BUILD with Blake Bartlett: Recent Episodes
OpenView Venture Partners
It takes 3 ingredients to build a software startup in today’s wild market: people, product and growth. Easier said than done. BUILD is here to help by featuring conversations between venture capitalist Blake Bartlett and the smartest folks in software. OpenView is a VC firm that invests in amazing companies like Datadog, Expensify and Calendly. Visit ov.vc for more details.
Alex MacCaw is the founder of Clearbit and Reflect, and his journey with each company has been wildly different. Clearbit took more of a “classic” startup approach—raising VC money, hiring hundreds of people, and working from an office in SF.
In 2020, he charted a new course by replacing himself as CEO at Clearbit, selling all his possessions and living full-time on a sailboat in the Atlantic.
And now he’s building his new company Reflect in with a totally different approach —building a fully remote & asynchronous “lifestyle” company that decidedly eschews VC money and the other common hallmarks of a tech startup.
Alex shares everything he’s learned as a founder and why he believes building startups should not be one-size-fits-all.
Blake and Alex talk through:
(7:07) Pros/Cons of being asynchronous by design
(09:01) Why Alex doesn’t believe in remote work for large companies
(10:11) Remote work pitfalls
(14:21) When to replace yourself as CEO
(15:52) How to find your zone of genius
(18:31) When do startups hire a CFO or COO?
(21:14) #1 piece of advice for founders
(24:14) Things to know before you found a startup (B2B vs. B2C)
(27:27) Why not raise venture capital
(28:28) When startups should (or shouldn’t) raise venture capital
(29:40) How Reflect started crowdfunding
(39:14) What AI and ChatGPT is good for
(44:13) Best time to start a company
(46:20) Not all startups need VC funding
(47:16) Advice for VCs from a founder
Patrick says work-life balance is the wrong framework. It’s more about work-life fit and finding what suits you best. This is especially true for startup founders, where your work is often all-consuming.
Episode Highlights
- [00:32 - 02:30] Thoughts on work/life balance
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Culture at a startup is always tricky, but there’s one common mistake founders should avoid at all costs. It’s the desire to make everyone happy all the time. Patrick says this leads to a “culture of accommodation” which ultimately ends up not working for anyone. Hear Patrick’s journey as a founder to define the culture at ProfitWell, and how you can do the same at your startup.
Episode Highlights
- [00:03 - 01:31] Episode intro: Patrick Campbell
- [01:59 - 04:04] What is the role and importance of company culture in today's market environment?
- [06:39 - 10:26] The culture of ProfitWell and the journey to get there
- [12:15 - 16:26] The most charitable interpretation
- [17:23 - 20:08] ProfitWell values and four principles
- [20:21 - 23:16] Speaking their mind, being human in the most charitable way
- [21:11 - 23:16] Values and principles must have trade-offs
- [23:16 - 25:41] Here's how we operate, transparency in hiring
- [25:46 - 32:10] Advice for making culture something more than theoretical, a real experience
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Every startup wants to create a category. This is often a mistake. Or at least it’s prioritized too early by many founders and marketers. Ryan Carlson, longtime CMO at Okta, explains why this falls flat with customers and what to do instead.
Key Takeaways:
- [00:31 - 01:53] A noted skeptic on category creation
- [01:54 - 02:15] Everybody wants to be a category creator
- [02:16 - 03:19] Focus on how they're better than the alternative
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Ryan Carlson, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Wiz
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Okta’s CMO for 5+ years, Ryan Carlson, says marketing’s guiding light should be the company mission and values. Marketing’s job is to tell the story of the company, not to merely promote the product or drive leads into the top of a funnel. Authentic marketing is rooted in the BIG questions. Why does this company exist? Who should care about that and why?Today’s episode will help you:
- Understand this strategic approach to marketing
- See the impact strategic marketing has on your audience
- How to hire mission/values-aligned marketers
- Leverage Ryan’s playbook for company storytelling by working directly with customers
Key Takeaways:
- [00:19 - 03:37] Introduction to Ryan Carlson, and thoughts on company culture in the world of marketing
- [03:44 - 06:53] What should define culture is the mission, values, and vision
- [06:54 - 10:00] Imparting importance, and showing why culture mattered at Okta
- [10:02 - 13:32] Authenticity, avoiding hyperbole and marketing BS
- [13:43 - 16:10] Who do you hire to marketing leadership to operate more authentically?
- [16:13 - 18:18] Hiring true believers, and avoiding a "customer's wrong" mentality with product market fit
- [19:26 - 22:45] Understanding why people like the product and the people behind it
- [22:48 - 25:40] Combining pen to paper with mission, values, and vision
- [25:42 - 28:27] Storytelling and presentations, how they impact retention
- [28:30 - 32:26] Story and history of your company is different
- [32:32 - 35:37] Figuring out if a company operates by its values as a candidate
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Ryan Carlson, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Wiz
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Raj says that most of the PLG advice out there today is missing a key foundational point: data. Many PLG companies still rely on traditional sales & marketing software that keeps data in silos. The key to winning in PLG starts with your data infrastructure, and wiring it up early helps you scale later.
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Raj Sarkar, CMO & Advisor
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B2B marketers usually overlook brand in their marketing mix. Brand marketing is only for CPG companies, right? Raj makes the case that brand marketing is not optional, if you want to win your category.
But brand marketing isn’t just buying a Super Bowl ad. Before you think about channels, you need to define your brand identity and build awareness. Done right, brand marketing can become an infinitely scalable strategy to drive growth.
Key Takeaways:
- [01:19 - 04:05] What exactly is brand marketing? And why is it important?
- [04:06 - 05:41] Why we should dive deep into brand
- [05:41 - 07:36] Differentiation in branding, infinitely scalable
- [07:39 - 11:38] When to start thinking about brand, SEO, and the funnel
- [13:36 - 15:36] Determining your mission and values, brand attributes
- [15:36 - 17:26] Speaking ways that is consistent with identity
- [17:28 - 19:45] Balancing different brand attributes in messaging
- [19:47 - 21:04] House of brands or a branded house
- [22:08 - 25:31] Amplifying brand marketing and the channels of choice
- [25:38 - 28:58] Tracking efficacy in print and non-digital formats with modern tools
- [28:58 - 30:47] Where to take action on Raj's advice
Mentioned in this episode:
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Raj Sarkar, CMO & Advisor
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B2B marketers usually overlook brand in their marketing mix. Brand marketing is only for CPG companies, right? Raj makes the case that brand marketing is not optional, if you want to win your category.
But brand marketing isn’t just buying a Super Bowl ad. Before you think about channels, you need to define your brand identity and build awareness. Done right, brand marketing can become an infinitely scalable strategy to drive growth.
Key Takeaways:
- [01:19 - 04:05] What exactly is brand marketing? And why is it important?
- [04:06 - 05:41] Why we should dive deep into brand
- [05:41 - 07:36] Differentiation in branding, infinitely scalable
- [07:39 - 11:38] When to start thinking about brand, SEO, and the funnel
- [13:36 - 15:36] Determining your mission and values, brand attributes
- [15:36 - 17:26] Speaking ways that is consistent with identity
- [17:28 - 19:45] Balancing different brand attributes in messaging
- [19:47 - 21:04] House of brands or a branded house
- [22:08 - 25:31] Amplifying brand marketing and the channels of choice
- [25:38 - 28:58] Tracking efficacy in print and non-digital formats with modern tools
- [28:58 - 30:47] Where to take action on Raj's advice
Mentioned in this episode:
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Raj Sarkar, CMO & Advisor
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Podcast produced by OpenView.
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Chris was Snowflake’s first sales hire, and he built the commercial business from $0 to $1B+ ARR. What is the optimal relationship between a VP Sales and the Founder/CEO during this journey?
Many sales leaders solely focus on hitting their number. That’s certainly important, but sales also plays a pivotal role in product strategy by acting as the voice of the customer. The goal is to achieve a collaborative push-pull relationship with founders and sales leaders that drives more customer value.
Chris is CRO at Snowflake and has been leading sales there for 9 years. He’s helped grow from $0 to $1B+ ARR. He’s clearly a software sales legend. So how is Chris coaching his reps and leaders during today’s recessionary environment? What should you change about your sales playbook in order to keep winning in a down market?
This is the perfect episode for sales reps, sales leaders, and founders/CEOs who are looking for advice on how to navigate selling in a downturn.
Key Takeaways:
- [01:58 - 03:52] The mindset and action plan of a great sales reps in a recession
- [03:52 - 05:37] A passion and conviction for what you're selling
- [05:42 - 07:09] Addressing specific challenges of today, adding value, saving money
- [07:16 - 10:29] Understanding customer pain in difficult macro environments, solving for competitor gaps
- [10:34 - 13:03] Don't waste people's time, have a genuine conversation
- [13:06 - 15:27] The business value of Snowflake's model
- [15:28 - 18:42] Increasing sales, driving cost savings and business value
- [19:38 - 26:34] How sales reps and leadership should be thinking about success
- [26:35 - 31:27] Pipeline generation and sales success
- [31:26 - 32:45] It's easy to blame others
- [32:45 - 36:27] Dealing with smaller budgets and cultivating empathy and problem solving
- [36:27 - 39:14] Preparing for 2023 budgets and planning differently
Chris is CRO at Snowflake and has been leading sales there for 9 years. He’s helped grow from $0 to $1B+ ARR. He’s clearly a software sales legend. So how is Chris coaching his reps and leaders during today’s recessionary environment? What should you change about your sales playbook in order to keep winning in a down market?
This is the perfect episode for sales reps, sales leaders, and founders/CEOs who are looking for advice on how to navigate selling in a downturn.
Key Takeaways:
- [01:58 - 03:52] The mindset and action plan of a great sales reps in a recession
- [03:52 - 05:37] A passion and conviction for what you're selling
- [05:42 - 07:09] Addressing specific challenges of today, adding value, saving money
- [07:16 - 10:29] Understanding customer pain in difficult macro environments, solving for competitor gaps
- [10:34 - 13:03] Don't waste people's time, have a genuine conversation
- [13:06 - 15:27] The business value of Snowflake's model
- [15:28 - 18:42] Increasing sales, driving cost savings and business value
- [19:38 - 26:34] How sales reps and leadership should be thinking about success
- [26:35 - 31:27] Pipeline generation and sales success
- [31:26 - 32:45] It's easy to blame others
- [32:45 - 36:27] Dealing with smaller budgets and cultivating empathy and problem solving
- [36:27 - 39:14] Preparing for 2023 budgets and planning differently
Today’s shorter episode is a follow up to my longer conversation with Alex Su, Head of Community at Ironclad. In that conversation, we talk about his TikTok channel @legaltechbro and how he developed a personal brand strategy that compliments Ironclad’s community-focused GTM strategy. So if you haven’t heard that yet, go check it out now. In today’s episode, we dive into TikTok more specifically and why you shouldn’t overlook this huge new channel.
