#founders

Founder Interviews: Todd Olson of Pendo
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-todd-olson-of-pendo-4d0f1030d4ca?source=rss----3a8144

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Learn how Todd Olson created Pendo, a product experience platform that helps software product teams deliver software users love.What’s your background?Before I started Pendo in 2013, I had a long career building companies and products. I had a passion for programming and entrepreneurship from the beginning. I was writing code as an intern at a large commercial bank when I was 14, and in my senior year at Carnegie Mellon, I became a part-time student in order to start a software company with a friend. It was called Cerebellum Software, and we raised more than $20 million in venture capital. I went on to found another company called 6th Sense Analytics which was acquired by Rally, where I became VP of product and contributed to a successful IPO.At Rally, I experienced the need that would (...)

#founder-interview #founders #davis-baer #founder-stories #founder-advice

Founder Interviews: Jim Rose of CircleCI
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-jim-rose-of-circleci-edd76bea3c65?source=rss----3a814

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Six-time founder and CircleCI CEO Jim Rose is on a mission to give everyone the ability to build and deliver software at the speed of imagination.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Jim Rose: I’m originally from Wisconsin and went to Duke for undergrad. After I graduated, I spent some time in China as an analyst working on the copy machine supply chain. There are lots of stories there, but we’ll save those for another time. After a while I came back to the States and spent some time working in Seattle, and then for WPP. It was just at the start of the first tech boom, and I started a company called MobShop. We wanted to give consumers the ability to get discounts when they bought goods at volume — this was way before Groupon, who had a similar idea and ended up (...)

#davis-baer #founder-interview #founder-stories #founder-advice #founders

From Warm Intro to $107M: Qwil’s Step-By-Step Fundraising Journey
▻https://hackernoon.com/from-warm-intro-to-107m-qwils-step-by-step-fundraising-journey-412315450

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It’s a near-universal pain point for freelancers: the unpredictable cash flow cycle. It’s common to wait 30-plus days to be paid after completing a job, and sometimes, it’s just too long.Qwil, says its co-founder and CEO, Johnny Reinsch, was born out of his own experience as an independent contractor with a high-value client that paid him late. “I was about to overdraw my bank account the day before my payment was due,” he says. “I tracked down the finance person and got the money just in time, but I was like, ‘why does it have to work this way?’”As a self-described “recovering M&A lawyer” and a former exec at bitcoin wallet Xapo, he knew that it didn’t.Enter Qwil — a fintech company with a mission to “empower freelancers with instant, convenient access to credit.” For businesses, it’s a way to (...)

#entrepreneurship #founders #startup #loans #venture-capital

Founder Interviews : Kyle Killion of Suiteness
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-kyle-killion-of-suiteness-6c8887327d88?source=rss----

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Kyle and the Suiteness team have built a platform that allows larger groups to book connecting hotel rooms and hotel suites that aren’t normally listed on booking websites.What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Kyle Killion, founder of Suiteness, a travel company with a simple goal: increase the number of vacations people take by making them better, more affordable, and easier to plan. I have built products at companies including Apartment List, Coupa, Yelp, and Apple, and I have founded companies such as maccontrol.Suiteness started out as Flights With Friends, an app I built for real-time trip planning and collaboration between travelers. We eventually pivoted to the current version of Suiteness when we learned that travel is actually a dictatorship, not a democracy (...)

#davis-baer #founders #founder-advice #ycombinator #founder-stories

Retail Meets Rideshare: How Cargo Spun “In-Car Commerce” Into an Over-Subscribed $6M Seed Round
▻https://hackernoon.com/retail-meets-rideshare-how-cargo-spun-in-car-commerce-into-an-over-subsc

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If you’ve taken an Uber lately, odds are you’ve seen one of those containers displaying assorted goods for purchase — gum, candy, cell phone accessories — in between the two front seats.Cargo, the #startup behind this “in-car commerce platform,” says it has worked with more than 12,000 rideshare drivers to sell $2.4 million worth of merchandise over the last two years.Founder Jeff Cripe came up with the idea back in 2015. Since then, he quit his job, got accepted into #techstars and raised more than $6 million from investors. He broke down how he did it from the angel round and beyond when I spoke with him on the How I Raised It podcast. An edited version of that conversation appears below.How did you come up with the idea for Cargo?I think like a retailer. So when I looked at how big Uber and Lyft (...)

