Jan Arendtsz and the trouble with a working product

A product with four million dollars in annual recurring revenue can make a persuasive case for its own existence. It has customers. It has invoices. It can point to the bank account. In 2015, Jan Arendtsz looked at Celigo’s software and concluded that it needed replacing anyway. There are easier ways to give yourself more work.

He and his chief technology officer had watched the market change around them. Businesses were buying cloud applications differently, connecting them differently, and expecting an experience their existing product could no longer provide. So a few engineers began building the replacement while the company continued serving its customers. Revenue had confirmed that the problem mattered. It had not guaranteed that their answer would last.

That decision offers a useful way into Arendtsz’s life. The founder and CEO of Celigo has spent his career moving between the technical and commercial sides of software, accumulating enough experience in each to become dissatisfied with an incomplete answer. The recurring question is practical: will this work for the people who have to use it?

First, leave the island

Arendtsz grew up in Sri Lanka. His account of childhood begins happily, then changes with the civil war that intensified during his teenage years. In 1990, at twenty, he left for New Brunswick, Canada, to study computer science. The weather alone represented a considerable change of plan.

He remembered the move as exciting. Canada brought a different culture, experiences in Toronto, and eventually a realization that the University of New Brunswick was not quite the college experience he wanted. He transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science.

Mathematics had helped steer him toward computing. Professional life clarified what he wanted from it. After about two and a half years working as a developer, he decided that writing software was not his calling. He kept the technical grounding and moved toward work that put him closer to business problems. It was an expansion of interests that would later become useful when there was nobody else available to fill a role.

At Cambridge Technology Partners, he worked on complex implementations for clients ranging from internet startups to Fortune 500 companies. At NetSuite, he worked in product management and integration services, launching its integration platform. These jobs placed him near a particular awkwardness in the cloud’s promise: buying an application did not make it cooperate with the applications a business already owned.

There was a business between the applications

Consider what happens after a customer places an order. A shop may accept the purchase in one application, track inventory in another, and keep its financial records somewhere else. The sale is one event to the customer. Inside the business, it creates a small procession of jobs. Somebody, or something, must make sure the information arrives in the right places.

Arendtsz’s early consulting work dealt with this sort of problem. Before the Celigo software chapter began in 2011, he ran a consultancy focused on processes and integrations. It grew to more than a hundred employees. Customer work supplied an education in what companies needed, along with resources for the transition to products.

That origin is less tidy than a sudden invention. The idea developed through repeated encounters with the same difficulty. A service company could solve each client’s problem individually. A software company might turn parts of that accumulated work into something more people could use. The transition required a different way to build, sell, and support the answer.

Celigo focused on connecting cloud applications, while also accommodating older systems. Arendtsz explained its technology through two layers: general connectors that could reach systems through their interfaces, and application-specific connectors that made the details easier to handle. Even a technically capable customer could benefit from having an unfamiliar application made more understandable.

The distinction also shaped how he talked about automation. An individual might want a single task completed, while a company needed a process to function across departments and users. A change in a customer record could have consequences well beyond the person making it. Designing for that situation meant considering the next system, the next user, and the work that would follow. The apparent simplicity of a connector concealed a fairly crowded set of obligations.

The second start

The original product presented another obstacle: it required too much technical sophistication from its users. Reaching a broader audience meant reconsidering the experience itself. A platform intended to simplify integration could become one more thing that needed a specialist to operate. That is an expensive kind of irony.

The rebuild began in 2015. Celigo’s Series A closed at the end of that year, and the new product followed in 2016. Arendtsz has described that period as a practical new beginning for the company. The first version of the replacement still needed more capabilities; the team found smaller market segments it could serve while continuing development.

For a founder, a paying product creates an especially awkward judgment. Every improvement competes with something a customer needs today. A replacement asks the company to support two time horizons with the same pool of money and attention. Celigo’s experience gives the familiar word “pivot” some weight: customers still expect their work to get done while you are changing direction.

His reaction to unhappy customers helps explain the discomfort. A customer’s dissatisfaction, he said, “never sits well.” He has also spoken readily about mistakes, including his own. The willingness to enumerate them gives his advice a texture that a polished list of founder virtues would struggle to supply.

The boardroom begins at breakfast

Investors joined a business that had learned to fund itself. Arendtsz wanted compatible partners and paid attention to the person who would occupy the board seat. In describing NewSpring, he remembered meeting a partner for breakfast in San Francisco and leaving with a sense that they understood how each other worked. Due diligence has its uses; apparently, so does breakfast.

He was willing to work with active investors, provided they took time to understand the company before prescribing changes. That condition carries an implication for the founder, too. Choosing a partner means thinking beyond the transaction to the conversations that follow it. A funding round eventually becomes a room full of people deciding what to do.

People inside Celigo presented another education. Looking back, Arendtsz said he would spend a scarce hiring budget differently: concentrate it on the right leader, even if another vacancy remained open. He also acknowledged underinvesting in finance, human resources, and operations. The company needed the people who made growth manageable as well as those who brought it in.

A funding round eventually becomes a room full of people deciding what to do.

An observation on Arendtsz’s approach to investors

He applied a similar test to sales leadership. A candidate could arrive with a successful process, but still needed to understand Celigo’s customers and reasons for buying. Experience was useful when it could adapt. A playbook that survived every previous job unchanged deserved a few questions.

His advice starts to sound like a job description for his own position. Product, sales, finance, and investors each supply a different view of the same business. The founder has to understand enough of each to notice when an attractive local answer creates a problem elsewhere. His varied career gave him experience across those boundaries. It also left him with a long list of things he would handle differently. He offers both parts of that education when discussing the company.

Please adjust the introduction

In September 2024, Nathan Latka introduced Arendtsz with a description that put Celigo above a hundred million dollars in revenue. Arendtsz corrected him. The company was not there yet. He reported approximately $92 million in annual recurring revenue and $72 million in primary capital raised. The exchange made a small, revealing interruption in the usual rhythm of founder interviews.

Precision matters in a story that can otherwise become a parade of round numbers. An annual recurring revenue figure describes a subscription business at a moment in time. It cannot tell you how often the product was reconsidered, which jobs went unfilled, or whether the next person hired will understand the customer. Those judgments are where much of his account lives.

When the plumbing needs to think

By 2026, Arendtsz was describing another change in the problem. Connecting applications had become easier. Maintaining their connections, investigating errors, and managing exceptions still demanded work. AI offered a way to address that burden, provided it operated inside the business processes and controls that gave its actions meaning.

In September, Celigo made Ora generally available. Its chief technology officer, Scott Henderson, described a system in which proposed changes are staged for a person’s approval. Matt Graney’s account of the open beta added a telling detail: troubleshooting was the most popular use case. Customers frequently wanted help understanding what had gone wrong.

For a company built around the spaces between applications, that is a fitting request. Arendtsz’s work has followed the consequences of software arriving in businesses: first the cloud applications that needed connecting, then the growing systems that needed maintaining, now AI that needs useful work and limits. Each arrival creates another set of practical questions.

He has said he wants to keep growing as a person while the company grows. His history supplies a fairly demanding interpretation of that ambition. A founder may have to question the product that pays the bills, the hiring compromise that fills the chart, or the flattering number in an introduction. The next decision still has to survive contact with a customer.