Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about inter-departmental bridging essentially. You are talking about CRM servicing the closing of the deal in sales and then you’re introducing a bridge into professional services on actually implementing the deal. There’s a project management and staffing that you’re now bringing into the CRM workflow.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Absolutely, you got it 100%. This is really building the bridges between departments. Let me give you another example of a bridge that we built. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That’s not necessarily the only kind of companies that VCs back. VCs also back enterprise software that delivers that kind of growth. In fact, I would say the IT industry’s bread and butter success have been from enterprise software – not from consumer software.

Eric Burns: I guess the thing that may have stood out to some of these VCs is that our renewal rate was extremely high at 93%. When you have a SaaS business and you’re getting that revenue again every year and you devote the new spillover to new customer acquisition, you have a nice virtuous cycle.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying of course requires a lot of integration with other systems. If you’re talking about customer interactions, then you’re talking about the CRM system. Now we’re talking about some sort of a portal that brings together all of these integration elements?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Not necessarily, although you’re raising a very good point. We do have an amazing integration, for instance, with Salesforce. Let me describe to you a use case that will clarify this. For instance with regards to CRM, think about an opportunity that is about to be closed at 80% within the Salesforce or the CRM system. We have many companies that are using it this way. Marketo and Bazaarvoice are customers. We have about 25,000 customers. The third biggest bank in the world is using Clarizen. One of the top four auditing companies is using Clarizen in order to run their audit process. Overall, we get a lot of success with the concept that I’m now describing.

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Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of other vendors that you compete with, whom do you see in deals?

Eric Burns: Initially, we were quite afraid of what seemed like the incumbent player in the lecture capture market in the higher education, which is a company called Tegrity. I think it’s safe to say that we badly disrupted their market. We came in with what we believed as a superior technology, a better workflow and data model, and particularly support organization. We went after their core business, which was software-based lecture capture using web cams and cameras. Over the first couple of years, it was very much trench warfare, trying to win deals, and flying places for presentations. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 2)

Avinoam Nowogrodski: What we have created in Clarizen is collaboration in context. It’s in context of getting work done and promoting work. If I would just use another term, which is a bit more complex because I come from the area of product lifecycle management, it’s all about the work-life cycle management collaboration. You need to collaborate in context of work-life cycle and not just collaboration for the sake of collaboration. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So roughly speaking, it is end of 2007. How much venture capital did you raise at that point and how long did it take you to get the first product out of the door?

Eric Burns: We had an extreme advantage here, which is that we have the opportunity to research that market to understand what classroom capture required under the CMU umbrella for several years.

Sramana Mitra: You did all the research and validation work before the company was founded. It was all happening on a different clock – not on the venture clock.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 1)

Let’s take a look at the future of cloud-based collaboration with Avi Nowogrodski.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some of your background as well as introducing Clarizen to our audience.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: I’m actually a second-timer. The first company I built in 1996 was a company named SmarTeam. It dealt with collaboration for bill of materials. I was the CEO of this company for 10 years. I sold it to Dassault Systems after three years of inception.

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Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: They basically asked you to become the CEO of this entity that was already funded?

Eric Burns: I actually became the Chief Technology Officer because my competencies at that time were that of an engineer. I’m now the Chief Product Officer and I’ve done a lot of the CEO duties. We have this unorthodox operating structure that ended up working very well for us. >>>