Eric Anderson

Chief Executive Officer Walnut

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Eric Anderson is Chief Executive Officer of Walnut, the interactive demo and digital sales room company, a role he took in December 2024 when the company established a US base in San Francisco and its co-founder Yoav Vilner moved to the board. Walnut’s premise is a specific complaint about B2B software selling: the product demo, the single most important moment in an enterprise sale, has traditionally been a live performance that depends on a sales engineer’s availability, a working sandbox and nothing breaking. Walnut replaces it with an interactive, instrumented demo the buyer can drive themselves, and has since extended that into a deal room holding demos, content, mutual action plans and buyer-side collaboration together. Anderson is a natural fit for the thesis: he has spent roughly three decades on the revenue side of enterprise software, as Chief Revenue Officer at Optimizely, Spredfast and Return Path, and most recently as President of Global Go-to-Market Operations at Mindtickle, where the product was sales enablement itself.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer of Walnut since December 2024, based in San Francisco.
• Took over from co-founder Yoav Vilner, who transitioned to a board advisory role as Walnut expanded into the United States.
• Led Walnut’s July 2025 launch of the Interactive Deal Room, a digital sales room uniting demos, content, mutual action plans and collaboration.
• President of Global Go-to-Market Operations at Mindtickle from 2023, running marketing, sales, customer success, partnerships and alliances, revenue operations, enablement and corporate development.
• As Chief Revenue Officer at Optimizely, helped grow annual revenue from roughly $60 million to more than $350 million.
• Chief Revenue Officer at Spredfast and at Return Path earlier in his career.
• Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Nuance Communications.
• Roughly three decades of senior leadership experience scaling high-growth technology companies.

Professional Journey

Anderson studied business management at San Jose State University and built his career in Bay Area enterprise software sales, rising through worldwide sales leadership at Nuance Communications before moving into chief revenue officer roles.

Those CRO posts — at Return Path, the email deliverability company; at Spredfast, the social media management platform; and then at Optimizely, the experimentation and digital experience company — form the core of his reputation. Optimizely is the one most often cited: he is credited with aligning its go-to-market functions during a period when annual revenue grew from roughly $60 million to more than $350 million.

In early 2023 Mindtickle recruited him as President of Global Go-to-Market Operations, a deliberately broad mandate that put marketing, sales, customer success, partnerships and alliances, revenue operations, enablement and corporate development under a single leader. The logic was that a company selling revenue productivity software ought to run its own commercial organisation as one system rather than as competing departments. Announcing the hire, Anderson argued that economic uncertainty made sales enablement more necessary rather than less, because resilience depends on sellers being effective rather than merely numerous.

He left Mindtickle after roughly two years. In December 2024 Walnut named him Chief Executive Officer as part of its US expansion, with founder Yoav Vilner stepping back to a strategic board role — the familiar pattern of a founder-led company bringing in an operator to scale commercially in a new market. Under Anderson, Walnut has pushed beyond standalone demos: the Interactive Deal Room, launched in July 2025, extends the product across the whole buying journey, and he has become a public advocate for the view that AI-assisted building is pulling demo platforms into the mainstream of B2B selling.

Education

San Jose State University

Bachelor of Arts, Business Management