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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 2)

SM: When did you switch to general management? MG: Coming out of that job I ended up having a large team. I woke up one day and realized I had a hundred developers reporting to me. The transition from being the technical architect to working with multiple technical architects and helping them get their vision

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 1)

In our Enterprise 3.0 coverage, I bring you, next, a conversation with Michael Gregoire, CEO of Taleo (Nasdaq: TLEO). Taleo had 2007 sales of $128 Million, and a market cap of close to $500 Million. In this case-study, we will do a deep-dive into the company’s business with Michael.