Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What use cases are you finding adoption in?

Mark Mader: The marketing operations is a big center of gravity within our businesses. They typically have many touch points within an organization who are responsible for either bringing something to market or managing the development of something. They’re usually the coordinators. When we look at the personas within our customers, they are very distinct users. Some of them are people who initiate process but they don’t invite anybody. Others are >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what happens after you did the reset. What was your go-to market strategy with the new horizontal product?

Brad Peters: We had to sit down and figure out what the go-to market strategy was going to be. There was a lot of experimentation. We couldn’t make our enterprise product available to everybody from day one. So we had to pick a small piece of it and make that available. It was not able to satisfy the entire market. We had to find little pieces of that marketplace that we could grow, expand, and drive. We tried a lot of value propositions – some of which worked, many didn’t. Ultimately, as we kept building the product and getting it richer and more robust, we continued to put more enterprise capabilities into the product. As we ultimately got those enterprise capabilities into the product, we started to compete in that main market. It was late 2010 when we really nailed it and things started to click. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 3)

Mark Mader: The second piece is a fundamental shift away from how Google Spreadsheets and Excel store their data. When we think about work and tracking items, we don’t think about it as a collection of cells as you have in a spreadsheet. We think about it as a unit of work. A row within our world represents a unit of work whether it’s a task, contact, or candidate. These are all things that exist within our applications. We’ve found that while people like the simplicity and flexibility of spreadsheets, what very often happens was when they shared those with others, people would make changes that were very unpredictable. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your original estimate of the TAM for your application in the financial services area? As the market was shifting, what did you estimate it down to that made you explore other verticals?

Brad Peters: The TAM for each application was probably $100 million. It had to be $100 million to get into it. The idea would be you could find multiple of these $100 million segments. We weren’t sure, but we figured that there are roughly 100 financial services institutions and 150 to 200 minor ones. If we could get a reasonable percentage of them, we’ll probably hit 50% of the TAM, or about $50 million. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 2)

Mark Mader: One of the categories that really took quite some time to move was one of the biggest ones, the Office Suite. As we look at all the different categories that are forming today, many of them have direct analogs to the pre-cloud world. One of the things that we found fascinating was that as Office was trying to figure out what its life in the cloud was going to be, there were two big companies that were going to help shape that. Microsoft being the obvious one and the other one was Google. They are working to bring the traditional Office Suite and the components of Office – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – to the cloud.

What we found, as a huge opportunity, was if Office was going to be reinvented in the modern day with these mobile devices in the cloud, would it really look as Office was defined 20 years ago? >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was the seed that you got enough to get you to the next milestone or did you have to raise?

Brad Peters: We raised seed financing before we started. We couldn’t afford to make the mortgage payment without a little bit of seed financing. We got a little bit of seed financing from some VCs and paid ourselves next to nothing, just enough to keep the lights on.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of raising the seed money, what did you sell the VCs? What was the investment thesis that you sold the VCs?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 1)

This conversation takes our coverage of the cloud-based productivity space further.

Sramana Mitra: Mark, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Smartsheet.

Mark Mader: I’m the CEO of Smartsheet. We are a Software-as-a-Service provider that serves about 40,000 businesses today in over 150 countries. The category of solution that we provide is enabling teams and businesses to collaborate on work and projects more effectively. That sounds like a very expansive category but in essence, it is one that is going through tremendous change right now as individuals and companies are trying to figure out how to adjust to working in a networked, cloud-based model. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in 2005 when you started this company?

Brad Peters: We needed to do two things. We had to get some funding because we didn’t have personal savings to be able to survive very long. We needed some seed capital. We spent a lot of time thinking through markets where, with a single sale, we could get enough customer traction to fund the company for a period of time. >>>