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HOT TOPICS
- 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 6)
Sramana: What are some of the key strategic points today? What needs to be done for you to scale to a $500 million company? Chris Cabrera: We need continued solid execution with growth rates exceeding 30%. We are the only pure-play SaaS comp player as well as the experts in comp. We have terabytes of
Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 5)
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
Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 4)
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
Building a Pre-IPO SaaS Company: Chris Cabrera, CEO of Xactly (Part 3)
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
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