Sramana Mitra: There are a lot more hubs that have developed where interesting companies are built. You probably know Greg Gianforte who had built up a very interesting unorthodox place like Montana into a very nice technology destination. Louis Tetu: Technology is ubiquitous. Regardless of where we are, we all have the challenge of distributed
Sramana Mitra: Our program is 100% based on this philosophy that you have to immerse yourself in customers and you have to understand the customer dynamics—why they buy, when they buy, and how they buy. Louis Tetu: If you do that, you can use seed capital to get very quickly to a use case and
Sramana Mitra: Just to get the facts straight, you have a bunch of Fortune 50 companies starting to adopt the solution. You did the seed round yourself. What about the venture round? At what point in that adoption cycle did that venture round come in? I’m not talking about post-IPO. I’m talking about the pre-IPO
Sramana Mitra: In the case of HP as the anchor tenant, were they paying you? Louis Tetu: They were in exchange for significant development capacity and applications suited to their needs. Of course, we had the framework for that. As I said, we went to them with a concept of digital competence profile. That was a significant
Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Baan? Louis Tetu: I stayed at Baan until 1998. The dynamics of Baan at that time, without going into too much detail, had changed quite a bit. Several of us left. Several started other companies. I was 34 years old. I was doing some investments in multiple
This interview gives us an opportunity to speak with a seasoned enterprise software entrepreneur who has founded and scaled a number of companies, including Taleo that went public, and was eventually acquired by Oracle for $1.9 billion. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you
Sramana Mitra: That’s not entirely fair. These are not ERP solutions; they are best-of-breed solutions as well. Adam Miller: Well, they used to be. SM: They’re not ERP solutions. They’re best-of-breed talent management solutions.
SM: OK. What was the evolution of those situations? AM: Typically in these private equity rollups of software companies, they’re not all that effective. The top talent will leave right away. Those two companies still exist [but] neither is competitive in the marketplace today. SM: OK. All right. Those are on the private equity side,