Smartsheet
Founders
Brent Frei, Mark Mader, Eric Browne, John Creason · Founded 2005 · HQ today: Bellevue, Washington, USA
Smartsheet was founded by Brent Frei, Mark Mader, Eric Browne, John Creason in 2005. It is now led by Rajeev Singh.
Smartsheet was founded in 2005 by Brent Frei, Mark Mader, Eric Browne, and John Creason. The founders recognized an absolutely massive flaw in corporate America: millions of workers were using Microsoft Excel to track projects, manage tasks, and coordinate teams, even though Excel was built for financial math, not project management. They set out to build a platform that retained the deeply familiar, highly intuitive 'grid' interface of a spreadsheet, but heavily infused it with powerful project management tools like file sharing, automated workflows, and Gantt charts. After a severe early struggle that nearly bankrupted the company in 2006, they completely redesigned the product, sparking massive viral growth.
Founder and former CEO of Onyx Software; Pacific Northwest enterprise software entrepreneur.
Brent Frei co-founded Smartsheet in 2005 in Bellevue, Washington, after founding Onyx Software, a CRM vendor he took public. He led Smartsheet in its first year before Mark Mader became CEO in 2006, and later served on the board. Brent Frei was born in 1966.
Former Onyx Software executive who worked alongside Brent Frei before Smartsheet.
Mark Mader joined Smartsheet as CEO in 2006, a year after its founding, and is counted among its founding team. He led the company for about 19 years, through its April 2018 NYSE IPO, the crossing of $1 billion in ARR in fiscal 2024 and the $8.4 billion sale to Blackstone and Vista, which closed in January 2025. He retired as CEO and left the board at the end of September 2025. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Software engineer and tech entrepreneur.
Eric Browne co-founded Smartsheet in 2005. Providing absolutely critical early technical leadership, he helped design the platform's initial architecture, heavily focusing on ensuring the cloud-based application could instantly sync massive spreadsheets across multiple users without data corruption or lag. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Software engineer and tech entrepreneur.
John Creason co-founded Smartsheet in 2005. Working closely with the technical founding team, he played a massive role in building the early prototype. He was absolutely instrumental during the company's critical 2006 redesign, which simplified the UI and finally achieved product-market fit. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Rajeev Singh
Chief Executive Officer
As a highly experienced tech executive and board member, he provides absolutely critical guidance on scaling enterprise SaaS operations.
Sunny Gupta
Executive Chair and Acting CEO
As an influential board member and enterprise CEO, he advises on highly complex enterprise sales strategies.
Mark Mader
Chief Executive Officer & President
As Co-Founder and CEO, he navigated the company through its difficult early years, guided its highly successful IPO, and established it as a dominant player against aggressive rivals.
Brent Frei
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
As the visionary Co-Founder (who previously founded Onyx Software), he provided the massive initial capital and strategic direction to launch the company.
Smartsheet was founded in 2005 in Bellevue, Washington, by Brent Frei, Eric Browne, John Creason, and Maria Colacurcio, with Mark Mader joining in 2006 as Chief Executive Officer and integral member of the founding executive team.
Brent Frei graduated with an engineering degree from Dartmouth College. In 1994, he co-founded Onyx Software, an early customer relationship management (CRM) pioneer that he led to a successful public offering on NASDAQ in 1999 before co-founding Smartsheet.
Mark Mader graduated from Dartmouth College and spent nearly a decade at Onyx Software leading customer services and international operations. In 2006, Brent Frei recruited Mader to take over as CEO of Smartsheet to guide product strategy and commercialization.
Eric Browne, a senior software architect who had also worked with Frei at Onyx Software, co-founded Smartsheet and architected the original real-time cloud data synchronization engine that allowed multiple remote users to edit tabular sheets simultaneously.
John Creason co-founded Smartsheet as a principal software engineer, playing a critical hands-on role in developing the early platform infrastructure and executing the complete 2008 user interface overhaul that created the iconic grid layout.
Maria Colacurcio was an early founding team member who led corporate marketing, communications, and customer outreach during Smartsheet's formative startup years, later becoming CEO of workplace equity platform Syndio.
Brent Frei and the founders self-funded Smartsheet with personal capital and angel investments before raising venture funding from Madrona Venture Group (led by Matt McIlwain) and Insight Partners.
The initial software had complicated hierarchical menus that confused customers. The founders made the painful decision to throw out two years of code in 2008 to refocus on a pure, elegant spreadsheet paradigm, a pivot that saved the company.
Both Brent Frei and Mark Mader were alumni of Dartmouth College, establishing a strong institutional bond that influenced their shared data-driven, analytical management philosophy.
After stepping back from daily operations at Smartsheet, Brent Frei co-founded TerraClear, an innovative agricultural technology robotics company developing automated rock-picking machinery for farmers.
The founding team was widely celebrated across the Seattle technology ecosystem, earning induction into the Pacific Northwest Hall of Fame and receiving GeekWire Deal of the Year honors.
The founders pioneered the modern Collaborative Work Management (CWM) software category, proving that empowering frontline knowledge workers with intuitive, spreadsheet-like automation could revolutionize corporate productivity worldwide.
Compare founding stories, origins, and entrepreneurial journeys
Explore Smartsheet
Core profile pages, founders and related research hubs for this company.