Built By Humans: Recent Episodes
Troops.ai
In this podcast, Scott Britton (co-founder) and Andrei Newman (Product Marketer) at Troops.ai discuss the challenges high growth companies face and how to overcome them. They specifically focus on the human parts of work and how you can create a culture that brings out the best in your people and unlocks their full potential.
Jason Krantz started his first company in 2000, which was an amazing year to found a business followed by 3 very tough years for early-stage businesses. That environment forced Jason to build a capital efficient, bootstrapped business from day 1. When considering his 2nd act, Jason identified 3 factors that he felt would reshape the healthcare industry:
- An explosion of data as organizations adopted electronic health record systems for the first time.
- The passing of the affordable care act.
- Tremendous market consolidation.
Jason decided Definitive Healthcare would be the GPS system for the healthcare universe. Definitive helps customers understand how all the organizations in the industry are related and how patients flow through the entire healthcare ecosystem.
Example - Definitive helps life science companies take new drugs to market in a more effective & efficient manner (lower time and cost).
Today Definitive has > $200M in ARR with plans to reach over $1bn over the next 5-7 years. After spending the last 12 years building data sets that are not available anywhere else and investing in data science to draw out detailed market insights from this data, Definitive also has an enviable moat as their product is incredibly difficult to replicate.
Jason joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Scaling a business is incredibly challenging. What is interesting is that the challenges are not necessarily related or transferable across stages. Your challenges with 100 employees are different from 200, and different from what you will face at 300. As a founder, you must constantly evolve to be effective in each phase.
- Data businesses take a long time to build but the reward can be very large if you aggregate a dataset that is truly unique.
- Data companies must invest in having strategic (market insights) and tactical (contact info) data if they want to drive high user engagement.
- Founders who understand the power of capital efficiency and invest in it early will have a ton of leverage in future fundraising conversations.
- It is quite common for companies to drastically underestimate the size of their market. It takes time and effort to properly identify and carve out your addressable market.
Henrique and his co-founder, Pedro, started their entrepreneurial journey at 16 when they started pagar.me. In the process of doing so, they learned a ton about what product market fit looks like and how difficult it is to run a profitable business.
Henrique and Pedro went on to stumble on quite the market opportunity: Why was it that startups were raising millions of dollars from VC funds but then struggling to get a corporate credit card with a $30,000 credit line? In short, they identified an underserved market with tons of latent demand and very little actual credit risk. These companies may have been considered ‘risky’, but in reality, they were very credit-worthy.
5 years and change later, Brex has raised over $1.5Bn, employees well over 1,200 people, and is a market leader in the corporate credit card and spend management space.
Henrique joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast as they discuss how to design processes that scale with your company, the importance of focus, and why being extremely authentic is the key to being an effective leader. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- The best CEOs are extremely authentic to themselves and build a team of people around them that allow them to be the best version of themselves.
- Antiquated industry infrastructure can yield fantastic opportunities for disruption. In Brex’s case, banking infrastructure prevented incumbents from underwriting customers daily which turned out to be a key differentiator for Brex.
- Calculate the true cost of a new process before implementing it. Many processes make the lives of 99% of your people worse all in the name of preventing the 1% of times where things go wrong.
- A CEOs job is to balance risk with speed and decide what types of risks they are willing to take on in order to move faster.
- Doubling headcount doesn’t mean double the output. Many times leadership bandwidth is the biggest bottleneck to productivity.
- Focus is imperative. There will always be many strategic directions that have merit and value to your company but it’s important to be okay ceding some to competitors in the name of doubling down on your core business.
Dave Wessinger started PointClickCare in his garage alongside his brother Mike. They started the company with the goal of improving senior care through software and digitization. What began as a garage startup became Dave’s life work as he has now been working on this mission for 25+ years. Today, PointClickCare has over 1500 employees and powers over 65% of nursing homes in the markets they have entered.
Dave Wessinger joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast to discuss data transparency in healthcare, bootstrapping for 15 years, and why prioritizing growth in a company’s early phases is critical to success. Here are some key takeaways:
- Achieving data transparency in healthcare is a regulatory challenge more than it is a technical one.
- Great team dynamics drive outsized outcomes more frequently than individual talent.
- Taking on large customers before you are ready is the only way to grow to a point where you will be able to service them in a satisfactory manner in the future.
- When evaluating a role, people should aim to identify whether a company is a growth business or a lifestyle business.
- Prioritizing your people should always be P1. If you do, they will make sure to take care of your customers.
By serving as his father’s road buddy, Adam Harris got significant exposure to the value of travel from an early age. Through traveling to over 60 countries, Adam found that some of the best hotel properties were smaller and off the beaten path. Many of these hotels were ill-equipped to compete with the larger hotel chains in the area, a big reason being that there was a large technological gap between the big players and the independent hotels.
In short, the incumbents did not have much interest in sharing their proprietary software with boutique hotels and decided to use this as a competitive moat. Realizing this, Adam Harris decided to found Cloudbeds, which is a company that provides independent lodging businesses everything they need to run their business more effectively. Today, Cloudbeds powers 2.5 million beds across over 150 countries and is now considered to be one of the biggest players in the hospitality technology space.
Adam joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast as they discuss how to create highly effective teams, the importance of communication, making acquisitions, and the future of travel. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- A strong team usually has the following 3 people: an operator, a strategist, and a visionary.
- Having the most senior person on a team be the first round of the interview process is an effective way to drive alignment from the start and show the candidate that you are serious about them.
- Hire people who are driven by passion and interest rather than financial incentives.
- It’s okay to be wrong. Just be sure to make a strong bet on your new hypothesis rather than trying to hold onto something that you know is flawed (strong convictions, loosely held).
Lendio is a marketplace that simplifies the process for small businesses to get loans. By Q1 of 2020, they were growing 100% Y-o-Y and had hit their monthly goals 24 consecutive times. When COVID hit, every lender on their platform stopped lending and they went from nearly $100 million in monthly loan volume to 0 overnight.
Rather than pullback, Brock Blake (CEO and co-founder of Lendio) used the opportunity to double down in a big way, hire 250 new people, and re-orient the entire company around PPP loans.
As a result, they helped 100,000+ businesses secure close to $10 billion of loans and saved 1.5 million jobs in 6 weeks. Brock joined Scott Britton and I on Built By Humans to chat about taking big bets, how to keep a team afloat under extreme pressure, and Lendio’s push to add a SaaS business onto their marketplace. Here are some key takeaways:
- Never underestimate a group of individuals that rally around a big mission.
- It is so critical to have clarity of message and vision. If people feel a lack of clarity or transparency, like when there starts to be doubt about where the company is headed and the message…… that is really the most damaging thing that can happen to the company.
- The most successful companies have this combination of marketplace + SaaS + data.
- Moving from a single to a multi-product strategy is tricky. It’s tough to have all this energy and growth in your core business but then also look at a longer-term opportunity and invest in it properly.
- Leaders should re-assess their org’s design as revenue scales up from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and then 10 to 100 million.
By purchasing a home at 24, Dan Snyder experienced the value of homeownership at an early age. As a result of that experience, Dan decided to found Lower, a bootstrapped fintech focused on helping people build wealth through home ownership.
Lower raised a $100 million Series A in June of 2021 and proceeded to grow the team exponentially to about 800 people over the last year. Dan joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast to discuss the importance of having strong core values, investing in training front-line managers, and constantly recruiting for new talent.
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A key part of being a mission-driven company is making sure the people you hire are aligned to that mission. If you don’t believe in the value of home ownership, you probably shouldn’t work at Lower.
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An underrated benefit of raising institutional capital is raising the level of awareness the market has about your product or service.
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Building and maintaining a high-performing team is always going to be harder and take longer than you think. Companies should always look to keep their bench full by recruiting across all areas of business regardless of need.
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Managing people is very difficult and it is only something you do well when you’ve had the right amount of reps. Make sure to invest early in training your managers (especially newly promoted ones) as they are critical to your ability to rapidly scale out a team.
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Hire people who do more than they think. The easiest way to lose motivation is by making your team feel like they cannot chase opportunities because they need approval before taking action.
Superhuman aims to make responding to emails less time-consuming by building a blazingly fast, yet gorgeous email experience. CEO and Founder Rahul Vohra joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to offer some untraditional takes on user onboarding journeys, how you can build software products that feel like games, and why productivity and mental health are intertwined. Here are some key takeaways:
- When trying to build a quality product, be wary of early customers experiencing bug fatigue -- if
too many users run into the same set of bugs, it can overwhelm both them and your
development team. Instead of risking this with a traditional all-at-once launch, consider a
measured pace of onboarding that allows your team to fix bugs at the same rate they’re found.
- Keeping a manageable onboarding pace coincides with a good strategy for developing the
onboarding process. Start by ensuring the founder can tackle onboarding calls, and as long as
you’re retaining healthy customer metrics, transition to shorter onboarding times and specialized
teams to make the process efficient. Nail it before you scale it.
- While ‘gamifying’ your product with explicit rewards can decrease end-user motivation, some
underlying trends of game design can be implemented to create an extremely engaging product.
Consider all your individual features as toys forming a larger game for the user. If each feature
is created as its own engaging toy, the overall product acts as a game that motivates users to
learn all its features over time.
- Communication is a major stress point for remote workers: 89% said that responding to emails
and messages was the worst part of their day, while over half said they think their presenteeism
and quick responses are valued just as much (if not more) than substantive work output.
Superhuman’s software largely eases this process, but reworking workplace norms to reinforce
clear communication in remote work can also help improve your employees’ productivity and
mental health.
- When building a quality product, it’s best to limit your building to a single platform. Choose a
target market, and build on whatever platform is used most. Going multi-platform can be a
monumental step -- good strategy usually means waiting until your customer requests demand
that you expand into new markets.
Sean Scott spent close to 15 years at Amazon where he ran their shopping experience and autonomous delivery product, Scout. In January 2021, Sean decided to join Pager Duty as their Chief Product Officer. Pager Duty is a software company founded by 3 former amazon developers that helps customers move at ‘machine-speed’ in critical moments. Pager Duty’s business has dramatically accelerated over the past 2 years as the rise of remote work made real-time incident response and work orchestration incredibly important to the enterprise.
While Pager Duty is mainly known for being an industry leader in notifications and work orchestration, they have recently launched new products for AI ops and automation. Scott joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast to discuss the importance of being data-driven, how the modern product leader’s skillset is shifting, and what aspect of Amazon he made sure to bring with him to Pager Duty. Here are some quick takeaways:
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Having the right data is paramount. The question is do you have everything instrumented to get those insights and learnings. And, more importantly, are those insights actionable.
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To understand your customer, you need to break down the user experience and instrument it for all the metrics that matter so that you can truly understand what is happening within your product.
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When analyzing your product’s performance in aggregate, it is easy to trick yourself into believing everything looks good. When customer anecdotes disagree with the data, the anecdotes are usually right.
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Companies experiencing hypergrowth need to make a habit of revisiting and questioning the effectiveness of the processes they have in place. They usually grow stale every time the size of your team doubles.
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Companies need to move away from having separate motions for sales, marketing, and product. You must analyze the entire flow holistically and combine how every team interacts with the end-user to create a truly great customer experience.
When faced with a global pandemic and social isolation, you wouldn’t expect Envoy, a startup based on improving physical workspaces, to come out alright. But, through a user-oriented mindset, and a willingness to adapt to new situations, they came out not just surviving but with an exponential growth from where they had been.
CEO and Founder Larry Gadea joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to offer advice on how to move through situations like the pandemic, what kind of mindset you need in a startup, and some unique takes on the future of workspaces. Here are some quick takeaways:
- When forced to transition through uncontrollable events like the global pandemic, ask yourself how you can build through it instead of focusing on the losses you might face. These events can be tragic, but they also create new customer needs that you can treat as unique opportunities to solve.
- With advancements like the pandemic and meta, it seems like modern work will only become more and more isolated and flexible. However, there is evidence to the contrary – our current situations may make an in-person workspace even more important to keeping human connections with each other.
- In a company, people are more important to the overall culture than the physical space they meet in. Because of this, the future might see more coworking/lending of physical workspaces, sacrificing personalization for efficiency and availability.
- In the startup world, taking constant changes and risks are necessary for long-term success. Make sure you find some thrill in facing the tough problems you’ll have to work through and be wary of burnout. If you and your team get too focused on in-the-now projects, make sure to remind yourselves of the bigger vision you’re working toward – a paycheck won’t always be enough for motivation.
- The people you hire define what your company will become. Don’t be afraid to hire opinionated people, and make clear paths for your team to voice complaints. The more feedback and open communication, the better for everyone.
Few businesses have grown as unconventionally as CircleCI. CircleCI, a CI/CD platform, experienced numerous product pivots at its beginning, saw key merges with other dev teams, and grew as a small engineering team adopting management and operational roles. On top of that, CircleCI was already a remote environment by the time COVID forced other companies to do the same, and so it went through its own separate set of challenges as the rest of the world shifted.
