Rinke: Experienced tech leaders often agree to mentor founders via cold email
Alex Rinke · Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke · Feb 8, 2024 · at 33:28
Alex Rinke, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis, explains how early-stage founders can obtain mentorship by directly reaching out to senior leaders.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Rinke
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: 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: 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?”
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,…”
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: 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…”