Palm’s Elevation Partners deal is a smart move to give the cmpany its best shot at a turnaround. Jonathan Rubinstein joins as Executive Chairman, as part of the deal, and the transition is due to happen soon. SM: What about the CEO though? EB: What was critical was to be able to add this talent
SM: What is your educational background? RL: I went to school at Stanford and ended up with a Masters in electrical engineering and an undergraduate in economics. When I was looking for a job, a lot of consulting firms came calling. They were saying “Come work with us. You will work 80 hours a week
René Lacerte is the founder and CEO of Cashview, a Web-based cash management solution delivered as a SaaS. Prior to Cashview, René founded PayCycle, which I covered recently. In this interview, we will trace the thinking of a serial entrepreneur who brings substantial SME and SaaS expertise to the table. SM: René, I would like
SM: What kinds of problems have you identified as big open problems you are going to tackle in the labs? TL: We are always working on making the service faster, scalable and more reliable. We have a team of folks that are looking for the 1 in 10,000 to the 1 in 100,000 “nasty thing”
SM: You may have to do some of that equity/liquidity swapping due to the structure of venture funds. JH: One of our funding sources may have to close out their fund, and in that case we will go find someone to help do that. In fact we just recently had a conversation about this amongst
SM: I was reading an article about how a lot of startups are using credit cards to finance their early days. American Express is a very common way of financing startups, and I have used it myself. JH: Rene used to use that as well. It was a big day when he got his name
SM: That is good insight to carry to the audience in this particular type of business. I have heard that about the GoToMeeting product as well, that they have no vertical bias at all. They are trying to focus on very small businesses as well, and are finding no vertical alignment whatsoever. Switching topics, you
SM: Out of 5.2M small businesses, only 800,000 are using a software service for payroll? JH: It is under 16%, and that is why this is an attractive space because it is un-penetrated. All 5.2M of those people have some solution, but our belief is that a lot of them are doing it manually and