TUW i²c Founder & Investor Talk #62: Craig Soules (Director Product Management @freshworks)

Event Details

Topic: One researcher’s journey into business: What went right and what went wrong

About this Event

The Founder & Investor Talks organized by the Innovation Incubation Center (i²c) at TU Wien enable the audience to learn first-hand from experienced founders, investors, and innovators. They share their international experiences, dos and don’ts and lessons learned during inspiring talks and answer questions in interactive Q&A-sessions.

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More about Craig Soules Ph.D.

Craig is a researcher and entrepreneur with a deep interest in data and systems. After receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, he joined HP Labs leading research and development on a new kind of SQL database that traded data freshness for performance and scalability, without giving up transactional semantics like noSQL systems. Frustrated with corporate productization, Craig co-founded Natero with the aim to help businesses leverage data to improve their operations; and, in early 2016, Natero launched it’s customer success product to help businesses take a data-driven approach to customer management. In 2019, Natero was acquired by Freshworks to complete it’s Customer-for-life vision, allowing businesses to manage customers from lead to advocate and everything in-between.

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The Talk will focus on…

One researcher’s journey into business: What went right and what went wrong

In this presentation, I will talk about my personal journey from research to startup to acquisition by a Silicon Valley unicorn. I will try to outline places where my technical academic background helped in entrepreneurship and places where it led me astray. Hopefully, my story of near-failure can help provide others an easier path to success!