Vena Solutions

“Since Vena, there have been another, let's call it half dozen vendors that have entered the space that are all doing well.”

“One of our first 20 customers was Wells Fargo, as an example, and we sold to all, you know, a lot of the big banks in the U.S. After that, but we were getting half a million dollars a year from the banks to use Venna for mission critical regulatory processes.”

“I left my very, very high paying job to start Vena. I think like it was a seven figure income the year I left just to take a risk to start something, but I did it without even seeing the product.”

“A million would have been literally, I'd say maybe a year and a half.”

“I mean, I left Vena five years ago when we were halfway there, but the company was well on its way, and so great to see that they have eclipsed the hundred million ARR mark.”

“Before we actually did a series, proper series A, we actually called our series A and series B because we raised, I think, close to thirty million dollars you know, from our first real serious investor that came in.”

“Not only did we hire, you know, our first person to generate leads, but I've done that in my last two startups since as well. So it is the number one hire in my opinion. If you don't have leads, you don't have sales. If you don't have sales, you don't have a c…”

“The biggest thing in that space is, is really getting the most out of your team. You know, when you think about the manual Sort of archaic way of doing budgeting and planning of like sending spreadsheets, chasing the numbers, manually consolidating the results…”

“The primary one was budgeting and planning to mid-market, which, you know, might've been in that kind of 30,000 dollar per, per customer per year range”

“Early days at Vena, going back to Vena now, had invested over a million dollars launching a go to market motion for enterprise. Okay. Hired very expensive sales reps.”

“All of the vendors were replacing Microsoft Excel as the tool that most companies use for budgeting and planning. We actually embraced Microsoft Excel as the grid technology in our software, so we kept people in a very familiar environment, and you know, we us…”

“When IBM acquired the company where we worked, they discontinued the product that we then re-entered the market with our own approach, so we fill that void in a sense. Their product, the company that was sold to IBM, had an Excel look and feel capability withi…”

“If you go back to Vena, like those first five years, you're just building that first, like getting to five to ten million of ARR, you know, that's really what you're doing, I think, in most cases. But then if you think about where Vena is today, like eight yea…”

“Early days, we were an on-premise solution actually. But within about a year, George, you know, really determined we needed to be a cloud first, you know, type of application be, you know, when I say cloud first, we cloud second, I guess, but it was really qui…”

“So on Vena and Cube and Data Rails. And so their churn problems are like fairly acute and we get people switching from them all the time.”

“And when we came with such a compelling and impressive technology with this capability that we beat them in every deal. In every deal, we beat them because they couldn't even get close to what we offer with this connectivity with Excel and database.”