Steli Efti

Steli Efti is a German-born entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Close, the bootstrapped, fully remote CRM for small and mid-sized sales teams. He is also one of the most recognisable sales educators in the startup world, through his writing, books and The Startup Chat podcast with Hiten Shah.

Efti grew up in Germany, disliked school and started several businesses there as a young man. In his early twenties he sold what he had and bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley, without fluent English or a clear plan beyond wanting to build a software company. His first US startup, SwipeGood, a micro-donation app, did not work, and he pivoted it into Elastic Sales, which supplied on-demand sales teams to venture-backed startups.

The internal tool Elastic Sales built to manage all those calls and emails became the product. Close launched as a CRM in 2013, and Elastic Sales was eventually shut down so the team could focus on software. Efti chased the close.com domain for years, following up twice a year for six years before buying it.

Close stayed bootstrapped. On the Indie Hackers podcast in 2018 Efti described the company as very profitable, with revenue in the many millions and about 30 people. It has since grown into a fully remote team spread across many countries, and a 2025 Mixergy interview billed it as a $50 million-a-year CRM.

Alongside Close, Efti has written several books on startup sales and co-hosted The Startup Chat, which has run to hundreds of episodes. He lists Austin, Texas as his home. For B2B founders he is the go-to voice on follow-up and founder-led sales.