Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 1)

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 born and raised, and in what kind of background?

Louis Tetu: I’m French-Canadian. I was born and raised in Quebec, Canada. I live there with my wife and three children and that is where we started several software companies, including Taleo and Coveo.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a little more context. What did you do in terms of education?
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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 7)

Harman Singh: I’m a fundamental believer that this is going to go a long way. No matter how much I have in the business, it’s the reputation that’s going to be there forever—not the exit. That was the gist of the whole thing. We are where we are and the investors are happy.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still maintaining the same logic in the business, right? You have this classroom product that test preps agencies around the world are using on a per educator basis. You’re selling this product using telesales from India. That’s the core of your business, correct?

Harman Singh: Correct. I’ll elaborate a bit more about that. We consider education service providers as a customer of ours. However, we want to broaden the definition from just education service providers. It could be community colleges or universities, but we don’t have K-12 right now. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eugene Laney, Head of International Trade Affairs at DHL Express (Part 2)

Eugene Laney: We also have a hybrid model where we have customers working with e-commerce companies using those companies as their domestic mailboxes. You have an individual who might be in the UK and wants to purchase a number of e-commerce goods from a domestic-only retailer who sells through e-commerce. Their goods would then be consolidated in the US held by that e-commerce mailbox. Then that e-commerce company would then use DHL or other logistics providers to send all of that products to him. It’s like a consolidator type of model. Those are the new models that we see emerging now.

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging?

Harman Singh: On an average, $250 per educator per year. In those days, it was about $150.

Sramana Mitra: It was a per educator pricing?

Harman Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you worked the test prep academy, were they buying for multiple educators? What would a test prep academy deal look like?

Harman Singh: About three to five trainers.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eugene Laney, Head of International Trade Affairs at DHL Express (Part 1)

E-Commerce is a global phenomenon today, and over the next decade and more, it will become more so. Eugene talks about the trend from the perspective of one of the top logistics vendors.

Sramana Mitra: Welcome to the Thought Leaders in E-Commerce series. Why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us what you’re working on. We’ll take it from there.

Eugene Laney: I’m the Head of International Trade Affairs for DHL Express here in the US. I have two responsibilities. One is to represent DHL Express here in Washington DC before Congress as well as US embassies. The second part of my role is export promotion where I work with our sales, marketing, and media as well as operations team to develop products and services to help SMBs as well as large corporations to >>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you’ve read it, we’ve released a book called Bootstrapping Using Services where we deal with this topic extensively. We have companies that have gone up to $25 million in revenue using bootstrapping using services. This is a very viable strategy. However, you have to do it right.

Harman Singh: I agree with you. I wouldn’t do a lot of things I had done in those days. It survived only because of one reason—perseverance. There was nothing else that got us to this point.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. Frankly, I used to think a lot like you when I started out. That was a long time ago. I started my first company in 1994 while I was still a graduate student at MIT. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I’m talking of an era which >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in your marketplace? Is the market penetrated at this point or is a lot of your customer base still on legacy systems?

Chris Sullens: There’s a lot of white space because of the new entrants and the capabilities of these small guys to now consume the technology. At the high-end, there is pretty high penetration where you have legacy solutions. The small companies have been doing things with white boards and spreadsheets and finding a good dispatcher who has it all in the head and leaning on that particular person to be their solution.

From that standpoint, there’s a lot of white space which is also the case from the field service side. More and more people are finding solutions for the market, but I would say that over half of our customers come to us with no system at all.

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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The angels invested on what thesis? Typically, investors look for investment thesis. What was the investment thesis?

Harman Singh: The thesis was that educators want to be connected to students over the Internet. That thesis never changed. The business model was unknown, but this thesis hasn’t changed. It wasn’t about B2B or B2C. This is all about whether educators can be connected to students online. We went on and the company Educomp invested some money into the business. The good thing was that we had users. Thousands of educators were using our product although for free. That was when we experimented by introducing a $50 a year membership. However, $50 per year is a very small amount.

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