CEO Jim Rose joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to offer his unique ideas on facing the problems of in-person vs. remote work, building out good software, and seeing the startup world as a journey. Here are some quick takeaways:
- Transitioning both into and out of a remote working environment can present cultural challenges that weren’t addressed before. Accept that you’ll make mistakes along the way and learn from them as you go - you can’t always please everybody, so it’s important that people trust you to have good intentions for them.
- Often, the idea you start a business on won’t be the one you end up going with. Especially in the early stages, be open to pivoting focus until you find an idea with good product-market fit.
- When building out software, keep in mind that many of your problems have already been efficiently solved by other teams. Don’t feel like you have to do everything from scratch - instead, use your needs as opportunities to work with, integrate, and possibly acquire others’ solutions before you resort to building internally.
- Don’t assume that an employee’s performance issues are their own fault. Instead, view the problem systematically, and keep open communication with them to figure out what role they would work better in. Many times subpar work is simply the result of someone working on the wrong problem.
- The startup world can be seen as a collection of journeys. While finding early product-market fit and making profit are priorities, having the mindset that it’s all ultimately about the people can be rewarding: without a good team and good friends, even a profitable journey might not feel worth it.
By taking a unique user-oriented approach to workflow organization, ClickUp has managed to see extraordinary success in an already crowded market. Because of this, ClickUp has had to navigate and find solutions to the problems common among all fast-growing startups. Head of Global Revenue Tommy Wang has been with ClickUp since its earliest stages and joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss the complexity problem of user-oriented products, how to find the best hires, and how to adapt your company and yourself during hypergrowth.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Different people and different teams work best in different ways. If you can, make your software configurable and flexible to meet each client’s needs. At the cost of complexity in your go-to-market, this can lead to faster growth and better net retention.
- Knowing what customer behavior(s) indicate healthy usage of your software is a difficult but important question. Try to find which measures for customer usage lead to the best outcome so you can train on those behaviors.
- Relying on other peoples’ judgements is crucial for finding and hiring the best-in-class. When working with a limited network, you can ask coworkers at other companies who their strongest peers are. With a more involved network, talk to well-known leaders and enlist the help of professionals to get a better idea of what talent looks like.
- During hypergrowth, your company quickly becomes less nimble - you need to make sure you make the right decisions at the start because changing direction later is almost impossible. Context is more important than experience here: look at the history of companies and institutions in similar situations.
- Almost every team in hypergrowth will hit an inflection point for communication: people start to lose connection with the larger team as they’re subdivided into more and more groups. Having a single place to connect workflows helps with this, but you may also have to hire roles focused on intercommunication.
- Having a good market is more important than having a good team. Focus first on making sure there’s a good market for your product, then focus on making sure you have a solid team - don’t waste time on trying to start a business with a perfect idea.
Cyber-attacks are quickly becoming a worldwide problem, and in many cases, cybersecurity systems are too slow to keep up. By taking this issue head-on by catching insecure code while it’s being written, Snyk has become a hyper-growth SaaS business in an impressively short timeframe. Snyk aims to expand its services to as many developers as possible, making our world’s digital infrastructure safer in the process. CEO Peter McKay joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss how he coaches teams, how to prioritize, and why you should hire diversely.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- In today’s world, applications need to be built at a faster rate than ever before. With cyber-attacks becoming an ever-increasing threat, viable security for your applications is necessary to staying competitive in any type of company.
- A good workplace doesn’t need to work completely like a sports team or completely like a family: Hire the best people you can and expect quality work, but also trust them until proven otherwise, and offer as much flexibility as you can. The more flexibility you offer, the more talented people will apply.
- Especially at a time where we’re mostly online, try to get rid of the taboo of talking about mental health in the workplace setting. Being able to constantly communicate about mental health is vital - good communication can help point out who’s struggling, plus we all need to talk about it sometimes to get over occasional hurdles.
- Taking time to choose which projects to prioritize is important: choose 3 and run with them to completion. At the same time, don’t get blindsided: many executives fail by completely ignoring the things they’re not prioritizing.
- In tech, only hiring in-network means critically low diversity, you won’t have enough range of thought to approach many issues well. Instead, value diversity and try to hire from as many different backgrounds and perspectives as possible.
- Resiliency is an overlooked skill in the modern world. Be able to take harsh criticism and failure, and always be willing to use these experiences to keep growing and advancing.
Lucid, a visual collaboration platform most known for its original product Lucidchart, has grown from a zero revenue company to a wildly successful startup, now passing 30 million users and 100 million in revenue. Lucid only continues to grow, transitioning more recently to a multi-product platform and always advancing its mission of ease-of-use for knowledge workers.
David Grow has been with the company almost from the start, giving him unique insights into the changes you have to go through at a company moving from small to giant. President and COO Dave Grow joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss his approach to strategy, hyper-growth, self-awareness, and patience. Here are some quick takeaways:
- With growth comes a greater need for disciplined strategy. Expect a formal timescale for a meeting on strategy every 2-3 years, and make sure your plan for the future still connects your mission to your customers.
- The ability to be everything for everyone is just becoming a possibility and relies upon your end-user needs. If your product meets an inconsistent end-user need, you may need to work vertically. If your product solves a problem across companies of all sizes, you can work horizontally and market to a large number of people.
- High growth situations mean you’ll have to “give away your legos” and partition off what was your responsibility to new hires. Leaving ego aside while others do what you used to is necessary for this.
- Self-awareness is key to making the right future career decisions. The goal is to know when there’s still more for you to do at a company but to also accept and know when you’re not needed anymore, and when it’s best to move to a different project.
- In the SaaS world, tons of stress is put on speed. On the contrary, be comfortable with waiting. Have patience with the process and with your employees: most great companies take around 10 years to get where they are, and many employees need patience and second chances to step into their role.
Starting third to market and rising to be the market leader in just a few years is rarely heard of, but that’s exactly what Gong has done. Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that gives sales and customer success teams insights on what is happening with their customers without anyone having to lift a finger. Their vision is to build the best autonomous applications in the world. By prioritizing quality, Gong has managed not only to become the best at what it does, but to stay on top, always running fast to keep making its product better than the alternatives. CEO and Founder Amit Bendov joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss the future of autonomous applications, how to pull away from the competition, and the importance of being able to ‘zoom out’.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- As time goes on, businesses will only continue to favor autonomous software solutions over human-curated ones. The goal is to make what was hard work effortless and more consistent.
- There’s no moat between you and your competitors in the SaaS world. While in competition the strong tend to get stronger, you shouldn’t assume the advantages you have will last any longer than 12 months: you have to run like crazy to stay ahead.
- A strong collaboration between sales and product is vital for either team to work effectively. The goal is to have a product so good even a mediocre sales team would work, and a sales team so good even a mediocre product would work.
- When it comes to marketing, be bold and be comfortable with polarizing decisions. Being safe with marketing is a risky choice; taking risks is your safest option.
