Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the deal sizes?

Juha Lehtonen: It was very little – annual fees of €20,000. It was more like an advertisement for us. In addition to developing the platform, we did quite a lot of projects. We needed to self-finance. After the initial investment, we didn’t raise any other capital. That was the only capital we got. We ended up building up a consultation business.

Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions (Part 1)

European companies often follow a methodical, deliberate approach to business building as opposed to mindlessly chasing venture capital.

Juha has used the principles of bootstrapping using services to build his venture from Finland.

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

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It’s true about men also. Unless you come from our kinds of backgrounds, you don’t reach this community. If you come from an average background, you don’t have much of a choice than go through the bootstrapping route. We belong to a very privileged elite class of people who have access. Most of the industries don’t have that access.

Aparna Dhinakaran: Maybe we agree to disagree on this one.

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You believe there is a bias from customers?

Aparna Dhinakaran: No, I think there is a bias in the tech industry itself. In general, there are not that many women that go into AI. I don’t think that we can argue that we’ve reached a neutral point. If I saw that in reality, there would be more women founders.

Sramana Mitra: I’m not asking you the question on statistics. I’m asking about your personal experience. Do you face bias from customers?

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So what use cases did you find the maximum traction in?

Aparna Dhinakaran: AdTech click-through rate is a common use case. Fraud is a big one. Lending is a big one. Demand forecasting is another big one. There are these common use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Are you direct selling?

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you generate inbound interest?

Aparna Dhinakaran: Cold emails. It works. I just told them that I’m building a company focused on ML observability. We spent months doing this. Every call we were on, we showed them our mocks. We asked them for feedback. At the end of these calls, people would say, “When is this going to be released?” We started to build up a list of alpha users.

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s we?

Aparna Dhinakaran: I went through YC with my brother.

Sramana Mitra: What’s his background?

Aparna Dhinakaran: Also computer science. We jumped in and did YC. I recommend this to entrepreneurs. If you get into YC, it’s absolutely worth it. For it is for a first-time entrepreneur, there are two things that you need to focus on. One is building the product and then selling the product. They just focus on how do you remove every other noise. That’s the focus of that entire program.

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So did you quit Uber?

Aparna Dhinakaran: The reason I left Uber was to go to a PhD program. No one in my family had ever gone through higher education. When I had applied to Uber, I had an offer from a PhD program in Computer Vision. I had a ton of debt, so I had to first go to work for a couple of years. I’m really glad I did because nothing beats real-world experience. I left Uber to do a PhD at Cornell.