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I first met Sravish about 10 years ago. It was an era where there was a resurgence in the Boston tech scene. A new level of excitement that was fueled by a crop of young entrepreneurs who were building companies that were powered by accelerators or incubators like Techstars, Dogpatch Labs, Bolt, and others. What is great about this era in the Boston tech scene is that many of these entrepreneurs, like Sravish, have exited and are now on to building their next startup. Having successful serial entrepreneurs is a critical part of the success of a land standing major startup ecosystem. Not only do they have more experience and lessons learned from their first company, but they can also think longer term and swing for the fences. Sravish's last company was Kinvey, a company that coined the term Backend-As-A-Service with their platform for mobile developers. The company was acquired by Progress in 2017. His current company is called Kintent, which is looking to become the trusted platform for compliance. Its Trust Cloud will help eliminate those dreaded compliance and security questionnaires that you get from companies that take forever to fill out. The company announced its $18M Series A round of funding led by OpenView earlier this year. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice for founders on the acquisition process. * Sravish's background growing up including how he got involved as an early employee at a startup called United Devices that was a pre-cursor to cloud computing. * The story of Kinvey and its acquisition by Progress. * All the details on Kintent and what the future looks like for the company. * Advice for getting started as an angel investor. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.
Guest Ryan Light is the CEO of Pistol Lake, a clothing brand where everything is ethically made in the U.S. The Boston Speaks Up community may recognize Ryan Light from his time in Boston in prominent executive and marketing roles at Kinvey and CoachUp. After seven years in Boston, Light moved to Los Angeles in 2018 to run Pistol Lake. In March 2020, Pistol Lake stopped manufacturing clothes at its Los Angeles headquarters, in favor of making masks for hospitals and urgent care workers treating patients with COVID-19. Well known for his creative marketing skills, Light’s creative business decision to help medical workers on the frontlines while keeping Pistol Lake’s factory workers paid during uncertain economic times really caught our interest. Discover more Boston Speaks Up at Boston Business Journal's BostInno: www.americaninno.com/boston/boston-speaks-up/
Joe Chernov is the VP Marketing @ Pendo, the startup that understands and guides your users allowing you to create products they cannot live without. To date they have raised over $108m in funding from some of the best in SaaS including Meritech, Salesforce, Battery, Spark Capital and Sapphire just to name a few. Prior to Pendo Joe was Chief Marketing Officer at Robin and before that he was the CMO @ InsightSquared where he led the transition from an email-driven leads model to an account-based marketing model. Before InsightSquared, Joe was Head of Content Marketing at Hubspot where he increased blog traffic by more than 1M visits/month and increased leads by 40%. Finally, pre-Hubspot, Joe held VP of Marketing roles at Kinvey and Eloqua. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Joe made his way into the world of startups and SaaS marketing many years ago? Does Joe really believe in the saying that, “no one really knows what they are doing?” Where are the nuances to it? Joe has been CMO and then #2 and alternated between the 2 roles many times, so what the continuous alternating? How does switching from CMO to VP of Marketing prepare you better for each subsequent role? Does Joe agree with the saying that the best in marketing are able to “throw the playbook out of the window”? What does Joe mean when he says, “the most powerful mentorship is mentorship from below”? What makes the best #2’s just so good? What do they do? What advice would Joe give to a #2 in a role today? What can the individuals do to foster a relationship of deep trust and transparency? Having worked at both early and late stage companies, what does Joe believe the early companies can learn from later stage companies? Does installing very severe ops not reduce the creativity of a young company? What does Joe believe that later stage companies can really learn and take from early-stage companies? How do the marketing functions differ in both structure and process when comparing early to late stage? What does Joe find to be the biggest challenge within each respective stage? How has Joe seen the content landscape evolve and change radically throughout his career alternating between early and late stage companies? Joe’s 60 Second SaaStr: Who does Joe believe is killing it in SaaS marketing now? Why? ABM, total BS or real meaning to it? If Joe could change one thing about SaaS today, what would it be? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Joe Chernov
Joe Chernov is the Chief Marketing Officer at Robin, the startup that simplifies scheduling, visibility and management of meeting rooms, desks and people in your workplace. To date, Robin have raised over £9m in funding from some of our dear friends in the form of BoldStart, Accomplice and FirstMark, just to name a few. As for Joe, prior to Robin he was the CMO @ Insight Squared where he led the transition from an email-driven leads model to an account-based marketing model that's tightly coupled with sales. Before InsightSquared, Joe was Head of Content Marketing at Hubspot where he increased blog traffic by more than 1M visits/month and increased leads by 40%. Finally, pre-Hubspot, Joe held VP of Marketing roles at Kinvey and Eloqua. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Joe made his way into the world of startups and SaaS marketing many years ago? What was Joe’s missed founding story and how does that affect his thinking today? Does Joe believe that ABM is a paradigm shift in the way we approach marketing or another word for high ACV target sales? How can founders determine whether they have the right business, pricing and hiring strategy that will align with an ABM strategy? Is it the right decision to focus squarely on ABM? How should it play into your overall marketing portfolio? Why does Joe believe we have seen a massive rise in SaaS conferences? How can a startup determine whether the conference strategy is the right strategy for them? Where does Joe see many startups going wrong when selecting this approach? Why does Joe believe you have to get comfortable with losing money in conferences? What are the determinants or leading indicators of a successful conference? What is the ideal composition in terms of attendance? Why does Joe believe that marketing should be held accountable to a number that is directly tied to revenue? Why does Joe believe that Head of Sales and Head of Marketing should not be separate functions? What is it that leads Joe’s thinking when saying, sales and marketing are overlapping functions? What are the commonalities of the truly special CMOs? When is the right time to really consider adding the CMO to your exec team? What is the ideal relationship between the CMO and the CEO? What is the one question that will largely determine the strength of a potential CMO? Joe’s 60 Second SaaStr: What does Joe know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Who does Joe believe is killing it in SaaS today and why? Advice Joe often hears in the world of SaaS that he actively disagrees with? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Joe Chernov
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Sravish Sridhar. He’s the VP and General Manager at Kinvey Progress and was previously the CEO and founder of Kinvey before it was acquired by Progress. He’s also an angel investor in multiple startups with successful exits. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Crossing the Chasm What CEO do you follow? – Matt Barbey Favorite online tool? — If This Then That How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I would never become a movie actor” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:50 – Nathan introduces Sravish to the show 02:18 – Kinvey’s acquisition closed on June 1st and was announced on June 28th 02:30 – Kinvey does “backend as a service”, which is a term that they coined 02:58 – Schneider Electric has a lot of apps that are used to interact with its hardware, employees and customers 03:13 – Kinvey is in charge of the backend features that an app needs 03:44 – “We make every frontend developer become a backend developer” 03:55 – Developers don’t have to learn the backend processes, they can simply drag and drop 04:07 – Kinvey has three types of customers: 04:10 – First, those who are building apps as a hobby or trial and pay nothing up to $200 a month 04:22 – Second, business edition customers who pay an average of $24K a year per application 04:44 – Lastly, enterprise edition customers who pay around 6 figures a year 05:03 – ACV is around $80K to $90K 05:24 – When Sravish came up with the idea for Kinvey, he knew it should be a venture-backed company 05:46 – Sravish funded the initial capital of $150K 06:06 – Kinvey has raised over $15M before the acquisition 06:30 – It took Kinvey 15 month to launch their product 06:43 – In the second year, they started to build their revenue 07:10 – In 2013, they were doing high 6-figures in revenue 07:24 – They broke their million dollar mark in 2014 07:54 – Sravish invested in startups to learn strategies and build his financial portfolio 09:20 – Sravish has three things he looks for when investing in a startup: 09:22 – The team’s relationship with each other 09:39 – The space of the startup 09:55 – The potential he has to help the startup to grow 10:40 – Kinvey has over 50 enterprise customers 12:54 – The acquisition of Kinvey by Progress was for $50M 13:13 – Sravish shares how the board and himself decided on the acquisition 14:40 – Sravish’s discussion with Progress 15:43 – Team size prior to acquisition was 44 and everyone stayed after the acquisition, current team size is 65-70 16:00 – Kinvey had multiple offers and it took them 2-3 months to decide 16:40 – Progress matched the best offer 17:00 – Kinvey and Progress are both based in Boston 17:58 – Kinvey had direct sales models and enterprise sales reps 18:10 – CAC is $95K to $100K and LTV is $2.1-2.2M 18:33 – Payback period is 13-14 months 19:04 – Kinvey has 98% retention rate 20:40 – Progress has been thoughtful with their employees’ restricted stock units (RSU) 23:40 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Choose the deal that will be a great fit for the long-term. Always consider the company and, most importantly, your team’s future when making decisions. Investing isn’t just about the financial gains, it’s about your ability to believe in and help a company grow and succeed. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
In this episode of Device Squad, the podcast for the Mobile Enterprise from Propelics, Steve discusses Health Care Mobility Strategies with Ivo Janssen, Solution Engineering Director with Kinvey, and fellow Propelics Mobile Strategists David Enarson and Todd Chusid. Get your Mobile Checkup! Join us for The Health of Health Care Mobility - a Strategists Forum covering today's most pressing shortcomings and most exciting advancements in Health Care Mobility.
CJ Barton, VP Sales, Kinvey talks about why clients who have tried to design apps most appreciate the value Kinvey brings to the development of HIPAA and security compliant mobile apps being used by hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies and other healthcare providers. He also talks about innovative mobile health apps for pets that their humans seem to enjoy and that are not required to meet all the standards for moving electronic health information of their owners. @Kinvey #HITSummit Kinvey.com
This week's episode of TNS Analysts features a discussion about Apple's CloudKit and Swift, the new PaaS and programming language. Joining us were Michael Cote of 451 Research and our guest, Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Kinvey, a backend service provider. Kinvey is a founding sponsor of the New Stack. Fellow co-host Donnie Berkholz could not make the show. Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-4-cloudkit-and-swift/
Lauren Pedigo is a Marketing Associate at Kinvey in Boston. But she didnt get that job by browsing job boards all day. Instead she made twitter her primary job search tool. And it worked!
In this episode we discuss the Salesforce Dreamforce 2013 conference, the million dollar mobile hackathon contest, Heroku and limits of the Salesforce.com Apex language, the shutdown of Do.com, Women in Tech, and Hibernate compatibility issues with Spring.Salesforce Dreamforce 2013 Conference Salesforce $1 Million HackathonKinveyHeroku Salesforce says goodbye to Do.comWoman in TechHibernate compatibility issues with Spring Download MP3 (38.6 MB, 00:53:38)
Reuven is hosting solo this week, as Allyson is in San Francisco at the Intel® AtomTM processor C-2000 series launch. He guides listeners through a couple of fascinating interviews – first up is Rajeev Chawla, the CEO and Co-Founder of CloudVelocity, and second is Sravish Sridhar, Founder and CEO of Kinvey. Rajeev chats about viewing the public cloud as a seamless extension of your data center, taking existing workloads and running them in the cloud without having to re-architect. Sravish takes over to talk about the emerging technology of “backend as a service,” meaning developers can setup, use and operate a cloud backend for their mobile, tablet and web apps. 0:00 – Introduction and News of the Week 7:48 – Interview with Rajeev Chawla 19:06 – Interview with Sravish Sridhar 31:13 – Wrap up