Eléonore Crespo is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, an AI performance management platform that brings a company’s finance, supply chain, HR, and sales data into one place so teams can make the best possible decisions. Since the beginning of the journey, Pigment has raised over $400 million, is growing 2x year over year, and counts companies like Figma, Brex, and Anthropic among its customers.
Before founding Pigment, Eléonore worked for the CFO of Google and Alphabet, where she was stunned to find that one of the most innovative companies on the planet was running its strategic planning on Google Spreadsheets. If Google was getting it wrong, she figured thousands of other companies were too. That realization became Pigment.
In this interview, Eléonore opens up about:
1. Why even Google, with all its resources, planned its business on spreadsheets, and why Excel will never scale for companies like Coca-Cola with billions of rows of data
2. The decision to “climb Mount Everest” by building a full enterprise platform from day one, instead of shipping a single feature against legacy giants that have been around for 30 years
3. Why “enterprise ready” is a lie most founders tell themselves, and how a Paris startup with zero US brand awareness won over its first American customers
4. The trust playbook behind Pigment’s growth: getting the most respected companies in the world to publicly vouch for you so everyone else follows
5. Her hiring philosophy, from borrowing instant credibility by hiring people from the ecosystem, to the case study and background check that actually reveal who a person is
Watch to see why Eléonore believes every hiring mistake quietly lowers the bar across your entire company, and why she says taking the hardest route is often what creates your biggest advantage over time.
00:00 Intro
00:45 What is Pigment?
01:17 Even the Most Innovative Companies Got It Wrong
04:38 The Hard Path is The Fast Path
06:13 Why Enterprise Sales is Harder than Founders Think
08:39 Your Team is the Deck
10:37 The Two Hiring Stages that Reveal Everything
#pigment #startup #siliconvalley
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