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HOT TOPICS
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 3)
SM: How long did you stay in that job at Unilever? LD: I moved back to the head office after a year, which is unfortunate because I really liked that job. They moved me back because we bought our biggest competitor, and they asked me if I could travel around the biggest countries and understand
Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 2)
SM: What happened after you left Novartis? LD: This all ties into how I ended up starting my company. I remember being headhunted by Unilever, a big company with 320,000 employees with $60B in sales at the time, and I felt Novartis had done so much for me … I remember walking into the global
Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 1)
If you think you need to have Silicon Valley DNA to become a successful technology entrepreneur, Lars Dalgaard proves that it ain’t so. Lars is the CEO of SuccessFactors (Nasdaq: SFSF), a SaaS company which recently went public. SM: Lars, I want to start with your personal background – tell me who you are. LD:
Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 10)
SM: You announced this million dollar challenge for SaaS startups developing on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. What are you seeing in response to that? BJ: We have a great relationship with Salesforce.com, and as you know their big initiative now is their Force.com platform – the ability for a developer to use the SalesForce infrastructure to
Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 9)
SM: What is in your portfolio in those later two categories? BJ: We mentioned InsideView as an information service. We have a company called Krugle which provides a search engine for software developers. Most software developers start with a base of code, often an OpenSource project they download as the basis for a new project.
Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 8)
SM: An example is when InsideView did the acquisition of True Advantage and laid off 150 people who were doing the same thing manually. I wrote a piece recently called the “Death of Indian Outsourcing” that featured InsideView and I talked about that example. My thesis is the Indian BPO industry is very much at
Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 7)
SM: Tell me about some of the deals that you have done since coming into existence, and what is unique about them? BJ: Since we started Emergence we have had three IPOs. That is pretty good for a young firm. Obviously SalesForce.com was one. We also invested in a software provider in the Human Resources
Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 6)
SM: The surprising part of the story, one of the reasons I decided to cover it, is that I have not seen too many major trends in our industry in the Valley that all of the VCs did not run after. The venture industry is like lemmings. Everybody is running after the same trends. Someone