EP349 From $300 to a Multi-Million Dollar Exit
About this episode
Bobbie Racette shares her journey from starting Virtual Gurus with $300 to selling it as a multi-million dollar company.
Bobbie Racette started with $300 at her kitchen table. Nine years later, she became the first Indigenous woman in Canada to build, scale, and sell a tech startup. In this episode - the first time Bobbie has dug into the details of the sale on a podcast - host Colleen O'Connell-Campbell sits down with the founder of Virtual Gurus, an AI-powered inclusive talent marketplace that matched underrepresented talent with businesses including Mastercard, Telus, and BMO. Bobbie shares the full arc: bootstrapping to $1.8 million in revenue before raising a cent, hearing 170 no's before closing a seed round, scaling through three funding rounds during COVID, becoming the first Indigenous woman in Canada to close a Series A, navigating founder fatigue, stepping down as CEO before the exit, and ultimately selling to a U.S. private equity firm that rolled Virtual Gurus into North America's largest virtual assistant platform - with the AI sold separately to a Calgary company. This is a conversation about what it takes to build something from nothing, what it costs personally, and what comes next when the mission is bigger than the transaction. Key Takeaways: Bobbie created Virtual Gurus in 2016…
More episodes of The Cash Rich Exit Podcast
- EP351 100 Years of Sharing the Wealth. The Rise of Employee Ownership in Canada
- EP350 How Bright Spot Climate Became One of Canada's EOT Pioneers
- EP348 80% of Small Businesses Never Sell
- EP347 From Basement Labels to a $12 Million Exit
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