攀登“珠穆朗玛”：选择最难的赛道
在竞争激烈的企业服务市场，挑战盘踞多年的传统巨头（如 SAP 和 Oracle）似乎是一项不可能完成的任务。这些老牌公司的系统虽然陈旧——甚至在许多创业者出生前就已建立——但它们却牢牢占据着市场。面对这样的格局，Pigment 从创立第一天起，就做出了一个极其大胆的决定：不走捷径，直接“攀登珠穆朗玛峰”，致力于打造一个完全符合企业级标准的大型数据与平台系统。
这是一个反直觉的战略选择。很多创业公司倾向于从边缘需求切入，先做容易的产品，再逐渐向复杂演进，但这种路径往往在后期会遇到无法逾越的瓶颈。而选择直接攻坚企业级核心架构，虽然初期步履维艰，但它能带来惊人的复利效应。当最前沿、发展最快的公司开始信任并公开背书你的产品时，整个市场就会产生强大的网络效应并跟随你的步伐。这种看似最艰难的开局，反而会在时间的长河中成为最宽阔的护城河。
Original English Source
We compete against legacy player SAP, Oracle that are very dusty but that have been here for a long time. Some of them have been built before I was even born. And so since day one we actually decided to climb Mount Everest and to build a product and a platform that was enterprise ready. We live in a world where decision makers are looking after the best decision makers out there. You need to have fast forwardlooking companies telling we love pigment, we love that platform and we will tell the entire world that this is true and people will follow. So it was not easy but today it has an amazing compound effect. So sometimes you know taking the hard route can bring you to an easier route over time and sometimes you know you start easy and then it gets hard. So you have to pick your battle. I'm Krespo co-founder and coco of Pigment. Pigment is an AI performance management platform. We bring data within one platform. So you bring your finance data, your supply chain data, your HR data, your sales data and the goal is really to make the best possible decision on that data. We've raised over $400 million since the beginning of the adventure. This year we are growing. We are still on a 2x trajectory in terms of AR. We were on the same trajectory last year. When you are in Europe, you for sure are going to live in a small country. France is small. Entrepreneurship in France at that moment was clearly not as big as what it is today in the world. But still you could see and you you started to have the first few unicorns that were really inspiring and actually my co-founder was a very very big inspiration for me because you had built one of the first French unicorns that was very famous at the time I did my studies and I did actually at that time a minor in entrepreneurship because I knew that this career of potentially building a company at some point would definitely have to be part of my journey. I wanted to have a big impact on the world and I just needed to find the right moment.戳破幻象：大厂内部的工具困境
很多时候，巨大的商业机会隐藏在令人震惊的现实反差中。以世界上最具创新力的公司 Google 为例，外界往往以为其内部进行战略规划和财务决策时，必然配备了最顶尖的系统工具。然而，残酷的真相是：即使是 Google 和 Alphabet 的首席财务官，在进行收入预测、预算管理和利润分析时，依然高度依赖普通的电子表格（Google Spreadsheet）。
这种依赖暴露了一个致命的业务痛点：电子表格从未被设计用于处理企业级的大规模数据融合。当一家公司需要整合几十个国家的多个业务线数据时，传统的电子表格根本无法扩展。不仅是 Google，包括 Figma、Datadog、Revolut 在内的众多顶级科技公司，在筹备 IPO 甚至上市后，依然在数据洞察、利润优化和销售区域规划上苦苦挣扎。即便是到了 AI 时代，如果没有将正确的数据、人员、权限治理和建模机制进行系统化融合，企业在面对如 Coca-Cola 这种体量的数十亿行数据时依然束手无策。正是在这种“所有顶级公司都在用低效工具做核心决策”的普遍痛点中，孕育了重新定义企业绩效管理的巨大市场空间。
Original English Source
So Google was my very first job and I actually worked for the CFO of Google IMIA and the CFO of of Alphabet. I was really exposed to everything planning at Google, strategic planning, strategic decision making. But I was pretty naive. I saw that whenever they had to make a strategic decision, they would have the best possible tools internally to do that. You know, Google is one of the most innovative company out there. So you would imagine they are very well equipped. And I was very very surprised actually that everything they were doing there was made on Google spreadsheet pretty much. So they would you know really trying to understand their business do their revenue forecast understand their margin understand their budget. Most of it was done on Google spreadsheet but Google spreadsheet has never been built for that scale has never been built for that amount of data. When you have to combine data from multiple business dozens of countries it just doesn't scale that way. So that was very surprising to me. I thought this problem probably has to be cracked because if Google doesn't do it right, I'm pretty sure thousands of companies out there do it wrong too. After that, I joined Index Ventures and I was very lucky to be with some of the best founders in the world. You could think about the founder of Figma, the founder of Data Dog, the founder of Revolute in Europe. I was working with the most fastforward