Company kick-offs don't come around too often! This very unique event will feature 3 small fireside chats with Pipedrive's team and an external engineering professional. One not to be missed.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is the tool of choice for salespeople in scaling companies – the sales CRM pipeline platform that makes selling simple. Founded by seasoned sales professionals, Pipedrive launched in 2010. It is one of the fastest growing cloud-driven SaaS companies worldwide, having raised $80m in funding from investors including Insight Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Paua Ventures. Today, 75,000 customers in 170 countries, and across 100+ industries leverage Pipedrives' award-winning software to manage their sales process.
In July, Pipedrive announced its official launch in the Czech Republic with a formidable product development base in Prague, tapping on the local resources and talent to help make Pipedrive and its customers even more unstoppable.
Agenda
We will discuss:
1. What is Pipedrive - Martin Henk (Co-Founder & VP Product, Pipedrive)
2. Staying innovative in a growing company – Maria Lasprilla (Head of Core Product, Pipedrive), Ashwini Raman (Lead Technical PM, Facebook), Thijs Niks (Senior Product Manager, Uber)
3. Scaling and motivating Engineering teams – Sergei Anikin (CTO, Pipedrive), Tomas Rehor (Engineering Manager & Site Lead, Pipedrive) and Radek Domín (CTO, Storyous)
We'll have time for some Q&A too!
The interviews will be conducted by Patrik Juranek who runs Startup Grind Prague, giving him a strong background and a lot of experience with global tech companies and startups.
Martin, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Pipedrive, is a serial startup entrepreneur and has first hand experience in building highly scalable useful and usable software products. While he honestly admits he has managed to fail five startup ideas before co-founding Pipedrive, he has efficiently tied his skills of planning, organising and coordinating development processes to results that help over 75,000 sales teams globally get better organized and more productive.
Currently VP of Product residing in the Pipedrive Lisbon office, Martin is responsible for running about a dozen product teams all responsible for a certain area of the product. He has also served as Head of Customer Support and Chief Technology Officer at Pipedrive. Martin is slightly obsessed with hiring and finding a perfect fit for everyone involved. He is passionate about adapting Agile and Scrum for product management and knows how to keep product managers and product teams productive and delivering value, all the while happy and engaged.
Martin has been coding since the 90s when he started building CMS based websites in high-school to pay for his computer gear. He co-founded an online booking startup with his college friends while studying Advertising and Media in Tallinn University. After going through one of the more public Estonian startup failures with United Dogs and Cats as the CTO he ended up co-founding Pipedrive.
Sergei, CTO at Pipedrive is a strong supporter of agile software development and has a proven track-record of scaling the work of large engineering teams by applying Scrum development methodology. With domain knowledge in banking, telecommunications, sales and start-ups, Sergei believes that it is crucial to minimize the friction and time between the thought and the implementation, to minimize the amount of work which needs to be done through using the best tools available, and automation. Sergei also thinks it is crucial to let technical and product leadership focus on the right things — technical legacy should never prevent the teams from innovating.
As CTO at Pipedrive Sergei Anikin is responsible for managing Pipedrive development and infrastructure departments. As part of Pipedrive’s executive team Sergei is responsible for top priority, business critical efforts and transforming development organisation into a high performing, top-notch team. In just 5 years, Sergei has grown Pipedrive’s engineering team from 10 to over 200 engineers.
Prior to Pipedrive, Sergei worked at Skype for over 7 years, filling the roles of Billing Architect and Team Lead. Most notable projects that Sergei has an impact on in Skype were Facebook Video calling (using Skype technologies) and Skype for Windows 8 client development. Sergei’s career began at Hansabank where he started as an Internet Bank developer and moved his way up to become the manager of the development team.
*Ashwini Raman* is a product and technical leader with extensive experience leading teams and building 0-1 products in Ad Tech and SaaS. Currently, she works with a talented team at Facebook London, enabling meaningful connections between people and businesses. Prior to this, Ashwini was on the Ads Delivery team in Menlo Park, California. Ashwini started her career as an engineer and then moved to product. She has held product roles at Salesforce and Yahoo.
In her free time, Ashwini loves to read, go on long art walks and visit the many museums in London with her husband and two kids.
Maria Lasprilla, Head of Core Product at Pipedrive is responsible for driving the vision of the core product and helping build a team of talented product managers who work on building the best sales tool out there. As a product vision and strategy advocate Maria’s tasks include listening to the feedback and problems manifested by Pipedrive’s customers, working closely with research and design on finding the best solutions, preaching and helping people within and outside of the company to understand what it is that Pipedrive’s Product Management does, with the emphasis on the why and the how.
Prior to joining Pipedrive over three years ago Maria worked in product development in for two Fin Tech companies, where she kicked off her product manager career. She loves dogs, and is passionate about learning and helping others learn and develop. Maria has also worked as a teacher and is particularly passionate about getting involved in voluntary work to contribute to solving general world problems. Helping bring in more diversity to the IT industry has been her main voluntary focus in the last 5 years closely with the team at MTÜ Tech Sisters.
Tomas, Engineering Manager and Site Lead, is responsible for setting up Pipedrive’s development centre in Prague, Czech Republic. Tomas has a wide range of experience from different kinds of environments in Software Engineering, including 10 years at Skype both in Prague and Palo Alto, CA, and working as a Digital Nomad at Toptal, where he managed to work from 14 different countries in just 9 months - his favourite experience so far. His most recent experience was as CTO in groceries delivery startup Košík.cz, which was the most intense yet the most valuable training for what’s coming at Pipedrive.
As an Engineering Manager and a Site Lead, Tomáš is responsible for hiring strong Developers who will fit into Pipedrive’s unique culture, as well as improve existing, and deliver new, Pipedrive features. He will work closely with a whole range of internal teams to set up Pipedrive Prague’s identity and theme, ensuring Prague will become a valuable contributor to Pipedrive’s success. As Site Lead, Tomáš is determined to root the Czech branch into the local startup and sales communities and give back insights and experience both him and Pipedrive have learnt over time.
Senior IT professional with 15+ years of experience in leadership roles in the software industry. A recognized leader with strong communication skills and emphasys on agile way of thinking. Led complex and cross-functional teams across time zones. Gained wisdom from startups as well as the corporate world. Motivated and driven mainly by seriously hard tasks and challenging requirements. Able to take responsibility and deliver.
