Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and CEO of Pigment and former Index Ventures investor, explains how working as a VC provided her with perspective on founder excellence.
Opinion
Crespo: Incumbent FP&A software competitors lost their innovation velocity
“It's a world where a lot of companies out there are private equity owned. And so unfortunately not innovating at the pace at which they used to innovate. And most of our competitors are, you know, 20 years old plus, 15 years old plus, and have lost this speed …”
Insight
Crespo: Winning US enterprise software buyers is easier than in Europe
“A lot of people say it's harder than you think, where I think it's actually easier than you think. Because I said it's hard, yes, but it's easier than in Europe. People buy faster.”
Disclosure
Crespo: Pigment excluded Index Ventures to bring fresh perspectives
“All of the people at Index are my friends and they were already helping me. And in a way, I already knew the way they were thinking. And so for me, it was really important to bring new people, fresh ideas to the table.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Crespo: Pigment will never prioritize term sheet terms over board quality
“I will never, you know, take the best term sheet based on, on whatever is written in there, because you just want the best people on your board.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Crespo: Thin AI wrappers will die; deep workflow SaaS will win
“If you are building a layer, like a marketing tool that is just a layer, probably you can be killed by AI. If you're building something more fundamental that, you know, requires like, for instance, at Pigment, you know, we have this huge database, huge compute…”
Insight
Crespo: Pigment aims for $1T, but current platform won't get them there
“Nothing is preventing me from thinking how can I create a trillion dollar company out there? So what I am constantly thinking about, and this is where you need to think slow, is what is the second, the third, the fourth act of pigment? Because the platform we …”