Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2013, you put in this $17 million. At this point, you have about $20 million of external capital in the company.

Dave Terry: That’s exactly right. Then we put that to work in the exact same manner. It was really proportional. We now have even more international sales. We are setting up more of a presence in London. We’ve had customers that were international businesses but they were headquartered in the US with 60 to 70 offices around the world. We were now starting to get into accounts that are headquartered in London, Canada, or Australia.

We didn’t have much of a presence in those locations and still don’t today, which led to the most recent round that we’ll talk about in a moment. We took the Bain round and put it to work in 2014. 18 months later, it worked really well for us. We’re growing the business at a phenomenal rate. In the early years, it’s a crazy 1000%. Now, we’re steadily growing every year at over 40%. We have a tremendous market opportunity that we can talk about with respect to Concur and what’s happened there.

We went out and looked at the market to test the investment community. They were all equally enthusiastic about our business and numbers. That’s when we took the latest round. Our newest partner is Great Hill Partners.

Sramana Mitra: As you keep saying, putting money to work. What are some of the key strategies that you have implemented that really worked for you in terms of growth?

Dave Terry: It’s more about hiring more resources. We’re attacking the market from both the engineering side and making sure that we can implement and support customers. We’re bringing on good and knowledgeable resources on our services implementation team and have those backed up with support and QA personnel. On the sales and marketing side, we continued expanding within the US market as well as internationally.

Now, we’re looking more at partner channels. We have a partner channel manager assisting us. We’ve just added a Channel Partner Manager over at the UK to assist us with partnerships internationally. We are looking at expanding our sales and marketing footprint also.

Sramana Mitra: That’s basically building your channel and direct sales infrastructure primarily.

Dave Terry: Yes, as well as proportionally spending back on the internal infrastructure. It’s not really just throwing all the dollars to sales and marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the competitive landscape. Obviously, there is Concur inside SAP now. There are the competitors like Expensify. What’s the evolution of the competitive landscape?

Dave Terry: If you take a look at it, there’s a number of vendors out there. You’re absolutely right. On one end of the market, there’s Expensify, ExpenseWatch, and ExpenseCloud. That’s not where we can be. There’s a good market for that. They’re typically lower-end app. They do a great job for small operations like log-on, sign up, get a free trial, run it for your small operation. I’ve got a customer with 13 employees but that’s not the norm. It’s a scalable SaaS subscription model. Typically, you’re going to find our value proposition at a 100 to 200 employees and up. In the upper market, you start moving into thousands of employees – Fortune 1000 and the Fortune 500.

I failed to mention earlier that right before the Series D Great Hill investment, the other key driver to this is we attacked the Fortune 500 market in 2014. We quickly began to win a number of those companies including one of the largest private companies in the US. That gave us real market validation.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry
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