Bootstrapping Course: Welcome

Nowadays, startups can be built while a founder is still fully employed. Many entrepreneurs start as solo founders and achieve great progress until they need a team. Virtual teams are common these days and easily affordable.

At 1Mby1M, we support employed entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who are at the very beginning of their journeys. They might not even know what to build or how to build it.

We encourage entrepreneurs not to quit their day job until their business becomes fundable or sustainable. 

Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs get rejected by investors and accelerators every year. Y Combinator rejects over 95% of their applicants. Andreessen Horowitz rejects 99% of theirs. 

In this mind-boggling stream of rejections, there are numerous high potential companies that need to bootstrap their way to fundability or sustainability.

We accelerate their learning with the 1Mby1M Curriculum and over 1000 case studies of real-life success stories. 

We support their fund-raising efforts through personal introductions to investors.

If you enjoy this course, check out 1Mby1M Basic, our curriculum-only option.

If you’re trying to assess why you’re getting rejections, use the 1Mby1M Self-Assessment.

Featured Videos

Women Entrepreneurs and Investors: Two Sides of the Proverbial Coin

Is entrepreneurship different for women entrepreneurs?

Is there bias against women entrepreneurs?

Is the increasing presence of women investors changing the venture capital industry?

At 1Mby1M, we’ve been nurturing women entrepreneurs for 15+ years.

Throughout that journey, we have done extensive research on how women entrepreneurs are successfully building companies and finding different degrees and nuances of success.

All this and more are covered in these two courses:

Keys to Success for Women Entrepreneurs with Sramana Mitra

How Women Investors Think About Startups with Sramana Mitra

Cloud Stocks: Dropbox Expands in International eSignature Market

According to a recent report, the global Enterprise File Sharing and Synchronization market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20.7% over the next five years. Dropbox (Nasdaq: DBX) recently announced its first quarter results that continued to outpace market expectations.

Video FAQs

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Francisco Webber, CEO of Cortical.io (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me interrupt you for a second and try to understand the technology better. I completely understand the statistical approach versus more of the semantic modeling approach. How do you start? Let’s say you get a dataset. How does this begin?

Francisco Webber: One big problem that we have in statistical representation is that we lack something like semantic grounding. There are no fundamental ground truths to which we can tie the features and properties of what we want to represent. In our approach, we model what the brain does by the continuous saving of all the experiences.

Best of Bootstrapping: Gravitant CEO Bootstrapped Using Services to $15M in Venture Capital

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

We continue to see exciting enterprise software companies being built by entrepreneurs who have roots in the consulting business and who have taken their domain knowledge and customer insights to develop compelling products to solve specific problems. Gravitant is yet another case in point. Before Gravitant was acquired by IBM in 2015, I spoke with Gravitant CEO Mohammed Farooq about his journey.

Sramana: Mohammed, let’s start our discussion by reviewing your background. Where do you come from? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial journey?

Mohammed Farooq: I am originally from India, close to Hyderabad. I went to engineering school in India and came to the United States in 1991 to attend graduate school. I was born in 1967 and went to school locally in India. I attended Gulbarga University in India where I studied mechanical engineering. I attended graduate school in Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, I completed a dual degree in operations research and computer science. I then did an MBA in finance as well.

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How to Build an Artificial Intelligence Startup

One of the single hottest trends in technology startups is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and various other nuances are being constantly applied to problems up and down the alleyways of all industries from Manufacturing, to Retail, to Education, to Drug Discovery.

All the methodology building blocks you have been learning through the 1Mby1M entrepreneurship fundamentals courses apply. You can, for instance, bootstrap an AI startup with Services, then you can raise money (or not). You can build a Unicorn (or not). 

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Cloud Stocks: Analysis of Rapid7’s Velocidex Acquisition

Recently Rapid7 (NASDAQ:RPD), a leading provider of security analytics and automation, reported its quarterly results that continued to beat market estimates. The company has been on an acquisition spree and recently announced the acquisition of another Australian player.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Francisco Webber, CEO of Cortical.io (Part 1)

This is a terrific conversation on cutting-edge Natural language processing (NLP) with an entrepreneur in Vienna. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Cortical.io.

Francisco Webber: I am the CEO and one of the founders of Cortical.io. It is a startup originating from Vienna, Austria. We are working in the domain of natural language understanding. We have developed our own technology for rendering text information.

Catching Up On Readings: E3 2021

This feature from Engadget brings to you the highlights of the online edition of the gaming event Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.