SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Matt Ford launched his first Music Tech startup - spotlight.fm - while attending the University of Wisconsin in 2011. Spotlight.fm was a marketing platform for major festivals, record labels, promoters, and music brands including Ableton, Electric Daisy Carnival, and Frank Productions. After growing the userbase to over 250k, Matt successfully exiting the company and started Solstice in 2014. Solstice started as a hybrid concert management platform and concert promoter. While putting on thousands of events around Austin including an annual festival (Solstice Festival), Matt began working on technology to connect venues and artists with a tech partner Adrian Tavares. Through this process, the ubiquitous problem venues, agents and promoters face operationally became abundantly clear. Prism.fm emerged in 2018 with Matt as the CEO. In just 2 short years since inception, Prism is working with hundreds of partners around the world booking thousands of venues.

Derek Wang is the CEO and co-founder of Stratifyd, Inc. Wang grew up in Beijing and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Along with two other co-founders –began conducting government-funded research on the ways AI could be used to ingest, analyze, and visualize unstructured data.

Mark Abbott shares a passion for farms, food and community wellness with his wife and two school-aged kids. He is founding team member for AmeriCorps and past Director of the Poverty program at the C. S. Mott Foundation. Mark has a PhD in economic anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh and start-ups in the non-profit and for-profit sectors. Mark is the founder and CEO for FarmRaiser, a platform and service for healthy product fundraising.

As a serial entrepreneur, I live and breathe franchising. He has started several local and national successful businesses in the technology, rental, service, e-commerce and retail markets which have generated hundreds of millions in sales. Steve identifies the creation of Bpro as the main contributing factor to his success in franchising his businesses.

Experienced Founder with a demonstrated history of working in the health wellness and fitness industry. Skilled in Negotiation, Business Planning, Sales, Entrepreneurship, and Public Speaking. Strong business development professional with a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) focused in International Business.

Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO of CropIn Technology Solutions, has made it possible to enable data-driven farming by connecting all the stakeholders in the agri ecosystem. CropIn is a leading global full-stack ag-tech organization that provides SaaS solutions thus enabling businesses to utilize technology to effectively drive their initiatives around Digitization, Predictability, Risk Management, Compliance, Sustainability and Traceability. With robust solutions that are crop and region agnostic, CropIn has so far digitized nearly 3.2 million acres of farmland, enriching the lives of nearly 2.1 million farmers in addition to creating a footprint in 29 countries globally. Krishna is also a 'BusinessWorld 40 Under 40 Achiever 2018'.

Dr Brian Harris is one of the nation's leading experts in cosmetic dentistry. His creation of the Smile Virtual software platform allows cosmetic dentists to connect with patients from around the world via video consults. This software streamlines the smile makeover process and transforms lives by increasing self confidence.

John Corrigan, Co-Founder, CEO of SummitSync is most interesting man in the world you have never met or heard about. A native of Chicago now living in NYC, John spent a decent portion of his 20's having an unimpressive career in digital ad sales and corporate development selling a couple billion dollars of ads to the world's largest brands. Through boredom, randomness, and a strong desire to avoid graduate school in his late 20's John founded TravelsOfJohn an online newsletter that interviewed global thought leaders across politics, business, sports, and science. At its height achieving a readership of over 100,000 people per month. Having been raised by a civically focused mother, in 2012 John became the largest fundraiser under 30 for President Obama's re-election campaign, sitting on the President's National Finance Committee. Today in his 30's John and has found maturity with purpose as both founder and CEO of SummitSync. John has lead SummitSync to be one of the fastest growing enterprise SaaS companies in the US today. SummitSync provides sales enablement and marketing intelligence to drive more meetings for it's thousands of clients at the conferences and trade shows they attend. Outside of capital and political pursuits John is known to travel extensively, spend way to much time on his Instagram photo's, fly planes, ski, and read any book he can find on history and foreign policy.

I am a multi time founder and currently running Castos podcast hosting and analytics. We provide podcast hosting alongside our Seriously Simple Podcasting WordPress plugin to thousands of podcasters. Our goal is to make podcasting easy to understand and accessible to all.

Deepak has 20 years of experience in product and marketing roles at storage, application and networking companies. He has served in leadership positions at Druva, Riverbed, Sun, AOL and at Netscape where he launched several products. Deepak has an MBA from UC, Berkeley and an MS in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Scott grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and studied business at PSU. After working as a 3D VFX Artist, Scott ventured into manufacturing, wholesale and distribution of electronic novelties. During the recession Scott realized that business had changed forever and in order to compete businesses were going to need a whole new set of tools. This gave rise to Sellution.

Serial entrepreneur with a wide experience in IT domain from software development to services and software/solution sales. +20 years in enterprise service management. Excellent track record of building and leading winning teams. Personal goal: help business leaders to see information technology as an organic and critical part of their businesses, not just hard-to-understand-expensive-techie-driven-cost center.

Dhruv serves LogiNext as the CEO and has been recognized as one of the youngest and fastest growing SaaS CEOs in the US. He has previously worked with Deloitte leading consulting assignments for some of the Fortune 500 clients and has extensive experience in advising enterprises and governments on how to rebuild their transportation stack to match the expectations of the new age customer. Under his leadership, LogiNext, has quickly become a household name for companies trying to deliver goods to their customers in a faster, cheaper and better way with the use of AI and enterprise maps. LogiNext currently serves more than 100 large enterprises and has been growing 200% YoY. LogiNext is valued at more than $100mn by marquee investors like Tiger Global Management, Steadview Capital and Alibaba.

Dr. Narjès Boufaden is a pioneer and thought leader in the Natural Language Processing field who transitioned from the academic world to run her company. She founded Keatext in 2010 for professional services in AI, then pivoted into a product company in 2015. Narjes is also a contributor at Forbes and a dedicated mentor at Techstar AI.

Vaibhav Domkundwar is an entrepreneur & seed investor with dual bases in Silicon Valley and India. Vaibhav runs Better (the parent company of PicBackMan) which is a micro venture firm that builds & invests in category-defining businesses at the seed stage. Prior to Better, Vaibhav cofounded mobile roaming platform leader Roamware, which was acquired by Audax. Vaibhav is a graduate of University of California at Berkeley and runs marathons to put health & fitness as high up as his work & family.

Steve is the founder and CEO of Badger Maps. After receiving his MBA from Stanford, Steve was Google Enterprise's Top Sales Executive in 2009. In 2012, Steve founded Badger Maps, a software company that helps Field Sales People optimize their routes and schedules to save time and be on time so they can sell more. Steve is also the host of the Outside Sales Talk podcast where he interviews industry experts on their top sales tips.

Andy brings 20 years of enterprise SaaS experience to UserTesting. As a former product executive at Oracle and Salesforce, he saw the critical role that customer centricity plays in creating great experiences. By helping companies become more customer-centric, he has grown multiple enterprise SaaS businesses to hundreds of millions of dollars.

George Arison is the co-founder of Shift, an online marketplace disrupting the used car industry. An immigrant from Georgia and lifelong entrepreneur, he also co-founded the first on-demand mobile transportation booking technology Taxi Magic (now known as Curb), as well as working for Google and BCG.

I'm a social entrepreneur and the Co-Founder and CEO of erxes Inc, an open source growth marketing platform. Marketing, sales, and customer service platform designed to help your business attract more engaged customers. I'm passionate about social entrepreneurship and possesses a strong desire to create new solutions to social problems and then implement them on a large scale to change society for the better.

Mike is a jazz musician, smart entrepreneur and maker. He runs a portfolio of software companies including angage.net, scrapebook.net and fbradar.com which are bootstrapped and profitable from day 1. Additionally, Mike runs multiple digital marketing agencies that focus on helping businesses in different niche markets, currently managing more than 100,000 people on different social channels for clients.

Sai Hossain is the CEO of Crowdcast, a live-streaming & webinar platform for professional creators. Born in a small village in Bangladesh, Sai immigrated to the country at a young age and slowly made his way to silicon valley. There he teamed up with some great thinkers to design and build a new way for people to share ideas at scale.

