Raj Sarkar
I am currently working in the Google Apps Product Marketing team building the next billion dollar business for Google. Before that I was in Small Business Marketing at Cisco Systems. At Cisco, I had fun launching viral campaigns like: Peace of Mind and Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker and working closely with the small business market segment.
Before that in 2004, I re-located to the wintry Midwest to attend the MBA program at Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. At Michigan, I co-chaired the 2006 FuturTech Conference, was a leadership fellow and an executive member of the student government body. During my summer internship, I worked at Amazon.com leading the business development and launch strategy for S3 (Simple Storage Service).
In my spare time I enjoy reading, running, hiking and mountaineering.
I saw your posts on the TC board tonight while we were all trying to figure out the Google phone number here in Boston. From that I found your blog and read the post on TC50. I couldn’t agree more.
I wrote something about it as well for a friends blog. I just couldn’t figure out what half of them were doing there (Penn and Teller, Yext, etc). For some I felt they needed to get a business guy involved before they open their more (like dataXu), and yet others didn’t seem to have a revenue model.
In todays day and age it appears that revenue models are an after thought. I have meet with VC’s and the more I do the more I think that it is about that BIG BANG and not about putting together a self sustaining company. For this reason I have been funding start ups with investors outside of the VC model as well as outside of technology. It seems to work well as long as you state the realities of what they can expect since you aren’t selling widgets.
Still, I believe that any start up has to at least have a model where profitability is achievable in a reasonable amount of time. Sure there are going to be those that don’t need it such as FACEBOOK, YouTube, Twitter, etc, but at the end of the day, these are few and far between.
Anyways, I enjoyed your blogs and will continue to visit for more of your industry insight. I am in Boston for the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. Hopefully we have some great presentations.
Damien
@WebBizCEO
Raj- when are you going to start your own biz?
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