Trailblazing Entrepreneurs to Know

TRAILBLAZING ENTREPRENEURS TO KNOW How they Scaled their Businesses to Success in the Salesforce Ecosystem

Behind every successful On the following pages you’ll examine the company is a story — a road winding roads that led these entrepreneurs less traveled that few from an inkling of an idea to a full-fledged individuals embarked on. business in the Salesforce ecosystem. Read on to learn how it all began, their learnings from the journey, and how they But no matter how many ups and downs were able to scale successfully. These are 10 experienced along the way, successful entrepreneurs in the Salesforce ecosystem individuals persisted. Who are these that you need to know. individuals who pushed forward in the face of adversity? Who found the winning formula to grow their company into what it is today? They are trailblazing entrepreneurs. 2

Trailblazing Entrepreneurs to Know Jennifer Mercer Jerry Huskins Manoj Ganapathy CEO & Co-Founder, Metazoa CEO & Co-Founder, Fonteva Founder & CEO, SalesTrip David Schmaier Kraig Swensrud Jaswinder Chadha CEO of Industries, Salesforce & Sean Whiteley President & CEO, Axtria Co-Founders, Qualified Melanie Fellay Max Rudman Sean Hoban CEO & Co-Founder, Spekit CEO, Prodly CEO & Co-Founder, Kimble 3

Jennifer Mercer CEO & Co-Founder, Metazoa Current venture: Metazoa Industry focus: Healthcare & Life Sciences, Government, Financial Services Stage/funding: Angel investment/Pre-seed Previous ventures: DreamFactory Software 70% of our leadership team About Metazoa Metazoa’s product, Snapshot, is an end- is women and multicultural. to-end solution for org management. It provides powerful tools that help I know by experience that Salesforce administrators manage the it drives innovation and change and release process, visualize and reduce complexity, improve security and creativity and commitment compliance, and lower the total cost of org ownership. from your staff. 4

The Aha Moment The Secret to Scaling Back in 2003, Jennifer Mercer and her co-founder, Bill How does a 10-person company sell to the largest customers Appleton, were early adopters of the Salesforce Platform. in government, healthcare, financial services, and more? During this time, they built their first company, DreamFactory, Jennifer shares that “Having the reputation of Salesforce where they launched one of the very first applications on already sets us way ahead.” Being a Salesforce partner has AppExchange. They went on to publish dozens of apps on allowed Metazoa to gain trust and access to the Salesforce AppExchange, and one that became increasingly popular was a ecosystem — allowing it to sell like a 100-person company. change and release management app called Snapshot. Funny In addition to being vetted, Metazoa manages its customers enough, this app was originally built for Jennifer and Bill to efficiently by leveraging Salesforce’s infrastructure. What would use for themselves. As early adopters and developers on the originally require a one server per customer setup, resulting Salesforce Platform, they needed a solution to help with release in high costs and many hours, Metazoa can instead leverage management and continuous integration. It wasn’t until 2017, Salesforce-managed packages and license managers to do the when they sold DreamFactory, that they decided to completely same job. In Metazoa’s case, leveraging the Salesforce Platform rewrite Snapshot. allowed it to free up developers and dollars so they can spend their time on their solution. After numerous conversations with Salesforce admin contacts they had had for over a decade, Jennifer and Bill realized that Learning From the Journey there was something missing — org management. What do As a veteran Salesforce partner, Jennifer shares her experience you need to get your org ready for release management? What on growing a business: “You don’t need to go out and raise are you releasing? Are you pushing bad metadata into more round after round of funding. There’s nothing wrong with that. bad metadata? With rapid innovation and constant growth, But you don’t have to. Being a part of the Salesforce ecosystem Salesforce orgs become more and more complex every day. allows you to be a startup and sell big and grow big and scale. Thus, the idea was born to make it very easy for Salesforce And we’ve seen it over and over again.” admins and developers to manage, maintain, and optimize their orgs. 5

Jerry Huskins CEO & Co-Founder, Fonteva Current venture: Fonteva Industry focus: Financial Services, Nonprofit, Education, Public sector Stage/funding: Growth company Previous ventures: Astada, GrowthCircle, NetEffect As an entrepreneur, it’s really About Fonteva Fonteva is an integrated platform important to think about not focused on membership and event software. It delivers complete just how fast I’m going to association management solutions, grow my revenue, but what from implementation and data migration to customization do I have to invest to get and training. that revenue? 6

