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?
• • 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
• • 05:47 – SaaS in the sense of push-button
• 06:39 – Give credits to new customers
• • 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
• • 10:15 – Investors’ different valuation
• 10:40 – Number of current customers
• • 11:00 – Fantastic feedbacks from customers
• 11:20 – MRR
• 11:48 – Team size
• • 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
• • 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.
• [email protected] – Mark’s email address
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives