1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Holleran of Cloud Apps Capital Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Now let’s tie this into the investment strategies that you are following. What kind of cloud companies appeal to you? Of course, you want a venture scale category. That’s table stakes, otherwise, you don’t want to do the kind of investing that you’re doing. But within that, we’re looking at a very mature category. Cloud Apps is a very mature category.

How are you thinking about where in Cloud Apps are the big venture scale opportunities sitting in the first quarter of 2019?

Matt Holleran: Our model is, in part, what helped inspire the firm. In 2007, I led an event at my prior firm for building Global. We had executives from Salesforce.com that had been part of that global expansion in Europe and Asia Pacific.

We had Dave Goldberg, who’s since passed away, who was the CEO of SurveyMonkey. What became clear at that time is that the cloud market was increasingly global and increasingly had not only small or medium-sized company, but also global enterprise. So, the question on what’s a venture scale category when you consider that entrepreneurs can serve the world.

You now have global scale categories that may not have existed in the client-server world. For us, it’s really about saying what is the group of titles that aren’t well served. If you’re the VP of Sales at an industrial B2B medium-scale company that doesn’t necessarily want the most cutting-edge technology, you’re well served by Salesforce.com.

But how do you think about titles that aren’t well served and building out businesses around the right titles that are global scale? That’s pretty interesting.

For example, ServiceMax and I had championed that initial class at my prior firm. That’s going after the VP of Field Service. That’s a big global category if you can get it right. That’s a good example of the kinds of titles that we think about.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting way to look at it. What is your TAM assessment right now? Given you’re talking about these ambition serve titles, you must have done some assessment of how many of those titles are there.

The main, big titles have been picked up. So you have one option of cutting it on verticals and looking at clusters of vertical specific titles, manufacturing titles, and service titles.

What homework have you done to assess what kind of TAMs? Which titles have venture scale TAMs that I would go after?

Matt Holleran: Well you’re correct in saying that we do have a map for that. We have an evolving map for that and there are a lot of titles that are not well served. Then there are many titles that aren’t well served for which it may not make sense to build a business around because they can’t get it.

Sramana Mitra: It may be okay to build a business, but not a venture-scale business.

Matt Holleran: Right. Right now, there’s a brand new title called customer privacy management that may be the same as the General Counsel. The General Counsel is increasingly a business person in addition to a lawyer.

With a new GDPR legislation and California Privacy Act, we’re pleased to have led the classic series A financing in a company called DataGrail last year. It helps companies to not only manage the compliance but also provide information when customers want it.

As a result, they can be proactive about changing the privacy dynamics in a relationship between a company and its customers. That’s an example of a title that those people are all over the world. It’s a new title that is pretty exciting for DataGrail to be servicing around the world. We think it’s a great idea.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Holleran of Cloud Apps Capital Partners
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