The Aha Moment Learning From the Journey Jerry Huskins’s aha moment dates to 2008 during the financial Jerry had never developed or sold software before he began depression while he was living in San Francisco. He had been Fonteva, but that didn’t stop him from founding a multimillion working with the first salesperson hired at Salesforce.org and, dollar business. Personal fulfillment and motivation are what as a result, was exposed to the nonprofit world. Jerry shares, drove him to success. “Don’t do it unless you really feel like you “With that early window into how nonprofits used the Salesforce love it and you’ve got a passion for it,” says Jerry. He believes Platform, I saw deals where membership management was that it’s important to love what you do every day. If you have an really the requirement.” He then realized that there was an entire exit plan, you’ll constantly be thinking of your way out instead of category of software that had grown up over 30 years on client- what truly matters. server networks and mainframe computers that no one had built in the public cloud. As you can imagine, this realization led to an idea, and the idea turned into an opportunity. Not long after, Jerry took a giant leap to found the first membership product built 100% natively on Salesforce. The Secret to Scaling When it comes to growing a business, Jerry believes that capital efficiency is key. He has been able to make his money go further by investing in the right places and focusing efforts where it matters most. Instead of building its own infrastructure, Fonteva leveraged Salesforce technology so that it could focus on its customers. Jerry shares that “With the Salesforce infrastructure, we have invested significantly less in this business than we would have had we built it on .NET or built a stand-alone Java application on AWS.” 7

Manoj Ganapathy Founder & CEO, SalesTrip Current venture: SalesTrip Industry focus: High Tech, Professional Services Stage/funding: Seed funding Previous ventures: Invoice IT (now Salesforce Billing) Always know where you About SalesTrip SalesTrip is a travel-booking, ticketing, want to be in two, five, and expense management system built natively on Salesforce, changing the and 10 years, then work way organizations manage, govern, and backward from there in justify corporate travel and expenses. It offers employees a fast and intuitive order to go forward. way to book trips and submit claims in a single place, dynamically driven by company CRM data and recorded against the activity’s forecast value. 8

The Aha Moment SalesTrip’s listing on the AppExchange homepage, and speak at In a past role, Manoj Ganapathy used to manage a large team a number of Salesforce events, including the Partner Keynote at that traveled often. He could never attribute the travel back to Dreamforce 2019. a particular customer, sales opportunity, or even his company’s revenue. Manoj recalls, “Some months we spent $100,000 on Learning From the Journey travel and expenses, and some months we spent $150,000. What helped Manoj during his journey was deciding what Was it because we were going to have an increase in sales, he needed to do now to achieve goals further down the road. or just that the flight costs were more expensive?” Out of the He also learned to always say “yes” first to solving problems frustration of not being able to measure the ROI on travel and and accepting new opportunities, and then learning how to expense, Manoj decided to create a solution that he could use deliver afterword. New challenges and experiences are what himself, and that’s how he started SalesTrip. enable individuals to grow. For example, Manoj recalls that at the beginning of his journey with SalesTrip, he wasn’t a travel The Secret to Scaling industry expert. However, it didn’t hold him back from building Manoj shares, “Building SalesTrip on the Salesforce Platform his business and learning along the way. In fact, he leveraged has given us an enormous boost.” He credits the immediate his beginner’s mindset to think outside the box and bring new access to a range of enterprise-ready technologies and the ideas to market. support of the AppExchange ecosystem to helping SalesTrip go to market faster. When building on Salesforce Platform, Manoj was able to focus on the core technology he was offering to his customers. Never once did he worry about the technology stack, where components sat, or how the system would be delivered to customers. In addition to the robust technology, the marketing opportunities that were readily available as a partner helped SalesTrip scale quickly. Manoj had several opportunities to host webinars with other Salesforce partners, advertise 9

David Schmaier CEO of Industries, Salesforce Current venture: Vlocity Industry focus: Communications, Media & Entertainment, Healthcare, Energy & Utilities, Insurance, and Government Stage/funding: Acquired by Salesforce Previous ventures: Siebel Systems I often say to prospects About Vlocity Built natively on the Salesforce and customers, ‘In five years, platform, Vlocity, (now a Salesforce Company), is a leading provider how much software will be of industry-specific cloud and in the cloud?’ I think all of mobile software for the world’s top communications, media and it. And most of it will be entertainment, energy, utilities, insurance, health, and government industry-specific. organizations. On June 1, 2020, Salesforce closed its acquisition of Vlocity. 10

The Aha Moment help him get this new venture off the ground. David shares that You know how they say that sometimes the best ideas come to “The AppExchange program accelerated our trajectory three you when you’re away from your desk? That’s how the idea for a to four to five years. We didn’t have to build a platform, which Forbes Cloud 100 company struck David Schmaier. would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We were able to use the Salesforce Platform.” At his very first Dreamforce conference in 2013, a light bulb went off in David’s head. Upon arriving at the event, he was Building Vlocity 100% on the Salesforce Platform prevented amazed by two things: first of all, the absolute size and scale of redundancies by leveraging the products and features that the Salesforce ecosystem. David says, “I was simply astonished Salesforce offers. For instance, if Vlocity needed an order object, by how successful and how big Salesforce customers and the they used the native Salesforce order object. The primary partner ecosystem had become.“ And second, “I saw many additional technologies applied to its industry applications are really great applications that were horizontal cross-industry apps specific to the needs of that industry. David uses an analogy to — you know, 10 or 12 CPQ software products, CTI middleware, the automotive aftermarket: Salesforce is the car, and Vlocity proposal generators, document management — and literally zero needed to put in a better engine or new stereo system. The car vertical industry-specific applications, and that presented the still has four wheels and drives, but it has a new engine (Vlocity) opportunity to me,” recalls David. that is plugged right in. This “100% additive” approach delivers industry-specific capabilities that customers want and ensures It was then that David knew what he had to do. With his idea that there are no redundancies. in mind and his expertise in building 20+ industry applications for the front office, he was certain that this new endeavor would Learning From the Journey find its home in the cloud. David believes that “It’s always good to have a pathfinder that you’re following.” The two companies that David modeled The Secret to Scaling Vlocity after were Veeva and Workday. By setting the bar high Driving scale is one of the biggest hurdles when launching a new and comparing Vlocity to others, the company had a North Star business. As someone who had done it several times before, to guide it along its journey. David knew that a synergistic partnership with Salesforce would 11

Kraig Swensrud & Sean Whiteley Co-FounderS, Qualified Current venture: Qualified Industry focus: Communications, Manufacturing Stage/funding: Series A Previous ventures: GetFeedback (Sold to SurveyMonkey in 2019), Kieden (Sold to Salesforce in 2006) When you’re trying to build a business from About Qualified scratch and you want to be a billion-dollar Qualified is a conversational marketing software company, the most important thing platform that helps companies meet is establishing customer trust. — Kraig Swensrud with VIPs in real time using live chat, chatbots, voice calls, and screen sharing. Qualified instantly alerts sales reps when high-value prospects land on their Consumers have been conditioned to expect company site and gives them tools to things to happen fast, quickly, and in real engage in real-time conversations. time. B2B companies have to evolve to meet that bar because your buyers have that expectation. — Sean Whiteley 12

The Aha Moment From having previously built companies on the Salesforce Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley noticed a marketing gap Platform, Kraig shares his advice for scaling: “If you’re going in the digital world. They saw that after watching a television to build a consumer app, you can go to many different ad or listening to a radio commercial, the next step was to pick vendors. But if you want to build an enterprise billion-dollar up the phone and dial a 1-800 number. In today’s digital world, software company, you should be a Trailblazer on the although we are still driving customers to follow through with Salesforce Platform.” a call to action, customers log onto their devices and go online. Digital ads, search engines, social media, and emails always drive Learning From the Journey prospects to a corporate website. The main difference between Every company begins at square one. It’s the steps you take from driving people to pick up their phone versus going online is there that influence how you progress and where you end up. that there is no one waiting to greet them when they land on Kraig and Sean are no strangers to that starting block. That’s why the website. they always start off every day with a winning perspective. Kraig shares that “When you’re a brand-new company and you’re two Kraig and Sean recognized this as a problem that made it guys in a room and you’re starting out, you want to do everything difficult for B2Bs to generate leads and get closer to their in your power to increase your chances of success. And that’s customers. As a result, Qualified was built to address this crucial what we think. We wake up every day and think, ‘Wow, I don’t customer moment. Kraig says, “There’s a huge gap in between know what today is going to bring. I don’t know what this month when you come to the website and when you are engaged in a is going to bring. But how can we win?’” sales process. And it’s this gap, that we’re addressing right now.” The Secret to Scaling Aligning with the right strategic partners at the inception of a new venture can pay off for years to come in your company’s journey. Kraig and Sean are able to scale Qualified by positioning it with Salesforce’s technology. By building on Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and more, Qualified is able to grow everywhere Salesforce continues to grow. 13

Jaswinder Chadha President & CEO, Axtria Current venture: Axtria Industry focus: Life Sciences Stage/funding: Series D funding Previous ventures: MarketRx So many of the unicorns of About Axtria Axtria is a global software and data today came out of the great analytics provider that combines strong process knowledge of life recession of 2008–2009. sciences commercial operations, The period of crisis is when it data analytics, and software. It helps companies transform the product becomes clear if your solution commercialization journey to drive sales growth and improve healthcare is critical or just nice to have. outcomes for patients. 14

The Aha Moment Salesforce to deliver customer service around the clock so that Ever heard of spreadsheet sabotage? Jaswinder Chadha saw companies can keep things running smoothly no matter where miscalculations, churn, and various process-related inefficiencies in the world their customers may be. characterizing life sciences companies that were running their commercial operations across spreadsheets, ad hoc Learning From the Journey models, and people instead of software systems. How could Based on personal experience and advice he received from pharmaceutical companies that were investing valuable time mentors over time, Jaswinder places an emphasis on hard work and resources in R&D and revolutionary medicine still depend and a clear vision to bring his ideas to fruition. He shares that on archaic methods of data entry? Jaswinder knew that there the best piece of advice ever received is, “There are three things had to be an easier way. He noticed this immense gap and that matter to drive success in business — luck, intelligence, and grabbed the opportunity to develop a cloud-based platform hard work. You can’t do much about the first two, so focus on that would transform commercial planning and operations in the hard work.” This advice has helped take him further along his the life sciences industry. journey as an entrepreneur. The Secret to Scaling In addition, Jaswinder believes that your vision is one of the few things that you can control throughout your journey. He Jaswinder credits his company’s ability to scale by automating says, “You have to believe in your vision to help you get over business workflows on the Salesforce Platform. Built on the challenges, which are inevitable along the way.” Salesforce technology, Axtria has been able to integrate seamlessly with third-party management systems. These efficiencies allowed it to streamline processes, resulting in tens of thousands of sales reps onboarded in 50+ countries. Delivering customer excellence consistently across regions is no easy feat. That’s where Jaswinder taps into Salesforce’s global presence and access to life sciences industry stakeholders. Axtria works closely with the global and local partner teams at 15

Melanie Fellay CEO & Co-Founder, Spekit Current venture: Spekit Industry focus: Financial Services, Real Estate, Healthcare, Media, Education, Travel & Hospitality Stage/funding: Seed stage Change isn’t going anywhere. About Spekit Spekit is a documentation and If anything, it’s only getting training platform that acts like a digital companion for employees. It helps users faster. It’s only getting bigger. learn new applications like Salesforce, as Companies are only investing well as adopt process changes and find information easily when they’re working. more and more in technology. By blending the sophistication of a digital adoption platform with the simplicity of a contextual knowledge base, it helps boost user productivity and learning in any tool. 16

The Aha Moment an AppExchange partner has allowed it to gain access to the Melanie Fellay joined an early-stage startup in San Francisco Salesforce customer base. Melanie shares that “AppExchange right out of college where she worked in a variety of roles. One and the Salesforce ecosystem as a whole has helped us scale of her responsibilities was overseeing the company’s Salesforce and move faster through the community. What I think is so instance. Melanie recalls, “It was about five or six years ago, so magical about the Salesforce ecosystem is that while there are there weren’t many people in the company that were familiar a lot of Salesforce-led events, there is a huge community that’s with Salesforce. I was the lucky one to be selected to manage it. also very, very engaged.” In a lot of ways, I was an accidental admin.” Investing in the AppExchange Partner Program has allowed Melanie was responsible for ensuring that all of the employees Melanie and her team to access a customer base and understood how to use Salesforce and any related processes. community that she can tap. Melanie has the ability to reach The main challenge that Melanie ran up against was that as she out to customers in the Salesforce ecosystem for feedback on was implementing changes, she didn’t have an effective way of Spekit’s product. As a result, the Spekit team has been able communicating them for employees to retain. to solve their customers’ problems by receiving input from the customers themselves. By leveraging the power of the As a result, she began searching for different solutions ecosystem, Melanie has tapped into the Salesforce customer that could help her solve this challenge. She found that her base to learn, grow her company, and spread the word company had an LMS, a knowledge base, and “help text” throughout the community. bubbles; however, all of these solutions lived across different systems and were difficult to access. It was through the discovery Learning From the Journey process of looking at different solutions on the market that Melanie has learned that you don’t need to be aligned with Melanie realized there was an opportunity to make the process your business partner on 100% of their decisions to be a easier. That’s when she took the situation into her own hands perfect match. She believes that “While the day-to-day decisions and created Spekit. don’t always need to be aligned, the underlying values that are driving those decisions are.” According to Melanie, a healthy The Secret to Scaling partnership is driven by your beliefs in company culture, In order to scale successfully, it’s important to identify your customer engagement, and your business priorities. key channels for driving lead generation. For Spekit, being 17

Max Rudman CEO, Prodly Current venture: Prodly Industry focus: Manufacturing, Consumer Goods, High Tech Stage/funding: Seed funding Previous ventures: SteelBrick (now Salesforce CPQ) To me, it’s always been about About Prodly Prodly’s AppOps platform automates customers and being focused the full lifecycle of low-code app development, removes bottlenecks on their success because I am in the development process, and a firm believer that if you drive provides IT governance to mitigate the risk inherent in updates to success for your customers, mission-critical systems. the rest will come and fall in place. 18

The Aha Moment Learning From the Journey Before Prodly, Max Rudman was the CEO of another Salesforce Building a business can be like raising a child — there is no partner, SteelBrick (now Salesforce CPQ). While at SteelBrick, one right way to do it. Max advises entrepreneurs that it’s Max and his team kept running into an issue: It took two days important to figure out what works best for you. What is for his most experienced solution architects to deploy a project important, however, is just to start. Max emphasizes that no from sandbox to production. That’s when they came up with the matter how you go about it, “follow your passions and make idea to create an AppOps platform to accelerate data migration it happen.” for faster deployments. Max jokes, “With my second company, I’m solving the problem I created with my first.” Although this gap presented itself as a challenge, it became an opportunity. Max took advantage of the problem that was staring him in the eyes and turned it into what is now Prodly. The Secret to Scaling One of the most difficult parts of getting a business off the ground is developing a customer base and promoting brand awareness. From his personal experience of being a two-time Salesforce partner, Max shares that the Salesforce ecosystem has helped Prodly grow by enabling the company to tap into Salesforce’s install base of 150,000 diverse customers. Max says, “It comes down to the scale of Salesforce, the size of its customer base. And these are organizations of all shapes and sizes. So whatever your industry, category, or segment, there’s something for everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem.” 19

Sean Hoban CEO & Co-Founder, Kimble Current venture: Kimble Industry focus: IT Services, Management Consulting and Hi-Tech Stage/funding: Scale-Up Previous ventures: HindSite, Fulcrum Solutions Remain customer focused About Kimble Kimble is a cloud-based professional at all times. It is very easy to services automation (PSA) solution built natively on the Salesforce Platform. It become inwardly looking, but helps services-oriented customers kick- it is important to always ask start growth and cultivate best practices across business processes. Kimble’s PSA the question, ‘how will this guides users to the most cost-effective route, from profiling potential revenue help our customers?’ in the pipeline, to reporting revenue recognition and performance after time entry is complete. 20

The Aha Moment Salesforce’s reputation and reliability to create confidence Sean Hoban’s aha moment was more of a realization that grew in enterprise customers to buy Kimble, even when we were over the years of being in the professional services industry. much smaller.” He became increasingly frustrated with the software he was using that was built by accounting software vendors who were Learning From the Journey unaware of the problems professional services organizations Sean tells people that making mistakes is okay, as long as were facing. Sean knew exactly where the software needed to you learn from it. He has learned that if you disagree with improve. He says, “They focused on the problem of speeding someone’s decision, you should first ask them why they came up the production of historic data and putting it in one place. to that conclusion. Sean says, “They might just have some But the secret to really moving the needle in a successful information that you weren’t aware of that influenced them professional services organization is about gaining as much to make that decision.” insight into the future as possible.” From his own personal experience in the professional services industry, Sean was certain that predictive analytics would be a game changer to help guide future decisions. Fast forward 10 years, Kimble serves over 300 customers, and Sean’s early vision is now his everyday reality. The Secret to Scaling “By selecting Salesforce at the start of our journey as our development platform, enough of the technical infrastructure components were taken care of, and we were able to launch six months ahead of schedule,” says Sean. Building on the Salesforce Platform created efficiencies enabling Kimble to start making money at the onset of the venture, rather than having to raise money. Throughout its journey, Kimble has been able to scale alongside Salesforce. “We’ve been able to leverage 21

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