Zylo
Eric Christopher built a remarkable career in enterprise software sales before founding Zylo. After spending over 7 years at ExactTarget as a Senior Business Development Manager—where he met High Alpha's Scott Dorsey—he progressed to VP of Sales at Shoutlet, managing global sales teams. He then led revenue operations at Sprout Social where he oversaw customer relationships for over 11,000 customers. These experiences gave Eric deep insight into how enterprises manage software spending and the inefficiencies in existing solutions.
Zylo's founding moment reflected Eric's credibility in the SaaS space. The company successfully raised over $12M from some of the best investors in the business, including Byron at Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, GGV Capital, Semil Shah at Haystack, and the team at High Alpha. This backing from both traditional VCs and strategic corporate investors validated the problem space Eric had identified.
Throughout the SaaStr podcast interview, Eric shared crucial insights about transitioning from founder-led sales to building a sales team, navigating early customer acquisition strategies, managing growth through the 50-person employee milestone, and adapting to the higher execution bar required in modern SaaS compared to the 2009 era. He emphasized the importance of logo quality over quantity in early customer acquisition and discussed how discounting should be strategically used to extract maximum value.
- •Eric's deep operational experience across multiple enterprise SaaS companies gave him credibility with investors and customers—he wasn't building blindly but solving problems he had witnessed firsthand.
- •The company secured backing from both traditional VCs and strategic corporate investors like Salesforce, suggesting Zylo solved a real pain point that enterprises were actively trying to address.
- •Eric's prior success leading revenue operations for 11,000+ customers at Sprout Social demonstrated he understood how to scale sales organizations, a critical capability for an early-stage SaaS company.
- 1.Build deep expertise in your target market before founding—spend years in customer-facing roles at scale to understand the real inefficiencies and pain points you'll address.
- 2.Leverage your professional network and credibility to attract top-tier investors; Eric's relationships from ExactTarget and beyond opened doors at Bessemer and other leading firms.
- 3.Apply lessons from previous scaling experiences to your own company—Eric's experience managing sales teams and hitting critical milestones like the 50-person threshold informed how he approached building Zylo.
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