Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $5 Million First

Founder CEO Josh Millet had bootstrapped Criteria to almost $5 million in revenue before raising funding.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Josh Millet: I was born in Toronto, Canada. I have dual citizenship of US and Canada. I came to the States for school 20 years ago and have been here ever since.

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1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The other really interesting area that I find very promising is that there are a lot of services companies out there and there’s so much AI technology right now to make services efficient. You almost can productize your services.

If you have a hundred clients that you’re providing services to, you should be able to use AI to dramatically get margin out of those businesses, which is another interesting development for bootstrapped entrepreneurship, in particular. As you know, we support bootstrapped entrepreneurship very, very seriously.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You know, we’ve had several discussions on AI-enabled drug discovery in, towards the end of last year. We have covered AI-enabled drug discovery on our blog quite extensively. It’s an area that I think is super exciting and super promising.

Now, the conclusion that was coming out of those discussions was that drug discovery platforms that are out there, like Adam Weiss, for example, are selling only to the large pharmas. So, if you’re a researcher at a university or if you’re trying to do a startup in drug discovery, you don’t really have access to the infrastructure that you need to be able to develop your products.

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Agentic AI: Analysis of ServiceNow’s $2.85B Moveworks Acquisition

The high growth Agentic AI market has attracted several big and niche players in the market. The industry is bound to see some consolidation. One such player is Mountain View-based Moveworks, which was recently acquired by ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) for an estimated $2.85 billion.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Software development is getting hugely streamlined, right? The co-pilots are becoming extremely effective. So, you don’t need as many people on the software services side as well. There are a lot of co-pilot products that are getting sold into that business. So, there’s a whole market emerging out of efficiency in the software development ecosystem.

So, let’s talk a little bit about these companies that you mentioned as use cases and case studies of what you’re investing in. Cognida and Critical River are two that you just mentioned. Could you talk to us about what these companies are doing and how these models are playing into their situations?

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 1)

Entrepreneur, Angel Investor, and Board Member Raju Reddy discusses his AI investment thesis.

Colors: Illusion II

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 – Illusion II

Illusion II | Sramana Mitra, 2019 | Watercolor, Ink | 16  x 20, On Paper

Colors: Illusion I

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 – Illusion I

Illusion I | Sramana Mitra, 2019 | Watercolor, Ink | 16  x 20, On Paper