Mark Ross, a man who’s spent 20 years working in senior level global technology management, and owns board-level experience with Fortune 500 financial services companies. He’s the co-founder of GridMarkets and senior level advisor for a number of startups. Listen as Mark discusses why he jumped into entrepreneurship and how it differs from big-time corporate life.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – The Tipping Point
- What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
- Favorite online tool? — Slack
- Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— “Never”
- If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “Startups are a whole lot harder than you think”
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:42 – Nathan introduces Mark to the show
- 02:07 – What is GridMarkets and how does it generate sales?
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- 02:18 – Power extensive engineering applications
- 02:40 – Serve studios that make animations and simulations
- 03:33 – Similar with dark-power concept
- 04:08 – Agreements with the suppliers
- 04:20 – GridMarkets has their own grid
- 05:00 – Idea of GridMarkets started in 2011
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- 05:47 – SaaS in the sense of push-button
- 06:39 – Give credits to new customers
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- 07:20 – Offering credit hours at $ 1.60
- 07:30 – Credit numbers per month is over a million at the moment
- 07:57 – GridMarkets is self-funded and 10 people invest in the company
- 09:46 – Valuation of GridMarkets
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- 10:15 – Investors’ different valuation
- 10:40 – Number of current customers
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- 11:00 – Fantastic feedbacks from customers
- 11:20 – MRR
- 11:48 – Team size
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- 12:26 – There’s a lot specific skills and knowledge needed
- 12:50 – The demand would justify having our own machine
- 13:10 – Amount a computer can handle per month
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- 14:00 – Millions of computer hours needed to serve studios
- 15:00 – Spinning up machines
- 15:45 – Connect with Mark through his email
- 18:06 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- It won’t hurt to give your customer something for free to start off.
- Invest in your people.
- Value your customer’s feedback and learn from it.
Resources Mentioned:
- Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to quality of Toptal developers.
- Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible.
- Freshbooks – The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
- Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
- Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.
- Mark.Ross@gridmarkets.com – Mark’s email address
- Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives