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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
Stardoll for Little Girls: Mattias Miksche (Part 1)
I covered Stardoll in the Deal Radar series. Here’s the story from CEO Mattias Miksche. SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to this venture. MM: I have a multicultural background. Austrian dad, German mom – they came to Sweden during/following World War II. I was born &
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 10)
SM: What is your channel strategy? Direct in the enterprise, Telesales for SME? MG: Very close. At the enterprise it is a direct sales force, distributed globally. In SME, it is telesales, our own telesales team. We have a lot of partners we do business with where we get a fee for transacting through our
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 9)
SM: What is your business model? What is the pricing model? MG: The pricing model in the enterprise space, for companies with more than 3,000 employees, is that we charge by the number of employees in the company. It is not a transactional pricing system. We use multi-year contracts; most of them are three years
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 7)
SM: I wonder how Louis was able to fund the company in 1999. I talked to a lot of SaaS company CEOs and all of them were turned down by the VCs. Yesterday, I was having lunch with Philippe Courtot, who you may know, is the CEO of Qualys. They do security as SaaS, and
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 6)
SM: So you got your first CEO job! MG: I met with the board to understand what they wanted. It was important for me to know that I was not coming to package a company up in order for them to sell it. I wanted to go build a company. I was very comfortable with
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 5)
SM: What was your role at PeopleSoft? MG: PeopleSoft was a complete software shop. They had no processes or culture of customer service from an implementation point of view. They did not have a good relationship between people who wrote the software and the people who implemented the software. Initially I started running North America,
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 4)
SM: Tell me about your move from EDS to PeopleSoft? MG: In 1999 I was recruited by a headhunter at Spencer Stewart. Craig Conway had become the CEO of PeopleSoft, he had been there for 6 months, and he had a vision of re-tooling the ERP software space and re-tooling the company. One of the
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 3)
SM: So how did you get from CTO to GM? MG: One day at work I got a call from my wife. I was in downtown Toronto, serving as the Chief Technologist of EDS Canada, and I was 30 years old. I had been married to my wife for 5 years … she was my