Eskinder Assefa, Co-founder & CEO

Eskinder has over 20 years of marketing, sales, and business development experience. Prior to co-founding DiamondTip, Eskinder served as Director of Business Development and Product Strategy at Granicus, a company that provides on-demand video management tools for government verticals. While at Granicus, Eskinder was responsible for signing up key document management partners in the company's market space, and telecos such as AT&T. Eskinder was also responsible for launching the company's next generation enterprise application platform and the company's first video based training system.

Prior to that, Eskinder was VP of Business Development at Global Soft Solutions, where he signed up a number of professional services agreements with key software vendors in the Enterprise Application Integration space. Additionally, Eskinder developed and implemented the company's offshore contract engineering business around open-source software. These agreements led to the company's ability to grow nearly 300% over a two year period.

Prior to that Eskinder worked as an independent marketing strategist with a number of small technology companies helping them define their go-to-market strategies.

Eskinder received his MBA from Santa Clara University, and BS in Information Systems Management from the University of San Francisco.

Alicia Assefa, Co-founder & President, DiamondTip Marketing & Sales Services

Alicia Assefa has over 25 years of Telebusiness and Sales Management experience. She has worked with over 100 high technology companies including, CA, Oracle Corporation, Informix Software, Sqribe, Aion Corporation, Blaze Software, Granicus, Intacct and Sanctum, to name a few.

Currently, Alicia is the Chief Operating Officer at DiamondTip, a SaaS Productivity Portal for startup companies. Alicia is the managing partner of the DiamondTip Professional Services Division, which provides cost effective Inside Sales and Telemarketing Services.

Alicia specializes in designing and implementing Sales Best Practices for small software companies. Most recently, she was Vice President, North America Teleprospecting, at CA, a multi-billion dollar software company. There she managed the North America Teleprospecting team who provided leads for the 5 major Business Units within CA. During her tenure at CA, she grew the Field Pipeline from $3.4M to $87M in a nine-month period. The revenue contribution, from her teams' efforts grew from $4M to $17M in that same period. In addition, she implemented Salesforce.com, replacing SAP and developed the global Teleprospecting plan for her counterparts in EMEA, AsiaPac and South America.

Prior to that, Alicia was the Director of Inside Sales for Scientific Learning, an educational software company that provides reading intervention strategies to the K-12 public schools market. In this position, Alicia implemented a highly successful Inside Sales team. She grew revenue from $20,000 to $1,200,000 in under 8 months. She also designed and implemented a lead generation strategy (which included telemarketing) that generated over 200 leads for the Field team in under 3 months.

Alicia was the Director of Corporate Sales for Blaze Software, a provider of rules engine technology. In this position, Alicia grew the Corporate Sales team from 2 to 20 employees. Her team generated 30% of Blaze Software's revenue and passed, on average, 180 qualified leads to Field Sales, each month.

Prior to joining Blaze Software, Alicia was the Director, Inside Sales at Computer Curriculum Corporation. During her tenure with CCC, Alicia grew the Inside Sales revenue from $6m to $13.7 million. She was instrumental in repositioning the department from a lead generation team to a revenue generation organization, with a focus on small districts with fewer than 5,000 students. In this market, she increased revenue by 270%. In 1998, her team was awarded Region of the Year for their revenue contribution and market strategies.

Alicia holds a B.A. in Theater Arts from the University of Delaware.