YouSaid · the spoken record

David Ulevitch

lines on the record: 77
first: 2019-05-20
most recent: 2019-05-20
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

“Absolutely. I think about demographic transitions. I think about when I read about what's happening in Japan, it makes me think about how's that going to change my investing thesis. I think it comes up.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm just like, also, like, I'll be okay if I just don't do this. So I had trouble in school with things I really didn't enjoy. So I learned how to optimize for the things that I like doing. And anthropology, I just, every book I read, I thought was so interesting. I learned about like how women, you know, enforce power hierarchy in South America in a way that we don't have elsewhere in the world. I learned about what happens in Southeast Asia around farming. I learned about the Green Revolution in Africa. But then I find that in my life, I actually think about these things all the time.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've had a 1099 or a W2 every year since eighth grade. I worked at a mom and pop ISP in San Diego and I learned all about routing and networking. I went to Washington University in St. Louis. I applied to the School of Arts and Sciences. When I went there to interview, they actually then had me interview with somebody in the School of Engineering and the Computer Science Department by the end of first semester of freshman year I'd switch back to the School of Arts and Sciences. And the reason I switched was I took a class of introduction to human evolution and I just found it so fascinating. Like I've always learned in my life, I do best of the things I really enjoyed working on. Like I have trouble doing things I don't want to do.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly Totally, totally. I consider myself an ethnographuresque editor. Totally. Because I want the context to know what I'm not hearing, to really understand. So it's interesting because on the ethnographer's side, I don't think people know this about you, but you started off your career or academic career because you actually started working when you were like”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right The deeper insights come out when you go down there, like, tell me more about that picture. Exactly. That's when you get these flashes in your brain of like, wait, now I really understand what's happening. It's not that annual planning sucks. It's that you're having budget issues that aren't being resolved in a way that you need or that maybe your tools you're using to do annual planning or your way you communicate and collaborate with your team or the way you work cross-functionally is not working totally”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's interesting to me about that is to me, this is the difference between a focus group and an ethnographer. Focus groups and surveys are asking questions for things you already know to ask. That's right. And an ethnographer is embedded in an organization or is sitting and is essentially just listening to learn and observe and letting those patterns reveal things.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk to a customer. Oh, what's going on? Oh, we're doing like annual planning, budget planning. Tell me more about that. Like, how are you thinking about that? What is happening? What's the frustrating part about annual planning? Tell me more about that.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need an answer 99%. You That's right. When I think about empathy, you really want to be a great listener. And so actually, a friend of mine, Wendy McNaughton, she does this whole like New York Times thing every other week where she really goes deep onto a topic. Yeah. She's written these books. I think she thinks of herself as an artist. I think of her as an artist and an entrepreneur. One of the things that she taught me about a year or a year or two ago was like when she's trying to teach people like how to sort of be a really, really solid listener is that when someone's talking to you, you're like, tell me more about that.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, that's half the battle in relationships. You don't need an answer 99%. You need someone to say, fuck, I feel for you. That sucks. And you're already feeling like 80% better. That's right. That's right.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Design thinking Dag knows what's wrong. Then, when you're building a company, being empathetic really means understanding. It doesn't mean accommodating. There were situations all the time, and this happens all the time as a leader, like, you may not resolve that thing. You can still understand it and be empathetic. And be like, yeah, that is terrible. Like, I understand what you're saying. I'm hearing you.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a function of how humans. So, speaking of this telling people more than once and learning to listen, that was your big shift between when you came back to BCEO and you kind of learned your lesson, so to speak. I honestly feel like that's kind of a trite thing people say all the time. Let's listen better. I hate the design thinking mindset around empathy for the, and this scenario and this persona, and it's just so I can't diagnose what's wrong.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but he would tell me some statistic about what's happening with marketing spend or with hiring or sales plans. And I'd be like, oh, that's not really a problem, like whatever. Like, I don't care. You're just like a crazy finance bean counter. But then you'd come back a week later and he'd be like, hey, I have more data. Like, I did further analysis. You ignored me. Like, I know I'm right here. And then I'd be like, oh, you're right. Why didn't you tell me this last week?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I would say is you do sometimes need to present an idea more than once. My old head of finance who ultimately became my best friend used to always joke with me that like he would just tell me everything he said twice because he knew the first time I would ignore him.