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Arendtsz watched companies drown in disconnected SaaS apps after years inside NetSuite, then rebuilt Celigo so business teams could wire those apps together without waiting on a specialist for every flow.
Jan Arendtsz is the founder and chief executive of Celigo, an integration platform that helps companies connect cloud apps and automate processes across departments. He is based in the Bay Area in California and has spent more than 25 years in software, from coding to enterprise sales and product work.
Leaving the Cubicle for Business Problems
He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin because he was strong in math, according to his Celigo leadership bio. He started as a developer for about two and a half years, then decided that sitting in a cubicle writing code was not what he wanted. Looking back, he told UpTech Report, he wanted to understand the business problem the code was meant to solve, so he moved onto the business side.
Seeing SaaS Early at NetSuite
He worked at Cambridge Technology Partners implementing complex systems for startups and Fortune 500 companies, then joined NetSuite when it was still a small cloud ERP vendor. Within months he concluded that software-as-a-service was the future, which he later called a leap of faith. At NetSuite he became a director responsible for integration strategy, and he watched customers struggle to connect the growing pile of cloud apps around their ERP.
Starting Celigo After the Consulting Years
Before Celigo he ran a consulting company focused on process and integration work and grew it past 100 employees. The seed for a product company had been planted years earlier, and in 2011 he started Celigo to make connecting business applications simpler for the enterprise.
Throwing Out the First Platform in 2015
Celigo's first product was too hard for ordinary business users. In 2015 the team decided the platform did not solve the problem they cared about, so they started over with a blank canvas and launched a new product in 2016. Arendtsz has said that rebuild was the hardest decision they made and, looking back, the best one, because they could fix mistakes most companies never get a second chance at.
Selling Celigo to Commerce Brands
Today Celigo sells an integration platform used by B2C and direct-to-consumer brands as well as IT teams, including customers such as Olipop, SKIMS and Therabody, according to a University of Texas computer science profile. Arendtsz still runs the company from Redwood City, California, and argues that hiring the right team matters as much as shipping the right product.
