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

“Can get more money. Maybe you're a technical CEO who's becoming a product CEO, who's becoming a sales CEO. If you're listening, you're going to be like, wait a minute, they're telling me we're leaving money on the table. And it's generally a very strong signal.”
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 generally fewer is better because focus is key. Yeah, less is more. Like, time is always the most valuable currency in an individual's life, in a company life. And so then aligning all that time behind the most important, like putting more wood behind fewer arrows to me is always much more important. I think generally like two packages, three packages, when you make it too complicated for the customer to figure it out, that creates friction to the sales cycle. Right. Now, that said, one thing that startups often do is they share their pricing publicly on the site. And the engineer and all of us, like the pragmatic person and all of us, we're like, well, of course we want to share pricing because as customers, we hate not knowing the price, but as products get much more nuanced and organizations that are buyers and you actually don't know what your pricing discovery looks like, you're better off not sharing your pricing. One way you know you have a great product is when you're salespeople are the ones demanding you remove the pricing because that means that they're telling you you can get more”
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 don't think I've seen that. Generally, it's much more of a ladder where the next package includes everything in the previous package. Got it. And I think that while there's usually a number of features that get unlocked when you go to the next package, to me, there's always one that has that forcing function. In fact, when I think of packaging, it's oftentimes a way to segment your customer base because you're going to say, like, we know SMB midmarket under a thousand employee companies. They're going to be this package. Right. Everything we do, the product manager on that package is thinking about those features, thinking about that persona. And then the next package, the person saying, wait a minute, I want to go after the 1,000 to 10,000 employee company. And this is what they need. This is how I communicate with them. This might be how I do webinars to them. This is how I'm going to do pricing that more fits their model. Maybe you can't do a three-year contract if you're on the low-end product. So all these things are puts and takes that reflect where's the product, who is the customer you're targeting, and then how do you want to market and get to create demand with that audience?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of sign on is a good one. Lots of SaaS offerings let you create accounts and use a product, but if you want to tie it to your Okta directory or some other directory service, you're going to have to jump to a much more expensive tier.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So packaging is usually, I mean, it can mean a bunch of things, but to me, packaging is what set of features are you going to put into an offering to a customer? I always try to think that you want to make it easy for your customer to give you money. It was like sort of like a foundational principle for me. And so packages are a way to do that. We've all been to the restaurant where the a la carte menu is all over the place, but sometimes restaurants just say, well, here's like the three options. Comes with one of these appetizers, you get this main course, and you get this dessert. So if you want to make it easier for people to give you money, generally people come up with packages. And the friction is removed to becoming a buyer. So in the SaaS world, sometimes there might be a tier that says you're going to get, you know, the full functionality of the product, but you're not going to get archiving and logging and all this detailed reporting analytics. So it allows the company that maybe doesn't want to spend as much or isn't as big to get the full functionality of your product. But then there's like a hurdle. And usually when I think of it,”
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 that's well, I mean, all of, I would say, Google G Suite is an add-on. Google should just shut down G Suite altogether, even though the whole Silicon Valley would go crazy. Like, I mean, their rounding error in their business, and it's a rounding error to productivity, like versus what Microsoft has. I don't think they'll do that. But strategically, it's just so unimportant for them. What I would say, though, is that I like software that is easy to use, that has that short time to value, but allows me to be a power user if I want to be. And in fact, as an investor, when I talk to companies, I always try to figure out like what is their 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
“Because I also don't like that. It's also, I think, ignoring the realities of organizations today. Which used to be so siloed, and now you have people collaborating cross functionally in different ways.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's a better way to frame it because I also don't like that phrase it's really about that extension of the product experience and really taking that more holistic approach. It's not just about the UI. It's not even just about the user experience of a particular workflow. It's about that whole customer experience. We're actually entering a period of time where more and more people in the workforce are sort of digital natives and they want to be power users. You know, why isn't there an equivalent to like Microsoft Excel on the web? Like Google Sheets, it's not Excel. The current state of collaborative tools in SaaS apps is just so weak and they don't let you be a power user.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've noticed this resurgence, and I don't know if it's just like a zeitgeist thing or just anecdotal evidence of design focused startups precisely because of the thing you're saying, because that's one of the ways to instantly differentiate.”
