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Mark Ross, a man who\u2019s spent 20 years working in senior level global technology management, and owns board-level experience with Fortune 500 financial services companies. He\u2019s 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? \u2013 The Tipping Point
• What CEO do you follow? \u2013 Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? \u2014 Slack

• Do you get 8 hours of sleep?\u2014 \u201cNever\u201d
• If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? \u2013 \u201cStartups are a whole lot harder than you think\u201d

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Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:42 \u2013 Nathan introduces Mark to the show
• 02:07 \u2013 What is GridMarkets and how does it generate sales?
• • 02:18 \u2013 Power extensive engineering applications
  • 02:40 \u2013 Serve studios that make animations and simulations
• 03:33 \u2013 Similar with dark-power concept
• 04:08 \u2013 Agreements with the suppliers
• 04:20 \u2013 GridMarkets has their own grid
• 05:00 \u2013 Idea of GridMarkets started in 2011
• • 05:47 \u2013 SaaS in the sense of push-button
• 06:39 \u2013 Give credits to new customers
• • 07:20 \u2013 Offering credit hours at $ 1.60
  • 07:30 \u2013 Credit numbers per month is over a million at the moment
• 07:57 \u2013 GridMarkets is self-funded and 10 people invest in the company
• 09:46 \u2013 Valuation of GridMarkets
• • 10:15 \u2013 Investors\u2019 different valuation
• 10:40 \u2013 Number of current customers
• • 11:00 \u2013 Fantastic feedbacks from customers
• 11:20 \u2013 MRR
• 11:48 \u2013 Team size
• • 12:26 \u2013 There\u2019s a lot specific skills and knowledge needed
  • 12:50 \u2013 The demand would justify having our own machine
• 13:10 \u2013 Amount a computer can handle per month
• • 14:00 \u2013 Millions of computer hours needed to serve studios
  • 15:00 \u2013 Spinning up machines
• 15:45 \u2013 Connect with Mark through his email
• 18:06 \u2013 The Famous Five

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3 Key Points:

• It won\u2019t hurt to give your customer something for free to start off.
• Invest in your people.
• Value your customer\u2019s feedback and learn from it.

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Resources Mentioned:

• Toptal\xa0\u2013 Nathan found his development team using Toptal\xa0 for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn\u2019t have to hire a co-founder due to quality of Toptal\xa0 developers.
• Host Gator\xa0\u2013 The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible.
• Freshbooks\xa0\u2013 The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
• Leadpages\xa0 \u2013 The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
• Audible\xa0\u2013 Nathan uses Audible when he\u2019s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.
• Mark.Ross@gridmarkets.com \u2013 Mark\u2019s email address
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

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