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Alex Su, @legaltechbro
Ironclad
TikTok
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Alex is big on TikTok under the handle @legaltechbro. He has quickly become one of the biggest influencers in the entire legaltech industry. How? 15 second video skits poking fun at the legal profession. It’s a counterintuitive strategy on its face, but it’s working in a big way. Alex lays out his journey and his playbook.
Conversation Highlights:
[00:10 - 01:36] Introduction to Alex Su
[01:40 - 03:11] Alex Su's personal brand and strategy for his channel @legaltechbro
[03:11 - 05:50] Going from a lawyer, to sales, to a content creator with a ton of influence
[05:51 - 07:12] The video that blew up
[07:12 - 09:41] Speak to the things you care about and that they care about
[09:43 - 11:26] Resonating authentically vs thought leadership
[11:33 - 13:49] Relating to friction, and layering in what a company does by focusing on the problem
[13:50 - 15:37] How does @legaltechbro fit into Alex's daily role at Ironclad
[15:37 - 18:02] How does making a TikTok turn into community dinners and connectivity in the buyer's journey?
[18:03 - 20:04] Connecting in a genuine human way on social
[21:03 - 24:50] What's the business value, budget, and the ROI? Answering the skeptic's questions.
[24:50 - 27:18] Considering content's effect on inbound marketing
[27:19 - 29:35] Exploring ideas, realizing when nobody is doing the idea it may be brilliant
[29:37 - 32:27] Where to begin? Select the right platform for your audience.
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Alex Su, @legaltechbro
Ironclad
TikTok
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Mark is now a VC at Stage 2 Capital, and also teaches a class at Harvard Business School called “Decoding Growth in Silicon Valley.” It focuses on applying the best practices from B2C growth to B2B GTM playbooks. Today on BUILD, he gives us the key organizational and strategic “must-have” pillars in order to embrace the future of B2B growth and win with PLG.
Mark was CRO at HubSpot for 9+ years. He built the successful sales-led GTM playbook that helped the company scale to nearly $100M ARR. Then he shifted gears and helped pioneer PLG at HubSpot, effectively disrupting the original GTM playbook he built at the company. Hear Mark walk through the full story on how HubSpot became PLG, and how you can transition to PLG at your company.
Conversation Highlights:
- [3:18] Hubspot's PLG story: How it began
- [7:08] The complexity of adding a free product, and maintaining your revenue
- [13:28] Through the PLG lens: What was the starting point, and how Hubspot made self-service work within the CRM space
- [18:41] The intricacies of forming a new pricing tier
- [28:39] Disrupting yourself before someone else does
- [31:26] Advice from Mark: What is the first step? And how long after that can we expect to see some results?
Katie shares the advice she’d give a friend or family member who is deciding to stay in a role or recruit for a new one. Most of the advice today is focused on leaders and companies. Katie’s advice for you, the employee, is fresh and spot on.
Katie shares the advice she’d give a friend or family member who is deciding to stay in a role or recruit for a new one. Most of the advice today is focused on leaders and companies. Katie’s advice for you, the employee, is fresh and spot on.
Katie has been Chief People Officer at HubSpot since 2017. She has helped the company grow to thousands of employees globally. Katie outlines her top priorities in today’s uncertain macro environment — both for existing employees and for recruiting new talent. Must listen for any leader today!
Conversation highlights:
- [01:40 - 03:04] What is happening in the talent markets given the macroeconomic environment
- [03:04 - 03:58] Is top talent pronounced more in one area or industry than another?
- [04:01 - 05:47] Three factors leaders should be thinking about in regard to existing talent inside their organization
- [05:56 - 08:32] Great storytelling is important right now especially, and the idea of cartoon clarity
- [08:33 - 14:05] Prioritization in the age of downsizing, focusing on what matters most
- [15:02 - 19:12] What people need to keep top of mind for their current team: transparency and communication around decisions
- [19:17 - 22:24] Switching gears to recruiting and new talent
- [22:26 - 24:52] Screening for adaptability in the hiring process
- [24:54 - 29:56] Creating culture after the covid new normal
Katie has been Chief People Officer at HubSpot since 2017. She has helped the company grow to thousands of employees globally. Katie outlines her top priorities in today’s uncertain macro environment — both for existing employees and for recruiting new talent. Must listen for any leader today!
Conversation highlights:
- [01:40 - 03:04] What is happening in the talent markets given the macroeconomic environment
- [03:04 - 03:58] Is top talent pronounced more in one area or industry than another?
- [04:01 - 05:47] Three factors leaders should be thinking about in regard to existing talent inside their organization
- [05:56 - 08:32] Great storytelling is important right now especially, and the idea of cartoon clarity
- [08:33 - 14:05] Prioritization in the age of downsizing, focusing on what matters most
- [15:02 - 19:12] What people need to keep top of mind for their current team: transparency and communication around decisions
- [19:17 - 22:24] Switching gears to recruiting and new talent
- [22:26 - 24:52] Screening for adaptability in the hiring process
- [24:54 - 29:56] Creating culture after the covid new normal
Krista was CCO at Okta for 6 years, and held a similar role at Salesforce before that. But this is a relatively new role at large software companies. What does it mean exactly? And what makes for a good CCO?
Conversation highlights:
- [01:20] What is the Chief Customer Officer
- [02:22] The glue between an organization and its customers
Krista was CCO at Okta for 6 years, and held a similar role at Salesforce before that. But this is a relatively new role at large software companies. What does it mean exactly? And what makes for a good CCO?
Conversation highlights:
- [01:20] What is the Chief Customer Officer
- [02:22] The glue between an organization and its customers
Let’s face it. Statistically, your current team is not likely to be your future team. It’s incredibly rare for any single leader to stay with a company through multiple phases of growth. As a board member and advisor to companies like Asana, Krista’s job is to assess teams and help CEOs determine who’s gonna make it and who isn’t. What she looks for to determine this may surprise you.
Conversation highlights:
- [00:09] Intro — Meet Krista
- [02:11] Having a team for the future
- [05:09] Common traps people fall into when building their teams
- [10:15] Addressing and assessing whether or not you have a team for the future
- [12:37] Lean on others, and learning what your business should be solving for
- [15:03] Characteristics to look for in future-proofing your team: passion and curiosity
- [19:24] Embracing and loving change
- [22:31] Finding the truth and not just hearing the right answer
- [25:29] The challenge of scale and growing teams with the business
- [27:33] A good starting point for looking at teams and defining if they're tomorrow's team
Let’s face it. Statistically, your current team is not likely to be your future team. It’s incredibly rare for any single leader to stay with a company through multiple phases of growth. As a board member and advisor to companies like Asana, Krista’s job is to assess teams and help CEOs determine who’s gonna make it and who isn’t. What she looks for to determine this may surprise you.
Conversation highlights:
- [00:09] Intro — Meet Krista
- [02:11] Having a team for the future
- [05:09] Common traps people fall into when building their teams
- [10:15] Addressing and assessing whether or not you have a team for the future
- [12:37] Lean on others, and learning what your business should be solving for
- [15:03] Characteristics to look for in future-proofing your team: passion and curiosity
- [19:24] Embracing and loving change
- [22:31] Finding the truth and not just hearing the right answer
- [25:29] The challenge of scale and growing teams with the business
- [27:33] A good starting point for looking at teams and defining if they're tomorrow's team
Kyle is a one-man content machine. If you follow him on LinkedIn or subscribe to his Substack, you know this is true. How does Kyle approach content? What is his personal brand strategy? How did he win at Substack?
PLG breaks traditional SaaS top of funnel. Why? Trusty channels like content marketing, email nurture and in-person events don’t translate to PLG. Kyle has identified what works for PLG leaders like Zapier, Figma and Calendly, and shares a new top of funnel playbook built for the PLG era.
Conversation highlights:
- [01:54] Problems PLG companies face when it comes to top of funnel
- [04:16] Thinking about building for the end user, and building to be discovered
- [08:19] Full empathy and finding solutions to user problems, the customer perspective
- [11:33] SEO and Organic Search: How to get discovered and what things folks should focus on bringing to their business
- [12:57] What SEO best practices should PLG companies consider
- 15:15[] Opportunities for PLG businesses and the RFP template
- [16:13] Viral loops in products, and what they look like
- [22:11] What role community plays in top of funnel for PLG businesses
- [24:42] What app stores and distribution channels look like for users
- [27:05] Where should folks get started
Everyone today claims to be an expert in their social media profile. But truly being a world-class expert requires extremely narrow focus. Harini argues that range and breadth is just as important, but often overlooked today.
Harini leads customer success at AWS, which is arguably the most important enterprise technology vendor today. She says customer success needs to play proactive offense more than reactive defense. By starting with your customer’s customer, you can align your strategic initiatives with your customers’ to achieve win-win outcomes.
Key Takeaways:
[ 00:07 ] Overview of episode
[ 02:47 ] What customer centricity means to Harini
[ 06:44 ] Customer success as offense vs. defense
[ 15:50 ] How customer success should partner with other teams, and should they partner with customer success?
[ 22:54 ] How to get a good interface between CX and product, and correctly prioritizing what needs built
[ 27:27 ] What you can do to move from defense to offense in your CX org
A lot of PLG talk is focused on operational strategies and tactics. But what does PLG mean for the CEO of a company? What should your mindset be? How do you address common objections you might hear from your team (especially if transitioning to PLG for the first time).
Key Takeaways:
- [00:04] Fully supporting product level growth
- [00:39] Investing in sales, self-service, and not optimizing for the local maximum
- [02:27] KPIs and linking to revenue
- [03:18] Growth teams need support and buy-in
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Martin Gontovnika, Co-Founder and General Partner at HyperGrowth Partners
HyperGrowth Partners
Subscribe to Blake Bartlett on YouTube.
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“Community” is a major buzzword today, and for good reason. Community creates leverage, and lots of it. Gonto ran marketing and growth at Auth0 for 7 years before the $6.5 billion acquisition by Okta. He cuts through the buzzword noise to give us his perspective and playbook on why (and how) to win with a community strategy.
