About Us
ClearSlide is the leading sales engagement platform that empowers sales teams to engage customers and close more business. ClearSlide improves customer-facing interactions (web, email, face-to-face) by providing real-time visibility and analytics for both sellers and sales leaders. As a result, customers achieve higher seller productivity, increased sales management effectiveness, and stronger customer-facing messaging. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, ClearSlide serves thousands of customers, including Rackspace, Thomson Reuters, LinkedIn, AOL and Lexis Nexis.
Executive Team
Al Lieb
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
Al is passionate about leveraging technology to help people connect in the real world. His unique ability to merge technology, product design, strategy and marketing has contributed to a long track record of creating and growing successful companies. In 1998, he co-founded Evite which became the leading event invitation service. Al sets the vision for the company and its products, and drives relentless execution across all fronts. Al earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Dustin Grosse
Chief Operating Officer
Dustin leads the company’s go-to-market strategy with integrated sales, marketing, and services teams focused on delivering long-term customer success. Prior to joining ClearSlide, Dustin was SVP and CMO of DocuSign, where he built its marketing, business development, industry partner and e-commerce capabilities. Dustin has 25 years of sales, marketing, and operations experience, including management positions at Microsoft, PlaceWare Web Conferencing, Covad Communications, McKinsey & Company, and P&G. He earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BS in Economics from the University of California.
Jim Benton
Chief Business Officer & Co-Founder
Jim has built his career around generating revenue by translating customer needs into innovative new products. Prior to ClearSlide, Jim served as VP of Sales at AdBrite, where he was a founding executive and the company's fifth employee. In his first three years at AdBrite, Jim helped grow revenue from $1 million to $30 million. Prior to AdBrite, and following Evite's acquisition by Ticketmaster, Jim contributed his sales expertise to IAC/Ticketmaster.
Mark Lambert
Chief Financial Officer
Mark oversees Finance and Legal at ClearSlide. He brings more than 18 years of leadership in finance, strategic planning, operations and mergers and acquisitions. He has held financial leadership positions at Blurb, Connexus Corporation, Tellme Networks, Yahoo! and 3Com. Mark has a Bachelors' degrees in English and Economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame.
Carmela Krantz
VP Talent & HR
Carmela partners with ClearSlide's leadership team to build a rock star culture and implement strategic and tactical HR initiatives focused on achieving business objectives while the company grows exponentially. Carmela joins ClearSlide after six years as the VP of Human Resources at Ariat International. Carmela has over 20 years of experience, including Design Within Reach, Reactivity, Linuxcare, Sydran Services, Sesame Street Retail Stores, and Gymboree. Carmela earned Bachelor's degrees in Speech Communication and Political Science from the University of Nevada-Reno.
Lawrence Bruhmuller
VP Engineering
Lawrence oversees ClearSlide's engineering efforts, including site operations, sales engineering, and IT support. Previously, Lawrence was the VP of Engineering and Product Management of Data Loss Prevention for Symantec (formerly Vontu), where he led a rapidly growing team delivering the undisputed market leading product. Prior to Vontu, his experience includes a variety of other startups as well as BEA Systems, where he worked on WebLogic Server. Lawrence holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA.
Raj Gossain
VP Product
Raj drives Product and User Experience strategy and execution at ClearSlide. Prior to joining ClearSlide, Raj was VP & GM for new cloud & mobile collaboration apps at Cisco Systems where he ran the Project Squared team. Prior to that he was VP Products for Cisco WebEx. He has an 18 year career in general management, product management and product marketing for global technology companies including Cisco WebEx, Yahoo!, Netscape & AOL. Raj earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Board Members
Al Lieb
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
Al is passionate about leveraging technology to help people connect in the real world. His unique ability to merge technology, product design, strategy and marketing has contributed to a long track record of creating and growing successful companies. In 1998, he co-founded Evite which became the leading event invitation service. Al sets the vision for the company and its products, and drives relentless execution across all fronts. Al earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Jim Benton
Chief Business Officer & Co-Founder
Jim has built his career around generating revenue by translating customer needs into innovative new products. Prior to ClearSlide, Jim served as VP of Sales at AdBrite, where he was a founding executive and the company's fifth employee. In his first three years at AdBrite, Jim helped grow revenue from $1 million to $30 million. Prior to AdBrite, and following Evite's acquisition by Ticketmaster, Jim contributed his sales expertise to IAC/Ticketmaster.
John Lilly
Greylock Partners
John joined Greylock as a partner in 2011. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO. Earlier in his career, John held positions on the executive team at Trilogy Software and as a Senior Scientist in Apple's research labs.
Byron Deeter
Bessemer Venture Partners
Byron is a successful entrepreneur and investor who has focused on cloud computing for more than a dozen years. He founded Trigo Technologies in 1999 where he served as CEO and vice-president of business development until IBM's acquisition of Trigo in 2004. Joining Bessemer in 2005, he has invested in leading cloud companies including Box, Cornerstone OnDemand (CSOD), Criteo, Eloqua (ELOQ), Playdom (acq: Disney), SendGrid, and Twilio. Byron is the author of Bessemer's 10 Laws of Cloud Computing and was named to the Forbes Midas List.
John M. Jack
Startup Consultant
JJ has over 32 years of sales, marketing, and executive management experience. JJ served as the CEO and President of Fortify Software Inc., which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He served as the President of OS Group, LLC and served as its CEO for 3 years. He served as the President and CEO of Shaman Corporation and as the COO of The Vantive Corporation, where he was responsible for worldwide sales, consulting, support, channel, and education organizations. He began his career at Sybase as one of the first sales representatives and eventually became SVP of sales.
Mamoon Hamid
The Social+Capital Partnership
Mamoon is a General Partner at The Social+Capital Partnership (Social+Capital), an early stage Venture Capital firm based in Palo Alto. Mamoon has invested in and served on the boards of some of the most disruptive software companies of recent times including Box, Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), Castlight Health and Act-On Software. Prior to starting Social+Capital, Mamoon was a Partner at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), where he spent six years. Mamoon started his Silicon Valley career at Xilinx where he spent six years in various engineering and marketing roles. Mamoon holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, an MS from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Other Advisors
Aydin Senkut
Board Observer, Advisor, & First Investor
Aydin is the Founder and Managing Director of Felicis Ventures. Aydin has been an angel investor in promising start-ups since 2006. His portfolio encompasses over 50 companies. Prior to starting Felicis Ventures, Aydin was at Google, responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Asia Pacific (including Japan). Aydin joined Google in 1999 as its first Product Manager to launch Google's first 10 international sites, its first online search licensing products and its first Safe Search. He speaks five languages: English, German, French, Portuguese and Turkish.
Media Coverage Highlights
March 26, 2015
ClearSlide brings analytics to a long-ignored aspect of B2B sales: the slide deck
March 20, 2015
Cloud talent search leads booming Silicon Valley startup ClearSlide to open Seattle office
March 9, 2015
Top perks for tech employees
October 20, 2014
Top 10 new iPhone Business Apps in October 2014
September 24, 2014
ClearSlide Acquires SeedMail, Builds Bridges with Beijing
February 27, 2014
ClearSlide Raises $50M From The Social+Capital Partnership, Greylock To Help Make Sales Presentations More Effective
February 27, 2014
ClearSlide snags $50M to make sales pitches easier - and smarter
February 27, 2014
ClearSlide hooks $50M for its WebEx killer for sales
December 4, 2013
ClearSlide Earns TRUSTe U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Status
Press Kit
ClearSlide Blog