SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Jake Diner is an innovation and technology expert with two decades of experience in product management. He graduated from MSU with a degree in computer science. After working for over a decade in corporate leadership roles, including positions at Belkin and Dell, Jake decided to use his experience to build start-ups with a focus on those serving the insurance industry. After exiting from his first InsureTech venture-backed startup he co-founded seven years ago, he currently serves as CEO of Elafris, a San Francisco-based company that has built artificial intelligence-powered chatbot technology designed to help insurers meet the engagement expectations of today's consumer.

Atul Poharkar is the Founder and CEO of Plobal.ai. In 2016, Atul realised that even though mobile apps were the default future, the technology was limited to just the bigger players. That's when Plobal was born. He and his team built a platform for developing mobile apps and setting up the mobile commerce success journey for businesses without compromising on any tech abilities. Today, Plobal powers mobile commerce for hundreds of fast growing Shopify and Shopify Plus stores and has partnered with some of the biggest tech companies, including Google (Instant Apps), to bring the most cutting edge tech to their businesses. The team is building towards putting m-commerce on autopilot viz. autonomous commerce. Atul's future plans include roaming around the globe, gaining new experiences while serving as a bartender at local watering holes.

Robert Frederick, founder and CEO of Sirqul, has been focused on connected communities of devices, people, and businesses since 1993. He was inspired by the boundless future potential of smart connected devices and leveraged this passion to attend MIT, to work on projects in the MIT Media Lab, and to join one of the first startups focused on standards that would later be called BlueTooth in the late nineties. The startup's licensed product, DeviceTalk.com, was a central server running Intelligent Agents that used event-based logic to complete actions on behalf of its users via simple commands and conditional triggers. Identity and Presence were important then and still tends to be important now. Amazon acquired the company in 1999, and Robert led the internal team, Amazon Anywhere, that focused on making it possible to interact with Amazon Anywhere, Anytime, on Any device. After becoming the technical co-founder of Amazon Web Services and setting the stage for Amazon to become profitable leveraging the Cloud, Rob started Sirqul to create an Intelligence of Things (IoT) ecosystem on top of the cloud that also works at the edge. Sirqul has numerous partners that span Retail, Smart Buildings, Autonomous Vehicles, and Robotics.

Dave is an entrepreneur specializing in high-growth tech businesses, and a video insight evangelist with global ambitions for growth and adventure. As CEO at Voxpopme, he has redefined the possibilities of video for market research and customer feedback. The solution Voxpopme has built provides an end-to-end software solution for video research, enabling researchers to capture video feedback at speed, analyze it at scale and share it with ease. With Voxpopme, video is now truly agile.

Max Kolysh is a serial entrepeneur and investor. After graduating early from MIT with a degree in Computer Science, Max started Zinc.io (YC W14), a 20 person startup in SF which now powers tens of thousands of ecommerce companies around the world.

An early fascination with Google Adwords and analytics at the age of 18, lead me to start Data Nerds in early 2014. We have dabbled in digital marketing and optimization in several domains albeit real estate had us hooked. Our first product was a Carfax for Homes which landed us in the prestigious Techstars Boulder 2017 program. Fast forward less than a year and we are now backed by Foundry Group and Techstars Ventures. We are primarily focused on bringing transparency, accuracy, and education to the vast and segmented real estate industry.

Lalit is an enterprise mobility veteran with 17 years of experience building over 150 products. He invented hybrid mobile programming and has a patent in visual merchandising using image recognition. His 6+ years of sales force automation experience with FMCG market leaders has resulted in Bizom being at the forefront of digital sales transformation in India, helping over 250 enterprises achieve data driven transformation via automation and analytics!

John Nardone is the CEO of Flashtalking. A first-generation ad tech pioneer, Nardone served as a founding board member of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). Throughout his career he earned recog­nition within the advertising community for his ground-breaking work at Pepsi, Modem Media and Marketing Management Analyt­ics (MMA), culminating in his receiving the Ad:Tech Industry Achievement Award in 2012.

Entrepreneurial leader and team motivator with the ability to proactively identify market opportunities and solve challenging business problems. Keen sense of time-to-market and the bottom-line. Passion for new product/service innovation, startups, helping entrepreneurs, driving business acceleration and business execution. Experienced in Business Development, Product Management, Marketing, and Business Mgt & Operations in ecommerce and Marketing Systems, Mobile, Print-on-Demand, IPTV, 3D Printing and Automotive Telematics.

Matthew Schiltz is an experienced senior executive with a proven track record in building successful, high growth technology and cloud companies ranging from private startups to public companies. Matthew is CEO at Conga, directing the company's growth strategy, which includes financing, driving global sales and expanding product offerings. Matthew's extensive executive management and leadership experience is driving strong company growth which has resulted in several Inc 500, Fast 50 and Top 100 Places to Work awards. Past CEO successes include Insightful Corporation, CourtLink, DocuSign, Tier 3 and Blue Box Group. Matthew has received several industry accolades in recognition of his past successes and is considered an expert on software, technology, and cloud business practices.