ScaleApp Podcasts with Prof Dan Isenberg

Episode 2 - Yodeck bootstraps over $20 million ARR! This is a great venture from Greece

Professor Daniel Isenberg

Vangelis Mihalopoulas and Dimitris Tsingos, two engineers in Athens now in their 40s, founded Yodeck to do a digital signage project for a customer in Greece who wanted to easily send information to numerous digital signs (think schools, government offices, sports stadiums, train stations, corporations - any place that has multiple screens conveying information that changes frequently.)

In the midst of the Greek financial meltdown, they wanted just to provide jobs for a handful of engineers. Today, Yodeck is a $20 million ARR global market leader, growing very profitably at 60% year over year with no end in sight. They were bootstrapped with customer financing (think: profitable sales are the best source of growth capital), a tiny seed investment, and only recently raised growth capital, which is mostly still in the bank. Learn how they pulled this off, and what they learned along the way.

My favorite quotes:

  • "We had a venture right next to us in the same group, Epignosis, scaling up, and that gave us confidence."
  • "My advice to my younger self - start having kids earlier, before starting your venture."
  • "The most important thing - pick your founding team from people you trust."