5 Thought Leaders in Vertical Cloud

We’ve been covering the Vertical Cloud trend extensively this year. The following in-depth interviews with five leaders in Vertical Cloud offer an opportunity to get up to speed with the developments.

• Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva Systems – Peter Gassner is a self-described late bloomer. In a wonderfully authentic interview, Peter describes here how he turned his mid-life crisis into a multi-billion dollar market cap company. Veeva, in 2016, will do well over $500 million in revenue and trades at a market cap of over $4 billion. There’s nothing foo foo about this company. It’s raw execution. I love this story.
• Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho – Zoho has been a tremendous success story in the cloud. During this interview, Sridhar Vembu discusses his strategy for the next phase of growth, and his general observations about the dysfunctions in the cloud ecosystem. A compelling conversation, must read.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Mike Ward, Chief Revenue Officer at World First (Part 1)

In an increasingly globalized world, currency transfer is becoming increasingly digital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to World First as well as yourself.

Mike Ward: I’m the Chief Revenue Officer for World First for the global business unit. It was started in 2004. Jonathan Quinn and Nick Robinson were our two founders based out of UK. While working with a large financial institution, they saw the opportunity in the international payment space. They wanted to help service consumers and small to medium-sized corporations that faced problems in doing transactions and activities cross-border. >>>

Scaling a SaaS Business to 11,000 Customers: Booker.com CEO Josh McCarter (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

In 2010, SaaS investors were less rigorous than they are today about unit economics. Josh managed to raise a $15 million Series A and acquired a significant runway to figure out the metrics of his SMB-focused SaaS business. Read more about his journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Josh McCarter: I was born in Sacramento, California. I lived there till I was about 12. Then we moved down to San Diego. My mom’s family was an immigrant family from Greece and has a bunch of entrepreneurs. My grandfather and uncle on that side were very >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The customer has everything happening in an auto mode. They don’t really have to worry about it as long as they authorize you and you have ways of figuring out which authority accepts what kind of filing. Accordingly, you handle them digitally or manually. That’s opaque to the customer.

Peter Horadan: Exactly. We have some customers who file one return in one jurisdiction every month. We have some customers who file, literally, thousands of returns for a single merchant per month. When you think about the burden on that customer in doing that manually, it’s really just a space that cries out for automation. There’s a third part to it, which is the exemption certificate issue. If you’re a seller, you will find that some of your buyers say that they are exempt from paying sales taxes for a variety of reasons.

They might be a reseller and so, they’re exempt because they’ll charge the ultimate sales tax. There’s government entities. There’s non-profits. Depending on the >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You parameterize all these different pieces that are used in calculating the taxes. If I understood you correctly, even in a situation where merchants are selling through Amazon, Amazon will calculate the total sales tax to be collected on the transaction but when it comes to the merchant’s actual filing in all these different states and counties, you take care of all of that.

Peter Horadan: That’s exactly right. The second part is the filing. When the filing period ends, we add up all of the commercial activity. This needs to be separated out by jurisdiction. You need to file with the specific jurisdiction that the activity happened in. For most sellers, it’s every month. You have a monthly burden to file in every jurisdiction. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the space, what are the emerging trends in e-commerce you see that are creating more pressure on this kind of real-time tax calculation?

Peter Horadan: One example is a customer of ours. They’re an online Amazon seller. They started using Amazon to manage their inventory. It’s a program called Fulfilment by Amazon. The interesting thing about that is, Amazon will then distribute your inventory to multiple states, which gives you an obligation to collect and remit sales tax in those states. They’re a Washington-based business but they quickly had to file taxes in 17 different states. It had previously taken them eight hours to manually prepare just the Washington return. After using our system, they’re spending one hour a month for filing in 17 different states. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Automated tax filing has been around for a long time. I did a story on Sabrix. That must have been 2007. We are in 2016.

Peter Horadan: You’re right. It has been around for quite some time. One of the things we find amazing is that it has not yet been automated. Most companies are still dealing with transactional taxes manually. There is a lot of opportunity to help customers by automating this. When you’re going after trends, there’s a couple that are related to each other to make this an interesting space. The first is the incredible growth of online sales. Forester estimates over $350 billion in online sales this year.

Online selling continues to grow. Beyond that, businesses of all types are realizing that they need a multi-channel strategy. We’ve seen pure play digital >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 1)

The increasing adoption of electronic commerce and the related national/global nature of the business has created challenges for merchants on the tax calculation and filing front. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Avalara and yourself.

Peter Horadan: I’m EVP of Engineering and CTO for Avalara. We help customers with managing their transactional tax. That includes sales tax, VAT, or GST. Our business is to deal with the staggering complexity of dealing with transactional taxes so our customers can get back to business.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about your customers? What kind of customers use this technology? >>>