Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 5)

SM: When working with smart people, it always pays to explain why. LD: Exactly, and they will ask 15 questions to get there if they need to. To this day I adore them. They cannot do anything until they know why. I love that. That was the biggest learning for me was how to manage

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Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 4)

SM: Your technology background is nominal by Silicon Valley standards, it seems. LD: Absolutely. At that time I was a little more humble. I thought technology was intimidating even though I had used it in my different jobs.

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

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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

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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:

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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

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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.

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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

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