EP 6: Future of SAAS with Dennis Cail the CEO of Zirtue, Kate Bradley Chernis the CEO of Lately, Matthew Barnett the Founder of Bonjoro, and Shripriya Mahesh a Partner at Spero Ventures

Four SAAS founders tell their stories and look to the future of SAAS.

Connect with incredible founders at https://entre.link/EntrepreneurShow

Dennis Cail, Co-founder & CEO of Zirtue

Dennis is a FinTech technology executive, investor, and Navy Veteran with over 20 years of successful entrepreneurial experience along with a distinguished Multi-National Cross-Border M&A track record across leading FinTech, SaaS, business applications, and technology-enabled companies. Dennis led the M&A Delivery Team at PwC where he served as Managing Director and Co-Head of Application Integration. Prior, Dennis was Co-Founder and CEO of Uptown Financial Group where he oversaw the launch and scale of three business applications before successfully exiting. Dennis received a BS in Computer Science and an MBA in Finance from Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business.

Kate Bradley Chernis, Co-founder & CEO of Lately

Kate Bradley Chernis is the Founder & CEO of Lately, which uses AI to automatically learn what sales and marketing messaging your customers are most likely to engage with so you can STOP GUESSING. It then builds a writing model, based on this data, to transform long-form content like blogs, podcasts and videos into DROVES of targeted, pre-vetted social posts – in multiple languages.

Matthew Barnett, Founder of Bonjoro

Matt launched Bonjoro as a sales hack for his first agency, where he would send every new lead a personal video to delight and surprise them whilst taking a boat to work. What started as fun over a few beers quickly snowballed into a high growth, funded company, and the team are now spread across 6 countries, headquartered out of Sydney Australia. As a design-led founder, Matts love of building great products is only surpassed by his total commitment to building great business culture. Bonjoros goal is to be the next Zappos, to be the most loved brand in the world.

Shripriya Mahesh, Partner at Spero Ventures

When we founded Spero Ventures in 2018, we thought about what people might want in the future. We kept coming back to the idea that no matter what happens, people will always care about the basics: health and wellness; work and a sense of purpose; and human connection. So that’s what we decided to invest in.

Before starting Spero, I ran Emerging Tech investing at Omidyar Network. I loved the sense of purpose of bringing more opportunity to more people. We decided to spin out of Omidyar Network in order to invest in for-profit companies that shared the same purpose.

Prior to Omidyar Network, I worked with Pierre Omidyar to launch First Look Media. Before that, I worked at eBay, which Pierre founded in 1995. eBay’s mission — to enable economic opportunity around the world — felt like the ultimate purpose for the internet. I led the global product team and later I led US product marketing. Before eBay, I led product at a startup called NextCard.