Today, Percolate helps brands sort and curate content on the social web. In late 2012, the company announced their $9 million Series A financing led by GGV Capital with participation from existing investors First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and others.

Best Success Story

It’s hard to isolate just one thing.

To start, we’re two and a half years old, and we’re still alive. We are the leader in our space, helping brands create content through a technology platform. We have about 50 clients, 50 employees, and we just moved into a nice, new office.

Most importantly, we have developed a product that our clients love and pay for. Like I said, it’s hard to isolate any one of these successes. I’m just incredibly proud that we’ve built a tool that Fortune 500 companies appreciate and find useful.

Biggest Startup Challenge

In the very early days as a bootstrapped company, we had the normal problems related to cash flow — waiting for people to pay you so that you can continue to make payroll.

Also, we have the challenge (that every startup has) which is finding great people, but we’ve been very lucky there. We’ve built a great team.

Everything is a challenge… It’s really hard to start a company. It’s hard to find out everything for the first time. You discover a new challenge every day when you start a company. In the early days it was challenging to setup payroll, billing, healthcare and things like that. But ultimately, everything ends up working out.

From the beginning, we’ve tried to be thoughtful in how we approached building the company. So, a lot of how we’ve dealt with these challenges is to try to find scalable solutions that will last. It’s important to bring people in who are really good at [managing] challenges and give them the freedom and support to deal with them.

#1 Tip for Entrepreneurs

Find a co-founder you can disagree with — productively. Of course, you need a co-founder that you trust and believe in deeply, but I think people forget to find someone that they can disagree with; have an argument that leads to a productive end.

Stay connected with Percolate on Twitter.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Interview conducted by writer, Katherine Burks.

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