Key Takeaways:
- [00:27] Overview — Building a community
- [02:24] Defining community, and why is it trending
- [04:56] Creating communities through open source products, enterprise solutions, and other methods
- [08:55] How to identify members to target if you're building from scratch
- [13:31] Tapping into existing communities and identifying communities to target
- [21:17] Doing research with a user, interviewing developers, and engaging on Twitter
- [26:30] What does a community team look like, and who owns the effort in a PLG company?
- [30:02] KPIs and measuring the business value of building community
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Martin Gontovnika, Co-Founder and General Partner at HyperGrowth Partners
HyperGrowth Partners
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Cliff has a secret learning strategy: recruit the best people in the world at a skill to personally train you. It’s easier than you think. They’re just a DM away. Check out this quick pro tip and try it out yourself!
Key Takeaways:
- [00:34] Rule 25 — How to find the best people in the world at a skill
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Cliff Weitzman, Founder & CEO of Speechify
Cliff's YouTube video, 28 Lessons for Turning 28
Speechify
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Cliff is the Founder CEO of Speechify. He’s also a “full-time” YouTuber, with an awesome channel that features startup advice, life hacks, and self-improvement philosophy. He explains the why and how behind his personal brand strategy on YouTube, and we dive deep into one of my favorite videos of his, “28 Rules for Turning 28.”
Key Takeaways:
- [02:45] Meet Cliff, CEO of Speechify, and his YouTube channel
- [06:31] Connecting with an audience, and thinking "will this be interesting to someone?"
- [08:15] 28 Rules for Turning 28
- [12:27] Rule #10: Lead with Love
- [15:55] Rule #22: Speed is critical
- [21:36] How to begin writing your own rules for your age
Mentioned in this episode:
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Cliff Weitzman, Founder & CEO of Speechify
Cliff's YouTube video, 28 Lessons for Turning 28
Speechify
Subscribe to Blake Bartlett on YouTube.
Podcast produced by OpenView.
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Adding a top-down sales motion is a make-or-break moment for PLG companies. If it’s done right, it can make you the next big thing in your category. If it’s not done right, it can break your team and ultimately compromise your position in the market. The answer? All-in commitment from the founders and key leaders. Enterprise PLG is a team sport!
Key Takeaways:
- [00:06] The most common mistakes John sees PLG founder make when adding sales to a bottom-up or self-service motion
- [02:15] The hidden subtext to be helpful
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John Eitel, Former Global Vice President of Sales & Success at Canva
Canva
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John built the global sales team at Canva, which allowed the company to expand further into the enterprise. He walks us through everything a PLG founder needs to know about adding a top-down motion to a bottom-up, product-led foundation. When should PLG companies do this? Why is it necessary? What is the strategy? And how do you do it IRL?
Key Takeaways:
- [4:35] Repeatability in enterprise customers and understanding where these deals stall out
- [8:01] Stall points in enterprise spending and getting purchase approval
- [10:30] Embracing a top-down motion for PLG companies
- [14:17] Combining bottom-up and top-down to scale business using customer success stories
- [17:24] Communicating to executives the story of what software adoption saves
- [20:24] A broader context and story of how the platform improves customer lives
- [22:47] How the data component can make or break sales efforts
- [27:40] Where is adoption happening and using data to determine who gets involved
- [30:10] How to get the entire company working with sales
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John Eitel, Former Global Vice President of Sales & Success at Canva
Canva
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A product professional’s role changes dramatically over time as a company and product scales, and as the individual develops additional skills and experiences. Annie says you need to “product manage” your own career as a PM in this highly dynamic environment.
Calendly is an OpenView portfolio company. For a full portfolio list please visit ov.vc
Key Takeaways:
[0:13] What it's like for Annie to product manage her career as a PM
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Annie Pearl, Chief Product Officer at Calendly
Calendly
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Every PLG business will eventually have to build for the enterprise. Why? Bottom up adoption can indeed go “all the way up”...to the C-level of large organizations. But to get that 6- or 7-figure contract, you’ll need to beef up the product for the big leagues. Annie has gone through the journey at Glassdoor, and now at Calendly. She shares her playbook with us in today’s episode.
Calendly is an OpenView portfolio company. For a full portfolio list please visit ov.vc
Key Takeaways:
[2:10] What it looks like for PLG businesses to embrace enterprise
[4:42] Three components that make adopting enterprise easier said than done
[7:49] How to tackle the PLG plus enterprise transition in terms of people
[17:00] Maintaining simplicity and the end user experience as a philosophical north star
[19:51] Trades offs of embracing enterprise products from the PLG standpoint, and how to manage them
[22:57] Building solutions for personas and horizontal platforms
[28:06] Platforms and opting into layers of complexity
[30:01] Foundational step number one to building towards enterprise
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Annie Pearl, Chief Product Officer at Calendly
Calendly
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Founders often shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to running an M&A process. Andrew points out the most common mistakes he’s seen, and how to avoid them.
Key Takeaways:
[0:23] The Biggest Mistake Founders Make Selling Their Business
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Andrew Gazdecki, CEO of MicroAcquire
MicroAcquire
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There is a dearth of good advice on how to sell or exit your startup. Most people use outdated slogans like “companies are bought, not sold” but offer little practical advice to navigate a daunting M&A process. Andrew has sold two software companies previously, and now is building MicroAcquire, the founder-friendly marketplace for selling startups. He shares everything he knows about selling companies.
Key Takeaways:
[1:17] Andrew talks about Bizness Apps—his first company—and the experience of being a founder
[3:01] What selling his first company was like for Andrew
[4:09] Paths available to folks considering selling their startup outside huge IPOs and unicorn acquisitions
[6:25] What does it take to sell the company?
[8:35] The role of marketing in telling the story of your company for someone else to believe in and buy the company
[10:39] Addressing myths about selling, and the reality that founders aren't trained to sell their businesses
[16:03] Understanding why you want to sell, and setting it up for success
[18:33] What is MicroAcquire, and how can startup founders leverage the service?
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Andrew Gazdecki, CEO of MicroAcquire
MicroAcquire
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Services-based startups are often dismissed as unscalable “body shops.” But agencies and consultancies are often where product ideas hatch. Yaw reveals his pro tips for how to identify which product ideas are worth building as an agency.
Key Takeaways:
[0:08] Advice for an agency, consultancy, or freelance operation on knowing which idea to go after and build
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Yaw Aning, Cofounder and CEO of Malomo
Malomo
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Many SaaS startups are launched out of services companies. Yaw was running an agency building apps, and kept seeing a consistent pain point in his ecommerce clients’ workflows. So he built a SaaS product to address the need, and boom💥, his startup Malomo was born. This is a common founding story, but it’s often underappreciated as an entrepreneurial path. Hear Yaw’s story, and what other services founders can learn from his journey.
Key Takeaways:
[3:56] Best practices for building products that Yaw has learned as an agency founder and a SaaS founder
[11:36] Yaw's path from building products for others to building something of his own
[17:25] Validating a solution before building
[20:36] A walled garden between Malomo's product and services teams
[25:18] The role of services in a SaaS company
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Yaw Aning, Cofounder and CEO of Malomo
Malomo
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A company is only as good as its people. And if a company is growing fast, then it’s only as good as the last hire. CEOs should set the tone by striving to be the top performing recruiter at the company.
Key Takeaways:
[0:10] "People, culture is the top job for a CEO."
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Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk
Snyk
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Hypergrowth is hard. Sustaining hypergrowth is even harder. Leaders need to constantly bring new talent into the organization to avoid plateaus. The tricky part? New talent almost always entails changing roles for existing team members. Peter says the answer is to embrace the pain of difficult conversations to maintain speed.
Key Takeaways:
[2:54] What makes hypergrowth hard for a startup leader?
[5:48] Anticipating plateaus to guide company success, and answering "What could go wrong?"
[9:42] The time to anticipate plateaus is when things are going really well.
[13:56] Early indicators of problems, and staying ahead to scale talent with the organization]
[17:07] Adding specialized talent rather than replacing people
[20:02] How to approach tough conversations
[24:51] Choosing the pain of difficult conversation, and the context of delivering bad news
[27:32] Understand what you're good at and be proactive in finding talent who can do the things you don't like to do
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Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk
Snyk
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GPT-3 is a deep learning language model from OpenAI, and it has taken the developer world by storm. May Habib is the Co-Founder and CEO of Writer, an AI writing assistant for teams, and she unpacks what GPT-3 is and why it’s so promising for SaaS companies.
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Maya Habib, CEO at Writer
Writer
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Founders often obsess over product, and for good reason. It’s hard to have a good business with a terrible product. May Habib argues that is only half the solution for founders. It’s equally important to obsess over product distribution. After all, it’s hard to achieve and maintain hypergrowth with terrible distribution.
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Maya Habib, CEO at Writer
Writer
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PLG companies are raising larger rounds than ever, at higher prices than ever. Seeing this prompts two BIG questions. Why is this happening? What are these companies going to do with all that cash? Alex works directly with these companies and their GTM teams, and tells us what he has been seeing.
To hear this interview and more like it, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or search for BUILD with Blake Bartlett in your favorite podcast player.
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Alex Bilmes, Founder and CEO at Endgame
Endgame
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Product-led sales is selling to companies that already use your product. How hard can that be? Very hard, it turns out. PLG companies need to think about sales in a fundamentally different way in order to succeed. Alex has dedicated his career to solving this problem, and he shares his expertise with us.
To hear this interview and more like it, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or search for BUILD with Blake Bartlett in your favorite podcast player.
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Alex Bilmes, Founder and CEO at Endgame
Endgame
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PQLs are a hot topic, but they are very tricky to define and implement correctly. Jesus helps clarify and illustrate the role of PQLs in a broader PLG analytics stack.
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Jesus Requena, Vice President of Growth Marketing at Figma
Figma
Unity
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PLG changes the customer journey. A customer advances by taking actions directly in the product, which means product analytics are paramount to PLG success. Jesus Requena tells the story of how he built the PLG analytics stack at Unity, and the unexpected insights it uncovered. He shows you how embracing product analytics can change your company’s go-to-market results.
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Jesus Requena, Vice President of Growth Marketing at Figma
Figma
Unity
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Your product’s story is really the story of your customers. Listen to Devang’s straightforward framework for successful product storytelling.
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Devang Sachdev, Vice President of Marketing at Snorkel AI
Snorkel AI
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Everyone wants to be a platform, but be careful what you wish for. Platform go-to-market is radically different from application go-to-market. It requires a whole different framework and a special focus on solutions. Devang describes the platform GTM frameworks he developed at Twilio and Snorkel AI.
