SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Sati is a seasoned entrepreneur who loves building product, growing people and delivering customer value. He has both enterprise and start-up experience that enables him to transform an idea into a scalable company. He founded Zenkraft (the leading shipping platform for Salesforce), Eversauce (CRM for PR industry) and most recently OneMob, which has earned the support of Salesforce Ventures and was awarded Gartner Cool Vendor and Aragon Hot Vendor. OneMob makes video recording, sending and tracking easy for any professional, with powerful integrations into platforms like Salesforce, Cisco Spark, LinkedIn and more. Before starting OneMob, Sati spent 8 years at salesforce.com, where he built and grew the AppExchange from an idea to 2000 apps.

Designer and entrepreneur who loves solving problems using technology.

Jake Atwood is the Founder & CEO of BuzzBuilder. He's also an author and keynote speaker who is focused on helping companies discover new ways to attract customers and grow their business. He enjoys disrupting the status quo and his ebooks and blogs have been read by more than 500,000 people worldwide.

Joshua Tillman began building DialSource in 2005, while studying at the University of California, Davis, to seal the gap between business and consumers through analytics and automation. The engineering firm has since changed the way modern enterprises communicate, earning Product of the Year honors in 2016 and 2017. Tillman received the Sacramento Business Journal '40 Under 40' award in 2016.

Murry founded Metrilo in 2014 to help eCommerce store owners grow their businesses. Other than spending lots of time with his customers and his team, he love to do trail running in the beautiful Vitosha mountain.

I'm the CEO of Apptimize! We're probably installed on your phone right now because we work with top 10 apps in every category in 100+ countries. Prior to co-founding Apptimize, I led the Fixed Income Quantitative Strategies team at GETCO after studying Math with CS at MIT.

Mark Grether is CEO of Sizmek. He focuses on guiding the company, and accelerating the growth of the business. Before Sizmek, Mark was cofounder and global COO of Xaxis. Under his leadership, Xaxis grew into the world's largest programmatic media company, with over $1 billion in revenue in five years.

Eric Frankel is an innovative business leader with a proven track record in both traditional media and new-and-emerging technologies. He is the CEO and founder of AdGreetz, the industry's leading SaaS video personalization platform that is disrupting the $560b advertising marketplace by empowering brands worldwide to build stronger relationships with customers and exponentially increase engagement, activation and revenue by deploying billions of never-before-available, hyper-relevant, one-to-one, personalized video and display ads and messages, utilizing brand, social, third-party, geo/browser, publisher and user-generated data, delivered on the Internet and mobile via 18 channels. Prior to AdGreetz, spent 20-plus years at Warner Bros., most recently serving as President of Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution (2000-2008). There he created new strategic architecture in the broadcast, cable and pay-TV landscapes, as well as advancements in new technologies including: VOD, HD and the internet. Frankel made numerous record-breaking sales and ground-breaking deals at WB.

CEO & Co-Founder of CoreMedia. Recipient of the German Fairness Prize 2009. Co-Editor of eEnterprise 2.0 - The Art of Letting Go. Married, father of 4

Collin Holmes, founder and CEO, started chatmeter in August, 2009. Prior to chatmeter, Mr. Holmes was VP of Product Management and Marketing at V-Enable (now xAD). His extensive experience in the local search industry, both online and mobile, provides a solid foundation for the direction of the company. He has worked in leadership roles at several other startup companies and held other notable positions in product and marketing roles at Akamai Technologies and AT&T Wireless. He earned his MBA from San Diego State University and a BA from UC Riverside.

I'm CEO of SocialRep, providing social sales enablement to global brands since 2008. I ran a digital marketing agency in SF during the dotcom boom, then ran the CMO Council. I’ve been a columnist for BusinessWeek and guest lecturer at Thunderbird. I’m a coach for the California champion Drake Mountain Biking Team.

As CEO of LogicBay, John works with leading companies to develop and implement strategies for scaling indirect sales channels using a combination of services and technology that LogicBay offers. He is also the co-founder of VetToCEO, a non-profit focused on helping veterans transition into being entrepreneurs.

Michael Johnston is founder of Notablist.com, a competitive intelligence platform for email marketers. Prior to Notablist, Michael was VP of Technology at Critical Mention, where he led development of the firm's broadcast monitoring platform. Prior to his involvement with startups, Michael spent a decade in the Wall Street trenches.

Dr. Foroutan is a parallel entrepreneur and philanthropist with over 30 years of experience in Information Technology, Software Design and Entertainment industries. He is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Contest Factory, Classitech, ZipTech Media, Virtual NGO and Invitation Records. He holds multiple US patents on Online Contest Systems.

