INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
He knew that for companies to succeed with subscriptions, they needed a bookkeeping system that understood how they collected and reported
The company went public yesterday, another clear sign post on the road to SaaS maturation.Tzuo was an early employee at Salesforce and
environment for building, marketing and delivering software
traditional accounting methods, which were designed for selling a widget and declaring the revenue
A subscription was an entirely different model and it required a new way to track revenue and communicate with customers
Tzuo took the long view when he started his company in early 2007, leaving a secure job at a growing company like Salesforce.He did it
because he had the vision, long before anyone else, that SaaS companies would require a subscription bookkeeping system, but before long,
so would other unrelated businesses.Building a subscription systemAs he put it in that 2016 interview, if you commit to pay me $1 for 10
It could account for that recurring revenue when nobody else could
Kurka/Getty ImagesAs Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research put it, they pioneered the whole idea of a
subscription economy, and not just for SaaS companies
founder at SaaStr, a firm that invests in SaaS startups, says Tzuo was a genuine visionary and helped create the underlying system for SaaS
It could only thrive once SaaS became mainstream, and could only scale on top of other recurring revenue businesses
He certainly saw companies like Salesforce needing a service like the one he had decided to create
The early investors must have recognized that his vision was early and it would take a slow, steady climb on the way to exiting
It took 11 years and $242 million in venture capital before they saw the payoff
The revenue after 11 years was a reported $167 million
There is plenty of room to grow.But yesterday the company had its initial public offering, and it was by any measure a huge success
