YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Gross

lines on the record: 48
first: 2024-04-26
most recent: 2024-04-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Harry, I'm delighted we made a habit. Thank you to you to your listeners. I hope you find it valuable. And I'll look forward to continuing the conversation and getting that beer in London with you.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to be as excited and enthusiastic and energized about the world of technology as I have been for the past ten years and the previous ten years before that.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to be shy on specializing growth teams early because growth is an optimization. An early stages you typically have much bigger fish to fry than thinking about local maxima.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get people to think and operate more holistically that growth is not a function, it's something that really has to pervade to work, it has to pervade all aspects of the organization.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to side with not to disrespect my current host. I'm going to be an optimist because, hey, we can't be in this business if we're not going to be optimistic. So I'm going to go with Jason.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking at growth across the industry, I sure hope it comes back, but it's taking longer than it has. And if you look at where growth rates are, even for SaaS leaders, this year compared to last year, it's a more challenging time than it was last decade.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was the first check in the first round with Docker. I mean, I remember meeting with Solomon and those guys at Founders Den on third when there were just like three people in a room. Yes, we did get recapped and I was not happy about that at all. Look, I mean, I can be not happy about it. I'm just delighted that Solomon team had such an amazing impact with their vision and that I could even have some infinitesimal part in it.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if I worked a little bit harder, I could have used some relationships to maybe get into the striped seed. I definitely had visibility into it. Yeah, I know. Remember, I had done, I was the platform guy at Salesforce. And so even in 2007, you know, I was doing developer stuff since 2003. So I remember meeting with GitHub when they were three people. I was a seed investor in Heroku from the beginning. So I saw all that early developer stuff. So Twilio Stripe, all that kind of stuff. I was the first check into Docker. That's a whole other story.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if we're going to talk about deals that got away, you know, it's morning here, but I'm going to need to trade my water for a drink. I saw the Twilio seed. I didn't think big enough. And this has been a problem with my kind of personal cognitive model for a while. I didn't think big enough. I didn't understand how much value was there. And I overendexed on how commoditized it would be. But also, it was six people in a room, you know. It wasn't exactly the same vision as we see today.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once a quarter, do a blog post, do a web page that says this is our Q1 release, here's what's in it. This is our spring release, here's what's in it. Even that basic cadence creation, that seasons of software, that creating that kind of predictability starts to create that beaten rhythm that everybody starts to align to. And it's incredibly powerful to keep the organization moving at a constant and hopefully accelerating pace.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number three gets right to that question about how often do you do it, what I call the seasons of software, and that is imagine for your business a giant metronome that is just sitting there ticket. And part of any leader's job is to coordinate and align the activity of all kinds of diverse sets of people in their activity and their nature. And getting aligned to a cadence, to seasons, which is typically a quarterly boundary, is so helpful in helping the organization understand when are we working, when are we all lifting our heads up and saying, okay, boom, here we are, and just having everybody operate on a common schedule. And we have the seasons built in. I've done this at countless companies, and it's honestly one of the most powerful simple things you can do is just have quarterly releases. It doesn't matter what your actual software development schedule or process is, but”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The company you do it on an annual basis, but it's a great tool to deploy if there's a new area or a project where you just need to get everybody on the same page quickly, but the cycle should be annually.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very simple version is make sure you're all getting in a room, ideally cross organizationally, and spending the time to hammer it out so it's usually a day or two minimum to get to your eight shared priorities in Stack Reg. If that's the simplest recipe, if you're trying to take anything on, I've done a bunch of work with Tailscale, brought this to the organization, in this case how we are structuring the self-serve business. And with having that clarity, having the time spent across organization to say, these are just even the buckets how we're thinking about things and this is their stack rank. It's simple. It doesn't have to be complicated. It's hugely powerful. You will know when the team feels the value. It won't feel like that OKR spreadsheet that's pointless and administrative. It'll feel like, ah, clarity alignment. Okay, let's go. We now know we need to do.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like, it's bureaucratic, and it has no impact. And most of the time it is done wrong. I use a methodology from Salesforce that's called V2Mom. It doesn't matter what methodology you use. It doesn't matter if you have methodology at all. If you are doing it right and you are genuinely aligning and focusing and you can feel it viscerally, you can feel it viscerally. There is nothing more powerful. An organization's time and attention and focus is the most precious resource you have. And your ability to actually steer and navigate that across this collection of people, across these different functions, across this chaotic environment, if you can unlock that power, it is a superpower. And that is why you have these planning methodologies, not so that you can do some checkbox accounting on people's performance or whatever.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same thing with engineering. Do you want somebody who's a technical leader who will configure Kubernetes in their sleep and elevate your technology prowess by their personal ingenuity? Or do you want somebody who's a process leader who will help the trains run on time and scale the systems? First and biggest place people go wrong is looking for one and or thinking they need the one or hiring the other or not being clear about it because people like you and me tend to be a little to both. Like Harry, you're alive. You're a poet, right? If you were a librarian VC, you'd have a big supercomputer sitting behind you running math models, doing high frequency trading. That's not you. You're a man of stories and people and narrative. Like, that's poetry. It applies to your VCs too. So that's the first thing. Number two, the power of alignment. I'm a big believer in kind of planning methodologies, and they tend to have a bad rap. Like everybody's had a bad experience with OKR, right, where it just feels perfunct.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing comes to hiring, right? The first thing I see go right or wrong in a hire is knowing what you are hiring for. The biggest question people tend to get for you confused are, and wait with me for a minute on this, is are you hiring a poet or are you hiring a librarian? Which is to say, for any given role, you are trying to mix some blend of process expertise and kind of domain or content expertise. This comes up in every single marketing hire conversation I have with founders. Do you want somebody who knows the space, who can use the product, who is expert in talking to customers, i.e. a poet? Or do you need somebody who understands all of the process machinery of setting up demand gen and the systems and the analytics and the best practices for customer acquisition, i.e. a librarian?”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would kind of call that maybe like full stack AI versus kind of an AI tool thing. Absolutely. What an interesting opportunity that is. You see hints, just hints of this. If you look at some of the support companies moving from seat licensing, support tool companies to incident resolution, that's getting, that's further up the stack, that's closer to business value, that's closer to kind of selling the end result and output. If you really squint, you know, what does that look like in other kinds of industries? What would it mean to pay a CRM company per lead?”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New entrance in SAS. AI is not the same. AI is much more of a continuous innovation, where it's much easier for incumbents to adopt and take advantage of these technologies without upending their entire company structures. So this isn't like early SAS days where all this new value will be created. That said, when we dream about user experience paradigms or engagement models that you and I haven't experienced yet, that's likely to come from somewhere else. There's likely to be new value there in this kind of AI native.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of two minds on this. I think a lot of AI value will accrue to existing large distribution players. AI is not naturally disruptive in the way that the shift from on-prem to cloud was, right? Which obviously I had a front row seat to. Moving from on-prem to cloud, the reason why so many companies were so poor in doing it is it required not an upending of their product, it required an upending of their business models. Moving from perpetual licensing, from a sales point of view, from a finance point of view, moving from an engineering process that delivers software on CD to delivering continuously on the internet and operating a service versus just shipping software, these are tectonic shifts in how an organization structures and runs itself. And the further and more public company you are, the harder that is to execute. Right? That's why it was so, so hard to do, and we saw so much opportunity.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question is how is AI going to change customer interactions and ultimately customer experience? And man, is that a fascinating topic? And so, you know, I think what we see in the market today is the most obvious first places are support case triage and routing. Okay. From there, how sophisticated can AI become in educating and moving customers through an injurious experience?”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it tends to go south, and this happens all the time, is when you cross the streams, is when you don't have the clarity in how you run the business of this is our self-serve product and this is our self-serve business and this is how it works and this is our sales led business. This is its value proposition and this is how it works. The most common failure mode is that those intermingle in ways that they're not differentiated by motion, by customer, by product and value proposition, by message and then you just have teams that are stopping on each other all over each other and then you have acrimony. So having again the idea of these kind of distinct businesses that are adjacent and connected in really important ways versus effectively a scrum very, very common failure.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“inert set of nouns, right? It's just a database, it's just interacting with these files versus a thing that actually does something. What a powerful concept. What a big change in evolution for the company and for how you want people to conceive of that. What's the simplest way you can kind of capture and communicate and get people excited about that? For me, it was actions. I think that was a pretty good name. You know, at its core, it's just getting to the essence of why people should care about your product and how they should relate to it, just trying to be as customer centric as possible and appreciate that somebody's going to have microseconds to contemplate what this thing is. And so you wanted to have as great an impact as possible.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gets to what I was saying before about capturing that strategic and emotive position. Customers want to love your products. They want to be excited about them and they want to understand and inhabit the vision that they represent. And the positioning and ultimately the naming is the invitation to do that. Two examples. When I was doing some work with GitHub, the team there came up with this great product that let you build workflows. And, you know, there are a bunch of names being kicked around like flows and workflows or stuff like that. And now, and I'm happy to take credit for this. It's of course called GitHub Actions. Think about like workflow versus actions. Which product do you want to use? Which kind of captures the essence of what this product was about? One way of thinking about what was behind that product naming was GitHub was this kind of”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“challenge the core values that you genuinely believe have contributed to your success because they may not be the values or the strategies that will deliver that next frontier growth.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amen, amen. You know you're doing it wrong when the company, it gets too religious about its own culture and ultimately it gets to introspective. We are successful because we've always done it this way. We have whatever special t-shirts on Fridays that we spend an exquisite amount of time building GitHub and Heroku. This is so core to our culture. Clearly this has to be the reason for our success. And almost in like this religious way where you don't even know where the growth comes from. You're just afraid of upsetting the growth gods. You romanticize or elevate these kind of semi-arbitrary aspects of your internal culture that have served you very well in the past but are not what's going to get you to where you go when you need to go in the future. That's part of you asked before what's growth growth mindset? That's growth mindset. Being so religiously customer focused that you're willing to”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe kind of the implicit contradiction of being a high growth company. I see this play out all the time. You have this initial thing, this initial idea that whether you're GitHub, again, Dropbox Roga, you name it, that has generated unimaginable success. You've gone not just from zero to one, but zero to ten, zero to a hundred. You've broken through on the internet. One of the rarest things to do. You develop internal ideas and theories about why that was the case. This one thing that you did, the set of values that that thing represented was this thing that got you to this unimaginable place of success relative to all the odds and all the other companies out there. Then you have to say, I'm going to put those aside or I'm going to challenge those or I'm going to think beyond that and develop a new framework of value or a way of contradicting even maybe some of the principles that got us this far in order to serve.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They think about the world too much from their worldview, their situation, their consciousness out versus customer in. The hardest thing about being strategic about having that transformation narrative is having genuine what I like to think about sometimes as enterprise empathy. It's very hard for organizations to do is have enterprise empathy, which really means being able to understand how your product sits in the full context of your customer. Politics, its orb structure, its business processes, its successes, its dysfunctions, all of your products are kind of sitting in this context. And to genuinely understand that takes a real kind of presence of mind.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start by thinking that it's important to do so. Have some intentionality to say, this is important, experience is important. This is why do like big old software companies suck? Because they're not experience oriented. They don't care about these things. They've lost the connection to the individual user. It's why these companies tend to be PLG companies, because to get the individual user, you have to be empathetic. You have to care about experience. You have to have meetings with the CEO and the management team where you're debating minor switches in the command line, which trust me, we did it Heroken. So you have to care. But emotive is just half of it, right? The other part you have to do is be strategic. And if you're emotive and you're not strategic, you're interesting and cool, but you'll never command the kind of business impact and ultimately budgets and ultimately growth for your company that you're trying to look for. And it's on that strategic dimension that this idea of”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If your company doesn't have one, it should. You're always trying to do is navigate your company on two dimensions. One is be emotive and the other is be strategic. You need to be emotive, right, because you want people to care. You want people to have an experience with your product that they feel emotionally and passionately and viscerally connected to.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really at its core, it's what is the narrative of your company? What is your industry transformation narrative? How are your customers even going to imagine Your product and how the impact it's going to have for them.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the Heroku core website really was always just about getting free developers to sign up. And in fact, a lot of the work we did, and again, this is my era was 2013 to 2018, so this is a while ago, the enterprise products that we built and spent, you know, customers would spend millions of dollars on. Most of like your hacker news crowd didn't even know that stuff existed. But that's because it was, we would communicate with them individually or differently versus what you would experience on the website or in this case, maybe the billboard.