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Episode 138

The Invention of a Category, an Exit & an IPO with Bobby Yazdani

This week on The Exit: Born in Tehran, Iran, Bobby Yazdani left the country at age 16 during the Iranian Revolution. Jumping forward, Bobby graduated from Berkeley and started work at Oracle. Back then you had to log into the internet and the concept of internet cookies didn’t exist. But Bobby could see the potential for a suit of technology and browser-based applications working with the internet. So together with a group of friends from Oracle, he left to start Saba. What followed was the creation of a category: Learning Management Systems. The idea was to move training to the internet which led to the shift of content and learning onto the internet. It was a hugely profitable system which evolved into supply chain and talent management. After their first big investment the exit quickly followed, but Bobby wasn’t done with Saba. Listen to find out about the first exit, and Bobby’s experience of then taking the company public. 

Bobby Yazdani is Founder and Partner of Cota Capital, a San Francisco-based firm investing in private and public U.S.-based modern enterprise technology companies. Before forming Cota Capital, Bobby spent over 20 years investing in technology companies both individually and through his family office, Signatures Capital, which he founded in 2006. Bobby founded Saba Software in 1997, taking the company public in 2000. Saba was acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. in 2020. At Saba, Bobby served as CEO from 1997 to 2002 and from 2003 to 2013. 

Cota Capital: https://www.cotacapital.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-yazdani-015a13a/

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YOUR HOST

Steve McGarry

An entrepreneur, content creator, and investor based in sunny Tampa, Florida. In 2015, while living in San Francisco, Steve sold his first fintech startup LendLayer to Max Levchin’s (founder of PayPal) consumer finance company Affirm.

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