S 01 Ep 11 | Driving Business Growth Through People - Centric Strategies and Successful Partnerships Aaron Au co - founded SuccessFactors with Lars Dalgaard in 2001 , took the company public in 2007 , and sold it to SAP for 3 . 4 billion dollars , at the time the highest multiple ever paid for a SaaS company . He later ran SAP Jam , a collaboration platform with over 50 million subscribers . This episode traces the full arc of that journey , starting from a lesson Aaron learned at his first failed startup : a product screenshot taken nine months ago means nothing when your engineering team ships every two weeks . That disconnect between what salespeople were selling and what the product actually did became the founding logic of SuccessFactors . Aaron talks about why HR was considered an unlikely category to build a cloud company around , why utilization and adoption mattered more to him than revenue , and how he approached collaboration at SAP Jam differently by asking which enterprise tasks are collaborative by nature and which ones are not .