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excellent question, and usually this debate comes up not in the billboard but in the homepage of the website. Imagine now when you've got the full fledge PLG model, you've got Enterprise 2. How do you manage that? A friend of mine runs the website for GitHub, and this is a classic GitHub problem in spades. My default is the website is about the top of the funnel, is about establishing the initial customer relationship. You want to yoke towards that free customer acquisition. And that's kind of the primary thing. Because once you are engaged with them in the product, you have all kinds of additional communication mechanisms, in product, out of product, events, you name it, to engage with them and move them on the journey, but the website is frankly a kind of a blunt instrument, and so point it at that largest pool of unwashed masses. And then as you kind of pull them up into your journey, into your company experience, you reveal a different ways of engaging with them and delivering these other messages.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest mistake is not understanding that it's different, not approaching it with the intentionality of it's going to require a different value proposition that having a single player product, a product that has value on a single player basis, and that you can then build a multiplayer collaboration product experience on, you're doing MVP, you're doing product market fit twice. And I've seen this a bunch and I've seen companies I've invested in not make it where they get the individual value proposition, but they're not able to translate to the collaborative value proposition.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Libraries, whatever, right? Creation oriented. As a team, I'm using it as part of my workflow in a team in order to collaborate, right? Collaboration value proposition. And then enterprise, what's the value there? It's compliance. That's where I have my security. That's where I have my auditability. That's where I have my observability, all those kinds of pieces. These are distinct products. They're distinct value propositions and they're distinct go-to-market motions that you assemble in in a kind of an adjacent way into a layer cake, if you will. So yes, you start with that individual free user, but in order to make the jump to team, you're going to have to have a different value proposition and probably a different product, complementary product.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the key things to understand about PLG is it's not linear. It's not a single product that you have a value proposition for or an experience for that you sell to one user or market to one user, that you then take the same thing and then try and get them to adopt as a team and then get the same thing adopt to an enterprise. What makes PLG PLG is it has these distinct, discrete but complementary motions and value propositions. I'll give you a specific example. I think when you look at PLG this does tend to be true. That first step, that individual free, typically free step is usually a creation value proposition, right? In the Heroku case, creation meant like building and deploying an app. The second step, which is usually your team self-serve step, is usually a collaboration value proposition. GitHub is another great example. A company I did some work with as a consultant. As an individual developer, I'm using GitHub to, you know, find code, find samples, you know, find”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to kind of what I was saying before, you know, enterprise versus PLG or self serve. How do you think about that decision? My rule of thumb there is you only get to have one of those until at least 10 million, if not further. If you're up at like five, six million and you're like, gee, now's the time to add enterprise. Usually the challenge is companies going enterprise too soon because it's very tempting. It can be the other way of companies trying to go into PLG from enterprise, which is a much harder path to go. If you're doing that under 10 million, I just think you're not big enough. It's too distracting. You haven't built enough of the machine. I would hope that a channel would get you pretty far again into the, you mentioned fifty before, a hundred. And maybe it's also, you know, I think about a full fledged channel as in a full-fledged enterprise sales organization with all the SEs and SDRs and all the mechanics and machinery. That takes a lot to really get spun up.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“one good acquisition mechanism that is contributing to a disproportionate 50, 60, 70 percent of their actual customer acquisition volume. And usually that's like one or two things. The distribution of acquisition methods or specifically even content is highly asymptotic. One good piece, two good pieces will move the needle as opposed to doing a thousand.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Channel JSON Lemkin here. PLG is not for everybody. And PLG is not a go-to-market motion. PLG is a business model. It is a, again, holistic way of architecting and constructing your product, your business, and your entire organization. It is not something that you add on, say, you know, gee, wouldn't this be nice to have as a kind of additional distribution channel? You know, it has to be really, really intentional. With that in mind, every not even great, but good PLG business I've seen has some specialized customer acquisition piece that is not paid acquisition. If you are doing PLG and you're doing paid acquisition in the early days, and I'll even say like sub 100 million in revenue, so pretty far up. If you're doing paid acquisition, I'm not sure you're really PLG. Whenever I talk to founders, a good PLG business, even at the 510 million range, they usually have discovered.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're more in the category of fewer larger customers, right? Because it's very personal and engaged. So companies can say, oh, well, I'm going to go down, or our founders go down that path and say, great, I'll just get more of those. And you realize, well, you know, it's easy to get the first five, but then you got to build the whole customer acquisition machine to get the next 50 versus, you know, the challenges as well on the smaller side. You have to get be expert in a whole different kind of customer acquisition.