saas-executive
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Jay Choi Is Teaching a Form to Finish the Conversation
The Typeform CEO built his career by listening for the question behind the answer. Now he is betting that the humble online form can become the beginning of a customer relationship, rather than its paperwork at the end.
Five Yeses Before a Single Line of Code
Malte Kramer sold the promise first, then built the product. A decade later, the former college forward is still running the same play: watch closely, test early, and make technology earn its place.
Landon Taylor and the Expensive Art of Saying No
He built three companies by following the flaw each business revealed in the last. The harder trick was deciding what could never be for sale.
Michael Ramlet Asked One Question. It Became a Data Company.
A student newsletter, a $30,000 bet and one well-timed survey became Morning Consult. Now its co-founder is wagering that the next research revolution will make answers faster - while making judgment more valuable.
Chris Harrington and the Business of Paying Attention
He helped web analytics outrun the overnight batch. Now the veteran Utah software operator is trying to give creator marketing the discipline of an enterprise system without sanding away the people who make it work.
Aarij Khan Still Wants to Leave a Signature
Long before he joined product, engineering, and marketing under one title at Blazeo, Khan was an engineer impatient with theory that never met the real world. His career has been a decades-long attempt to close that gap.
Mike Shapaker Learned Marketing by Running Nearly Everything Else
Before Mike Shapaker became a CMO, he worked the machinery behind the message - engineering, analytics, services, operations, product and an EMEA business. That unusually wide apprenticeship now shapes how he markets software built to help companies reach their own people.
Nai Kanell Learned Marketing by Knocking on Doors - Now She Opens Them for Others
A first-generation refugee once walked into office buildings asking for an internship. Two decades later, the SafetyChain CMO is still solving unfamiliar problems - with data, candor and a preference for outcomes in which everyone gets a slice.
Karen Stephens Took the Scenic Route to the C-Suite
Before Karen Stephens sold hotel software, she taught French and sang in a Midtown Sacramento rock band. Her route to Revinate's C-suite is a study in useful detours, listening first, and letting talented people become stars.
Ashleigh Cook Is Turning the Event Badge Into a Business Signal
The RainFocus CMO has spent nearly two decades making B2B marketing less episodic. Her playbook connects the handshake, the session choice and the follow-up into one customer journey without losing the human point of gathering.
Lasse Kalkar Learned Finance the Hard Way - Then Built a Company to Make It Flow
Before LiveFlow served thousands of finance teams, its founder sold football tricks, ran a coffee shop without knowing its true margins, watched a crypto app fail and learned how Revolut moved at speed. The through-line is less glamorous than fintech usually sounds: find the tedious work, then remove it.
Reed Liggin Keeps Building for the Hospitals Technology Forgot
A pharmacist turned repeat founder, Reed Liggin has spent his career making complicated hospital technology usable for smaller providers. Three companies and two exits later, his favorite market is still the one larger vendors tend to pass by.
Anju Mathew Put Cancer Care’s Crowded Meeting on One Screen
Before AI could help a care team, someone had to fix the meeting. Mathew’s path from engineer to operator to founder explains why OncoLens began with workflow - and grew into infrastructure.
Mike Myer Bet the Phone Call Was Finished. Then AI Picked Up.
Before customer service became an AI arms race, Mike Myer was asking a plainer question: why can’t talking to a company feel like texting a friend? A career spent building service software turned that irritation into Quiq - and a decade-long lesson in making new technology behave.
Marc Laplante Keeps Rebuilding the Map of Buyer Intent
After 13 years in technology media, a predictive-analytics exit, and a return to the CEO seat, Marc Laplante is still chasing the same useful question: what are business buyers trying to do next?
Lucas Takahashi Bet on the Space Between an Order and an Answer
The Medmo co-founder turned a stubborn trail of phone calls, faxes and missing follow-ups into a coordination business. His route there runs through finance, a discarded mail idea, and the cool concentration of a junior skeet champion.
Michael Lucarelli’s Startup Idea Arrived by Fax
A renter’s absurd errand became a lesson in distribution, patience and the overlooked economics of the American rental market.
Kevin Baum Put the Farm’s Whiteboard in a Pocket
A city-raised rower followed a friend to an Australian sheep farm and found a stubbornly useful idea: make livestock software behave like the whiteboard in the shed. A decade later, Kevin Baum’s lesson is still the same - start with the work already happening.
Adam Holt Drew Finance Back to One Page
Before Asset-Map became software used to organize trillions in financial instruments, it was Adam Holt's hand-drawn answer to a stack of reports nobody wanted to read.
Kim Snyder Turned 20 Daily Reports Into One Clearer Question
A bank sale ended the job she loved. The reporting headache she could not forget became KlariVis - and a second act built around making community-bank data useful before the moment passes.
Matt Wilson Put Clinical Research on Autopilot
A 14-hour emergency shift and a six-week military camp exposed the same problem: clinicians had no spare time for research. Matt Wilson built uMed to make the machinery run in the background.
Chris Smith Bet Against the Startup Script - and Built Kipsu for the Long Game
The former venture capitalist knew every fashionable way to fund a software company. He chose customer revenue, plain text messages and patience instead - then spent more than a decade turning small service moments into a durable Minneapolis business.
Justin Shriber Is Turning Revenue Intelligence Into a System That Acts
After three decades inside sales technology, Justin Shriber has reached a blunt conclusion: companies do not need another dashboard. His bet at Terret is that AI should connect the clues, explain the risk and do the next piece of work.
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Kion, a cloud governance and management software company based in Columbia, Maryland. He was appointed CEO in October 2025 after more than two decades leading SaaS, observability, and customer experience companies, including roles as CEO of Monetate, COO of Kibo Commerce, and Chief Customer Officer at Zenoss. At Kion he is driving a 'FinOps+' strategy that combines cloud cost management, governance, and policy automation for multicloud and AI-driven workloads. He is based in Austin, Texas, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Eric Shoemaker
Eric Shoemaker is the Chief Executive Officer of Keebo, a startup that uses patented Data Learning algorithms to autonomously optimize cloud data warehouse workloads on Snowflake and Databricks. Appointed CEO in March 2026, he brings a long track record of scaling enterprise SaaS companies through growth and acquisition, including growing CloudHealth from zero to roughly $100 million in ARR and serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Device42 before its $230 million sale to Freshworks. He is a go-to-market and revenue operator focused on turning cloud data cost reduction into measurable business impact for enterprise customers.