YouSaid · the spoken record

Emmanuel Schalit

lines on the record: 33
first: 2019-12-06
most recent: 2019-12-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So what we want to accomplish in the next five years for us as a company is actually quite clear. Our mission is to fix the UX of the Internet, the way we transact, the way we authenticate, is as broken today as it was 25 or 30 years ago when the Internet started. And so in the next five years, we want to build a mainstream consumer brand and a mainstream consumer product that will have made a significant dent in how the UX of the internet is experienced every day by millions and millions of people. If we succeed, we will have created a new category that today doesn't exist. And if we succeed, we will have built a pretty formidable company. So I'm very excited for the journey ahead in the next five years and beyond.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the city of finance, of retail, of advertising, of e-commerce. And so as such, I find it a very enriching environment that meets people that are not just startup founders and VC. And I think it's culturally something that I found very powerful about New York. But today, the New York ecosystem, thanks to some of the investors we're fortunate to have, has become, for me, the best destination for European entrepreneurs that want to expand or start in the US for the reasons I just mentioned.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very early days of our company were actually in Paris, France. But very quickly, one of my decisions was to say we're going to launch this product in the US and we're going to raise capital in the US. And so when you do that, and for us, this was in 2011, we had two choices essentially, which were San Francisco and New York. And I've lived and worked in both cities. I love the West Coast, but there are two things about New York at the time that made me decide for New York. The first one was the proximity to Europe, both in terms of time zone and travel time. I have run companies between West Coast and Europe, and it's extremely hard to build a cohesive culture, to be present on both sides as a founder frequently. The time overlap is not sufficient, and so I knew it would make our life much harder. So New York was better, but also there is something about New York that the Valley doesn't have, which is there is a form of diversity because New York is not just the city of tech, which it has become. New York is also”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Sekoya, and he convinced me in that meeting to rethink, because I had essentially decided we would not ever raise equity again because we had a very powerful access to debt and we didn't want any more dilution, but Jim forced me to rethink that by focusing me on the bigger picture. And it's a thing I'll remember.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll name two. The first one and the last one. The first one was when we were raising our Series A and I was meeting with Habib Kerus from Roe Ventures here in New York. And I was halfway through my pitch and he banged his head on the table right in the middle of it. I was not even finished. And he said, I love it. How much is it I want to do it? And it was a great meeting because from that day until today, and it's been eight years, Habib has been an incredible supporter of the long-term vision of the company. So that was the best first meeting. And there have been lots of great meetings. And then the best one I had also was the one last February with Jim Goetz when he came to see me in New York, as he had done several times over the last few years. We'd always had great conversations. And we had just raised a 30 million round of debt with no plan on taking equity. And in the meeting, Jim made me see the opportunity I was potentially missing by not considering an investment.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“diversity, more women, more people of color, that is a cancer running through the tech ecosystem today, and it's one that's really hard to cure.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, but of course it is. The rewards are incredible. The pride you take in your job, the human stories you build, the relationships you build. But most of the time you're dealing with problems. That's just what we're paid for.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other by the way, that's also the kind of threshold where you need a very strong people function, which is something you may not have at 50 or 60, and that's something we waited for too long to build. Now we have an extremely strong one. But the thing is when you start having a strong people function, which other people”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have breakpoints earlier than that if you go through the whole range. You have a first breaking point at between 10 and 20 when it's not the few people that were there in the beginning and that have cleaned the toilets and built the network. So you have a first breaking point there. I think you have a second one between 50 and 100 where you start having a clearer hierarchy structure and you start having more people, more management, more managers at that level. Obviously you have that dumb bar or that 150 limit which is really, really very palpable because it essentially means when you are in an organization where you can't know everyone enough to trust them implicitly. And this is where vision and culture become so critical because you need something that binds people together even when they don't know each other. You need something that makes people trust each other when they don't know each other.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's my current favorite because I think there is so much learning about so many things that is packed into the way it looks at history in that book. And there are even lessons you can apply to your business, like the challenges of what happens in a culture when you go above 150 people, which is why homo sapiens prevailed over Neanderthalis and other human species because of their ability to form large groups of humans because they were able to have a shared vision. So like there are so many things in this book about economics, about civilization that can be applied to life and to business that I found it fascinating.