Henrique Dubugras is Co-Founder & CEO of Brex — the first corporate card for startups. A Brazilian entrepreneur, Henrique built payments company Pagar.me — the Stripe of Brazil — when he was 16. In three years, Pagar.me grew to $1.5 billion in volume of transactions processed. Prior to Pagar.me, Henrique built a number of online businesses in Brazil including an education company and a dating application.

Johns Hopkins. Army Ranger. 27 mo in Afghanistan. UNC MBA. Founder of Stop Soldier Suicide & GoodUnited. Husband & father of two.

As ClientPoint's President & CEO, Andy is a seasoned venture-backed high growth leader, with extensive board and operational experience. He has led the growth of large-scale digital media, SaaS, IoT, mobile and app businesses in the B2C and B2B sectors. Andy began his business career at NBC/GE after completing a successful career as a professional basketball player in Europe.

Blake Smith is founder and CEO of Cladwell, a digital closet manager. Cladwell's goal is to manage the world's closets, by helping people do more with less. Cladwell resides at the intersection between math and art - much like Blake - who used his background in computational mathematics as a hedge fund analyst before joining the founding team of an agency that produced movies for Walmart, P&G, and many other Fortune 500 brands. In addition to Cladwell, Blake and his wife Chandler raise and homeschool 4 kids.

Andres is the CEO and Founder of iKizmet that delivers business analytics and insights to boutique fitness studio owners. With over 500,000 business in the fitness and wellness space iKizmet is making valuable data analysis tools affordable for small business owners to help them make data driven decisions faster without the complexity while helping to grow their businesses. Andres has been in the fitness and wellness space for over 15 years and was a founding member at MINDBODY helping build a world class sales and business development organization.

Technical background, started as software developer. Co-founded my first business in 2001, entrepreneur since then. Went from startup owner to executive in a multi-national company, then back to startup founder. Now CEO of RenderStreet, backed by advanced tech and dedicated to reducing the stress levels of 3D artists and studios worldwide.

I am the Founder and Product leader at Brandzooka. I develop and scale web services that disrupt and delight. I build teams and create the space for people to deliver extraordinary results and develop Market Product Fit. I write for publications such as AdAge and DowJones and speak regularly on subjects ranging from Entrepreneurship and Ad Tech, to Agile and Product development practices for organizations such as Stanford GSB and IDEO.

Dropped out of college to start the worlds largest answering service, left after 12 years to start an accounting software company, sold that and is now helping marketing agencies close more leads to customers through automation. Live in Eugene, Oregon, married with a 6-year old son.

Mayukh has been working in the Technology industry, specifically cyber security, Identity and Access Management, and data security for the past decade and a half. He has been part of multiple successful startups as an early employee before he ventured out on his own. He has also consulted for Fortune 500 companies such as TD Bank, RBC, ING, and IBM.

As CEO and Cofounder of Braze (formerly Appboy), Bill is humanizing connections between brands and customers at a global scale. By streamlining customers' past, present, and future data in an interactive feedback loop, Braze allows brands to take immediate actions on insights – creating personalized messaging experiences.

Justin Burns is a serial entrepreneur who with just a few hundred dollars and no college degree when he got started and launched his second SAAS platform Miestro- An online course platform that allows for course creators to get their course up fast.

Born and raised in Puerto Rico previous owner of SociallyRich took up to $50k MRR moved to Austin. SociallyRich got shut down by Facebook and built Trend.io within the same year.

Jaideep is the CEO of Legasis, a market leader in Legal & Compliance Solutions. He is an executive program graduate from Stanford University & repatriated to India in 2012. Jaideep has 21 years of experience & has held leadership positions with organizations like Thomson Reuters. He holds a patent in AI & is a hobby macro-economist.

Serial entrepreneur with a wide experience in IT domain from software development to services and software/solution sales. +15 years in service management. Excellent track record of building and leading winning teams. Personal goal: help business leaders to see Information Technology as an organic and critical part of their businesses, not just hard-to-understand-expensive-techie-driven-cost center.

We launched ipgeolocation.io in June 2018 and have 100 paid customers and 3000+ developers actively using us. We handle more than 100 million requests every month.

After seeing first-hand how bad most organizations are at taking their strategy from PowerPoint to reality, I wanted to see if we could build an affordable technology solution to solve the problem.

