SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Pat Sullivan has been building software for over 30 years. Along the way, he was named one of the "80 Most Influential People in Sales and Marketing History" along side Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Jack Welch and Bill Gates by Sales and Marketing Management. He was also twice named Ernst & Young "Entrepreneur of the Year" for both ACT! and SalesLogix software.

Roger Wu is co-founder of Cooperatize, a marketplace connecting brands with bloggers. Prior, he had started e-commerce site, Giftfinder.com, and interactive video software, Klickable.tv. Roger was on the founding team of Bloomberg Law and started his career on Wall Street. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Management and Technology Program.

Adam Saven, Co-Founder & CEO of PeopleGrove Adam is the co-founder of PeopleGrove and has served as its Chief Executive Officer since inception. He previously worked at Google as a Business Analyst from 2013 to 2014, performing data analysis as well as informing strategic decisions for the Online Partnerships Group (OPG). Prior to Google, he served as an Investment Banking Analyst in the Global Technology Group of Credit Suisse.He holds a B.S. in Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The impetus for starting PeopleGrove came from a realization of how powerful mentors and the Penn alumni network had been in helping Adam to explore various career paths and access great opportunities. While at Google, Adam embarked on an after-work side project that would eventually become PeopleGrove. PeopleGrove has grown to reimagine mentoring for today's college students and professionals at over 120 colleges and organizations across the country.

Philip Soffer has been the CEO of test IO since May of 2016, splitting his time between Berlin and the SF Bay Area. Prior to test IO, he held senior leadership roles in product, development, and marketing at Plumtree Software, Lithium Technologies, and Piazza.

Dan Reich is the Co-Founder and CEO of Troops, a venture-backed technology company that is building artificial intelligence for work. Troops is working with hundreds of companies and has raised about $17 million in venture capital. He is also the Co-Founder and President of TULA, a health and beauty business that has created the world's first probiotic-based line of skincare products. He has been involved with companies that have raised over $100 million in venture capital and have exited for over $1 billion in mergers and acquisitions. Prior to Troops, Dan started a software company called Spinback which he sold to Buddy Media, and then to Salesforce.com for about $850mm. He has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a contributing writer for Forbes and has been named Silicon Alley Top 100 by Business Insider.

Ian has been involved in technology businesses and start-ups for over 22 years and has built businesses in Australia, Taiwan, Silicon Valley and the UK. Ian has grown Adthena since 2012 to its current position as the premier global provider of competitive intelligence. While Adthena itself has won many major industry awards, Ian's entrepreneurial determination has also been recognized with the Developing Entrepreneur Award at the WCIT Enterprise Awards – commonly regarded as the 'Oscars for technology entrepreneurs'.

Gabriele joined Doodle in 2016 to transform it into a SaaS business. After studying physics, he went into consulting, got an MBA at London Business School and joined Doodle's mother company Tamedia. Swiss and Italian, Gabriele is a polyglot and loves the Mediterranean, the Swiss Alps, seafood and Swiss cheese.

As Riddle's co-founder, I'm a Californian who fell in love with living abroad in Europe over a decade ago. Since then, I've helped a string of start-ups and European companies (gaming companies Kabam and Marvelous AQL, Monster, and restaurant finder app CityHawk). I wear many hats - our quiz maker makes it easy for brands like the BBC and the NFL to engage their audience and collect leads with their own Buzzfeed-style quizzes, polls, and more.

In 2010, Drew Sheahan started a GPS Fleet Tracking Business from his up-stairs bedroom that would eventually rank #126 on the 2014 INC500 List. He sold that company in 2016 to pursue solving the #1 issue he encountered while scaling a business that generates website leads. That business became BirdSeed.io

Alex Bates is an angel investor and a Member of Peter Diamandis's Abundance 360 Network. He has spent the last decade bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the forefront of the industrial market. From leading DARPA funded research in neural networks, to applying analytics for the world's largest data warehouses at Teradata, to creating Mtell, a machine learning company acquired by Aspentech (NASDAQ: AZPN), he believes the coming wave of human-centered Al has the potential to make us superhuman and create a world of abundance.

Matthew is a seasoned growth-stage technology investor and career VC, having originated, managed and completed dozens of transactions. As General Partner at Plaza Ventures, Matt specializes in deal flow, investment transaction processing, ecosystem development and investor relations. He sits on the board of numerous companies, as well as various accelerators and charities.

Software veteran Dave Keil brings a growth-oriented leadership approach to his job as CEO of QASymphony. For more than 25 years Dave has built a strong track record of business success. Prior to QASymphony, Dave was CEO of Digistrive, a provider of e-commerce solutions to large membership based organizations. He grew and eventually sold that business to a large private company. Before joining Digistrive, Dave was CEO of Integrated Broadband Services (IBBS), a software and services company. During his tenure, the company doubled in size, completed two strategic acquisitions and established a market leadership position in the "Tier Two" broadband space. Earlier in his career, Dave served as Chief Strategy Officer and later as Senior President and General Manager at ChoicePoint, a NYSE listed global information services provider (acquired by Lexis Nexis in 2008). Dave has also held senior executive roles at Novient, and Robinson Humphrey (now part of SunTrust). He received a MBA from The Wharton School and a BS in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Brown University. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and two kids.

LBA Ware™ CEO Lori Brewer is an accomplished entrepreneur and technology leader. Following the conclusion of her service in the U.S. Air Force, Brewer has dedicated her talents to improving the mortgage industry. She founded LBA Ware in 2008 to deliver business process optimization through LBA Ware's flagship products CompenSafe™ and LOS Talker™.

Payman Taei is an avid technologist who loves new trends and tries to keep up with the ever-evolving internet. Taei's background in Biology led him to truly believe in the art of evolution: everything changes in time and you either follow or create new trends or are left behind. Taei founded HindSite Interactive, a digital agency, in 2001 and out of that in 2014 incubated Visme, one of the leading presentation and infographic tools online. Visme empowers more than a million businesses, non-profits and individuals from over 90 countries, including NASA, IBM, and SONY, by improving the way ideas are visualized into engaging presentations, infographics and other forms of visual content.

Jeremy has spent the last 15 years in the tech-industry as a serial entrepreneur, startup adviser, and occasional investor. Jeremy has helped dozens of B2B companies drive adoption of digital commerce, and is still an active board member at a number of fintech companies. He started his career in technology as an engineer at nanotech startup Digital Instruments, which was acquired by Veeco (NASDAQ: VECO). Jeremy holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of California and a Masters in Business from the University of Massachusetts.

After working inside newspapers for 10+ years, Lloyd started OwnLocal to fix the business of news. With initial seed investment from Y Combinator, OwnLocal has grown to work with 276,000 SMBs through 3,500 newspaper partners all over the world. Today, OwnLocal is profitable and growing with 8-figure revenues.

James is the founder and CEO of Adzerk, an API company that powers native ads, promotions, and sponsored listings for companies like Ticketmaster, Wattpad, imgur, and many others. Prior to Adzerk, James co-founded TekPub which was acquired by PluralSight.

Web entrepreneur with an IT background working on his second startup.

Worked in Telecom for much of my carrier. Starting as EIR at IDT Telecom. Then worked as director of mobile apps for PCS wireless. It's there that I saw the market opportunity. I left PCS, sold my home and launched UpChannel.

Chad Rubin (Ecommerce Renegade) builds e-commerce businesses. Fresh out of college and Wall Street, he took his family vacuum business online and built his own direct to consumer e-commerce business called Crucial Vacuum. He grew it from 0 a $20 million dollar valuation in just 7 years. He happens to be a top 250 Amazon seller. He co-founded Skubana with DJ Kunovac and built one of e-commerce's hottest operational softwares.

For the first 18 years of my career, I built and scaled sales organizations at both Gartner and CEB. The corporate cultures instilled a sales rigor and discipline that has helped me to appreciate the complexities of sales management, operations, as well as the development of reps and their managers.

Serial Entrepreneur (1 Acquisition & 2 disastrous failures prior to this venture) and Online Advertising expert with more than 8 years of experience in advertising for retail brands and their retail locations.

Deb Noller is the dynamic CEO and co-founder of Switch Automation, a smart building software company specializing in building performance optimization. With 20+ years of experience in real estate, technology and sustainability, she is passionate about helping enterprises leverage next-generation facilities management technology to execute more efficient business operations.