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said the first thing is constantly think about this notion of advice and consent and understand when you are stepping beyond this notion of advising and help the founders you're working with understand that when you tell them something you're advising them but you're not asking them to do it. To see founders that take your advice as I instruct you to do this immediately tell them that that's not what you're asking them to do. So I would start there then I think it's also about understanding you're not going to be able to help on every front. There are things you're better at. Is it your network? Is it specific areas of the business? Like typically I'm very privileged that Seth Farman was the former chief marketing officer of Spotify and before that of the GAP joined our board obviously having a marketer of his caliber on our board means that when we have complex far-ranging strategic marketing questions he can be a fantastic sounding board but I'm not asking him to give me his advice.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the meeting to prepare the meeting so that you can take off the table all the tactical stuff, all the stuff about understanding the metrics and the details of the reporting with the objective that the discussion at the board is purely focused on one, two, maybe three at most really strategic topics where you have the time to present the strategy question, get into a real discussion with the board so they can really advise you. And so keep for the board really strategic topics for the company and move the tactical stuff outside of it by having the DEC sent a long time in advance and potentially discussing all the key metrics outside of the board because the board should be a strategic discussion.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the idea several elements to that, which I learned over the years thanks to some of the people like Rick and Alex and Habib from Row and now Jim from Sequoya. And I learned from them over the years. The first lesson is that a lot of that relationship is the one that happens outside the board. The board is a very formatted exercise where we go through things we need to go through as a company for good governance. We formally present a number of things and we need to do it and it's an important collective discussion. the most valuable discussions I've had with my board members are happening outside of the boardroom so investing time with your board members outside of the boardroom is the number one advice I'd say the the second advice is to prepare the board materials a long time in advance send them to your board members a long time in advance we do that 10 days before our boards and have individual discussions with each of them in advance”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dynamic is when they break that model of advice and consent and when because the CEO allows it or because the VCs want to jump in more, they start running the company. And that's a recipe for disaster, regardless of well-intentioned, how well intentioned the VCs are because they don't have the context. They are too far from the company. They are on 10, 15 different boards. They spend a few hours a month on the company. And most of the decisions they are going to make are the wrong decision. And so as a CEO, you can't let your board run your company for their sake, actually. Dynamic really well. They give me very valuable advice. Sometimes I agree. I always listen to it. Oftentimes I do not. And I explain to them why I do not. And we move along to the next topic.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it also has to do with, I'm going to tell you something that may surprise you, but I think the thing I wish I knew if I was starting again is I wish I knew how to work with a board in a VC-backed company. It took me a while to learn how to do that because when you've run companies in a more corporate environment or large divisions and the largest division I had run at 10,000 people and close to $2 billion in revenue. So it's not like I've never run large organizations, but the dynamics are completely different with VCs because your board is not your boss. You are running the company and you're running the board. And you have to really understand that because you become effective at working with your board and your VCs the moment you understand that the board is there to advise and the board is there to consent on certain important corporate decisions. But the board is not there to run the company. And so where VCs and CEO founders build a negative”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of first Mark and Bessemer and Rogue were already there with us. So I think all these things are part of the consideration, but you need to learn how to work with your VCs and with each and every one of them individually because they all.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To meet with other CEOs or other executives without them being in the room because there's nothing more precious than talking to another CEO and realizing that the chances you're going through, they're also going through them and maybe they have solved them in a different way. So this is way beyond the money they bring can be incredibly helpful and that is why actually that was one of the key decisions or decision factors when we took that very large round from Sekoya. We had no intention of raising a round at that time. We had just raised a significant round of debt and we were not looking for new capital. The thing that decided me was the combination of two things. One was clearly with that amount of capital we could think about our business plan differently, which is what we're doing today. But B, the opportunity to have Jim Gutz from Sequoia joining our board given his vast experience and given what the Sekoya brand brings in terms of recruiting and partnering was also going to be a key factor when it joined was the”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So VCs are, if you know how to work with them, they are incredibly helpful. And by the way, not all for the same things. Some are going to be incredibly helpful because they have such a vast network and they are fantastic connectors that if you want to meet somebody to recruit or just for advice, they will know that person, they will give you access to anyone. Some are incredibly helpful because they have seen so many things that you encounter a situation and they are the pattern recognition engine that will give you the, these are the three things companies do when they encounter that. Some are going to be incredibly helpful because their firm and first mark is certainly top of mind when it comes to this do so much in terms of their community of entrepreneurs, particularly in New York, to create community of CEOs, create a community of CMOs, of CPOs to share best practices. And just the other thing that VCs can do a lot is provide you with an opportunity”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, that's one of the benefits of raising a large amount of money. But it depends on where you are in your gross curve. If you're already growing very fast and you have access to more capital and with that create a bunker balance sheet that protects you against anything, by all means. But if you're not, in other words, if you know the value of your company is going to grow massively over time, even without that capital, yes, you can raise it and put it aside as a safety mechanism. But if you're not growing at an incredible rate, if you are not guaranteed to be worth way more money without using that capital, then you must deploy it because otherwise you will have raised your exit bar. You'll have a lot of money in the bank, but you will not have grown the value of your company sufficiently. And the only thing you've done is you've put your equity underwater potentially. Because you'll never justify the valuation of that round.