YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian O'Malley

lines on the record: 28
first: 2016-05-04
most recent: 2016-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This platform thing, people want to be the core platform of the home. But if you're not selling a product that has value on its own, you're not going to get there. So I think the router has an opportunity to really be that platform over time. And the team that was going after it really brought a unique perspective, these two guys, Mike and Paul, have a very deep background in enterprise networking and enterprise security, fundamentally understand how businesses have built out their networking capabilities, and they're taking that same level of expertise into the home. And where that manifests itself for the average consumer is kind of threefold. The first and most important thing is the performance. It's the performance that they put out is better than any other product in the market. The second thing is”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shirts of the most recent one is a company called Luma, and Luma is building a next generation home Wi-Fi router aiming to really recreate the whole in-home experience for what Wi-Fi should look like for a connected home that has multiple devices streaming, it has anything from a garage door to a toaster connected to the network. And it's very different than the world that the Lynxys and Neckgear routers were built for 10 plus years ago. And so what excited me about that opportunity was, A, I think it's a very real market problem. And I think it's an important market to a lot of players, whether you're an Amazon who invested in the round or whether you're a telecom provider or whether you're best buy or whether you're one of these other connected home devices. I think there's a lot of opportunity around that ecosystem. And I think a lot of times, again, going back to the”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really tends to be what you're focused on. I think Fred Wilson said this as well, but your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to set the vision, hire the right people, and make sure you have enough money to operate. And so the focus is really on those three things as opposed to finding anyone who has particular functional expertise.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think over time, my thinking has evolved to really looking at the team. And I think a lot of times when people hear looking at the team, they think that means that you're looking for someone who's done it before. And that's not necessarily the case, right? A lot of times people have done it before are the most blind to the opportunity that they're going into because they think it'll be, you know, be easy. And the teams that are most intriguing are the ones that have a high degree of precision around what questions they need to answer and what their strengths are and how they should go about answering those questions in the most kind of capital efficient, urgent way possible. And you'd be surprised how sometimes you see that level of understanding and detail from someone who's never really done a startup before, never founded something before, but they just have a very fundamental understanding of a particular market opportunity. And other times you see it with very experienced folks.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's funny. So early on, I became very focused on companies that had a really strong value proposition and a really interesting market that they were going after. And I wasn't too focused on the team side of things. And so I ended up backing a bunch of companies that did very well out of the gates. A, that helped me with promotions and helped me with my career. But a lot of those companies got to a point where they tapped out at the 50 or so million dollar revenue mark. And there just wasn't enough focus on are we building the right teams to really scale over time. Not to say that you need to have it all, but I think the reality is you kind of need to have it all. You need to have something that has a very strong value proposition into an intriguing market opportunity. But you also need to have teams that are able to execute on their own teams that know how to hire great people and teams that know how to get ahead of problems.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I feel incredibly fortunate to be where I am today. I think every once in a while you got to pinch yourself and feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with such amazing teams. We've got a really great collection of partners here at Excel. There's a lot of firms that have internal challenges where people do well financially, but they don't really love their partners. And we just have a really good dynamic going on here. So I feel very fortunate, right? And I made the move over here a couple years ago because I thought this was a platform that could be a place I spent 20 plus years. And so my career goal is to continue to have the opportunity to do what I'm doing. It just get better at it over time.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't read a ton for pleasure. My wife actually gives me a hard time. I read so much for work that my eyes are kind of tired. So my favorite business book that I read is actually zero to one. It was something I read on vacation a little while ago. It really helped me crystallize my thought process as I looked at companies, which ones are more incremental and which ones were fundamentally changing a marketplace and changing the way something is done today. So I'm a big fan of that book”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Community and the product over time, even if it's a commerce product or even if it's a SaaS product, those initial users actually are really important to how the product gets built out and what it looks like over time.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scariest companies are the ones that show up and they say, look, we're a platform. We're going to be the center of this ecosystem and all these people are going to integrate with us and we're going to be core to their businesses. Nothing really starts out as a platform. You need to start out solving a very fundamental problem. That problem is likely tied into some level of emotion, whether it's a business problem or not. And then over time, you take that product and you earn the right to be a platform because you reach a certain level of scale and penetration to the point where other people now want to take part in your ecosystem. I ascribe to the idea that you need to be very focused. Otherwise, you never going to get off the ground. You need to have value to their first hundred users, your first thousand users, and you need to be very cognizant over who those people are because that's going to drive the”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember it hung out around 4 million users for a good chunk of time. And there was always this question of like the seniors graduate and they turn off of Facebook and then the freshman come in. And so are you dealing with that? And so that's one of the things that we need to figure out as investors is which products look niche, which products look small, but if they focus on the right things, they have the opportunity to be really big over time.