#venture-capital #entrepreneurship #founders

ReTest Must Invoice 83,333 Subscriptions Per Month for Its €3M Valuation
▻https://hackernoon.com/retest-must-invoice-83-333-subscriptions-per-month-for-its-3m-valuation-

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German #startup ReTest just raised €600K from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF).ReTest sells subscriptions to its software testing tool to DevTesters and managers for €15 per subscription per month (€150 per year).ValuationAssume that ReTest sold a 20% equity stake to HTGF.Then ReTest is valued at €600K / 20% = €3M post-money.How many subscriptions must ReTest invoice each month for its €3M valuation?ExitHTGF labels this investment as a seed round.Assume that HTGF want to make 10x on its winners.And that they need 2x to compensate for dilution.Then HTGF wants to make 10 2 = 20x on its investment.And ReTest needs a €3M 20 = €60M exit value for its €3M valuation.RevenueAssume that ReTest trades at 4x trailing 12 months revenue at exit.And that there is no cash and debt at exit.Then ReTest needs an (...)

#fundraising #startup-valuation #founders #venture-capital

Founder Interviews: Robert Vis of MessageBird
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-robert-vis-of-messagebird-afd34c7dc761?source=rss----

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Robert Vis is the found of MessageBird, which has raised $60 million Series A, and currently work with customers like Uber, Telegram, and Domino’s. He was originally interviewed in the Founder Interview series here.This interview is specifically about MessageBird’s Y Combinator experience, with advice for others considering applying to YC.Let’s start off with the two questions I’m sure you get all the time. Is Y Combinator worth it? And, if you had to do it all over again, would you?Without a doubt, yes and yes. YC is the only school you never want to leave. I’d go back in a heartbeat.When it comes to the #founders that are accepted to the program, does YC have a “type”?I get this question a lot, and usually, when people ask it, they tend to have two “types” in mind. One is the 24-year-old in a (...)

#startup #davis-baer #ycombinator #founder-stories

1 Key Reason Crypto Startups Fail !
▻https://hackernoon.com/1-key-reason-crypto-startups-fail-793c30953e61?source=rss----3a8144eabfe

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Image Credit: PixabayThe first public blockchain -the #bitcoin network is a little over a decade old. Since 2009 after Bitcoin blockchain went live just less than a year after the global market crash, we have since been faced with a deluge of cryptocurrencies whether they are coins or tokens.Fast forward to 2019, barely 2 years later after Bitcoin attained its all-time high, there are well over 1600 cryptocurrencies many of which may never escape obscurity yet the list keeps growing.Before 2017, bitcoin experienced its fair share of bashings from mainstream media, big banks such as JP Morgan and central banks of nations. With its ability to facilitate monetary transactions in a trustless manner, the threat to conventional institutions that have since time immemorial fiercely fought to (...)

#cryptocurrency #blockchain-startup #startup #founders

7 Reasons Why Crypto Project #founders Should Jump Aboard the #ieo Ship Before it’s Too Late!
▻https://hackernoon.com/7-reasons-why-crypto-project-founders-should-jump-aboard-the-ieo-ship-be

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Photo Credit: coin girlsA taste that keeps you craving for more with such beautiful craze. The nose catches the sweet and enticing scent from afar, as it touches the mouth, the lips register the taste even before the tongue enjoys it. Such was my experience with my favourite and symbolic ofe-nsala soup, a special delicacy enjoyed in Eastern Nigeria always in popular demand and the first delicacy to finish in any buffet event where its part of a meal course.“Don’t waste any more time and funds configuring your website to have the ICO section, it shows you’re not prudent and have a bad sense of judgment as a Founder/CEO. You should quickly capitalize on the growing IEO interest in the industry before it’s too late”Quoting myself above, I told one of the project founders who recently consulted (...)

#cryptocurrency #blockchain #binance

Founder Interviews : Oege De Moor of Semmle
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-oege-de-moor-of-semmle-dc72e7888bd6?source=rss----3a8

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A former Oxford professor and author of several books on coding, Oege de Moor is on a mission to secure the world’s software as co-founder and CEO of Semmle.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Oege de Moor: At Semmle, we are focused on securing software, together. We’re creating technology to scale security expertise through automation and provide a platform for sharing community-driven security. The biggest security challenge we face in software development today is a chronic shortage of security experts — even leading technology companies struggle to staff one security engineer for every 100 software engineers. Our products help automate variant analysis — the process of finding all instances of a coding mistake that caused a security incident — allowing (...)

