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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 2)
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?
Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 1)
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
Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 7)
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
Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 6)
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
Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 5)
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
Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 4)
Sramana: What was the reason you were making pitches? Were you trying to raise capital? Jake Weatherly: We were pitching for practice in the beginning, but it was warming up to raise capital. In our first round we raised just over 1 million dollars and just over 1.5 million dollars in the second round. Both
Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 3)
Sramana: When you set out to deliver an eligibility verification service and technology, did you have specific questions that you wanted to frame the capability around? Jake Weatherly: One of the things that we uncovered in the early stages in terms of personally identifiable information, where security is a huge concern, is the need to
Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 2)
Sramana: What years were you at WebEx? Jake Weatherly: I was there from 2005 to 2006. I was there when the company was preparing for an acquisition. It was a fantastic experience and I was fortunate enough to be there during the acquisition. I stayed there for a quarter after the acquisition before I was
