As a young coder, Jan Arendtsz wasn’t so interested in coding. He was much more interested in why the code should exist to begin with—what problem it was solving, what it was trying to accomplish. So he moved from the coder’s cubicle over to the business side. As an early member of NetSuite, he recognized SaaS as the future, which may seem obvious now, but at the time this was a riskier proposition. 

“Looking back, you can say, of course you should have thought about that,” Jan says. “But that was a leap of faith to me.” After starting a consultant business, he realized his prescience was more profound than he could have realized. IT systems had become a spaghetti plate of SaaS solutions, and getting them all to work together was a major challenge for most businesses. 

So he started Celigo, a company that offers an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to help companies connect all their SaaS solutions to create smoother automation. 

In this edition of Founders Journey, Jan talks about his pioneering years in SaaS, how he funded the startup, and he tells us the one thing he’d do differently if he could go back and start over.