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe not day one, but definitely year two. At some point you need to decide who is your customer, not just from a use case and value proposition point of view, but from a go-to-market point of view, which the best proxy for that is deal size. Are you going to get from year one to year three, from seed to A or maybe A to B, depending on how you name the rounds, right? Are you going to get there by getting X customers at 50K a pop or Y customers at 5K a pop? The physics of those two systems are entirely different. And at some point, you got to decide and you have to decide pretty early because nobody has ever raised an A or I would think a B doing both. You just would spread yourself far too thin attempting to do both. And it's a very, very challenging discussion to have, especially in the early days, because if you're doing founder-led sales or even early MVP development by definition,”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make them profitable growing customers both in terms of them getting value and your business getting revenue. The thing about kind of just bottoms up growth is it's just very narrow in its perspective. It doesn't take the kind of holistic view of how does your product value proposition interact with customer experience of how they engage with your product? What's the journey that your customer goes on if they start as an individual? An enterprise customer, each of these kind of different phase transitions, this is kind of a whole architecture of a business. I really encourage founders to think more holistically about all the pieces and how they come together because that is the hardest thing about growth in the modern SAS era. It requires all the pieces coming together.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I honestly don't love like the title VP of growth and I don't love growth function. All of that stuff, it is a lot of local maxima. It's improving a flow, it's improving a journey. All of that is really, really important. But that's more kind of bottoms-up growth. Where I spend a lot of time with the companies I've led or worked with as an angel investor or board member is a little more of the top-down idea of growth, which is fundamentally how do you set a vision for yourself, for your customers that you can articulate and communicate at scale that is going to be transformative for them and is going to be really, really valuable and is empathetic to where they are as an organization. So one thing I like to think a lot about and talk to companies and founders I work with a lot about is what's your theory of your business, which is another way of saying kind of holistically where your customers are going to come from, how are you going to make them successful, how are you ultimately going to go?”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would hope that one channel could get me further than fifty, and I've certainly seen PLG businesses that got well past fifty on one channel or even back to Dropbox, got well past fifty in one channel. That seems a little low to me. I would hope I would get more given how hard it is to build a channel.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a Dropbox in the very beginning. I was employee 11, so it was 2010 when I started. And it was already clear, even in the very early days, that they were onto something very, very special from a customer acquisition point of view. One of the many things I learned from Dropbox was the power of being really innovative around customer acquisition. One of the things that I think is maybe underrated that I'm really attracted to, and I encourage entrepreneurs to think a lot about, is what's changing? Where is their innovation in customer acquisition? I mean, it's hard to find a company that was more innovative in customer acquisition than Dropbox.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it? It's really interesting, and we'll talk about some of the other companies. I've worked at a lot of companies that have enjoyed a lot of fast growth. And Salesforce was different. Salesforce owned its own growth. The growth didn't happen to it. It didn't just kind of experience, you know, kind of a viral growth and kind of took off on the internet. When it started, maybe the internet wasn't even big enough for that to happen. It owned it through understanding the power of marketing, understanding the power of a message, understanding the power of an industry transformation narrative, and really being intentional on owning it. Of the iconic brands”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll try and keep these brief. You know, so I was very lucky to be very early at Salesforce. I joined in 2003. One of the things that people don't maybe understand about Salesforce looking at it as this huge, big enterprise software company now is that thing was built brick by brick. That thing was built through the pure energy and intentionality of all the people on the team there, which was amazing. And so what I really learned there was just the kind of genuine power of a growth mindset. And what that really means and what that means applied every single day. That thing was forged into existence. It didn't just kind of get lucky right place, right time. And that was a very powerful lesson.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harry, it's been a long time coming. I'm delighted that we finally got it scheduled and nice to spend some virtual FaceTime with you.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PLG is not for everybody, and PLG is not a go to market motion. PLG is a business model. Not even great, but good PLG business I've seen has some specialized customer acquisition piece that is not paid acquisition. If you are doing PLG and you're doing paid acquisition, sub 100 million in revenue, I'm not sure you're really PLG.”
2024-04-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Dropbox, Salesforce & Heroku's Product-Led Growth Engine; What Works & What Doesn't | Why Startups Doing Paid Under $100M ARR are not PLG | Why PLG is a Business Model, Not a Go-To-Market Motion with Adam Gross, Former CEO @ Vimeo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source