Alston Gardner

Alston Gardner is the founder and managing partner of Fulcrum Ventures, a closely held venture capital firm that invests in early stage technology companies. Active investments include SaaS Optics, Bandwidth, Sageworks, Ibotta, and RevBoss.

Alston was the founder and CEO of OnTarget, Inc. prior to its acquisition by Siebel Systems in 1999. Under his leadership, OnTarget grew from start-up to the industry leader in sales force development with $75 million in revenue and 100+ professionals in fifteen countries. OnTarget’s clients included HP, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Oracle, Alcatel Siemens, IBM, and Xerox. Recognized as a thought leader on sales force issues, Alston has written numerous articles for Sales and Marketing Management, Selling Power, Marketing Management and Harvard Business Review. He also authored several top selling training programs, including Target Account Selling, Selling to Senior Executives and Managing Strategic Relationships.

Alston holds a BA degree from the University of North Carolina (’77) and has attended executive programs at Harvard Business School, Stanford, UVA, and the Aspen Institute. He completed a post-baccalaureate certificate in psychology at Columbia University in 2011.

He taught Introduction to Sales and Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina from 2003-2008. He served on the Board of Trustees of UNC Chapel Hill from 2007-2015 and was the Vice Chairman 2014-15. He currently serves on the board of Higher Education Works, an advocacy group for higher education in North Carolina and is the chair of the board of Hot Tubes Development Cycling, the top junior cycling program in North America.