From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 6)

SM: What else has come out in your genre the last four years? JR: If you look at commercial open source, which is the category we put ourselves into, there are about 20 companies . Zembra had the same model as ours and was founded at the same time. It was sold to Yahoo for

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 5)

SM: Can you take us through the process of building your sales team? JR: People started calling from all over the world, so we built four different sales channels: an ecommerce engine, an inside sales team, a channel sales team and enterprise sales team.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 4)

SM: Who is your customer base? Do you mainly have small businesses? JR: This is a very interesting area to explore. In open source there is very little control over who your customers are. As a result, we have everything from big banks to the Men’s Warehouse.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 3)

SM: The situation you described is not a pretty one. Why did you do it? Did you have any idea how you were going to make money? JR: We just believed. It was pretty early on. We did not know how we would make money. We hoped to be able to create a commercial version,

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 2)

SM: During that timeframe, what did you think were the bright flashing lights of OpenSource? JR: It was all about hope and belief. That is why in the fall of 2003 I decided to go for it. I asked my wife for six months to chase this idea.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 1)

John Roberts is CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM. He established SugarCRM’s commercial open source business model. Today the Sugar community is one of the largest open source communities on the Web.

Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 7)

SM: Really strong people do not tolerate that kind of dynamic. JE: The way to lead innovation is to bring out the leadership in each individual.

Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 6)

SM: What knowledge and experience did you gain from your time at Packet Design? JE: For the first time I realized how hard it is to hire CEOs. One of the problems with an incubator is that if you try to turn the idea over to someone else and it was not their idea, they

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