Sramana: You have talked about your land and expand model. How does that play out in the sales process? Fred Laluyaux: Finally, we are looking to build the community of users. We are looking to build a community of system administrators. We have an opportunity to build great community amongst business analysts. Business analysts build models
Sramana Mitra: How does the story of wefi begin? Were you incubating this company inside of your venture firm, Pitango? Zur Feldman: Yes. Pitango was a seed investor in this company. This company actually started in late 2006 before the first iPhone came out in 2007. The premise was that the devices that were starting
Sramana: What application areas are we talking about? Fred Laluyaux: We enable hyper growth and hyper change. We empower users to enable data-driven decisions in real time. HP is live with Anaplan to do their territory and quota plans around the world. They deliver territories and quotas to their sales reps globally. Other companies use Anaplan
Sramana Mitra: What led you to going to the startup world after all these years of Packard Bell? Zur Feldman: The experience in Packard Bell was very different because when I joined the company, there were 16 people. Packard Bell helped to revolutionize the PC industry and actually create what we see today – all
Sramana: When did your transition to Anaplan occur? Fred Laluyaux: This occurred just over 2 years ago. Sramana: When was Anaplan founded? Fred Laluyaux: The story of Anaplan is very interesting. The founder, Michael, was working for a company that was acquired by Cognos, which was later acquired by IBM. There was a lot of
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 8 million users and no revenue. What do you do? Find out from Zur Feldman. Sramana Mitra: Zur, let’s start with your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of circumstances? Zur Feldman: I’m originally from Israel. I spent
Sramana: What did you do after the company was sold? Fred Laluyaux: That was in 2006 and for the first time, I found myself working for a real company, Business Objects. I did not think that I would stay there for more than 2 weeks, but I felt responsible for my team. I committed to
Sramana Mitra: In that strategy, were you actually partnering with Salesforce and going to market through the AppExchange? Brad Peters: We were. Salesforce is a fairly hands-off partner. I wouldn’t say that it was a huge help. That has generally been my experience talking to other people. You find Salesforce customers on your own and