- In many markets, you’ll have to make the product decision of whether to be the budget option or the expensive solution to your problem. In either case, make sure to stick to your decision: if you decide to be the best solution, don’t also feel the need to lower your prices as a competition strategy, and instead market on being worth the high cost.
- Job interviews are a tremendous source of information for learning about organizational design.
- The ability to “zoom-out” can be a great addition to your skill set as you move forward in business. Constantly challenge yourself to think bigger to find new solutions and ideas.
The recent uptick in online learning has drastically changed what has long been a stagnant industry: education. Course Hero capitalizes on these changes, providing a massive affordable library of online supplemental resources for both students and teachers. Through their model, Course Hero wants to fix the nearly universal problems each student experiences. Founder and CEO Andrew Grauer joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss how to build on a good opportunity, what the future of the education industry looks like, and why it’s so important to put company culture first.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- When creating any product, make sure to prioritize understanding and empathizing with the problems of your end-user. Finding a widely shared pain point can be key here.
- When building a business in a typically low-speed industry like education, it can be better to start with discipline: keep your fixed costs low and wait for expansion stages.
- The future of education will likely solve for learning speed and cost. Technology that makes education widely available and easy to learn will rise in the coming years.
- A large portion of today’s students are parents or workers - many are working to pay off debt and many don’t graduate after 6 years. Companies that try to act as an alternative to college and supplementary resources like Course Hero aim to fix this problem.
- Building your company’s culture always comes before building a product. Treating others well and building a community of trust is necessary for overcoming inevitable future challenges for your business - make sure to be intentional in your day-to-day interactions with coworkers.
- The “pod model”, when done effectively, is a great way to maintain the shared culture at a large scale. Split into teams, and try to balance team autonomy with cohesive leadership.
Scaling is often a major problem for rapidly growing startups; rarely does a company adapt to and fill out its product as well as Dialpad has over the past 10 years. Today, Dialpad can claim to be a standalone solution to communication in the modern workplace. Dialpad Founder and CEO Craig Walker joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss how to start building an “all-in-one” company, why to prioritize workspace culture, and how to adapt to the modern SaaS world.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- The modern workplace has radically changed in how it views employee productivity. Don’t force employees to sit in an office while they work; instead, prioritize giving good software and cloud access so they can be mobile and more active throughout the day.
- Building an “all-in-one” company that has filled out the scope of its market takes an extremely solid foundation -- make sure you’re confident in your product market, then take the time to build something scalable.
- Aligned culture and tightly-knit teams are vital for a startup. Agreement on values and the ability to make decisions quickly are the only advantages a small team can leverage over massive corporations.
- In today’s market, you don’t need to artificially limit yourself to one strata of the SaaS market, small teams have become just as interested in and capable of buying software as large enterprises. Learn what differently-sized markets want out of your software, and market accordingly.
- The SaaS market is shifting to meet the needs of end-users - if you create a product end-users don’t need, it will not be used. Always approach new ideas from the consumer side.
- Mobility and availability will only become more important in the future of video calls. Expect future innovations such as AR calls or advanced ai popups during calls.
The stock market has historically been highly exclusive and highly discriminatory. By instead advocating for accessibility and inclusivity, Public creates a business model for personal investing that has grown wildly over the past couple of years. The company offers a unique avenue for enterprise: combining social media with a goal-oriented product. COO Stephen Sikes joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss the future of investing, a community model for business, and what a good revenue model should look like.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- The best way to invest is by balancing passive and active trading. Get excited by stocks but don’t get too emotionally invested in the process.
- Modern improvements to the availability, accessibility, and inclusivity of stock market trading have brought a massive cohort of small investors.
- Building a valuable community means putting community first: start by defining a consistent brand and reinforce that brand upon your community members.
- There is a huge gap of business opportunities in community-driven content aimed at positive results.
- The consumer startup world has a two-phase sequence, first focusing on growth over economics and then flipping to economics once large enough.
- You should align your revenue model with customer satisfaction, not revenue itself. Don’t start a business that predicates on its’ customers’ losses.
It’s not often you see a company well established in its product niche completely rebrand, but that’s exactly what Tom Hale and his team at Momentive, formerly SurveyMonkey, have done. Tom joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to discuss what an effective rebrand looks like, why modern businesses need AI-generated feedback, and how the workplace can help the world.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Automated surveys give the quick data needed to remain agile and move at “ventilator speed” in the modern workplace.
- All growing multi-product businesses hit a wall where they need to rebrand. Matching different products to buyer profiles is key to getting past this.
- Brand health can be measured both through traditional metrics like awareness and competitive share but also through monitoring statistics like customer calls and the amount of people directed to your product without a referral.
- AI, if made well enough, can provide a volume of personal feedback humans are unwilling to expend the time and energy on.
- Try to look past just money and see the workplace as a way through which to positively affect the world. If you can use business to help people, you should.
Whether you realize it or not, part of your job is being a marketer. Broadly, every company is becoming a content machine. Effective content marketing is a crucial part of growing a company.
According to Semrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin, marketing is something that you can’t excel at through just studying- you have to practice. Eugene joined Scott and Andrei on the show to elaborate on how trends such as Tik Tok are creating a generation of skilled marketers and why this is a good thing.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Technology goes through cycles where it begins with a high barrier to entry before becoming accessible to the masses. Marketing is experiencing a similar trend.
- Discovering and capitalizing on trends is a fundamental marketing skill and one that apps like Tik Tok are honing.
- Education has historically been highly structured, with an emphasis on hard skills- the future of education will focus on developing soft skills that are necessary for building relationships with others.
- With an ever-increasing number of channels and a finite amount of time spent online, content discoverability is a pressing challenge.
- Competing with many competitors over popular keywords becomes a zero-sum game- you need to find a niche and then grow out of it.
ServiceNow: the best-kept secret in Silicon Valley. The company, led by the tenets of humility and hunger, has grown in orders of magnitude in the past 3 years. The longtime consultant turned Chief Customer and Partner Officer Lara Caimi joined Scott and Andrei on the show. In a world where every SaaS company claims to be customer-centric, Lara provides specific examples of how to truly embed this into the culture of a company.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- You need to be aware of the distinct phases of growth in a software company- at a certain point investing in customer success becomes more important than winning new clients.
- Be better than yesterday but realize that you are not as good as you will be tomorrow.
- Enterprises can and should learn from consumer-facing companies to understand how to put the customer first.
- Remote work is an important step toward the real democratization of talent.
