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 8)

SM: In the way the product is marketed, are you also competing against job boards such as Monster? MG: No, they are more partners of ours. We have direct linked feeds to most of the job boards. If a company decides to approve a requisition, they can hit a button in our system and it

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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

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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,

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 4)

SM: Tell me about your move from EDS to PeopleSoft? MG: In 1999 I was recruited by a headhunter at Spencer Stewart. Craig Conway had become the CEO of PeopleSoft, he had been there for 6 months, and he had a vision of re-tooling the ERP software space and re-tooling the company. One of the

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 3)

SM: So how did you get from CTO to GM? MG: One day at work I got a call from my wife. I was in downtown Toronto, serving as the Chief Technologist of EDS Canada, and I was 30 years old. I had been married to my wife for 5 years … she was my

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 2)

SM: When did you switch to general management? MG: Coming out of that job I ended up having a large team. I woke up one day and realized I had a hundred developers reporting to me. The transition from being the technical architect to working with multiple technical architects and helping them get their vision

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Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 1)

In our Enterprise 3.0 coverage, I bring you, next, a conversation with Michael Gregoire, CEO of Taleo (Nasdaq: TLEO). Taleo had 2007 sales of $128 Million, and a market cap of close to $500 Million. In this case-study, we will do a deep-dive into the company’s business with Michael.