Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This strategy that you followed is good for companies that have a lot of early-stage funding. It’s not so easy to follow for companies that are trying to work in a very constrained financial resources situation. What did you learn? Focus on the nuggets of what you learned from the early customer engagements when you were not charging yet?

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your selection of which investors to work with, what was your decision making? Was it people you worked with before?

Arvind Jain: There are two key investors in our first round. One of them was Ravi from Lightspeed. I had worked with him in my previous startup. It was an easy choice from that perspective. We also raised from Kleiner Perkins. They had the right experience for us.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This problem has been identified a long time ago. People have tried to build such enterprise knowledge management companies before. I’ve seen many of these attempts. Mostly they’ve failed. While these attempts were made and failing, there was an explosion of digital tools and data. All this was happening in parallel.

In 2019, the enterprise world is more data-rich. There’s more to draw from. AI has become mainstream by this time. What is it in your approach that is different in 2019?

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 1)

Arvind is an experienced entrepreneur who was able to raise $15M on a concept to solve a big problem. Since then, Glean has been abundantly funded, generates abundant revenue and has become a legitimate Unicorn.

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

Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Did revenue take a hit in 2020?

Hannah Fastov: It did. That was when we were able to see the benefits of the direct to consumer business that we had built. It remained equal to the year prior.

Sramana Mitra: You did $2 million in 2020?

Hannah Fastov: Yes.

Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What level did you reach in 2019?

Hannah Fastov: In 2019, we did $4 million. Then the pandemic hit.

Sramana Mitra: How did that go?

Hannah Fastov: That was an interesting time for us. We’re selling an on-the-go bag and everybody’s staying home. We just had our shipment come in at the beginning of March 2020. All of our wholesale partners either postponed or cancelled their orders. We had a ton of inventory.

Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to end of 2017. What kind of revenues were you tracking at?

Hannah Fastov: Close to a million. At this time, most of our revenue was coming in from our wholesale business but we were doing over $250,000 on our website. When we saw what was working in advertising, then we were able to put a bit more into our advertising and use our profits to reinvest back.

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights of 2018?

Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about traffic for the Shopify website. What strategy did you follow to drive traffic?

Hannah Fastov: After we launched our Shopify website, we started to engage with a digital advertising agency. I worked closely with them to develop this strategy of how we are going to get people to our website. We focused on Instagram and Facebook, more Facebook at that time. What we learned is that, like you mentioned earlier, who our customer was. It’s so important to define your demographic. For us, we felt like we were all over the place.