Outreach.io comes to Prague

Curious about how Outreach.io got started in Prague? You can read this story to find out more or listen to a CZPodcast episode from early 2021. Tomáš Bergl and Fero Kaduk describe the beginnings of Outreach in Prague from their perspective.

Outreach was founded in 2014 in the US. Built as a tool supporting salespeople, Outreach has developed into a team determined to use technology to change how companies engage with their customers.

Opening an office during the outburst of Covid-19

In late 2019, Tomáš Bergl and a few Outreach.io Prague pioneers started building the Prague office. It took some time, and all was ready in March 2020, right when covid-19 was making global headlines. With all the uncertainties surrounding covid, all the plans to get help from our headquarters in Seattle to build the Prague office had to be reset… Nevertheless, the team hired around 40 people within a year at the peak of the pandemic. And all of this was done without the help of a local recruitment team and with no prior reputation in the local market to rely on. They hired a powerful engineering team and started building the Product and Design teams. Among the first people on board was Amit Paunikar, a very experienced Product Manager and Director.

“In the beginning, I had one core guiding principle: To build an independent and standalone office here in Prague,” says Tomáš. In mid 2021 Outreach secured $200 million in funding with a market valuation of $4.4 billion, making it a unicorn tech startup. The team was keen to find the right people across all roles needed to build a successful independent office. Today, the Prague office has more than 120 employees comprising a team of engineers (both for backend and frontend, with DevOps roles), product managers, product marketing, quality assurance, design, customer support, and other supporting roles covering finance, people, community management and legal. “In the beginning, we thought of a smaller team, but plans changed when we proved that we could not only recruit excellent engineers in Prague, but also product managers, designers and other roles. As the number of people increased, we got more responsibilities for other parts of the product,” says Tomáš.

What technologies does Outreach use to deploy the parts of the product they are responsible for?

Today, “over 5,000 global customers trust Outreach as their Sales Execution Platform. These include corporations like Zoom, Snowflake, Siemens, SAP, along with mid-sized companies and startups” continues Tomáš. Prague is the second European office for Outreach. The first one was set up in London, and, alongside Seattle, there are others in Atlanta and Indianapolis.

Outreach is the only Sales Execution Platform that unlocks seller productivity for efficiently creating and closing pipeline. Its AI assisted platform increases seller productivity by automating many aspects of their workflow, so they can spend their time more efficiently and generate more revenue. For example, it creates a daily list of tasks that they need to concentrate on, helps them automatically transcribe calls with customers and helps them forecast their outcomes. The Prague team contributes to the core aspects of this platform and has become a key part of the global Outreach team.

Interested in more detail? Listen to the podcast (in Czech) hosted in early 2021

There, you can learn more about:

• How and why Outreach uses stock option plan for employees
• Fero Kaduk talks about his experience with a switch to GO
• How many microservices does Outreach have, and what technology is it built on, etc.?