#founders #davis-baer #startup #founder-advice #founder-stories

Founder Interviews: Liana Herrera of Bottomless
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-liana-herrera-of-bottomless-5fac1f9caaf7?source=rss--

Liana and her co-founder/husband Michael have created the first coffee delivery service that uses a smart scale to figure out the perfect time to automatically reorder.What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Liana Herrera, co-founder of Bottomless, a coffee delivery service that uses a smart scale to figure out the perfect time to ship a re-order.It’s simple, customers get the scale when they buy the first bag of coffee. Coffee is roasted to order and shipped directly to customers. Since the coffee never sits on a shelf, it’s much fresher than can be bought anywhere else.We founded Bottomless in 2016 and bootstrapped it until 2018. We’ve hand-built hundreds of prototypes. On the coffee front, we’ve partnered with 15 of the top roasters on the West Coast. Some of the more well (...)

#davis-baer #founder-advice #founders #founder-stories #hardware

Zenloop Must Invoice 11,000 NPS App Subscriptions per Month For Its €26M Valuation
▻https://hackernoon.com/zenloop-must-invoice-11-000-nps-app-subscriptions-per-month-for-its-26m-

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In its #startup plan, German startup zenloop sells NPS app subscriptions to startups for €299 per month.They just raised €5.3M ($6M) from Nauta Capital and others.ValuationAssume that zenloop sold a 20% equity stake to the investors.Then zenloop is valued at €5.3M / 20% = €26M post-money.ExitAssume that this was a Series A.And that the investors want to make 5x on their investment.And that there will be 1 follow-up round of 20%.Then zenloop must have a €26M * (5 / (1–20%)) = €165M exit value for its €26M valuation.RevenueAssume that zenloop trades at 4x trailing 12 months revenue at exit.And that there will be no cash and debt.Then zenloop must have an average €165M / 4 / 12 = €3.4M in monthly revenue for its €26M valuation.SubscriptionsZenloop charges startups €299 per subscription per month.Then (...)

#founders #venture-capital #startup-valuation #fundraising

Wash Out Must Sell 116,000 Washings per Month For Its €5M Valuation
▻https://hackernoon.com/wash-out-must-sell-116-000-washings-per-month-for-its-5m-valuation-7577a

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Wash Out Must Wash 116,000 Cars per Month For Its €5M ValuationItalian #startup Wash Out washes cars for car owners for an average of €21.90 per washing (including VAT, complete washing medium car).EconomyUp reports that Wash Out just raised €1 million from Telepass.ValuationAssume, based on comparable deals, that Wash Out sold a 20% equity stake in their company to Telepass.Valuation = investment / equity stake sold.Then Wash Out is valued at €1 million / 20% = €5 million post-money.ExitAssume, based on comparable deals, that Telepass wants to make 15x on their investment.Exit value = valuation money multiple.Then Wash Out’s €5 million valuation requires a €5 million 15 = €75 million exit value.To simplify, this ignores dilution. To make 15x with 50% dilution, the €5 million valuation (...)

#fundraising #founders #startup-valuation #venture-capital

Founder Interviews: Asher King Abramson of Bell Curve
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-asher-king-abramson-of-bell-curve-1f606647164?source=

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After building 20 side projects that nobody bought, Asher decided to learn the principles of growing a business, and now trains Y Combinator startups how to grow.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Asher King Abramson, partner at Bell Curve and head of its growth marketing training arm. We teach #founders and new marketers how to get more paying customers.Multiple startups have raised their next round directly because of us, and Y Combinator brings us in to lead sessions on growth.As far as background: before Bell Curve, I worked a software engineer for a few years. Then, I joined the leadership team at App Academy as we grew from 20 students to 80 students per cohort.As far as Bell Curve itself: we’ve been bootstrapped and profitable since day one. We’re at (...)