Data is nothing more than a collection of facts spliced by rows and columns. Yet, this simple concept is the single most important driver of innovation. SafeGraph provides Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) about physical places. The company is in a constant search for truth and lives to provide others with data to build innovative solutions. According to CEO Auren Hoffman, working in such a company requires humility and veracity. As he puts it, data is like high-quality butter that a baker uses to make a croissant- it often goes unnoticed, but it is essential. Auren joined hosts Scott and Andrei on the podcast to elaborate on the democratization of data and how it can be used to do good in the world.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Data needs to meet different thresholds of accuracy depending on its use (eg marketing vs modeling), ranging from directionally correct to nearly 100%.
- Data science as a field is growing as more and more students are pursuing this discipline.
- As accessibility to reliable data increases, so does the capacity to address issues across areas such as healthcare, economic mobility, and more.
- The trend of perfectly optimizing your most valuable resource (time) is misguided- it is ok to allocate time to interests outside of work.
- Treat your past self as a separate person and as someone that you don’t mind disagreeing with.
The “Good Guys” of the credit card industry, Ramp’s goal is to actively help customers spend less. We often are excited by reward points and bonuses when using a credit card; however, these incentives often delude us into spending more.
Co-Founder and CEO Eric Glyman embarked on his mission with Ramp after discovering how customers were being deceived. The avid StarCraft player joined hosts Scott and Andrei to describe the misalignment between what customers want and what their credit card gives them- and how you can avoid it. Listen in to become a smarter spender and learn about a company disrupting a space dominated by incumbents.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- When services such as expense management are generally provided at a cost, offering it for free is an effective way to secure a foothold in a market
- Banks and consumers have inherently different goals- understanding this is the first step in becoming a budget savvy person
- In marketing efforts, directly show how your product or service addresses a customer’s needs rather than how other companies are lacking
- Be strategic with hiring- talented individuals often run in the same circles
- Don’t crush the butterfly- acquiring a company should be a delicate process to integrate the two entities
In the mid 1990s, a group of MIT students stunned casinos by winning extraordinary amounts of money playing Blackjack. These students, utilizing a data-driven card counting strategy, gained notoriety and became the subject of acclaimed books and films such as Bringing Down the House and 21. One of the team members, Jeff Ma, went on to become a 4x founder and an executive at Twitter before joining Microsoft as VP of Startups. Jeff joined hosts Scott and Andrei to describe his key learnings from building and exiting several successful companies. The conversation covers misconceptions around funding as an end goal, aligning perspectives between enterprises and startups, and the most exciting areas in tech.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Aligning perspectives to avoid friction should be the first consideration when entering a partnership
- When partnering with an enterprise, startup founders often underestimate the sheer scale that they are dealing with- fully utilizing their resources is not a trivial task
- The size of large enterprises can hinder rapid implementation of initiatives; however, it also makes accomplishments more rewarding
- Starting a company with the hope of being acquired is the wrong mindset
Coming up with an idea and raising capital to execute on it is often seen as a “chicken or the egg” situation. According to Stephanie Fox, COO of Thrasio, having a viable idea comes first. Thrasio, which acquires and grows brands on Amazon, began with no outside funding when it bought a milk frother brand on Amazon. 3 years later, with over 150 brands acquired and a billion dollars in funding, the original idea has proven itself. Stephanie joined hosts Scott and Andrei to share her learnings from previous endeavors and how they prepared her to excel in her current role.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Though top-line growth is often celebrated, entrepreneurs need to refocus their priorities on profitability when the time is right.
- Building a company is a cycle of being on fire, struggling, and readjusting and overcoming. The third step is where many fail.
- Companies shouldn’t necessarily hit all their yearly goals- this suggests that the goals were too conservative
- Culture is deeper than free coffee and a relaxed dress code- it should involve every employee feeling a personal connection to the success of the company
Checkout.com, already a leader in the payments space across Europe, is poised to make a splash in the North American market. With complex regulatory issues and technological inefficiencies to deal with, driving revenue initiatives is a massive challenge. However, that is exactly what CRO Nick Worswick was tasked with when he joined the company in February. Nick joined hosts Scott and Andrei to illuminate his philosophies on joining new companies, building competitive moats, and pinpointing areas of opportunity.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- We instinctively want to quickly implement changes at a new role- this is a mistake. Take the time to listen to both customers and your team.
- TAM is a misleading statistic- you must narrow it down to a serviceable market, and then to a sellable market
- Despite the numerous companies sprouting up in the space, payments remains an area in need of a major overhaul
- Take on initiatives with asymmetric upside- not every decision needs to be revolutionary
Salesforce is synonymous with CRM. The cloud based company’s enterprise offerings were recently bolstered by the landmark acquisition of Slack for nearly $28B. Bill Patterson, EVP and GM of CRM at Salesforce, had a front-row seat to this monumental integration. Bill joined hosts Scott and Andrei to discuss the synergies gained from the Slack acquisition, how to achieve work-life harmony, and how to stand out as a sales rep in an online environment.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Always operate with consideration of your core values. When crises like the Covid pandemic occur, these values will keep driving you forward
- Business is the biggest platform for change. Find ways that your company can do good.
- Ensure that your employees have the tools to communicate seamlessly both internally and externally
- Calls per hour is an outdated metric for tracking a sales rep’s productivity- more attention should be paid to the quality of relationships being formed with clients
- You don’t know everything. Be a learn-first person
The idea for Rapyd was born when Arik Shtilman realized that there was no all-in-one financial services platform. Despite discovering the solution to this problem, the company failed to raise $3 million on just a $5 million valuation. Over $800 million in funding later, and with goals of becoming a $100 billion company, Rapyd is poised to be the platform upon which any FinTech solution can be built. Listen in as Arik challenges misconceptions around entrepreneurship and describes Rapyd’s astronomical growth.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Although online transactions have been occurring for decades, there still remains massive opportunity for disruptive innovation in this space
- Pitching a product to a customer and pitching the company’s vision to an investor are completely different- entrepreneurs fail when they use the same pitch for both audiences
- Raise capital when the market environment is right, not when you need it
- Fundraising is the most important skill for an entrepreneur
Chris Koehler, currently serving as CMO of Box, has seen it all. He took the path less traveled all the way back to his days at Adobe. While heading Box’s customer success department, Chris interviewed several CMO candidates before stepping in and filling the role himself. His experiences across distinct business areas provide him with a unique perspective that is valuable to those across every facet of an organization. Join hosts Scott and Andrei as Chris shares his marketing wisdom as well as the context around major career inflection points.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- Continuing to grow once a company has scaled requires a delicate balance of setting long-term goals while allowing for a flexible path to reach them
- Being a ‘generalist’ is not a bad thing- it allows one to leverage their knowledge from other areas and provide new ways of problem solving
- Marketing is more than winning new customers- it should involve working with the customer success team to keep existing customers happy
- Covid has accelerated the demand for self-service B2B products, and companies should invest in their e-commerce presence to keep up
Chances are you were directed to this episode via a shortened url. You might not notice, but these shortened links are everywhere. Behind the scenes, Bitly is hard at work, shortening over 600 million links per month. CEO Toby Gabriner joined the show to share the lessons he’s learned from his 9 months working the role. The biggest shift in corporate culture, according to Toby, is in decision making occurring throughout the company rather than simply at the executive level. Listen in as Toby explains how leadership can empower their workforce.
