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Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 5)

Posted on Monday, May 20th

Sramana: The period over which you have built your company is also the same time as the emergence of SaaS. What was the hardest aspect of scaling on the customer side? Chris Cabrera: In the early years there was a lot of skepticism of SaaS. In the early days we were relegated to companies that

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Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 4)

Posted on Sunday, May 19th

Sramana: Did you build the product around the five companies who indicated they would purchase your solution? Chris Cabrera: We took all of that into consideration. Of the five companies that we showed to the VCs we ultimately ended up closing four of those companies. It worked out very well and that is what allowed

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Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 3)

Posted on Saturday, May 18th

Sramana: What was your observation of the market in 2005 that prompted you to found Xactly? Chris Cabrera: At Callidus we were very focused on the high end of the market. Our systems were very expensive. We had traditional enterprise software, and companies paid a lot of money to get installed. These deals could be

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Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 2)

Posted on Friday, May 17th

Sramana: Selling the first few instances of a new product is vastly different than building a sales organization that the market has validated and accepted. Could you talk about what is unique about the early sales process? You don’t have reference accounts, you are selling a new concept. What have you learned over the years?

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Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 1)

Posted on Thursday, May 16th

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Chris Cabrera is the founder and CEO of Xactly, a leading incentive compensation management software suite for companies of any size. He has more than two decades of successful senior management experience at both early-stage and public companies and has managed sales, marketing, operations and business

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Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 7)

Posted on Wednesday, May 15th

Sramana: Are your investors all Eugene based? Jake Weatherly: Most of them are; however, we do have an investor from the Los Angeles area, and one in far eastern Oregon. Sramana: What is the entrepreneurship community like in Eugene? Jake Weatherly: It is an area that is near and dear to my heart. This is

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Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 6)

Posted on Tuesday, May 14th

Sramana: I have been noticing a trend lately. Companies are building very sizable revenue with small teams. The ideal example of this is FineArtAmerica which, when I spoke with them, they were doing $5 million dollars a year with three people. He had all sorts of outsourcing. You have 16 employees and are approaching $5

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Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 5)

Posted on Monday, May 13th

Sramana: Your TAM is essentially tied to the number of transactions you can process. You really needed to get a handle on the volume of transactions going through your system. What did you define your TAM after this reality emerged? Jake Weatherly: We look at all of our segments somewhat uniquely. We also look at

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