social-selling
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Jon Ferrara and the things we forget
A pile of concert tickets, a $5,000 software company, and a career spent keeping conversations from disappearing. For Nimble founder Jon Ferrara, remembering people has always been the point.
The Advisor Has Two Audiences: The Client and Compliance
Hearsay made social posts, texts and calls usable at the scale of a financial firm. Its clever trick was to let an advisor sound like a person while giving the institution a record it could defend.
The Jewelry Party Learned to Use a Link
Stella & Dot built a jewelry business in other people's living rooms. The living room has shrunk to a phone screen, but the wager is the same: a recommendation from someone you know can make a necklace feel worth trying on.
Trapit Put the Company in the News Feed
A news reader born in the same research lab as Siri became a tool for salespeople with something useful to say. The difficult part was learning when to let the machine stop talking.
Michael Labate Put a Number on Trust - Now He Is Selling the AI Shift
Before enterprise AI became the boardroom’s favorite noun, Michael Labate was testing how trust travels through a sales organization. His career is a study in turning relationships into measurable systems - and then rebuilding those systems when the technology changes.
Cameron Brain Bet the Company on Your Most Underrated Media Channel
Before employee advocacy had a tidy category name, Cameron Brain was learning the awkward, useful truth behind it: companies have audiences, but people have relationships.
EveryoneSocial Spent 14 Years Turning the Employee Repost Into an Enterprise Growth Channel
Corporate social posts are easy to ignore. EveryoneSocial built a business on the wager that employees can travel farther - if companies give them useful content, room for a human voice and numbers the CFO can inspect.
Mike Derezin
Mike Derezin is a technology executive and lifelong entrepreneur who became CEO of Teaching Strategies, an early-childhood education company, in May 2025. He spent nearly a decade at LinkedIn, where he helped launch and scale LinkedIn Sales Solutions (Sales Navigator) and later ran LinkedIn Learning Solutions, growing it into one of the largest professional-development platforms in the world. Before LinkedIn he founded companies including Porvenir and VoxPop, advised Fortune 500 firms as a Bain & Company consultant, and taught elementary-school computer classes in Oakland and Santiago, Chile.
RateS
RateS was a Singapore-born, Indonesia-focused social commerce platform that let anyone - housewives, students, small shop owners - start an online business with no inventory and no upfront capital. The app sourced products directly from suppliers and handled warehousing, logistics, payments and financing, while its network of micro-entrepreneurs handled sales through their social networks. Spun out of the foreign-exchange startup RateX, RateS grew to more than 500,000 resellers across Indonesia's tier-2 and tier-3 cities before being acquired by e-commerce enabler SIRCLO in 2023.
Nimble CRM
Nimble CRM is a relationship-focused customer relationship management platform built for small businesses and teams. Founded by CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara — the co-founder of GoldMine Software — Nimble integrates deeply with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to automatically enrich contact records, manage sales pipelines, and enable AI-powered prospecting. With transparent single-plan pricing at $24.90/user/month, Nimble positions itself as the smart, simple alternative to complex enterprise CRM systems, serving 10,000+ customers worldwide.