companies out there that were equipped with the best technology because these founders are the early adopter of the technology and yet that's the topic they were struggling for. They were preparing for an IPO. They were post IPO. They were trying to understand their finance data. They were trying to understand how to improve their margin, how to optimize their quota, their sales territory, their revenue, but they were not equipped. They were not equipped at all to do that. Even with AI, a lot of companies will keep using Excel for quite a while. Now I do think that Excel has it own limit. Excel was created to be a very flexible platform that would help you build quick models. But what's happening obviously at a company of a certain scale is that you need to bring together the right data, the right people with the right governance, the right security and the right modeling to really help them take these decisions. So imagine Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is a company where you have literally hundreds of business units, hundreds of countries, thousands of product and all of a sudden you have to understand what's happening in your business. You have to understand your supply chain. You have to understand your revenue. You understand your margin by product by business unit by contract. Can you do that in Excel? Does that scale? No. When you have to look at billions of rows, billions of sale, that is not the technology that you want to use. And we realized that this problem was real. And it was really everywhere and it was a massive market to go after and that's what we decided to create pigment.平台级战略：拒绝做“可有可无”的单点功能
在面对已经积累了几十年产品厚度、提供端到端解决方案的行业巨头时，初创企业很容易陷入一个陷阱：只做一个小而美的功能插件。然而，想要在企业级市场生存并彻底替换老牌玩家，你必须提供一个真正的“必需品”（Must-have）。
为了吸引如 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 等公司的首席执行官及顶级财务团队，初创企业不能只发布单一的工具，而是必须交付一个完备的、超越性的全景平台。因为企业级客户一旦启用新系统，往往意味着要将数十甚至上百名员工的工作流迁移到该平台上。在没有市场知名度和标杆客户背书的冷启动阶段，这种信任的建立极度困难。为此，创始团队需要耐心打磨底层核心——例如构建弹性画布（Elastic Canva，一种强大的计算引擎，用于在平台上对任何数据进行建模），并精心挑选能为公司打通高端客户人脉圈的风险投资机构。正是通过这种极致的底层产品力与战略性的资源结盟，创业公司才能打破巨头的封锁，拿下那批极其挑剔且具有行业示范效应的早期种子客户（如 Carta）。
Original English Source
We come in the market. We are in front of companies in the likes of SAP, Oracle that are very dusty but that have been here for a long time. Some of them have been built before I was even born. As a VC I had seen many many times founders that were starting in a category but where what they were building was not a must-have. It was a nice to have. We really wanted to create a platform that would become a must-have. We live in a world where decision makers are looking after the best decision makers out there. Today, a lot of people are looking at the CEO of Entropic. It's one of our customers, the CEO of OpenAI, the CEO of these companies to think about, you know, the future of their own companies because especially in our category, as you can imagine, we serve CFOs, we serve large finance team. When you serve this type of customers or when you serve strategic decision maker, you need to build trust as early as possible. People need to trust you, right? If you want people to trust you, you need to have fast forwardlooking companies telling we love pigment. We love that platform and we will tell the entire world that this is true and people will follow. We wanted to create that network effect. So since day one, we actually decided to climb Mount Everest and to build a product and a platform that was enterprise ready. But getting their very first customers was very hard, very very hard because you know we were based in Paris at the time. We didn't have a very big US presence and we needed to go after these very large tech companies here in the valley that had never heard of us where we had zero brand awareness. One difficult moment lot of founders get wrong is how difficult it is to sell to large companies. You think perhaps that your product is enterprise ready. You're ready to sell to enterprise. That's not the case at all. What we do is quite different from a lot of SAS companies out there. We compete against legacy player that have been here for 15, 20, 30 years and hence they have built a platform end to end that brings a variety of features and functionality. And in order to be really relevant in the world of enterprise performance management, business planning and to bring and deliver value to our customers, we couldn't just ship one feature or we couldn't just ship one product. We needed to deliver the entire platform because the first use case we were shipping at the time were already embarking dozens hundreds of people on the platform to work on a variety of use cases. In order to do that and in order to bring that value we needed to come with a superior platform from all angle. We needed to build this incredible what we call the elastic canva which is an incredible computation engine that really helps you model any data on pigment. And we need to build the most incredible UX for anybody to adopt the platform. And in order to do that, we we would not be able to ship a product in a month. It took us sometimes we started end of 19 and the product was truly ready in 21. And we actually carefully picked our investors on what help they could bring us. So could they actually open some doors for us? Could they really help us also find perhaps some US executives that could help us open doors for us? And that's really how we managed to create this first mode and this first advantage of being able to open as many doors as possible and to find our very first customers because again these customers I I think if they didn't have VCs backing us and telling them to use our product I'm not sure they would have been able to really go after that and I have amazing stories. Figma is one bra is another one where they really were the first one to say yes we are going to go after the platform. I even remember the CFO of Karta at the time that was also one of our very first customer that immediately wanted to become an angel because he saw the potential and that's really what made the beginning of the adventure.降维打击：用顶尖人才破局信任鸿沟
在产品正式上线前就获得大规模融资，其核心逻辑并不在于产品本身的完善度，而在于团队的强悍。当一家初创企业不具备高德纳魔力象限（Gartner Magic Quadrant）的背书，也没有成千上万的标杆案例和媒体报道时，唯一的破局之道就是规模化地引入比你更聪明的行业顶尖人才。
在拓展高壁垒的企业级市场时，销售的本质是建立可信度。为此，初创公司不仅要搭建地球上最优秀的工程研发团队，更需要招募那些曾经作为核心用户（如前财务分析师、前收入运营分析师）甚至在行业内深耕了数十年的生态系统专家。当这些深谙行业痛点、自带光环的顶尖专家站在客户面前，告诉他们“虽然这是一家成立不久的公司，但这是市场上最好的平台”时，这种极具信服力的降维打击，将直接抹平初创企业与巨头之间的信任鸿沟。
Original English Source
Before we launched our product, we had raised about 25 million. We didn't do like a proper fundraising. Some investor went to us and and asked us if they could actually put a term sheet out there. But I think what they saw goes back to trust and credibility. If you want to raise pre-launch, you need to have a very very strong story around what you've done, the team you've put together. It all goes back to the team. The team is the most tr critical piece where investors will spend a lot of time looking and digging. When you are not in the Gartner magic quadrant, for instance, for us, when you do not have thousands of reference already to share, people have never heard of you, they have never read about you in the Wall Street Journal yet, the only way to scale yourself is to hire people that are smarter, better than you, and that can help grow the company to the next phase. In the first one year and a half, two years of the company, we had brought together the highest caliber team of talent. We have one of the best engineering team on the planet actually that is building that product. We also hired people that were former finance analyst, former revenue operation analyst, so former persona of ours. When you go uh to a customer and you say that yes perhaps your product was just born two months ago but in your team you have people that are experts in the ecosystem that have been selling similar platform for the past 15 years and that can then tell to your customer that this is the best platform out there. That's a very strong message. So that's one advice I would give actually is to try to find people from the ecosystem that have the right level of expertise and that would create that trust and uh I think that's the only recipe for success.招聘校准：建立严酷的防御性筛选网
在人才战略中，任何一次招人失误都会在公司内部引发剧烈的连锁反应，导致整体执行标准的灾难性滑坡。为了防范这种风险，企业必须在创立第一天就确立清晰的价值观，并建立极其严谨的招聘校准（Calibration）机制。
在开启关键岗位的招聘前，管理者应该先去市场上拜访那些最顶尖的 CFO 或首席营收官，以此来校准自己对“卓越”的定义。在具体的筛选流程中，有两个环节被证明具有绝对的决定性意义：一是实战案例分析（Case Study），它能像照妖镜一样揭示候选人是否愿意挽起袖子亲力亲为、是否具备解决复杂问题的执行力，以及是否能听取反馈；二是深度背景调查（Background Check）。不要仅仅依赖候选人提供的推荐人名单，而是要顺藤摸瓜，通过提出尖锐甚至令人不适的直白问题来还原候选人的真实底色。在整个沟通过程中，永远不要向候选人过度美化或贬低工作本身，坦诚地展示岗位的残酷现实与真实挑战。真正的智慧在于：不断复盘每一次雇佣失败的底层逻辑，确保相同的筛选漏洞永远不会出现第二次。