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take the level of risk that comes with deploying large amounts of capital. Because if you are very frugal, you may be able to raise lots of capital, but you sure are not going to be able to spend it if you are very frugal. Deploying a lot of capital means stop being frugal. So you need to have the culture that is able to make that shift. And for us, it's a challenging shift because we've been frugal over the years and now we have to relearn how we do things. We have to learn how to take a level of risk we're not used to taking. All the ingredients are there. The market, the leadership team, the margin structure, the board that supports a new level of risk, yes, it's worth it.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first advice I give to people that ask me advice is to always take my advice or anyone's advice with a grain of salt. Why? Because every company and every set of circumstances is fundamentally different and you can only benefit from advice if you understand what it applies to you. That's number one. Number two, again, I think for me, it has to do with can you build a credible case? Can you convince yourself as a CEO, as a founder that you are going to deploy that amount of money quickly enough to produce enough acceleration in our growth that the risk of increasing the exit bar is worth the reward? It's really based on do you have the leadership team? Do you have the business model and the gross margin? Do you have ways? Do you know where you are going to deploy that capital? Do you have investors that are going to be willing to”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first driver is clearly related to market conditions, especially in a case like ours, because what we're effectively doing is we are creating a mainstream consumer category and even in the”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like if we do succeed, if we do reach our goals for all the people on the team, this is going to be something they remember all their life. This is going to be something they're going to be proud of all their life. This is going to be something that's going to be incredibly meaningful for their future careers because they're going to be able to say, oh, right, you were part of the team that built Ashland. Well, you know, immediately you are taken seriously because you built that incredible company. So, you know, from that perspective, I think it's about extracting what's positive about the outsized outcome we're going after, but not so much the pressure. And by the way, don't get me wrong, the pressure is not coming from the board and the investors. If you are a self-motivated executive, that pressure comes from inside. You've just made the decision to take that round. And so as such, you have created that pressure for yourself. Nobody has forced it upon you. My board didn't tell me we should do that round. I came to them and said to them,”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the answer is different when I think about me and maybe the people I worked with the most directly, the executives that are part of my immediate team, were all very, very senior and seasoned. I think at our level, it is important that we share the same understanding of what the outcome needs to look like. I think, again, that's senior executives like me and the immediate member of my team. We are very generously compensated for the job we do. We should look at the company as a shareholder. And as such, yes, we need to understand what these hurdles mean and what a good outcome is versus a bad outcome. I think at that level it is critical. Because for me, it's more about I want them to be motivated by the one thing we all share, which is the opportunity to build a formidable business that before us did not exist and to have a competitive”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of people, the number of meeting room you don't like. And all of these things are being revealed suddenly under the very crude light of hyper growth. And so, yes, life doesn't become easier once you've raised a much bigger and becomes much harder.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company that's going to go from a year ago, we were 80 people. Today we are 250. In a year will be 450. When you grow at that pace, you don't have the management, you don't have the bench, you don't have the management layers to manage the company at that scale. And building it very quickly is a big challenge. Your culture is also put under a massive amount of pressure because suddenly if I look at our company today, half of the people that are at Dashlane were not there a year ago. Actually, I think half of the people that are at that dash lane were not there nine months ago. So what does it do to the culture of your company when there are so many newcomers that were not there for the previous episodes in that season and don't have that culture deeply engraved in culture is very organic. And then you have other very trivial things that break but that have a huge impact on how your team functions, things like your offices are not adequate anymore. They're too small. You have to spread your people over multiple occasions. Your IT is not able to cope with the”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You completely change the parameters of your potential exit. You have to exit at a much higher valuation. So suddenly you've raised the bar for you and your team by a massive amount. And it's a one-way decision. You can't go back. As a consequence, you also, whether you like it or not, the level of pressure on the organization is increasing very, very quickly because suddenly the target has changed and it's a much, much bigger target for us. We need to build a multi-billion dollar company for this to make any sense. And when you look at history of companies, not many people succeed doing that. So that's the first part. But the second thing is that once you start deploying that capital, and in particular once you start going the size of your team much faster, that's when lots of things break in your company. From things around the fact that you may not have built at a smaller scale the right level of middle management. You didn't have the money to do that. You didn't have the need for it now. Suddenly you're talking about it.