Pawel Niznik is Co-Founder and CTO of Base CRM, a pioneering sales productivity and CRM platform that was acquired by Zendesk in 2018 and rebranded as Zendesk Sell.

Starting to program at 15 and turning professional soon after, Pawel co-founded Applicake at 21, a Krakow-based software development house that grew to 30 people and built technology for startups across the EU and US.

Driven by a mission to advance enterprise productivity, Pawel co-founded Base CRM in 2009 after growing frustrated with legacy CRM tools, setting out to build the first truly scientific, mobile-first sales platform.

As CTO for nearly a decade, Pawel scaled Base's engineering team to 150 people, raised $53M from top investors including Index Ventures and Tenaya Capital, and helped grow the platform to serve over 7,000 companies including Cisco, Groupon, and Dow Chemical.

Base's successful acquisition by Zendesk in 2018 validated its industry-defining approach to CRM; today Pawel continues to shape the future as an angel investor, advisor, and early backer of ventures like intoDNA.