The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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: 90% of business partnerships fail
“Partnerships, Often don't work. Like, 90% of them don't work, right?”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”