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, the funny story is that before we raised the very large round, we raised from Sequoya, which was $110 million in May, we had raised meaningful sums of money, but in smaller rounds, and when you raise smaller rounds, you have to be relatively frugal about or you invest the capital, you have to be thinking about the next round. And money is at all times a very important consideration for a founder and a CEO. And you have this fantasy that, you know, oh, maybe one day I'll raise a mega round and then I'll be able to focus on other things than money and my life is just going to become easier from one day to the next. It's actually quite the contrary because, and I'm speaking from experience because six months ago we raised the mega around because of a couple of things. You do that at a high valuation, otherwise it's massively dilutive. And as a result,”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first thing I would say is the excess of capital available today is a fact. Like there is so much cash that is looking for places where it can be invested that whether you are concerned about it or not, that capital is still there and is still looking for ways to get better return than what treasury bonds or money markets are giving today. And it's not easy in a world where you have negative rates to find what places to put your money. So the thing that is fueling that excess of capital is not about to go away anytime soon, whether we find it good or bad. I think the question of whether raising a large round for a company, the question whether that's a good or a bad idea, I don't think there's a general answer. I think it depends much more on very specific circumstances about a given business at a given point in its life cycle.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly going to be high gross because when you start from zero. Going to grow fast, and by definition, the problem you're going after is a global problem. So she ended up telling me, look at me, it may not work out, but you should give it a try. Give it a few months, give it six months, give it nine months, and see where it takes you. And that's what I ended up doing when I met with Bern Aliuto. I told him, look, I'm going to join for nine months and I'm going to try to build a team, build a product, and raise the first round of capital. If it doesn't work, no harm done. Because anyway, you know, you can't really pay me for my market value other than with equity. And if it works, we'll see where we take it. And the rest is history. It's the best I ever made to follow Bernard's instinct that this would be a big market. And it's the”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can absolutely ask. So she asked me if I had put together a list of criteria for what my ideal next job would be like. And I gave her that list of criteria. I said, look, it has to be a company that's in technology because I've spent many years trying to help traditional companies migrate towards technology, towards a world that software is transforming. And it's very hard to get traditional businesses to do that. They just don't have the mindset. So number one, it needs to be fundamentally about technology. Number two, it needs to be high growth business because again, I have spent the last eight years turning around traditional businesses where a goodyear was plus 2% and a bad year was minus 2%. In order to be in a world where a good year was plus 200%. So the second characteristic was high growth. And the third one was I wanted it to be global because my life has been about building global businesses. And she said, well, that thing you're talking about, which was not even called Dashlane at the time, it's certainly about technology, I to say yes.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Offer that Bernal Lu is part of that funding team made to me to join as CEO. And I was actually on a train from Paris to London on the Eurostar to go meet with a number of folks, you know, private equity investors who talk about real CEO jobs in real companies. And I was also supposed to meet with Bernard Lyoto to give him my answer on whether I joined Dashlane or not. And I ended up on that train sitting across from a very successful headhunter I had worked with in the past. She had helped me hire senior executives. She asked me what I was going to do in London. I told her about my various meetings. And I said, of course, you're advising me against joining this very, very early team that is starting this because it's a very risky carrier move. And essentially on the train from Paris to New York, she made me change my mind. And I went into the meeting where I planned to say no, and I ended up saying yes. That was nine years ago, almost to the day. And that's the best decision I ever made, even though it was a risky one.”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was the CEO of a unit of CBS called CBS Outdoor, the Billboard Business in France. It was a mid-sized company of about 1,200 people, a few hundred million in revenue. And when I left it after working for a number of years on essentially what was a turnaround plan, I decided to go back in tech because that's my passion. Originally, I'm a software engineer, and I looked for what at the time I called small tech companies, a few thousand people and a few hundred million revenue. And I met with the people that had started down the path of what would become Dashlane. And I was fascinated by their idea of solving what was one of the biggest unsolved problems of the internet, how we navigate, how we authenticate from services to services. I was fascinated by that, but obviously from a carrier standpoint, it didn't make a lot of sense for me to join what was almost not a company at the time. And I had actually decided to turn down the very generous”
2019-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Raising A Mega-Round Makes Your Life Harder Not Easier, Why Your Board Is Not Your Boss and Lessons on Successful Board Management & The Biggest Breakpoints in Company Scaling with Emmanuel Schalit, Founder & CEO @ Dashlane · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source