Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You say it’s broader than that. The unstructured data problem in the enterprise is a broader problem, but I believe it’s going to get solved in pieces just like the contract problem will be solved at the contract lifecycle management level. Then there are other types of unstructured data in the enterprise. There are huge amounts of social media information, which is all unstructured data that needs to be analyzed. It’s a whole different application. It’s going to be solved at the customer analytics level. All these are different applications of different heuristics. What you’re looking for in terms of managing and analyzing the unstructured data is very different.

Ulf Zetterberg: Absolutely. I didn’t mean that there’s going to be one universal tool. There’s a very large farm of data that the customer has very limited insight into today compared to the structured stack they have. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does an enterprise account look like for you?

Ulf Zetterberg: Enterprise accounts are very distributed and fragmented. It could have two or three fairly old legacy data sources. It could be that the applications have been there for five to ten years. The usability and transparency is very poor. It’s a big project for them to try to find information and know how to extract the right information from each contract. One of the use cases that clearly puts this in the center is M&A. When you acquire a company and integrate that or you make a divestiture, it’s probably more troubling for many large companies, because now you need to know what contracts should go with that divestment. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I imagine it’s a fairly horizontal process. You basically work with all kinds of companies, right?

Ulf Zetterberg: Yes. There are certain industries though that particularly have more challenges and therefore see extra value with Seal. We also have an analytical module, which allows customers to do ad hoc queries and specific correlations of information. Financial Services is one of our largest verticals. Financial Services are hit by new regulatory requirements almost on a monthly basis. They can’t project what they need to capture on contracts on an on-going basis. Rather than burden their production systems, they use the metadata in those systems for what is needed to run the day-to-day business. When they need to rummage for regulatory questions or disputes, they use Seal to extract the information. Contracting per se is horizontal, but once you get into verticals, you can also have various industry-specific languages that you start to capture. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s put this in an ecosystem map. The contract management part of the business has quite a bit of activity. One that comes to mind is Aptus.

Ulf Zetterberg: They ride on the wave of Salesforce. Contracting has typically been driven by different departments. There hasn’t been any system for enterprise contract lifecycle management. Customers want to have one single system that they could use, but it never happens. Procurement tends to use its own system that is very much driven out of a supply or procurement system. You have contracting as a function there. Sales side usually is the back-end of the CRM system.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 1)

Unstructured Data Analysis coupled with Machine Learning is the most exciting area of business right now. In this interview, we discuss how Ulf and his team apply the process to Contract Analysis.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you. Tell us a bit about your background as well as Seal Software.

Ulf Zetterberg: I am the co-founder of Seal Software. I’ve been spending most of my time around content management. I have a passion for transformation of data to information, so it becomes useful and valuable inside a business process. I’m a serial >>>

Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Why do you need to filter the needs? From what you described, it sounds like the system is pretty self-correcting or self-converting?

David Barrett: It is. Most of our time is spent minimizing the number of times that you will need to reach out to us. For example, it’s possible that we can spend several hours dealing with a QuickBooks connection for some customer that will never pay us because this is just an individual person using QuickBooks. We want to make sure that we avoid getting trapped into spending a tremendous amount of time on people that will never pay us. We do all sorts of things like prioritize incoming messages that gives fast responses to people who are the biggest opportunities. It’s pretty self-optimizing. That’s why engineers are such a critical part of our model. Pretty much everything we do comes down to someone from engineering.

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Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At that point, you said you were charging subscriptions. Was anyone paying for subscription?

David Barrett: That’s interesting as well. At that time, we weren’t charging. In fact, we didn’t intend to charge for a long time. We raised our million dollars, did our pivot and were doing expense reports. This business was going to be so easy. It’s a classic enterprise play. We raise a lot of money and spend it on ads. Those ads were going to power a marketing theme that gets leads to the sales team. However, we soon learned that it just didn’t work that way. We did a whole lot of things, but we just couldn’t get customers. This is when the second really important thing happened.

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Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers did you gain traction with?

David Barrett: We did a couple of things. Most of the important things we did were, frankly, just by accident. I would say that the genius of Expensify is not that we have some great insight into the market, rather we knew we didn’t know anything. It’s fine to not know anything, so long as you know that because then, you’re in listening mode. The challenge is when you think you know something and you don’t. That’s a problem.

When we entered the space, we didn’t have any idea about what we’re doing. I don’t know anything about accounting. The most important thing that we did was have this email feature. When you sign-up for Expensify, roughly 30 minutes after the first email, you get a second email from me. It’s a pure text >>>