#davis-baer #founder-stories #startup #ycombinator

A CryptoPunk Startup Founders 2018 #reading List
▻https://hackernoon.com/a-cryptopunk-startup-founders-2018-reading-list-a52c7fb6bc0a?source=rss-

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A CyberPunk Startup Founders 2018 Reading ListThe Prince | MachiavelliHas a terrible reputation that never came through in the books. I found it a timeless resource for understanding the decisions people have made throughout time. Why people in power keep it, and why the careless cost themselves opportunities through mismanagement and a fundamental understanding of how the world works. This book elucidates principals on how to manage a corporate takeover — make sure you situate your own people within the organisation otherwise there will likely be a rebellion — and a host of other things which pull through truly sage advice. This might have been the most ingenious book I read this year, and to avoid it due to the perception of many is your loss indeed. This is as educational a read as you (...)

#cyberpunk-startup #cyberpunk-reading-list #cyberpunk-founders #founders-reading-list

Founder Interviews: Rob Walling of MicroConf, Drip, and TinySeed
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-rob-walling-of-microconf-drip-and-tinyseed-974469d574

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Rob Walling has bootstrapped multiple startups to exit, most recently Drip. These days he’s working on TinySeed, the first #startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. He also founded and runs MicroConf and Startups for the Rest of Us.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m a software developer by training and feel like I officially became an entrepreneur in 2005 when I acquired a software product that was in its alpha release. Since then I’ve started or acquired a few dozen products, most notably SaaS applications HitTail and Drip, both of which were acquired.In addition I’ve been spearheading a community for bootstrapped #founders through my essays, podcast, conference, and now TinySeed, the first startup accelerator designed for folks who would traditionally (...)

#founder-stories #bootstrap #davis-baer

Founder Interviews : Victoria Repa of BetterMe
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-victoria-repa-of-betterme-9dbea654b264?source=rss----

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Learn how Victoria and the BetterMe team leveraged social media to go from 0 to 15 million downloads of their health & #fitness apps in under 2 years.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m the CEO of BetterMe, an ecosystem of health and fitness apps I co-founded in 2016 which currently offers guided workouts, meditation, yoga and walking.Our apps are used by millions of people who try to lead healthier and happier lives, and we specifically focus on “entry-level users,” helping them ease into the fitness world.We are already one of the largest and fastest-growing health & fitness app publishers in the US, and are planning to take the top spot within the next three years. Our goal is to have a family of apps that would alleviate all major pains for anyone (...)

#startup #founder-stories #davis-baer #founders

Founder Interviews : Viral Thakker of eBZaar
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-viral-thakker-of-ebzaar-8f6f39f3d57d?source=rss----3a

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Viral and the eBZaar team are on a mission to give Indian brick and mortar retail stores with no digital presence an easy way to sell goods online.Davis Baer: What’s your name, and what are you working on?My name is Viral Thakker, and I run eBZaar.com as the CEO & Co-founder. At eBZaar, we are on a mission to bring Indian brick & mortar retail stores online by giving them a zero cost digital store, with the idea that technology should be easily accessible to this segment of the society. We want to enable the local retailer to sell more and sell better by better-leveraging technology and the power of digital; without having to worry about creating websites, mobile apps, hosting, cataloging or digital marketing. On the demand side, we aim to make the customers’ favorite stores (...)

#founder-advice #davis-baer #startup #founders #founder-stories

Make Buyers Want to Pay
▻https://hackernoon.com/make-buyers-want-to-pay-638245800da1?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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If you want enterprise customers, then users are just half your audience. The other half are buyers — executives with budget authority. Many startups focus on the users and forget about the buyers, then struggle to sell.Free trials, free and low-cost tiers, and open-sourcing are for making users want your product. Popularity is a benefit to buyers, because it will accelerate adoption, but it’s not enough, nor is it necessary. Buyers need to be convinced that your product will solve their most important business needs — their desired outcomes — such as lowering overhead or meeting compliance requirements. That’s what your marketing should be about.Even if you reach an enormous level of adoption like Slack or GitHub, all the work of attracting buyers and converting them into customers will still be (...)

#startup-lessons #b2b-marketing #founders #startup

Founder Interviews : Sid Sijbrandij of #gitlab
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-sid-sijbrandij-of-gitlab-862c391a3929?source=rss----3

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Learn how Sid Sijbrandij and the GitLab team went from launching on HackerNews to a $100M Series D in 6 years.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m originally from the Netherlands but have lived in San Francisco for nearly four years now. I’ve been involved in a number of different ventures — from selling programmable infrared receivers to starting a recreational submarine company — but seeing the first Ruby code in 2007 changed everything. I loved it so much I learned to program and made it my profession.This was a natural stepping stone to GitLab, which I co-founded. The first single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, GitLab is built on open source, leveraging the community contributions of thousands of developers and millions of users to continuously (...)

