Bootstrapping a Decacorn on $15k with Celonis CEO Alex Rinke

Last week, we sat down with Alex Rinke (  / alexanderrinke  , Co-founder & Co-CEO of Celonis, to explore how AI and automation are transforming business operations at large enterprises.

Celonis is the pioneer of "process mining" - the technology that uses graph databases, AI, and automation to analyze processes, find inefficiencies and their root causes, and solve them.

Most recently valued at $13B, Celonis is one of the most valuable startups globally. But Alexander and his two co-founders started Celonis while still in college on a $15,000 budget.

In this conversation, we talked about the early days of Celonis, how Alex acquired his first enterprise clients without inside industry connections, how Celonis navigates go-to-market for a product with an expansive scope, and much more.

CELONIS
Website - https://www.celonis.com
Twitter -   / celonis  

Alex Rinke (Co-Founder & Co-CEO):
Twitter:   / alexanderrinke  
LinkedIn:   / alexander-rinke-10733061  

DATA DRIVEN NYC
This episode of the MAD Podcast was recorded live at Data Driven NYC, an event series organized by FirstMark Capital. The events are free and held monthly in New York, currently with the support of Foursquare.

If you wish to attend and be notified of future events, please follow FirstMark on Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.com/o/firstmar...

WATCH AND LISTEN ON:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2mMt...

00:00 - Intro
02:32 - What is Process Mining?
05:50 - How Celonis got started
08:12 - “We had our first prototype in three weeks”
10:06 - Pivotal partnership with ACP
12:45 - How did Celonis find product-market-people fit?
14:45 - Penetrating the global market
16:50 - Technical deep dive into the Celonis’ product
20:00 - Celonis finds process gaps completely automatically
21:45 - Who is the average user of Celonis inside companies?
22:41 - How Celonis uses Generative AI
25:24 - Acquisition of Symbio
26:26 - How to keep the fire of innovation inside the team?
28:20 - How to bring a very horizontal product to market?
32:55 - Scaling yourself as a leader
34:46 - Glimpse into the future of Celonis
36:07 - Outro