Prakash Raina is the co-founder and CEO of Subskribe, a unified quote-to-revenue platform he started in 2020. Before Subskribe he led business technology at Okta, which he joined before its IPO, where getting quote-to-cash compliant and scalable for public-company operations became the problem that defined his career — Okta grew from under $100M to $1B in less than five years, and he tried every CPQ and billing product on the market without finding one that could keep up. He teamed with two co-founders from Zuora (one from engineering, one from product) who had lived the same pain from the vendor side. His thesis: because every public SaaS company answers to the same SEC rules, quote-to-cash should be standardized, not uniquely engineered per company.
“It grew from less than $100 million to $1 billion in less than five years. It was crazy growth. And we tried every product in the market on the CPQ, on the billing side, and none of them were solving what Okta was looking for.”
“If you feel that you are very unique in the process, that's probably not something to be proud of.”
“If you talk to many public companies, they'll say it takes 10 days, 15 days, long nights after every quarter end to close the book, because they have to make sure all three systems' data are reconciled.”
“I'll make a statement a lot of people will like or not: irrespective of how beautiful or how easy you build a CPQ, no salesperson wants to use a CPQ. And that's why the concept of deal desk came into the company.”
“There is an AI agent sitting in the back, and it's going to look at this and say, you gave me all the information, but you did not tell me what kind of support level they need — exactly what a deal desk guy would ask you.”
“Where we stand tall against all others is what you do post the customer has already signed. That's the most complex part.”
“They understand it's going to bring a hundred thousand more, but to make that hundred thousand, five people have to spend two days — so they're losing the revenue from that side.”
“One of our motives is that CPQ is not a deal desk tool or a revenue operations tool. CPQ is for sellers — they should be the primary consumer.”