YouSaid · the spoken record

David Politis

lines on the record
26
first
2016-12-23
most recent
2016-12-23
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “So, the next five years, we're just really getting started. Like I mentioned before, this SaaS management platform has been four, four and a half years in the making, and we've now started to add connectors to other applications. And for me, the way I view it is the adoption of SaaS applications is at this point taking off in companies of all sizes all over the world. And we want to become the centralized place for IT to control and manage those applications. And I think over the next five years, we're in a good position to do that.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The biggest maturation is stepping back from certain areas of the business and trusting them to other people on my team. I think that's probably the biggest or maybe alongside that is I communicate a lot more about why we do things to the company and where we are as a business, to the team in general. I just communicate a lot more. I spend a lot more time talking to the team so that everyone's on the same page. So those are the two things I do a lot more today than I ever did before.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The two must reads. The first one is recode. I read that every morning, and the only other newsletter that I get is honestly the only other one that I read is our own Better Cloud Monitor. So we have a daily newsletter about IT that we send out. So those are the two that I read every morning.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, that's a very interesting question. I wish that what I knew now is how much was actually possible in how open this market was going to be. I think there's a lot of fear about competition always in any market. And I wish that I kind of had reminded myself or that I knew, hey, this market is big enough for many different players and having more confidence in that.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So I have two books that I've read last, I don't know, five, six years I really like. The first is Red Notice by Bill Browder, and the second one is Banker to the Poor by Mohammed Yunus. Just both of them are stories about businesses in other parts of the world in emerging markets at the time that these were being written and very, very different kinds of businesses and, again, very different kinds of markets and just really fascinating. I mean, Red Notice reads like a spy novel, you know, but it's a true story and it's amazing. And I've always been interested in microfinance. And so Banker to the Poor is about that. And I think that that's really interesting. And just in general, they both make me thankful for the environment that I operate in compared to those markets.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, the thing we did well not on purpose, but it has come out of these rounds is we've ended up with a very good, very well-rounded investor syndicate. We have people on the West Coast, on the East Coast. We have people who are really big in the New York tech scene. We have people really big in enterprise IT. We have people who are operators, people who are full-time investors. And so we got this really, really good mix and really good syndicate that I feel is undervalued in terms of, as I talk to other founders, some people have challenges where you have all the same.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I had a family, so it really the stakes increased. And so when I look at it, process got easier as time went on because I was, I knew what to expect. I had a team that could back me up. I had materials. I knew what was going to be asked for for diligence. I had customers to do references. I had other investors that would vouch for me. And so the process I feel like got easier or more straightforward. The stress of the stakes, because the expectations internally and from investors that are giving you this much money, that got harder and more stressful for me and as well for my team. So I don't know if that, you know, but that's kind of how I would. Summarize the rounds”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “They don't at all. I would present, I'd realize how stupid some of my slides would look. I'd go back to the office and start reworking them. And so in the early stages, it was challenging. I met some VC, some high-profile VCs who won, which I'll never forget, said, okay, you get seven minutes to pitch me. I was four minutes in. He didn't even give me time to sit down. Didn't want me to pull out my deck. And four minutes in. Okay, well, why should I believe this is a multi-billion dollar idea? We had literally just launched our product. I was not really prepared to answer that question and basically got kicked out with, I don't think it's the best way to treat founders and entrepreneurs, but things like that where those early stages were challenging. And I think as the later stages came, the stakes were going up. And what was at stake, the expectations, we had a lot more people on the team. We had thousands of customers using us every single day to do their jobs.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I mean, every stage for me was different and challenging and unique in its own way. I'll say that the early rounds, I was really nervous. I mean, when I think back about my meetings, any new VC I met didn't matter who it was, I was nervous. I didn't really understand how to read VCs when people said, oh, this is interesting. You know, stay in touch. I thought they actually meant this is interesting. Stay in touch.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “At once over a period of a couple months. And it was shock. It just shocked everyone. It was culture shock, actually, to go from no programs to 10 people programs. And we were so excited about doing it. And so we definitely learned our lesson. We ripped some back. We canceled some. And then we've been aware as we're rolling things out. Okay, the last thing we did was six months ago. It seems like a good time to roll this thing out that we've wanted to roll out. So that's something that we that I learned that I won't do next time is I'll be slower with it. Probably started a little bit earlier, but it's worked. I think it's worked extremely, extremely well for us.