Alex Rampell: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you then think the SaaSapocalypse is kind of irrational? I think it depends. I think some of it is very rational. Because if I have a feature that became a company, and I know this sounds like a very negative thing to say, but I want to get paged if my server goes down. It's a very logical reason to build a company called PagerDuty. That now has a lot of stuff around it. But I might just say, “Hey, whenever my servers… “There are corner cases, there is the proverbial power outage in San Francisco, do something differently. That's very, very different from NetSuite, which is, I have a saying that I like, “the best companies have hostages, not customers,” at least in enterprise software. Not for you, because you actually have INPS. But they're much, much harder to go rip that out. And a lot of it is like the “Goldilocks zone” that you operate in. If you're too expensive, of course I'm going to try to rip that thing out. If it's so cheap then I forgot nobody even used it. So you have to be in this Goldilocks zone, you have to have enough complexity and ideally the front end is different than the backend. So, Workday I think is… Nobody's going to get rid of Workday. And I actually credit David Ricardo with this. Comparative advantage. Sure, you could grow your own food, you could plumb your own plumbing, but you're not going to do that. And somebody could do your own HR system.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.