Some key takeaways:
- Covid provided an opportunity for companies to reflect on every aspect of the corporation, from organizational structure to the frequency of meetings
- Leaders should create frameworks within which workers have leeway to make decisions- this empowers and motivates employees
- Experimentation with new corporate policies is a win-win, whether the outcome of the new policy is positive or negative
- Transparency is key: everyone throughout a corporation should be on the same page so that knowledge sharing and collaboration is seamless
TripActions, founded just 5 years ago, quickly became one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley after disrupting the $1.5T corporate travel market. CRO Carlos Delatorre joined the company shortly before the business world was decimated by the covid pandemic. Despite travel reaching a near standstill, Carlos helped the company vastly exceed performance expectations. He joined hosts Scott and Andrei on the show to unpack how a corporate travel company managed to succeed during the pandemic. The lessons he learned are applicable to any company facing unprecedented challenges, especially from a sales perspective- make sure to give it a listen.
Here are some key takeaways:
- Every major economic downturn has birthed long-lasting companies- the companies that were flexible and adapted during the pandemic will be the winners.
- An excellent product is rendered useless without an equally competent sales team- a salesperson needs to be able to articulate the benefits of a product to a client’s specific needs.
- The best sales reps utilize both top-down and bottom-up approaches.
- Doing difficult things that make you better is a huge differentiator- the best sellers build their own pipeline.
From 1 employee to over 600 in just four years, BlockFi is leading the pack in the cryptocurrency space. CEO Zac Prince joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast. Listen in as he discusses the future of crypto and the catalysts that have contributed to BlockFi’s exponential growth.
Here are some quick takeaways:
- One innovative product, a crypto account that yields interest, lead to BlockFi doubling in size every quarter.
- Scale and stickiness are effective ways of developing a competitive moat.
- Customer support is an overlooked area in FinTech- taking advantage of this is an opportunity for competitive differentiation.
- With rapid growth comes ever-changing job descriptions. Knowing where to focus your limited attention is a key skill.
- In the future, the lines between crypto, FinTech, and banking companies will become less rigid.
NuCalm might be the most revolutionary company you’ve never heard of. Blending science-fiction and reality, it is a patented, FDA-approved system to effectively reduce stress and improve sleep. NuCalm CEO Jim Poole joined hosts Scott and Andrei on the show to illuminate how the product works. This episode is a must-listen for anyone struggling with stress management. Some key takeaways:
- As humans, we cannot understand the intangible or long-time horizons. This is why stress builds over time and has become an epidemic
- The human prefrontal cortex is at a 36 million year evolutionary disadvantage to the ‘reptilian brain’, the area of the brain that initiates the stress response.
- Resource allocation, a fundamental concept in business, also applies to our bodies. When under stress, oxygen is diverted from the brain
- Chronic stress is not a badge of honor- it is highly counterproductive in terms of health and professional success.
- Quality above all else- NuCalm has generated tens of millions in revenue with almost no marketing spend
On today’s episode of Built by Humans, Bandwidth Chief Customer Officer Ryan Henley joins the show. Along with hosts Scott and Andrei, learn about how to manage the balance between keeping customers satisfied today and in the future. Some key takeaways:
- Customer success today is a listening organization that is always trying to understand what customers are trying to solve.
- Driving product adoption across your customer base needs to be a continual effort, and if done correctly, it will buy the time needed for future product development.
- When a company buys your software, what they are really doing is outsourcing a piece of their customer experience onto you (which is why trust is so important).
- First impressions are huge. Make sure your organization is aligned and ready to provide great experiences on a consistent basis.
CRO of Harness.io Jason Eubanks joins the show to discuss the importance of intrinsic motivation in the business world. He outlines his process for motivating employees beyond just salary and benefits. Join hosts Scott and Andrei as Jason unpacks the ‘why’ behind working.
Some key takeaways from today’s episode:
- Employees cannot reach their full potential by relying on external motivators
- Being an effective business leader means understanding what drives employees
- Creating individualized development plans for employees that rely on qualitative and quantitative data points can help increase talent retention
- There is nothing wrong with wanting money; however, you need more than just that in order to differentiate yourself when it comes to sales
In today’s episode, Founder and CEO of Drift David Cancel joins the Built By Humans podcast. Listen in as David outlines his philosophies for being an effective leader. Some key takeaways:
- Accepting that the future is out of your hands is an important step towards personal and professional growth.
- Finding a balance between quality and quantity when hiring new personnel is a skill that is honed over time.
- Effective internal communication is just as important as effective external communication.
- Remote work is a necessary and positive transition.
- CRM is an area that is ready to be disrupted.
Carrie Lazorchak (CRO of SimilarWeb) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Personal and social engagement is a big factor in the satisfaction individuals find in their jobs.
- Millennials are highly adaptive and crave a variety of experiences which means managers have to re-think career pathing.
- Self-assessing your strengths and weaknesses will make it easy to identify the right career path.
- Actively seek external feedback from others and use that as inputs into how you assess your competencies.
- Diverse teams drive better outcomes.
Emery Wells (CEO of Frame.io) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast.
Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- It’s very difficult to market something (and capture people’s attention) when you build in an iterative fashion.
- Building a culture of excellence is incredibly difficult because excellence itself is relative.
- Creating alignment and a shared commitment to excellence is one of the most important things a founder can do.
- Providing examples of excellence and setting an expectation of how long or hard it is to achieve is critical.
- Centralization at scale is possible if you build the right systems.
- If quality was only linked to time and money, every company would have the same outcomes.
Today on Built By Humans, CEO of FinancialForce Scott Brown talks about managing the complex relationship between an organization’s chief revenue officer and its chief financial officer.
As a former CRO, he shares his insights on how to make that relationship magical for company success. Plus, Scott gives us an inside look into how FinancialForce is pushing for post-COVID growth, including tuning up the organization’s efficiency with automation and a tailored sales funnel, aligning every team with three central goals, and using a new goal-setting and review approach.
Today we’re joined by Christian Lund, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Templafy, the document automation company revolutionizing how enterprises manage their brand and content on the cloud.
