Alex Rinke is the co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis. He describes how the enterprise software decacorn was bootstrapped from university origins in Munich.
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…”
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?”
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?”
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,…”
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.”
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…”