Matt Benati is CEO and Co-founder of LeadGnome, the market-leading Reply Email Mining web service that generates account-specific contacts, enhances existing leads, and identifies sales trigger events. Matt believes sales and marketing alignment, transparency, and communication optimize revenue generation, and he champions this philosophy in his teams and writings.

Adam is the CEO/founder of Arjuna Solutions, an artificial intelligence company. He invented and patented numerous AI technologies used today. At Arjuna, Adam is productizing specific applications of AI, starting with pricing. Adam is also a professor of Business Analytics at Johns Hopkins University and speaker on AI/predictive analytics for businesses.

Mike is the founder, Chief Enthusiasm Officer and inventor of the patented FISION digital asset management/ sales enablement platform. He attributes his experience serving as a US Navy Submariner and US Navy diver as the foundation to his success as a corporate executive and entrepreneur.

Co-Founder and CEO of elastic.io

I am an entrepreneur coming from the design and advertising background. I've build Sitecake, a WordPress for static websites. Blockchain enthusiast.

Co-founder and CEO of Vero. We help companies collect and organise data so they can create better customer experiences and happier customers through email. We're five years old and help hundreds of customers send 100s of millions of emails every month.

Pini Yakuel is founder and CEO of Optimove, provider of the science-first Relationship Marketing Hub. Pini's extensive experience in analytics-driven customer marketing, business consulting and sales, along with his innovative approaches to entrepreneurship, business-building and marketing, have earned him recognition as a thought leader.

I've started as telecommunication engineer and switched to analytics quite fast. We were analyzing mobile network throughput, daily load, and other technical parameters. In 2007 I've started Fidelity Media as the advertising network. My team was busy with websites representation and ad operations mostly so when RTB appeared that was quite logical that we've continued as Supply Side Platform (SSP).

Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer is the Co-founder and CEO of AirPR, a technology solution to measure the impact of PR. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Shasta Ventures focused on consumer internet and the social graph. Prior to joining Shasta, Sharam was a Senior Associate at Sierra Ventures focused on consumer internet, enterprise software (cloud computing / virtualization), and mobile. He served on the Board at Makara (sold to RedHat) and TouchCommerce (sold to Nuance). Sharam began his career as a technologist at Appian, a BPM software startup where he managed the first enterprise-wide tracking system for the Department of Homeland Security. Sharam has lectured at universities, events and conferences, and judged business plan competitions at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Syracuse. He is also an advisor and mentor to eLab (Princeton University's Accelerator), Dorm Room Fund (First Round Capital's Accelerator), and Acceleprise (Enterprise Technology Accelerator). Sharam graduated with honors with a BS in Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He played NCAA D 1 ice hockey and is fluent in Farsi. Follow him on twitter @sharamfm.

Santi is a General Partner at Emergence Capital. Prior to joining Emergence, Santi founded, AXG Tecnonexo, a SaaS e-learning company in Latin America. He expanded the company to 150+ employees with operations across Latin America and the US. Santi is also a founding board member of Puente Labs, an organization that finds and selects the best founders of high potential growth companies from Latin America and helps them scale their businesses globally. Santi currently serves on the Boards of Civitas Learning, CrunchBase, High Alpha, Quasar, Restorando, Tophat, Xapo and Zoom. Santi received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in Economics from St. Andrew's University in Argentina. He is Kauffman Fellow and an Endeavor Entrepreneur. Outside of work Santi is passionate about traveling internationally. He spent 6 months backpacking around the world and continues to work on a personal goal of visiting at least 50% of the world countries. He is an avid opera and classical music follower and, like almost every Argentine, he is passionate about soccer.

David brings a successful track record of executive leadership at growing both private and public venture-backed companies and has been a pioneer in online marketing since 1997. Before TruSignal, David joined eBureau in December 2007, spearheading strategic business and product development efforts. In his previous role as general manager and SVP, marketing analytics at Adteractive, David managed a team of 45 people, spanning all of Adteractive's business units. Under his leadership, Adteractive became one of the fastest growing private companies in America and a leader in online lead generation. Prior to Adteractive, David held executive roles at Drugstore.com and NextCard, Inc, where he was responsible for product management and customer acquisition. David began his career as a software engineer at Decision Systems, a research and development firm focused on voice telephony solutions for the health care industry. David earned a Bachelor of Science in symbolic systems from Stanford University in 1990 and a Master of Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Eric is the CEO and co-founder of TripleLift, the leading programmatic native ad platform. Previously, Eric was a leader at AppNexus and an attorney at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. Eric received bachelors and masters degrees in computer science from MIT and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

Scott brings over 20 years of deep product management, engineering, and SaaS expertise to his role as a partner on Norwest enterprise team. Scott most recently served as Senior Vice President of Product Management for Salesforce Service Cloud. While at Salesforce, he also served as Head of Engineering, Product, UX, and Documentation for Desk.com.

