Helping SaaS Companies Grow Through Revenue Sharing: Avangate CEO Carl Theobald (Part 1)

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Carl Theobald is the CEO of Avangate, a e-commerce and partner management solutions provider for software-as-a-service companies. Theobald has held senior executive roles at both large enterprise and venture-backed software companies, including being a VP at Oracle, founder at RubiconSoft, and SVP at Serena Software. At Oracle, Theobald helped establish the CRM division, delivering sales, marketing and e-commerce products that generated in excess of tenfold revenue growth over two years. Most recently, as SVP of products and customer service, he launched the first SaaS-based solution at Serena Software, which was taken private by Silver Lake Partners for $1.2 billion.

Sramana: Carl, let’s start with your personal background. Where does the story begin?

Carl Theobald: I had two passions in life growing up. One was writing music and the other was writing software. I started doing both at 10 years old. I quickly discovered that I would not make a lot of money pursuing music, so I entered Princeton University to pursue an engineering degree. After that I went to Stanford and joined a PhD for engineering economic systems because I thought the idea of using quantitative methods to solve real-world problems was interesting. I was working at Oracle part-time while I was at Stanford and ended up enrolling full-time into Oracle.

I spent 10 years at Oracle running major product lines. I started in ERP and then went into CRM product lines. I then went off and did my own startup. There was no code, no customers or revenue, so it truly was a ground-floor startup. I had a great experience doing that and getting to a point of first revenue. Most recently I spent time at Serena Software, which is a mid-cap company that I helped take private with Silver Lake Partners.

Sramana: Are you a founder at Avangate?

Carl Theobald: After my time at Serena, I looked around for a new entrepreneurial opportunity in the SaaS space. E-commerce was exciting for me and I found an opportunity at Avangate in 2011. They were looking for someone who could take the company to the next level. The company had started in 2006 with the focus to find an easy-to-use, self-service interface for SaaS companies to grow their revenue online. They help little guys sell their solutions internationally.

Oftentimes, the easier thing is to build the technology and service. Getting to revenue and getting to first sale is very difficult. Building up a sales organization is very expensive. In the new world, more and more sales are happening online and less is happening with traditional reps. We helped those companies move online with their business. They sell and gain their revenue online in more than 100 countries worldwide, literally, overnight. This allows product marketing folks to bring more products to market in a self-service way.

Our business model is revenue sharing, which makes us risk free. Companies do not have to put down any money to get up and running. They can pay as they go. That was very successful to me.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Helping SaaS Companies Grow Through Revenue Sharing: Avangate CEO Carl Theobald
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