sales-engagement
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Joshua Tillman and the business of dead air
An internship full of phone calls gave Joshua Tillman a problem worth solving. The company that followed, first DialSource and then Conquer, carried a UC Davis idea into enterprise sales.
Kyle Porter and the business he chose to bury
Salesloft was making millions when Kyle Porter decided its most successful product was teaching people to sell the wrong way. The choice that followed explains much about the company he built - and the life he made room for afterward.
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.
Srinath Sridhar
Srinath Sridhar is the co-founder and CEO of Regie.ai, an AI-native sales engagement platform based in San Francisco that automates prospecting and generates personalized outbound campaigns for enterprise sales teams. A computer scientist with a PhD in algorithms and machine learning from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA from Harvard, he spent time on Facebook's early engineering team and was a founding engineer at BloomReach before co-founding the supply-chain company Onera. He now argues for a humanistic approach to AI, one that hands routine work to machines so people can do the creative parts.
Jason Dorfman
Jason Dorfman is the co-founder and CEO of Orum, a live conversation platform that uses a parallel dialer and speech recognition to help sales reps skip busy signals, voicemails, and dead numbers so they reach live prospects faster. He built the idea out of a problem he lived through as the first sales hire at Rubrik, where reps dialed 100 times a day to get a handful of pickups. Since founding Orum in 2019 with Karthik Viswanathan, he has raised more than $50 million and grown the company into a widely used tool across outbound sales teams. He is based in Austin, Texas.
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.
Manny Medina
Manny Medina is the co-founder and CEO of Paid, a London-based platform that lets companies bill for AI agents based on the value they deliver instead of per-seat fees. Before Paid he built Outreach, the sales engagement company he grew from a near-dead recruiting marketplace into a business worth $4.4 billion with roughly $250 million in recurring revenue. An Ecuadorian computer engineer who was an early employee on what became AWS and spent six years at Microsoft, Medina is now betting that the seat-based SaaS pricing model is obsolete and that the agent economy needs a way to get paid.
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.
Matt Curl
Matt Curl is the CEO of Apollo.io, the AI-native go-to-market platform approaching $200M ARR with nearly 100,000 paying customers. A career operator who scaled companies from seed to exit at Fivestars and led product launches at Checkr before joining Apollo as COO in 2024, Curl was elevated to CEO in February 2026 after effectively running the company for a year. His thesis: AI should not merely recommend - it should act.
Abhijit Mitra
Abhijit Mitra is the chief executive of Outreach, the Seattle-based sales execution platform used by Cisco, McKesson, Okta, SAP, Siemens and Verizon. A self-described technologist with more than two decades of product leadership at Oracle, SAP, ServiceNow and Commure, he was elevated from President of Product & Technology to CEO in September 2024, succeeding co-founder Manny Medina. He is reorienting the company around agentic AI for revenue teams.
Sujan Patel
Sujan Patel is a serial entrepreneur, growth marketer, and SaaS operator best known as co-founder of Mailshake (a sales engagement platform used by 38,000+ professionals) and managing partner of Ramp Ventures, a B2B SaaS acquisition firm. A college dropout who earned $200K/year through SEO expertise, he has co-founded and scaled multiple companies, co-authored '100 Days of Growth' (50,000+ copies sold), contributed 200+ articles to Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur, and built a portfolio of bootstrapped SaaS businesses acquired through Ramp Ventures.
Max Altschuler
Max Altschuler is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author who built Sales Hacker from a 4-person meetup into a 170,000-subscriber media company, sold it to Outreach, re-bought it back, and then accidentally founded GTMfund - a $76M operator-led VC firm. He wrote three books (including the Wiley bestseller 'Hacking Sales'), invested early in Outreach and Gong, and is now one of the most influential voices in go-to-market strategy and B2B sales.