Jeff Judge is the Founder and CEO of Bright, a startup that helps SaaS companies quickly understand their core metrics, and gives them the tools to grow faster. Bright just graduated from the 2016 Techstars class here in Chicago. Before founding Bright, Jeff cofounded and led Signal (acquired) and he was an early engineer at Orbitz. 

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• Why Jeff founded Bright after selling Signal
• What kind of optimizations Bright can deliver
• What setting up Bright entails
• Why he applied to Techstars as an experienced founder
• What he got out of the Techstars accelerator
• Why he is a big fan of having a distributed team
• The tools Jeff finds helpful to make a distributed team work
• Why he would have raised money earlier 
• Why he’d like to see Chicago tech be more collaborative
• The motivation behind starting the Bright conference
• How to plan a successful conference in just two weeks
• What goes into making the perfect pitch
• The importance of having the right support structure in enterprise selling
• The value of submitting imperfect creations

Selected Links From The Episode:

• Fredrik Olsen, CTO at Bright
• Brian Flanagan, CPO at Bright
• Troy Henikoff, Techstars Chicago Managing Director
• Brian Luerssen, Techstars Chicago Managing Director
• Dan Willoughby, Techstars Chicago Program Manager 
• SaaStr Annual Conference
• Bright Conference

Favorite Books:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
• Managing Oneself by Peter Ferdinand Drucker
• Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande