Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said in 2006 you were doing $6 million?

OJ Whatley: Yes, $6 million – $500,000 in receipts per month.

Sramana Mitra: What was the inventory situation at that point?

OJ Whatley: I probably had closer to 50 to 80.

Sramana Mitra: That’s still out of your home?

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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your business was entirely Panerai until what year?

OJ Whatley: Until about 2003.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after 2003?

OJ Whatley: Again, I’ve always loved watches. Panerai has captured my heart. In fact to this day, my license plate is Panerai. I fell in love with Panerai like no other watch. I love watches to begin with. It took me a couple of years because a lot of people were telling me that Panerai was a bubble. It was going to burst – that Panerai couldn’t justify the resale prices or the profit margins on the watches I was making.

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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit more about some of the granular details of specific elements?

OJ Whatley: In 2000, I walked into a watch store and I happened to pick up these hardcover books on the history of Panerai. They were like coffee table books. I went on eBay and found about eight of these in different languages. I noticed that they were selling from $100 to $150 each. I asked everyone who was working with me at that software company and found out that you could call Panerai on the 800 number and ask them to send these books to you and they would send them to you for free. I had my co-workers order these books and I would take them out for lunch in exchange for getting me these books. I would then sell them on eBay for anywhere between $50  to $300. That was a big piece of my capital.

Sramana Mitra: Was that also getting you in touch with people who are passionate about Panerai?

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Why Did eBay Repatriate $9 Billion Foreign Cash?

Earlier this week, online retailer eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) announced their quarterly results. Their results exceeded market expectations, but the big surprise was the announcement of repatriating $9 billion in cash and paying $3 billion in taxes on these funds. eBay wants to use these funds to drive further growth.

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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why watches?

OJ Whatley: I’ve always loved watches. Even going back to my days as a 10-year-old, I was always enamored of watches.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a passion.

OJ Whatley: Yes. The price points were $10 to $300. I was always obsessed with watches and I’ve been wearing a watch since I was about 12 years old. It evolved. It started with Star Wars R2-D2 and Darth Vader watches. I wear some of them on a chain around my neck. It progressed to Casio calculator-type of watches and watches that would play music. Then it progressed to the freestyle sports watches and Casio G-Shocks.

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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 1)

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

OJ Whatley did $6 million in revenue in 2006 from his home, with ‘me, myself, and I.’ Further elaborating on the ultra-light startup trend, we bring you his story of approaching $20 million with 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

OJ Whatley: I was raised in Chicago. My father was a commodities trader. That’s where I got in my blood the idea of buying low and selling high – the idea of speculation and entrepreneurship.

Sramana Mitra: Entrepreneurship and speculation are not the same things.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 2)

Emil Sayegh: Fast forward to 2014, what we are seeing right now in the market is both of these models hitting a point where frankly they’re becoming less useful as a monolithic type of offering. Companies out there want to be able to benefit from the ability to grow very quickly with the cloud offering for the right applications but also need a solid performance of what used to come with dedicated servers for certain applications like databases and Big Data applications. All those applications need very high I/O still need traditional infrastructures.

Now, you’re in a dilemma. I put my front-end web infrastructure on something like Amazon cloud or Rackspace cloud, but then where do I put my high performance computing needs? Very few companies have been able to bridge those two elements. What we’re seeing is the emergence of hybrid cloud, which allows customers to essentially spin up front-end web resources in a cloud environment in a utility-based model and then have their back-end on robust dedicated gears. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit.

Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction, Codero has been around, as a company, since 1992 in various names. It started as a small corner computer reselling shop in San Diego. Quickly, the Internet came about. They got into shared hosting, domain name registration, and web design. The company grew and evolved into dedicated hosting and managed hosting, and later cloud. In 2006, Catalyst Investors out of New York came and purchased them. >>>