Pando
Barbara Gago has spent her career in B2B SaaS, working on disruptive products in people tech and the future of work. After roles at CultureAmp, Greenhouse, and most recently as CMO at Miro, she noticed a critical gap: leaders lacked proper tools to coach and develop their teams with structure and transparency. Traditional performance reviews perpetuate bias and systemic problems in how companies recruit, develop, and progress talent. This realization sparked the idea for Pando—a platform to kill performance reviews and replace them with a better way.
Pando is intentionally opinionated. Rather than offering maximum flexibility, the platform enforces best practices because the current way performance reviews happen is broken. Barbara believes that fixing compensation gaps after the fact (which many companies do annually) doesn't solve the root problem. Instead, companies need to create transparency around levels, expectations, and competencies—and build accountability on both manager and employee sides. The platform requires users to adopt a more structured, less biased approach to performance evaluation and employee progression.
Barbara's approach draws heavily from her playbook at Greenhouse, where she helped introduce the concept of structured recruiting as an opinionated way to reduce bias and improve hiring. She's applying the same philosophy here: there's a better way to develop people, and the software should enforce it.
While Pando technically fits into the performance management category (which already has budget and awareness), Barbara is committed to building the longer-term category of "employee progression." This mirrors her approach at Miro, where the company positioned itself in established categories (online whiteboard) while simultaneously building thought leadership around visual collaboration. For now, Pando will market itself as performance management but gradually shift the narrative toward progression, development, and eliminating bias in career advancement.
Similar Companies
247.ai
$25.0M/mo247.ai, founded by PV Cannon in 2000, is an AI-powered customer service automation platform serving over 150 enterprise customers with $300M+ in ARR. The company raised only $20M from Sequoia (2003) and bootstrap, achieving 10% net profit margins while maintaining a 12-month CAC payback period and 100% net revenue retention. Despite a security breach setback around 2018, 247.ai has recovered and recently achieved 20% new revenue booking growth in their best quarter.
iCIMS
$13.3M/moiCIMS is a bootstrapped SaaS provider founded in 1999 that dominates the talent acquisition software market as the #2 player, serving 3,500 enterprise customers with an average monthly spend of $4,000. The company exited 2017 with $160M ARR and is targeting 25%+ annual growth while maintaining profitability, recently acquiring Text Recruit to expand into candidate messaging and recruitment advertising.
Zoom
$12.0M/moZoom is a freemium SaaS video conferencing platform founded by Eric Yuan in July 2011 after he left Cisco to build a next-generation collaboration solution. The company has grown to 850,000+ paying customers across individual, SMB, and enterprise segments, generating over $12M in monthly recurring revenue with approximately 100% year-over-year growth. Rather than focusing on customer stickiness or aggressive growth targets, Zoom emphasizes customer happiness and organic word-of-mouth acquisition, which has proven highly effective in driving viral adoption.
Madwire
$10.0M/moMadwire is a comprehensive SaaS platform for small businesses (1-100 employees) that combines CRM, payments, invoicing, billing, e-commerce, and multi-channel marketing tools in a single platform. Founded in 2009, the company has grown to $120M ARR serving 20,000 customers with an average revenue per user of $500/month, while maintaining strong unit economics ($3,000-$4,000 CAC with 3-month payback) and recently turning profitable with a focus on reaching 15-20% EBITDA margins. The company is exploring an IPO within 12-18 months without having raised substantial capital beyond an initial $7.5M.
SwiftPage
$7.0M/moSwiftPage is a CRM and marketing automation platform founded in 2001 that targets small businesses. Under CEO John Oshel's leadership since 2012, the company scaled from 60,000 customers with $26.2M revenue in 2015 to 84,000 customers today with an estimated ARR of $36M+, maintaining 1.5% monthly logo churn and a 6-7 month payback period with a sub-$500 CAC.