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Devang Sachdev, Vice President of Marketing at Snorkel AI
Snorkel AI
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Career paths today look less like a ladder and more like a checkerboard. You go somewhere to acquire a skill, even if it’s a non-linear move on your resume. This is especially true for Gen Z. Hear how to leverage talent development to attract more top candidates to your squares on the checkerboard.
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Beth Steinberg, SVP of People and Talent at Chime
Chime
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Most startups and VCs focus on headcount growth. Success is often measured in how many times your headcount has multiplied. Scaling your people and talent deliberately requires balancing four factors: culture, structure, talent acquisition, and management systems. Hear how Beth has tackled this at Chime, one of the fastest growing fintech companies on earth.
Key Takeaways:
[2:34] The focus usually is on the number of hires; is this the right direction?
[4:35] Blake and Beth explain why faster is good, but it’s not the only thing.
[5:27] What is a model for scale for the people in talent function and why do you need one?
[6:00] Beth shares the example of Nike and their use of a model to scale.
[7:17] Beth talks about a model with four pillars: culture, structure, talent, and management systems and process. She starts explaining what culture looks like in this model.
[8:02] Beth dives deep into the concept of structure.
[9:00] Beth shares about talent.
[10:03] What are management systems and processes about?
[11:34] Beth explains why there has been a big misunderstanding of what culture is.
[15:08] Beth expands on why the ideal structure doesn’t matter if you have everything else in place.
[16:50] Structure goes hand-in-hand with culture; it is about clarity, communication, and collaboration.
[18:14] Beth shares her philosophies and strategies on talent.
[20:42] Beth talks about retention and the great resignation.
[22:50] Beth tells more about management systems and processes.
[25:20] Beth shares what Survey Champions are about.
[26:11] Beth shares her perspective on where to begin building a model to scale.
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Beth Steinberg, SVP of People and Talent at Chime
Chime
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Yac started as an agency side project. But after winning a big Product Hunt hackathon, investors started tweeting at them. In a few days, Justin and Jordan were now startup co-founders, and those tweets turned into a $400k seed round. Hear how Yac made Twitter their best channel for everything, and how you can create real community online.
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Jordan Walker, Co-Founder
Justin Mitchell, Co-Founder and CEO
YAC
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Yac started as an agency side project. But after winning a big Product Hunt hackathon, investors started tweeting at them. In a few days, Justin and Jordan were now startup co-founders, and those tweets turned into a $400k seed round. Hear how Yac made Twitter their best channel for everything, and how you can create real community online.
Key Takeaways:
[2:10] How did Jordan and Justin go from So Friendly to starting Yac?
[3:18] Are Jordan and Justin in a tech hub?
[4:02] What was it like to build Yac?
[7:00] Justin talks about how Yac certainly got bigger than expected.
[7:47] Justin and Jordan speak about the $400,000 tweet.
[11:06] Justin and Jordan initially felt it was unreal to get funded for Yac.
[12:33] Justin and Jordan started the trend of remote meetings prior to the pandemic.
[12:53] Did the origin of Yac feel like a product-market fit?
[13:42] Justin and Jordan explain how Twitter played a big role in the second phase of developing Yac.
[16:03] Jordan shares how they kept connecting through Twitter.
[17:45] How did Jordan and Justin make Twitter work for them?
[21:28] Be genuine, be nice, and keep doing it.
[22:26] Jordan talks about Emilio, a key member of Yac.
[25:59] Real is what converts.
[26:35] What does community mean for Jordan and Justin?
[30:52] When you have a hidden agenda, everybody knows.
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Jordan Walker, Co-Founder
Justin Mitchell, Co-Founder and CEO
Yac
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The Great Resignation is scary for many companies. But Sara sees it as an opportunity, not a threat. Hear her advice for how to lead your team in 2022 and beyond.
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Sara Varni, CMO at Attentive
Attentive
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What does marketing look like in a PLG model? Marketers know that PLG changes things, but does it change everything? Sara makes the case for finding the right balance between novel strategies and long-standing best practices for PLG marketers.
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Sara Varni, CMO at Attentive
Attentive
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Stack Overflow's mission is to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. Prashanth describes how his personal story connects to this big mission, and how his team works to make this vision a reality.
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Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO at Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow
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Founders often have strong opinions and extreme perspectives. In the early days, this is good because it leads innovators to start companies. But as a team scales, leaders need to adopt an open mindset. Prashanth describes how this approach has led Stack Overflow to huge success by embracing counterintuitive strategies.
Key Takeaways:
[3:18] What does Prashanth mean exactly by non-dualistic leadership?
[5:02] Prashanth shares examples of non-dualistic leadership.
[7:40] Prashanth shares his thoughts about the statement “strong opinions loosely held.”
[10:22] Prashanth shares examples of some best practices and commonly accepted ideas that he had thought about differently.
[16:41] How does Prashanth think about the risk and mitigating the risk of a consensus-seeking approach?
[19:10] What are some sort of starting points for those trying to put this approach into practice?
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Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO at Stack Overflow
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Mindfulness and meditation are two hot topics today. G2 makes this an intentional focus for its entire team, not just a personal practice. And it’s working.
Godard credits much of G2’s success to the practice of Conscious Leadership across the management team. It’s a framework that helps leaders build trust and create conscious cultures. Learn how Godard discovered it during a time of leadership difficulty, and how he implements it today.
Hubert shares what it means to have product objectives support company goals, why that’s so important, and how to watch out for the challenges that come with it.
The key to customer centricity is empathy. But where does empathy come from? Actual knowledge of your customer, their pain and their goals. Everyone on your team shares responsibility in developing this knowledge. But most companies delegate this to user research, annual surveys or maybe the founder’s gut. It’s not enough.
Gen Z thinks about work differently. How exactly do they evaluate new companies and roles? And how should your company adapt?
Are you struggling to recruit today? Postscript has skillfully navigated the myriad talent market challenges by leading with culture. The key focal points for the company’s culture are transparency and authenticity. Nailing these attributes can create a virtuous cycle of employee engagement and referrals for your company too.
Nikita has built exceptional product teams. Hear how her personal hiring framework draws a key distinction between the role and the person.
Founders typically own product in the early days. It’s only fitting, as the product is the manifestation of your entrepreneurial vision. But soon enough you need to hire a product team. Nikita says that happens sooner than you think. Listen in for her ultimate guide on how to build your company’s first product team.
What is the role of sales in a product launch? Hear how Kyle helped make Figma’s launch of FigJam a smashing success.
Kyle built Figma’s sales team from scratch. When he joined, company culture was established and PLG was already driving hypergrowth. Learn how Kyle integrated sales into Figma’s culture, and got the whole company cheering for the next gong.
Growth teams aren’t one size fits all. Hila talks about the importance of setting up a growth team that fits your growth model.
Hila is a uniquely talented growth leader. Specifically, she has led growth functions in both B2C and B2B contexts. There are many similarities, but also many differences. And one thing is clear today: B2B is taking its cues from B2C best practices as the PLG movement takes over the SaaS world.
It’s tempting as a founder to skip steps. Either because you’re eager to ship, or because you unknowingly lack visibility on key aspects of your business. Ed tells us why wiring up analytics from Day 1 is critical.
Ed is a really great VC. He backs founders from “Day 1” long before there’s a product. Even better, Ed happens to love PLG just as much as I do. We discuss the differences in backing PLG startups at different stages.
Developer-focused roles are popping up everywhere. But what do all these roles do, exactly? Paige walks us through the biggest differences between developer relations and developer marketing, and how to build your team.
Paige built and scaled platform and developer marketing at Slack. The success of the Slack App Store and the like showed her what works (and what doesn’t) with developer programs. She shares her playbook for attracting and engaging developers to build great stuff for your app store or marketplace.
CMOs own all the marketing, right? Wrong. CEOs need to be all-in on marketing too. But how? Hear about Ben’s working relationship with Privy's former CMO, Dave Gerhardt, on this episode of BUILD with Blake Bartlett.
Ben knows app stores. Privy is one of the most popular apps on the Shopify app store with nearly 25,000 reviews. Most companies focus on building the app itself, but distribution is just as important. Ben walks Blake through how to get traffic to your listing, and how to convert that traffic into a happy customer base.
This time around, we’re broadening our horizons to talk about a lot of new stuff. From cracking App Store distribution with Privy, understanding sales culture at Figma, and unpacking the leadership framework that helped G2 become a billion dollar company. Blake even chats with fellow VC Ed Sim at Boldstart to understand what he looks for in seed stage PLG founders. We’re covering a lot of new ground in the season of BUILD, and we can’t wait to share it with you. So let’s dive in together and see what we can BUILD.
Jürgen says designers need to stop trying so hard to be innovative and different. Creativity is obviously important, but you shouldn’t always reinvent the wheel. The key is to apply clear patterns and get things done. Plus, learn about the famous markets found in his hometown in Austria!
Atlassian is a company driven by its principles and values. Jürgen Spangl (CXO) has been a leader at Atlassian since 2012, and he says these values impact everything at the company. This even includes how they approach meetings. Hear how structured sparring sessions and dedicated journey mapping exercises lead to better collaboration and better outcomes.
Astha shares what traits make for a great product marketing hire (hint: it’s all about the customer) and tips on how to land your first board director role. Plus, find out what she loves most about her hometown of Delhi, India.
It often seems that product marketing is the least understood aspect of marketing. Many people are even confused by the definition of product marketing - what is it, exactly? In this episode, Astha Malik takes these challenges head on and gives us a masterclass on the role and impact of product marketing at all stages of company development. And if you’re hiring for PMM roles, you won’t want to miss her recruiting advice.
Zeplin is an emerging powerhouse in the design ecosystem. There’s just one catch: you can’t design anything in Zeplin. Founder/CEO Pelin Kenez had the unique insight that designing beautiful components, screens, and interactions is only the first step of a long journey. The success of a product is heavily dependent on the delivery of the design, which is much harder than it seems.
When Lauren started at Mailchimp, nobody was working on conversion. Hear about her experiment that led to a whopping 33% conversion increase. Plus, learn about the 230 year old national celebrity still living in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Lauren was tasked with building out Mailchimp’s first growth team. Growth is inherently cross-functional, so you need to get things done through other teams. And other teams don’t always share your priorities. Lauren soon realized that growth is a game of influence, but she had a secret weapon: her background as a marketer.
On the final miniseries episode of BUILDing To Boss, PagerDuty CMO Julie Herendeen reveals how she thinks about the role of marketing at a tech company. Find out how the company has changed since she joined PagerDuty and they became a public company, advice she gives to other marketers, and whether she’d recommend getting an MBA. Plus, hear what she thinks the next 5 years will look like for product-led growth companies.
