YouSaid · the spoken record

Dax Dasilva

lines on the record: 51
first: 2024-08-09
most recent: 2024-08-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And the people that work in those places, there's less waste. If you think about retail stores as a local warehouse, they're not sending boxes to your house. You're going to a place where it's already there and you make a selection. I think that these are environmental choices. And I don't think people think about them in that way.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the question sometimes that once in a while it gets asked, and I have to, I'm happy to give an answer on is like, if you're such an environmentalist, how come your company supports consumerism, your powering restaurants and your powering retail stores? I do believe in local business being able to make better choices that are rooted in their communities, rooted in sustainable options. And so it's going to come more from the local businesses than it is from the multinationals. And it allows people to also make those choices as consumers. So I think that there's an alignment there. We have to transform the way that we consume if we want to make progress on the environment. Like we're not going to stop eating. We're not going to stop buying things. But I think rediscovering retail and hospitality, like it's better to go to a restaurant with their reusable plates, investing in the...”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came from, and now that's in the urban setting or in the modern setting, that seems like something in the past. And we don't have anything to really replace it with.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, environmental trends concern me. That's why it's a big part of where I want to apply my startup DNA. I believe in the startup model. And so I've applied that to conservation. And I believe that Lightspeed actually helps with sustainability too, because the local businesses that are supported are like the ones that can actually make more sustainable decisions or more community-oriented decisions. But yeah, the environmental trends are terrifying. I also think that in society, we're disconnected from two things. Disconnected from nature or disconnected from spirituality. And I think that's why we're unanchored. And that's why some of my projects outside of Lightspeed really try to look for how we can reconnect with those things in ways that people find unexpected or exciting. They worry me because we used to, like in terms of spirituality, we used to have, folks used to have connections to community through their church or through their community hall or whatever. People used to know where their food came from or where their water came from.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that maybe because we were so growth oriented, I thought that the balancing of profit and growth sounded like something really limiting. Now I feel like it's a really positive constraint that's going to build like that long-term business that I want to see Lightspeed be and like build that long-term value. So it sounds”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it was like six to eight pages with a financial plan. Maybe you'll throw it away. Maybe you'll never look at it. But I guess what happened to me, I was like, wait a second, referring back to this three-year plan that we thought was BS, like did we not just hit that number? Like, it looks familiar. You might surprise you. It may not”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet, Harry, I would say that if I look at that original Lightspeed business plan, that is really the same customer. It's so much is almost 20 years later, so much, it's the core of, it's still relevant in terms of who we define ourselves as and who we define our customer as. So yeah, we've expanded to payments. We've expanded to another vertical beyond retail. But it's a crystallization of what we're offering and what we're doing and the value and how we're going to market. Even though that's evolved, it was a moment of clarity.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything changed. The model changed. And so that business plan gave us the ability to dig into that price. Because if we'd gone with 100 bucks, we wouldn't be the same.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely hear those concerns. I'm not a big master planner. I actually. Spiritually, I really believe the bigger plan is always going to be better than your stupid plan that you come up and you're with your head. But I think that that three-year business plan, if maybe the model, the projections are meaningless, but the clarity of writing down what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, there's so many ideas that people have when they're starting. Just writing on paper what are the core elements, who are your customers? And actually the pricing is a really interesting one because when I was pricing Lightspeed to begin with, there was a lot of Mac business software. There wasn't a lot of Mac business software, but there was one that we really admire that was like 80 bucks. And we priced a little bit more than them because we really admired them, but we knew that we did more. It was a different space with CRM versus POS and we did a lot more. But then I showed that business plan to a colleague of my father and he was like times four. Multiply that price times four. I was like, that's crazy. Like I can't ask for times four. That changed everything. We had four times the revenue. We had four times the amount to invest. We had four times a better product.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are a little bit scared by the rigor of having to write an essay and then have a three-year spreadsheet of what you're going to do. I think it's necessary. I don't think we'd be the same company if we weren't forced to do that.