Twelve years ago, Collobos co-founders Lanny Berg and Scott Herscher met at the best networking event in Silicon Valley — the local dog park. Over the ensuing decade, they became close friends and eventually teamed up to develop and sell Presto, a software that eliminates proprietary aspects of print hardware and mobile technology.

Twenty-five percent of IT support tickets are print related. This is a huge problem for a $900 billion industry. With the potential to eliminate a lot of those tickets, Presto could cause a massive disruption in the managed print services market.

“This is huge opportunity for Collobos because we can positively impact the budget of every single IT department,” Berg said.

Although Collobos has been selling software since 2011, Berg said a lot of that time was spent floundering.

Collobos CMO Lanny Berg

“Looking back, there were a lot of fundamental things that we hadn’t done to establish the direction of the company. We have strong technical instincts, but we were weaker on other things, like marketing and positioning. When you’re in the day-to-day of running a business you can miss the forest for the trees,” he said.

Berg found his way to RAIN Eugene through Chief-Startup Officer Joe Maruschak — an old friend from their days as undergrads at the University of Oregon. As part of the Summer 2017 Accelerator cohort, Berg received a “crash course MBA in startup.”

“When you’ve been selling software as long as we have, you can build this false assumption that you understand the market. One of the first thing you do in the Accelerator is conduct market research. Through that exercise we saw that IT support tickets related to print are a huge problem. We changed our internal brand identity and focus to directly address this problem. In two months, we found the vision and trajectory we were lacking,” said Berg.

Collobos is preparing to launch their revamped software as a service product by the end of this year. Berg, who has spent the past five years collaborating with Herscher from Virginia, has decided to return to Eugene where he will continue to work with RAIN Eugene on scaling the business.