YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Bialecki

lines on the record: 52
first: 2024-06-26
most recent: 2024-06-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's how do you fall asleep at night, by which I mean, how do you turn it off? I've asked this of a lot of other founders and mentors is when you get really excited about something, eventually you have to kind of put it on the table and go to bed. I think that's tough. So it's a little bit of how do you compartmentalize where you can have an off switch? And at least for me, well, my actual answer is probably listening to some audiobooks or podcasts at night, but that or I've always been a big fan of getting outside. I do a lot of running, but whatever it is, exercising into like something that kind of forces your brain into a totally different direction. Maybe to tie it all the way back, like this being curious about other things, yeah, I mean, I'll often unwind or fall asleep to, you know, learning about topics that just have nothing to do with what I'm working on day to day. Like I've gotten very big into for whatever reason, European and British history through some podcasts, it totally takes my mind.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I very much subscribe to the theory that there's sort of a minimum amount, a threshold after which wealth stops really mattering. One thing I've loved about my co-founder, Ed and I is we've always found joy and simple or non-extravagant things. I think in my personal life with our family, it bleeds over a little bit into Clavio, recognizing that like, look, people, the time you spend together and how you do it, that's really what matters the most. And in some sense, I think the financial side, the best thing there is like, if it allows you to spend more time with the people that you like spending time with, that's probably the best benefit.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always hated the term omnichannel because it felt like everything matters all at once. And so I used to unabashedly think that, hey, when it comes to marketing, there's only a couple of mediums, media types that matter. I've definitely changed how I think about that now. I mean, we added SMS as part of our product set, and now we're thinking adding a couple of bunch of other formats and other ways that folks can use Clavio. I think in the future, you know, for consumers, there should be these multiple interfaces that people can touch and feel rather than I used to think there was a big power law of like there's only really like one or two that matter, but I think that's changing for a lot of our businesses.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's never been a big priority for myself or my co founder Ed. I think where it's most interesting is if you feel we really believe in paying it forward. I've worked with so many great people that have been mentors to me. I often think of personal brand as you can share what you've learned and then people can decide what they like or don't like. They can borrow from that. If your goal is to pay it forward to others, that's a great reason to have it. And then there's probably certainly a halo effect of folks will say, oh, that's great. Well, I'd love to spend more time with that person and hey, maybe we'll join forces, but I don't think it's very important. I think it's often overemphasized by founders in terms of being successful. A lot of customers, that's not what matters to them. What matters to them is, you know, can you deliver great experience and a great product?”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always admired Shopify for two things one, an extreme dedication to the craft of building great products and delivering really high quality products. I think in the world of e-commerce, if you've ever tried to set up a website or an online business and it's just, you know, it's your Friday night project, it can feel like a lot. So making that super simple makes a big difference. Those gains extend not just to folks starting out, but actually folks in the enterprise want the same thing. And then the second is always admired the way they build their ecosystem. Unabashedly, every part of Shopify is going to be extensible. So if you want to develop against it, you can. And when we first started working with them, it was just so easy to share what we built. I remember building a little connector and they just got it right away. So I think if you take this ecosystem matter, they're going to be part of our strategy. I think we've seen a lot of great companies.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting comfortable just explaining why we're all here, why it's worth working so hard, and then how we're going to get there. But the number one question I get from folks, both internally and externally is tell me more about where you think we're going and what it's going to take to get there. I think telling that story through metaphor and through examples, tightening that up, I work a lot on that.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember in year two we had our biggest customer left us and it was right around the holidays. I remember it was right around Thanksgiving. It was pretty crushing in the moment. But I remember the time that was like a 20% hit to our $20,000 a month MRR and it felt huge. But I think you learn from that like if you just keep focusing on the right stuff, like eventually you get there.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I've got just tremendous respect for Microsoft as a business. Obviously, you study great companies and we talk about Clavio being this database and applications. I've always thought about Windows in their applications. So Bill Gates, or there's a lot of great folks at Microsoft, I think folks that have saw that grow up from the 80s and 90s, man, that'd be awesome.