Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back one step. Winning big customers like PayPal, what was the pitch that you made to let you start working on their technology stack?

Lior Gal: It’s the same pitch, but the pitch isn’t the trick if you can call it a trick. The process is, you need to identify which customers are early adopters. You can google PayPal and see if they have any PRs with any companies.

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet Yaniv?

Lior Gal: Through one of the angel investors. He was a Chairman at one of the startups that I worked for and knew the three other technical co-founders from another company. When he met them, he reached out to me and introduced me. He did not set up expectations.

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was going to be in the product that you were putting together based on this general observation?

Lior Gal: The first building block is, it needs to be software. That might sound not that unique but in this space, people are still buying appliances. It needs to be software because that’s the way the future consumption is going to be.

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 1)

This is a textbook case study of how to bring complex technology to market.

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

Lior Gal: I’m an Israeli out of Tel Aviv and soon to be 47 years old. I grew up in Israel. I did army service for five years and then left the army to study computer science and math in university. I ended up working in the space.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very good strategy. Where you can show ROI easily is where the sales cycle is going to be the fastest.

Arijit Sengupta: It’s easier for the champion to go up to the management and say, “I’ve made you this much money.” People are used to years’ payback.

Sramana Mitra: You are selling a product that customers are using directly.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 6)

Arijit Sengupta: They won’t tell you how much they’ve made, but you can tell that they have made more than you are going to charge them. That changes the conversation. I like to see this pattern. If somebody starts buying and within 24 hours, you see a couple more people buy. We had a client where their firewall blocks any product that is not whitelisted. It was blocking Aible. The customer fought with IT and got us whitelisted. It was helpful. It wasn’t a conflict. They really pushed IT to get Aible whitelisted.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your lock-in period? Did you go to Salesforce?

Arijit Sengupta: I had a three-year resting and two-year non-compete clause. I did my two years. Salesforce is a wonderful place. Even if you leave Salesforce, you’re part of the family. I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I wanted to solve this problem and started Aible.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The data sources are the ERP systems of these customers?

Arijit Sengupta: Initially, [the data sources were] CSV files. Eventually, we built connectors to SAP and Salesforce. At the time of funding, we were still taking CSV files. Not all of the features existed at that time. What was important for them was that we had customers talking to Menlo saying we replicated something we had spent months doing.