Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Who is the biggest of your partners?

Josh Kamrath: D2L and Cengage are tied right now.

Sramana Mitra: They have course material and you complement that with the video assessment. 

Josh Kamrath: There are two different partners. There is a content partner and what you just described is exactly what it is. They have existing content. Together with Cengage, for instance, we create preloaded assessment and that’s married to the content that’s already existing. It’s a just-in-time type of delivery.

Chapter seven may be about being persuasive and a student reads through that. Instead of it being a multiple choice exam at the end of that chapter, the student reads through chapter seven. Then, he/she is prompted to provide a persuasive speech, demonstrating that they have those skills or competencies. The prompts and the stimulus, everything is already pre-configured in the right place and right time. That’s one type of partner.

The other type is a technology partner, like D2L, where it’s more about authorship. We enable managers to evaluate their customer service professionals or sales professionals through D2L in a more authentic or genuine way because it’s done through video assessment. That is powered by Bongo.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in what you’ve done strategically to get to where you’ve gotten to so far? 

Josh Kamrath: With pivoting or shifting towards this partner-centric model, it’s allowed the company to focus on what we do best which is more of the engineering side of the house. I don’t want to diminish any department.

We have really high-caliber people in every department. But what we do best is the engineering, the hard technical tasks, and doing video, especially at large scale. Doing that for more than a million users is difficult. That’s our core competency.

As opposed to the other path where we would have to raise lots of money to hire lots of salespeople and have feet on the street. There are examples where that worked, but that’s just not the path we chose. I’m pretty happy that we chose this path because it allowed us to touch a larger number of students and also develop our product. So it touches them at a deeper level.

It makes a more meaningful impact in these students’ lives in helping them become better at articulating their knowledge as opposed to having to go to other routes. It would have been different. 

Sramana Mitra: What you’ve created is a more leveraged model. Where are you now? How far along are you in terms of revenue and other metrics? What are the usage metrics and adoption metrics? What are the interesting metrics in your business?

Josh Kamrath: Last year, we finished at $6.3 million in revenue. Right now, we’re at an $8 million run rate. We’re looking at getting towards $12 million to $15 million by the end of this year.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. How many people do you have at this point to achieve these kind of numbers?

Josh Kamrath: We have around 50.

Sramana Mitra: All in one location or are you dispersed?

Josh Kamrath: We’re still dispersed. We have two primary offices with our headquarters in Colorado. Lindsey and I are actually out here in San Diego. We have about eight people out here in the satellite office.

I split my time between Colorado and San Diego. Then we have a handful of remote employees – one in Phoenix, one in Atlanta, one in New York, and two up in Ottawa, Canada.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Excellent story. I enjoyed listening to it very much. You’ve built a very nice company – very tight and good strategic maneuvering. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath
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