The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers' Cash

Acknowledgments

Like almost anything else meaningful that I've ever been involved with, this book has been a team effort from the very start. It began with my students, whose remarkable efforts to conceive of and start a wide array of sometimes extraordinary entrepreneurial ventures, have been an inspiration to me and to others. But one of these students, Nell Derick-Debevoise, stands out.

After earning her MBA at Columbia and London Business Schools and while getting her own entrepreneurial venture, Inspiring Capital (see www.inspiringcapital.ly) underway, Nell was kind enough to share a portion of her time to assist me on the research project that has evolved into this book. Her dogged identification and examination of dozens of companies, and her ability to organize what we learned about those companies—and the entrepreneurs who founded and grew them—into a series of coherent and accessible case histories, were crucial. Her work made possible the insights that led to the typology of customer-funded models, and it brought forth the stories that bring them to life. Thank you, Nell. Without your work—not to mention your good humor and patience with me!—this book would not exist.

Thanks go, too, to those who so kindly consented to lengthy and detailed interviews that Nell and I conducted, especially those whose stories are profiled in several of the book's case histories: MapmyIndia's Rakesh and Rashmi Verma, and Rohan Verma, too; Rud Browne of Ryzex; Petals for the People's ...