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my sales would be like, yeah, so you can't negotiate with this customer because you're going to just blow up this deal. But also, I didn't like the uncomfortable, and I'm in a much different place now, obviously. But like at that time and where I was as a CEO, I hated the negotiation. I got uncomfortable, everyone. They taught me so much because there was only rumor on the table for me to not really know all the answers. I will often say that my CMO at OpenDNS, Jeff Samuels, I think of him not just as my CMO, but as a mentor to me. I mean, he taught me so much. And actually, I would say that about my VP of engineering, my head of sales, my VP of sales, I could take the inputs and use all that to make a decision. And I felt very good about those decisions I made. I think CEOs find it a huge relief when you tell them, you're allowed to not know. In fact, you kind of, if you have the best people, you're going to know the least. It is not uncommon for a CEO or a leader, a manager. This is just a good general life advice. It's like, you know, you don't want to be like the whiny person constantly harping on something.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I thought, you know, you could say that it was ego or ignorance or naivete. Like, I didn't like asking for the purchase order because, first of all, I always thought our pricing was low. So if the customer and customers often like to negotiate.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why I'm a VC. That's one of the best parts about the job is like I like being the first phone call for a CEO when they've had a tough moment or they need help. One of the things I often tell CEOs is like, you know, actually, like when you think about the table of leaders around you, like there's actually room around the table for one person who has no idea what they're doing, and that's you as CEO. If you have the right leadership team, they're adding intelligence for you. You know, I'd sort of gone from technical CEO to product CEO to sales CEO, but my fault as a sales CEO is that I loved the Dog and Pony Show. I loved the pitch. I hated the clothes. Why is that?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally Totally. And in fact, it turns out actually the opposite is true about having the answers. In fact, I often tell CEOs because even before I joined Andrews Norrow, people call me for advice and that's one of the things I really enjoy.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, coming back as CEO the second time. Should have been happening, and of course I blamed the current CEO, but the reality was I actually was not doing them either when I was CEO. Sometimes you just have to have this like outside the glass box kind of view. And you're like, wait a minute, people don't know what's important. Wait a minute. We're not making it clear what the priorities are. Wait a minute. We're not firing these low performing people. But I wasn't doing any of those things either. And so that to me was very eye-opening. So when I came back as CEO, I think I was a much better listener. I think I had this belief maybe the first time I was CEO that I'm expected to have all the answers. It's just not possible. What is important is CEOs have to make decisions. And I think they have to be able to articulate their decisions, but they don't have to have all the answers. They don't have to be the smartest person.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So right before all that happened, from most of 2008. And then the only good thing that ever came out of the total global recession and economic collapse was that my early investor needed cash. And so we found two investors, and that's actually when I first met Mark and Ben, we found two investors to come in and buy out my early investor. Those investors came in and started to rebuild the company.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in 2009, like feature flagging things. What's feature flagging? Feature flagging means that some subset of cohort of customers gets the access to a new feature or a new look and feel. A lot of times people use it for A-B testing to see if something works, but you can also use it just to keep certain customers on certain packages or on older features or older looks and feel. So it's not like you still have one code base, but people have slightly different experiences. And so we started to do those things. Like we started implementing feature flags and things of that nature. But it meant that over the course of about 12 to 18 months of the 30 people before the pivot, I think only three were left at the end.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as soon as you realize you're not going to be able to raise money and you actually have to build a business, you start to open your eyes a little bit. And so we did that. And then I hired Michelle Law, who actually spent seven years at Greylock to run BD for us. And ultimately she became my COO, a wonderful person and good friend. And she basically had seen enterprise companies many times. And so she realized as we wanted to go enterprise that a bunch of the team had to change. First of all, half the team just like didn't care about building an enterprise software company, so they just quit. Then, like the other half of the team just could not internalize that we can't just like change the UI overnight because it turns out some of our big customers had their own manuals that they had built with screenshots of our product. We got a nasty email once from this major oil and gas company. They said, like, we have all this training material and screenshots and videos we made. And you just totally changed your whole dashboard. You can't do that. And you just have to learn how to manage those things. And like, then you do feature flags, which are things that common today.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we were sort of enamored with this idea of keeping the whole internet safer, and that meant going after individuals. We had partnerships with Neckia and D-Link and these people that sold consumer routers. And so we sort of ignored the opportunity that's right in front of our face.