1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you are investing in such companies that are supplemental to other ecosystems like the Zendesk ecosystem and others, are they getting substantial support from those ecosystems?

In the case of Salesforce, they have a marketplace in AppExchange and Zendesk has been trying to support the ecosystem as well. What is the experience of company building for such a company that has other players that already have a significant presence in the market?

Ken Elefant: Great question. When these CRM companies are approach potential customers, they are looking for differentiation with respect to other CRM companies and ways to show that their product roadmap is unique. That is what Support Logic can do for them. That is what we are seeing from a lot of those vendors that you have talked about.

The other is that there are channel partners that are out there who are calling on large customers. One of their core issues is to not just decrease costs in customer support but also increase efficacy and upsell. This is a perfect addition for that and each of these resellers already have products like Salesforce or Freshdesk. 

Sramana Mitra: What else do you have in your portfolio in the AI domain that is scaling well?

Ken Elefant: One of the theses that we have is that with this movement to the cloud, the data is getting much more complex. In the old days, you had the stovepipe system and you had a stovepipe data warehouse. Your information was going in and out from there. In forward-looking companies, they have data going in and out of Snowflake and they might have a big data lake. They have data going across databases and they use Kafka.

Managing all of these data and the data pipeline is extremely difficult. We have invested in a company called Acceldata. Think of it as a Datadog or AppDynamics, but instead of just being at the app layer, it goes all the way to the data pipeline layer.

What we are finding is that large customers like Walmart need this because in an e-commerce situation, you need fast access to data. You also want to make sure that you can control all of the costs associated with the cloud. They have some large customers like GE.

Sramana Mitra: This is a data layer play?

Ken Elefant: Think of it as an observability play on your data pipeline.

Sramana Mitra: The data stack has so many players like Snowflake, Informatica, Talend etc. I’m trying to place your company in that stack. 

Ken Elefant: Think of it as Datadog or AppDynamics, but down to the data pipeline layer. Those are products that won’t be able to help an enterprise understand where data is flowing slowly and where the data is not being replicated correctly.

It shows you where you are paying too much to AWS or Azure and it shows you why the analytics are breaking down. Those are the problems that Acceldata deals with. The way this is solved today is you hire smart data engineers to solve this problem. The large companies have those capabilities. Walmart and GE are two examples. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021
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