Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 2)

SM: When did you switch to general management? MG: Coming out of that job I ended up having a large team. I woke up one day and realized I had a hundred developers reporting to me. The transition from being the technical architect to working with multiple technical architects and helping them get their vision into a product was exhilarating.

I felt I had this niche talent of being able to help really smart people express their technical creativity and simultaneously be able to talk to senior management and explain why an idea should get funded or adopted in business terms. In doing so, I became a good expert technically, and I became the chief technology officer for EDS Canada.

SM: Did you find your role changed significantly as the CTO? MG: What I did find was, oddly enough, that I was spending a lot of time helping the sales force. They would bring me out to talk about our capabilities at a very broad technical level with customers.

In a very short time, technology as a whole moved very quickly into relational databases, distributed UNIX systems, and saw the down phasing of the IMS database and the IBM large mainframe systems. Everybody wanted to get their hands on the cost saving and flexibility of the next generation of client server technology. I really understood that technology very well because I had been working with it for 8 years.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire
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