Exit Stories

On the season 3 finale of Exit Stories, Pendo Co-founder Eric Boduch joins our host Kevin Mosley.

For those unfamiliar, Pendo is a software company that helps clients collect data on how customers use their products. Eric recently exited the company to launch his own startup venture studio, 24 & Up, in early 2022.

During this episode, Eric talks about his early entrepreneurial background, which includes selling ice cream on the beach, and how he took these lessons into the tech space. He talks meeting Todd Olson, who is now the CEO of Pendo, and launching their first startup, Cerebellum, a data integration software company, in 1999. They almost sold the company for $60 million, but the deal fell through because of the dot-com bust. Todd and Eric parted ways after that, but Eric stayed in the startup space.

They soon came together again to start what we know today as Pendo. Fast forward to today, Pendo is the second-largest unicorn in the Triangle and is valued at $2.5 billion.

On this week's episode of Exit Stories, Ascend Goals Co-founder Christine Nicodemus joins our host Kevin Mosley.

Ascend was created in 2019 as a simple goal setting app for high school students, but quickly evolved into something much more. Together with Reg Gabriel, Christine built the company into a student empowerment software platform that helps schools and mentoring organizations cultivate, track, and measure their goals and achievements. She talks about seeking acquisition opportunities early on and being acquired by edtech partner, Aperture Education. In 2021, the combined companies struck a deal worth $18 million with the largest school district in the country, the New York City Department of Education, which proved to be a major win for them. Aperture was acquired by Riverside Insights in May 2022. Christine also discusses working with an investment bank to sell the company, which included managing the IOIs and LOIs.

In this episode of Exit Stories, Karly Pavlinac, the co-founder and former CEO of WAAM, joins our host Kevin Mosley. WAAM was a digital training app connecting world-class trainers to individuals worldwide.

The idea came to her while she was working at an architectural firm and teaching paddle board yoga in Hawaii during the summer of 2017. From personal experience, she understood how difficult it was for fitness trainers to scale their businesses.

It wasn't an easy journey, but Karly was determined to succeed, even if that meant sleeping on a blow-up mattress in her parents' living room for two years. She discussed working with Cofounders Capital, recruiting celebrity trainers to join the app, and the lessons she has learned along the way. In 2021, Karly and her team discussed pivoting from mobile workouts to physical goods. That's when St. James came along and acquired WAAM.

In this episode of Exit Stories, Ryan O'Donnell, the co-founder and former CEO of EmployUs, joins our host Kevin Mosley. EmployUs is a software company that aims to help employers get qualified applicants through referrals.

As a student at NC State, Ryan launched a startup called Pennies 4 Progress, which ignited his entrepreneurial spirit. He worked as a recruiter post-grad and quickly realized referrals were the most effective way to recruit. At the time, employee referrals were mainly tracked manually. So, Ryan created a tool to accompany his work, and help companies automate their referral programs. Alongside serial entrepreneur Jeff Stocks, he launched EmployUs in 2015. The company grew to over 100 clients across multiple industries, primarily medium and large companies. It even made NC TECH's Top 10 Startups to Watch list. Fast forward to 2021, EmployUs was acquired by Chicago-based Hireology.

In this episode of Exit Stories, Chris Romeo, the co-founder and former CEO of Security Journey, joins our host Kevin Mosley. Romeo is a lifelong cybersecurity professional who embarked on an entrepreneurial path. At Cisco, he developed the company’s security training program, the Cisco Security Ninja. It aimed to teach developers and engineers the basics of cybersecurity and secure coding. The high demand for such a program outside of Cisco led Romeo to resign in 2016, and launch the cloud-based platform Security Journey, which teaches developers how to improve security in their own companies. Earlier this year, Pittsburgh’s HackEDU acquired the company. Romeo shares the ‘Security Journey’ and what lies ahead in this episode.

On this episode of Exit Stories, Bill Spruill, the founder and former CEO of Global Data Consortium (GDC), joins our host Kevin Mosley. GDC is an award winning worldwide digital identity verification platform. 

From being in the enterprise data space to joining AddressDoctor, Spruill shares how everything he learned prepared him for GDC. Early on, the company struggled to find product market fit, and after losing their sales lead, a decision was debated on whether the company should close. Nevertheless, he and the team set a simple goal: to grow 10% each month and see what happens. A few years later, in 2022, GDC was acquired by the London Stock Exchange for $300M, one of the largest deals of recent years to come out of the Triangle. 

In this episode of Exit Stories, serial entrepreneur Robbie Allen chats with our host Kevin Mosley.

Robbie shares his journey in launching his website StatSheet, which transformed sports data into written content. In 2011, the company expanded to non-sports content and was renamed Automated Insights. Ai went on to produce over 1.5B pieces of automated content and release their natural language generation platform called WordSmith; they had customers like Yahoo and Associated Press.

In February 2015, soon after raising its Series B round, Ai was acquired by Vista Equity Partners. Robbie details how the company was able to make a successful pivot. He also explains why they sold soon after a fundraising round, and the patent technicality that saved the deal.

On this episode of Exit Stories, Greg Clary, the co-founder of Mi-Corporation, joins our host Kevin Mosley.

Mi-Co is a leading enterprise mobile software company specializing in audits, inspections, surveys and assessments. Clary ran the company as CEO until it was acquired by IdeaGen in 2021. He chats with Kevin about its' early development, its involvement with Microsoft and Apple, and how they grew their revenue by about 50% in 2020.

On this episode of Exit Stories, Neal Goffman—who is a seasoned sales, marketing and operations executive who specializes in startup success—joined our host Kevin Mosley.

Goffman served as the Chief Operating Officer at Vanguard Software, a global provider of cloud-based integrated business planning solutions, from 2016 and during the company's acquisition by Wolters Kluwer for $110M.

Goffman details exactly how he built their sales, marketing, and delivery teams, their channel partner program, and their “go to market” strategy.

Welcome to season three! In this episode, host Kevin Mosley talks with entrepreneur Brian Reale, who has more than 15 years of experience building tech companies. He co-founded and runs Durham-based ProcessMaker, one of the world's leading Open Source BPM & Workflow Software Suites. It is now available in 17 different languages and has been downloaded more than 1 million times. In February 2021, Aldrich Capital Partners invested $45 million in the company, taking majority stake. Brian managed to squeeze the nearly 15 year business journey into 40 minutes. Tune in to hear him discuss bootstrapping, meeting with financial advisors, OEM deals, relocating to Durham, and more.