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Florian Leibert

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23
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2018-01-19
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2018-01-19
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1
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  1. “So many great things from so many different people. So huge thank you for joining me today and I can't wait to see the road ahead for Mesosphere. Thank you, Harry. Great being here.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Day in San Francisco, what's the favorite blog or newsletter for you? I love seeking alpha because it doesn't really have that much to do with my day job, so I love to learn about finance. That's a great one. Penultimate one, what did you believe that you've maybe changed your mind on over the last few years? So I came out of engineering and I never really understood how important sales in a company is. I guess my naive way of going into starting a company in enterprise sales was that if you build up a great product, it's going to sell itself. But sales is super important. It's equally important to building a great product. And then let's finish on the next five years for you and for Messosphere. What have we gone in store? We really want to execute on our mission to make it insanely easy to build and scale world-changing technology. And we really want to help companies in their journey of digital transformation. As Mark and Reason famously said, software is eating the world and every company has to become a software company. We want to help every company on this journey. Florian, as I said, I heard”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, I can't say it's true or false, but I think there's certainly something happening right now at the edge. So we're seeing a lot of companies coming to us and saying, like, look, we believe that there's a lot of compute that's moving to the cloud, but also a lot of computing has to happen at the edge because the amount of data that's being generated is just exploding. So data is growing at 40% compounded annually. And you just won't be able to just put all of this data into a centralized system. So we see this with connected cars. We see this with even cruise ships. So today we have actually cloud and edge cloud on each of the cruise ships. So while it's still a cloud, it's not a centralized cloud. Love that. What about the big learnings from your time with Airbnb and Twitter? I think a lot of people obsessed too much about title. Charles Sandbrook said this best. When you offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask which seed. And I think you learn so much at companies that go through this hyperscale mode and you get so many opportunities to contribute that, yeah, you shouldn't be focused on title. It's a rainy.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'm taking the alchemist by Paolo Coelho. There was an awesome book that I actually read right before starting Mesosphere. And I think this book really outlines that on your journey, a lot of things go wrong, but you'll learn a lot of great things on the way. And as long as you continue to get up and continue on your journey, everything's going to be fine. The end of cloud.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so I think as you scale a company process becomes much more important. And I think that happens across all organizations, not just sales. It's really important to have process and product and engineering. I remember when we were first just the founders and a couple of engineers and we didn't even have really product management initially. We would come up with an idea and then we would start implementing it. Now that's great and that's great in the early phases, but I think later on what you really need to do is you need to write all of your user stories down. You need to then actually figure out like how does this translate into Jiro tickets how can we break these big tasks down into smaller tasks and get them done. So process becomes super important and I think it's just a big transformation from early stage to later stage and process is all about being efficient.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So we did early on a couple of nonpaid pilots, and I think we learned a lot from them. That was when we didn't have a large customer base. So we took these pilots to really refine our product. So in that way, we gained something. But I think it's super important when you go into a pilot paid or unpaid, actually, to identify the success criteria. And if you do that right, you basically can then make a sale up on completion of the pilot. I think our very first pilot we went into, we didn't identify success criteria or at least we thought we had our success criteria, but the customer actually had her own success criteria and they just didn't overlap. So that was a big problem in the end because that sale actually never happened afterwards. So it was a lot of time spent on both sides that was essentially wasted. And now what we do is we sit down, our sales engineering and solutions team. They sit down with the customers and we and the customer agree on a set of common goals and then we execute to those goals.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The struggles that we've had early on in our sales organization was we brought some people in with the wrong DNA that were really not familiar with our space and they had a different background. And I think for sales, you really need to find the right prototype of an account executive. And for us, those are people that have a lot of relationships into very large organizations. And they've oftentimes worked just with a handful of very large customers. So that was one part that we had to learn. The other part is, of course, we don't want to hire five salespeople when you don't have a single one fully ramped, meaning that person hasn't achieved the entire quota yet. You want to really build out your sales organization slowly and not just drop a bunch of sales executives in there when you haven't really figured out what your sales mode.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So it is, of course, important to not just listen to a couple of people, but I think you should definitely talk to your customers.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think it's a numbers game. I think you have to talk to a lot of customers and then you see what they all converge on. What are the real pain points? And our product is very, very complex. So there are, of course, certain use cases. And I think this is really more of an art than a science is to cluster these use cases together and identify what are the commonalities. No two use cases are exactly alike, but we see a lot of similarities in some of them. And I think you need to have seen a certain amount before you go in and build something. I think if you just talk to two or three customers, you're probably going to end up building the wrong things. But if you look at 100 customers and you find, oh, there's like 10 main use cases in those and you can group those together and then you can do analysis and figure out like what's the deal size in each of these use cases. You can make really much more informed decision and figure out if I double down here, I'm going to increase my average sales price and maybe if I double down in this and this other use case, I get a much broader customer base.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, so I think it's super important to be connected and to get introductions, I think, especially in enterprise sales. You don't sell things over a website. So it's super important that you have the right ins at the companies you're dealing with. And then, of course, you want to establish a relationship, a vendor customer relationship when it comes to very large deals, requires a lot of work, and you need to spend a significant amount of your time with your customers. But I think that's actually also useful to then plug the learnings that you get back into the product. Because if you spend a lot of time with your customers, you'll figure out what they want and what they would pay probably more money for. So we have three co-founders. So Ben and Toby are my other co-founders. And we spend an enormous amount on product together. Toby and I right now are more in the field. And Ben is really internally driving process and driving engineering and integrating the product and engineering organizations. But the three of us still spend a lot of time taking the customer feedback from our network that we have.