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was like a tiered call system. It went to like three people and we sent them a quote for 100 grand and they signed it immediately and returned it. And there now went from like us making $2 a year in advertising, which we hated to paying us $100 grand for something we're already doing. And we get to turn off the ads. You don't need to be a rocket science to figure out like, wait a minute, maybe there's something here. And we had two or three other companies that had asked previously for something like that. So we went and sent them quotes and they all signed them and returned. Yeah.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pivoted the business in 2009. What we thought was a consumer business actually turned out to just be a free business. And one day we actually got a call from a major oil and gas company that had been using us and we knew they were using us globally, like on oil rigs at their headquarters at all their distributed offices. And so then they finally got an email like, look, we need to have a support contract. Like as a matter of just like corporate hygiene. So like figure it out and like give us a quote, we need to like have a way to call you if there's a problem. And so we went and got one of these like virtual phone numbers on the internet that would like route to like an engineer's phone number. And if that person didn't pick up, I would route to like the next engineer's phone number if that person didn't pick up a route to my phone.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around the pivot. What was that like? The best time I never want to have again. I mean, I mean. Like, this might be its podcast onto its own because there was an 11 month period where I wasn't even CEO of the company. My original investor had fired me. I was CTO. I didn't know that. I'd been demoted.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think if you looked at what happened between, let's say, 2007 and 2015, the iPhone came out, you had more and more people working from coffee shops that all had Wi-Fi, you had workers working from the road, people using mobile devices. So installing like Norton Antivirus or McAfee antivirus on your desktop was no longer a sufficient security. And so our service, OpenNS, was cybersecurity delivered as a service. And it happened just intrinsically as a part of your internet connection. So you didn't have to have special software. You didn't have to install an appliance or a piece of hardware. And so as people were working differently and the networks were becoming more ephemeral, Cisco, which is a major cybersecurity company, is actually the largest cybersecurity company, wants to evolve to match that shifting IT landscape.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had started a DNS company in college that did a different kind of DNS. And through that, I had gotten super interested in cybersecurity. And so I met an investor when I moved out to California who had asked me basically why I wasn't doing more with my original company. Then he and I ultimately came up with the idea for opening us. That original business model that I worked on with him was an advertising supportive business model. We pivoted the business and then in 2009 having the people that used our service be the people that pay us for our service was such a much better alignment of interest. And so that journey took a long time. And by the time we pivoted the business, it really was a different business than when we started in. Then when we sold it in 2015 to Cisco, it was really a full-blown cybersecurity company.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the thing of the DNS as like a phone book, except that what we wanted to do was not just give the same phone book to everyone, but we wanted to give a custom phone book to every person, which meant, let's say you typed in playboy.com. Well, for some user over here, they may not want content filtering, so they want the answer for playboy.com, but maybe for someone who has small kids at home, they want a different answer. And doing this at very high speed was thought to be impossible.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you get to this place where you do not have confidence that you are getting the best information from your leaders, if you don't resolve that, then you have to find someone who's a better fit. Whenever I hear, when I talk to a CEO who's having a tough time in the company and they're telling me about what's happening, I'm like, well, just tell me, like, do you really believe that that is what's happening? And you either have to go deep. And as a CEO, you do get these occasional bullets where you can cause a little bit of like organizational stress to like go through.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really important, and I think it does happen in a lot of high performing teams very commonly, maybe not explicitly, but it happens. And then obviously, I think in some places you can do it explicitly. And when it's done in a productive and positive way, not because the CEO is a distraction, but ideally the CEO is out doing something that's of high value to the company.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fire and move on I think you have to work to resolve these things. Like, you don't just cut and move on immediately, but you either have to work to understand what's actually, like, do they understand what's happening? And are they able to communicate it to you and the rest of your leadership team? I always like to think of leadership teams. It's not just this like, oh, the head of sales reports to the CEO, the head of marketing reports to the CEO. And you have these like siloed, you know, sort of pairwise conversations. The leadership team needs to be working together as a team and communicating with each other because as a CEO, you don't want to be interjecting and intervening in every conversation, every decision. And so you want to start to figure out, are they collaborating? Are they sharing each other's experiences? Do they understand what's happening in each other's businesses? Are they meeting on their own? I think as a CEO, you actually want your leadership team to meet independent of the CEO.