YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Pflaum

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28
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2018-02-02
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2018-02-02
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  1. “Thank you, Harry, very much for this opportunity. And if I can be helped, any entrepreneurs listening to this, please feel free to connect me on LinkedIn or send me an email at Andy atastro-inc.com.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So we say our next five years is keeping our heads down, working on building what we hope will be an indispensable service to help people and teams focus on their most important work. And we'll be providing that through the AI powered intelligence service that we have and a subscription service for the users. And we'll be providing good integrations and distribution with some key partners in the SaaS field. And in five years, we expect to be a thriving, profitable, independent company that's known for making its customers very focused, very productive, and happy.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, I think we really need continued improvement in access to early stage capital for first time entrepreneurs, especially the ones who don't come in with deep connections here in the valley where the plurality of VC investment comes from. That situation seems to be getting better, but I've witnessed how hard it can be for some very smart folks to get access to the same opportunities and the same consideration that some of us have been fortunate to have.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, I'll admit, I subscribe to a huge number, but I filter most of them and just look at them sort of casually. But the ones that I don't filter are Tom Tungas at Redpoint has a great blog just at his website, TomTungas.com. Terrific for operators, especially of earlier stage SaaS companies. And although it's not really a blog, I would definitely recommend going checking out the short videos at Michael Deering has on his HarrisonMetal.com website. Those are fascinating. And lastly, there's in the news category, the one newsletter I do look at is Recode Daily.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So, we want to continue evolving Astro and AstroBot so that it becomes the layer of intelligence for how people and teams work across a range of services in their work. This means helping tie together the cues and signals for what's most important to them from email and other messaging systems and everything else, all that other data that pours at them in the workplace so they can focus on their most important work and not be distracted by the majority of information that's available to us, but that's kind of low value and not urgent.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think there's no better one frankly in life and in work than do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. I think it just carries you through so many situations.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I love the Wright Brothers, which is written by David McCullough a couple years ago. Just this past week was the anniversary of that first controlled flight that the Wright brothers did back in 1903. And I think what's so fascinating about them is in just over four years from the time they first started researching how to create an airplane, they had an airplane up in the air having worked through multiple groundbreaking inventions in order to accomplish that. It's just a really remarkable story even in this age where we have what seem like overnight success technology companies for them to have accomplished what they did in just over four years, I think is such an inspiring story. And David McCullough is a fascinating writer, so it's a really great read.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Empty, you start to get a lot more careful with the tissues. And the same thing happens with your time, with your energy, and your finances as a company. You have to be thinking as if the tissue box is almost full for many of the decisions you make throughout the life of the company.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think that the primary thing that we would change is consistent with how you want to run your business, which is the more narrow you can have of a focus on what your proposition is, the better that people can understand it and give you feedback on it, and the better that you could start to build your business. Having a relatively narrow focus, you can almost always expand your scope from there. You can almost always expand the range of discussions that you have with investors, and you can almost always expand what you're building as well in the business. But if you go too broad, it can be hard for investors to understand. It can be hard for your you and your team to actually get a focused product into market. So that's one thing I think is always important in a fundraising process. And there's another element which comes to how do you spend your money and how do you spend your time? And Michael Diering is a great quote that I've really appreciated, which is he said a little while back that when you have a tissue box that's full, you typically take one tissue for each below. And then when your tissue box is getting”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I think that one of the most important things that we were able to do was to focus early on on who were the investors who were going to be able to give us the best insights and the best feedback. Ideally, these are investors as we have who have some knowledge of our domain and some expertise around it and are willing to share their views, but then also recognize that they're no longer quite the experts that they might have been or that we are on a day-to-day basis and that there's so much evolution going on in any one space that the operating team, the company, is going to need to be the real experts and we can get that advice and get that input and we want them to have that domain expertise. So that's very valuable to us. But then they also know where to sort of stop and say, okay, we trust what we're hearing from you. We have given you feedback and we can see it being incorporated, but we won't go beyond a certain point because we know that you're the specialists in that. So that's been very helpful to us to figuring that out from the beginning.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So I'd say the first thing that was really important to us is having a sense that we could have trusted conversations with our investors. We know we can't get the best insights and the best advice. If I'm worried about with each conversation having to sort of sell them or pitch them on the status of the company or what our next plans are, I want to be able to have honest open discussions about those things. And for them to feel that they can speak openly with us and that it's not going to wound us or cause us to change how we communicate with them. So having a sense that we could have those trusted conversations. And that comes sometimes from already knowing or already working with a firm or an investor, as was the case with Redpoint. In other cases with new investors like we have with Michael Deering of Harrison Metal and with Aspect Ventures, the relationships that others have had and the recommendations that others can provide there. And so having that, seeing that track record and having those recommendations is important for us because there's a real two-way street in the signals that the investors look for about us and the signals we look at.