Streak

Streak is the CRM that lives entirely inside Gmail as a Chrome extension, built by Omar Ismail and Jon Gordon who went through Y Combinator in 2012. The core insight was that salespeople already live in Gmail — every customer relationship starts with an email — so the CRM should come to them rather than forcing a context switch to another tab. Streak adds a sidebar to Gmail showing the CRM contact record, pipeline stage, and deal notes for every contact you're emailing. The product grew to $10M+ ARR with a team of 40 by attracting users who had tried Salesforce or HubSpot and found the logging burden unsustainable — with Streak, every email is automatically logged. The pipeline view (a spreadsheet-style Kanban built into Gmail) lets teams track deals, fundraising processes, hiring pipelines, support tickets, or any recurring workflow — making Streak a horizontal platform, not just a sales tool. Streak's freemium model (unlimited pipelines free for individuals) created massive viral spread through Google Workspace organizations where individual users adopted it and then introduced it to teammates.