Helping SaaS Companies Grow Through Revenue Sharing: Avangate CEO Carl Theobald (Part 1)

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Carl Theobald is the CEO of Avangate, a e-commerce and partner management solutions provider for software-as-a-service companies. Theobald has held senior executive roles at both large enterprise and venture-backed software companies, including being a VP at Oracle, founder at RubiconSoft, and SVP at Serena Software. At Oracle, Theobald helped establish the CRM division, delivering sales, marketing and e-commerce products that generated in excess of tenfold revenue growth over two years. Most recently, as SVP of products and customer service, he launched the first SaaS-based solution at Serena Software, which was taken private by Silver Lake Partners for $1.2 billion.

Sramana: Carl, let’s start with your personal background. Where does the story begin?

Carl Theobald: I had two passions in life growing up. One was writing music and the other was writing software. I started doing both at 10 years old. I quickly discovered that I would not make a lot of money pursuing music, so I entered Princeton University to pursue an engineering degree. After that I went to Stanford and joined a PhD for engineering economic systems because I thought the idea of using quantitative methods to solve real-world problems was interesting. I was working at Oracle part-time while I was at Stanford and ended up enrolling full-time into Oracle. >>>

Harvard Business Review: Can Crowdfunding Solve the Startup Capital Gap?

Harvard Business Review has published Sramana Mitra’s piece, Can Crowdfunding Solve the Startup Capital Gap? You can read the entire article here.

182nd Roundtable Recording On July 18, 2013

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Catching Up On Readings: What’s Ahead for the Rest of 2013

As the second half of 2013 starts in earnest, here are some “tech-spectations” from Cnet to think about. For this week’s blog posts, click on the paragraph link. >>>

181st Roundtable Recording On July 11, 2013

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Harvard Business Review: How Startups Overcome The Capital Gap

Harvard Business Review recently published Sramana Mitra’s piece, How Startups Overcome the Capital Gap How Startups Overcome the Capital Gap. You can read the entire article here.

179th Roundtable Recording On June 20, 2013

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Trend Spotting: Commerce on Facebook

Social media’s impact on global ecommerce is being felt everywhere.  By promoting products via social media outlets, ecommerce companies have invited customers to spread interest and awareness of their brands through liking, reviewing and sharing products with their network of friends. Commerce on social media has become a hot trend for many ecommerce firms to jump on.

A company that has successfully exploited ecommerce on social media is Bigcommerce, co-founded by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper in 2009. They are present in over 65 countries, within 25 different industries, and have processed $1,657,523,898 in transactions for 35,387 of their store owners, generating annual revenues ranging from hundreds of dollars to tens of millions.

With Bigcommerce, anyone can create an online store, upload and manage his or her products, and market them anywhere on the web whether through social media, email, blogs or independent websites.
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