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Sure, that's definitely a consideration. I hate to start off with a firm. We have multiple investors and we think about this with each of them who might then back away get cold feet or say, you know, we're not too enthusiastic about participating in the future round. So that's always a concern, but that just keeps the onus on us to perform as we need to anyway and to execute and to be good partners with the folks who've entrusted us with the money that the pension funds and the hospitals and the endowments have all given them to succeed with.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Go in deep and go ahead and commit ourselves to a long term in this red point is an example of a firm's great to do that with.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “There were two factors for us in that. One is that we believed what we were getting into in workplace communications was going to be a long play. That there are big players in this space that we partner with as well as you could say kind of compete alongside. And those are Google and Microsoft to name a couple, but there are many others as well that are also formidable and have great product offerings. And so we knew this was not going to be something we could just conquer the market in a year's time. And so we were going to need to put our heads down and work for quite a while and having the funding to back that was important. We also had an existing strong relationship with Redpoint and Satish Dharmiraj at Redpoint. And we had a comfort in knowing that this is a firm that we very likely could grow with into the future and that if we met our goals that they would be interested to work with us as we went from seed to A round and hopefully well beyond that. And so those two factors caused us to say we'd like to”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, we try to do paid in a couple ways. We try to never let it go beyond a certain portion, a very kind of low fraction of our overall attainment of new users. If it goes too high for any brief period of time, then that suggests that we're out of balance and we're not kind of focused on the right areas of our product growth and the product features and the appeal of the product itself. But we do use paid growth as well to try to test different messages and test different channels because they're going to be periods in our life that we really want to pour on the gas and where we feel like we've really got the product nailed and we got the proposition and we simply need to get the word out. And so we do a lot of sampling and testing right now again at a pretty modest spend, but it's important that we do that testing now so that we're really ready when we want to turn on the jets.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, I'd say a few things. One is, ironically, some of the factors I just mentioned about having all these services kind of do it yourself to start and launch a company through its early stages. It actually, I think, then puts a lot more dependency on a few team members in running that company where some of that was handled by other people in the past. So maybe you don't have an on-staff bookkeeper or an accounting consultant as early in the company, but now you've got the CEO handling reimbursements or you don't have a retained recruiter, but now you've got the VP of engineering managing the company profile on a hiring website or things like that. And so there's some time and distraction that you have to consider. It's a bit of a drain sometimes now with that. But a major one is just the overall challenge in hiring for technical talent. It's just become more competitive and one of the negative real challenges being here in the Bay Area is the overall cost of hiring here. And that has been driven by that competition with the big tech companies, as we mentioned.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Or easier ways to manage our company's finances, or online services like eShares for managing our company's cap table, and hiring services like Hired.com and Handshake. Our last two hires each came from those two services that previously we would have had to work through recruiter under a different and more expensive paid model. And so we've used those kinds of services. It doesn't take us the same number of people or the same amount of spend to manage the operational aspects of starting a company like it once did.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, one thing I would say is there's just so much more information available even than there was 10 years ago. You could read online about nearly every problem or issue or facet of your business that you need to tackle. And sometimes that's through discussion boards and sometimes that's through private groups you can join and sometimes that's through blogs from operators and from venture capitalists. So there's so many great resources. And then there are so many systems in place to help you launch and run a startup with frankly less dependency than before on hiring specialists or team members or consultants who are just dedicated to some admin or operational tasks. The biggest I'd say element of that is of course AWS or the similar services from Google and Microsoft cloud services but also the rise of more online services for managing a company. We probably use I'd say 20 online or SaaS services to run our company and I'm not even talking about other online services related to building our product like JIRA and GitHub, but these are services for operating our company like managing our company benefits.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Leading stripe, which is clearly an immensely successful startup in a relatively short period of time, but even he says, hey, this takes a long time of dedicated work, and I think we have to have that in mind when we're in startups. Now, having said that, Harry, I would also say we really want people to be virtually all in, but that has to be balanced for every person on the team with ways to sustain that protracted effort. People have to have some good balance and some good healthy outlets. And for some of us, that's family and friends, the time we spend with them. And for others, hopefully everybody has a healthy pursuit, like some sort of a sport or physical activity they can do for me. I like to run with my wife and a couple of my daughters, things that get you a release away from that dedicated, hard work time you do have to spend when you're in a startup.