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. And they made it easy for individual users as long as you could use Google Auth to authenticate, anybody could basically set up a Slack channel inside their organization. After a while, IT says, hey, wait a minute, we have all these teams that are chatting on this thing. They're doing integrations. Files are being shared. We need to have a little bit more visibility, a little bit more access control. And even for security and compliance reasons, it became an enterprise sale that went wall to wall. It's now already entrenched in the organization. There's already integrations happening with some of the developer tools and workflows. And at that point, they've earned the right to be more complicated.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so Slack, for instance, they did a lot of really creative things. I remember I was at Wired and the product that we use was Hip And the thing that kind of eventually got me into Slack was the fact that you could do all these gifs, whatever. You could do kind of more fun things. And even I know that sounds really”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then I want to ask you more about what needs to go into that time to value. So let's be a little bit more specific. I mean, I get the point that you're talking about, it's incredibly competitive. So you got to differentiate fast and show the value. But what are the things that drive that? Is it a great, like a cute little jiffy that, you know, that jumps out at you and like makes a clippy type of thing? I mean, what is it?”
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 goes hand in hand with a short time to value. So the short time to value gets you in the door, but we know that you and I could download Zoom on our phones and be in a video conference call. Now we're like, well, wait a minute, maybe all of our conference rooms should have Zoom. Maybe we should integrate Zoom with our Google Calendar G-Suite. You've earned the right to do that complexity because you've already proven so much value. And not only that, the value you get by doing the integration with G-Suite or by adding some cameras to your conference room so that you can have room-based Zoom rooms. That complexity is commensurate with the value you're getting. And so when people say, oh, consumerization of enterprise just means it has to be easier or simple. That's not quite what it is. It's to me it's two things. It's a short time to value and then the complexity curve is commensurate with the value proposition.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to frame it a little bit differently. When people talk about the consumerization of enterprise, like enterprise customers today are being bombarded by so many different vendors, their attention span is so limited that the products today, like I think when people say consumer, they mean easy. They don't really mean consumer. The value proposition that I'm hearing when I talk to customers is that the time to value needs to be short. There's actually two parts. The first is I want value almost immediately. Sometimes even before I pay for it, like I want a trial or I want to get up and running on my own and then I'll talk to a salesperson. So the time to value can either be like T minus zero days, like negative time, or it has to be very short from hours to days. And so I always encourage founders think about like the first hour, the first day experience, the first week experience, the first month experience. The second part is that like enterprise software can get quite complex. And so Zoom is in the news because they went public. And Zoom's a great example of something where they earn the right to be more.”
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 is a little counterintuitive too, though, because the other piece of advice I've often heard from folks is that the number one mistake a lot of consumerization of the enterprise type of founders make is that they go too heavy on bottom-up to the point of ignoring the importance of top-down sales. What's your view on that?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Patrick's tweet was right on, and Rahul's weekly sort of marketing email to existing users, it helps teach me these new things that they've unlocked. They become very intuitive, but you still have to learn about them. One of the best things about building a company today is it's easier than ever to get close to customers, to get constantly get iterative real-time feedback, both from an analytical standpoint and just from customer surveys, on PS scores, all these kinds of things. You have all this telemetry through SaaS products where you actually see how people use your product. But the second thing that's happened is people talk about this like bottoms-up SAS motion, but it's not always just that. It's really.”
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. Resources. They don't have the Absolutely. Small companies have unlimited compute. They have unlimited storage. They have unlimited bandwidth now. And so when I meet with startups, they often want to ambitiously and altruistically want to go satisfy this pain for SMBs. But it turns out that the reality is if you want to charge a high price point, if you want to pay inexpensive sales force, then you're going to realize that your average deal sizes have to be higher. If I really want to go after a target market where the price point is going to be lower, then I have to think about bottoms up sales, about self-serve offerings, because I might not be able to afford to have a sales force or a huge customer success engine. And so I love when I see startups that think not just about who they want to go after, but then they build that into their whole sort of customer experience model and like marketing programs, pricing and packaging, renewals, sales, in the whole business model. I mean, nowadays, think about how many emails you get where it reminds you of a new feature that you may not even have known existed. For instance, like I'm using an email product called Superhuman, and every week I basically had an email from the team saying,”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it enables smaller and medium sized companies to have the accesses to big companies' resources. They don't have the in-house engineers, but they can essentially, as a service it in to their company.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another way to think about that is that what used to just be like a product experience is now much more of a customer lifecycle experience. It starts before you sell, building evangelist, then there's an onboarding part. Then there's making sure the customer's really happy. How do you market to your existing customers to make sure they're getting full utilization of your product? And so that customer lifecycle makes it much easier as a startup is getting started to start to really identify like who is the target customer and then thinking about does that actually map to the business I want to build? Is it the big Fortune 500, the global 5000? Is it SMBs? Because it has all these like downstream effects. So a lot of startups, they'll come in here and in my first six months here, I've now met with over 200 companies. And a lot of them, like they really have this ambition to go after SMBs. And one of the cool things about SaaS is that SaaS can take something that in the olden days of enterprise computing, you'd have to like buy the biggest server, the biggest box to get the best solution. But with cloud and with SaaS applications, you can now have the power to get the massively great.”
