Announcing Greylock’s Investment in ClearSlide

September 28, 2011 3 Comments

We’re very happy to be new investors in ClearSlide, a company that builds tools for sales & marketing professionals to communicate — it’s radically simpler than the cumbersome conference tools we use today, and blends synchronous and asynchronous tools to make it easier than ever for sales people to close business. They’ve been flying under the radar since starting a couple of years ago — except with their amazing & rapidly growing customer list, full of raving fans who say they can’t live without it now. This morning they’ve launched more publicly with a new site and an announcement of new funding led by us and Aydin Senkut from Felicis, who led their initial funding.

What’s special about their products today is how simple they are to operate: you can get on the phone and do a product demo or share slides in under a minute. It’s trivially easy to send information around to customers and be able to understand what they viewed themselves or forwarded along. And it closes the loop by allowing easy sharing of all materials and insight with your coworkers.

And it all works in a web browser, with just a URL. No special installs, no plug-ins needed. I’m not talking about just modern browsers, either: any browser, even including IE6. (I’ll wait for your gasps of amazement to die down on that one. Also, it’s the last time I’ll ever mention IE6 on my blog. :-) )

They’ve really thought hard about how to build great tools for sales and marketing people, and it shows.

It was a very quick decision for us — at Greylock, we talk a lot about “our kind of founders” — and Al and Jim are definitely that. Here’s what I mean.

We’ve known Al for some time — he was the founding CTO of Evite — it’s a little hard to remember, at this distance, what a revelation that product was, but it changed everything — it let us interact with each other and collaborate in ways that had just been way too painful previously. And it’s influenced too many startups to count since then.

Well, he and Jim came in to give a presentation to us about they’d done, they jumped right into how their customers love it, how sales are rocketing up, what’s next — and slowly it dawned on me that they were using their own service to present! So I opened up my laptop to type in the URL & access code and bam!, I could see their slides — took maybe 3 seconds. I got sort of excited so pulled out my iPhone, then my iPad — everything just worked. And to Al & Jim’s credit, none of my futzing around with various electronics fazed them one bit. They just kept moving, unsurprised that there were no glitches in what they’d built.

And that’s part of what we mean when we say “our kind of founders” — they’re strong product and operating founders, who after changing the world once with Evite, just put their heads down and did the hard work of building something from scratch these past two years. No hype, no fanfare, just customers that love their products and working with them.

So we’re very excited to get involved in the next phase of their growth, and couldn’t be happier to be leading their funding round. Take a look.

http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/28/announcing-greylocks-investment-in-clearslide/

John Lilly is a partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla.

Filed under Enterprise Tech, Greylock Updates, SaaS/Cloud, Software Tagged with , , , , ,

Workday’s Year of Transformation

February 2, 2011 3 Comments

Now that we’ve closed last year’s books and are several weeks into 2011, I want to share some thoughts on Workday’s accomplishments and where we’re headed. But where do I start? How about with this indisputable fact: 2010 was a transformational year for Workday.

We exited the start-up phase and emerged as the leader of SaaS HCM solutions for large and medium-sized companies. The economic downturn—if anything—boosted the momentum of Workday and other cloud-based providers, as organizations realized the cost savings of SaaS. That helped Workday enter 2010 as a strong company and emerge from it as an even stronger one, with customer bookings growing 90 percent and revenues up more than 160 percent from 2009.

The past year also exposed the huge lead cloud providers have over on-premise vendors in their ability to innovate for exciting new platforms, such as Apple’s iPad. The multi-tenant, modern architecture of cloud computing lets real SaaS providers more quickly develop and deliver highly relevant, modern-day products. Nothing personal against the legacy on-premise vendors—once upon a time I was part of one—but there’s no way they can match our pace of innovation. Their outdated model is just inferior.

I’m also delighted that even with our nearly doubled bookings growth, our customers let us know that we took care of them. Our surveys revealed a 99 percent customer-satisfaction level, which is extremely important to me, Dave, and the rest of us here at Workday. That’s a hard level to reach for on-premise vendors because—once again—their outdated, inferior model prohibits customer intimacy.

There were many exciting product deliveries in 2010, including the first phase of talent capabilities in Workday Human Capital Management and maturation of Workday Payroll. In the area of Workday Financials, we saw good uptake in our spend-management offering and a new product, Initiatives, that lets customers plan and track the progress of work and align it to company goals, and to search and group employees based on attributes such as skills and experience. These innovations helped Workday win top honors at the HR Demo show in December.

Looking into 2011, I believe the momentum behind our human resources products will continue to build, and we’ll further extend our position as the clear leader of unified HCM, which brings together core HR, payroll, and talent management for large and medium-sized companies. Our pipeline is very strong, so the outlook is great for this goal.

For Workday Financials, we have signed 16 medium-sized companies. By year end 2011, we hope to grow that number significantly and add five or six flagship accounts. We believe that our work with these customers will pave the way for us to start aggressively selling Financials to the broader marketplace in 2012.

We landed our first wave of public sector customers in 2010, and will further penetrate the public sector market with Workday HCM and Payroll, followed by Financials in 2012. In terms of geographic reach, we ended 2010 as a U.S.-centered company with good growth in Canada and the U.K. We’ll continue to extend our reach in those regions and will begin expansion into other parts of Europe and Asia in 2011.

