Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 7)

SM: Tell me about some of the deals that you have done since coming into existence, and what is unique about them? BJ: Since we started Emergence we have had three IPOs. That is pretty good for a young firm. Obviously SalesForce.com was one. We also invested in a software provider in the Human Resources

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 6)

SM: The surprising part of the story, one of the reasons I decided to cover it, is that I have not seen too many major trends in our industry in the Valley that all of the VCs did not run after. The venture industry is like lemmings. Everybody is running after the same trends. Someone

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 5)

SM: What happened after you closed the fund? Did the thesis check out? What was happening in the marketplace, and how did you get your positioning and your thesis out there to solicit deals? BJ: SalesForce.com went public as we were closing our first fund, and that proved to be a home run for Emergence.

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 13)

SM: What is your take on the Street’s understanding of how to analyze SaaS companies. Why are SaaS companies down so much? MG: It is coming around. I think SaaS gets put in the same bucket as tech. Right now there is a lack of visibility and understanding of how the future is going to

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 12)

SM: How many engineers worked on the new product? MG: We don’t break out how many engineers work on what products. SM: The reason I am asking that question is more intelligent than it sounds. SaaS companies have a big operational overhead to come to market and get established, but then additional products are not

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 11)

SM: Which international markets are you seeing adoption in? MG: We are probably the number 1 provider in Australia and New Zealand. We are in the top 3 in France and the top 5 in the UK. Momentum everywhere is going up. From a revenue perspective, we grew revenue by 32% to $128M. In applications

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Indian IT Industry: The Next 8 Years

Forbes has some scary statistics on the salary hike rate in India. The 2007 rate is 15.1%, up from 14.4% the previous year. 2008 forecast: 15.2%. This is the fifth consecutive year of salary growth above 10%. Good lord! Is Death of Indian Outsourcing all that far out?

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

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