"The fact that we situated ourselves between Salesforce and Google was interesting, but ... we didn't use that to go get $20 million in venture capital. We used it to provide a product that delivers real benefit to real customers ... as opposed to just exploiting the hype."
For anyone who doesn't play close attention to developments in the SaaS (Software as a Service) space, the story of San Francisco startup Kieden might sound like a replay of one of those "spin straw into gold" tales from the height of the dot-com bubble. However, Salesforce.com's (NYSE: CRM)A A August announcement that it had acquired six-month-old Kieden and its technology for tracking Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)A AdWord campaigns was no act of drunken optimism.
Kieden's success, like that of Salesforce, is evidence of a new and powerful wave that's just starting to break in the IT sector, as SaaS vendors create an environment in which countless smaller companies can quickly and effortlessly be born, grow and thrive.Kieden founder Kraig Swensrud, now senior director of product marketing at Salesforce.com, spoke with InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul F. Roberts about SaaS, Web 2.0, agile development and how the rules are changing for startups of all stripes.Q: You were self-funded and didn't take in any venture capital. Had Salesforce.com not come along as it did, would that have continued indefinitely?
A: I believe it is possible for a small company to get up and running and reach a level of revenue generation where venture capital is not necessarily needed. The benefit to startup companies like Kieden these days is that there are so many services on the Web that can be subscribed to for a monthly fee as opposed to shelling out up-front cash to acquire a bunch of systems to run a small business.
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