Christian shares his experience going from CEO to CPO, making transparent communication key to company culture, and finding the right role for the right people. He also talks Templafy’s product philosophy, the future of presentations, and what he’s learned about American culture during Templafy’s U.S. expansion.
Rowan Trollope (CEO of Five9) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Thanks to technology, businesses no longer have to trade good customer service for a healthy margin.
- Leaders have to create an environment where people feel that level of psychological safety to be themselves.
- Emulating others makes you a bad copy of someone else (humans have a really unique ability to pick up inauthenticity).
- It is the most unusual part of humans that draws us in (authenticity attracts).
- If a CEO wants to understand their business, go watch what your customer support reps are doing.
- If you can automate 90% of support tickets that are tedious and repetitive, the support job becomes quite intellectually stimulating.
Marcus Jewell (CSO of Juniper Networks) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast.
Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- The buying community is getting a lot younger and they are a bit less interested in the relationship part of a sale.
- We doubled down on AI and micro-motivation tools to gamify the sales job and make work a bit more fun for our people.
- Sales are very hard to fully understand from a psychological perspective because it is a human-to-human interaction (and humans are unpredictable).
- A good salesperson describes the process they will use to get to a good outcome rather than talk about the outcome or how much they are going to sell.
- Salespeople today need to be incredibly dexterous with data so they can pick the important data points and use them to tell a compelling story.
- You never really lose a customer, you just lose that customer at that time. You will always have an opportunity to get it back and win the deal so it’s important to make a good impression and be professional.
Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot.io) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Becoming a better human is difficult because we are deathly afraid of confronting the parts of ourselves that we do not like.
- One of the biggest fallouts of not normalizing struggle is that we presume we are the only ones going through difficulty
- When you become the moviegoer and create a distance between you and your thoughts, life can be much more enjoyable.
- False grit is the ability to take the punches life throws at you and deal with them. True grit is the capacity to adapt, let things go, and surrender.
- The attempt to control the ups, downs and unexpected changes of life is a feeble exercise since we do not know whether their long-term impact will be positive or negative.
Taylor Brown (COO of Fivetran) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Business Is Human podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- You have to make a decision about how good you want to be (and hire the people that match that level).
- Fivetran tries to strike the balance between being a value-based and performant culture
- People need to know their role, what you expect from them, and the rules in order to perform.
- Giving people the right amount of ownership and letting them fail is key to growth.
- Building a lasting, valuable business is a longer process than most people would expect.
- Work-life balance is a moving target.
Rob Gonzalez (CMO & co-founder of Salsify) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Creating things is really hard to do unless you have huge blocks of time.
- You always want to assume that people are operating with good intentions.
- Preparing for 1v1s and career development conversations takes a ton of time and is very hard to do well.
- When Product Marketing is not working it is death by a thousand cuts.
- Everyone always has a thousand pieces of advice and so the most important part is deciding what advice you’ll actually listen to.
- To the extent that your circle of concern is the same as your circle of control, that actually increases your ability to make changes in the world.
Edan Gottlib (VP of Sales at Cloudinary) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Business Is Human podcast.
Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- You have to properly incentivize salespeople to sell a new product, otherwise, they will choose the path of least resistance (selling your old products).
- Great salespeople are people first.
- A large part of the deal is helping your champion acquire your solution (guiding them through a software purchase).
- Salespeople avoid asking certain questions because they are afraid of the response.
- Crises expose your strengths and weaknesses in a way that makes acting on them simpler.
Todd Olson (CEO at Pendo) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Business Is Human podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Solving a problem or facing a challenge with someone is the best way to get to know them.
- It’s important to be incredibly mindful of the behaviors you celebrate in your company.
- A key aspect of being able to take dollars online is the level of commitment you are asking for (monthly billing > yearly contract).
- The best companies are accepting and embracing that people will want to try things before they buy them (you cannot hide behind slick marketing or a hyper charismatic salesperson anymore).
- As a CEO, it’s important to avoid behavior that might make an exec feel disempowered.
- Create a culture that makes employees feel comfortable with speaking to you and bringing pressing issues to light.
- Invest in educating your salespeople on how to have an executive-level conversation.
Sean Lyons (CEO at R/GA) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Business Is Human podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Design is not a veneer. It’s the interface you put in between your customers and your product.
- Your brand is a living, breathing thing that is dynamic and lives all over the internet.
- Make a habit of carefully examining how you are spending your time and try to retool your schedule quarterly.
- It’s great to have data to make decisions but that data should be informing your gut rather than leading it.
- A CEO’s greatest pressure comes from setting the pace for the company and making decisions that create momentum
- Think about how you can harness technology to creatively solve problems rather than just figuring how to integrate it.
Howard Brown (CEO at RingDNA) joined Scott Britton and I on the Business Is Human podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Allowing people to autonomously enable themselves with software is a huge opportunity.
- Hire people that can be coached, enjoy coaching, and have a thirst for learning
- Create a culture where making mistakes is celebrated.
- Coaching your people should not be an afterthought, it should be the first thought.
- AI is not about replacing people, it is about augmenting and enhancing them.
- It’s all about taking data, normalizing it, and using it to draw insights that allow you to improve customer or employee experiences.
John Girard (CEO at Cience) joined Scott Britton and I on the Business Is Human podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Meaningful B2B sales don’t close without a conversation between two humans.
- Sales skills are very well preserved in this coming AI revolution.
- The pandemic highlights the importance of raw interpersonal skills associated with having a meaningful, curiosity-driven conversation with a human being.
- Zoom has allowed us to look at each other’s faces and detect body language in a new way.
- It’s impossible for any of us to be on the other side of our own communication (getting objective feedback and improving it is an art).
- The prospect to cash cycle has to be airtight in order to scale a bootstrapped company.
Steve Blum (CRO at Autodesk) joined Scott Britton and I on the Business Is Human podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
- Having a clear vision of the desired end result allows you to sell the mission to the people around you.
- People buy-in when they understand the why.
- You will never have perfect data when you are doing something new/disruptive.
- Top professional athletes spend the majority of their time practicing and honing their craft. There isn’t enough practice in high-tech sales.
- Leaders must focus on creating moments of impact (shared experiences that will always be remembered).
Loren Padelford (GM of Revenue at Shopify) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Business Is Human podcast. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation: * Being customer-centric is the best moat. * If you want generational customers, you cannot say yes to their every request. * Optimizing for short-term revenue leads to long-term churn. * The better you integrate and partner with others, the faster you become essential in the market. * Chasing competition often distracts you from your own strategy. * Market segmentation is a lie that legacy applications have kept going to perpetuate their pricing models.
Tim Kopp (CEO of Terminus) joins the Business Is Human podcast to discuss creating immersive experiences, focusing on customer lifetime value, customer marketing, and why winning builds great cultures.