Chris started Versium six years ago with the vision of helping marketers to utilize data and data technologies to improve their marketing and ROI. He lives and breathes technology innovation. Being involved in several early-stage technology ventures, his success spans enterprises in the Internet, mobile, and SaaS spaces.

Angam Parashar is a founder of ParallelDots. He is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. After his graduation and before starting ParallelDots, he worked as a consultant at Opera Solution, a niche big data consulting firm.

Lover of dogs, people, uncontrollable laughter, and of course water fountains

Nicole Verkindt is the Founder & CEO of Canadian technology company, OMX (theomx.com). Previously, she led a high tech manufacturing business selling to Governments around the world. Nicole is on the Board of the Canadian Crown Corporation, CCC (Canadian Commercial Corporation) that performs government to government contracts between Canada and other countries around the world. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Peter Munk School of Global Affairs, known for their Munk Debates. She is a commentator on CBC and columnist for Vanguard magazine focusing on technology and business news and a "Dragon" on CBC's Next Gen Dragon's Den, which is dedicated to early stage technology businesses. She was named Canada's national woman entrepreneur of the year in 2017. She joined Gimlet media's show "The Pitch" as the 4th investor for the 2018 season.

CEO & founder of Pingboard, which provides live org charts & planning software to thousands of companies. Prior to Pingboard, Bill was CTO & co-founder of Webmail, the largest B2B email provider before Gmail. After Webmail was acquired by Rackspace, Bill co-founded Capital Factory, which helps entrepreneurs in Austin build great companies

'm currently 25 years old and is the co-founder and CEO of two software startups. I started coding at the age of 13. Started my first software business at the age of 18. I founded a web called Cloudfoyo in 2015, which was a web development agency. In 2017, I started Engagespot as a side project which is currently one of the leading push notification platforms, that sends around 400M notifications a month.

Ofer is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led several companies in the areas of data communications, telecommunications, Internet, homeland security and medical devices. Ofer was founder & CEO of RIT Technologies (NASDAQ: RITT), a provider of sophisticated telecommunications and data communications systems to major world carriers. He began his career as an aerospace engineer in the Israeli Air Force and then built his own aerospace engineering consulting firm. As a hobby, he has also invented, developed and licensed toy concepts to companies such as Milton Bradley, Hasbro and Tomy. Ofer holds a Bachelor of Science (cum laude) in aerospace engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Nick Francis is Co-founder and CEO of Help Scout, where he is on a mission to make every customer service interaction a more human one. His two passions — technology and entrepreneurship — led him to start a web consultancy soon after college where he learned how to craft user experiences with his partners, Denny Swindle and Jared McDaniel. In 2010, the trio founded Help Scout and left their hometown of Nashville to join the TechStars accelerator program in Boston. That program, along with the Boston startup ecosystem, helped transform Help Scout into something real — a successful, remote company now serving more than 8,000 customer support teams around the globe. Nick lives and breathes product design, customer experience, and building a thoughtful, thriving company. He feels lucky to wake up every day and work alongside people who challenge him to grow and do great work.

Mike Land is the Founder and CEO of Rela (www.RelaHQ.com), a cloud based digital marketing platform for real estate agents and brokers. Rela allows real estate professional to create amazing digital experiences that promote their listings, enhance their online presence, and drive new business. Prior to Rela, Mike was the founder and President of a digital marketing and software development agency in Newport Beach, CA.

CEO – Luther Birdzell Luther is an entrepreneur, data scientist and engineer passionate about energy efficiency, AI and self-service machine learning. From boardrooms, to oilfields, to data centers, Luther has been building tools that transform data from a cost to an asset for over 20 years. He founded OAG Analytics in 2013 to build an AI and self-service machine learning platform for the oil & gas industry.

At 23 Spencer accepted his first Sales Director role and a year later was promoted to VP of sales for an e-commerce doing $5M+ in revenue. Spencer went on to begin is own company then found himself working at PandaDoc, a hot Silicon Valley startup before founding Cliently.

I'm a founder and CEO of Qlicket. We help enterprises and midsize businesses reduce turnover by giving frontline employees a voice. Before Qlicket, I worked at Blackstone in New York, and as a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners. I graduated from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks: powering more than 10 trillion requests per month, nearly 10% of all Internet requests, for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He's also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.

