sales-automation
(38)
Oleksii Kratko and the Trouble With a Cheaper Yes
The Snov.io founder thought a $9 option would help customers take the first step. The experiment went the other way - a useful clue to how he builds, tests and changes his mind.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and the three words he had to outgrow
Artisan’s co-founder turned “Stop hiring humans” into a sales pitch heard far beyond Silicon Valley. His next act asks a harder question: what should the humans do instead?
Sven Platte and the business behind the buy button
He set out to sell ebooks and found himself wrestling with the machinery of online commerce. Digistore24 grew from that frustration into a business he now uses to help other entrepreneurs build their own.
Tim Zheng and the price of getting cheaper
Apollo was running short of cash when Tim Zheng made its software cheaper and easier to buy. The engineer who helped rebuild the business has now handed over the CEO job.
Hasan Sukkar and the trouble with moving fast
He wanted to free people from repetitive work. Building 11x took Hasan Sukkar from London to San Francisco, through two major funding rounds and into a different job: handing over the company he had started.
Samay Kohli Keeps Going Back to the Floor
A student robot took Samay Kohli into warehouses around the world. After twelve years building GreyOrange, a stint behind a coffee counter and a new AI company have brought him back to a familiar question: what makes work work?
Jerónimo Uribe and the distance between a click and a home
A cold email helped open the door to La Haus. Years later, Jerónimo Uribe is still working on the harder part: keeping a buyer’s questions from disappearing into silence.
Chris Bache Built a Company by Calling the Leads Everyone Else Had Forgotten
One experiment with a pile of neglected sales leads revealed a $400,000 answer. Chris Bache spent the next decade turning that answer into Hatch, then carried it through Y Combinator and a $270 million acquisition by Yelp.
Daria Shevchenko Built Snov.io’s Marketing Around the Art of Being Remembered
The Chernihiv-based CMO helped turn a useful email finder into a global sales platform. Her operating philosophy is simple: do the homework, make the encounter memorable, and give people a reason to answer.
Ashok Kammara Left Derivatives for the Messy Math of a Ringing Phone
After 13 years in financial services, Klenty's founding marketer chose a less orderly ledger: the missed calls, burned numbers and human follow-ups that decide whether an outbound team works.
Alexandra Najaryan Built a Growth Engine Out of the Messy Middle
Before she became Kommo's CMO, Alexandra Najaryan turned a two-person partner program into a lesson in humane automation: map the friction, choose the channel people actually use, and let a person step in when the conversation matters.
Kris Rudeegraap Put a Dog Toy Where Another Sales Email Would Have Been
A bark on a sales call became a dog toy, then a product, then a company. Sendoso's co-founder has spent a decade turning small observations into a system for earning attention.
Ishan Chhabra Put Product Last - and Found Oliv's Point
After years of building sales software from the inside out, Ishan Chhabra reversed the order: sell the pain first, write the code last. Oliv AI is the long experiment that followed.
Daniel Ho Learned Sales by Building the Follow-Up Machine
The Apten co-founder went from supply-chain analytics and zero sales experience to running a small, profitable AI company. His operating lesson is plain: follow-up is a system, and focus sometimes means firing revenue.
Four McDonald’s Rejections, One One-Way Ticket, and Saurav Bubber’s Sales-Software Bet
He once wanted a life on the golf course. Instead, a bank counter, a consulting desk and Deel’s crowded sales stack led him to FuseAI - and a distinctly operator-shaped idea of what AI should do for sellers.
Anis Bennaceur Is Teaching Sales Software to Finish the Job
A former startup rival became his co-founder. A neglected CRM became the clue. Now the Attention CEO is betting that the useful sales tool is the one that acts after everyone leaves the call.
The Accidental Founder Who Wanted Software to Get Out of the Way
Andy Fowler never planned to run a company. He followed his curiosity from a Kentucky dial-up shop to an Ann Arbor CRM, then spent sixteen years making the machinery of sales feel a little less mechanical.
Mikhail Tokovinin Built a CRM by Learning the Unfashionable Art of Selling
Before Kommo became a global messaging CRM, its co-founder had to learn a less glamorous system: pick up the phone, hear no, and keep listening. Mikhail Tokovinin turned that education into software, spectacle, and a blunt philosophy of business.
Austin Hughes Is Turning Outbound Sales Into a Product Problem
The Unify co-founder went from finance to product by following a simple instinct: shrink the experiment, watch the signal, and build distribution with the care usually reserved for software.
Amanda Kahlow Is Selling the Moment After Intent
She spent years teaching software to spot buyers before they raised a hand. Now the founder of 6sense and 1mind is testing what happens when the answer arrives before the sales handoff.
Xiaohan Shen
Xiaohan Shen is the co-founder and CEO of Coldreach (YC W23), a San Francisco startup that uses AI to find ready-to-buy leads by watching public buying signals and to personalize cold outbound at scale. A University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science and data science grad, he calls himself an 'outbound nerd' after writing more than 1,000 cold emails by hand at his first startup, EasyJobs, which he and co-founder Hankel Bao grew to 20,000 monthly active users before pivoting into the tooling problem they lived themselves.
Kareem Amin
Kareem Amin is the cofounder and CEO of Clay, a New York-based go-to-market platform that lets sales and marketing teams pull data from dozens of sources and run AI-powered personalized outreach at scale. After a seven-year search for product-market fit, Clay crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $100M Series C in 2025 at a reported valuation above $3B. A second-time founder and McGill-trained engineer, Amin frames Clay as a creative tool that gives non-programmers the power of code, and talks openly about meditation, founder psychology, and building 'from a place of wholeness.'
Nick Smith
Nick Smith is the President, CEO and Founder of Sailes, a New York-based AI company that builds personality-driven autonomous Sailebots to handle B2B prospecting for Fortune 1000 enterprise sales teams. A former sales leader at CBS Corporation and iHeart Radio, he sketched the idea for Sailes on his iPhone at the Lake of the Ozarks on July 4, 2018.
Nico Ferreyra
Nico Ferreyra is the co-founder and CEO of Default, a New York-based B2B revenue operations platform that bundles inbound scheduling, lead capture, enrichment, qualification, and routing into one system for Series A-C go-to-market teams. Born in Córdoba, Argentina and raised in the United States, he dropped out of college, moved into a San Francisco hacker house with cofounder Victor, and launched Default in late 2021. The company raised $6.6M seed led by Craft Ventures (with Jack Altman, 8VC, BoxGroup) and has reportedly raised roughly $20M total. Ferreyra also angel-invests in ~50 companies including Anduril, Browserbase, Runway, and Wander.
Trey Gibson
Trey Gibson is the co-founder and CEO of SPOTIO, a Dallas-area field sales software company he started in 2014 after a visibility crisis on his own outside sales team, where reps worked territories blind and managers had no idea what was happening in the field. A Texas Tech MBA who spent his early career running foam insulation and construction businesses in the DFW area, Gibson built SPOTIO into a mobile-first platform used by thousands of field reps for GPS activity tracking, territory mapping, and sales engagement. He raised a $4.5M Series A from Ballast Point Ventures in 2020 and now hosts the 'From the Field' podcast, interviewing sales leaders about how modern teams sell, scale, and win.
Zayd Ali
Zayd Ali is the founder and CEO of Valley, a New York based AI SDR that runs LinkedIn-first outbound for B2B teams by learning a company's product, cloning its best reps' voice, and booking sales meetings. He sold his first appointment-setting company for seven figures while still in high school, briefly studied at Columbia, joined Antler in 2022, and after starting and shelving a founder-VC network called Fish, pivoted into Valley. He took 136 investor meetings before closing a seed round that grew to roughly $3M from backers including Antler, Jason Calacanis, and General Catalyst's Fellows program.
Daniel Saks
Daniel Saks is the co-founder and CEO of Landbase, a San Francisco agentic-AI company building GTM-1 Omni, an action model purpose-built to automate B2B go-to-market work. He previously co-founded and co-led AppDirect, the subscription-commerce platform that became a unicorn. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and McGill graduate, Saks traces his obsession with helping small businesses survive to his family's century-old furniture store in Niagara Falls, which closed during the Great Recession.
Dan Lee
Dan Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nooks, an AI Sales Assistant Platform that automates the manual busywork of sales development reps so they can focus on the human side of selling. Born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, Lee studied AI at Stanford (BS '21, MS '22), did ML stints at Scale AI and Cerebras Systems, and co-founded Nooks in 2020 with Stanford classmates Rohan Suri and Nikhil Cheerla. The company has raised $70 million in total funding, including a $43M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins in October 2024, and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 AI honoree in 2025.
Jason Ambrose
Jason Ambrose is the Chief Executive Officer of People.ai (rebranding as Backstory.ai), a San Francisco-based AI revenue intelligence platform backed by ICONIQ Growth. Appointed CEO in October 2025 after serving as SVP of Marketing and Strategy, Ambrose brings over two decades of enterprise software leadership spanning McKinsey's Digital Labs, Motive Partners, Anaplan, Unqork, and Appirio. A Stanford Psychology graduate who started as a network engineer, he now leads a platform used by enterprise customers including AMD, Verizon, NVIDIA, Red Hat, and Okta - turning raw sales activity data into actionable answers for both human sellers and AI agents.
Michael Gilson
Michael Gilson is the CEO of Conversica, the San Francisco-based conversational AI company behind over 1.5 billion automated customer conversations. Appointed in April 2025, he has repositioned Conversica as 'The Conversation Company,' expanding its AI agent platform from sales automation into automotive data intelligence, sports and entertainment ticketing, and enterprise customer lifecycle management. A Princeton graduate with a background spanning enterprise SaaS, media technology at Telestream, and data analytics at Wiser Solutions, Gilson brings operator instincts to a company that pioneered AI-to-human conversation at scale.