He’s already built and exited one of Yorkshire’s first tech unicorns, a company valued at over $1bn, and now Michael Gould is back with a new venture. And his ambitions are just as big.
With his mind still “whirring” with ideas, he’s back on the tech scene with his new business Kaleidoscope, aiming to tackle what he calls the “unfinished business” from his time at Anaplan.
So, could he now be building the North’s next tech unicorn? “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think that,” he tells Prolific North.
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The Anaplan co-founder, who launched the business intelligence platform in 2006 and exited before its New York Stock Exchange float in 2018 and subsequent $10.4bn sale in 2022, has spent decades circling the problem he’s now trying to solve with Kaleidoscope.
It’s definitely not his first rodeo, but this time he says he’s picking up where he left off.
Kaleidoscope officially launched in 2024, a platform he describes as continuing the work he started with Anaplan, which he hopes will transform business planning for small and medium-sized companies.
But the roots of both Anaplan and Kaleidoscope actually go back four decades.
“You’re always thinking: ‘could this be a big thing?’
Looking back on the early days of his tech career, he credits a gap year between school and Oxford University, when he worked at IBM on an internal planning system, as the moment that set him on the path into the world of computing.
“I worked with someone called George Kunzle, who was developing an in-house planning system for internal use in IBM. I worked for him for a year and a half before going off to university. That was the foundation for the rest of my career.”
After university, the stint at IBM would mark the start of an impressive journey into software development, which saw him join business planning platform Adaytum. And it was through that role that he first came to Yorkshire in the late 1990s, relocating from Oxford.
“There was a small development team in Denmark and a few people dotted around the UK working from home. They were keen to get us into an office, and there were a few people near York, so they asked if we’d be willing to move up. So we moved from Oxford at the back end of 1999.”
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Having fallen in “love” with Yorkshire, he moved North with his wife and growing family, and didn’t look back.
Following the sale of the business to IBM Cognos for $160m in 2003, he later founded Anaplan in 2006, a platform designed to help large organisations plan and model their business decisions. But did he ever expect it to get as big as it did?
“I suppose, in some ways, yes. You’re always thinking: ‘could this be a big thing?’ but the companies we were dealing with, and the problem we were solving, meant that if it was successful, it could be really successful.”
Despite moving Anaplan’s head office to San Francisco just a few years after launching, Gould credits Yorkshire’s tech talent as being a “loyal and stable workforce.”
“We agreed on San Francisco because of the opportunities in terms of getting in front of venture capitalists, and the tech scene there was where we needed to have our global head office,” he explains.
Pointing to the contrast between building a team in Yorkshire and building one in San Francisco, he describes it as a “very different” world.
“In the York area, it’s harder to find people, so you’re not dealing with a huge pool of potential resources, but we did find really good people. When we found them, they tended to stick around, so you had a very loyal, long-serving workforce who really understood the product and how to continue building it.
“Compare that with San Francisco, or London, probably to a lesser extent, people tend to move on very quickly. They jump from job to job after a couple of years if they see an opportunity. It’s very competitive, with a vast number of hot start-ups to choose from, or they can join established companies like Oracle, Google, and the like. So it’s a fiercely competitive market to work in, but it’s a huge technology hot house over there.”
“There was still a huge gap for small and medium-sized businesses”
It undoubtedly became a major tech success story, but for him, Anaplan was just one piece of the puzzle in tackling a major problem for businesses.
“Anaplan was hugely successful and I was enormously proud of what we did, and the team and product we built. But there were problems I felt that we hadn’t solved, in terms of the process of how businesses make decisions, as those platforms were really only available to larger companies,” he explains.
Smaller businesses struggled to afford external consultants to bring in complex systems, so he set out to create a modelling platform that was much more accessible.
“There was still a huge gap for small and medium-sized businesses. The cost of the licence fees, the effort of implementation and big, on-going consultancy costs were out of their reach, so we partly wanted to address that market.”
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In a nutshell for those that are not so tech savvy, he describes Kaleidoscope in its simplest form as a “big fancy spreadsheet” for businesses trying to make decisions.
“It essentially helps businesses to look ahead, to model different scenarios to see what might happen next and what risks they might be taking. If a lot of that work is done in spreadsheets, they might be great tools for a lot of things, but they’re not great for complicated business models as they are difficult to maintain, understand and are too error prone,” he explains.
“Think of it like a spreadsheet but it’s designed to be modular. You don’t build things from scratch, you build them together. It’s very maintainable.”
It brings us back to why he says Kaleidoscope is tackling “unfinished business”.
“Anaplan was version five, now Kaleidoscope is version six. Each time, you figure out a bit more about what it ought to be and what it should do. That’s what I’m trying to work on now with Kaleidoscope. Anaplan got a lot closer but it still left gaps.”
He sees Kaleidoscope filling that gap by giving smaller businesses access to similar, but less complex systems. For now, the focus is on small companies, but the ultimate ambition is much bigger.
If they can “crack” the solution for smaller businesses, it could eventually scale to serve large organisations as well.
“The intention is to be able to sell this solution across the world to businesses, large and small, across different industries and sectors.”
The future
Kaleidoscope now has around 20 staff and operates fully remotely across the UK, with the head of product management based in San Francisco.
Having a “great team” to rely on means he’s able to juggle the demands of running a start-up without taking his focus away from home, where he and his wife have four birth children, three adopted children, and often foster unaccompanied asylum-seeking and refugee children.
“Unlike most tech founders, I work long hours but I don’t work crazy hours. Having had success with Anaplan, I’ve been able to hire a great team so I’m not at my computer thrashing away at all hours trying to build something by myself, or holding down a day job, which you often do while building a start-up,” he explains.
“We generally have a company culture of wrapping up work at five o’clock to go off, relax and spend time with family, which is very different from the attitude of some which is: ‘If you’re not willing to work 70-80 hour weeks, then you don’t belong here.’”
It’s a big shift from his Anaplan years, when late night calls to the US were often part of the job.
“It was fairly intense,” he explains. “I was working long hours and we had a big family. I ended up doing a lot of evening calls during my Anaplan days as we were doing presales calls with customers in the US and I needed to be available.”
Now, it’s all about “keeping that balance” between family and work as he credits having a “supportive family” as one of the keys to his successes so far.
“My wife has been amazingly supportive. She has worked very, very hard and looked after our children. So it’s all about having her support, and her commitment to understanding what I’m doing.”
He also credits having a “vision and a dream”, as well as early mentorship at IBM, as being crucial to his career successes.
“He [George Kunzle] was a bit of a maverick, running his own thing inside a very structured organisation. That was a great help and that was one of the inspirations in understanding the problem I’m trying to tackle, and have been doing now for slightly over 40 years.”
For now, the focus remains on growing his new platform and on solving the problem he’s been circling for more than four decades. It might be “unfinished business”, but if he manages to get it right, this time it could become something much bigger.
