Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 7)

Nick Hedges: At the same time, the current CEO was facing unfortunate circumstances. Two weeks after he joined the company, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He spent two years as the CEO of Velocity, or Leads360 as it was called then. All the time, he and I knew that he was not going to be the CEO forever. The only good thing was that I was lined up for succession very early in his tenure. That’s partly why I was promoted so quickly to a number of different roles and how I ended up becoming the CEO of Velocify.

Sramana Mitra: How has revenue been tracking in this period that we are talking about?

Nick Hedges: We grew at 40% to 60% from the time that I’ve been at Velocify. That’s year-on-year growth. Growth accelerated in 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the trigger that accelerated that growth? >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did eteatrade go?

Nick Hedges: It went well. We ended up transacting about $2 million a month. The net margins were pretty small. Ultimately, we sold it into one of Nick’s businesses that ran his tea and coffee estates. I didn’t want to be a part of a bigger entity, so I left. I did VC for a short period of time doing small investments in southeast of England for a company called Southeast Growth Fund. That was really a tremendous experience for me. I had the entrepreneurial experience and had some success at doing that. I also got to see a large number of very early stage companies.

We were investing £250,000 to £1 million in businesses that were trying to get off the ground. We were investing quickly in a lot of companies. I got to see a very big pipeline. That was super interesting to me. While I was working for that company, I also applied to business school. I got a place at Harvard Business School and got a scholarship. I decided that I was going to do that for a couple of years, and that’s how I came over to the US. >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

This story illustrates a couple of interesting strategic moves that have resulted in growth acceleration for Velocify. These kinds of strategic moves are critical to the evolution of a business.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of Velocify?

Nick Hedges: I was born in England where I lived for 30 years. I would say that I was expected to be a banker when I grew up. My father was a successful banker and his father was also a banker. I really disappointed my parents by going into the advertising industry after college. I went to Manchester University and graduated Valedictorian from school. I decided that I wanted to do something more creative than banking. I went into advertising and worked for Ogilvy & Mather for a couple of years. I enjoyed that but found it a bit limiting. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Switching topics, what do you see on the horizon? What are the trends? What are the open problems around which people can build new startups in the cloud space?

Louis Tetu: I’ll declare from the get-go that I’m fairly passionate way above Coveo on the whole topic of leveraging data and not so much for BI and analytics, which is a major trend right now. I feel it is more important to leverage data in better ways to empower people. The fundamental premise is that people are capable of more on their own. We saw that as a major trend even over the past 20 years starting with ATMs. People can suddenly manage their transactions on their own. I’m starting with a very simple example. We evolved to portals and now e-commerce. Increasingly, we are in an era where digital literates can do a lot on their own and are not very well served, in general, by companies.

If you give digital literates richer information, they will do more on their own. I’m talking basically about intelligent software or software that can provide a better response. I think there are three things here in that journey. When a customer has a question, it might sound simplistic, but companies should provide >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say we have a customer support representative who’s answering a call and looking at the knowledge base to look for information, what does that customer support agent find in your system that he would not find through a RightNow system?

Louis Tetu: I’ll give you a practical example. Let’s take GoPro cameras who we work with. In their contact centres, they use Salesforce Service Cloud that has a knowledge base. Presumably, they should deliver the answer. The reality is that what Coveo brings in the GoPro console is aggregation of content from other sources like Confluence.

We will even index a YouTube channel because the agent has to see what the customer sees. We’ll index the entirety of Salesforce.com to find answers and matching cases anywhere. We’ll suggest content based on a number of factors. We look at all the metadata around the case. We look at the text analytics of how the customer describes the case. We’re looking at very advanced suggestions from many sources that we bring to the agents, straight in that console. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 2)

Louis Tetu: Marketing is also a dominant functional area. We do a lot of work around CMS or web content management in delivering, more so than search, intelligent search using, in that case, machine learning and crowd analytics to deliver better relevance. We’re involved in areas such as sales to consolidate customer information within CRM. All these three are really around customer engagement, so to speak.

We’re also involved internally with the digital workplace space. Think about the next generation intranet that is far more intelligent in terms of being able to reach out everywhere in the enterprise as opposed to your traditional SharePoint. We’re able to reach out across the enterprise and make suggestions—recommending people and content. We’re involved with intranet and help desk. In general, sort of reengineering knowledge management and collaboration around data analytics. Those really are the four areas. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 1)

If you are passionate about the future of data-leveraged decision making, this discussion will be great for you!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with setting a bit of context. We have talked about your entrepreneurial journey. Set some context about Coveo.

Louis Tetu: Coveo is a player in a space called intelligent search. More specifically, we provide technologies for enterprises that essentially aim at delivering the best available information to every employee and every customer, every time. What that means for practical purposes is, we help companies engage their customers with more relevant information, and we help companies leverage their data so that they can upscale their workforce empowering people with richer information so that they can do more on their own. That’s really the essence of what we do. We’re a little more than 200 people and growing very fast. We operate across the three continents. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You shouldn’t be selling through as a technology platform. It sounds like you have a set of disjointed stuff and you’re basically doing custom solutions in various areas that are quite diverse from IT, marketing, to supply chain. I’m trying to understand the organising principle of the company.

Ravi Reddy: The organising principle of the company is to help customers with digital strategy.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically running a consulting and custom software company.

Ravi Reddy: We are trying to transform over the last 18 months from a pure consulting company to a platform company. >>>