Bootstrapping and the Power of Product-Led Growth

Yashad Kulkarni40min

Speaker 1

00:03

Good afternoon. I'm Danny Creighton, one of the managing editors here at TechCrunch. And I'm hoping you're enjoying early stage. I am thrilled to host this panel on bootstrapping one of the most common topics where we getting from founders in the last couple of years. Today, we have two panelists, Toko wattana, the CEO and founder of countly. And Blake Bartlett, the partner at OpenView. ventures. I believe you're headquartered up in Boston? Is that correct? Blake, you got it. Great. So we're going to start this panel off of the q&a, Blake and Toby, we're going to talk to each other about their experience connecting together first on a seed round. And then most recently, on 350 million, I guess you'd call it a series A, although, at this point, the letter sort of don't make any sense anymore. And then we're going to open up the questions, the floor to questions from the audience, you can use a slider app, as with all the sessions today, to ask questions to me. And we'll be presenting those in the second half of the session. So like, why don't you kick us off?

Unknown Speaker

00:56

Yeah, thank

Speaker 1

00:57

you, Danny. So we're gonna start initially by talking about funding calendly in the early days, and a little bit of the the approach that Hope has taken with his team so so maybe Toba as a starting point, how did you decide to fund calendly? Back in the earliest days, when you're first getting it off the ground?

Speaker 2

01:14

Yes. So I, when I had the idea for county, I was eager to get started. And, you know, like a lot of founders, you just have this like paranoia around like, if I don't do this, you know, somebody else is going to do it. And so the quickest path to getting started for me was to fund it myself. And I have so much conviction in the idea that what I did was I migrated my 401k took all the money out of it, took out some small loans through Lending Club maxed out credit cards. And that's how I got started.

Speaker 1

01:47

And did you know that you always wanted to bootstrap? Or did you sort of discover that as a strategy you preferred later on?

Speaker 2

01:54

Yeah, I knew that I waited bootstrap, mostly because I felt like, you know, I wanted to control my destiny. Right? You know, in a lot of ways. I also felt like, I guess you could say, mostly to, to control my destiny. And I, I had no intention of ever raising. But so you

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