Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Our program is 100% based on this philosophy that you have to immerse yourself in customers and you have to understand the customer dynamics—why they buy, when they buy, and how they buy.

Louis Tetu: If you do that, you can use seed capital to get very quickly to a use case and some customer adoption. Then, you can leverage upon that to raise the next round. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I’m saying that’s the way to do it.

Sramana Mitra: No arguments whatsoever on that. Now that we have that point fleshed out, what else do you want to tell in the Taleo story? As you pointed out, we have done the story with Michael.

Louis Tetu: I hired Michael when the company went public. The driving reason was family. I have three children and lived in Canada. I wasn’t prepared to do what it takes to move to the US and run a fast-growing, highly-watched NASDAQ company. I spent a few years investing and traveling around the world with my family and going to pretty remote places. Michael did a great job in taking Taleo to where it went.

Sramana Mitra: What year, by the way, did you stop being operationally active in Taleo? 

Louis Tetu: In the end of 2008. I’d say 2009. I stayed as Chairman until 2008.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start Coveo?

Louis Tetu: I didn’t start Coveo. I originally invested personally in Coveo. I led the private round in 2008. Coveo was a spin-off that was founded in 2005 by Laurent Simoneau. Laurent created before a company Coveo by the name of Copernic Technologies. At the turn of the past decade, Copernic was the global leader in desktop search software. That was before Google had its desktop search and before Microsoft started providing better search within the file system of Windows. Copernic did meta search engine. It had some powerful indexers.

In 2005, Loreaux did a very smart move. They essentially sold the goodwill of the company to an acquirer and then rolled the R&D and some of the intellectual property to a new company by the name of Coveo. They bootstrapped that leveraging on the success of their previous venture. I was at Taleo. In 2008, they raised a round and that’s how we got together and I led it. I wasn’t part of the company at that time. It’s only two years ago when I re-engaged post-Taleo. The company grew and Laurent asked me to become the CEO of this company.

Sramana Mitra: What does Coveo do?

Louis Tetu: Coveo is actually starting to look like another Taleo and potentially with broader applications. The technology behind it is indexing and search, but unlike traditional search where you think about your search box, we use indexing and search as a way to mash up information on demand. It makes sense of the IT ecosystem. We became the leader of the space. Are you familiar with the Gartner Magic Quadrant?

Sramana Mitra: Sure.

Louis Tetu: We’re the leader in the leader’s quadrant in an area called enterprise search. Essentially, enterprise search is a little bit like a Google for the enterprise except that in the enterprise, you deal with security. Coveo has the broadest set of crawlers and connectors to create a unified index of anything from your IBM database all the way to SharePoint, Oracle, Twitter, and Salesforce.com. It’s the technology that makes information consolidation the easiest on the planet right now. It’s really a new paradigm in terms of being able to assemble fragments of information from multiple systems from massive amounts of data. We make information findable and also mashable. We bring that, for instance, into CRM or websites. We can consolidate within CRM. That’s an easy one to understand.

We’re a big strategic partner of Salesforce.com. We provide the core search technology. Salesforce themselves use Coveo internally. If you go on their portals, Coveo is the application that will deliver to you the most contextually relevant information from multiple sources within Salesforce so you can solve a case or basically get your question answered. Search technology is probably the best technology to deliver a search experience to end users and deliver the information they need to do their jobs regardless of where it came from. You don’t log in to Salesforce, leave that, and then login to SharePoint. Search and indexing can consolidate it for you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo
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