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The SaaS Prophet | Jan Arendtsz from Celigo

As a young coder, Jan Arendtsz wasn’t so interested in coding. He was much more interested in why the code should exist to begin with—what problem it was solving, what it was trying to accomplish. So he moved from the coder’s cubicle over to the business side.

As an early member of NetSuite, he recognized SaaS as the future, which may seem obvious now, but at the time this was a riskier proposition. “Looking back, you can say, of course you should have thought about that,” Jan says. “But that was a leap of faith to me.”

After starting a consultant business, he realized his prescience was more profound than he could have realized. IT systems had become a spaghetti plate of SaaS solutions, and getting them all to work together was a major challenge for most businesses.

So he started Celigo, a company that offers an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to help companies connect all their SaaS solutions to create smoother automation.

In this edition of Founders Journey, Jan talks about his pioneering years in SaaS, how he funded the startup, and he tells us the one thing he’d do differently if he could go back and start over.

More information: https://www.celigo.com/


Jan Arendtsz is a veteran of the software industry with more than 25 years of experience in sales, marketing, business development, product development, and customer success. He founded Celigo with the goal of simplifying how companies integrate business applications together for a connected enterprise. He is responsible for overseeing all company operations.

Celigo, the next-generation Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) built for both IT professionals and business users that easily connects and automates processes across thousands of applications. Named a G2 Best Software for 2021, Celigo allows users to quickly build, manage, and handoff complex integrations at scale, requiring fewer IT resources and lowering the total cost of ownership. With Celigo, users can automate processes such as Lead-to-Cash, Subscription Management, Customer 360, Expense Management, Hire-to-Retire, Reporting, Marketing Automation, and so much more, across key applications such as via prebuilt or universal connectors.

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