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When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Some technology startup veterans will tell you that when the markets are crashing, it could be a good time to pick up great technologies at rock-bottom prices. SuccessFactors was such a company. It was born out of the dot-com crisis of 2001 when Lars Dalgaard bought
Sramana Mitra: So your system recommends where to move the dollars to? John Wallace: Correct. Sramana Mitra: How do you sell this solution? What part of your organization is buying and how is the sales cycle?
Sramana Mitra: If you could be more granular, how do you account for that? What data can you work off of and how do you tie that to how you charge? John Wallace: I thought you were going in the direction of how I know what they spend. So you mean how do we measure
Sramana Mitra: What were the backgrounds of these other two companies? Were they using a vertical approach? John Wallace: No, they’re horizontal. I think what they have in common is that they have simplified the problem by collecting data off of Excel. They try to get themselves on the website. It makes the day of
Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about that? John Wallace: The problem now has a name. It’s not an ideal name but it has a name. It’s called marketing attribution. It’s looking at the effectiveness of marketing spend. The field closest to that would be approaches of this in Statistics in the past 20 years –
Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in terms of revenues in the first couple of years? John Wallace: It probably took us four years to get to a million dollars. Sramana Mitra: How many people were involved? John Wallace: There were about four people. My original hypothesis was that there would be a lot
Sramana Mitra: You were kind of an applications engineer? John Wallace: It was a great opportunity. Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2003? John Wallace: Yes. In 2003, I started a firm doing analytic consulting. I thought that I would be more impartial to what software we use to solve a problem and be more focused on