About Steve Waters

Steve Waters is the Founder and Principal of Triggerbox, and has spent the last 15 years turning emerging technology startups into high-growth, highly-valued market leaders.  As an entrepreneurial, business-focused Chief Marketing Officer, he has built revenue momentum and shareholder value across technology megatrends, diverse target audiences, disparate vertical industries, and wildly fluctuating economies. 

Steve began his technology career as an analyst/mule in the nascent Silicon Valley investment banking industry, where he supported M&A and financing transactions for many technology segment leaders and gained invaluable insight into the drivers of market valuation.  It was there that he also learned an important lesson: if you are going to work yourself nearly to death, it’s nice to have equity participation.

He made the successful leap in 1993 to an emerging startup called Trilogy, where he architected the vertical marketing and sales model that fueled the company’s explosive growth in the 1990s.  During his four-year Trilogy tenure, Steve led all marketing efforts for Trilogy’s largest vertical business unit, generating over $100 million in software license revenue and driving the largest client/server sales software deal in history in 1994.

After Trilogy, Steve was VP of Marketing at Firepond, where he led that company’s transition from a custom application development firm to an internet-driven enterprise software company, growing product-related revenue from $0 to ~$50 million in three years.  Based on his corporate finance background he was chosen to lead the company’s IPO process, which resulted in Firepond going public with a $1 billion+ market capitalization in February 2000.

He spent the early part of the millennium managing his own business consulting and marketing advisory practice, where he was instrumental in helping a wide range of early- and mid-stage companies either thrive or survive during the post-Bubble economic downturn.  During this period, he developed deep domain expertise in software-as-a-service (SaaS) business models, most notably as an advisor for eCRM market leader RightNow, where his work provided a foundation for  their recession-proof growth toward a successful IPO in 2004 (NASDAQ: RNOW).

Steve then joined B2B process compliance software leader BetweenMarkets as VP Marketing, where he applied his SaaS domain expertise to extended enterprise business processes in high tech and retail supply chains, built a Fortune 100 customer base from scratch, and set the stage for the company’s ultimate acquisition by Inovis  in 2007.

Most recently, Steve led the market launch of B-Side Entertainment, an internet technology company that is creating disruptive change in the distribution of independent film.   Using emerging Web 2.0 technologies and social network marketing, he invented a new “theatrical release” model that is now being adopted by major film distributors.  Within 18 months, he also grew B-Side’s strategic customer base from 15 festivals to 100+ and developed innovative partnerships with film industry leaders like IFC, YouTube and Netflix.

Triggerbox, launched in February 2008, provides a powerful new kind of strategy consulting that converges Steve’s battle-tested value-building methodologies with the power of Web 2.0 and SaaS technologies.

Steve has one wife, two kids, three dogs, and far-flung interests.  He also has a Sociology degree from Stanford University, with a focus on Organizational Behavior.