#startup #founders #davis-baer #founder-stories

Founder Interviews: Ryder Pearce of YoGov
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-ryder-pearce-of-yogov-2d8e50790b4e?source=rss----3a81

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After a number of frustrating experiences at the DMV in 2016, Ryder saw an opportunity to provide better DMV information and faster appointments online. By February 2018, YoGov was doing $40K in monthly revenue without yet having written a single line of code.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Ryder, the founder of YoGov. I started my career in urban planning, working for the cities of New York and Vancouver, before founding my first venture-backed #startup, SherpaShare, which offers financial management tools to rideshare drivers and other gig workers.At YoGov, we’re building the consumer layer on top of government services. Our initial target is the DMV (the Department of Motor Vehicles, for those of you outside the US), where we’ve proven that even the (...)

#founders #founder-advice #founder-stories #davis-baer

Founder Interviews: Ayush Jaiswal of Pesto
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-ayush-jaiswal-of-pesto-bd3144f42e9a?source=rss----3a8

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After seeing how little the average software engineer in India makes compared to their peers in the US, Ayush created a bootcamp that teaches coders how to be effective remote employees, then helps them get full-time remote jobs at US tech companies, making up to 10x more than they were making before.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Ayush from New Delhi. I dropped out of college after a year to work fulltime on the startup I wanted to build. I was disappointed looking at the broken education system. I decided to self-study.A couple of years ago, I found venture capital very cool. I made a TV show (Shark tank of India) as an associate producer and invested in a few startups as a scout for another firm- Project Guerrilla.I’ve been working on different (...)

#davis-baer #remote-working #founder-stories #founder-advice #founders

Founder Interviews: Mikko Kenttälä of SensorFu
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-mikko-kentt%C3%A4l%C3%A4-of-sensorfu-4c384b5df87d?sou

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Learn how Mikko and the SensorFu team built a product that detects network and system leaks for mission-critical production networks.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?My name is Mikko Kenttälä and I am CEO and one of the SensorFu’s #founders. SensorFu builds a cybersecurity product that continuously seeks new network and system leak paths and alerts IT-ops when they are found. These leaks can be a result of human error or malice and they may violate #security policies or contractual obligations. Making sure that planned network segmentation or containment holds is crucial for keeping things safe and private.I have always loved to hack devices and software to find out how they work, learn new tricks and build something new. I have been curious about what makes (...)

#founder-advice #founder-stories #davis-baer

Founder Interviews: Emmanuel Straschnov of Bubble
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-emmanuel-straschnov-of-bubble-a794f542c41e?source=rss

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Please welcome Emmanuel Straschnov, co-founder of Bubble, the easiest way to build software with no code.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Emmanuel Straschnov: I’m originally from France, and I worked for a few years before getting into technology. I studied math in France before moving to China to work as a management consultant for a few years. I came to the US for business school and met Josh Haas through mutual friends. He had started a company a few months before (it wasn’t called Bubble at the time) and was looking for a co-founder. We actually decided to partner after our first coffee!Bubble is a visual programming platform that lets users build web apps without typing any code, and then let’s them run their app on Bubble’s cloud platform without having (...)

#founder-advice #startup #founders #founder-stories #no-code

Founder Interviews: Steve Newman of Scalyr
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-steve-newman-of-scalyr-67ac861aac63?source=rss----3a8

Please welcome Steve Newman, the man who created Google Docs, and the current founder of Scalyr.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Steve Newman: I’m an engineer and, I guess I’m supposed to say “serial entrepreneur” but I’m more comfortable with “startup guy.” I’ve co-founded six startups, including Writely, “The Web Word Processor.” We were acquired by Google in 2006 and relaunched as Google Docs. The original motivation for Writely was to help people collaborate to create a document — or as we thought about it, “solving the problem of having to email Word files back and forth.” And of course people do use Google Docs to collaborate, but a lot of the value turned out to be in having access from anywhere.Currently I’m CEO of Scalyr, where we’re attacking the problem of (...)

#founder-stories #startup #founders #google-docs #founder-advice