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, it was always about just understanding it and then trying to do what we can to minimize it. I'll give you one example. When we started working with a lot of marketing agencies, one of the things we found is just from a business perspective, it was actually, you know, not only could we help them grow their business in terms of offering services on top of Clavio, but when they'd refer business to us, that was a great model we could pay them for referring business, but the cash cycle was very fast because it wasn't the same thing where you pay a sales rep and you pay them all up front and you just have to amortize that out. In this case, we could sort of pay them as a customer grew with us over a set period of time. So there were all these things where we would look at what were strategies for marketing or sales or some of these partner plays that would allow us to minimize that. That's part of when we thought about the capital required to grow Clavio, if we could keep that low, we could grow really quickly.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never been as big of a fan of LTV to CAC as a measure. So I feel like it'd be too long term. You can have high upfront costs that sort of it takes you a really long time to earn back. When we were bootstrapping, we always thought about the cash cycle. If we invest a dollar today, how long is it going to take for it to come back? I think it's the exact same, right? So describe Starbucks is if I invest a dollar, how long does it take for me to pay back? And obviously the best is like, yeah, folks will pay up front in software or, you know, load up dollars for later”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always felt in a stack ranking of business models, the best ones are transactional is obviously hard for the reason you're saying because there's no commitment to the next purchase. Anything that subscription or recurring is great because there's kind of this auto on piece to it. But the really the best model, and you have to have a really great product to do this, an even better model is something that's, I used to think of it as like a utility, like, you know, like, you know, like water or electricity. Like, of course, I'm going to buy that. Everybody started calling it consumption so we can call it that. And yeah, I may fluctuate a little bit, but I've always felt like the best business models out there are you have a product that's so good you actually want to reduce friction for people to use more of it and you're willing to float a little bit with you know the the ups and downs of the economy broadly are you willing to accept some variance for the upside and the downside versus just the straight predictability”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's actually, it actually can look almost pseudo recurring, where I have customers, I know who they are, they come back, I'm building, you know, some cadence with them. Actually makes my business more durable and more resilient. That's the trend that we're really interested in, obviously, trying to accelerate.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people are being more thoughtful about how they spend. But interestingly, and we shared this stat last year, we're finding that more and more consumers are building deeper relationships and more loyal relationships with businesses and organizations and brands they love. So there's this interesting thing going on where, well, consumers may be more thoughtful about spending overall. They're tending to concentrate it in a handful of companies that they really love. If you're a business, it's really about how do you deliver great experiences to the customers that you have. And once you acquire somebody, how do you make sure you also go deep with them? I've always thought it's interesting. You know, in the world of retail economers, it's still, even for digital, for e-commerce online, there's still a very traditional retail mindset of, well, I drive traffic, it's not foot traffic, it's web traffic, I convert some fraction of it, and that's the basic funnel of my business. A lot of those businesses are recognized.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Language models. It's more of this, it's kind of this productivity will help you click the buttons faster, like navigate the UI or maybe do it through natural language. I think that's a nice to have. But if you can actually measure the lift, the increase in output, and then you can put a dollar sign on that, that's something that customers really understand. And I think that's like another level of value beyond just the, you know, you can do your day job quicker.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two fundamental forces kind of working in opposition. One is all technology fundamentally makes things easier. So there's a deflationary element to it. And so there's this constantly you have multiple people build the same tool set that fundamentally should make it better for those customers. On the flip side, as you build better and better tools, better functionality, it is increasingly valuable. So I think for us we're so far away from the total value that we can bring to our customers. And we know that it's so profitable for them. A lot of the conversations I have with folks are we're eager to see that next world and we'd be happy to pay for it. But just how long is it going to take for it to exist? I think in our case, I think there's a lot more value there. And if you index pricing to that, I think there's a lot more there. With some software categories, I think they're not, you know, if you look at the way they're using AI and maybe specifically.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even better algorithm for that process, that's very possible. So take it in our case in the world of marketing. I talk to a lot of marketers and we ask them, hey, how do you spend your incremental hour in the day? Like how do you decide how to optimize your time if you're using expected value or something like that? Like, how do you decide what to work on next? Which project? And a lot of them say, well, I've kind of got this notion of what I should be doing, but actually I'd love some advice. We think that's something that's ripe for machine learning and AI to just say, yeah, here's where you should aim. So we think we can discover these processes. We think through data, we can build even better versions of that to say, hey, here's how you really should be doing it. The third part is we think then that adds up to, you know, at least a 2x, right? 