Vivun’s origin begins in a camper van on the shores of New Zealand’s Lake Wānaka, features a blue folder and ends with a high five.

Matt Darrow, CEO and Founder, had been on a 10-year journey in sales engineering at companies that include Big Machines and Zuora; he moved through the ranks as a frontline manager and eventually became a global vice president. After the Zuora IPO, he and his wife, Dominique – who had been in Customer Success at Google – decided to take some time off with a one-way ticket to New Zealand.

Between trekking and camping, Matt started to pull together a list of ideas he’d been thinking about – and one of them? A product to unlock PreSales. Inspired by his experience as a Presales leader, he understood the breadth of insights captured by sales engineers and knew that those insights could drive meaningful business impact.

Matt shared his idea with Dom and soon they were trading the camper van for a rental with wi-fi. He wrote the first lines of code, built the first version of the website and added the first pages of a pitch deck to a blue folder. Dominique researched how to establish a company, developed the brand image, and explored legal steps. At that point, the vacation was over and they headed home to get to work.

Matt’s first call was to John Bruce – his Zuora colleague and a technical expert who spent years building his own PreSales solutions. Matt and Dom met John and his wife Claire for dinner and brought the blue folder with them. The team required to turn Vivun from slides to reality sat around that dinner table: Dominique Darrow (Customer Success, Google), John Bruce (CTO), and Claire Bruce (seasoned General Counsel). Most early stage founders could only dream to start with a team like this and for Vivun? A high-five solidified the plan that night and the rest… is history [in the making].