CloudCherry

Vinod Muthukrishnan

Salt Lake City, Utah
Cofounder & CEO, CloudCherry (Acquired by Cisco)

CloudCherry is a customer experience software solution that helps companies manage the customer experience journey and increase customer retention.

Even though there were others in the customer experience market, we decided to create CloudCherry because we saw a gap that could be solved by approaching the problem with a customer perspective lens. Most contact centers are run and evaluated on key performance indicators (KPIs), like average handle time, cost of service or others, but customers don’t care about the company’s optimized costs, they’re more concerned about whether they experienced empathy, attentiveness, and a resolution on their call. None of those components are absolute either. For example, if someone wants to return a broken product, and you give them their money back but are rude about it—you’ve resolved their issue, but they probably aren’t going to buy from you again. So, we built CloudCherry to help companies understand where to invest to improve the customer journey, and we raised funding from corporate and venture investors along the way.

Cisco was one of our investors, since they agreed with our hypothesis that the contact center is really a customer experience business. And so when we began receiving unsolicited acquisition offers from other companies in the space, they made an offer as well. There’s a lot that goes into evaluating an acquisition offer. Obviously there’s the price, but the terms are very important as well—is it cash or stock? What’s the vesting period? Are there clawbacks, performance riders, or other contingencies? In addition, evaluating the company’s “acquisition muscle” — their experience and reputation for successfully completing the process and integrating acquired firms is important, too. If you enter exclusivity with one firm and they decide to abandon the deal, it sends a negative signal to all of the others that may make it harder to get acquired in the future.

Ultimately, given all of these considerations and our long relationship with the company, we chose to be acquired by Cisco. That decision was validated by my experience there. The majority of our team joined Cisco and the company put in a lot of work to make sure our culture was safeguarded. For example, at CloudCherry we had an inspiration wall, where each new employee who joined put up a picture of something that inspired them—Cisco let us replicate it there despite the scale it would have to become. They plotted the closest office location to each employee so they wouldn’t have to relocate. And we continued to innovate and build our product. For me personally, I ended up becoming Chief Operating Officer for Webex Customer Experience, which was a massive learning experience.

I really enjoyed my time at Cisco—in fact they knew I would never leave to another large company, because if that was the alternative, I’d rather be at Cisco—but my real joy lies in startups. My two options seemed to be: be an investor, which I was already doing, or start a new startup. Ultimately, I decided I wasn’t ready to start a new company again (yet), and joined a friends’ growth-stage startup, Uniphore, which seems well positioned to IPO one day.

I am also supporting startups as the Co-Chair of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum. Barriers to immigration is one of the key issues that needs to be solved to bolster the startup ecosystem and both countries’ economies. Something like half of unicorn startups have one Indian cofounder, and for every visa awarded to an Indian startup founder, 40 high-paying local jobs are created. Despite this, founders often struggle to come to the U.S. and often end up using job-seeking visas. Such founders are actively being courted by other countries with tailored immigration processes, resources and other incentives. To remain competitive, we need an entrepreneur visa that helps high-skilled individuals who are starting businesses, bringing capital, and creating jobs to do so in the U.S.