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the point where that's already published, then you're probably four years too late to that market, if not eight years too late to that market. It's really more a function of market potential, right? So this company Cruz just got bought by GM, and that was a really great investment that Spark Guys led. That's one of these things where you can look at that market and you can say, hey, today it's unknown. It's really small. It's got a ways to go. But on the other hand, that's a market that's really interesting because it's impacting a lot of very large companies and the core fabric of their business. So markets don't need to be there today. And I think a lot of times the most interesting companies are the ones that create a market, right? So you mentioned Facebook earlier. With Facebook, there was a question for a long time about whether there would ever be value outside of colleges.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I say a market, it's less that you've got some Gartner report that shows a magic quadrant that tells you that this market's already great, right?”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's funny because a lot of times you'll have companies come to you and say, Hey, if I hit this particular metric around number of users, or hey, if I hit this particular bar in terms of recurring revenue or in terms of sales efficiency, do we all of a sudden become an interesting candidate to investing? I think that's just such an overly simplistic model, right? Because the quality of a user or the value of a user is very different depending on what you're building. And there's never a threshold where you go from being not interesting to being interesting. It's really more this continuous spectrum where a variety of factors come together. And a lot of those factors don't even have anything to do with the metrics. They have to do with what's the market you're going after, how important is that market, what's going on with your team, how important do you understand the problems that you're facing now and will face over time.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a freemium offering down the road, or it might be one of these things where you look at it and you say, hey, if we can aggregate this audience, this is going to be strategic to a half a dozen different players. And so we're going to focus a lot more on audience aggregation because we think that if we can do that, there's a revenue model to be built over time. It really varies based on the business.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenue does a couple things, right? So A helps with cash flow of the business. And this is assuming we're talking about gross margin positive revenue, which was sort of the assumption for years until recently. But we're thinking about revenue that is margin positive. And so it helps with cash burn and it helps with expenses. That's one thing. And the next thing is that it shows a deeper level of customer engagement around a product. And there are certain categories you need to generate revenue in order to show that people like your product. And that tends to be into these commerce channels where at the end of the day, there's not a lot of strategic value if you can actually generate cash, if you can't actually have a sustainable revenue model, right? So if we're selling you something, we want to look at revenue as a core metric, right? If you're looking at more of a social app, there might be an advertising stream down the road. There might be more.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I was an investor in Dollar Shape Club. For them, subscription makes a ton of sense because the products are consumable. Subscription actually provides a value to the end consumer to not have to think about it. But other products, subscription is really serving the business more than it's serving the consumer. And in that case, you end up with these latent churn issues, whereas if you just had a product that people love, they would independently come back and use it because they love it, right?”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you don't rise to that level, people are just going to forget about you and you're going to fade into the background. You run into that retention issue. But there tends to be commonality. And I think a lot of times people try to lock retention in with a business model. Some of these subscription commerce companies, they're able to show that they have this nice lifetime value because people take a little while before they churn. But a lot of that I look at is it's almost like latent churn, right? If you make it really hard to actually cancel where you're opted in to purchasing, you got to call someone, then you got to email them. It takes three weeks before that person churns. And so you maybe get a couple more weeks of revenue. That looks okay in a financial model, but ultimately that doesn't feel sustainable. And so I really don't, I shouldn't say I don't care because certain businesses have the right model.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting because I invest in software companies, I invest in consumer marketplaces, I invest in social apps. And so I invest in businesses that ultimately have very different products and different business models. But at the end of the day, there's a commonality across all of them. And you're really looking for a product that has a high degree of usage and a high degree of stickiness. So whether it's a business app where you're looking at is someone in the app every day, right? Is this their core system of record? Is this fundamentally changing how they go about doing their job on a daily basis or whether it's a commerce app and you're changing the way someone buys a product on a recurring basis or whether it's a social app and you're changing how people interact with their friends and the people in the world around them, you're looking for something that's going to drive a fundamental change in behavior because at the end of the day,”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retention is really the only variable that is exponential, right? So if you think about your retention numbers compound every month, right? So the difference between a churn rate of 1% per month, 2% per month, or 3% per month, if you compound that out over time, it makes a dramatic difference versus a metric like a CPA metric, which is linear, right? So you would much rather spend $300 to get people who are going to churn one-third the percent than spend $100. So for different businesses, we look at retention at a different rate.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're in, you get excited by success and you get excited by growth. That's the main reason why you'd be working at a startup as opposed to taking a more cushy job at a bigger company where you get paid a ton of money out of the gate. What's been surprising to me is how many companies where they've handled these conversations the right way and really align people around look these are the metrics we need to hit to show whether it's profitability or whether it's sustainable growth, aligning people around those, even if it involves some level of cuts to the expense side of things. Today, that's what people are looking for. Like they don't want to go work at the companies. They're just blowing cash left and right. They want to work at businesses that have a mission, have a strong team, have a strong culture, but are also building sustainable companies that are not reliant on capital markets in order to be successful over time.