For nearly two decades, RightWave, Inc., has expanded the services provided to B2B Marketing and Sales organizations. This leadership is built on innovations by RightWave founder and CEO Anurag Khemka including creation of the world’s first Marketing Automation System. In this interview by Ray Rike, RevOps Squared CEO, Anurag explains why and how he was motivated to create a new industry that is now populated by many products.

Founding a B2B SaaS company is an exhilarating, yet high-risk experience. Creating a new market category at the same time is an even higher risk and often serves primarily to pave the path for second-generation market entrants who learn from the successes and failures of the first generation.

Back in 1996, when the internet was first being commercialized, most B2B marketers were just starting to think about how to develop more personal, 1:1 relationships with potential customers. Anurag founded MarketFirst, the first generation of enterprise-class marketing automation technology.  Developing the software was the easy part; educating an entire market on how to design, build, and execute B2B marketing campaigns on the internet was the real challenge.

Marketing Automation is now one of the most mature segments of the MarTech market (more than 8000 vendors).  Marketing Operations is a mature, yet still evolving profession that was spawned out of the need to manage and maximize the return on Marketing Automation investments.

Anurag is a founding father of both Marketing Automation and Marketing Operations. Anyone who seeks to better understand how history predicts the future will profit from this podcast.