Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you one thing that I disagree with in what you said in this particular comment. I think you actually grew perfectly reasonably from a SaaS business model point of view after you made the switch in about 2010. If you look at your company from 2010 to 2014, my assumption is you have a reasonable growth rate. I don’t think it’s a sub-par growth rate but until 2010, you were not operating on a SaaS model.

Eyal Magen: That’s also true.

Sramana Mitra: We’re doing story after story of SaaS companies that start as SaaS companies that are scaling phenomenally fast. If you look at Marketo, for instance, it’s a rapidly growing company. These companies started as SaaS. They had no illusions of being anything else. They wanted to be SaaS.

ServiceNow was there earlier but Marketo came into the market much later where cloud adoption had already started. The ones who have come into the market in the second phase of the cloud movement where cloud is an accepted phenomenon in business and enterprise software are scaling phenomenally fast.

Eyal Magen: It’s also a question of how quickly your market is happening. It’s something that is variable. We have to follow the speed that the market is growing at. The basic reason for the financing that we had was to finance the growth ahead when you reach the second, third, and fourth year of the SaaS model.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, your product has been in the market for just over four years.

Eyal Magen: Four or five years.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics can you offer in terms of your growth?

Eyal Magen: We have over 700 customers. I can tell you that our growth is in the double digits. Our revenue is in the tens of millions. We work eight of the top ten media companies. We have seven offices around the world and 325 employees.

Sramana Mitra: What else do you want to touch upon?

Eyal Magen: How we got Disney is an example of a mindset that you have to be in. We always talk about thinking outside the box. A funny example we always give our employees is the one where some of us had to go to a particular Disney meeting. They took the wrong exit. They could see the Disney office but they were stuck in traffic going in another direction. They then decided to do ditch their rented car, and they went back by foot, crossed some fences, and marched their way to the Disney offices just to get to the meeting on time. We always tell that story. You need to do what you need to do in order to reach your goal. After a three-hour meeting, their car was still parked on the same spot.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you very much and congratulations!

This segment is part 7 in the series : Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen
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