Disclosure
Pujji: Ampush halved headcount while growing revenue after Red Ventures invested
“When they invested in Ampush, I cut the headcount under their sort of tutelage by more than half. And our revenue grew during that time.”
Opinion
Pujji: Bootstrapped founders should run PE roll-ups instead of raising VC
“If I'm a profitable bootstrap founder, including myself, like even for growth assistant and other things, I'm like, this seems like such an obvious path to create a tremendous amount of value. That's like better than the venture path for so many different reas…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pujji: McKinsey makes over $1B from PE consulting at 55% EBITDA margins
“McKinsey has an over billion dollar business just for private equity firms. It's got 55% EBITDA margins.”
Disclosure
Pujji: Aux Insights advised PE clients to reject 25% of target acquisitions
“We've had, I mean, it's a young business. We've only done 20 projects, but let's say on 25%, we've said we should, you should stay the hell away from it.”
Disclosure
Pujji: Ampush got a $5M interest-free loan in exchange for aggregate Meta data
“So this guy, Peter, he's a good friend of mine now, he gave us a five million dollar loan, so we didn't have to pay any interest to our bank to do working capital, and all I had to do was basically give him a real-time feed from our Tableau or whatever, our ag…”
Opinion
Pujji: Private equity buyers are urgent and completely price-insensitive
“They're not price sensitive at all. They're urgent.”
Disclosure
Pujji: Aux charges $50k/week versus MBB's $200k/week consulting rate
“We charge 50,000 dollars a week for a team of consultants. And McKinsey, Bain, and BCG charge 200,000 dollars a week. So our argument is we're 75% cheaper than them, but way better in our world of online market, you know, the world that we know extremely well.”
Insight
Pujji: Selling to alternative asset managers is ideal for bootstrapping businesses
“The lesson here is that category alternative assets are a great thing to bootstrap into because they like one deal basically can make you as a business and then you can go from there.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pujji: Red Ventures built a $75M EBITDA business selling DirecTV subscriptions
“And in four years, they built a seventy-five million dollar EBITDA business just selling DirecTV subscriptions because they would run the media, take the phone calls, and all these things that are commonplace today where like what you do on your website gets c…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pujji: Red Ventures acquired Bankrate and tripled its EBITDA in two years
“He went and bought Bankrate, which is a billion dollar publicly traded company for a hundred and EBITDA. It owns the points guy. It owns creditcards.com. It owns. And in less than two years, they tripled the EBITDA of the business.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Pujji: Red Ventures has never raised a dollar of primary capital
“They've never raised a dollar of primary capital. So they're, in my opinion, they're a bootstrap giant, right? They've taken secondary, but they've never raised primary.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pujji: Accordion generates $300M revenue and $100M EBITDA in PE consulting
“And there's businesses like Accordion, the cool example, Three hundred million revenue, a hundred million EBITDA. It's only a 12 year old company. They do the same exact business for office of the CFO.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pujji: Eight expert network firms generate high 8-figure to 9-figure EBITDA
“And by the way, there's eight of them that all have, like, high eight or low nine figures in EBITDA, to be clear. There's GuidePoint Global. There's alpha sites. The whole category has just crushed.”
Disclosure
Pujji: Ampush bootstrapped $150,000 selling $5K research reports to hedge funds
“By the time it was all said and done, we sold 30 of the reports. So I always joke that was Ampush's Angels round. We raised a 150,000 dollars selling research reports to hedge fund people.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pujji: Aux Insights will do $5M in revenue this year
“It's like five million. It'll do five million this year.”
Assertion Supported
Pujji: Bloomberg generates $5B to $10B in annual EBITDA
“The thing makes like five, ten billion a year in EBITDA.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pujji: Zuckerberg outlined Facebook's expansion roadmap in a 2005 phone call
“To his credit, he outlines the entire strategy that Facebook has executed. He goes, first we're going to go to high schools, then we're going to go to workplaces, then we're going to go into pods, then we're going to like, he had the whole strategy. This is in…”
Disclosure
Pujji: Paid $60,000 to charter a Gulfstream IV for Nelly
“For 60 grand, I got him a round trip on a G four Napa to STL, STL to Vegas.”
