How to scale sales & marketing in your deeptech software venture and deliver an $85m exit, Shirin Dehghan - Arieso & OpenSignal

Shirin Dehghan was the Founder CEO at Arieso and is currently Chairwoman at OpenSignal.

Arieso provided subscriber experience geo-location and network optimization solutions for wireless operators and service providers. Funded by Qualcomm Ventures and Oxford Capital Partners, Arieso expanded across EMEA, Asia Pacific and The Americas before being acquired by JDSU for $85m in 2013.

Shirin now Chairs the board at OpenSignal, Funded by Passion Capital, O’Reilly AlphaTech and Qualcomm Ventures. OpenSignal crowd-source data on the performance and coverage of wireless networks around the world and use that data to produce independent and unbiased coverage maps for any network around the world.  Since launch, their mobile app has been downloaded over 20 million times and billions of data points have been collected in over 200 countries.

In this week's episode we’re focusing on the importance of sales and marketing for technical founders and the challenges of international expansion for startups and scaleups. You will learn:

• The lesson that all technical founders must learn – sometimes the hard way - about the importance of creating a strong sales and marketing machine
• About a blueprint for international expansion for enterprise software ventures
• How Shirin resurrected her start-up from “near death” to achieve a 6x exit just a few years later
• About the need to treat VCs like customers when you’re approaching them for funding

For more insights into OpenSignal check out https://opensignal.com and for advice on successfully scaling your software venture head over to http://alpinasearch.com