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So we don't necessarily see that that slow motion M&A, we really believe that in our line of business, the strategics can really help us selling more of our product. So that's, I think, the primary focus. Now, I think in other industries that might be slightly different, but for us, it's certainly not the case that we picked our strategic investors because those were the companies we thought are necessarily going to acquire us.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so for us, the strategics came in during our CRC financing. And I would even say, I think it was just the right time. So we were big enough where we could actually spend resources, meaning headcount on these relationships and have a BD team that could actually help us get plugged into HP and Microsoft. And if you're too young of a company, if you're too small, you might not be able to actually hire someone to really own the relationship and help you navigate this very large company.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think you will realize how strongly they are leaning in, and that will give you an indication of how good of a partner they will be in the end. I think in our case, for example, it was really good because we saw that really the leadership team at HPE and Microsoft wanted to strongly partner with us. And we saw this because when it came to negotiation around the terms, it was many of the issues were resolved very quickly. So they really wanted to get the deal done.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I think you have to very quickly when you form one of these partnerships, and of course most of the time that happens because of one champion, you have to really start building relationships with other parts of the company that can really help you. And I think you can have a single point of failure in an organization because, as you mentioned, like things change, people leave, and then you don't want the partnership to suffer.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So, I think when you deal with a really large company that has probably more SVPs and VPs than you have employees, It can be a huge time sink, right? You can spend a lot of time chasing certain projects and especially in the beginning when you pulled in, you're the new shiny object for that company. So a lot of people want to spend time with you, but not all time, I guess, is spent wisely. So you have to have some really clear goals of what you want to accomplish with this relationship. And I think those goals should really also dictate who you're going to partner with and who should be your strategic investor.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I don't think necessarily because we deal with HPE, but we also actually have a really good relationship with Dell EMC. And I think if you look at HPE, for example, they also resell VMware, even though VMware is mostly owned by Dell EMC. So I think in this space, the larger players have to be somewhat neutral.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So, the great thing about strategics is that, especially in our space, they can really help you with introductions to customers. They usually have, I mean, in the case of HPE and Microsoft, they have a massive amount of connections. They have hundreds of thousands of customers, and they pretty much know a lot of people in every organization. So they can really help you with introductions. And of course, the hope also with strategic is often that they actually plug your product into their channel so that they actually resell your product.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I think it depends on the stage, but I think usually I'm a big fan of one on one advice because then you can have a much more honest conversation about everything. It's kind of hard when you're in a room with 10 people or so to really dive in and discuss some really hard issues. I think that's much better in a smaller group or even one-on-one setting.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So, the way that we communicated this was, I mean, we of course had the conversation initially, should we build a SaaS business? A SaaS business has its advantages in many ways. But also, of course, as I mentioned, some disadvantages. And what we ended up doing is we ended up just saying, look, this is great advice. Let us get back to you. And in a couple of months later, we were like, look, this is not the route we decided to go down. And we have now a product that we think we can really sell. And it really helped us that we actually had a big technology customer that actually a fairly large deal for our stage with. And I think that gave us the ammunition we needed to just continue down our path.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “$500,000 worth of a product on our website. So these are contracts that go through long negotiation cycles. They go into procurement. And we got this advice in the beginning many times. Go build a SaaS product. And in the end, just wasn't a good fit for a SaaS product.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, first of all, of course, a lot of our investors have a ton of really useful advice, and I don't think we would be where we are today without this advice. But you're right, one of our early investors during our seed round was always when he saw the product that we wanted to build, was always pushing us towards going for a SaaS model. Now, if you know what Mesosphere does, right? We basically are building an operating system for data centers and clouds. We make it much easier to transport data by providing message queues and we make it really easy to store data by providing and operationalizing distributed databases. And what I think our investors didn't get initially, or some of the investors didn't get initially, was that this doesn't really lend itself to a SaaS business, at least not for the market that we were aiming for initially. So we wanted to really target the global 2000 and now really the global 8000 companies out there. And those companies won't be just putting in a credit card and ordering.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Consumer internet companies, I thought that every company should be able to take advantage of a lot of the technology that's out there that's being released into open source, but that's still really hard to assemble. And that's when we started Mesosphere, we wanted to really make it insanely easy to build and scale world-changing technology.”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, sure. So I started out finishing my degree in Germany in computer science, and after doing so, I actually went to the US. I first worked in ad tech. And in ad tech, I worked very much with Hadoop, so a large-scale data processing system. And with that experience, I was actually hired into Twitter. And at Twitter, then I worked on some of the early who to follow, so the graph algorithms trying to densify the graph and give users better recommendations. And from there on, after about two years of doing that, and there were many other projects there, for example, I worked on user search and I worked on some of the initial deployments for Mesos for deploying user search to Mesos. From there on, I actually switched over to Airbnb and joined a good friend of mine there who was running engineering. And at Airbnb, I worked again on some of this early search algorithms. I worked on some of the infrastructure and build up the data engineering team. After Airbnb, after working on solving two times these scalability problems for”

    2018-01-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Should Not Always Listen To Your Investors, The Pros and Cons of Strategic Investors & How To Approach Operational Efficiency with Scaling with Florian Leibert, Founder & CEO @ Mesosphere · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source