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Episode Description

Jesse Lipson, CEO and Co founder of Levitate and ShareFile, joins the show to talk about

  • Bootstrapping his SaaS company, ShareFile, to a $93M acquisition by Citrix.
  • What the acquisition process looked like during the sale of ShareFile to Citrix.
  • The keys to building successful companies with and without venture capital.
  • Becoming the diagonal aSaaSin and dominating in categories that cut across verticals.
  • Building really big businesses in the Raleigh tech scene.

Episode Transcript

Jesse Lipson

Founder and CEO of Levitate

Jesse Lipson is the CEO and Founder of Levitate, a platform that helps businesses keep in touch with their customers. Prior to founding Levitate, Jesse founded ShareFile in late 2005, bootstrapping the company from zero to four million users in six years. He joined Citrix in 2011, when Citrix acquired ShareFile. At Citrix, he was the CVP & GM of the Cloud Services Business Unit, where he was responsible for the vision, market direction and strategy behind Citrix's cloud products, including ShareFile, ShareConnect, RightSignature, and Citrix Workspace Cloud.

Jesse is a self-taught software programmer and he has launched and led multiple cloud and e-commerce businesses since the age of 23. His first startup was Rapidata.net, a pharmaceutical market research company, where he served as CEO. While involved with Rapidata, Jesse helped grow revenues by over 500% and laid the foundation for the company's acquisition by Greenfield Online. Subsequent to Rapidata.net, Jesse co-founded and served as CEO for a web site development firm called novelProjects.

Jesse graduated Magna Cum Laude from Duke University with a degree in philosophy in 2000. He currently serves on the board of directors of Yext and he's a founding partner of HQ Raleigh, a co-working space in downtown Raleigh and an entrepreneurial co-living space called ThinkHouse.