Serial Entrepreneur Rob Käll on The SaaS Podcast

“Before starting his first company, Rob worked at an enterprise software company, calling it his “Office Space days,” but decided that wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore.”

Cien’s CEO and co-founder Rob Käll joined Omer Khan on The SaaS Podcast to reflect on his personal journey as a serial entrepreneur in the world of SaaS startups.

Before starting his first company, Rob worked at an enterprise software company, calling it his “Office Space days,” but decided that wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore. So, along with his co-founders, he went on to create a business establishing websites for real estate agents.

“This was right after the dot.com crash and we said to ourselves, maybe we should just make a company that does not rely on any external financing – that just provides a service and people pay for it right away. And that’s what we did.”

Three years later, they sold the business in a successful exit.

“What was different from other service companies, was that we kept investing into our underlying technology and scaling up the ability to actually process these data feeds and provide a more sophisticated property search. That became the thing that allowed us to go national.”

Next, shifting from the CTO to the CEO role, he created vacation rental technology company. After struggling and finally succeeding in growing that business, Rob, Ben and Margot created Cien after realizing they could have scaled the business further by measuring the sales factors that really matter.  

The most important thing to remember is that it’s never going to be smooth sailing, says Rob. What sets successful founders apart from the rest is that they are able to roll with the punches and try something different.

Tune into the full episode to find out what other advice Rob had to Omer Khan about scaling SaaS companies and to learn more about Cien.

You can connect with Rob on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Office Space is a Twentieth Century Fox movie from 1999. No endorsement of Cien implied.