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser was hired to scale the sales team at Stripe, which meant that she had to become smarter about customer segmentation. Throughout her career, Jeanne’s relied on strong partnership with the data science organization. In this episode of BUILDing To Boss, we unpack how Stripe leveraged product-led growth to scale a sales org with a repeatable process. Plus, hear what Jeanne has to say about revolutionizing the idea of personalization in sales outreach. Hint: it’s more than just personalization tokens in mass emails.
Rashida Hodge works at the intersection of AI and customer success. During her 18 years at IBM, she led teams in strategic partnerships, product management, go-to-market, and business operations. She now heads up the customer success Azure data and AI team at Microsoft. In this episode, Rashida’s giving advice to AI’s future leaders, talking about representation in tech, and sharing her predictions for the future of AI.
Take it from Andrea: go-to-market strategies are not one size fits all. But, no matter where you are in your go-to-market strategy, learning how to prioritize your time is always one of the biggest challenges. Find out how she decides which ones Cyral should focus on and which to leave behind. Plus, learn the nuances of selling to a security audience and how to position your product and messaging to really build trust.
Tech companies love a good framework, and there seems to be frameworks abound for every aspect of company building except diversity, equity, and inclusion. Enter Just Work, a book from Radical Candor’s Kim Scott. Kim is launching a company with the same name led by Trier Bryant. It’s all about recognizing, attacking, and eliminating workplace injustices. In this episode, she draws on her experiences leading DEI efforts in The United States Air Force, Goldman Sachs, Twitter, and beyond to share tangible steps the tech ecosystem can take to improve DEI.
Anne DelSanto has seen it all. She’s currently an independent board member for five public and private companies in the tech space: Axonius, Traction on Demand, Juniper Networks, New Relic, Inc., and Advanced Energy. Before, she led cross-functional teams at IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce. She knows what it takes to build deeper employee engagement and how vital it is for a company’s success. Today she’s sharing these tips as well as the key areas product-led growth founders need to focus if they want to succeed.
Puppet CEO, Yvonne Wassenaar, credits three fundamental attributes for becoming a CEO: curiosity, connection, and agility. Whether it’s her path from CIO to CEO, how Puppet has evolved its go-to-market strategy, or why it’s so important to have professional role models, Yvonne has a story for it and is sharing it today. And, don’t miss the advice she gives founders looking to use open source as part of their business.
Merline Saintil has led teams at Intuit, Yahoo, PayPal, Adobe, Joyent, and Sun Microsystems. Now, she serves on the board of directors at a combination of five public and private companies – Alkami Technology, ShotSpotter, Inc., Banner Bank, Lightspeed HQ, GitLab, and most recently she was appointed to Evolv Technology’s Board of Directors. . She’s constantly thinking about how companies can address and be prepared for cybersecurity threats. Today, Merline shares these insights, her advice for first time managers, and what it means to send the figurative elevator back down.
Krista Anderson-Copperman has led two customer support teams through successful IPOs, first at Salesforce and then at Okta. At both companies, she was instrumental in building the SaaS playbook for customer success. Tune in and find out what Krista has to say about that and her time as Board Director at Drift and Advisor at Gainsight.
Lisa Campbell is Autodesk’s CMO, so she knows that marketing is always evolving. Hear what it takes to reimagine a design company, the role cross-functional teams play in getting things done, and how she balances the difficult tradeoffs between current needs and future impacts when setting marketing strategy.
Join OpenView’s Khira Gabliani, Kaitlyn Henry, and Casey Renner for honest conversations with the female leaders at PagerDuty, Microsoft, Puppet, and more. They’ve led teams through IPOs and built product led growth companies that change the way we work. Now, they’re sharing their wisdom with you. If you’re ready, let’s start BUILDing To Boss.
Over the course of her 30+ year career, Edna has developed a premise: security is an inherently human challenge. Humans create and must safeguard the security integrity of technology. Hear how she balances this with the opportunities of living in a hyper-connected world.
David’s favorite book of 2020 was about Minecraft, and he read it for a special reason. He also reveals his two favorite books of all time. And don’t miss how being from The Bronx can help you at the airport.
David Cancel read 50 books in 2020, and he reveals his absolute favorites on this episode of BUILD. Tune in to hear which popular book influenced Drift’s approach to company culture, and which author is helping David plan for life after COVID-19. David Cancel is best known for being a serial founder and product visionary from his track record with Drift, HubSpot, and beyond.
Yamini points to navigating uncertainty and building resilience as the most important job of a leader. It’s always true, but especially so today. And don’t miss her experience of growing up in the cotton mill hub of Southern India.
2020 was a year of change and redefinition across the board for software companies. Yamini Rangan is HubSpot’s Chief Customer Officer, and she believes that when customers are struggling to adapt to change, the concept of “growth” itself needs to be redefined if your goal is to truly put customers first. Hear her advice for how to practice customer empathy by embracing the “customer-in, NOT function-out” approach to org design and GTM strategy.
AJ reveals how to win Product Hunt and why he loves Naval Ravikant. Also, don’t miss pro tips about his hometown of Nashville.
AJ never meant to start a company. He was building websites as a freelancer, but was frustrated with the popular website platforms. They were far too complex, so AJ built Carrd as the easiest way to make one-page websites. It launched on Product Hunt and took off faster than AJ had ever expected. Now with 800k users, it’s much more than a side project. And AJ has become much more than a freelancer. He’s a founder, even if it happened by accident. Tune in to hear AJ’s advice on what to do when your side project takes off with users and takes on a life of its own.
Leandra learned one big thing leading sales at Twilio and SendGrid: let developers build. You can’t be overly prescriptive when you are selling building blocks. And don’t miss the good things that come to you when hitchhiking in Australia.
Sales models are not one size fits all. There are key differences between traditional enterprise sales, high-volume inside sales, and product-led sales. In her 30 years of experience, Leandra Fishman has led teams in all of these environments. In this episode of BUILD, we unpack these different models and how to apply best practices of the past to a modern product-led sales model.
The secret to product-led sales is realizing the customer and the vendor have the same shared goal: more usage and more success with the product. And don’t miss a description of the many wonders found in Chardon, OH and North Andover, MA.
2020 was a big year for SaaS. From IPOs to record-breaking quarters to huge M&A deals, there was no shortage of activity. But how did the average SaaS company fare in 2020? Was the breakneck growth experienced by Zoom, Shopify, and Snowflake common to the rest of the industry? Or did COVID have a bigger impact on software than the standard press headline would suggest?
OpenView surveyed 1,200 software companies for our annual SaaS Benchmarks study. This year’s survey revealed the impact of COVID-19 on software companies, and some of the results may surprise you. In this episode of BUILD, we hear from the masterminds behind the report, OpenView’s own Kyle Poyar and Sean Fanning.
Francesca says that data is good for more than analysis and modeling. It can lead to more customer empathy. And don’t miss what makes Queens the best borough in NYC.
Francesca Krihely knows developers. Many VCs and startup pundits suggest that the key to success is simply winning the “hearts and minds” of developers in the community. One problem: developers are notoriously allergic to traditional marketing. So, what’s the secret? Francesca wrote the developer experience playbook at companies like MongoDB and Snyk, and now she is sharing her best practices with the BUILD community.
Todd’s view of product-led sales is all about human effort complimenting product effort. And don’t miss his pitch on the #1 reason to visit Delaware.
Todd Olson is the CEO of Pendo, the leading software platform for product teams. Todd recently wrote a book called, “The Product-Led Organization,” and we unpack its key themes in this episode. Learn about the importance of cross-functional teams, but also how to work through key challenges that arise when more folks are involved in decisions. Plus, you’ll hear about the power of “addition through subtraction” when it comes to product management. All that (and more) on this episode of BUILD.
Join Blake this season on BUILD for a behind the scenes look at the brilliant minds scaling Slack, Notion, Atlassian and more to discover what it takes to build awesome product and achieve hyper growth across every stage of maturity - from seed to IPO and beyond. If you’re ready, let’s build this together.
In this episode we hear from Stella Garber (Head of Marketing, Trello at Atlassian). Stella is known for building out Trello's marketing team and strategy as their first marketing executive, and for leading the team through a $425 million dollar acquisition by Atlassian.
Stella and Blake unpack the role of B2C marketing strategies in today's B2B environment, how to make agile marketing decisions in a product-led world and Trello’s biggest lessons learned on freemium pricing.
All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
In this episode we hear from Chris Miller, the Director of Product Growth at Hubspot. Chris has been a key growth leader at Hubspot for over 4 years and he’s been instrumental in driving the company’s adoption of product led growth.
In today’s episode Blake and Chris unpack the differences between growth marketing and growth product, how to use the 3 D’s to solve growth problems (discoverability, desirability, doability), and how Hubspot uses advanced segmentation to serve a large and heterogeneous pool of prospects. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
In this episode we hear from Brian Rothenberg, a Partner at the early stage venture capital firm, Defy. Brian was at Eventbrite for over 6 years from startup through IPO generating $300M revenue and nearly $3B market cap while serving as VP of Growth and running a $100M+ revenue line as GM. Blake and Brian discussed how Eventbrite’s growth model created a viral loop that led to massive success, how to go about building a distribution advantage and the biggest pitfalls of people who haven’t done this and how founders can go from siloed to a cross functional approach. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
In this episode we hear from Christine Itwaru, the Director of Product Ops at Pendo. Today she unpacks the role of Product Ops and how it came into popularity, when, why and how to incorporate a Product Ops role into your team, and Christine’s prediction of where the Product Ops movement and community will be 5 years from now. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
In this episode we hear from Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at Hubspot. Kipp shares how a self-service journey fundamentally changes B2B marketing, his view that anyone (including C-level executives) can introduce a new self-service tool to a team, and Hubspot's secret to collaboration between marketing and growth. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
Jay Simons, Atlassian’s President for the last 12 years, joined the company in 2008 when the company was already a product-led success making an estimated $150 million in revenue that year. Now in 2020, Atlassian’s revenue guidance is more than 10X that number at nearly $1.6 billion dollars. Jay has helped lead and grow their product led growth efforts and has created a truly epic revenue engine.
In today’s episode we unpack Atlassian’s secret to creating compounding customer value, how Atlassian uses pricing as a competitive advantage, and the role of human champions in a self-serve customer journey. That and more on this episode of the BUILD podcast.
In this episode Airtable’s Co-Founder and CEO Howie Liu unpacks the hype and substance of the low-code/no-code movement, the challenges of building a mass market platform with a hugely diverse customer base and how to nail a self-serve strategy in the enterprise. All of that and more in this episode of the OV BUILD podcast.
