Sharat Sharan kept the company. He changed the idea.

Sharat Sharan remembers an office on San Francisco’s Market Street that felt scarcely larger than a closet, and a company with less than $2,000 in the bank. It was 1998. The business distributed multimedia press releases. A quarter-century of reinvention lay ahead, although a sensible visitor might first have inquired about the rent.

By April 1, 2026, ON24 belonged to Cvent. Between those two moments, Sharan had led the company for more than 27 years, taken it public and repeatedly changed what it sold. Financial news gave way to webcasting; webcasting developed into a platform for business marketing. Longevity, in this case, required a considerable willingness to abandon yesterday’s plan.

He described the sale as “bitter-sweet.” There were colleagues who had stayed from the early years, investors who had backed successive versions of the business, and customers whose needs kept changing. His account of the journey returns to those relationships. For all the software involved, the company’s story has a distinctly human cast.

A childhood with regular changes of address

Long before Silicon Valley, Sharan had practice arriving somewhere unfamiliar. He grew up in New Delhi, the son of a senior military officer, and his family moved roughly every two years. He later connected those moves with learning to make friends and adjust to new surroundings. Adaptability had a practical meaning before it became a management virtue.

In 1984, he chose graduate study in computer science in the United States over a management-school opportunity in India. He earned his master’s at Virginia Tech, having studied electronics engineering at the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra. His education eventually included an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

That combination of engineering and management fits the career that followed. His work crossed telecommunications, wireless systems and internet media before ON24. He had experienced businesses in which the underlying technology was changing, and in which a useful invention still needed a workable commercial home.

The broadcaster learns to sell the broadcast

At Hearst, Sharan worked on the company’s developing internet businesses, eventually serving in senior new-media roles. An established publisher offered a close view of the collision between content and the technology that carried it. He later argued that the experience a platform delivered could matter as much as the material passing through it.

ON24 initially combined the two. Its financial-news service aimed at retail investors, with the ambition of becoming an internet destination for business coverage. After the dot-com collapse, the webcasting technology became the company’s focus. The news operation ended in 2002. A business that had wanted an audience of its own began helping other organizations reach theirs.

The investor Deepak Kamra has preserved a pleasing historical irony. Canaan’s 1999 investment memo named Broadcast.com as a competitor. Years later, ON24 bought some former Broadcast.com assets from Yahoo. Venture capital occasionally supplies a plot twist with its paperwork.

By 2008, ON24 was serving more than 600 organizations and had introduced Virtual Show for online trade shows, conferences and events. Its customer list included Cisco, which owned WebEx. Technology markets have a habit of making the seating arrangements more interesting than the rivalry suggests.

A marketing department acquires a balance sheet

The next change concerned the customer’s purpose. Companies buying a webcast were often trying to explain a complicated product, educate prospective buyers and generate demand. Sharan’s business increasingly served the marketing department. The live presentation became part of a longer commercial conversation, with questions and participation offering clues about what an audience needed.

Inside ON24, he changed his own view of marketing. He had once treated it as the department that polished the materials. By 2019, he was describing a more accountable operation, reviewed quarterly and judged on its contribution to business results. A smart-looking brochure could still have its charms; it would now be expected to earn its keep.

His preferred measures included the quality of sales opportunities, attribution, retention and customer lifetime value. He even accepted that a stricter definition of a qualified lead might shrink the reported pipeline. A smaller number could be more useful if it represented people the sales team could actually serve. There is a certain relief in a chief executive allowing a dashboard to look less flattering.

The organization around him changed too. In 2015, ON24 recruited Joe Hyland as chief marketing officer after reporting that revenue from its Webcast Elite product had nearly doubled in 2014. The business was putting staff and investment behind its marketing focus, rather than merely changing the vocabulary on the website.

The event ends. The conversation carries on.