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think that everybody so loves their pitch decks. I always see a little bit of a frown when I suggest to folks that the thing that made a huge difference to me is that I was forced to write a three-year business plan in order to get our early grants. I got $6,000 and $8,000 grant when I was basically on unemployment when I started Lightspeed. And that three-year business plan, I just thought it was so much BS. So I was like, oh, I just got to do this and mail it in. And it was a written component in a spreadsheet component. And that business plan, we actually hit that business plan on the nose in year one. No, I think we failed a little bit on year one, but year two, we hit it on the mark. And year three, we exceeded it. And it actually changed everything about our pricing because we actually had to run everything through spreadsheets. It actually solidified and made helped us decide what we were doing and what we're not doing. And I know it's not fashionable. And I know that people love their 10 slide pitch deck, but that's not a business plan.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to have a founder of a comparable company to Lightsview that's sort of maybe done a similar journey, but in business software, in SaaS, maybe in payments, but that's gone on a similar arc, or beyond it, hopefully beyond what we've done. Love to learn from that kind of person.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're right because you can have large figures, but can large figures make change? Can large figures actually do anything? Has Greta Thunberg, like there's a lot of awareness, but I think when I look to, for example, you know, let's say Paul Watson of C Shepherd saved every species of whale in his 50-year campaign, putting his body and the cruise between pods of whales and whalers from Iceland and Japan or a business example, Steve Jobs. There's individuals that I admire, whether it's in conservation or whether it's in technology, there are people that actually make things move. There is this whole thing of Instagram influencers, but I want people, I want action, right? I want to see individuals cause results to happen. And that's what I want to believe. And that's what I see in the things that inspire me.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really believe that individuals matter. Individual business person, individual conservationists makes such a huge difference. I feel like people feel like there's this huge ocean of problems or ocean of the status quo or the zeitgeist that not individuals don't really make a big difference. But I have some incredible examples.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convince the market, how do I talk to media? It's not necessarily something that everybody knows how to do just because they start a business.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't think of myself as a leader. That two year period I spoke about where it was like 4 a.m. in the morning, that was me transitioning from me being that independent software guy, one-man show. I was a little bit scared of my team. This software was selling really well and this team was growing. I was like on the third floor of this apartment building. I rented the second floor for light speed. There's lots and lots of people starting to show up there because we were selling. The revenue was coming in and we were, we needed more folks. Eventually, I had to start talking to these people and was forced to be a leader. And we talked about the dreamer that I was as a kid. I was like an introvert. I think light speeds pushed me to be able to articulate a vision, to be able to communicate, but it didn't come naturally. That's something that I think a lot of people that are in startups that might be passionate about solving a problem, then they have to figure out, okay, now how do I be a leader? How do I lead these folks? How do I inspire these folks? How do I pivot these folks? How do I...”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's areas that we've marched forward. We've had to course correct. We're okay with failing. We're okay with iterating. We're okay with rescuing a situation.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a certain degree of fearlessness. There's an appetite for risk. There's a reason why when I went into conservation, I'm like the person that's ready to go into a jungle and not think about it. Or when I've done all the things that we've done in Lightspeed that seemed that would seem like bold moves, I didn't hesitate to go for it, you know?”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we're definitely in a transition. We're in this profitable growth phase. It's a bit of a show-me story. I would say out of six check boxes that we've nailed five in the last couple months, maybe one more to go on software growth and location growth. And then I think we're there in terms of like the shopping list. And we have to show consistency. I feel like there's a lot of value we can create on the public market.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say it's been my favorite phase of the company, despite the challenges being a public company, I think is so good, has been so good for Lightspeed. It's really a graduation. It's a graduation your process is. It's graduation in your storytelling. You get a ton of, like I mentioned earlier, you get a ton of feedback from shareholders. Your business improves. How it feels different from VC, and we've had really, we had some really great VCs with Inovia and with Excel. But you really feel like there's a couple of personalities that are your bosses or not your bosses, but your key partners. Whereas when you're public, it's yours to screw up. It's really you and your team that you're failing. It's a very freeing and independent sort of way of operating.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Now we're a billion in revenue because of acquisitions, because of the way we've grown, it used to be so easy to model the business. It was locations times subscription revenue and it was easy to model light speed. Today it's extremely difficult for folks to model light speed. And investors can lose interest if it's super hard to model. And that's part of why I want to clean up the location. The question around locations in anticipation of capital markets day. Because one of my goals is to simplify so that people can model this business again when there's understanding investors can buy back in. And that's why when they sniff, when they're like, let's be doing more M&A, there's like, okay, well, it's never going to be easy for us to understand this business ever again. And that's the opposite of the direction I want to go to.