Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I am going to ask you a couple of questions from the point of view of how you built this business. How do you scope the sizing of the market? How big is the TAM in financial services?

Dorian Selz: I do not have a single number to give to you. Whoever you ask gives you a different TAM perspective.

Sramana Mitra: Let me put it in the way we frame it. We look at average deal size and then multiply that by how many customers are out there. If you were to own 100% of the market, how many of these deals are you going to be selling?

Dorian Selz: For corporate global banks, we do have reliable numbers that talk about the TAM. It’s in the area of $10 billion.

Sramana Mitra: $10 billion bottom up. That sounds very high. It may be top-down.

Dorian Selz: Maybe. I’m more than happy to share some of that stuff. Globally you have 350,000 plus customers with $10,000 ARR. We also do the same for industrial companies.

Sramana Mitra: The other question is about go-to-market. Whom do you sell to? Is it the head of sales? Is it the CIO?

Dorian Selz: Let me lay out the vision. The big vision is the needle in the haystack and associating that needle with the workflow. That is irrelevant whether you do that for sales, or any backend service work. The world we foresee is a world where a technology like ours provides a company-wide platform that just does one thing and one thing only – get the right insight to the right person at the right moment.

Say you’re a global banker. It comes up and says, “Here are three accounts you need to call now.” At the end, it’ll be your choice and your call whether you deem this relevant or not. I always compare that to going into a cocktail reception. If you look at half the room, it will be totally empty because everybody congregates around the drinks. We build intelligent business applications that tell you, “Look over there where this room is full of interesting people.”

That is not something that is reserved for sales. If you look around, there is no such insight layer that provides you with the insight to do your job better. That’s big vision. It’s a corporate nervous system. Who do we sell to? I’m from the other side of the pond. There is a crucial difference between this big ambition that I just laid out and the truth and realities of startup land over here in Europe. In Europe, the funding situation is substantially different from the US. Series A can easily be $10 million to $15 million in the Valley.

Sramana Mitra: Series A has become much larger.

Dorian Selz: At best, that’s Series B or C here in Europe. That makes a difference in the way you approach markets. We have built very specific applications on top of that core platform in sales, service and, risk. We address a specific pain point of being able to extract sales-impactful information out of internal datasets. That is a sale that you do to the Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, or the person who owns the CRM.

In the case of service where we do case attribution, it is the Head of Operations or Head of IT. In the case of risk, it’s often the CFO. Quite often, we see people using it on that side of the business. They internally start to talk to their peers. Then they start to adopt that into other parts of the business. That is a wonderful moment because that’s an upsell opportunity. Often, between nine and fifteen months, we have an enterprise-wide agreement.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz
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