categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
talent management
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:
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
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
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
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
Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 7)
SM: I wonder how Louis was able to fund the company in 1999. I talked to a lot of SaaS company CEOs and all of them were turned down by the VCs. Yesterday, I was having lunch with Philippe Courtot, who you may know, is the CEO of Qualys. They do security as SaaS, and
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
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,