A webinar has an obvious ending. The business built around it need not. In 2016, ON24 introduced Demand, designed to help marketers reuse and distribute webinar and video material. One event could provide assets for subsequent campaigns. Preparing a presentation is expensive work; letting it retire after a single appearance is a rather lavish habit.

This became a broader product argument. Sharan described buyers educating themselves online before approaching a salesperson. ON24’s response included content hubs, personalized landing pages and analytics connecting audience behavior with subsequent communication. The opportunity was to make each encounter useful enough that the next one could be better informed.

In his IPO-day reflection in February 2021, he pointed to average live experiences lasting 50 minutes. That historical measure helps explain his interest in the format. A participant willing to spend that much time with a subject offers a different kind of opportunity from someone briefly passing an advertisement. The task is to deserve the attention.

As the platform expanded, so did its geographic reach. ON24 opened an Asia-Pacific headquarters in Sydney in 2016, appointing Michael Savanis to lead the regional operation. The company that had started in a cramped San Francisco office was organizing itself to support customers across time zones.

A public milestone, reached at a private pace

Back in 2007, Sharan had already distinguished taking a company public from finishing the job. Asked about an exit, he called an IPO a milestone on the way to building a substantial business in rich media. Fourteen years later, ON24 reached that milestone.

The February 2021 offering comprised approximately 9.85 million shares at $50 each, including the underwriters’ exercised option, and generated roughly $492.3 million in gross proceeds. Those figures describe the completed offering, including shares sold by selling stockholders. They are not a measure of Sharan’s personal proceeds or wealth.

The elapsed time is striking enough without adornment. A company incorporated in 1998 arrived on the public market in 2021. Several versions of the business had existed under the same name. The founder’s continuity had been accompanied by changes in product, audience and financing.

Public ownership also brought a different daily discipline. In his third-quarter 2024 remarks, Sharan reported $36.3 million in revenue and a sixth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted profitability is a specific measure, distinct from net income. His discussion paired product adoption with operating performance, a familiar combination for a founder whose engineering interests had long shared space with the accounts.

“It is not an exit strategy in itself.”

Sharat Sharan on an IPO, 2007

The screen still led him back to people

Asked to describe his working style, Sharan chose “passionate and focused.” The second word does useful work. Over a long career, enthusiasm needs something to stop it wandering into every attractive new market. His record of changing the business suggests an ongoing negotiation between curiosity and discipline.

ON24’s AI work extended the same concern with making existing material more useful. By 2024, the company was discussing tools that could turn longer events into shorter content and support personalized experiences. The January 2024 ON24 NEXT event paired Sharan with product leader Jayesh Sahasi, marketing leader Callan Young and HubSpot’s Scott Brinker. The topic had changed; the familiar question of how companies communicate remained.

There was also an agreeable irony in his working habits. A chief executive selling digital engagement recommended putting aside two or three weeks each quarter to visit customers face-to-face. He valued direct feedback and the trust built over time. Apparently, a screen could improve a relationship without being required to conduct every minute of it.

Breakfast before the acquisition

The road to Cvent included a breakfast. On July 14, 2025, Sharan met Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal, who expressed interest in exploring an acquisition. Blackstone had introduced the two executives in 2024. No offer was made at that breakfast. Further calls, diligence and negotiations followed.

ON24’s board considered approaches from several parties, with Goldman Sachs advising the company. By December 29, the board had approved the merger agreement. The announcement arrived the following morning: an all-cash transaction with total consideration of approximately $400 million and $8.10 in cash for each ON24 share.

The deal closed on April 1, 2026. Cvent set out plans to keep investing in ON24, connecting its webinar and digital-engagement capabilities with a broader event portfolio. Sharan framed the combination around joining digital and in-person engagement. The business would continue within a larger organization.

For Sharan, the transaction gave a definite date to a very long stretch of leadership. His earlier distinction about an IPO now seems particularly apt: a financing milestone had arrived, and the company had carried on. Five years later came a sale. Across those chapters, his most consequential habit was allowing the business to become something different from the thing he had first set out to build.