Alex Rinke

Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Celonis · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@alexanderrinke ↗LinkedIn ↗celonis.com ↗

Alex Rinke co-founded Celonis in 2011 out of the Technical University of Munich, pioneering enterprise process mining software that scaled the company into a decacorn. In 2019, he received Germany's Deutscher Zukunftspreis for his work, and he actively angel invests in enterprise software startups.

20statements → 7claims → 1claims resolved → 4.2/5average certainty → 2.25/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources →

0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 6 assertions · 2 opinions · 8 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. 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 Alex argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 4.1 · coherence 4.4 · precision 3.8 · compression 3.3

redirected or did not address 1 of 12 assessed questions (8%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

271 words/min while actually speaking · 20.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 11,489 words across 2 episodes 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 →

What they said20 Episodes2

Everything Alex Rinke said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Alex Rinke: Hiring a large sales force is not a GTM strategy

“Just hiring a lot of salespeople, right? It's not a go-to-market strategy. And that's what a lot of startups did, right? Hey, we have just got a hundred million dollars in funding. We're going to hire tons of salespeople. They know how to do this. Good luck. T…”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 29:42 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Insight

Alex Rinke: Enterprise founders must personally sell their first $2 million

“If you didn't sell the first million or two in revenue yourself, Don't expect anybody else to do it, right?”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 30:54 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Alex Rinke: Celonis tracks the exact realized value for every customer

“So, for example, I can pull out a dashboard right now Every single customer that we have, how much value have they realized?”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 34:50 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Insight

Big tech partnerships will not solve a startup's go-to-market problems

“Some entrepreneurs look at this as a big tech partnership as this silver bullet that's going to solve their go-to-market problem. That's not going to happen, right? It's going to be a very long journey and going to take a long time, require a lot of, you know,…”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 11:21 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Fully autonomous 'self-driving' enterprises will not happen because humans are required

“We're not going to have a self-driving enterprise. You need employees and human input, but you can automate it.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 27:10 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Insight

Alex Rinke: Do not scale GTM or raise big money before achieving PMF

“I would not recommend you thinking about partnerships, or scaling go to market, or hiring salespeople, or even raising a lot of money, to be honest, before you feel really confident that you have a product that solves a problem, that you can scale, that you ca…”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 13:28 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Opinion

Rinke: Many enterprise software companies over-pivoted on AI without achieving traction

“A lot of enterprise companies sort of over pivoted on AI, but then couldn't really show traction, right?”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 26:09 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Celonis is the largest third-party product sold by SAP

“We're the biggest product on there that they sell outside of their own portfolio.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 10:48 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Opinion

European tech startups must succeed in the U.S. to be globally relevant

“Companies that start in Europe often have to do it earlier to become relevant, because you really can't be relevant without being very strong in the U.S.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 14:01 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Insight

Enterprise startups often underprice their software, ruining their sales unit economics

“I think a lot of entrepreneurs, if they sell to the enterprise, underestimate the effort of selling to the enterprise and end up selling their products so cheap so that the sales process is so cumbersome that you can't really invest into it.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 32:17 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Insight

Product roadmaps should strictly prioritize features that accelerate time to value

“I think the only thing you should think about and you should be extremely fisa about prioritizing your product roadmap should be what accelerates time to value.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 35:35 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Assertion Partly supported

Alex Rinke: Celonis raised only $15,000 during its first six years

“We had no funding, right, so for the first six years we had All the funding we had was 15,000 US dollars.”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 6:58 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Alex Rinke: 90% of business partnerships fail

“Partnerships, Often don't work. Like, 90% of them don't work, right?”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 11:12 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Insight

Alex Rinke: European startups expanding to the US require singular focus

“The U.S., if you're a European company, is a really tough market to crack, and you need to put a lot of focus into that. You can't do 20 other things at the same time.”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 15:32 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Disclosure

Advisors urged Alex Rinke to rebrand Celonis to an AI domain

“There was literally people telling me, like, you need to get rid of solonis.com, you need to call it solonis.ai, right?”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 26:16 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Insight

Rinke: Experienced tech leaders often agree to mentor founders via cold email

“You wouldn't believe like what kind of people you just email. Hey, can you get on a call with me to, you know, to, you know, I'm trying to do the startup and, you know, I want to learn something that actually are going to mentor you and help you.”

Alex Rinke Feb 8, 2024 ▶ 33:28 Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Thousands of KPMG and McKinsey consultants use Celonis

“We have thousands of certified consultants from KPMG, from McKinsey, et cetera, that use our platform extremely heavily.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 24:48 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Disclosure

Celonis bootstrapped without outside capital for its first five years

“So, so actually we didn't raise money for half a decade. We raised three hundred sixty million or sixty-seven million cents. The first, so the company has been around for nine years, and the first five years we didn't raise a cent.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 4:20 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Celonis's first customer cut ticket resolution from five days to same-day

“Like within three months, they got their resolution time for tickets, right? That's a very important metric to measure. Down from five days to solving over 80% of their tickets in zero, like in the same day. Without firing or hiring a single employee.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 5:43 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Disclosure

Alex Rinke didn't know what SAP was when he co-founded Celonis

“Before we started Salonis, even when we started Salonis, like the day we started the company, I didn't know what SAP was.”

Alex Rinke Aug 13, 2020 ▶ 7:41 Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Appearances (2)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke	Feb 8, 2024	26m
Fireside Chat: Alex Rinke (Founder & CEO, Celonis) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)	Aug 13, 2020	27m

Alex Rinke

The record, in short

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (2)

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