SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? KR: Finding the right executive team members can be a nerve-wracking experience. You are essentially giving a huge amount of responsibility to a person who in many cases you’ve only known for a few weeks during the interview process. A key
SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Any other metrics you track? KR: We launched our service in Q2 of this year, and the response has been fantastic. We’ve already signed up our first set of paying customers, which is a great milestone for us. Initially, our primary goals are
SM: What are your top target segments? KR: We are finding a lot of success with Sales Operations managers, VP of Sales and also the CFO or Director of Finance at small and medium size companies. Those with a slightly distributed workforce and who don’t want the hassle of managing the cost associated with traditional
SM: Describe the value proposition of LucidEra, including differentiation versus the rest of the market. KR: LucidEra combines sales and financial data to give users at small-to-mid sized businesses powerful insight into the effectiveness of their entire sales operations process (including quotas, pipeline, revenues, and expenses). We firmly believe that just like the everyday consumer
SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? KR: When we founded the company in 2005, the BI market was pretty stagnant. Not much innovation had happened in that market in the prior 10 years. It was basically a lot of vendors selling expensive solutions that were difficult and time consuming
SM. Where did you get the idea for LucidEra? What is your domain experience in the Enterprise 3.0 business? KR: The idea developed in two stages. First, when I ran my Business Intelligence consulting company many years, it became obvious that while Business Intelligence solutions were common in large enterprises, they were rare in small
SM: So your professional career began at Oracle. KR: Yes. I left Oracle to get a business degree at Stanford University. When I graduated in 1994, I started a consulting company called Emergent that focused on designing and building Business Intelligence solutions for large companies. We were acquired by Keane (a public systems integration company)
We have had lots of discussions about Enterprise 3.0. In this interview, I will be speaking with Ken Rudin, CEO of Lucidera, a young company attempting to become a leader in the massive Business Intelligence market by applying Enterprise 3.0 principles. Readers, note that Ken is an experienced serial entrepreneur, and you will learn much