100% productivity boost. And in some cases, it might be infinite where the work just goes to zero. So that's kind of our strategy when it comes to, and I think you can get to this world where, hey, if you can automate a lot of that way, you can literally just say, hey, here's the output I'll deliver for you. And somebody can say, great.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's generally the right direction. I'm maybe a little skeptical of how fast we get there. When I think about machine learning and artificial intelligence, it's kind of three core principles that we have. The first is being a physics background, the laws or the algorithms that govern how the world works are discoverable. So the way that we as humans use software or try to execute very processes, we actually define those. We can codify those. So we can understand those. The second part is I think for a lot of things that we as humans do, if you look at our algorithms once you've documented them, they're actually really naive and inefficient. That's not anybody's fault. It's just, you know, a lot of these things we don't practice that much. Or maybe we've practiced a lot, but compared to what a machine could do, there's just a lot of room for optimization. We also believe that if you look at a lot of the algorithms that we use, if you use data and obviously software to then try to understand, well, what would be...”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to lead to more customers revenue growth. And if we do that, I think ultimately you build up a track record that folks externally can see and everything kind of takes care of itself.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know the answer to the stock market. We've always looked at it as the market cap, share price, all this kind of stuff will take care of itself. Companies fundamentally get valued on either revenue growth and then ultimately free cash flow or profitability. If you just keep growing those things, then you're in good shape. We think about, well, what makes us believe that that will be true long into the future? I think there are products that are core to a business. And it's either because for a particular function or for an area, they're kind of a tent pole or it's because your core, how a business drives growth for our customers, how they drive revenue. What I've always been excited about for us is we're like right in the middle of both. When you're storing all the data for a business, you know, when you're kind of the center of how they think about marketing. And then if you can tie that back to actual results, customers are going to be pretty happy with that. And then ultimately over time, like that's.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, there are so many things that were under optimized. I think great products really do sell themselves customers will come to them. So it can hide a lot of things that you could be better at. The analogy I always use is it's like imagine you're like a sprinter and imagine somebody is running a 100 meter dash. They run it and they have terrible form, but their time's pretty good. Or imagine that they run it and their time's good, but their form is great. You'd rather be the person that has kind of, okay, their arm is kind of hanging out to the side and they could actually probably go faster. And I always felt like that was, you know, we had these opportunities that were right there. And it's something we obviously work on now is, okay, how do we continue to get better and better and better form?”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say the two things that I think have been real positives. One, I think there's a lot of smart folks that have studied a lot of software companies that are public market investors that you just, you know, now they're again, they're on your cap table. So you spend time with them and learn how they're thinking about things. I think that's interesting. The second is as a private company and especially a bootstrapped one, I think the great part about bootstrapping is you tend to do all these little habits that like really help make you successful, like to staying close to customers, being scrappy, being frugal. I think some bootstrap companies, maybe because they don't have, you know, they haven't raised as much capital. Sometimes they're not as rigorous on their kind of successful in spite of some other things.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember sitting with our general counsel the night before, I told him it's like the probably the best analogy is it feels a lot like a wedding, honestly. I mean, two things are true. The advice you get when you get married is like there's going to be a lot of people there. It's going to go by fast. You're not going to remember much of it. It'll be fun, but actually it's just a lot of pomp and circumstance. I remember feeling it's like, boy, that actually is pretty accurate. I think what was important for us was we went to New York, we had a great time rang the bell, but then we wanted to get back to our office. And, you know, I always felt like we're like, okay, we're going to have one party. We don't really celebrate fundraisings, but this one's probably worth celebrating. We're going to do it that night. That's the end of it. And then we're back to work tomorrow. And I remember going to bed that night. And I think the text message I got from my wife the next morning was, hey, before you go to work, just reminder, just make sure you take out the trash. So, you know, it was very much like, hey, this is a fun day, but you go back to what you were doing.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has kind of this weird, you know, back to the beginning feel of boy, there's 20 or 30 folks that you're spending time with and just sharing what you're up to.