Meet SaaStr’s Most Respected Leaders of 2019. Our most popular CEOs, COOs and Presidents that spoke at SaaStr Annual 2019. Curious how we came up with this list? We found our most popular speakers by speaker views and likes, session bookmarks and ratings weighing categories more heavily for overall rating than initial interest. Using magic (standard deviation) we came up with the best of the best of our sessions as voted by you, our SaaStr community.
Every week we’ll be rolling out new winners until we get to the very pinnacle of our list. Keep your eyes peeled as we unveil the list and a bit more about your favorite leaders.
SaaStr’s Most Respected Leader Awards Number: 19 to 15
Eric Yuan Zoom Founder/CEO
About Eric…
Eric Yuan’s session was heavily bookmarked before SaaStr Annual was even underway, landing Eric at number fifteen. Zoom is a cloud video conferencing provider that lets users collaborate, chat and host webinars across mobile devices and desktops. Zoom recently went public on the NYSE, rallying 72% on its first day of trading.
Eric Yuan is as synonymous with Zoom as he is with his motto of delivering happiness. As he likes to say “Your happiness is my happiness”. Before founding Zoom, Eric was a VP of Engineering for WebEx from 1997-2007 and Cisco from 2007-2011. Zoom’s unique public offering was hotly anticipated due to its already profitable status. Not too shabby for a freemium product.
Dug Song Duo Security Co-Founder/CEO, Cisco GM
About Dug…
Dug Song lands at number sweet sixteen on our list with high engagement from attendees who attended and loved the content from his session. Duo Security, now a part of Cisco, is a provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered via the cloud.
Dug Song founded Duo Security in 2019 and grew the company as CEO until it’s acquisition in October of 2018. The Ann Arbor, Michigan based company was acquired for $2.35B in cash. Over the years, Dug has been an advisor to many startups from Mu Dynamics, Olark and Tech Brewery to Trace and Stratos Card. He is also a Techstars mentor and sits on the board of Censys.
Tom Bogan Adaptive Insights CEO/Workday EVP
About Tom…
Tom Bogan is number seventeen on our list with highest marks in attendee interest in both the session but Tom as a presenter. Adaptive Insights is a cloud-based platform for modernizing business planning.
Tom Bogan is the EVP of Workday’s Planning Business Unit but has a long history in both tech and finance. He was the CFO of SQA and Orange Nassau. He went on to serve as CEO of Avatar Technologies and Pacific Data before joining Rational Software as President and COO until its acquisition by IBM. From 2004-2009 he was a partner at Greylock. Tom was CEO of Adaptive Insights which was acquired by Workday in June of 2018 for $1.5B.
Matt Mullenweg Automattic Co-Founder/CEO
About Matt…
Matt Mullenweg lands at number eighteen on our list with highest marks in speaker likes. This means that our attendees might have liked the session separately but they loved Matt as a presenter. Automattic is a web development company best known for WordPress.com. The company’s name is a play on its founder’s name, “Matt”. Over the years it has acquired companies like Woo, Parka, Longreads, Lean Domain and Cloudup amongst many others.
Matt Mullenweg is the Founder and CEO of Automattic. Prior to Automattic, Matt was a senior product manager for CNET, Co-Founder of GMPG and Principal at Audrey Capital.
From 2003 on he has been with WordPress in a role he best describes himself: “My roles with WordPress have spanned development, support, design, systems, event planning, janitorial, and public advocacy — thankfully, the community now includes people far better than me at all those tasks.”
Jeff Lawson Twilio Co-Founder/CEO
About Jeff…
Jeff Lawson sits at number nineteen on our list with incredibly high session averages by our attendees. His joint session with Glitch CEO Anil Dash proved to be highly effective in communicating an often hard to translate the message, “how to build a billion in ARR while being an ethical leader”. Twilio allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, text messages, and other communications through its web service APIs.
Jeff Lawson began his career as Founder, CEO and CTO of Versity.com, a venture he embarked on part way through his time at the University of Michigan. He went on to become the founding CTO at Stubhub, Technical Product Manager with Amazon and finally Founder and CTO of Nine Star from 200-2008. In 2008, Jeff founded Twilio and has since seen the company through it’s 2016 IPO and beyond.