In this episode we hear from Wes Bush, founder of the Product Led Institute, author of “Product Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself” and fellow PLG enthusiast. Blake and Wes discuss the importance of customer empathy, how to get started with product led growth and why building great products is a lot like bowling. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
In today’s episode hear from Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB. As Chief Product Officer, Sahir is responsible for product management, growth marketing/operations, and go-to-market strategy across the MongoDB portfolio. During his time there he’s grown the cloud business from zero to over $150 million annually. In this episode Sahir shares how you go from individual adoption to org-wide adoption, MongoDB’s philosophy for monetizing open source software, and how they scaled their open source product using both bottoms up and top down sales motions. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
Datadog is known for being the essential monitoring platform for cloud applications. Alex Rosemblat (VP of Marketing) explains how Datadog generates over half a billion in revenue annually by going both bottoms up with individual developers, as well as top down with technology executives simultaneously in their go-to-market strategy. Blake and Alex also unpack how to decide which leads get human attention, what team owns success metrics in a PLG model, and the best way to cross promote your product. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
We all know and love HubSpot. In this episode we hear from Kieran Flanagan who is the VP of Marketing AND Growth at Hubspot. Blake and Kieran discuss the importance of Ops roles in a product-led model, the shift occurring today in B2B marketing, and how cross-functional teams are the org design secret to success in product led growth. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.
If you listened to the first intro episode you know why we’re here, to figure out the new customer journey and what that means for PLG and SaaS. Today we hear from Dave Grow, President and COO at Lucidchart. Lucidchart is now a household name in productivity software, enabling over 20 million users to think, work and communicate visually. Since he joined Dave has helped lead Lucid to more than $100M in ARR (annual recurring revenue) and >$1B valuation.
On this episode of BUILD we discuss the concept of growth, what role each department plays in the product-led engine, and the shifting buyer persona found in a self-serve model.
On the season 9 premiere of BUILD Blake Bartlett unpacks what product led growth is and asks what growing product-led businesses looks like in the end user era. Follow along as Blake interviews industry leaders at companies like Hubspot, Lucidchart and Atlassian to discover the new customer journey and what that means for SaaS.
Co-Founders Robert Wahbe and Oliver Sharp from Highspot share their insights on how to build during a downturn on the final episode of Building to Last.
Jai Shekhawat former CEO and Founder of Fieldglass shares his insights on how to build during a downturn in our new short podcast series, Building to Last.
Graham Smith former CFO at Salesforce shares his insights on how to build during a downturn in our brand new podcast series, Building to Last.
Seasoned operator Bill Conroy (Fmr CEO, Initiate Systems) shares his insights on how to build during a downturn in our brand new podcast series, Building to Last.
We wanted to round out another great season of BUILD with a recap of key learnings from all of our guests. We had an incredible roundup of executives from thought-leading companies join us to share their candid points of view on everything from GTM and product strategy, organizational design to optimizing productivity and more.
After Nir Eyal wrote the B2B product bible, "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" in 2013, he turned his attention toward how to break habits—bad ones.
Listen in to hear Nir explain why our distraction isn't just a tech problem, the myth of ego depletion, and whole lot more.
Chris O’Donnell, HubSpot's SVP of Product, has been with the company for years and was at the forefront of their shift away from marketing and sales-led growth towards product led growth. Chris explains how they were able to do this effectively with a customer base that spans across multiple industries. He also discusses how PLG can be adopted in "old-school industries" and the key changes an organization needs to make in order to do so effectively.
Brian Balfour has seen, been responsible for, and taught exponential user growth since the early 2000s. Learn why he thinks growth shouldn’t be a function at a company, why product growth is like the game Battleship, and a whole lot more.
Thinking about your valuation? You should talk to Sean Fanning—our very own Director of Corporate Development. Learn why Sean believes everything is valued on cash flow (eventually), 6 metrics every company should key in on and more.
Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Zeit, is a big believer in 2 contradictory ideas. First: To create a successful business, you have to create a ton of customer value that’s both viral and distributed (open source is great for this). Second: But successful open source projects need to have a strong backing and foundation—not just code submitted ad-hoc. Learn how Guillermo rectifies those ideas into Zeit’s strategy for building a successful open source business—and community.
Camille Ricketts, Head of Marketing at Notion, is building a B2B brand that embodies honesty and humility. Learn why Camille is prioritizing cleverness over efficiency, her marketing strategy for the End User Era, and more.
Rahul Vohra, Founder and CEO of Superhuman, puts his stake in the ground that game design philosophy is integral for building B2B products.
Learn the differences between gamification and game design (the gap between them is huge), the scientifically-backed reason why Superhuman sometimes purposefully makes email harder, and more.
Brandon Chu, VP Product & GM of Platform at Shopify, built his own flavor of product management. Learn how he thinks about the strategic benefits of building a platform, what Shopify’s underlying product philosophy is, how they think about competing with applications built on their platform and more.
Leela Srinivasan, SurveyMonkey's CMO, is no stranger to experimenting with marketing tactics to get products into the hands of users. Learn how SurveyMonkey made the shift from consumer to enterprise (and the lessons learned along the way), how they use traditional marketing channels with a viral product, tips for developing a GTM function within a PLG company and more.
Fareed Mosavat, Director of Product at Slack, joins us for a second appearance on BUILD.
Learn how Slack’s product teams handle product prioritization at scale, what Fareed thinks about giving product teams a revenue quota, and what he means when he talks about ‘zone-era defense’.
While Season 7 has come to a close, we’re back with a special bonus episode! When businesses are building out their product-led strategy, when and how does marketing come into play? OV Partner, Devon McDonald, sat down with Helen Min, former Head of Marketing at Plaid, live at INBOUND to discuss this question and the importance of investing in marketing (particularly product marketing) early on in a business’ journey. Helen also touches upon marketing to developers (hint: invest in your community) and the best advice she’s received from mentors.
The final episode of Season 7 features Tope Awotona, Founder & CEO of Calendly. He shares how they balance feedback with such an expansive user base, why he felt like he had an unfair advantage in the scheduling space and why they provide support even for free users.
This episode features Vlad Magdalin, Co-founder & CEO of Webflow, a business that took four tries to get off the ground. Find out how they think about creating a product that's applicable to as many people as possible and why adding incremental value is more important than shipping a perfect product.
Abhinav Asthana is the Co-founder & CEO of Postman, a collaborative environment for API development that has scaled to more than 7 million users. Abhinav shares how they balance empathy and data, and how a product led growth approach leads to fundamentally better products.
Liat Bycel is the VP of Customer Engagement at Airtable. She shares how they made the decision to bring all customer-facing teams under one roof and how that decision has furthered their growth and made the customer experience more cohesive.
This episode of BUILD features Alex Marinos, Founder & CEO of one of the newest members of the OV portfolio, balena. Find out how they pivoted to a product led growth strategy and the solution they built to minimize pain for employees as a distributed team.
Pendo was founded on three main principles: delivering an incredible product, putting customers first and creating a culture that attracts the best people possible. Todd Olson, Founder & CEO, shares exactly how they've executed on each principle and how the product empowers customers to deliver amazing experiences to their users.
Eugenio Pace is the Co-founder & CEO of Auth0. Fundamentally, their product answers two questions: Are you who you say you are, and what can you do? Find out how they've managed to answer these questions in a way that gives users the flexibility to tailor the solution to their specific needs with the simplicity to scale.
On this episode, Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder & CEO of GitLab, shares their top three values and how they came to be. Find out why they're so public about how the company operates and Sid's perspective on why values shouldn't be universally positive. You'll also get a sense of what they do to ship more features every month than some competitors do in a full year.
This episode features Ashik Ahmed, CEO, CTO and Co-founder of OV portfolio company, Deputy. Find out how product led growth fueled their expansion into more than 100 countries and how flying inspired him to believe in this model. You'll also find out how their growth team operates and the best business advice he's ever received.
Alex MacCaw is the Co-founder, CEO and office DJ for Clearbit. Find out how he learned to love management, the most difficult period he went through as a CEO and their biggest competitive advantage as a company (spoiler: it has to do with their people).
JumpCloud is an OpenView portfolio company that's focused on building the next generation of directory services. Rajat Bhargava, Co-founder and CEO, shares what they value most as a company and the two things he looks for when building a new business.
Our 2019 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks are live! This year we surveyed over 500 companies, ranging from pre-revenue to $150M+ ARR with nearly half of respondents coming from outside the U.S. On this episode, OV’s Kyle Poyar and Sean Fanning along with NetSuite’s Tom Kelly, share the findings and some advice for founders. Follow along at www.saasbenchmarks.com.
Season 7 of BUILD focuses on the design principles and practices behind market leading product led growth companies. We're kicking it off with the CEO and Co-Founder of Zapier, Wade Foster. Find out why Wade puts such a strong emphasis on the customer and how Zapier has managed to scale quickly with capital efficiency.
For the final episode of Season 6, Kyle caught up with Simon-Kucher Partner, Josh Bloom. He explains the inspiration behind the firm's book, 'Monetizing Innovation,' the concept of developing a product around the price and the most important question founders should be asking customers. He also breaks down the trends he expects to see in the next year.
We're bringing OV Partner Liz Cain back to the podcast for the third time. On this episode, she and Kyle dive into their experiences with pricing and product led growth. Learn about some of the most common pricing mistakes they see and why they were both hesitant about PLG initially, but came around in a big way.
Lindsay Bayuk (VP of Product Marketing) and Porntepp Ungvichian (VP, Head of Strategy & Business Operations) are the B2B SaaS leaders behind Pluralsight's pricing overhaul. They went public last year, serve 70% of Fortune 500 companies and have customers in over 150 countries. Get ready for some serious note-taking on how they built a process around pricing changes and the importance of having the right infrastructure to make it all happen.
John Kelly is the Head of Global Revenue at Hired and has been in the enterprise software space for over 25 years. On this episode, John gets into how and why Hired changed their pricing model from pay as you go to subscription. Learn how they knew the switch would work, the trickiest customers to convince and how the change impacted their growth.
After a decade, it was finally time to make a change to SurveyMonkey’s pricing. In this episode, learn from Pri Carr (SVP, Strategic Development) and Jordan Nolff (Senior Manager, Business Strategy & Monetization) about how they were able to pull off a massive revamp of the pricing and packaging of a beloved PLG brand without seeing a meaningful impact on acquisition or churn.
