If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  As a variation on our ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’ theme, we also see many entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped a first company (or business), and then gone onto venture-fund a second. Christian Chabot built Tableau Software in this mode. Sridhar Vembu built Zoho. We have numerous examples of this tried-and-true path. Something to consider for first-time entrepreneurs chasing venture capital and Unicorns. Since speaking with cVidya Founder Alon Aginsky in 2015 ..read more

Enterprise services provider Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY) recently announced its first quarter results that surpassed the market expectations. The company continues to expand offerings to diversify its reach within the organization. Workday’s Financials Workday’s first quarter revenues grew 17.4% to $1.68 billion, ahead of the Street’s forecast of $1.66 billion. Non GAAP EPS was $1.13, ahead of the market’s forecast of $1.11. By segment, Subscription services revenues grew 20.1% to $1.5 billion. Professional services revenues fell 3.8% to $156.4 million. For the second quarter, the market estimates ..read more

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after? Volker Smid: Fulfilled my lifelong dream to go to the US. It was in 2000. Sramana Mitra: To what company? Volker Smid: It was a US-German company that went public in the year 2000. It was called Poet. We had a marketplace catalog product, which was a big thing in the year 2000. Every marketplace needed to have a catalog and we were the catalog provider. If you remember 2000, it was a pretty crazy time. Sramana Mitra: The market crashed in 2000. Volker Smid: Yes, B2B was all of a sudden back to business school for many people. Sramana Mitra: How long did yo ..read more

In this conversation, Volker discusses how his company is extending its product line with Generative AI, and also, very specific new startup ideas leveraging the capabilities of Generative AI. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background? Volker Smid: I’m a German born in northern Germany close to Hamburg. I lived most of my life in Hamburg. I then decided to leave the country. I had the opportunity to work in the United States for quite some time. I came back to Europe and was then assigned some ..read more

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Thunderstorm VI ..read more

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Thunderstorm V T ..read more

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  True to our mantra, Co-founder Mark Newman bootstrapped HireVue to $1M in revenue before raising the first funding. When we spoke in 2015, the company had raised a total of $92 million, and was doing $30 million in revenue. Excellent case study to study! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances. Mark Newman: I was born in Northern Canada, about 400 miles nor ..read more

We have packaged our proven 1Mby1M methodology for building technology startups into short courses on Udemy as a part of our aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally. In addition to offering you up to 85% off the following Udemy courses this month, we are introducing the new course, Student Entrepreneur Startup Case Studies. Through this course, we explore our most informative and inspirational case studies of noteworthy startups founded by student entrepreneurs. These coupons will expire on June 30, 2023, so enroll today! Bootstrapping: Bootstrap First, Raise Money Lat ..read more

Sramana Mitra: The PaaS business is getting harder and harder to do because the big players are so entrenched. It’s so expensive. The stack is so expensive from an infrastructure and computing point of view. You can’t really play the PaaS game as a startup anymore. Let’s switch to what you’re seeing on the go-to-market side. When you were doing the beginning phase of Aisera, AI was not in the mainstream. The demand in the enterprise for AI-enabled solutions was not as strong. Now, the conversation has shifted. C-levels are talking about it. This must be making life easier for you. Muddu Sudhak ..read more

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard and his co-founders had built a sizeable bootstrapped business in North Carolina when we spoke in 2015. Read on to learn what worked for Ateb and what you can learn from them. Ateb was acquired by Omnicell in 2017. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where do you come from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances? Frank Sheppard: I was born in Florida but I was raised in Atlanta in a typical middle ..read more