SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

When Derek O'Carroll joined Brightpearl three years ago, he took on the biggest risk any CEO can take - a turnaround. Since taking the helm as CEO, Derek has led the retail operations platform from stagnant growth to more than $12 million in revenue, nearly 1,400 customers worldwide, and managing more than $3 billion in orders. Shortlisted for CEO of the Year at the Digital Masters Awards in 2018, the father-of-two is now recognized globally as a retail expert. In the 90s, Derek left his career in chemistry to found Ireland's first online advertising agency and he never looked back. After some painful lessons learned during a market crash that took his business from $9 million in revenue to $900K almost overnight, he moved on to leading Symantec as Senior VP of Norton in EMEA. At Symantec, Derek was responsible $1.7 billion of revenues and 200+ employees globally. There, he learned about value-based management from Jack Welch's protégé Steve Bennett. Derek has taken all of the leadership lessons and playbooks he's learned to date to take Brightpearl to an unprecedented growth rate and an increase in average deal size by 500%. His specialties include building exceptional teams and creating winning environments, simple messaging, zero ambiguity, and training for excellence.

Sales Coach for B2B Tech Startups, Author, Speaker, Podcaster and Ultra-Marathoner. First head of sales @ Blend. 20 years in Silicon Valley with three B2B startups – one unicorn, one exit, one still going.

Entrepreneur building Aikon Labs, the startup behind Ariv.ai and iEngage.ai

Trevor is the co-founder and CEO of Measured, an industry leader in cross-channel media incrementality measurement for portfolio investment decisions. Trevor has spent his 20-year career building and growing enterprise technology companies. He is a pioneer and expert in the cross-channel marketing measurement category, having spent the last 10 years working with advertisers to deploy and benefit from advanced cross-channel measurement technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies and emerging brands across retail, eCommerce, telco, finance, auto and CPG in North America, Europe and Australia. Trevor earned an MBA from the University of Southern California and holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Santa Clara University.

Jeffrey Harris is Founder and CEO of Springbig, a leading provider in cannabis CRM and loyalty marketing technology with over 25 million users across the United States and Canada. Jeffrey has over 15 years of marketing, sales management and client services experience in the incentive marketing and loyalty marketing fields.

Chris Hale is Founder and CEO of Kountable, a San Francisco-based technology company actively solving the world's distribution problem by building a trust network for global trade that integrates, digitzes and optimizes collaboration between qualified big and small players. Its cloud-based global trade platform delivers transparency, governance and efficiency in trade.

Christopher Tufford is the Founder & CEO of Green Apple Pay. He left college after two years to start his first business and has success in a variety of unrelated markets from telecom to iGaming including the largest amateur poker league in Canada, the World Poker Tour Amateur Poker League.

Harris Kenny is the Founder of Intro CRM, a simple CRM for self-employed and early stage founders. He has helped grow dozens of hardware, software, and service companies for over a decade. Harris also hosts the Pipeline Meeting and Hello Blink Show podcasts. He's on Twitter @harriskenny.

Tom Logan is the Co-Founder and CEO of NYC-based Cohley — the tech company that's changing the way brands generate photos, videos and product reviews. Tom leads with a "people first" mentality, continuously moving Cohley up the ranks of "Best Places to work in NYC." Under Tom's leadership, Cohley has achieved triple digit year-over-year growth every year since the company's inception in 2016, and Cohley now calls companies like Unilever, S.C. Johnson and CVS clients. Tom entered the tech world back in 2011 after fortuitously applying to a small startup called Wildfire Interactive — which was acquired by Google less than two years later.

Dru is the President of OMC, the company behind one of the leading SaaS+ search products in the market, Bonsai. Dru is classically trained in Business and Economics with a school-of-hard-knocks education in Software Development. Based in Austin, TX. Foodie and up at 4:30 everyday.