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think when it comes to MA, what I've heard, and I've spent a lot of time listening to shareholders, it's one of the best things about being a public company, is you get some really direct feedback. And the very frank feedback is Lightsfeed doesn't need further distractions with new M&A projects, ingest and digest all of the things that are a part of the company now. Make sure all of that is creating value, that the company is generating profit. At the end of the day, I think there's another thing that I haven't mentioned that when we went public in 2019, we were a much simpler company, 70 million in revenue. 70.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that large M&A would benefit the business either. I think that we accomplished what we wanted to do with all the M&A that we did between 2020 and 2022 of consolidating all the complex hospitality and retail players that were a similar size to us. We did that. There's not really another list of players that we want to do that with.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we did a couple of really great things with our acquisitions, but what we haven't done and we haven't finished doing is all of the back-end integration. There's a lot of costs that we can pull out. There's a lot of things that we can sunset over time. That work hasn't been done. That's like the third phase. And so I'll be giving like a plan at our capital markets on how that's going to look. But I don't think that we should be adding more until we've done that. And then the market doesn't want to see more confusion added to the picture when we're trying to simplify and focus.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's the first one I've done because we did one the year before, but it was my predecessor. I underestimated how emotional that process would be. It's difficult. People are so excited to be a part of this story, to let talented light speeders go is, and when you're responsible, I mean, you have to do it for the greater good of the company. It's hard. I think we learned a lot from the first time. I mean, there's a lot of logistics and coordination of those emails that go out and the packages and how people are informed or informed that they're staying. And we actually pulled off a very flawless execution. We got a lot of high marks from folks on how it was done. I think it's one of the toughest things I ever had to do. I'd never done layoffs personally at the company, and it's almost been 19 years. So yeah.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All want to see investor confidence return in the stock. I mean, that's not been a good story. The story is the profitable growth adult version of Lightspeed, right? It's got all of these things in balance. I felt JP felt the board felt that the founder, it's a good moment for the founder to be able to tell that story and lead the team through the transitions that are necessary. And we have to do some, in the five months I've been back, we've had to do some tough things. We've had to do reduction in force. We've had to, you know, get into the capital allocation strategy. We've had to make some big clear statements that calmed down nerves about no more, no M&A, no large M&A, and show great growth numbers, show a great forecast of a balance of profitability and growth. So there's been lots of, not resets, but clear definitions of what it's going to look like for investors. And now I think that they want to see that consistency.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's great about being the executive chairs? It's great for a founder because you can be on the email, you can be on the Slack, you can be get the pulse of the business, but you really aren't in the day-to-day operations. You can kind of see it happening. But being in the chair is very different. We are in a new phase and we've pulled off some incredible things. The acquisitions, getting to two flagships, making the payments thing a lot of the market was skeptical on the payment that we'd be able to execute on the payments thing. All that's been done. But now I think we're in this grown-up phase. We are no longer a teenager next year. We're turning 20, right? Like I want us to be a great adult. We know what the formula is. It's a good time for a founder to lead people through some maybe some Structural changes, you know, like”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just hasn't been a focus. And that's part of the reason why I think it's important for the founder to come back. It's a new phase for the company being a profitable growth story.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we've been a grow, grow, grow story for a long time. Last year, we spent almost the entire fiscal year rolling out lights beyond payments and converting a third of our base. Now we've got this really great foundation for profitability. I've spent a lot of time and focus on cutting OpEx. And so I think we're doing a lot of the things the market wants to see. I think it just wants to see that plus software revenue growth as opposed to payments growth for a few quarters.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The software and the payments piece? You know, there's always a debate of whether we want to be considered software company or a payments company. What's better for Lightspeed? I mean, my preference would actually just be that the markets understand us as a profitable growth story. And we've got three quarters of EBITDA positivity under our belt. And we still remain a bit of a show-me story for the market.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's why hardware sales is not a big focus for Lightspeed. Our revenue is primarily software subscription revenue and payments revenue.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for our ICP, which is 500,000 of annual transaction value, they do want to speak to somebody. There is complex operations. It's not something you're going to sign up for and just start going with. There is a segment of customers that's below that that could probably do that, but it's no longer our main target. Over time, you have to make choices and you have to choose focuses of like, who do you really serve? And who is really going to want to pay for all the functionality that we have? So it's a really rich system. If your needs are X, it may not be that you want to spend the money on everything Lightspeed can do. You may be better served by a clover or a square or a Shopify.