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Pierre Valade

Co-founder & CEO, WorkflowAI · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveinvestor@pierrevalade ↗LinkedIn ↗

Pierre Valade is an entrepreneur and designer best known as the co-founder and CEO of Sunrise Calendar, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2015. He later founded the mobile data protection app Jumbo Privacy and the generative AI platform WorkflowAI.

10statements → 1claims → 1claims resolved → 4.1/5average certainty → 1.7/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 assertion · 2 opinions · 3 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Pierre argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Sunrise founders left Foursquare and U.S. due to visa restrictions
“We quit Foursquare end of 2012, and we had to go back to Europe because we didn't have any visa at that time to stay in the U.S. Because we were just, we quit our job, so we had to go back in Europe in the winter of 2012, and then we launched Sunrise February …”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 3:32 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products

How they sound: speaking style how? →

258 words/min while actually speaking · 32.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Pierre Valade: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,594 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Pierre Valade said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
Valade: Some Sunrise investors wanted to reject Microsoft's $100M offer
“Yeah, so this, so some of them thought that we should go for more, but I also think investors who really respect entrepreneurs, And, ah, and I think those investor that we worked with respect the entrepreneur decision at the end of the day.”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 17:27 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Disclosure
Valade: Sunrise sold to Microsoft because the team couldn't monetize it
“I think we didn't know exactly how we could take it from a great product to a great business. I think we've done a good job building a great product. We didn't really know how we could make money. Or turn it into, and turn this into a successful business. And …”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 15:55 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Insight
Valade: Product teams must invent features users don't request
“We can think about building and stuff that, that people Don't even expect in their calendar. So on that type of things, we don't really expect them to come back to us and say, you know, I wish I could do X, Y, and Z, because no one even thinks that's even poss…”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 6:23 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Opinion
Valade: Smartwatches are the most critical platform for calendar apps
“Watch is probably the device that, you know, you associate the most with time, right? The watch is like device where you will look and see what time is it. And so we thought about this as like, oh, this is really interesting because it's probably the device th…”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 6:58 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Disclosure
Valade raised Sunrise's seed round with a live product, no deck
“So the funny, so I didn't do any business plan for that. I just say, we have a product out there. Try the product. It speaks for itself. So I was really almost kind of like arrogant about the fact that I didn't want to do slides. I was like, you know, we just …”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 14:30 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Insight
Pierre Valade: Startup CEOs carry unique pressure as ultimate decision-makers
“When you're the CEO of the company, you're the guy who's making the last decision, right? Like, no one can just everyone can blame you for everything, and you can't blame anyone, right?”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 18:25 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Insight
Valade: Mobile and smartwatch features must be evaluated in real-life contexts
“Especially when you're building mobile apps or watch apps, you can't look at them on the TV in the room and decide if it makes sense or not. You have to, you live with the feature for a few days before you realize that, you know, when I'm going out of the subw…”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 7:57 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Disclosure
Valade: Microsoft Paid the Acquisition Price Sunrise Asked For
“You just, you know, for us, you know, we knew that we had a price, and we got the price we wanted, and the vision were aligned, and we liked the people we met there, so, you know, we said, okay, you know, we should do it.”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 17:05 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Opinion
Valade: Traditional calendar software provides minimal value to users
“This thing is just not great. I mean, you can just put stuff in your calendar, but it doesn't give you that much value out of it.”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 2:32 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products
Assertion Supported
Sunrise founders left Foursquare and U.S. due to visa restrictions
“We quit Foursquare end of 2012, and we had to go back to Europe because we didn't have any visa at that time to stay in the U.S. Because we were just, we quit our job, so we had to go back in Europe in the winter of 2012, and then we launched Sunrise February …”
Pierre Valade Aug 14, 2015 ▶ 3:32 FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products

The other half of the tape: Pierre Valade's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2

Every mention by year

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001111201520162017201820192020episodesmentions
011201520162017201820192020episodes it came up in
000.50.511201520162017201820192020episodesmentions per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Aug 14, 2015 16m
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