Mike is currently the Head of Marketing at Reflektive, but was at Lever and Glassdoor during periods of hypergrowth, where the name of the game was to double in size every year. Mike explains why you should lean on your sales reps throughout a pricing change, how to think about pricing as a competitive advantage and how his background in product marketing has benefited his role in pricing projects.
This episode features BUILD superfan, Abde Tambawala, Head of Business Strategy, Operations and Monetization at Atlassian. His team focuses on making better business decisions, faster. He breaks down why even successful companies can benefit from a pricing change, how to create a framework to make data-driven pricing decisions and how their product led growth approach affects their overall strategy. You'll also hear his perspective on when you should embrace change in the pricing landscape (yes, some things are iterative, but others should stay the same).
This episode features two pricing professionals from PLG companies for double the insider secrets! Madeline Stein is the Principal Pricing Manager at SendGrid and Ismail Madni is Director, Product Pricing Strategy at InVision. They discussed the ideal time to build a pricing team, the cross-functionality of their roles and where pricing should sit within the org. You'll also get their takes on which KPIs matter most for determining when it might be time to make a pricing change.
Andy Wilson is the Founder & CEO of Logikcull, a legal tech startup that’s revolutionizing how lawyers handle document discovery. In this episode, Andy explains why they pivoted from an annual subscription model to pay as you go and the implications this had on the business as a whole (spoiler: it changed everything). He also dives into how their mission drives decision-making and what they've done to help their customers have an amazing experience.
Amanda Kleha has been involved with pricing at PLG companies like Zendesk and Figma. On this episode, she explains when freemium makes sense in SaaS, the right time to add sales or customer success to a self-service business and the implications of PLG on culture. You'll also learn why she thinks you should know your leaders, fillers and killers.
Mike Volpe is no stranger to competitive markets. He was part of HubSpot's founding team, then moved into the world of cybersecurity with Cybereason and is now CEO of Lola.com, a travel management tool. In this episode, he explains the relationship between pricing and brand, his perception of freemium and the importance of looking closely at your happiest customers for growth opportunities.
We're kicking off Season 6 by bringing OV Partner, Blake Bartlett, back to discuss the magic of product led growth. Blake breaks down the placement of the paywall, when a freemium model makes sense and the importance of getting specific about your target customer. Find out why PLG means you can have your cake and eat it too.
Hiten Shah is the mastermind behind Crazy Egg, Product Habits & FYI. He and his team pioneered heat maps and the left to right funnel, but what actually got him obsessed with product and product led growth? On this episode, Hiten dives into freemium, his love for solving problems in unique ways and why founders should get involved with sales. He also describes how to get the entire team to think about growth and the role of sales and marketing in PLG businesses. You'll hear how he got to #1 on ProductHunt and his tips for getting there - be sure to check out his collection, 'Free Stuff For Startups.'
Jeff Weiser hasn't exactly followed a traditional path to get to CMO, but his background in strategy and analytics has made him incredibly successful. In this episode, Jeff explains his perspective on the power of analytics (while also laying out the limitations they present). Learn about the role product led growth has played in the evolution of Shopify's target customer, advice about amplifying the power of word-of-mouth and the role of marketing in a product-led world. At the end of the day, marketers have to be willing to embrace the messiness around their craft and the analytics that come with it and know that there will never be a perfectly attributable answer.
Kelly Watkins has consistently been at the heart of marketing within PLG companies - first at GitHub as the Director of Product & Brand Marketing and most recently as the VP of Global Marketing at Slack. She's seen first-hand the role marketing plays in growth and knows the ins and outs of each type of marketing. In this episode, Kelly sheds light how young companies should think about product marketing and when to make their first hire, how impactful brand was for her team and the role content played in Slack's strategy. You'll also find out the two things she cares about as a marketer and what's next for her career.
This may sound strange, but more often than not, Appcues' biggest competition is actually nothing. Most companies don't have an intentional onboarding experience; users are just dropped into a dashboard full of zeros. Their Co-founder & CEO, Jonathan Kim, explains how to master the art of a meaningful onboarding experience through personalization and humanization. Listen to learn about their definition of product led growth, where they've seen sales add the most value and what he sees for the future of UX. You'll also find out how to maximize impact if you're designing onboarding for the first time.
Customer success has come to mean a lot more than just churn prevention. As Head of CS at Dropbox, Lisa Ashcraft is constantly thinking about continuous improvement and what success looks like for her team. Learn about the importance of pattern matching to remove friction, the metric that matters most for her team and some of her proudest moments. At the end of the day, it's all about becoming a trusted advisor to users and educating them on using the product in new ways to get the most out of it.
Expensify kicked off 2019 with a Super Bowl-sized bang, but it's a well-known fact that for most of their history, they haven't engaged in outbound marketing or advertising. Oh yeah, and they don't have a sales team. So what's the secret to their success? PLG. Jason Mills, the Director of Product and Customers, describes how they focus on their customers and the product to have maximum impact. He also describes how they are proactive about virality, their motivation to remove confusion from the product and how automation is augmented with a human. You'll also find out what else to expect from the Expensify team in 2019.
PLG companies don't necessarily rely on a large sales and marketing team to grow. Wistia’s Co-founder & CEO, Chris Savage, explains their decision to create a self-service funnel and when their sales team gets involved in the buying process. Chris also explains how the sales team came to be and how they adopted Wistia’s values during the customer’s buying process. Also make sure you check out their One, Ten, One Hundred video series by going to wi.st/series.
You've seen the growing trend of Growth teams and Growth leaders, but what does that actually mean? Elena Verna, the SVP of Product & Growth at Malwarebytes and formerly the SVP of Growth at SurveyMonkey, wrote the book on growth. This episode is all about the importance of a solid analytics platform, the metrics freemium businesses should focus on, how to make your customers drive acquisition and how the Growth team fits in with the rest of the business. Learn from her biggest wins.
Scott Williamson, VP of Product at SendGrid (recently acquired by Twilio), is no stranger to utilizing a product to drive growth. He explains the nature of product led growth at SendGrid and how it calls for ruthless prioritization in the core product and a focus around making changes that positively impact the most people. He also discusses the importance of listening to your customers, prioritization of your roadmap, launching a new product within an existing company and much more.
Justin Gallagher, Head of Product Management at Trello, is no stranger to building a simple, yet extremely valuable, product for users. On this episode of BUILD, he explains how Trello came to be, the importance of demonstrating value in your product from the very beginning to drive virality, the concepts that are most important to get right in a self-serve model and much more.
Welcome to Season 5 of the BUILD podcast! Today's episode is all about virality. In this episode, we'll hear from Oji Udezue, VP of Product & Design at Calendly. Oji previously worked at Atlassian where he was the product owner for Atlassian's communication products like HipChat.
Oji discusses the story behind Calendly and how they built virality, network effects, and viral loops into their product. He also explains how to add virality to a product that isn't inherently viral, how to prioritize building out the core product vs. product enhancements, who should own the growth function in a product led growth business and more.
We're taking a break in between seasons to chat with Lessonly's CEO, Max Yoder. Max discusses the background behind his new book, Do Better Work, and how the principles laid out in the book are integrated throughout the Lessonly organization. Learn more and preorder your copy by going to www.dobetter.work.
Jim Baum is currently a Venture Partner at OpenView and serves on multiple boards including Logz.io, Applitools, project44 and DataStax. Jim previously served as President and CEO of Netezza where he drove the nearly $2B acquisition of Netezza by IBM in 2010. Jim also led Endeca’s early rise from tiny startup to the leading provider of innovative information access and delivery software solutions. Prior to Endeca and Netezza, he served at PTC as an Executive Vice President and General Manager.
On this episode, Jim discusses his experience as a venture partner and the difference between joining a board as an investor vs. an independent board member, why sitting on a board is a great opportunity for executives and advice for expansion stage CEOs looking for the right board members.
Bill Wagner started his tenure at LogMeIn in 2013 as their first-ever Chief Operating Officer. In 2015 he was promoted to President & CEO and joined the board shortly after where he's played a key role in their rapid growth. Prior to LogMeIn, he was COO at Vocus, a cloud-marketing software company, and held multiple executive and operator roles prior to that. Bill discusses the largest drivers of growth when he joined LogMeIn, the philosophy behind their freemium model and his role on the board when he first started his tenure. Bill also explains how to get the most leverage out of the board, the importance of a diverse board that brings different experiences to the table, and how to search for key external board members.
John True has had an impressive professional run, both as an operator and as a board member. He is currently a GP at Cultivation Capital and has previously held executive roles at Guidewire Software, Fortify Software and EqualLogic. John takes us through his remarkable career, including his experience joining his first board and what he's learned from his (currently) 7 board seats. He also discusses the importance of devoting time to building relationships so you're top of mind when opportunities come about and how to make the biggest impact once you get a seat at the table.
Bill Welch was most recently the President & COO of Duo Security, guiding them through a successful sales to Cisco. He's also held key leadership roles at Zscaler (which went public in early 2018), Hewlett-Packard and Symantec and most recently took an independent board seat at Logikcull. Bill explains the importance of hiring the right individuals for your company and making sure everyone has a role in the journey (employees, customers, partners, etc.). He also explains how he explored board opportunities and the power of board mentors in your company.
A Chief People Officer may not be the first choice to add to a board, but it is a choice that all early stage startups should make from the very beginning. Marty Reaume, Chief People Officer at Twilio, has held multiple HR and People positions at companies like NetSuite and Fitbit. She also holds board positions at Ambra Health and SPS Commerce. Marty explains the importance of hiring HR and People talent early on in a business and key initiatives that are currently top of mind as the CPO at Twilio. She also explains when she started to get serious about joining a board and advice for a CEO building out her board for the first time.
Elisa Steele is currently the CEO of Namely and holds board positions at Cornerstone OnDemand (Chair) and Splunk as well as advisor roles at People.ai and Tile. Her past CMO experiences at Yahoo, Skype and Microsoft naturally led her to explore board seats where she could add her expertise and perspective. Learn how leadership teams can and should use their board as a resource, how roles differ on a board, the importance of using your network to explore opportunities and how to establish your voice on the board.
Caroline Tsay wanted to be a neurosurgeon when she grew up. Plans changed! Caroline has held leadership positions at Yahoo and HPE and is currently the CEO of Compute Software. She also sits on the board of Coca-Cola, Rosetta Stone and Morningstar. So how did this all come to be? In 2013, her boss introduced her to an executive coach that pushed her to build her own brand and explore board opportunities. In this episode, Caroline gives key insights on leveraging your network to find board seats, how board positions can make you a better leader and advice for executives looking to join their first board.