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one, everybody talks about a roadshow, but the reality is you meet everybody three or four times leading up to that. It's more like you're seeing people that you already know, since in some sense the roadshow should feel, it's a little anticlimactic, hopefully. That's one part is you're meeting folks. But then along the way, I've always subscribed to like, you will get the investors that you deserve. I think if you're clear about what you're going to focus on both in the short and long run, you'll find folks that line up with that. You want everybody to know where you're aiming and there are no surprises. So anyways, I think that's how we thought about building up the book. And then, yeah, it's interesting, you get kind of to the finish line and, I mean, lots of great folks to work with. And I think there's, it always felt to me like you do this thing where you raise a seed round and there's like lots of people involved. And then for us, you know, when we did our series A, B, C, it was all one investor. By the time you get to the roadshow, you're kind of back to like these party rounds where there's going to be lots of people you're raising from.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We backed up and we tried to take a very long view. I used to tell folks at Clavio, I was like, because people ask all the time, when will you go public? I said, look, I know we'll get to 2030. You know, we'll have grown, we'll have built a great business, great products, we'll delight a lot of customers. I know we'll be a public company, but I probably won't really remember what year it was. It's not going to be a long time, but it's going to be somewhere in this like early 2020s. We did that and we're like, well, we know it's going to be at some point. And I've always had this belief that if you know something's coming and it's going to be a bunch of work, like you might as well just do it. So a big part of it was we were just ready. We knew we were in good shape as a business as we're working with larger customers. We knew there was some value in folks knowing that like, hey, we were in it for the long run. I think that's actually played out. Like I've talked to a lot of folks now and they said, hey, look, it's great to know your profitable business.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rope has to be tight. We're both working on keeping it taut. I think partnerships can go sideways when folks just aren't upfront with each other. What are we going to be great at? What are you going to be great at? It's actually okay if there's like a little bit of overlap. But the more you can kind of clarify that, the better. And I think certainly with Shopify and others, I think we've just been very upfront. And it bleeds over a little into our ecosystem. We have a lot of folks that integrate into Clavio now, and we try to do the same thing. Just be very clear about, hey, these are things that we're not interested in, where we need help. And these are the things that we think are core competencies. And I think if you can just get all that on the table, things go a lot better.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we all have skin in the game together. It was a win win win, right? Valuable to Shopify, valuable to us. And I think to our customers showed that like, hey, these kinds of partnerships can work. There were a lot of great things that came out of that. But an interesting thing that happened was a lot of other partners that we had, both inside and outside of retail said, wow, we love the way that you've worked with Shopify. That clearly is working. It's accretive to everybody. Can we replicate that? I think partnerships, they're kind of a newer art form in software. Like a lot of these SaaS, like how do we work together? Are we complementary or are we on each other's turf? I think this kind of helped make it clearer that like, no, there's a real positive kind of symbiosis here. And we've actually started to take that to, you know, other verticals and other industries and use a little bit of the template.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was more gradual than that. I mean, we'd been working with Toby, Harley, the entire Shopify team, really on the product side for a long time. And then started to be a little bit on the marketing side. And I always felt like if you've got this really good partnership, if you can figure out like the product side, the kind of go-to-market side and then the financial side, you can get all three of those things lined up, like that's the best of all worlds. You know, we knew they were adding a lot of value for us in terms of just literally recommending Clavio to folks. You know, we felt like we built a great product, but like, hey, I mean, again, all people didn't know who we were yet. They were saying, hey, look, you know, what works well, what integrates well with shopping. Hey, you should go check out Clavio. So we felt like there's this kind of consummation, but it was always, it was right. It was a very gradual thing. And it was, I think one day I remember sometime during COVID. And we just said, like, you know, if we're both in this for the long run, why don't we just make this more formal?”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always kind of the analogy I've made is it's a little bit like when you're dating and then finally you kind of get you formalize it right you get married to some degrees not a perfect analogy but it's kind of like that”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our business. Obviously, we've got a great relationship with Shopify and with others. I've always felt with partnerships. It's like a tug of war. I mean, not in a competitive way, but like for string to stay tight, my metaphor to our teams has always been you need two people pulling on both ends of the rope. That means that there has to be this economic incentives that line up, products they have to work well together. Customers care about that. In that case, it felt like we had great alignment with Shopify because we were helping their customers drive more sales, which was accretive to both our customers, to Clavio, and to Shopify. And that was like a great everybody win situation. So I think with all partnerships, if you can set those kinds of things up, I mean, if it's a win-win-win for all sides, like that's the best of all worlds. And what you want to avoid is things where I think sometimes it's not even it's like a win-lose.