As you can see, we have a busy year ahead. Before I sign off, here’s a snapshot of some of our best numbers at the end of 2010:

3 Feature-packed Workday updates
177 Companies that have selected Workday
1 million + Workday users under contract
99% Workday customer satisfaction rate
99.92% Workday system availability in 2010 (uptime)
800 Attendees at Workday Rising User Conference (up 60%)
160% GAAP revenue growth
90% Growth in three-year bookings
599 Employees (up 55%)
No. 1 Business Application (Private Company), San Francisco Business Times’ Technology and Innovation Awards
No. 1 HR Application, HR Demo Tektonic Awards
No. 1 Professional Services Organization (out of 214 firms), receiving perfect scores in all five categories of SPI Research’s “The 2011 Professional Services Maturity Model Benchmark“

I’m proud of everyone’s contributions at Workday in 2010, as each person played a part in making it possible for me to share such great numbers. And while Workday is no longer a “start-up,” in many ways, this is only the beginning.

Now back to work! ☺

­ – Aneel

Aneel Bhusri is Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive at Workday and a partner at Greylock. Formerly he was Vice Chairman and a Senior Vice President at PeopleSoft.  Aneel was also the former Chairman at Data Domain and is a current board member at Cloudera, Data Robotics, Proferi and Pure Storage.


Filed under Industry Insights, SaaS/Cloud, Start-up Updates Tagged with , , , ,

Dreamforce Musings: Why the Real Cloud Has Gained Momentum

December 15, 2010 Leave a comment

I had the rare and great opportunity to attend the opening two days of Dreamforce last week. Rare, because I can’t remember the last user conference I went to as an attendee rather than a speaker (turns out it’s a lot less stressful to be in the audience ☺). And great, because it truly was a great event, with the de facto ambassador of the enterprise cloud, Marc Benioff, playing the roles of preacher, humanitarian (Salesforce.com Foundation does some really great things) and innovator throughout the event. I’ve had a week to digest the happenings @ Dreamforce, and thought I’d share a few takeaways:

  • Dreamforce is beginning to rival the biggest user conferences on the planet, with more than 30,000 customers, prospects, press, and analysts having registered for the event. If anyone needs further proof that the cloud is real and here to stay, they should’ve witnessed the crowds, excitement and energy at Dreamforce. It was truly awesome.
  • The event felt more like a revival or a movement than a user conference. Partly because the cloud is a movement, and partly because Marc is a great evangelist.
  • The energy and optimism levels reminded me of the early days of ERP: New vendors hawking their services and wares; established vendors like Accenture and Deloitte beginning to make a big presence; and individuals and organizations alike sensing the opportunity to reinvent themselves around the cloud. Salesforce.com does an amazing job of serving both customers and non-customers alike at its user conference—I took notes, Marc!
  • There was evidence everywhere that businesses of all sizes have embraced cloud computing. When Marc asked during his keynote how many in the audience were from companies of greater than 1,000 employees, hands shot up across the packed conference hall.
  • The product announcements and demos validated something I’ve been feeling for some time: The technology revolution taking place isn’t just about the cloud—it’s about the convergence of the cloud, “consumerization” of enterprise technologies, and mobility. And with multitenancy and native Web architectures, vendors like Salesforce and Workday are able to innovate for this revolution at a dizzying pace. Dreamforce provided just some of the examples of this increased pace of innovation, specifically as cloud platforms have become more mature and full featured, allowing developers to build more usable functionality and native applications for the iOS, Android and WM7 mobile devices at an ever-accelerating pace.
  • While there was a ton of energy, packed conference halls and real innovation happening at Dreamforce, I understand SAP was holding a summit about 20 miles away. The amount of news stories, blogs, and tweets from Dreamforce (the hashtag #df10 actually trended on Twitter) blasted away the buzz on the old stuff. And while it seems to me SAP takes a somewhat tentative approach to innovation—unsure of where and how to take the leap into modern and better technologies—the vast majority of customers that I talk to want innovative solutions, and they want them now.

As Workday’s co-founder and co-CEO, I’m a true believer in the cloud movement and admittedly have a biased perspective. But once upon a time, I was a product executive at a legacy enterprise application vendor. When I look back at the dramatic changes since those days at PeopleSoft, I really do wonder how software vendors that depend so heavily on traditional models will ever make the leap into the cloud. (And I mean true cloud computing—hybrid or hosted R/3 is not a cloud, it’s just warmed-over hosting).

If SAP can get its cloud strategy and Business ByDesign offering on track, it’ll be good for the industry and good for competition. But based on where I’ve been and where I am now, what I’ve seen from SAP, what we’re doing here at Workday, and what I’m witnessing from the cloud vendors around me, I just don’t see it happening anytime soon.

Now back to work ☺.

­ – Aneel

Aneel Bhusri is Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive at Workday and a partner at Greylock. Formerly he was Vice Chairman and a Senior Vice President at PeopleSoft.  Aneel was also the former Chairman at Data Domain and is a current board member at Cloudera, Data Robotics, Proferi and Pure Storage.


Filed under Industry Insights, SaaS/Cloud Tagged with , , , , , ,

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