Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Baan?

Louis Tetu: I stayed at Baan until 1998. The dynamics of Baan at that time, without going into too much detail, had changed quite a bit. Several of us left. Several started other companies. I was 34 years old. I was doing some investments in multiple technology companies. When you’re 34 years old and you’re basically technically retired, there are not that many people to play with on Wednesday mornings. You realize that the DNA of entrepreneurship is something you enjoy. The world of investing, albeit interesting, does not have the same DNA as the world of entrepreneurship and building organizations. We soon wanted to get back in the game.

Sramana Mitra: What was your next step?

Louis Tetu: That was the inception of Taleo. I think you interviewed Mike Gregoire from Taleo in the past, right?

Sramana Mitra: Yes. We have the Taleo story from Mike’s perspective.

Louis Tetu: Mike took over Taleo when it was a public company. I can certainly tell you how I got it there.

Sramana Mitra: The story from zero to being a public company is certainly a very different story.

Louis Tetu: I was with Mike because I stayed as Chairman of the company while Mike was CEO for a number of years. Actually, I hired Mike in 2005.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you conceptualize Taleo?

Louis Tetu: One of the investments I had made on a personal note was in a job board in Canada. We have to go back to 1998 to understand that the concept of job boards was fairly novel. Obviously, it’s now fairly mainstream and becoming a commodity. Back then, the whole idea of leveraging the Internet to access a broad candidate base and doing the matchmaking was novel. I had invested in one of the leading job boards in eastern Canada. I started realizing, as an investor at that company, that fundamentally, it was a media business.

We ended up selling the job board business and wrote a business plan to create a company that would essentially manage the supply chain of people— the whole process of acquiring talent and moving talent throughout organizations through a digital competency profile as opposed to working with very inefficient text-based resumes. The whole notion of the digital competency profile was something we pioneered. We became the number one in the world in that too. We ended up selling the job board in 1999 and turned around and hired 50 programmers and started building a solution. We convinced the higher ranks of HP all the way to CEO that we would build a platform that would be far more efficient to acquire talent. We built Taleo around HP. We essentially made the offer to HP to dedicate half of our R&D bandwidth and team to them in exchange for a global roll out and building this solution together with us. We got HP. As I said, we pioneered the whole notion of matching talents.

Sramana Mitra: Why did you choose to do that with HP?

Louis Tetu: I only know one thing. I think I got a decent understanding of enterprise software and how those markets work. When you build a software company, you spend a lot of money in research and development. That’s increasingly true, obviously, because the ticket to the game is increasingly expensive. One of the key mistakes you want to avoid is to build technology at a vacuum. One of the strategies that we consistently try to deploy is bring our R&D to the client very early on, oftentimes, even before the product is built. Truly, align with what clients need. We always work with that notion of the anchor tenant. Many products can be a technical success but that’s not quite what customers want for various reasons.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo
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