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that event, you know, we ran some analytics on this. I think a while, while ago. And there was a bump, but I think people were surprised at how much there was kind of already these big, huge tailwinds and that accelerated a little bit, but it wasn't the step change that a lot of people thought. My kind of learnings from that were twofold. One, I think we had kind of shown that in the world of data-driven marketing and especially as applies to retail, we had all these folks that loved us. And there were a lot of folks that weren't aware of us. They didn't know who we were yet, but when they found out what we did, it didn't take them a long time to figure out, oh, we've got a really great product. When that happened, we just saw, it was almost like a bump in awareness all of a sudden. People are like, oh my gosh, I have to find something else. So being ready, having a great product, you know, leading with that and then investing in marketing or in this case, having the marketing kind of happen to you, I think is a good strategy. So make sure you're sequencing those things the right way. The other is I've always felt with partnerships. Partnerships are such a huge part.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've always had the thesis that if private companies, if there was more liquidity in the stock, we always felt like that was better. I mean, we weren't a public company, but if you just, the more often you could do that, if there was some cadence, that was fine, that was a very healthy thing. So after we did that, I think that was our series B, I think we did ran a couple of others. Some were coordinate around fundraisings, and some I think were just we had cash on the balance sheet. I always felt like that was a great way that, you know, for folks that were really invested in Clavio, it's like, you know, for some of them, I mean, they grew up, their careers at Clavio, and they were sort of like equity was a big part of, you know, their wealth creation. It felt like to let folks do that along the way. I mean, I heard all sorts of great stories of folks paying off student loans, right, putting a down payment on a mortgage. So that was great. I guess my advice is, I don't overthink the, oh my gosh, will people be demotivated? It's a positive thing. And then it actually set the way that when we went public, I think a lot of folks were like, well, yeah, now it just feels like when you're public, it's like, hey, it's kind of what we've been doing, but just now the stock.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was around a little over 100 million is what we raised again because we were profitable. I think there was a mix of primary capital and there was secondary to existing investors. And I think we actually ran our first tender then. I know that's gotten more popular, but like I think we ran a tender for everybody too. Yeah. So there was around 100 million. And I think we sized it based on what we thought because at the time the kind of wisdom was like, hey, it has to be around 20% of the company. So I think that's kind of how we backed into the size. And the price, it was around, I think around 800, 800 million. You know, the logic was we always had the same logic with fundraising that, you know, it was kind of like, hey, look, if whatever the kind of going market multiple was because we were profitable, we'll be like a little bit ahead of that. But we never really tried to push the price that much. So I probably got some of those numbers a little bit off.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, the first big round for us was with Summit Partners. And then Excel the year after. But we raised that million and a half, probably about a year, two years later, we added five more from the same investor. And then we went like a bunch of years where we probably scaled to about, I think it was around 50 million, 60 million in RRR before we raised our next rounds. That's when we knew that was going to be like, it was just going to be, I mean, we probably had 10x at that point. It was going to be a different order magnitude”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember asking, like, hey, look, I know 10x is the normal thing. Can we do 20x? And yeah, I mean, this seed investor we were working with just said, yeah, sure, that sounds good. That was it. The silly mistake we made actually, which was it didn't really matter much. But because we were profitable, we also said, okay, cool. So we'll negotiate the price. But hey, we actually don't need the cash right now. So it's actually okay if you want, like you can just send it to us in a few months. So we used to laugh about that of like we should have just, you know, wait another three months and we would have, I don't know, maybe doubled revenue and we could have raised at a higher cap. But I don't know. We've never tried to be perfect with fundraising. We've always felt like if you can find people that are value add, those are kind of like the best people to have on your cap table.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We raised a million and a half dollars and we weren't super formulaic about it. We made a couple of like kind of silly mistakes. I started out with going back to folks that I'd worked for, CEOs, CTOs, and asking them, it's like, hey, we've kind of built this business. Would you be interested in writing us an angel check? And they said, yeah, of course. And then I asked them, okay, well, and also do you know like who are the good seed stage VCs? Because we hadn't spent any time meeting these folks. They said, sure, so I got introduced to a couple folks around Boston. And from there, we thought like a million dollar sounded good. So we did a million dollars and there was like a little bit from these angel investors. And then when we were figuring out the price, thankfully like safes had come into existence, you know, maybe a year or two ago. So it's like, okay, we'll just use this kind of new format. And then what I'd heard was, hey, if you were raising a seed round 10x ARR was kind of a lot if you had a little bit of traction. But we felt like because we were profitable, we're like, okay, well, we could double that.