Siebel Systems

No, I started out before that, really.

I mean, I worked for Siebel Systems way back in 2000.

Yeah.

And I started my career with Siemens in industrial automation.

Well, no, actually, I started another startup, actually, back at Dynamic CRM version one back in 2000.

Yeah.

With a couple of guys from Siebel Systems.

I don't know if you remember.

And so Salesforce was in the market, but they were only focused on the very low-end SMB part of the market.

On the enterprise side, there was a big, big company in the Valley called Siebel, and they were giant, like 2 billion revenue, 8,000 employees, an incredible company.

And we were 30 employees, maybe a million and a half revenue, and we had this product.

So we were positioning it as an enterprise CRM, which put us directly in competition with them.

So not surprisingly, every deal we went to do, we would walk in and the first question we get is, how are you different than Siebel? And the hard answer to that question was we kind of sucked compared to them.

Like, we were newer than they were.

We didn't have as many features as they had.

That's it.

and then it doesn't.

And so why the heck would you need SAP or, you know, in those days, Siebel or Salesforce or whatever? Like, that's ridiculous.

There's nothing there.

It's just a RDBMS wrapper.

I tell this story, I hope it's true.

I tell the story I heard that Tom Siebel, when he was running Siebel Systems, started every quarter, every six months, would have five big initiatives for the company.

This is what the company cares about to be successful right now.

And when he would talk to you and meet with you on QBR or whatever, he'd want to know how you're thinking about what you're doing and your job on the bottom end of operations somewhere is going to somehow affect one of his five initiatives, right? And I always think about that when we're engaging with customers, like what else is going on at this company that we could align to? It doesn't mean to say we're going to drive revenue up 10%, but maybe it's a project that we might enable a little bit or take the risk out of it, the friction out a little bit.

They had a really good pulse on the nature of the business of their clients.

And then Salesforce came along and basically blew up the concept of a forward deployed engineer for Siebel and, uh, CRMs and went, "Nah, you can do it all in the cloud." And then, like, it seemed like-

Yeah

... cloud plus verticalization led to this waning of why would I want a forward deployed engineer? We're too specialized.

In fact.

When they started, the big 800-pound gorilla in that space was Siebel Systems.

And Benioff, famously with his very small team, went out in front of a Siebel conference with demo signs, like no software, all this.

Literally, he treated it like a movement.

So I really started with some of the basics, and I think we had so much success, uh, correcting those within 90 days that they started expanding the role, and, and they added, I didn't, well, I didn't have the CRM team or the data warehouse team when I got here, but they then asked me to go dig from my background, uh, you know, doing some of that stuff in the past, to tackle other projects.

And, and I got very lucky because having the ability to build a team, I brought in some really great people and had some people here that were, were exceptional to help us get off an old Siebel platform, expand what we had with our CRM, and then start building AI tools on top of.

Really got to innovate and create, and I was able to focus on, as I said, using some great historical team members who had such knowledge to quickly help me get up to speed, even though I said, told you it's hard to learn this industry, and then put a, a strategy in place to go and transform and, and now we're, um, you know, more than two years into that transformation.

We've had a lot of success on sales with our AI sales platform, and now we're focusing hard on service, so it's been quite a transformation.