"Flip" Filipowski re-invents himself and the wheel... again

You have to admire a guy that not only re-invents himself every couple of years but also re-invents the wheel. While getting someone else to partially fund him. The news is that SilkRoad technology (the lower case "t" is apparently not a typo) announced on May 14 that

"...it has closed on a $54 million equity round of capital led by new investor Foundation Capital, and including existing investors Azure Capital Partners, SilkRoad Equity and several individuals."

I say partially fund him because via Silkroad Equity (why not a lower case "e"?), Filipowski has some of his own skin in the game.

The nut of it is that Filipowski is now banging the drum for software as a service [SaaS], the way he banged it for dot.com 10 years ago and RAD 20 years ago. Interestingly he is hyping SaaS in the same week that Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison, another guy with his own skin in the SaaS game via NetSuite (N), along with 469 signfiicantly minority "partners" [other shareholders as of February 29, 2008], suggested SaaS would be a slow payback investment.

To Larry, that means a long patient climb for an ERP SaaS offering to a become a billion-dollar business, a process already 10 years in the making. To Filipowski, 10 years is a dozen startups, restarts, renames, mergers, acqusitions, bankruptcies, and so forth.

As for the functionality that Silkroad is offering, it's called talent management software. I doubt if that is a billion-dollar market opportunity, at least on a pureplay basis and as I define the words talent and management. But the company offers more mundane things like benefits administration (called "life events") and hiring (sorry, "onboarding"). According to Filipowski it is:

"one of the greatest opportunities for value creation that I have ever personally observed in the software industry."

Adding such mundane functions does increase the opportunity. That's why a guy named Dave Duffield,, who actually knows something about human resources [HR] automation, is all over the opportunity already.