Eleonore Crespo
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Pigment · Co-Founder, Pigment. On 3 shows, 2 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Eleonore Crespo is a founder at Pigment, where she has raised over $397M from investors including ICONIQ, Greenoaks, and IVP. Prior to Pigment, she was an investor at Index Ventures.
3shows
2appearances
63statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
12said about them ↓ Everything Eleonore Crespo said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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 …”
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.”
Crespo: Microsoft Excel will still be actively used in ten years
“I have a prediction that Excel will still be here in five years. And there is a good reason. You can keep that. In five years, Excel will still be there. And in 10 years, Excel will still be there.”
Crespo: Pigment aims to build a $100B+ to $200B+ business
“We have a very, very large ambition with Romain. We want to build a, You know, a hundred billion dollar business, if not more two hundred billion, if we can, or even more.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
Hiring senior talent from day one accelerates startup growth, says Crespo
“Finally, something we did with Pigment was to hire very senior talents day one. And I can tell you that this is a very big accelerator as well of growth for two reasons. First of all, senior people, they have their own network, so they are going to bring also,…”
Crespo: AI will compress 15-year scientific research timelines into two years
“I actually think that now, probably in two years, you can actually, actually achieve things that you would have done before in 15 years.”
Crespo: Enterprise AI finance systems will always require human supervision
“I do believe that in what we do, they will always be on top of that a supervising human.”
Crespo: Developers cannot effectively use Cursor without understanding coding fundamentals
“The fundamentals of what coding is today, you are not able to use cursor. If you don't understand coding”
Crespo: Pigment reduces cohort analysis build times from months to minutes
“I think vibe planning is the sense that now you can build easily models on pigment. So you can do vibe planning on like, you know, like building super, super simple, like maybe, you know, like a cohort analysis that would have taken you months to build. Now yo…”
Deloitte partners carry a $25 million annual quota, says Crespo
“For instance, I was with a Deloitte partner, and they were telling me, for them, their yearly so-called quota is twenty-five million. And for those who don't know, in enterprise software, the quota is more between one and two million if you're lucky, right?”
Enterprise startups must initially source all leads for Global System Integrators
“They will take time then to build the practice, they will take time to start feeding you with leads, so at the beginning, do not wait for them also to think they're going to source leads for you. At the beginning, you are going to be the only one to source lea…”
Crespo: Pigment refuses to hire friends to ensure novel perspectives
“I'm not hiring my friends at Pigment. I'm hiring people that I don't know about that can bring things that I don't know.”
Crespo: Co-CEO Model Lets Companies Spend Double Time With Customers
“Well, when you are co-CEO, you actually have that superpower of being able to spend twice as much time with your customer, listening to them.”
Crespo Advises Founders to Spend Time Working in Venture Capital
“It's something I would advise to any founder, pretty much being a VC, because it created so many things.”
Crespo: Pigment recruited top talent directly from Paris Olympic Games CFO
“I lose a deal against another company, I always ask the name of the rep. I do something, you know, where I hear that there is, giving you a recent example, we had the Olympic Games in Paris last year, and I met the other day the CFO of the Olympic Games, the o…”
Crespo: Interview 20 top executives to learn to hire for unknown roles
“For me, the biggest advice is go human to human. Ask, when you're hiring your CRO, ask the 20 best CROs out there. Best CROs, again, in your category. What have they done so great? What makes them so different? That's really my number one advice to anyone.”
Crespo: European Employees Understand Equity Less Well Than US Peers
“I think we could be more appreciative of equity. Employees, a lot of employees do not understand equity as well as US employees.”
Crespo Shows Candidates a 'Hardships Deck' Before Hiring Them
“Now I do something that I didn't know in the past is putting in front of my candidates a deck to show them what's going to be hard at Pigment and make it very clear to them. Saying you're going to work harder than ever in your life here. These are the impossib…”
Crespo: Startups get individual board members, not VC fund brands
“And at your board, you get one person. You don't get a brand.”
The other half of the tape: Eleonore Crespo's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 9Dave Kellogg 2Rob Lacher 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 10
the Official SaaStr Podcast 2
2025 9 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
- 20VC: Four Traits of the Most Successful Founders | How to Hunt and Close Talent Like a Pro and Where All Founders Go Wrong | Lessons Raising $397M From the Best Investors in the World with Eléonore Crespo @ Pigment
- 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Eleonore's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder, Pigment | 1 | 24 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |
 MADLEDGER | Co-Founder, Pigment | 1 | 21 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Pigment | 0 +1 | 18 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |