Nurturing Europe’s Emerging Enterprise Leaders at Crane
After 25 years as an operating executive helping to scale Ariba, SuccessFactors, Bazaarvoice, Workday and Hortonworks from startup through to their respective IPO journeys, I am excited to announce I am joining Crane Venture Partners to help nurture and scale the next generation of European enterprise start-ups shaping the data and AI revolution.
The lack of European enterprise startups that I could get excited about over the last few decades has been a constant personal frustration — until now. News Alert! Europe has become a real focus for data-centric skills, particularly around Machine Learning and AI and more importantly, the founders are far more ambitious in their visions. Over the last few years I got to know and collaborated with Scott and Krishna, the founders of Crane really well. We share a passion for early stage, data-centric, Enterprise software companies who dream big. We’re maniacally focused on supporting early stage enterprise founders to establish the right foundations for success from the start — from achieving true product-market-fit, to crafting appropriate go-to-market and internationalisation strategies, to helping shape amazing commercial teams. Here’s to my pivot to the next stage of my career as a Crane Partner, nurturing the category leaders of the future.
The journey from serial enterprise software executive to Partner with Crane started with a chance meeting with Scott some years ago (and wasn’t something I planned), but in the words of John Lennon.
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”
And it’s a recurring theme across my career and I certainly felt that for the first time, aged 18, in my first term at University when I learned my father had passed away unexpectedly. My father’s passion for home computing had shaped my choice of a Masters in Microelectronics Systems Engineering — I was going to be a silicon designer! His passing was my first “career” pivot point — stay at university and learn the intricacies of silicon design or drop out, get a job and take care of family?
At the time, I wanted to be at home, but as a parent, I now see why my mother insisted I continue my education which led to pivot number 2 — becoming a Software Engineer. My first employer had dispatched me to Seattle to spend time with Microsoft and I could clearly see how hardware was being commoditised and software was nibbling (if not quite yet gorging) on the world — I wanted in! The very first string of code I wrote that was commercially deployed (and still in use today) powered the handset for the inflight entertainment system on a Boeing 777 and it still gives me a buzz when I see it on my travels.
My time with Microsoft could not have been better — a constant stream of learning, from doing business in new cultures, to servicing a global (airline) customer base, to learning the latest in client/server application software development. But I realised my leaderships skills needed developing and where else but General Electric (“GE”) to hone them — at that time the largest and most admired company on the planet.
I moved to Washington DC in 1999 to work on GE’s B2B eCommerce initiatives and was proud to attend Crotonville, GE’s in-house school for executive leadership development where many of today’s fortune 500 leaders were schooled. I met and shadowed several GE leaders including Jack Welch — life couldn’t get any better! This was the time the internet was redefining B2B commerce and all the noise was coming out of the Valley. Startup online marketplaces and procurement systems were disrupting our multi-billion dollar supply chains and off I was sent to check them out — enter career pivot number 3. If stage 1 of my life was Education, then stage 2 was Big Business and now stage 3 would be all about high growth disruptive tech Startups
Perceived (and GE) wisdom at the time had it that businesses take years to build, but the world was about to have its first taste of internet economics and how tiny startups can disrupt and dominate slow moving giant incumbents. Picture me at Ariba’s office for the first time, arms folded tight with a skeptical look on my face. By the end of the day I’d joined the company. It doesn’t seem so fantastical now to hear stories of buyers and suppliers putting billions of dollars of spend online, but in 1999 it was revolutionary. Time to move to London.
By 2000, tiny upstart Ariba was besting established players at their own game. We were growing like a weed and had to wear name badges just to know who the newbies were. After a searing IPO and a valuation in the tens of billions, the bubble imploded in March 2001. This was an ugly, ugly time and the end for many startups. This was a fight or flight moment, and I chose to stay and fight to turn the business around. But how do you do that in an environment where customers spurned large perpetual software licenses? The answer — “don’t sell software but deliver it as a service”.
Over dinner with some former colleagues who’d joined another upstart called salesforce.com, I went from an arms folded skeptic to an intrigued observer, but it would take me another year to realise Marc Benioff’s genius that a software subscription built on success was the future. The old world of large upfront payments for software licenses that were never fully utilised was dying and moving Ariba to the new world of SaaS was a revelation.
This got me dreaming of what leading a born-SaaS company must be like — no compromises on moving customers from the old world to the new world, just a 100% focus on customer success. Enter SuccessFactors and Talent Management, and my chance to build a fully SaaS business from startup through to IPO. The power of SaaS really came to the fore for me at SuccessFactors, allowing a young company to build a whole new category with a fanatical focus on customers. SuccessFactors seemed to run at the speed of thought, all driven by the incredible passion of one of the very best management teams, many of whom have gone on to do amazing things since.
The B2B Enterprise world was changing fast, but this was nothing compared to the consumer world. With Bazaarvoice I saw how explosive growth in Social could scale a business and with Workday, how the mobile first consumer UI delivered via the Cloud was ready to challenge the legacy giants. To this day, not many Enterprise Cloud startups have scaled through $1 billion in revenue and being a leader at Workday through IPO was very special. The Workday leadership team remain one of the most capable in the business, from whom I learned a ton.
Which leads me to my fifth rocket ship — Hortonworks, the fastest Enterprise company from founding to $100m revenue and an IPO in just 4 years! Hortonworks opened my eyes to how to build a business around open source, and how data is driving business models of the future. The ability to capture, process and analyse massive data sets at scale is going to open up whole new markets, from driverless cars, to healthcare diagnoses, to national security.
Stage 3 of my career was all about scaling startups — US startups. I launched products and built new teams across Europe and Asia and learned the hard way what works and what doesn’t. Getting the flywheel effect of sales, marketing and customer success working gives me a real buzz every time, but it’s always been for US startups. Which brings me to Stage 4 where I couldn’t be more enthused about sharing my passion for building and scaling teams with the next generation of enterprise founders in Europe.
Crane may be the new kids on the block, but we’ve been quietly assembling an incredible portfolio of next generation enterprise data companies and I’ve already had the distinct pleasure of working with several of them — CheckRecipient, OpenSensors, Aire and Onfido to name a few. The talent in these companies is exceptional and they are the focus of everything we do. Their success is our sole goal and I couldn’t be more excited about Crane and Enterprise software in Europe.