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So though we raised our first round right around when we hit one million RR. And the reason we did it was we were self-funding bootstrapping. We were hiring folks and Ed and I, we used to look every week at our bank account and we'd literally just pull it up. It's like a little bit like looking at your checking account, but it was just for a business. And there was this big sawtooth pattern of, you know, we kind of bump up day by day over the course of the month and it would drop to almost zero when we paid our server bills and ran payroll. And so this big sawtooth pattern. And so we would literally forecast out when we could hire the next person based on how much we thought the business would grow like in the next month. We tell people it's like, hey, look, we'd really like to work together, but I actually need you to wait like six weeks because we may not have the cash on this. That seemed like a really bad idea. So that's when we said, you know, it'd be really nice if we had a seed round at the time was maybe, you know, a million, maybe two million if it was bigger. And we said, you know, if we raised a seed round.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you know what you want to build and you've got a good plan, the capital is really helpful. You can go faster. And we probably could have gone faster if we had invested more. But I think there's some real magic in taking your time to get the product market fit right, really build up that customer love we talked about because that really does compound and snowball. I think the most challenging part of say a software business, SaaS business is if you rush too fast to try to force revenue growth, sales growth, but the product market fit isn't there. There's a lot of companies that have tried that and you just, you never really get it great. That's why I think a lot of these companies that end up building really are really enduring and build great community and product market fit, it's because they took some time to get it right and then really believed in the laws of compounding that, yeah, hey, if I can really solve this well for one person, that's okay. I mean, there are thousands or millions of other customers in our case businesses out there.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, it was a journey. I was telling some folks recently for us, we started on January 1st of 2012. In year one, we got to a couple thousand dollars in MRR, so say maybe $20,000 in RR. In year two, we got you a quarter of a million dollars in ARR, which was a huge jump, but we were still, you know, I think that was around the time where we felt like, okay, we could maybe hire one or two people. And then it was until the end of year three that we got to a million dollars. 36 months where 80% of it was just two of us. And then I think we then had the first couple of folks join with us.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, that's one thing I would probably do over, we probably would have grew our product engineering team faster. I kind of enjoyed writing a lot of the code, building and designing features in the early days. There was a point at which we knew what we needed to go do rather than me just keep chipping away at it. I remember when the first couple of Klavios, especially on the product engineering side, started, man, we did, we got a lot more done. So I would have done that sooner. I think a lot of people would have given us advice and I probably was too naive or didn't understand this part yet of there's a real there there. You have product market fit. You probably should invest more in sales and marketing. And I think that probably could have gone a little faster too.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably makes you less efficient. So, yeah, I don't know. I'd like to think that we would have done it the same way. And we did once we actually raised some venture capital. At that point, we were just like, look, it's kind of just pushing in our bank account. But yeah, my advice is raise as little as you need, because really good things will happen from that.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like to think we wouldn't have done things differently, but my advice to a lot of entrepreneurs don't take more capital than you need because the constraint breeds a lot of creativity. My routine in the early days was I'd wake up, I'd log into our, you know, our help desk, our support software, I'd answer customer questions for an hour or two, or sometimes a couple of hours if there was some real issue. And then I would get to coding. I always felt like that was a great pattern because if there was some painful problem with our product, some feature that was missing or some bug, I mean, that was obviously the first thing I was going to fix that day because it meant the next day I wouldn't have to spend all my time answering questions about it. And that viral loop of customers to code to back and forth was awesome. So there's things like that that you just learn how to do that I worry if you go too fast and you say bifurcate those roles and let's say that engineers never talk to customers and all of a sudden you lose all that magic.