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it was our direct sales model, like we're doing a lot of performance marketing. For people that are looking for a retail point, what a sales systems or later hospitality point of sale systems, you're generating all those leads and you're qualifying the leads, then your salespeople are closing. And then the close rates, you know, we had really, really strong close rates because we prospected leads that were very much in our wheelhouse. They were a good match for the product. Now, today we're going after ICP merchants and we're making a transition with locations where before we were going after everything and a lot of our everything in terms of like every range of GTV, right? So 500,000 and above is really where light speed's determined where we can where our product is the best fit. But we have tremendous, we have a lot of customers that are sub 500,000 as well.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reseller lead. Some of the resellers weren't as fast as the other ones were like, oh, if we kept that as a direct lead, we could just close that on our own. And then as we went into the cloud and there was less of a need for a reseller to do hardware, we started to lean more and more towards doing everything direct. And then as we did high velocity sales model, we went very direct, cut out a lot of the reseller energy. And I think that a lot of that network died away. And I think that might have been a mistake because now we're trying to bring bring it back a lot because there is more complexity now. Now we're doing the more complex hospitality businesses and so on. And we're building evolved way of go-to-market with partners. And we have a very huge direct effort and an outbound effort on the street.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the reseller's strategy was really successful. In those first seven years at zero, we spent zero money on advertising. But we spent a lot of money on these reseller conferences twice a year. We'd have like three or four hundred people show up. And actually, when the VCs came and saw that, they went undercover. They went undercover under false identities. It was a lot of fun during our Dallas certification camp. Our term sheet went from 25 million to 30 million because they were like, wow, you got a massive community of people around from like Saudi Arabia and like in like Europe and Australia and all over the US and Canada and like everywhere people are coming to learn how to sell lightspeed and are generally also users of lightspeed. I think we did a good job at first of integrating our direct go-to-market effort because we had internal salespeople but we always gave priority to the reseller. I think as we got bigger we had struggles with okay when does it become a direct lead? When does it become a”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's always a little bit of a risk to defocus. And I think right now, now that I've been back at light speed for five months as a CEO, I was executive chair for two years. I think there are areas where it's going to be helpful for us to focus again where we've decided to spread our wings maybe in too many places, too many regions across too many products, a lot of acquisitions. It's always exciting to grow the business, especially when the market's rewarding growth.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always good to create your own greenfield blue ocean, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to come up with. I think it's important for when you're competing that you know the actual value. Like our value is not that we can take a payment. Our value is that we are running a complex operation for one of these businesses. We're creating the competitive advantage for them versus their competitors. And so you've got to find that segmentation where”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting question. I know that when I've mentored companies that are building these SaaS solutions, in order to have attractive metrics that are going to be interesting to VCs, they're shortcutting a lot of the product development and the basics of building a business like we did. Obviously, there's less room to test and battle test and get to something really phenomenal. The slowburn, you know, like I think that's there's quality that happens in that process. And, you know, let it cook, right?”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it took actually the diligence took a few months, but within a few weeks we had a term sheet. And so it wasn't something that I contemplated, it wasn't even something I fully understood of all of how all that worked. Participating preferred curve. I didn't know what that meant.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2000, it was 2 January of 2012. We had a number of VCs come to our booth looking for the future of retail because every retail player is there. And they identified Light Speed as that. And within a few weeks, we had Excel partners who, you know, the investors behind Facebook. And then within two weeks of that, they were in Montreal at our office. And then within a few weeks of that, we had $30 million.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were at 10 million. It was actually those folks that I just mentioned, Square and that it was a New York POS company called Shopkeep. There was new players coming onto the scene at this point. We were competing with legacy black plastic POS systems. It was easy to compete with them. But then other POS systems that were more forward-looking, more cloud-based, like Square, even though it was very simple at the time and like Shopkeep, which was an iPad POS, which we had, but ours wasn't cloud-based. They started to come out even though they were very simple. They had hundreds of millions of dollars being funneled into them. And it started to be, I went from the perspective of like, yeah, I have no finance background. I haven't really looked for investors to maybe it would be maybe not a bad idea. And we didn't actually go out looking for VC money. We were masters of the trade show. We'd done Mackerel for many years and then we switched to doing NRA, which is national retail federation that happens in New York.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we did get money, we went, we transitioned our product into the cloud. We did it at the right time. We could have done it a couple years earlier, and it could have benefited us to have done it a few years earlier. Our cloud product was out by 2013, Square, some other folks like Shopkeep had, which we acquired later, maybe had a couple years on us because of that, but maybe that might have sped things up in our journey.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. Those seven years of bootstrapping, we're in our profitable growth phase where we're now out of this growth growth growth at all cost phase and we're now into balancing growth and profit. That's like the early first seven years where we were profitable. We ran the company and grew with a great degree of balance. And I think that that's a great part of our DNA. We also had a really good seven years of really solidifying our identity. I think that strong sense of identity and who we are and what we represented and how we did business helped a tremendous amount when we took VC money, when we went public, and also when we did M&A, when you merge other companies into your company, you have to have a strong sense of identity to allow other companies to be able to flourish as a part of your company and not try to suffocate them out of insecurity. I think that strong sense of identity is how allowed Lightspeed to do a lot of the”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% right. And so that's where you've got to be. And I think that's a little bit of where the tech support background comes in of like this user wants to accomplish this. And they think they want to do it this way. But from your observations of what their operations look like, and that's why you have to kind of, in my case, I want it to be physically there with the customer. It's probably not possible for every type of scenario, but I wanted to observe what it looked like. I wanted to see what they were trying to pull off so that with what I wanted to create as a user experience, maybe we're going to leapfrog their expectations of what we want to do. And so nobody asked for the mobile checkout.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First two years I coded till four in the morning for that first two years every day. I was fueled on, I don't know if you know Tim Hortons here in Canada, but it's like these French vanilla coffees that are like all caffeine and sugar. They're just like fueled by these things. They're just like coating. What was, I think, what helped the product market fit happen is when I wasn't coding, I was with those early four customers and they were like, I picked a variety of different customers and I'd sit with those customers and watch them use the software and then iterate quickly so that if something didn't fit with their workflow or it didn't consider something that they needed to do with their inventory, there would be another iteration of the software that was out within a week or so. They got them closer and closer to a perfect workflow.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's everything we offer in the light speed software today to retail. So I was cutting my teeth, building software contracted software for these dealerships between the ages of 15 and 28 when I started Lightspeed. And basically that moment of, okay, I'm not going to build another custom piece of software.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The environment that I grew up, so obviously there's a big background in the early Mac and being a part of that Mac ecosystem, whether it was the early developers or the dealerships before there's Apple stores, there was dealerships. I grew up in those dealerships. I was doing tech support. I was working in them. I was your little nerd. But I started building software for those dealerships. You know, they were building a lot of their own software. Each dealership was building their own software. And it was usually the business owner building their own custom file maker. It was like an Microsoft access database homegrown. They were terrible. So over time, I was trying to build more and more software for these dealerships. And if you think about what an Apple dealership would look like, it really is our ICPR, ideal customer profile of Lightspeed. It's a complex inventory-centric retailer with high value inventory, with serial numbers, multiple locations, purchasing across multiple stores and multiple currencies. It's everything we do as”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was like, I worked for that startup and got to see you like a startup from ages 13 to 15, the insides of one. It was like a husband, wife, and maybe a contractor. Quickly after that, I started building software on my own. So by 15, I was building software as an independent contractor. So yeah, one team of one, but entrepreneur to the core.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. Yeah. My dad brought home a Mac when I was eight or nine. He was a graphic designer. Actually, he was a welder. And they discovered that back in Africa, he was a journalist and that he was a communications guy. And so they gave him this opportunity. And I nerted out, you know, you're into vertical SAS. I nerded out on UI design and a tool called Hypercard on the early Mac. And that's how I became a programmer. I mean, by 12, I had my own Mac and by 13 I was working for a Mac developer. that was building early networking software on the Mac. So that's the other part of my childhood where I confirmed nerd, right? No, no.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a really beautiful childhood, but I think the context of where my parents had just immigrated from, there was a dictator in Uganda. They grew up in Uganda. My family family is from originally from India, from the Portuguese colony called Goa. But they all moved to Uganda for jobs in the British Civil Service. And then they were expelled by a dictator in 72. My mom was 18. My dad was like 22, 23. And so in that context, I was born, my sister was born in this new country where they were just super young and had to carve out an unexpectedly carve out a whole new life. And so the fact that we had these incredible childhoods that we spent a lot of time in nature doing these low-cost things like camping, which is why I'm such a big, big proponent of the environment today, it came from a bit of a chaotic background. And I sort of had the immigrant experience, definitely an introvert.”
2024-08-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source