Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get down to the specifics. We understand iteration. We’ve heard this many times. It’s part of our philosophy as well in terms of the methodology of how we train entrepreneurs. We are completely on the same page with you. Specifically, what were you selling? What was the segmentation emerging out of this process?

Dave Elkington: We built a lead management platform – not a marketing lead management but a sales management solution. We had all the expertise. We built a web database platform that was designed to help companies with, particularly at that time, web marketing-generated leads that they wanted to hand over to their sales team. We built automation tools for them like dialling, click-to-call, and emailing tools. A lot of the marketing automation that you would provide to marketing, we actually then took those concepts and applied them to salespeople and then built a platform that, most particularly, inside-sales reps would consume.

It was delivered on a per user per month basis. We just modelled it on other successful models. We were looking most particularly at Salesforce.com. We looked at their pricing. We were not really a competing solution, but we were a complementary solution. We felt that we need to be priced at a >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What I’d like to do next is to track the major strategic moves that were responsible for that growth to the extent that you can remember them.

Avi Steinlauf: There are two major things that I would refer to. I sometimes refer to these as the business model and the evolution of the business model. Let me talk about those two. Essentially, I mentioned that from the earliest days on the web and the gopher site before that, we made our information available for free. We built up a fairly large audience. As a result of having the audience, we got a call from a gentleman by the name of Pete Ellis. Pete was an auto dealer here in Southern California who had sold off his dealerships and had started a business called Autobytel. The premise of the business was that he had dealers around the country who wanted to sell cars to people who were doing research on the web. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When all of this was happening, it was still under your father’s watch and you were doing this other stuff?

Avi Steinlauf: That’s correct. It was a small business back then. He was 100% responsible for it. There were a handful of employees who worked in a virtual way. There wasn’t even an office back then other than the back of his house. That’s the genesis of where things started.

Sramana Mitra: That’s the business that you decided to come and join in?

Avi Steinlauf: Full-time in 1998.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that decision point. When you did that, what were the first few things that you did? What did you decide was going to be the strategy?
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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Cloud Investment Thesis of 5 VCs

Last fall, we had five VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Cloud Computing investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and Carnival In The Cloud. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Cloud Computing domain, I strongly recommend you listen to these five interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Web 3.0 and E-Commerce Investment Thesis of 3 VCs

Last fall, we had three VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Web 3.0 and e-Commerce investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Web 3.0 / e-Commerce domains, I strongly recommend you listen to these three interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

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