SugarCRM

John Roberts conceived of the idea and name of SugarCRM while riding his mountain bike named Sugar in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Clint Oram, John Roberts, and Jacob Taylor started full-time work on the SugarCRM open source project in April 2004, and incorporated the company in California in June 2004. Roberts served as the CEO from 2004 to 2009, Oram was the vice president, and Taylor was the CTO & vice president of engineering.

In June 2004, Josh B. Stein of DFJ invested $2 million into the startup and became a board member. With the help of this investment, Sugar expanded quickly and by September 2004, potential users had downloaded 25,000 copies of the application, then named Sugar Open Source. In October 2004, the company was named "Project of the Month" on SourceForge.

The popularity of this project allowed the company to raise $86 million of venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Walden International, New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs.

In 2006, SugarCRM launched SugarCon, a conference for Sugar customers, users and developers. It has since become an annual conference, held in the San Francisco Bay Area to begin with but in 2018 the conference was moved to Las Vegas.

By 2008, SugarCRM employed over 150 people.

In June 2008, co-founder Taylor left the company, during what technology website The Register called "a mysterious exodus of senior and experienced business staff" from SugarCRM. Clint Oram replaced him as the CTO.

In May 2009, co-founder and CEO Roberts left the company. He was replaced as CEO by SugarCRM board member Larry Augustin, who had previously founded and served as the CEO of VA Linux (now known as Geeknet).

In June 2010, Sugar launched Sugar 6, a major upgrade emphasizing ease of use and introducing a complete UI overhaul of Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise.