Pouyan Salehi

Pouyan Salehi, CEO and Co-founder of Scratchpad

Pouyan Salehi is the CEO and Co-founder of Scratchpad, a company that provides a workspace for sales teams to update Salesforce, take notes, and manage their pipeline.12 He has a long history of entrepreneurial success, having co-founded several other startups:

• PersistIQ (acquired by Wishpond) - Co-founder and CEO from 2014-20192
• Lera Labs - Co-founder from 2012-20142
• StackMob (acquired by PayPal) - Co-founder from 2010-20112

Prior to his startup career, Pouyan worked at Apple as an iPhone Business Operations Manager and iPod / iPhone Displays Manager from 2007-2010.2

Pouyan completed his MBA at Harvard Business School and his BME at the University of Minnesota. He also spent a summer at Y Combinator.2 Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Spanish Studies at Fundacion Jose Ortega y Gasset.1

At Scratchpad, Pouyan leads a team of over 35 employees serving hundreds of companies. The company has raised $16.6 million in funding from investors including Accel, Craft Ventures, Sound Ventures, and Shrug Capital.5

Pouyan is passionate about creating great user experiences and products that impact how people and teams work, especially in sales.23 He believes in the importance of developing empathy for your target users, finding product-user fit, and letting go of certain tasks as the company grows.3

Under Pouyan's leadership, Scratchpad has developed a hybrid product-led and sales-assisted go-to-market motion, leveraging both bottom-up and top-down sales approaches.4 The company's vision is to become the default workspace that sales teams can't live without.5