Some key points below:
- You should never acquire a customer you cannot keep.
- Many companies are underinvesting in customer marketing and enablement.
- Your people need to know what your company is doing, why you are doing it, and believe in that vision with authenticity.
- The smartest investors are moving away from the 'growth at all costs’ model to one that values capital efficiency and sustainable growth.
- Conversion issues in the middle and bottom of the funnel suggest a leakage in messaging and positioning.
Wyeth Goodenough (CCO of Ironclad) discusses how to understand value across customer segments, why the right customer success engagement model depends on product complexity and the importance of forming personal connections in business.
Some key points below:
- The customer success lens is applicable to every single business since every single company is trying to create happy customers that renew or buy again.
- Business moves so much more smoothly when you actually know the person. Focus on building relationships early on.
- Everyone should be thinking about the renewal from the beginning. The renewal starts during implementation.
- Adoption does not mean business value. You have to clearly understand where the value of your product lies to know whether customers will renew.
- The right success engagement model varies depending on the complexity of your product.
Cameron Deatsch (CRO of Atlassian) joined Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Business Is Human podcast to discuss how Atlassian has evolved over the past 9 years, how to bring the best out of your people, and the aspects of himself he’s currently working to improve.
Some key points below:
- You can’t improve on a process that isn’t outlined and standardized.
- Exposing and socializing customer feedback across your GTM team is critical.
- Every time that you remove a barrier between someone who has a problem and their ability to use your product….good things will happen.
- The more value you provide to your potential customer base upfront, the more it will pay dividends down the road.
- Slow down (most mistakes are a result of moving too quickly).
In a complex and rapidly changing world, it has never been more critical for CEOs to provide their leadership teams and employees with the right level of context.
Business information must be absorbed, adapted, analyzed, and used to make productive decisions. Since businesses are highly complex, doing so requires a certain level of organizational transparency. If you are running a business today, the most important thing is getting people the information they need when they need it.
Andrew Waitman (CEO of Assent Compliance) comes on the Business Is Human podcast to discuss when to hire/fire executives, how CEOs can establish a high level of context throughout their leadership team, and why some companies are their own worst enemies.
Jim Benton (Chorus CEO) unpacks how to build a system that empowers people to do their best work and build an 'iconic team'. He then walks us through why strategic alignment is absolutely critical at scale.
Should lawyers offer wills and estate planning as a subscription? Is every product and service destined to be frictionless? Should employees have a say in what the core values of a company are? Is copywriting a long lost art? Jack Newton (CEO of Clio) answers these questions and much more on this episode of Business Is Human.
There is often an asymmetric relationship between "how important" execs say hiring is and how much time, thoughtfulness, and process companies actually have in place.
Who better to come shed light on how the best companies are fixing this than the team behind one of the leading technologies in the space!
Sarah Bernard, who leads Customer Success at Greenhouse Software (recently acquired by TPG for 500m), shares a ton of insights on how they do hiring at Greenhouse.
Historically, whenever there’s a problem or issue, teams address it by throwing an ops person at it. As a result, the operations function has been operating in a reactive fashion for a long time.
Ops folks are innovative and they have big ideas. Alison Elworthy explains how to unleash your ops team and empower them to chase after strategic initiatives. She also talks about why this could be the most effective way for SaaS companies to break linear growth.
Convene raised over $280MM over 10 years and was on the path to an IPO. In response to the crisis, CEO Ryan Simonetti had to re-invent their business and launch a digital event services product in the span of months.
When embarking on an entrepreneurial journey, you have to accept that things will break and go awry. Those moments have an outsized effect on the outcome of a business. Here's what Ryan learned.
Godard Abel (CEO at G2) breaks down how the software buying process is changing, his main takeaways from past ventures, and the impact conscious leadership has had on his career.
When Dan Reich and Scott Britton founded Troops there weren't too many people thinking about using Slack as an operating system for Salesforce. That all changed very quickly when Salesforce bought Slack for $27.7Bn. The two co-founders explain why the intersection between CRM + messaging platforms is something GTM leaders should be paying close attention to.
The way people buy software is changing rapidly. Prospects want to see and experience the product firsthand before engaging in sales conversations. Ryan runs sales and customer success at Sprout Social, a company that helps businesses harness the power of social media marketing.
In this episode, Ryan breaks down how to design processes that allow salespeople to be true value-adds in the modern sales motion and what skillsets you should be looking for when building out a revenue org.
The 3 go-to-market motions most commonly employed in B2B are: product-led growth (Atlassian), sales-led (Salesforce), and sales-assisted (blended model). Choosing the right go-to-market strategy is critical to the success of any venture.
Shane walks us through the main factors that determine each strategy's effectiveness and talks about how to build and scale a B2B SaaS brand.
In a world where change is the only constant, opportunities to disrupt large incumbents present themselves every so often.
When Brad Birnbaum started Kustomer in 2015 there was no shortage of major players in the market (ex. Zendesk). Brad shares how to spot opportunities for disruption, differentiate from the competition and move up-market.
After several years of working at Google's political advocacy group, Matt Yalowitz decided to help build out Stripe's sales team. While this career move isn't all too common, Matt provides some insight into why politics and sales aren't too different after all.
In this conversation, Matt explains how to think about your revenue org as a system and why the best customers come from unexpected places.
So you're saying raising $200MM, growing like weave, and selling to a tech giant isn't a massive success story? Well..... it depends on how you look at it but to Andrew, a successful business venture is one that is profitable.
Andrew Bialecki walks us through Klaviyo's founding story, his decision to bootstrap, and how to raise the right amount of money.
According to Harvard Business Review, 70-90% of mergers and acquisitions fail. Chris Hays breaks down the ZoomInfo DiscoverOrg acquisition, how the actual decision was made, and why it was so accretive for the business.
3X founders are like unicorns.....there just aren't many of 'em. Ryan Denehy has started an ad network, swarm (google analytics for brick-and-mortar), and Electric AI.
In this episode, Ryan drops wisdom on the following topics: overcoming VC objections, hiring an executive team, assessing the quality of a market, how to leverage advisors, and the importance of self-awareness.
Should customer success teams carry a revenue number? According to Ziv Peled, the answer to this question is a resounding 'no'.
Ziv believes that CSMs should be measured on the amount of value they drive for customers. In this conversation, Ziv explains why an obsessive focus on driving value is the best way to build a land and expand strategy.
Zach Weinberg co-founded and sold two companies for a total of ~$2Bn by the age of 32. Today, he spends most of his time investing and opening bars in Brooklyn. Zach explains why customer development is critical, how to run a 2-sided marketplace, and when it makes sense for a startup to buy another company.