Medallia President/CEO Leslie Stretch Shares Lessons from his 30-Year Career at the World’s Biggest Tech Firms
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May
6, 2021
3 min read
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Growing a software company, let alone scaling globally, is no easy feat. Get the inside scoop on how to do it from a true industry veteran with a storied 30-year career leading cloud software businesses. In the next episode of our Leadership Lessons series, host and Comparably CEO Jason Nazar speaks with Leslie Stretch, President/CEO of Medallia (NYSE: MDLA). As the pioneer and market leader in customer and employee experience and engagement, Medallia collects and analyzes user data and transforms them into actionable insights for company leaders. With over $477 million in annual revenue, and an enterprise value north of $4 billion dollars, Stretch led the San Francisco, Calif.-based SaaS platform to a successful IPO in July 2019. Prior to Medallia, he delivered a 25x increase in value in the public markets during his time as President/CEO of CallidusCloud, culminating in the company’s acquisition by SAP for $2.6 billion in 2018. Stretch will share his most valuable leadership lessons — from his executive positions at Sun Microsystems and Oracle to his CEO roles. Other topics include:
- Listening to the voice of the customer
- How to scale operations in global markets
- Preparing to go public
- Patent-pending methods for hiring + performance predictions
- Best practices for motivating high-performance sales teams
Leslie Stretch is President/CEO of Medallia, and is a technology industry veteran and innovation leader with over 30 years of experience growing disruptive cloud and software companies. Stretch led Medallia’s IPO in 2019, and has overseen the company’s emergence as a category leader in the employee and customer experience and engagement space. Before joining Medallia, Leslie served as President/CEO of CallidusCloud, transforming the company into a successful, enterprise software company, acquired for $2.5 Billion in 2018. Prior to Callidus, Stretch held several executive sales roles at Sun Microsystems and Oracle where he was responsible for scaling operations in global markets.
Jason Nazar brings 15 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur, investor, and advisor to his role as co-founder/CEO of Comparably, a leading workplace culture and compensation monitoring site. Previously, he was co-founder/CEO of Docstoc (acquired by Intuit in 2013), one of the most visited content sites in the world for SMBs. Jason was named one of the “Most Admired CEOs in L.A.” by the Los Angeles Business Journal and appointed “Entrepreneur in Residence for the City of Los Angeles” in 2016-2018 by Mayor Eric Garcetti.