Agile CRM is a Dallas-based, bootstrapped SaaS company founded in 2013 that offers an all-in-one CRM platform combining sales, marketing automation, and customer service tools. Targeting small and medium-sized businesses, it provides enterprise-grade features — contact management, email campaigns, helpdesk ticketing, lead scoring, and 50+ integrations — at a fraction of the cost of Salesforce or HubSpot. With a free plan supporting up to 10 users, paid tiers starting at $8.99/user/month, and 15,000+ customers worldwide, Agile CRM has grown to $2.7M in annual revenue entirely without external funding.
Bitrix24 is an all-in-one online workspace that bundles CRM, project management, HR, communication, and AI automation into a single platform. Launched in 2012 and used by over 15 million organizations in 16 languages, it is the only major CRM in the world that prices per organization rather than per user - a structural bet that has made it a go-to for SMBs and growing teams that refuse to pay headcount taxes to their software stack.
Brilliant.org is an interactive STEM learning platform that teaches math, science, data, and computer science through hands-on problems instead of passive video. Founded in 2012 by Sue Khim, the San Francisco-based company has grown to roughly 10 million learners and operates on a freemium subscription model with 90+ guided courses.
Quizlet is an American education technology company that built the world's most-used flashcard app and is now retooling itself as an AI-powered study coach. Founded in 2005 by a 15-year-old high schooler studying for a French final, it has grown into a platform used by tens of millions of students each month across more than 130 countries.
Derek Ting is the co-founder and CEO of TextNow, the Waterloo-based company he started in 2009 at age 19 with classmate Jon Lerner while studying computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. What began as a scrappy solution to outrageous carrier text messaging fees has grown into the only U.S. mobile provider offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data on a nationwide 5G network. The TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, making Derek one of the most consequential quiet disruptors in American telecommunications - building a profitable, venture-light company that serves millions of users who can't afford traditional phone service.
Tugce Erten is a Partner on the Growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads pricing and packaging strategy for portfolio companies. Drawing on a career spent inside high-growth tech companies - Atlassian, PagerDuty, and Freshworks - she has become one of Silicon Valley's go-to voices on B2B SaaS monetization, generative AI pricing, and the art of bundling. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, she brings an economist's rigor (NERA Economic Consulting, Edgeworth Economics) to the distinctly human problem of what something is worth.
Sean Ellis coined the term 'growth hacking' in 2010, invented the 40% product/market fit test, and served as the first marketer at Dropbox and Eventbrite. Founder of GrowthHackers.com (1.8M members) and co-author of 'Hacking Growth' (750,000+ copies, 16 languages), he is arguably the single most influential figure in the modern growth discipline - the person who gave the industry its name, its frameworks, and its operating system.
Elena Verna is one of Silicon Valley's most respected growth operators - a former SVP of Growth at SurveyMonkey, interim CMO at Miro, and current Head of Growth at Lovable (the AI app-builder that hit $200M ARR in under a year). Known for popularizing Product-Led Growth frameworks, she runs 'Elena's Growth Scoop' newsletter with 89,000+ subscribers and a 40% open rate, and is a Partner at Reforge. She immigrated from Russia at 14 with $100 and no English, and has built a career on the principle: 'I will figure it out.'
Wes Bush is the founder and CEO of ProductLed, the world's leading education company for product-led growth (PLG). Author of two foundational PLG books - 'Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself' (2019) and 'The Product-Led Playbook' (2024) - Bush has helped 400+ SaaS companies collectively generate over $1 billion in self-serve revenue. After being fired from Vidyard for advocating product-led strategies over sales-led ones, he turned that conviction into a global movement, building a 15,000+ member community and coaching SaaS founders to scale from $100K ARR to 8+ figures.