Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal, and today we're sharing more founder stories.

This one hosted by Ben Horowitz and starting with one of our very own partners, Lars Dahlgard.

We cover Lars' own story founding success factors, one of the earlier Software as a Service

companies that was founded in 2001, which IPOed in 2008 and was acquired by SAP in 2012.

The company focused on software for human capital management in the enterprise.

And on that note, in this episode, we cover Lars's views on what are the success factors

in talent, scaling companies, and most importantly, scaling culture.

Over to Ben and Lars.

Hello, this is Ben Horowitz, and I'm here with Lars Dahligard, and we are going to talk today about how he built success factors and achieved the first great outcome in software as a service. And then what he took away from that, welcome, Lars. Thank you, Ben. I'm excited to have this discussion. Well, let's start with Success Factor.

So you came here from Denmark.

How did you and Success Factor's first get started and were people all fired up about it?

Did they believe in you? How did you get it going?

Yeah, it seemed like pretty much no one believed in it.

We had the opportunity I personally did to pitch to 73 venture

cabalists who all said no. And that was painful because in some case I brought them in front of

customers and also good stuff. Freckin venture capitalists. Yeah, I know. I hate those guys. Who the hell

wants to be around them? So it was kind of hurt my feelings. It was hard.

And oddly, it didn't really influence me much because I kind of felt that this had to be done.

And to me, that is the number one piece of information for anybody starting a company.

Don't try and catch a wave.

Don't try and do something you've read in a magazine that might be hot and you can just get in on it because there is no such thing. Once you try to catch that wave,

that wave is gone and it's got a bunch of people on it that came up with it and they are well-funded

...