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 the startup I'm talking to says, oh, well, we did a couple three year contracts, but we realized that we were priced really low. And so now if a customer wants a three-year contract, we're actually going to charge them more in the out years. Well, that tells me your product is really good and getting better.”
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 a retail business. Right. I never think about the first sale when I look at a business. I always think about what are you going to do in year two, year three to make sure you renew the account to grow the account. It's a way of peeling back the onion to figure out like how confident are you and where your product is today because if you say, oh, we're only doing three-year contracts. Well, is that because it's really hard to implement and tough to get customers onboarded? And so you need runway to get them happy? Or is it because you think you're overselling your capability set and you just don't want the customer to figure it out within a year and not renew”
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 okay for a company in the early stages not to know exactly who they want to go after, but they do have to understand the consequences of the customers that they're targeting. I think we're living today in one of the best times to be an enterprise software startup. And to me, one of the reasons is that because so many companies today are SaaS and subscription software companies where there's a recurring revenue component, it's better for the customer because they know that the customer experience is going to be good or they'll stop paying for the subscription, right?”
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 to ask this then since we're going with this theme of let's not do the platitudes, a lot of people say it's about the customer and the customer journey and understanding the customer. Honestly, when I hear that, I'm like, they can pull you in a million different directions. You don't even know what to do, especially if you're a technical founder. You don't know to sell to Fortune 500. Like there's a bit of a chicken egg. So how do you sort of figure out how to sell to the right customer?”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to take a control plan. Then you're going to move to demand gen to try to increase the top of the funnel. And if you fix that, then you want to make sure that your SDRs and salespeople are making sure they're converting on the marketing leads into qualified leads. Then you're closing. Then you're doing customer success. And once you tighten one of those knobs, it just creates slack in one of the other knobs. So, you might switch those hats from time to time, but I think you're rarely going to be wearing more than one of those hats at the same time.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, generally, you want to be more focused and less focused. And the reason I think you're probably also not all those things at the same time is a company is a set to me of these interconnected little knobs. And you can never just optimize one and then forget it and not come back to it. You end up going to another knob. Like if you fix pricing and packaging, then you're going to control.”
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 not usually one. I'm not a big fan of the platitudes where you just say one thing that applies to everyone because there's never one thing that makes the difference between success and failure. As a founder, generally you're at different stages of the company building journey. Sometimes you're a technical CEO trying to build a product to make sure it actually is feasible. Then you're constantly in the market with customers doing customer discovery, making sure that you are solving the problems you're trying to solve, you end up becoming sort of a product CEO, making sure that you have product market fit. Then you end up becoming a sales CEO on the enterprise side where you're trying to generate revenue and figure out how you can go acquire more customers. And then if that works out, you become this really general sort of manager, a go-to-market CEO, and you're thinking about how do you scale and accelerate a business. I like to think about those different journeys as where there's like the right decisions for the right time and really trying to help founders understand what time is it and where are they in that journey and where do they want to go.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make a comeback. I mean, it's not like he changed instantly overnight. So, what and how were the lessons learned? In 2015, Cisco later acquired OpenDNS and David ran their security business, where he also led the acquisition of three companies before coming here. So he seen startups from all sides from being acquired to being the acquirer, from small to big to small to big again, from on the inside, and from on the outside. But the real theme of this episode is the journey many founders make, from technical to product to sales CEO. And while we end with the story of Open DNS and the most important lesson learned there, we begin with what is a one piece of advice David has for founders.”
2019-05-20 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source