Mr. Claudio Erba is the Founder of Docebo S.p.A and has been its Chief Executive Officer since March 2005. He serves as a Director at Docebo S.p.A. Mr. Erba served as a Board Vice President of RYSTO srl from July 2013 to December 2014. He served as Project leader of MHP Srl from October 1999 to June 2001 and Product Manager of Selpress from 1996 to 1997. Mr. Erba is also engages in diving into the topics of AI, learning automation, and the future of online learning at DoceboInspire. Mr. Erba lectured at the University of Florence, before founding Docebo S.p.A in Milan in 2005. He regularly appears on thought leadership and "movers and shakers" lists in the learning technology industry. Mr. Erba was a Guest Lecturer - Content Management System at University of Florence from March 2001 to July 2005. He studied Laurea in Economy and Marketing at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore from 1995 to 2001.

Case is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of PRSUIT - a top daily email focused exclusively on self development content. Named a top email newsletter by Entrepreneur Mag and features in Inc, Forbes, Chicago Tribune and more. 152K daily email subscribers and growing. Case is also the host of the New Mindset, Who Dis podcast, an iTunes top 50 podcast focused on real and no BS self development content.

Dan is president and co-CEO of AppDirect, the only end-to-end cloud commerce platform for succeeding in the digital economy, which he co-founded in 2009 with Nicolas Desmarais. He and his co-founder dreamed to someday build a business worthy of the Inc. 500 list. Since starting his entrepreneurial journey, Dan and his co-founder officially launched their company in 2011, raised over $245 million in venture financing and reached a company valuation of more than $1B. The AppDirect ecosystem now powers millions of cloud subscriptions worldwide and connects channels, developers and customers to simplify the digital supply chain by enabling the onboarding and sale of products with third-party services, for any channel, on any device, with support.

David Canek is the founder and CEO of Memsource, a software company providing cloud-based translation technology headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic. David, a graduate in Translation and Comparative Studies, received his education at Charles University in Prague, Humboldt University in Berlin as well as University of Vienna.

Geoff Roberts is Co-founder of Outseta, a software platform that gives SaaS companies all the tools they need to launch and scale a subscription business.

Elizabeth specializes in strategy, market and product development for media companies and brands navigating a changing media landscape. As head of revenue for LAKANA she oversees platform strategy, business development and go to market for a leading content management platform powering 150 + million unique users a month across 60 % of local markets. Her firm The Osder Group has worked with brands including AOL, Univision, Associated Press, Kimpton Hotels, Ogilvy Mather and Group M on critical strategies for related to digital transformation.

David Naffziger is CEO and co-founder of BrandVerity, a provider of enterprise technology solutions that combat online trademark abuse and help advertisers ensure compliant marketing programs. BrandVerity's services enable clients to identify abuse and efficiently take action to resolve the issues discovered. David received his BS from MIT.

Kirk is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of Wave, which he has led to nearly 3.5 million small businesses registered, with $100 million in funding raised from investors around the world. Kirk believes in giving back to the tech community, as a mentor and angel investor.

Conor Lee is the founder and CEO of HipLead. The company helps leading B2B companies scale their outbound sales with high quality lead generation outbound campaigns. Before founding HipLead, Conor founded several other companies including TellFi which was in the Y Combinator, Winter 2011 batch. Prior to that, he worked as a lobbyist in statewide political campaigns.

Patrick is a high school drop out turned serial entrepreneur. He's started 8 companies and has been the CEO of a public one. He's sold several million with video online but was frustrated with the existing video platforms; so he founded Vidaytics.com. Which is the highest converting video platform for online marketers. He also wakes up to Eye of the Tiger everyday. ;)

Vlad is the CEO of Webflow, which he co-founded with his brother and a close friend. While studying 3D animation (with dreams of working for Pixar) in art school, he fell in love with the power of programming. He lives near San Francisco with his wife and two daughters.

Capitalistbook.com: My new SaaS book on buying and selling companies, locking up distribution channels, launching with $5k side hustle

Founder and CEO of Slidebean. TEDx Speaker. Graphic designer transformed into growth hacker. Frequent flyer miles hoarder.

Capitalistbook.com: My new SaaS book on buying and selling companies, locking up distribution channels, launching with $5k side hustle