Mark Ross, a man who’s spent 20 years working in senior level global technology management, and owns board-level experience with Fortune 500 financial services companies. He’s 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? – The Tipping Point What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Slack Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— “Never” If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “Startups are a whole lot harder than you think”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:42 – Nathan introduces Mark to the show 02:07 – What is GridMarkets and how does it generate sales? 02:18 – Power extensive engineering applications 02:40 – Serve studios that make animations and simulations 03:33 – Similar with dark-power concept 04:08 – Agreements with the suppliers 04:20 – GridMarkets has their own grid 05:00 – Idea of GridMarkets started in 2011 05:47 – SaaS in the sense of push-button 06:39 – Give credits to new customers 07:20 – Offering credit hours at $ 1.60 07:30 – Credit numbers per month is over a million at the moment 07:57 – GridMarkets is self-funded and 10 people invest in the company 09:46 – Valuation of GridMarkets 10:15 – Investors’ different valuation 10:40 – Number of current customers 11:00 – Fantastic feedbacks from customers 11:20 – MRR 11:48 – Team size 12:26 – There’s a lot specific skills and knowledge needed 12:50 – The demand would justify having our own machine 13:10 – Amount a computer can handle per month 14:00 – Millions of computer hours needed to serve studios 15:00 – Spinning up machines 15:45 – Connect with Mark through his email 18:06 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: It won’t hurt to give your customer something for free to start off. Invest in your people. Value your customer’s feedback and learn from it.   Resources Mentioned: Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal  for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to quality of Toptal  developers. Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible. Freshbooks – The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts. Leadpages  – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+ Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books. Mark.Ross@gridmarkets.com – Mark’s email address Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives