How to Steal Customers From Giants 600x Bigger than Your Startup | Pigment, Eléonore Crespo

Name: How to Steal Customers From Giants 600x Bigger than Your Startup | Pigment, Eléonore Crespo
Uploaded: 2026-06-12T13:00:13.000Z
Duration: 12 min 42 s
Channel: EO

EOJune 12, 202612m

Topics12

Competing Against Legacy Enterprise Players0:00 Pigment Overview and Background0:30 French Entrepreneurship Context1:02 Google Experience and Spreadsheet Discovery2:02 Index Ventures Experience3:01 Excel Limitations at Scale3:31 Market Positioning and Must-Have Strategy4:30 Enterprise-Ready Product Strategy5:31 Investor Selection Strategy7:31 Pre-Launch Fundraising8:30 Early Team Building Strategy9:30 Company Values and Hiring Framework10:31

In a Nutshell

Eléonore Crespo built Pigment as an AI-native performance management platform to replace legacy tools like SAP, Oracle, and Excel for large-scale financial planning across hundreds of business units and billions of data rows. She succeeded by raising $25M pre-launch, deliberately targeting elite early customers like Figma and Braze through strong VC backing, and building an enterprise-ready product from day one instead of shipping incrementally. The decisive factors were assembling a top-tier team with deep domain expertise before launch, establishing clear values and rigorous hiring processes with case studies and blind reference checks, and accepting the harder path of competing head-on with incumbents for long-term compounding advantages.

AI-Generated Notes

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We compete against legacy players 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. 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 forward-looking 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. Sometimes taking the hard route can bring you to an easier route over time and sometimes you start easy and then it gets hard. So you have to pick your battle.

I'm Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and co-CEO 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 ARR. 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 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.

Google was my very first job and I actually worked for the CFO of Google EMEA and the CFO 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 Datadog, the founder of Revolut in Europe. I was working with the most fast-forward 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.

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How to Steal Customers From Giants 600x Bigger than Your Startup | Pigment, Eléonore Crespo

Competing Against Legacy Enterprise Players00:00

Pigment Overview and Background00:30

French Entrepreneurship Context01:02

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