Welcome to Startup Grind's Founder Series, where our VP of Sales + Startups Alex Gordon-Furse educates our global community on highly relevant early-stage topics through interviews with founders of top startups from our Startup Program.

In this episode, Alex interviews Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of 8base, a next-generation backend-as-a-service for developers to build and run SaaS and market-facing applications using serverless and GraphQL. 8base is great for anything from personal projects or hackathons to building consumer-grade software applications for Global-2000 companies.

The subject of this interview is 'What raising $130M taught me about bootstrapping'. Expect to learn about how to bootstrap, how and when to raise different types of external capital, the pros and cons of taking VC funding and hear Albert's message to first-time founders.

0:00 Start
0:10 Quick intro from Alex Gordon-Furse, VP of Sales & Startups at Startup Grind HQ
2:23 Meet Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of 8base
3:59 Now CareCloud was founded in 2009. Why did you start it?
6:10 What was it like finding your product & customers in the first couple of years?
8:20 How do you balance product development versus sales?
9:41 By year 3 you had already raised almost $30M. How were you feeling by this point?
11:05 What is your recommendation for people selling their product?
12:49 Would you argue that the better side to raising venture capital pulls you forward?
14:47 How do you pick investors/ partners? Finding a good fit?
16:42 Talk me through your journey from Series A in 2011 to late 2016, by which time you had raised Series C.
20:22 Did you compartmentalize your VCs depending on their focus?
21:57 Talk more about how active the VCs were operationally in helping you
23:20 What would you recommend to people who are anxious about relationships with investors?
25:29 How would you advise people who are running a bootstrap company?
26:52 Firstly, where does the name 8base come from?
28:03 What is the problem 8base is solving and why is now the best time for 8base to be solving it?
30:45 Who are your main competitors and why are you better?
34:15 Contrast your experience with CareCloud to 8base
36:55 What are the main benefits of having taken a different approach here?
40:35 You recently went through Techstars Austin. Would you say early-stage accelerators are a good middle ground for those who starting out?
41:55 Are there any specific tips you’d give them about creative ways to at least minimize the dilution of their equity to outside investors if they are raising capital?
44:18 If you could give one message to the first-time founders out there watching this, what would it be?

Watch more of the Founder Series:    • Founder Series  
Read more from Albert:   / 5-things-raising-over-100-million-taught-m...  

Alex's twitter -   / giomate  
Albert's twitter -   / albertsantalo  

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