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Generally, yes. I certainly like people who have a creative side that flex their muscles beyond just what the day to day of the job entails. And so sometimes that's a positive signal, but be a little bit wary about somebody who's got too much of their time devoted to outside pursuits. I'll give you one example. We found and recruited an excellent contractor to work with our team based outside of the Bay Area, and he worked with us as a consultant for a while until we hired him on full time. But we made sure when we hired him on full time that we were compensating him sufficiently more than he'd ever been compensated so that we could as part of that deal say, could you take down your moonlighting business? We want you to be all in any extra hours and effort you can be giving, we'd love you to give to what we're doing here. So I think that's a bit of an issue. And when you're joining a startup, I do think you have to devote yourself to the long run. You can't build hoping for some quick win in the marketplace or quick outcome. And I think it was Patrick Collison I recently heard saying he was surprised how long it takes to build a successful startup. And he's...”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, what I was saying is that I think that as true as ever is that for startups to be successful, they have to understand and the leaders and the founders and certainly the early people who hire under those startups need to understand that you're rarely going to get extraordinary outcomes from ordinary type work. And I think in a lot of the big companies, you can do relatively ordinary work in terms of your effort and in terms of your contribution and the leverage that your contribution has. In startups, you can't really get away with ordinary work. You've really got to commit yourself to a lifestyle and to an effort level, consistent effort level that's mostly unlike what you have at the big companies.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I do think they have some interesting work to do. They're working on interesting projects, and you can tackle interesting things, although you do tend to work on it in a pretty minute way, so you're often working on one narrow aspect when you're in a big company of an interesting project. So I think that's a big difference versus a startup. And they have put more compensation toward team members in those companies. That's been something they've done with their big reserves of cash. So that's a strong competing factor. But I don't think those are insuperable. We can't, not as though we can't overcome those as startups. It just makes for a bit stronger challenge than there was maybe 10 years ago.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I think it is a significant issue, and I've spent about a half dozen years in large tech companies, and I have to say it doesn't really”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think my answer on that has probably shifted in the past few years. I would have almost hands down before said go ahead, get in that startup or go to that medium-sized growth company. I think there's merits to all of them, but I would now lean more toward go to that medium-sized growth company. You know, if you could get in today at a company like Stripe or Slack, for example, I think you get incredible growth opportunities. And if you merit it, you'll get great opportunities to grow in your own career very quickly as well. And there's a lot to be said for some of the larger companies because they're increasingly well managed. In some sense, I may be speaking against myself because of course we want to continue to recruit great people into startups like our own. But I think for the person just coming out, there are unparalleled opportunities now to learn in those growth environments and even some of the bigger companies.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Now dealing with a whole other set of business issues you typically don't have in the software world, such as managing physical inventory and shipping and seasonality and hospitality and these types of things. So it was a wonderful experience. After that, in 2015, I came back and got together with Roland and Ross, who I knew from way back at one box and from Zimbra. And we knew we wanted to do a company together. And we wanted to do it in the space of workplace communications, which we thought was still something of a chaotic mess, frankly, for most users in the workplace. And so we started Astro, which kind of brings us up toward today.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah. And also at that team were Roland Schemers and Ross Dargahi, who were my co founders in Astro today. So fast forward a few years and after OneBox had been part of a big acquisition by phone.com, I joined a new startup called Zimbra, which was being founded by Satish, Roland, and Ross. And Zimbra was a leading open source collaboration suite for enterprise customers. And that was also a successful company. And through some interesting M&A activities, it took me through a couple years first at Yahoo and then at VMware. And at the end of that, my wife and I took an opportunity we'd always talked about, which was to move our family to Chile and South America for a bit. Her father had grown up there on a farm, which is still in the family today. In fact, it has a vineyard and winery on it. So we moved to the capital, Santiago, put our three girls into Chilean girls school for about a year and a half. I stepped in as general manager of my wife's family's winery. And that was a great experience for me, not only because it was an interesting change from tech, but because I was”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, after university, I spent a few years in the 1990s working for a nonprofit organization that was helping support the process of democratization that many countries in Southern Africa were taking at that time. So as part of that, I lived and worked about two years in Cape Town, South Africa, which was in the period shortly after the end of apartheid and when Nelson Mandela had been elected president in South Africa. But what I learned very quickly is that in a country where 80% of the population, primarily the Black South Africans, were suddenly now free to vote and in theory to participate in all aspects of the country's development, the economy, politics, education system, in reality there were still huge barriers for most of the people to participate in a meaningful way. And at the time, I didn't know anything about how economies or businesses worked. So I came back to the US to go to grad school at Stanford. And after that, I joined a startup here in the valley called OneBox as the first business person on the team. And the first person I met when I was interviewing was the engineering lead, Satish Dharmaraj. Today is now our investor in my current.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yes, thank you very much, Harry. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk and follow in the footsteps of Michael and many other great guests you've had on this podcast. And I think the first of your podcast I ever listened to was a couple years ago with Guy Kawasaki. And ever since that, I've been a frequent listener.”

    2018-02-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Young People in Tech Today, Why Distributed Workforces Are The Secret To Beating Incumbents & Why It Has Never Been Easier To Operate A Company Than Today with Andy Pflaum, Founder & CEO @ Astro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source