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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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 3)
SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track? MM: We do not comment on our financials. We’re over 7 million uniques a month today and hope to be in the double digits soon. We’re over 2 million uniques in the U.S and over a million
Stardoll for Little Girls: Mattias Miksche (Part 2)
SM: How did Paperdollheaven come about? MM: Some of the ideas were already there – the initial magic of paperdollheaven.com was all because of Liisa, our original founder and her vision of a fun, creative place for a forgotten demographic on the web: young girls. The new team then added the idea of personalized avators
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,