Jeanette Maister is Managing Director and Head of Americas at Oleeo. At Oleeo, Maister drives growth, influences the product and helps customers leverage technology to transform their recruiting efforts. Prior to Oleeo, Jeanette spent most of her career as a recruiting practitioner holding leadership roles at Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers, IBM, and Gartner. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis with an MBA in Management from Columbia Business School, Jeanette was recognized as a 2018 IT Women of the Year finalist. She also received the Stevie silver 2017 Female Executive of the Year and the 2017 SmartCEO Brava Award.

Dane is a PLA co-founder who brings a breadth of experience and vision to Performance Livestock Analytics. Dane currently owns a progressive agricultural enterprise that consists of row crops and livestock based in Northern Iowa. With the Agricultural experience, Dane brings visionary insights to PLA with his prior experience in precision ag software. Dane most recently leads Iteris as the Sales Director for the agricultural division of ClearAg. Prior to ClearAg, Dane led the business development efforts in the midwest as the Regional Sales Manager at The Climate Corporation, formerly WeatherBill, assisting in scaling the team and sales from a 27 person start up company to a 700 employee company that was acquired by Monsanto for 930 million. Dane has participated in many Agtech venues such as Agstar Technolodge, Global Ag Investment Conference, Ag Innovation Showcase, InfoAg, World Agritech Conference, Agri Innovation Forum.

Founder, CEO, Marketer, and Architect of Thapos - sports management platform. I have over 18 years of experience in IT industry as a technology startup founder, software architect, product manager, marketer, and software engineer. I have experienced in all aspects of software development life cycle. I have designed and developed marketing management applications, financial applications, and web-based consumer applications. As a leader or team member, I love to work with teams. I truly believe in teamwork. I am an extremely energetic and highly motivated individual with excellent analytical, organizational and adaptive skills with a passion, to get things done. I enjoy playing and watching sports, working with kids, history, internet, and some television. As an entrepreneur, my first startup was a failure, which only made me stronger. I learned a lot of valuable lessons in this failure. Thapos is my second startup which is going strong. My current team really functions like a team. At Thapos, we all are determined to make it happen and take it to the next level and I am loving every minute of this exciting journey.

Alexander is co-founder and CEO of Syncbnb. Since 1995 he has worked as a web designer, web developer, project manager and team leader, SEO/SEM specialist and social media manager before moving on to C level positions in large tech corporations in Greece. He recently left a Managing Partner position in the largest online services group in Greece to start Syncbnb with his co-founder Petros.

Brendan Ciecko is the founder and CEO of Cuseum, a platform that helps museums and cultural organizations engage their visitors, members, and patrons. Ciecko has been building technology since the age of 11 and has been recognized by Inc. Magazine as being one of America's top entrepreneurs under 30. Ciecko has been featured in The New York Times, WIRED, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and PC Magazine for his work in design, technology, and business. https://brendanciecko.com/about/

Forbes 30 Under 30 winner. Successful serial entrepreneur in B2B technology development and SaaS companies. Law degree from University of Heidelberg in Germany. Member of National Small Business Association's Leadership Council

Retail Guru that has helped many retailers achieve a 360 degree view of the Customer in an Omni Channel world. Specialist in leveraging data and analytics to increase profitable sales. Implement Strategies and Tactics to compete with Amazon and on-line market places.

Jesse is the founder of NeoReach. Jesse is a mentor to the Alchemist Accelerator, a Thiel Fellow, and a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford and USC. NeoReach has generated $10's of Millions in revenue from customers like Walmart, Amazon and NBC

Paul Lappas is the CEO and Co-Founder of intermix.io. He holds multiple patents for cloud computing and performance analytics. In 2007 he co-founded GoGrid, one of the early cloud computing companies, which he grew from to over $50M in ARR.

Went from identifying as a basketball player to graduating as a nuclear engineer. Worked in the nuclear industry, got an MBA, joined a fast-growing tech company and lived in 7 countries while doing so. I love art and experimenting with food, and founded Mela with two of my best friends.

Michael S. Malone was the world's first daily high-tech reporter, and he remains one of Silicon Valley's best-known journalists. He is the author or coauthor of nearly thirty books, including The Virtual Corporation with William Davidow.