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Last thing I'll mention and then is the idea of recognizing people when they're doing well. So in those same company meetings, when we have the whole company together, it's a mandatory meeting. At the end of the meeting, we have a crushing it awards section. And so every month we call out somewhere between five and eight people who have done an amazing job in the last month. And those are people who were suggested by their peers, by their managers. And we call them out by name and also exactly what they did and why we're calling them out for quote unquote crushing it. And I love that. You know, it again goes back to the ownership that people have over their work. And if they do a good job, they get the credit for that. And so those are some of the things that we've done that have been good. The one thing I will warn against or that I will say we made a mistake in is we got so excited about being deliberate. We made 80 changes. I don't know. We made something like we put in 10 people program.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Feedback about a specific leader on the team, maybe meet with 10 or 15 people on their team or who work with them, gathers feedback, and what could they be doing better? What are they doing great? What do you want them to do more of? What do you wish they would do for their team? Things like that, and then take that information, share it with that manager or with that leader. The key part of this is that the leader has to then take that feedback, good, bad, and ugly, and show it to their entire team. And with that feedback, they also have to tell them what they're going to do to work on their weaknesses. And it creates this sense of this real accountability. And at that level. And when you do that, and I started with it, the first one was on me, and I went to a company meeting, and I presented everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, what people wanted more for me, what I was doing well. And I said, these are things I'm going to work on. And I think those kinds of things, it just helps to drive things forward.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And the employee value prop talks about how we give people ownership over their work, talk about how we're going to be transparent, how we're going to help people grow. This is going to be a personal growth experience, a career growth experience. So we write that down and we stick to it and we put it out there so people hold us to it and we tell them this is what we expect from you. If we're going to give that to you, this is what we expect from you. Always strive to delight, work hard with a sense of purpose, things like that, communicate early and often. So we write it down. That has helped put a stake in the ground and let management let new people who are joining revolve around that. Something else that we do that I think is unique, I have not seen it at other companies is we do these leadership effectiveness sessions. And these are things where it's kind of leadership 360s on our managers, our directors, our VPs, our C-level executives. And we go around the HR team anonymously meets with people one-on-one, gathering.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The first way we've done that, what we've done is one, we hired someone who's responsible to run HR. When I say that I've had HR people at previous companies, but they've been mostly administrative, where this person we brought on was really responsible for people and for culture. And we needed to find someone who's really passionate about that and ready to give really invest there. And they report to me, which is also important, is that this was not something that's reporting into operation CFO. It reports into me the CEO because that's how important it is. That's number one. Number two, we took all the things that we preach, our employee value proposition, what we expect from our team. We took all of these things and we wrote them down. And we wrote them down, we distributed them, and we repeat them at every meeting, company meeting that we do. We do a company meeting once a month for an hour and a half. And at the end of every meeting, we repeat these things.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That culture, if it's not deliberate, if you're not preparing for it, then it starts to break down when you reach that 80, 90, 100 people mark. So that's kind of where I've, where I've seen in the first two companies I was a part of, and I was part of the executive teams, and I feel like that happened at those two companies. We never really invested in being deliberate about it. And it was a beautiful culture, and it was amazing how it grew organically really in those cases from the founders, from the CEO, and it just broke down at some point because we weren't working on it.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, so I think that there is some limit. I think when a company is founded, the culture just is. It's created organically. It's almost unknowingly. And you have a couple people in the room, a couple dozen people across a couple rooms. It just happens. And in many cases, it takes on the personality of the founder or CEO. And no one's really thinking about it. And over time, that may grow. That continues to grow organically. But when you get to 80, 90, 100 people, that's at least where I've seen it. If you're not deliberate about it, it breaks down. It breaks out because there's just, especially if you think about how many people you've been hiring and how fast usually at that point in a company history journey, you're almost hiring too fast to really indoctrinate people and get them brought in and have it through osmosis reach that person. I mean, you have to really start trying. And so for me, I've seen that.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Point or something that's based on mutual respect and communication, a true connection, being upfront with each other. And the core of that relationship is going to be stronger and is going to outlast any problems that come up. And so that's where my frustration. I think it's become like an arms race. And really, it's not really good for anybody.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Puts that front and center, I think people would wonder, you know, not maybe people right out of school, but I think people who have been in other organizations, they start thinking if they're going to be investing this much in these perks, do they have enough or are they going to be investing equally in my personal kind of growth and my career development? Are they trying to just distract me from something else that's going on? So that's, you know, I feel pretty strongly in this, obviously I feel pretty strongly in this whole area. I think that it's actually easier to just spend money and deal with giving perks than it is to give the important stuff. I look at it a little bit like a marriage. That is how I describe it to the woman who runs HR for us. I describe it as a marriage. If you think about it, it's the difference between a marriage-based entirely on wealth and material goods and gifts and things like that. And that's pretty superficial. It's probably bound to break down at some point.