Sameer Patel
- CEO at Kahuna
GetLatka interview
How Kahuna Reached Close to 100 Customers and Over 100% Revenue Growth Serving Consumer Marketplaces (Interview with CEO Sameer Patel)
Sameer Patel (CEO of Kahuna) spoke to Nathan Latka on January 5, 2018.
Kahuna figures from the interview
- Annual Revenue Growth (past twelve months)
- Over 100%
- Total Customers (2018)
- Close to 100
- Total Funding Raised
- Close to $50M (all equity)
- Team Size (2018)
- A little shy of 40
“It's a SaaS company, focused on customer engagement for consumer marketplaces. So everybody from, if you're a classified, you're ride sharing like an Uber or an Airbnb or a DoorDash or Yelp or an OpenTable. When you bring buyers and sellers together, Kahuna helps you find the right buyers, spin them up, get them onboarded, get them on platform.”
“It's events and it's the volume at which they use the product that drives it. So as their businesses go, many of them enter new markets, they take us along with it, right?”
“Nobody has nine months in this market. If you're trying to like keep Uber out of your country or Airbnb out of your country, you don't have nine months to make any decision.”
Bio
On August 15th, 2016, I joined Kahuna as CEO and board member. Kahuna enables a new level of authentic engagement between brands and their customers wherever they are, the web, email, mobile, social channels through personalized communication at scale. Powered by big data and machine learning, we help create delightful experiences for every customer with the perfect message, delivered on the right channel, at just the right time. Kahuna is trusted by Yelp, Yahoo!, GoPro, Dollar Shave Club and other leading brands. The company was founded in 2012 and counts Sequoia Capital, SoftTech VC and Tenaya Capital as its lead investors. Kahuna was named Best Places to Work 2015, San Francisco Business. And yes, we're hiring. Most recently, I served as GM at SAP / SuccessFactors overseeing the Collaboration and Hybris Commerce Community Software business. In 13 quarters, SAP Jam scaled to over 34 million subscribers and 1300 customers, and consistently grew at triple-digit billings vs 42% forecasted growth of this category. In a span of 4 years, SAP Jam was named "leader" by 16 research analyst firms. Prior to SAP, I've had 15 years of leading enterprise technology teams in management consulting and the systems integrator business. I'm privileged to have been quoted in publications such as CNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and Harvard Business Review, and I've keynoted events such as CeBIT; Social Business Forum, Milan; GigaOM Future of Work; IBM Connect and others. More here: https://delicious.com/sameer.a.patel/sameerpress I have an undergrad from Babson College in Corporate Finance and Economics and a Masters from Boston University in Management Information Systems. I was a nationally ranked Squash Player and I still love the game.