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The time we had like 10 people in engineering and two sales reps. I think this was probably in 2009. And he looked at me and he said, well, no wonder we're not hitting any of our sales goals. We don't have enough people out selling. And so I think he took two heads from engineering, people that weren't performing as well and hired two more salespeople. And lo and behold, all of a sudden, we started selling more because the focus of the business at that time had gone from initial product development into customer development and into having more of a sales relationship. And same thing goes on the consumer side, right? I've got one company where, again, like we had a bloated engineering organization. That's not to say that they weren't productive and they weren't good engineers, but the best engineers are so much better than the worst ones. Being able to refocus some of that spend and put it towards things that are going to drive the business, that ends up exciting everyone across the company. It doesn't matter what part of the organization.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that people have gone from one extreme where there was a lot of spend on things that were not driving the business forward to the other extreme where you're taking good companies and you're cutting into the muscle a little bit. And so I think it's just being very thoughtful about which spend is actually driving the growth engine and which spend is just spend. In that company in particular, there were other things we were spending money on that just wasn't driving the business. So we cut a bunch of that out. That's a business where sales has a much broader impact than marketing does. And so we're increasing the expense on the sales side and we're stealing it from the expense on the marketing side. One of the companies I got involved with very early on was a business called Coupa and they're a spend management platform in the procurement space. And I remember talking to the CEO there and we had.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there's two separate trends that are converging at the same time, and they both have to do with fundraising getting harder and values dropping. Fundraising at the end of the day is a means to an end. And sometimes as a team, you can get very cheap money that has little strings attached and is not very dilutive. And other times money is more expensive. But at the end of the day, if you're successful, whether you as a founder get diluted down to 25% ownership or whether you get diluted down to 12% ownership, if you end up selling for several hundred million dollars or more, that still is a pretty good day at the office. And that still is a very successful outcome. Some of the factors is certainly around dilution. And I think that that's something we all need to be mindful for. But you kind of raise money in the environment that you're in. And the reality is every company, at least that we're involved with, the assumption is they're going to take eight to ten.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I think Q1 2001, we kind of goose egged it. And so seeing both those sides, I think I carry those lessons over now to A, you know, not assume that you have all the answers when you show up. And B, understand that people are working really hard. And a lot of times hard work putting against the wrong product set doesn't always materialize into success. And that doesn't mean that people just need to work harder. It means that you need to think about things in a different way. And that's been something that in the boardroom, you see a lot of venture people show up, you know, spend a half hour looking through the materials and assume that they have all the right answers. Living through the experience I live through, that just feels like a very naive way to approach working with founders and working with teams.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when you have things cratering like that around you and when you, we had some real customers, we had people paying millions of dollars to buy our software. And so when you've got juxtaposition of those two things of a team shrinking dramatically, but expectations of customers still being very high, you end up learning a lot very quickly. In venture, you see a lot of people who sort of show up and assume that they have all the right answers without really understanding the context or the history and saw that a ton with the new CEOs that would show up where they would try something that they thought was new but was something that the guy before them did. And they just very rarely would ask the right questions. And the assumption was that they needed to have all the right answers. Living through that company both in terms of, you know, I think we closed about $25 million in new business in Q4 2000 and everyone was high five each other.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, this was an interesting time, right? When I showed up, I was an intern originally. The company had about 30 people came back a year later, and it was around 360 people. And I think over 100 or so of those were MBAs and people were kind of pre-ordering their Porsches. It was very much a crazy time. Ended up coming out to the West Coast. The business was based on the East Coast. And so when I got to San Francisco, there was 20, 25 people out here. And after six rounds of layoffs, after four CEO changes ended up being the last one left on the West Coast.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started out more of a lofty kind of strategic title, but when it became clear that 2001 was going to hit and things were going to change dramatically, you wanted to be at the intersection of either building something or selling something. I ended up doing a little bit of both where I moved into more of a technical sales role where I helped build out a lot of the integrations at the time and then helped take those into customers. And that was actually a really amazing learning experience to get hands on with a bunch of the enterprise application platforms at the time, things like CBOL, things like interwoven, things like i2, but also spend a ton of time in front of customers and really understand how to work things through the sales process.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was maybe a little bit different. I was coming through school in the late 90s and had been fascinated by venture at the time, saw it really as this interesting intersection between building companies and also more of the financial markets. And so I'd always been intrigued by the opportunity but thought it was something that I would do maybe later on in life. Really loved computers. My dad worked for IBM, so grew up with a PC. When I went to college, I didn't get a CS degree. I did an undergraduate business program. I thought it was important that I knew how to write code. And so when I was a freshman in college, got a job at Motorola as a developer. And that carried over into the next year. Really love developing. Just didn't love the big company kind of game. And so ended up working with a couple startup founding teams and helped them launch their companies. And then, you know, Wen worked at a business called Bow Street that was very much a high flying business at the time.”
2016-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source