a tried and true strategy, including for building Unicorns. In our 2012 story, Alteryx Executive Chairman Dean Stoecker talks about raising a Series A with $10 million in the bank. Today, Alteryx is a $3+ billion market cap public company. Dean bootstrapped with services early on, and then raised VC money.

Sramana Mitra: Dean, let’s start at the beginning of your personal story. What is the context for your entrepreneurial journey? Where are you from?

Dean Stoecker: I grew up in a family business in Colorado. I would sit around the table every day and hear about the trials and excitements of owning a business. I went to school at the University of Colorado. I had the opportunity to travel the world through a program called Semester at Sea. That was where I got the idea that I wanted to have my own business. After I graduated, I moved to California and got involved in the information business.

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Language models have evolved a lot.

Arvind Jain: There is that vision for the future. The nature of knowledge work is going to change. We are going to have these powerful assistants that are going to take care of most of the repetitive time-consuming tasks as well as the tedious parts of search. While the technology is powerful, it’s also very hard to make it work for you. There are problems with instability in the sense that you can ask the same question four times and it comes back with a different answer each time.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Unicorn Startups

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

While it doesn’t happen that often, Bootstrapped Unicorns do exist.

My 2014 Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, has a whole section on this topic. You can read an excerpt on my blog titled Bootstrapped Unicorns. In this piece, I discuss three companies, Zoho, eClinicalWorks, and Veeam, that have bootstrapped to about a billion dollars in revenues.

Revenues NOT valuation.

That puts their valuations in the five to ten billion range or beyond. So they are Unicorns (billion dollar valuation) many times over.

You can also read an interview with Sridhar Vembu of Zoho here that describes the early journey of the company: Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you this question, computer scientist to computer scientist. Really great work in search is a matter of great algorithms. Algorithms are not necessarily people intensive. Five people can write great algorithms. Is this really a people-intensive business? Google was never a people-intensive business. They hire a lot of people, but the core products were not scaling by hiring people.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another positive impact that happened during the pandemic. On the sales side, organizations became comfortable buying products over Zoom calls. You do everything on Zoom. Large deals were closing purely on Zoom calls.

Arvind Jain: Yes. In our first year, we had one sales person. Then we hired the second one. We were able to get a lot of customers signed up. Zoom is interesting. It’s very efficient. You don’t spend a day to travel to a customer.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This strategy that you followed is good for companies that have a lot of early-stage funding. It’s not so easy to follow for companies that are trying to work in a very constrained financial resources situation. What did you learn? Focus on the nuggets of what you learned from the early customer engagements when you were not charging yet?