Mike Dougherty is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Jelli, the technology platform for the $40 billion global audio advertising market. He has 20 years of experience with online and mobile services and corporate development. Under his leadership, Jelli has developed a cloud platform that transforms audio advertising, enabling advertisers and publishers to buy and sell audio advertising programmatically through a suite of demand-side and supply-side services. Jelli's platform is used by some of the largest broadcasters and advertisers in the audio marketplace, reaching hundreds of millions of people monthly and serving billions of audio ads. Prior to Jelli, Dougherty was Vice President, Business Development at Tellme, a leader in speech recognition applications (acquired by Microsoft), and Senior Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at Loudeye, an early leader in online & mobile music web services (acquired by Nokia).

As founder / partner of Screen, David has been closely involved in the development and innovation regarding the latest technologies for online marketing and advertising.

Prior to joining Talend as CEO, Mike was the CEO of Rapid7, a security software startup that provides one of the leading security assessment platforms. Mike joined Rapid7 in 2008 and grew the company by 10x in the next 4.5 years. Rapid7 was consistently one of the fastest growing companies in Boston, and was recognized as the Best Place to Work by the Boston Business Journal. Prior to Rapid7, Mike was General Manager of Microsoft's SQL Server Marketing team. During Mike's tenure the SQL business grew from $1.5B to $2.5B, and was the fastest growing of Microsoft’s largest businesses. Prior to re-joining Microsoft in September 2003, Mike was General Manager of Polycom's Austin division, a $190mm videoconferencing equipment business. Prior to Polycom, Mike co-founded and was Chief Operating Officer of Paramark, a marketing analytics startup. Prior to co-founding Paramark, Mike spent six years at Microsoft in an expanding range of roles including product marketing, product strategy, and product management. Mike joined Microsoft as a member of the MSN team, and became an early evangelist of the internet and MSN's first internet marketing manager. He spent the last two years as Group Program Manager of Exchange Server, driving Microsoft's email strategy, product definition, and product execution for this $700mm business. During Mike's tenure, Microsoft category market share grew from 40% to over 60%. Mike began his career at Sun Microsystems, working as an engineer on Sun's SPARC workstations. He led the design of an integrated I/O chip, one of two chips that were used across Sun's low-end and midrange systems. Mike holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Brown University (magna cum laude), a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar.

Billy is responsible for the strategy, growth, and day-to-day operations of DataStax. He has 20 years of experience in the database industry in roles ranging from DBA to senior executive. Prior to DataStax, Billy spent 6 years at Quest Software, a provider of systems management software, where his most recent role was VP and GM of the database business unit. Under his leadership, the industry-leading Quest database business grew from supporting traditional relational databases to a portfolio that now includes tools for cloud, NoSQL, columnar, and Hadoop databases, as well as business intelligence offerings. Prior to Quest, Billy led product teams for Embarcadero Technologies' database productivity solutions. He serves as a director of Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA). Billy holds a bachelor of science in computer science from the University of Louisville.

Rob Nelson is the Founder, and CEO of Grow (grow.com), a cloud-based analytics software company for small-to-medium size businesses. Grow helps companies accelerate their growth by accessing all their data and measuring their business results in real-time. Rob is an entrepreneur at heart and a technology enthusiast. Rob's previous company Logica was acquired by AFS in 2012. Rob holds a BS in Business Management from Utah Valley University. He is married with 5 kids and lives in Orem, Utah.

Raj Co-Founded Localytics in 2009, and as CEO until 2017 created the leading mobile engagement platform that is used by many of the world's top brands. Prior to Localytics, Raj spent 12 years building a variety of technology companies. He was a management consultant focused on mobile with Bain & Company and Adventis. At Adventis, Raj worked alongside Steve Jobs at Apple to develop the business framework for the iPhone and led the formation of the multi-billion dollar Disney Mobile venture in Japan. Previously, Raj held sales and marketing leadership positions at Proco Machinery and Requisite Technology. Raj completed his MBA with Honors from the Ivey School of Business and London Business School.

As the co-founder & CEO of InfoScout, Jared leads a start-up that is fundamentally changing the way brands understand and engage consumers in the 21st century. Previously, Jared led research, product & services for Retail Solutions where he shaped how 500+ CPG companies leverage POS data to improve sales and execution at retail. During his tenure, the company was recognized by AMR. Jared’s storied past includes a few hacks at MIT, co-founding the Pat Tillman Foundation, throwing the javelin & playing Australian Rules Football.