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think you want to know what you're hiring for because there are product managers that are much more analytical and there are product managers much more visionary. And you might need different kinds of people at different kinds of times. So I think you have to be sort of self-aware and be really intellectually honest. Because if you actually need someone who is more visionary, then you're going to have to deal with the fact that you're going to be going to battle and sitting in a room and duking it out over ideas. It leads to a secondary insight, which is that if you're a CEO of a company and you do not trust that the information you're getting from one of your leaders is what's actually happening on the ground, that's a tremendous problem.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so people and your product managers will come to you and when they have conviction on something and they have the data and they have the view, you'll then be able to make those bets. And nobody would say that he wasn't a product visionary just because he didn't come up with the app story.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a recent podcast at Safi Bakal, and he described how Steve Job had both the artists and the soldiers. And so not only did he have himself, but he had like Tim Cook and Johnny Ives. But also, when you think about the story of the iPhone, the App Store was actually a result of his team coming up with the point that, hey, you can't just have Apple apps on this.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a visionary, you're going to have some special secret, some earned power that you have over the lifetime of your experience where you're the domain expert in a problem set because you're not the idea made.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally common. And it feels like it's your baby. You don't want to let it go. You're only going to have five seconds a day to think about different decisions you make. And so if your engineering team and the rest of your organization's constantly coming to you, you're going to end up getting paralyzed. The worst thing for a product visionary is to make some decisions and then they know where the wrong decisions because they lack data or they lack the time to be thoughtful about it. And then they start to undermine their own thinking about whether or not they even are a product visionary. When the reality is just hire a product manager, you're not offloading the product vision to that person, but you're offloading is the day-to-day ground war of figuring out what is customer support telling me, what is sales telling me, what is engineering telling me, what are customers telling me, synthesizing, analyzing, prioritizing, sorting that data, and obviously as the founder and visionary, you have ultimate say, but you're going to be armed with so much more insight information that your intuition, which plays a big role too, is just going to be that further enhanced.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the founder and CEO, you can always be the product visionary, but there's going to be a time where you're not going to be able to spend hours of time with the engineers hearing how they're working on a product or how it's technically going to work. You're not going to spend hours and hours of time looking at all the NPS survey data or the customer support tickets that are coming in. And so oftentimes I'll meet these startups with like, oh, I can't hire a product manager. I am the product manager.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this actually comes up a lot in startups, this idea that if you are the product visionary, you're the founder of the company, that means you are the product manager for the company. But at the same time, you need to scale an organization. And I think it's important to differentiate the product manager from the product visionary.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that's actually the biggest challenge as a product oriented person or a visionary for whatever the product is in any field, is how do you kind of keep that close to the metal insight yet you can't actually be close to the metal if you're scaling.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a good way of really figuring out is my leadership team adding capacity for me? Are they helping me understand what's happening in the business? Because as a certain point as a CEO, you're going to start to spend less time on engineering, less time on product. Ideally, you're going to spend more time in the field with customers, with partners, with customer success. And as you start to spend less time with any individual function, you're going to need to have leaders in place that really are spending all their time really understanding closer to the metal what is happening”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like that. I always used to joke it wasn't very nice probably, but I would joke with the VPS sales I had open ESA. Like, you know, maybe every quarter was his last quarter because he just constantly outperformed and we always wondered when we hired him, like, is this guy going to scale? Now he scaled wonderfully. He's an incredible sales leader. He went from, you know, a 20-person sales team to ultimately a 200 or 400 person sales team. Then once we got to Cisco, he did wonderfully. But we didn't know when we hired him how far he'd get past 20 people. He got to hire horses for courses. Right.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now this often comes up with like VPs of sales hires where somebody maybe has run you know a 10 or 20 person team, but you're like, well, can they run a 500 person sales team? Well, you don't have a 500 person sales team problem. People often think about the executives they're hiring like, well, is this person going to be with me for four years or five years for six years? I think that's not always the right question to ask. In fact, I had a board member once, Dave Strom, who's like, who's a mentor to me? I think of him as like the Yoda in my life. And he once said an expression that I'd never heard before, horses for courses. So have you ever heard horses? No, I don't even.