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's two answers to that. There's the one that sounds great, which is in my family, a bunch of my aunts and uncles and my grandparents, they were entrepreneurs. They ran small businesses. And I always felt like, well, they, from day one, they had to make money. They had to be profitable. That's kind of the lofty answer. The other answer was when we were building Clavio, we'd applied to all these, some of these venture firms had these kind of, you know, we'll give you $20,000. And it's like, you know, no strings attached, no equity, you know, for the summer. And so we applied to a bunch of these when we were about six months in. And at the time, we had real users and customers were like, oh, we'll be a layup. We applied to two or three of these and not one accepted us. I remember going to Ed and saying, hey, man, if we can't get the $20,000 check, why do we believe that we're going to be able to raise half a million dollars or a million dollars, which is what a seed round was back then? So he said, you know what? Let's just try to do this ourselves.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open up the conversation. And they're just very different. So we literally just, I mean, we look at them as two totally different types of customers. And then, you know, we're just lucky that we have a product that, you know, the fundamentals of like will work for both.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for us, it's a great, we've think about this a lot, and we're not perfect at it yet, but I think you just have to think about it as almost two different customers, two different businesses. I think because Ed and I had been entrepreneurs, we knew what it was like to be just starting out. We knew what that felt like, how your every dollar matters, and you almost, anything that takes on my time but doesn't cost money. Like, that sounds good. Like I'm willing to do it myself. But then we've also worked with big companies where we realized, oh my gosh, there's a process and they've got these security requirements and scalability and reliability matters. And the project's going to take 12 months for them to execute. So they're trying to de-risk that. And they're just totally different. The funny part is the technology isn't, it's not really all that different. The product and technology, it's really just matching up with what are the things that matter most to those folks. And I've always looked at it, when you walk in a room to a customer, if you can ask them questions that show that you know who they are, that you're one of them, that's the best way to.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's harder. The reason we got into, we started with SMBs. Both my co-founder and I came from enterprise sales and we would sell to huge companies like Starbucks and Bank of America and Marriott. And we saw long it took to get in there. So I think you just kind of have to pick your challenge. And for us, we just thought that would take a long time. Yeah.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great UX. But we also just built attribution. Like we want, because a lot of people say, like, well, especially in enterprise software, what's the ROI of this product? Why should I buy it? And we just built that straight into our product. And we put it on the homepage. When we would finally pitch folks, they'd be like, oh yeah, that's right. I've actually already seen the ROI I've done the calculation and I'm ready to buy. This is so obvious. So I think there's a lot you can do with product to just, you know, try to take the things you typically think of as like live in marketing or live in sales. And how can you just pull all of that forward in a product that lowers your CAC? I think that if you pick a product.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've always liked the kind of mantra that you can look at marketing as kind of scalable sales. Well, a great product should be scalable marketing. It's a little bit the show don't tell. A great product will kind of sell itself, right? Or it'll market itself. When we started, we felt like that's what it's got to do. It's got to be so good that, you know, if you sign up for our product, if you start to use it, it's really obvious where the value is right away. It's easy to get there. It doesn't need any marketing. Now, the reality is an asymptote, right? I mean, we obviously have marketing, we have sales. But the more you can do that, the more you make it easier for yourself. So Ed and I used to say like, boy, by the time we talk to a customer and we actually say, are actually working on them on a sales process, we want them to be so kind of in love with what we've built that we're rolling downhill. And so for us, like with Clavio, one of the first things we did was once we, especially once we got into marketing, not only did we make it easy to get started, I think a lot of people have done of like, how do you build?”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I'm a product builder. We want the best products to win. And I remember people telling me, you know, some of the companies I worked at, they're like, Andrew, you could build the best product, but the best product doesn't always win. And in some sense, we built Clavia to say like, well, gosh darn it, like we're going to level the playing field. Let's build software such that everybody can be good at marketing and now the best products can win. Hey, if we do this right, marketing is a thing, we kind of can level the playing field. There are folks that are great at, you know, building, you know, but maybe aren't great at marketing, like we can help them level up, give them superpowers.”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Analytical thinking, but also like fast record retrieval. So we need to build something that's good for that. But then after we built that, we were just very iterative and we said, okay, well, what is this useful for? It's kind of infrastructure in the world of software. There's infrastructure and applications. So what application should sit on top of this? And we pulled our customers and a lot of them said, oh, well, I'm using this for marketing. So we said, okay, great. Well, that will be the first application that kind of sits on top. That's how we got there. And that's, you know, it was kind of the bedrock. And now we think about like, okay, great. Well, what other applications could we build that sit on top of this multi-purpose database as kind of brain, so to speak, for a business?”
2024-06-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source