Anita Sands has spent much of her career in the financial services industry including leadership roles at UBS, Citigroup and RBC. She currently resides on the boards of Symantec, ServiceNow and Pure Storage as well as advisory positions at Accompany, Thrive Global and DocuSign. Anita has helped many businesses reach new levels with her strategic insight. Learn how to not only get on your first board, but navigate the position as a new board member. Also listen as Anita explains the importance of selecting the right board members and using them as a strategic asset for your company.
Steve Collins and Bill Conroy both sit on Instructure's (NYSE: INST) board among many others including Shopify, MuleSoft, etc. Steve has had a successful career as CFO (ExactTarget) and Bill with a focus in sales earlier on and CEO (Initiate Systems, acquired by IBM) later in his operator career. With distinctive skill sets, they naturally had different paths to the board room, but their messages around finding the stage of growth that is best suited for you are quite similar. Listen as they give advice on when it's the right time to join a board and how to play on your strengths as an effective Director.
Jenny Cheng led product program management at Salesforce during their explosive growth period from 2002 to 2011. Today she is an executive at PayPal focused on the intersection between the customer and the product. Learn what she did when she decided to get serious about joining boards, why she chose to be on the board of a smaller startup vs. a large public company and how to balance a board seat with your day job.
It's imperative to determine that you will have a good working relationship and share the same values with a CEO, well before you take a board seat. Karen Appleton Page was employee number seven at Box and her role evolved with the booming business over her nine-year tenure. When she began seriously exploring board opportunities this year, she realized that having the right chemistry with the CEO, much like she had with Aaron Levie at Box, would be key in finding the right fit. In this episode, learn how Karen broke boundaries as the first GTM leader at Box and about her recent journey to Deputy's board.
Welcome to Season 4 of BUILD! This season is all about the journey to the boardroom. We will be interviewing top leaders to highlight the steps that many successful executives have taken to get a seat at the table. This week, we have Blair Christie, former CMO of Cisco and current Board Member of MINDBODY. Learn about her transition from operator to board member, how mentorship played a role in getting on a board, how to get yourself heard at the table and much more.
As we conclude Season 3, it is only appropriate to do so at SaaStock. We sat down with Morten Primdahl, Co-founder of Zendesk, and Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Segment, to discuss their perspectives on what it takes to not only start a product led growth business, but grow it to massive scale.
Slack is known for their unprecedented growth in the SaaS community. They now have over 8 million daily active users! So, how did they do it? Fareed Mosavat, Lifecycle Product Manager, takes you behind the scenes into how Slack leveraged freemium and a bottoms up approach to achieve this scale.
Typeform leaders knew it was important to invest in customer success during the early stages of the business. David Apple, VP of CS, breaks down the team structure that has helped scale the business to over 3M users. Learn where to draw the line when it comes to segmenting customers who warrant a dedicated CS resource vs. purely self-service experience and the leading indicators associated with the success of the team. For more content like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.
Balancing fast growth while building for scale is no easy task. Wayfair's story started with hundreds of individual microsites and eventually turned into one of North America’s largest online retailers. Wayfair's VP of Marketing, Bob Sherwin, has been with the business through its explosive growth and has assisted in developing a best in class efficient marketing engine. Learn what happened behind the scenes as the business scaled, including how they expanded into the B2B market.
Dropbox is a poster child for product led growth - they successfully became the fastest SaaS business to reach $1B. Darius Contractor, Growth Engineering Lead, explains how they went about building virality into their product, the importance of visibility into key metrics and what the future of product led growth looks like. For even more content, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.
Lynn Tsoflias has held leadership roles across Sales and Customer Success at startups like Insightly to large tech companies including Microsoft and LinkedIn. In this episode of BUILD, she discusses her guiding principles to developing effective user onboarding to drive adoption. Learn the best way to structure your team to tackle onboarding and retention as your business expands. For even more content, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.
User activation is an important part of any growth function, but many startups fail to focus on this area. Shaun Clowes, former Head of Growth and Model at Atlassian and current Chief Product Officer at MetroMile, was tasked with building the growth function from the ground up for Atlassian's Jira product. He discusses the primary activation metrics they used and how those metrics shifted as the business scaled. Learn how to define you own activation metrics and how to create an onboarding flow that will keep users coming back to your product in this episode of BUILD.
Our 2018 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks are live! This year we surveyed over 400 companies, ranging from pre-revenue to $50M+ ARR with 40% of respondents coming from outside the US. Our massive data set gives you insights into trends around how fast startups are growing, the emergence of SaaS companies all around the world and the progress on hiring diverse candidates.
Follow along at www.saasbenchmarks.com.
Steli Efti, serial entrepreneur and current CEO of Close, is no stranger to success. But in 2017, when his company focused all departments on understanding their customers better, they quickly realized they'd approach the problem from the wrong angle. Doing so derailed their product roadmap, led to lots of unhappy customers and increased churn. When they shifted focus, Close got their business back on track. Learn from Close on when saying no to your customers might just be the right move. For more content like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.
SingleGrain's CEO, Eric Siu, is no stranger to the term "growth hacking." His performance marketing agency has helped scale high growth companies like UBER and Amazon. In this episode of BUILD find out how a product first mentality impacts growth marketing and how to increase brand awareness while staying cost efficient.
For even more content, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter.
Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot's VP of Marketing, is no stranger to driving growth through product. In this episode of BUILD, hear how and why the business transitioned from filling a funnel with marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to product qualified leads (PQLs) and how that change positively impacted the billion dollar company.
What the heck is product led growth? We sit down with OpenView Founder & Managing Partner Scott Maxwell to find out. In this first episode of BUILD Season 3, we define product led growth and find out what makes a PLG company unique. Scott also discusses the metrics investors look for in product led growth companies and the future of this go-to-market approach.
As Season 2 comes to a close, it's only natural to examine the exit landscape. OpenView's VP of Corporate Development, John McCullough, discusses the current exit landscape and the importance of creating relationships with strategic buyers well before a deal is done. Then Darren Abrahamson, Managing Director at Bain Capital, talks through the merits of private equity as an exit option and how a CEO can choose between several buyout offers.
SaaS pricing, every business thinks about it, but the majority rarely act. In this episode of BUILD, hear from Patrick Campbell, Co-founder & CEO of ProfitWell, on the importance of pricing, the impact of freemium, and the metric you should use to drive value for your customers. Plus, Deputy COO, Craig Harris, weighs in on his business’ go-to-market model and how it impacted the company's big pricing initiative.
Fundraising is an essential part of running a startup these days. OpenView's Ricky Pelletier breaks down the fundraising process and what to be aware of when negotiating with a VC. Then we hear from Zak Hemraj, Loopio Co-founder & CEO, about how his company went from bootstrapped to funded outside the Valley and the lessons learned along the way.
OpenView's Blake Bartlett discusses how a company's go-to-market model can impact CAC Payback and if there is indeed a magic number to hit for this metric. Then we hear from Marc Morin, Founder & CEO of Auvik, about the importance of experimentation in efficiently acquiring new customers to drive down CAC.
Building diverse and inclusive teams is a goal we should all strive towards. But how do you actually create an environment that fosters diversity? Ginny Fahs, co-founder of #MovingForward, explains how VCs can create a plan to foster diverse, inclusive and harassment-free workplaces. Applied's co-founder & CEO Kate Glazebrook also joins us to discuss actions startups can take to remove hidden biases in the hiring process.
How much or how little should a company burn? Adam Marcus, Managing Partner at OpenView, discusses the role of burn in a startup and how to determine the right time to raise a next round. Then we'll hear from Nick Romito, Founder & CEO of VTS, on the tactics he used to find efficiencies after merging with their closest competitor.
While most startups are laser focused on customer acquisition in the beginning, customer retention should always be top of mind. Mackey Craven, Partner at OpenView, explains what “good” retention looks like and how to measure it. Later on we hear from Lessonly's CEO & COO about how they built (and retained) a loyal user base.
Sales and marketing spend is and should be top of mind for sales leaders. On the BUILD podcast, Liz Cain, Partner at OpenView, discusses how and why companies waste resources. Later on we chat with Dave Grow, President & COO at Lucidchart, to learn from his experience scaling the company to 10M users with few wasted resources.
All startups strive for growth. But how do you determine how fast to grow, how to build the right foundation for growth and how to jumpstart growth when it slows? Dan Demmer, Managing Partner at OpenView, and Christoph Janz, Managing Partner at Point Nine Capital, discuss what it takes to successfully grow your startup.
Jon Russo, Account-based marketing expert, discusses how companies can align strategic marketing initiatives with sales and account management strategies to maximize ROI. Be sure to stay tuned until the end to hear what we having coming for Season 2!
In 2017, AppDynamics was preparing for an IPO. Less than a month later, Cisco announced they were acquiring the company for $3.7 billion – a day before that IPO was supposed to take place. Hear from Joe Sexton, AppDynamics' former President of World Wide Field Operations, on how the roller coaster ride played out.
Entering a company as a new CEO can be intimidating. It’s important to set the tone while also respecting the existing culture. Alex Shootman shares his personal experience on stepping into the role as Workfront's CEO.
Astha Malik, VP of Platform & Product Marketing at Zendesk, joins us to talk about Answer Bot, Talk Enterprise and Chat Enterprise, new applications of AI and machine learning that focus on making customer service more human. Tune in to learn more about Zendesk's customer-centric approach to launching a product to nearly 120,000 customers.
Nailing pricing is crucial to the success of your business. But it's often overlooked by early-stage startups. HubSpot's Chief Strategy Officer, Brad Coffey, discusses how a deeper look at unit economics led to a reinvention of Hubspot's pricing plans. Today the company's market cap is nearly 5 billion dollars.
We expect real-time answers in our personal lives, but when it comes to businesses, getting in touch is often a lengthy and complicated process. Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift, discusses why the company did away with all lead forms to provide better, faster and more personal interactions with prospects and customers.
Andy Raskin has worked with the likes of Uber, Square, Yelp and Salesforce to help these companies tell their stories. In this episode, learn what it takes to create a strategic narrative that converts.
When the market for Imprivata's founding idea was too small, the company changed course and pivoted successfully to grow into a multi-million dollar business. Omar Hussain, former President & CEO walks you through their journey.
Jeff Diana, former Chief People Officer at Atlassian, a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, explains how the startup went from one office in Australia to a network of hubs around the world.
Liz Cain, Partner at OpenView, and former AVP of Worldwide Business Development at NetSuite, built the company's BDR team to 170 people. Learn more about how she grew a global sales development engine from scratch to fuel a billion dollar sales pipeline.