ALLEN GANNETT is the founder and CEO of TrackMaven, a marketing analytics platform whose clients have included Microsoft, Marriott, Saks Fifth Avenue, and GE. He has an upcoming book The Creative Curve, on how anyone can achieve moments of creative genius, coming out June 12, 2018 from Penguin Random House.

Software engineer, VC Associate at OpenView Venture Partners, Director Sales & Marketing at InfiniDB, Co-founder & CEO at MarketMuse

Stefan is the only known startup founder to have been successfully sued by David Hasselhoff. His current company pr.co automates and fixes PR for global brands and their agencies. Currently serving 280 companies with content management tools and research automation across geographies, media channels, and company functions.

Patrick Campbell is the CEO of ProfitWell, the software for helping subscription companies with their monetization and retention strategies. ProfitWell also provides free, absolutely accurate subscription financial metrics for over eight thousand companies. Prior to Price Intelligently Patrick lead Strategic Initiatives for Boston based Gemvara and was an Economist at Google and the US Intelligence community.

Mr. Price is Senior Vice President of Zendesk's Product Portfolio. Prior to this role he served as Senior Vice President of Marketing and as Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa. Before joining Zendesk, he served as the Chief Marketing Officer of Troux Technologies, Inc.

As an early entrepreneur, Bruce founded his first business at age 16. He was a leader in the consumer practice at Boston Consulting Group and then built Jetstar into the largest low cost airline in Asia with 7,000+ employees. After Jetstar, Bruce revisited his roots and created another world-class company, ROKT. He expanded ROKT from a handful of employees working in Sydney in 2012 to a global team of more than 100 across four continents. His global experience, entrepreneurial spirit, vision for growth, and passion for business exemplify his high standards as a CEO, as well as his determination to build innovative companies.

Nanxi, named Forbes 30 Under 30, is founder and CEO of Enplug. She is also founder of Nanoly Bioscience, which develops polymers that eliminate refrigeration for vaccines. A UC Berkeley alum, Nanxi received an EMMY for producing the Amazon TV show, The Bay.

Formerly CEO & Co-founder of Geekatoo, scaled from idea to 7000 providers nationwide, sold for $20M in 2016. Now CEO & Co-Founder of Bestfoodtrucks.com. Also a musician who plays live EDM, @cinematronica on Instagram.

Jobscience is the #1 provider of Staffing and Recruiting Software on the Salesforce platform, with more customers, awards, deployments, users and development investment. We invented recruitment on the Force.com platform so that recruiters could be more successful.

Mike Lapchick co-founded The Chicago Catalog Group in 1996 which was acquired by Lake Capital/ Haggin Marketing (now Epsilon) in 2006. Encumbered by the daily expense of manually facilitating the exchange of product information between their retail and brand clients, Mike saw an opportunity to build an exchange platform that automated the process. He launched Shotfarm's Product Content Network in 2010 which enables rapid retail channel and product assortment expansion for more than 12,000 Brands and Retailers today.

Marc Smookler has founded 6 companies 2 of which have been acquired and 3 of which are market leaders in their respective spaces the leading brick-and-mortar retail analytics company (IdealSpot.com), a leading online retailer (SakeSocial.com), and a cutting-edge marketing services platform (Written.com). Marc's companies have generated over $300M in lifetime revenues and sold over 150,000 products worldwide. His current focus, IdealSpot, matches brick-and-mortar businesses to their ideal locations by mapping local demand for their product or service. Marc is also a partner/mentor for Austin tech incubator/fund(s) Capital Factory and Techstars, and invests and serves as a board member/advisor for a number of companies in the B2SMB/B2C spaces.

Roz Lemieux is the Director of Blackbaud Labs. Blackbaud (BLKB) is the world's leading software company powering social good. Over 18+ years in campaign tech, Roz has served as the CEO of Attentive.ly (now a Blackbaud company), founding partner at Fission Strategy, and Executive Director of the New Organizing Institute (NOI).

Greg Tanaka is CEO and Founder of Percolata. Percolata helps retailers optimize their retail sales teams giving retailers up to a 30% sales uplift using the same labor budget. They do this by using sensors data to schedule the right number and composition of salespeople to handle the forecasted shopper profiles using proprietary deep learning technology. Percolata has closed their Series A in 2017 and is funded by Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and others. They have had contracts with over 40 different retail brands in the United States, Europe and Asia. The company is based in Palo Alto with a R&D office in Shenzhen, China. Greg is also on the Palo Alto City Council. Previously, he served on the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission and the Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission, and he started the imaging group and held other senior business roles at Rambus, a leader in Intellectual Property. Greg has also played key roles at two other venture backed startups and at Synopsys, a $5B public software company, where he sold and marketed multi-million dollar solutions. He is a Caltech and UC Berkeley alumni.