Steli Efti

Yes.

So I've been a lifelong entrepreneur originally from Europe.

I came to Silicon Valley 10 years ago and I've started a number of companies.

I would say my entrepreneurial superpower is sales and communication.

So I've been hustling my whole life and I had spectacular failures and some decent successes.

So here we are.

Which success are you most proud of so far?

I would absolutely say CloseR has been the biggest success in terms of just the size and the impact of the business.

It's a very small team.

We're less than 20 people and we're driving many, many millions in revenue and are competing with massive organizations.

And it's not just the revenue that we make and the impact that the product had, but also just everything about this business in terms of

The people I work with, the customers we touch, even with our marketing and blog posts, the kind of impact we have in helping startups and new companies succeed by selling better has been pretty tremendous.

I do remember what the first year revenue was.

It was a few hundred thousand in revenue.

That's not horrible.

No, no, no.

But to be fair, this is not quite fair to frame it that way because we had started as a services business called Elastic Sales.

And in running a services business within the first year of running Elastic Sales, we had developed this internal piece of software called Close.io.

And a year later, we launched the software product.

But we launched it with a lot of kind of