Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 5)

SM: When working with smart people, it always pays to explain why. LD: Exactly, and they will ask 15 questions to get there if they need to. To this day I adore them. They cannot do anything until they know why. I love that. That was the biggest learning for me was how to manage

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Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 4)

SM: Your technology background is nominal by Silicon Valley standards, it seems. LD: Absolutely. At that time I was a little more humble. I thought technology was intimidating even though I had used it in my different jobs.

Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 3)

SM: How long did you stay in that job at Unilever? LD: I moved back to the head office after a year, which is unfortunate because I really liked that job. They moved me back because we bought our biggest competitor, and they asked me if I could travel around the biggest countries and understand

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Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 2)

SM: What happened after you left Novartis? LD: This all ties into how I ended up starting my company. I remember being headhunted by Unilever, a big company with 320,000 employees with $60B in sales at the time, and I felt Novartis had done so much for me … I remember walking into the global

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Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 1)

If you think you need to have Silicon Valley DNA to become a successful technology entrepreneur, Lars Dalgaard proves that it ain’t so. Lars is the CEO of SuccessFactors (Nasdaq: SFSF), a SaaS company which recently went public. SM: Lars, I want to start with your personal background – tell me who you are. LD:

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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 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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Trend Radar 2008: SaaS in the Enterprise

A Gartner report from August 2007 predicted that SaaS adoption in the Enterprise will be rising at a 22% CAGR through 2011. Worldwide total software revenue for software as a service (SaaS) within the enterprise software markets is projected to surpass $5.1 billion in 2007, a 21 percent increase from 2006 revenue ($4.2 billion), according

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