How This Entrepreneur Pulled his Company Out of Bankruptcy Cvent's story is about persistence and finding the right pain point

REGGIE AGGARWAL (48), FOUNDER AND CEO, CVENT

From using Outlook, excel and sticky notes to becoming the biggest software provider for the hospitality industry, Cvent's story is about persistence and finding the right pain point. Born to Indian parents in the US, Aggarwal started out as a corporate lawyer. He founded Cvent in 1999 as a two-person start-up, and today the company has 2700+ employees and more than 200,000 users around the globe. Its software has been used to power over one million business meetings and events across 25,000 organizations. Aggarwal is well known for having pulled Cvent out of bankruptcy during the dotcom meltdown, and successfully turning it around into a leading cloud-based event management company. Cvent was a publicly traded company until November 2016 and went private in an acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. Over the years, the company has become a leading global software-as-a-service (SaaS) company offering solutions for event management, mobile event apps, hospitality cloud and web surveys. Talking about the expansion in the India's market, Aggarwal says, "We came to India for cost then we stayed for value and growing because of innovation. India is a corporate mirror image having 1,200 employees with all the divisions as in the US."

LAUNCH: 1999 in Virginia

REACH: Over 100 countries worldwide

HEADCOUNT: 2700+ globally

GROWTH: 245,000 hotels and venues listed