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I'm pretty passionate about this subject. In general, I feel like incentivizing or recruiting or retaining people through perks is pretty lazy. I think it's superficial. It's unhealthy. You know, when I talk about perks, just to be clear, I mean things like free breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day, free dry cleaning, shuttle service, yoga. I think it's bad actually on both sides. I think the company is going to start attracting people who are motivated by perks and may not be passionate about the vision of the organization itself. Or you're just going to have to keep outdoing yourself in order to keep those people interested. And you're going to have to keep upping the game in terms of which perks you offer. And every time they ask for a perk, you kind of are on the hook to deliver it because that's what you brought them in from. And I think it leaves you with an unfulfilled team, which is not really what you want. At some point, it backfires. And for a person joining a company that is so focused on perks.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So I was at Vocalocity for about six years from Vocalocity, I went to a company that was called Cloud Sherpas. And Cloud Sherpas is very different from Vocalocity in that it was a cloud consulting company. They were helping people. When I got there, it was a very small company. And it was helping people move off of Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Nodes, groupwise.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That we interviewed people, trained people the way. I mean, it's thinking back on those days, if I got into all the stories, it's probably you would need a drink, I would need a couple, and all the listeners would need a lot more to listen to all these stories.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Things I learned, I mean, I learned everything about how to build an inside sales organization, how to do customer support, how not to do customer support, how to build product, how to hire, fire. I learned so much. And the mistakes, again, really way outnumbered the things that I would do again. And I've been working my whole career to not make those mistakes again, whether it be the investors that you bring on board, whether it be, again, the way you do customer support and how you treat customers in the process, whether it be when you choose to raise money, whether it be the culture and how you build that culture in the organization, how you actually have to invest in that culture, leverageable marketing. There were so many things that we did, that we made mistakes on. And it was, again, just really the most important point of my career because of that, because of being able to see that and learn that firsthand. I mean, the way.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, to do, I think that part of the benefit of being so young and really not having experience is that there really wasn't any fear and there wasn't any preconceived notions about what was possible, what was impossible. And so the first thing, and I still follow this today, is just really to trust your gut. And that really, if you put your mind to it, anything is possible. You need to figure out the right solution to get there. But I think that was the thing that I learned that I was lucky enough to learn early on. That was one, two. I learned that I was actually capable of doing building this business and that if I was able to do that, then there must be other people at my age or my level of experience who could really punch above their weight and that I needed to give that opportunity to people like that because they could really make a big impact. And I followed that throughout my career since then. Those are some of the”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So early in my career, I was able to do that and do that where I had the support of a couple of founders that had done it before.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Been very successful with their previous companies. So they weren't involved as much day to day and they made me CEO. I sat down with the engineer, realized we were really in the wrong business. We had an interesting technology we were using, but in the wrong business. So we pivoted and built a cloud-based PBX. And that was my first foray into the cloud. That was before the word cloud was being used is actually before the word SAS was being used at the time. We called it a hosted PBX. And so I was able to get a lot of experience there. And we built that business up. We had tens of thousands of customers, tens of millions of ARR, 150 employees. The company ended up being acquired by Vonnage a couple years ago. The company's called Vocalocity. It ended up being acquired by Vonnage and became Vonnage's business services group. And so I learned a lot in that experience about building a business, what to do, what not to do, made a lot of mistakes and was just honestly really lucky that...”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Sure. So, a little bit of background on me if I go all the way back born and raised in New York City, kind of always had the passion to be an entrepreneur. My father is an entrepreneur. And as I was growing up, I always really wanted to own my own business and to build something from the ground up. And when I graduated school, I went to Emory down Atlanta, Georgia. And when I finished school, I was looking for what I wanted to do next and kind of stumbled into a small technology startup, 15 people that was there in Atlanta. It was a voiceover IP company. And you could say either really lucky or really unlucky, but in about six months after starting that job, they ended up letting go of everyone in the company except for me and one engineer. And so the two of us were left there to build this business. They actually made me CEO of the company. That's an incredible compliment. Yeah, it was lucky that the two founders at that time had both.”

    2016-12-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What VCs Really Mean They Say 'Stay In Touch', Why Incentivisation Through Perks Is Lazy & Why Founders Should Always Under-Promise & Over-Deliver with David Politis, Founder @ CEO @ Bettercloud · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source