Christmas came a few days early this year when we announced Vista Equity acquired a majority stake in Salesloft. Salesloft powers the modern revenue workspace for digital selling, insights, and coaching. Think of software that helps sales team significantly increase their effectiveness at selling and, naturally, is directly in the path of revenue. Vista Equity, for their part, is continuing the strategy of acquiring successful SaaS startups that define new categories.
Salesloft is partly a story of major pivots. 10 years ago the initial product was a job change alerts app that notified sales reps when a contact joined a new company. That idea failed and the company morphed into a contact scraping and leads database. While the prospector product took off and generated millions of revenue, it was eventually shutdown. From there, the final pivot was to a sales engagement platform that achieved the proverbial hockey stick growth and recently hit $100M in annual recurring revenue. Prior to the Vista Equity acquisition, Salesloft had $246M of funding (Crunchbase) and 762 employees (LinkedIn).
Salesloft is mostly the story of the will, determination, and grit of the entrepreneur Kyle Porter. From a full reboot of the business in the early days, to multiple pivots, and recently navigating the pandemic, Kyle has endured the high highs and low lows of entrepreneurship many times over. And, one of his super powers is recruiting an amazing team starting with Rob Foreman. Rob was introduced to Kyle through a chance encounter at a local event. From there, the two hit it off and developed one of the strongest yin/yang partnerships I’ve ever seen. The team grew to include incredible leaders across all the functions including Ellie, Sydney, Scott, Chad, Steve, and many others.
Of course, Kyle was the visionary all along. Through a strong focus on organization health, heartfelt love for the customer (#saleslove), bold acquisitions of several companies, and masterful fundraising, Kyle operated in one of the most aggressive, yet thoughtful, ways imaginable.
I’m going to miss being on the board of Salesloft for the next stage of the journey but Kyle and the amazing team at Vista Equity will take it to new heights. Being on the Salesloft journey for the last 10 years with Kyle and his team was one of the highlights of my career and I’m incredibly humbled and appreciative to be a small part of it. Onward and upward!
Entrepreneur
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David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