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that there's a bunch of, you know, I always go to the question like what time is it? Like, what is the priority? Like, are you trying to figure out product market fit or are you focusing on go to market? Like, what time is it? Are you hiring salespeople and ramping up? Are you like figuring out that customers are churning and you better go fix your product? Focus is so important that if you were to ask all your leaders and all the people in your organization, like, what is the most important thing for our company right now? They should have an answer. But one of the, just one of the more tactical conversations that I have with leaders, especially when they're a startup and they have this core founding team and then they're thinking about scaling and they say, well, you know, I have this engineering manager. He or she was with me from the beginning. And I think they're doing a great job managing. One of the things I highlight is that like bringing in a world-class VP of engineering, that could cause rock the boat. It could cause issues, but it's not an indictment of your current engineering manager. Like, that's not what's happening. Part of bringing on these high performing leaders and these really well respected leaders that have a cult”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the biggest things that we see when we give technical founders advice is they need to bring on a VP of engineering. They need to bring on like a head of sales and they keep resisting this thing because they're kind of attached to their early startup team So, how did they figure out when to really? There's a lot of religious advice and debates around this, actually.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm ridiculously productive. Well, hopefully this podcast gets published because then I'll know that it had high ROE. So I think figuring out how you spend your mental calories is a really important question to ask. And sometimes the act of asking that question itself is just like part of the process of figuring out how to spend your time and spend it wisely. And there's different things that happen along different stages. I always just look at like what is the problem in the company? Is it that we can't get customers and then figure out who that right customer is. But as a company starts to mature, like a lot of these companies get to this like 2 million, 3 million in annual recurring revenue, that's a huge milestone. Very few companies ever get there, but yet it's tiny when you should be doing 20 million, 30 million view aspire to be there. Like you can celebrate the milestone, but it's clearly you have a long way to go to build an enduring iconic company. And so at that point though, you start to have a leadership team.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have a phrase that I use for all my editing, which is ROE, which is return on energy. I refuse to spend time on something that the output is going to be vastly low proportion outsize win to what the amount of work I put in in terms of energy creative. So I have a whole framework for thinking about this because I'm ridiculously productive.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, a big part of this, so the big theme I'm hearing from you is a lot of these things have intentionality, even if you don't know the outcome, and that you can actually control that intentionality by kind of being introspective, understanding your decision making, understanding what works. That sounds great. Now, as a leader of the company, how do you, the CEO, figure out what to work on, and depending on what stage you're at? This whole journey from technical to product to sales to go to market, that's not necessarily perfectly linear. So how do you figure this out?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And say, wait a minute, my West Coast territory is just doing so much better than my East Coast territory. What is the difference there? Is it because we actually are running more demand gen campaigns on the West Coast and the marketing team on the West Coast is separated? Or is it just that the West Coast sales reps are better?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that is the art of running a business. And like everything is multivariate, but you can generally, if you have smart people paying attention to the numbers, paying attention to the data, collecting the analytics, and giving yourself enough time to collect that data, like the worst thing for a company to do is make a decision and then not allow there to be enough time to collect the outcome of that decision and understand the consequences of that decision, and then they make another decision. So the question of how do you make decisions and run multiple experiments, I don't think it's that complicated as long as you're paying attention to like, what are the outputs from those decisions that you should be looking for and you should be looking at what's changing across the business. We're living in an era today of running companies where it's much easier to collect and analyze data than it ever has been. You have data lakes where you can bring in product data, your CRM can tie into that product data. We've never had that. We have BI tools now that we have open source intelligence tools, right? That's right. We have open source business intelligence tools. We actually run complex analytics.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a stage question on this, though, because if you think about the definition of a startup, a startup by definition, it's a business under a high condition of uncertainty compared to more established business. I won't even peg it to a particular size. And given that a startup is an experiment, you're running an experiment. And the product you can run multiple experiments at the same time. We've heard of the famous pivot, you know, the dreaded P word. There's all these different flavors of this. How do you run multiple experiments and also strike a balance with focus and the pricing and packaging strategy?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source