SM: Let’s start talking about PayCycle which is where you are now. This is your old team from Intuit, right? JH: The team I came to work with at PayCycle are all people I have worked with before except one person. I feel really lucky to be able to work with people I know. They
SM: Can you talk about the Adobe experience a bit more? Where did you find the Creative Professionals business? JH: There was a lot of work going on in bundling Adobe applications together. We figured out how to go beyond just bundling different applications in a box and we created synergy between the products. In
SM: You decided to stay with Adobe for a few years after selling them Fotiva, correct? JH: Initially I got out and I spent a few months looking around for the next smaller thing to do, but the market had dried up so badly there were no B and C round deals going on, and
There are 5.2 million small businesses registered with the IRS who have 20 employees or fewer. This is obviously a tremendous market which has largely remained untapped and ignored. SM: How would you define the portion of the small business market that Intuit was focusing on? Was it under 100 employees, or under 1,000 employees?
SM: A key issue with small business facing products is how do you reach your customers, give that it is such a fragmented market. What did Intuit do? JH: It was a direct marketing play. Historically, as computers came down from the enterprise level (the IBMs of the world), they went to the mini computer
SM: All of these things which we have discussed are a discipline in and of themselves. There are but a few people in the industry who understand this at the level and depth that we have discussed today. For companies who are coming up to speed, there is a lot of need right now because
For years, I have looked at the small business market as an opportunity that technology vendors need to attack. For years, however, the common wisdom in the venture circles have been that it is much too difficult to sell to small businesses. With the advent and popularity of Software-As-A-Service (SaaS), this sentiment has started changing.
SM: Webex is a very special case. They enabled a lot of the telephone selling by making it possible to demonstrate products over the web. AS: Exactly. Not only do they provide the technology, but they are a showcase for using the technology they provide. It is an incredible machine in terms of process. They