If you haven't already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. For those of you rushing to raise venture capital with a deck of slides or a minimum viable product, let me offer you a challenge: How can you get to a $20 million pre-money valuation in Series A, raise $5 million, and keep control of 80% of the equity? That's what Christian Chabot, founder of Tableau Software, can teach you from his real-life experience. Chabot, needless to say, did so by bootstrapping the early stages of his company, validating the customer need, building a great product in the domain of analytics and visualization, and generating serious revenue and OEM partnerships before going out to raise any venture financing at all. Where did he get the money to bootstrap Tableau? Well, he started a prior company, BEE-Line Software, also bootstrapped, and sold it to Vicinity for a nice upside. He then used that capital to launch Tableau.
If you haven't already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. I wrote a book called Billion Dollar Unicorns a few years back. Writing this book took me through the extensive process of talking to entrepreneurs who have built tech companies with valuations above a billion dollars. While there is a tremendous amount of serendipity involved in any extraordinary success story, one recurring theme comes up in these case studies. I am particularly excited to share this nugget because it applies broadly to all classes of entrepreneurial ventures. Bootstrap first, raise money later. That's what Fred Luddy did when he founded ServiceNow back in 2005. Leveraging his domain knowledge and expertise in IT ServiceDesk software, he rapidly acquired 12 customers before raising funding. Initially, he started charging $25 per seat and the 12 customers paid up. He raised $2.5 million in venture capital WITH 12 customers, and ample
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, cVidya was acquired by Amdocs in 2016. Sramana Mitra: Let's start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Alon Aginsky: I was born and raised in Israel. After completing my army duty, I found myself in New York as a young entrepreneur trying to make it. Luckily, I was able to pick an opportunity and
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