Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 1)
Check other articles in the series...In our Enterprise 3.0 coverage, I bring you, next, a conversation with Michael Gregoire, CEO of Taleo (Nasdaq: TLEO). Taleo had 2007 sales of $128 Million, and a market cap of close to $500 Million. In this case-study, we will do a deep-dive into the company’s business with Michael.
SM: Let’s start by reviewing your background. Where are you from? MG: I grew up in a small blue-collar town in Canada. I went to Wilfrid Laurier University which is in Ontario, and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics.
SM: Where did you start your career after college? MG: I began working in research and development for EDS, focusing on distributed systems. Afterwards, I did an MBA.
In a very short amount of time I had come to the realization that being a good technologist is nice, but if I wanted to see products evolve into the market place, I needed to have a better understanding of how business works and how to manage people. After my MBA I returned to Canada and led a very large project for EDS.
SM: What project was that? MG: It was working with the communication hubs for assembly plants. There used to be 38 GM assembly plants, I was the lead architect and project manager for the installation of a system for which we connected IBM mainframes and multiple variants of UNIX platforms with robotics systems. This was long before the MQ series, and long before UNIX sockets and TCP/IP became popular. We were writing device drivers to enable large mainframe data to be distributed down to a plant floor computer; it powered vision systems, and controlled robotics that would pick engine cradles and move them.
SM: You are a very hands-on, technical person. MG: I was very hands on technically in that project, yes. I did most of the architecture work myself. I wrote the first few versions of our TCP/IP stack.
This segment is part 1 in a 13 part series Segment 2 →
Jump to part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
[…] M&A activity this year. Let us look at them again based on recent results. You can also read my interview with Michael Gregoire, CEO of Taleo and with Steve Singh of Concur. You can also read my Forbes article on why I think the next VMWare […]
[…] been looking at various Human Resources related services businesses recently, especially with a multi-part interview series with Michael Gregoire, CEO of Taleo (Nasdaq: TLEO). Taleo has not signaled any weakness due to the economy. One would expect the payroll providers to […]