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Guy Podjarny

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2023-05-24
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2023-05-24
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  1. “I'm very uncomfortable with it. I like my kind of criture comforts. I like my sort of larger house and posh vacations, and I enjoy those. I like premium, even super premium. I really dislike luxury. I really dislike sort of status symbols and wearing something because it is to show that you're doing it. Those are negative value to me. And so I'm learning it. I am enjoying the ability to help family members, to help friends. And I think those are the things that give me the most pleasure. And eventually it's a bit of a burden. And I talk about giving it away. I think all the money that I have at Snake, my wife and I were planning to give that away. But when you give away larger amounts of money, suddenly that becomes a burden, which it's not donating $50 to UNICEF. So Burden, I accept those moments where I get annoyed with it and I don't pretend to be miserable for it. It's first last problems by definition. But I think it's an effort, not just a joy.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I don't really believe myself if I talk about past the five year horizon, but what I would like to think is that I focus on our family foundation. So we started a charity focusing on social inequality. It's a learning journey right now. It's a pilot a few years. I've got a couple of people in the UK. I have a couple in Israel. And learning how to give away my money. And it's fascinating and it's humbling and a lot more sobering than the sort of at the end of the day posh world of tech. And I would like to think that in 10 years that would be a more lion's share of my time.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Venture companies would never invest in venture companies. There's nothing scalable. There's no tech. There's no real kind of scalable assets in venture today. Most of it is like law firm style, a bunch of smart people that are relying on hiring additional smart people. And the little tech that does get built is all about deal flow. It's all about finding investment companies. And I would love to see venture investing in tech that makes their companies more successful, that makes them more scalable. But in general, kind of make it a bit more systematic. And I believe, I don't know for sure that there are sort of inklings of this that are happening, but I think that can be a disruptive force in the world of venture.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think there was a time horizon element to it. Probably for me right now, it's security scorecard, which has done very well. And that was invested all the way back at $6 million valuation. But a bunch of others are doing quite well. Cloudinary maybe is the other contender. Maybe even better. Cloudinary is an image management company that's been bootstrapped that I was an advisor in early on. I've got a few of them, and I do think Synthesia is an amazing company. I'm invested in now, Light Dash. There's a bunch of great companies that I'm excited to be investors in.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think it's a team, but I think teams can get awfully intimate. I think it's okay. It's a team that is on a mission. And what type of team is it? Is it a commando unit stuck in some format? Is it a set of explorers going to Antarctica and doing it? It's not a team as in a group of friends who met for a basketball game on the courts and went back home. It's a team that is all in together. And I think that's sometimes that's a more intimate and close-knit group than a family. And so making moves like letting someone go or quitting if you're the one that goes, they can be awfully emotional and awfully personal. I do think it is a team because you can't fire a child and you can't fire an abris. You can't quit from your family. I know many would want to. And so...”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I find that the analogy of the company's your baby, your startup is your baby, very apt. And I think one of the things you learn, I have two kids, is when you have one child and you want to accommodate their needs, then it's really about they want whatever and you need to either absorb it and give them or not. When you have two children, you realize you're in a position which you have to one child desires might come at the expense of the other and you have to actually teach them to do the balance and do what you think is communally best. And I think it's the same kind of in the company, you know, clearly it's adults and not kids, but you learn over time that you can't please everyone. And I want everybody to love me. And I think many people do. But at some point when you have enough people, there's going to be some people that are unpleased and you need to do the things that is in the kind of the greater good and the good of the broader family, even when you still think about it as a family and even when those are hard moves to make.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It was hard. It was also one of the better decisions that I've made. I think you have to understand what it is that you want to do. If you want to be a big company CEO, then as a founder, as long as you're executing well, you have the right to do it. Otherwise, you want to ask what the company needs from me most and what do I want to do? And for me, I felt like the thing I was most valuable thing that I could give the company was around my ability to see around quarters, my ability to understand where this is going. And I basically didn't have time to give that to the company because I was spending all my time trying to scale the organization. On the flip side, I had this opportunity to bring Peter, who was amazing, and my relationship with him is unique. And he could basically come on do that better and focus me on the other piece. And that was also where my passion was. And just because something is working doesn't mean it can't be better. So it wasn't from a point of failure. It was another step that made it even better. And it was very hard and it continues to be hard like any kind of partnership is.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think that when someone isn't working out in the company consistently, letting them go is not only in the company's favor, but also in their favor. You're really doing them no favor, keeping them in a failed position. That's doubly correct when the company is growing, when you're in hypergrowth, when someone starts to fall behind, especially in a leadership position, they need to be twice as good to be able to catch up and keep accelerating to the twice in size that you're going to be in a short order of time. And oftentimes you're just setting them up for failure.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Probably hiring for too big, too early. And so hiring people that are over oriented at processes or longer term status of the company, trying to sort of be ready ahead, but are not necessarily that good in today's needs.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That when you have a good idea, you're not the only one that has it. Rather, that you never have as much time as you think to act. We think that we're sort of these unique creatures that just have this sort of unique insight. In practice, we're influenced by everything that happens around us. And there are other smart people around they're noticing the same thing. They're probably building the same type of solution with the same principles at the same time. So you better get going.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's tough because it goes a fair bit back. The name that comes to mind is Amit Patel, who is an angel investor who joined us in that sort of round in which everybody was looking at it and saying thanks but no thanks on it and both started the top up. I think he's the only angel investor to have joined there. He's a professional angel investor and I have spins. I think he's one of, if not the most sort of impactful angel investor in Snake.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “People should get top ups in equity, and I think investors should be ready to do that. You got the higher valuation, and so you raised more money at a lower price. It's a little bit easier for the valuation, for the sort of the investor that actually has paid that amount, but it's a little bit harder for them to accept it. But I think generally speaking, people should be financially incentivized in a competitive manner around that growth, and they should be believers in the mission, especially early.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, I mean, I think there is a correlation. I think it comes back a little bit to the founder's ability to sell versus their ability to raise money, right? If you can articulate the opportunity very well, then oftentimes that translates both to your ability to sell it to investors and the ability to sell to customers. But no, I don't think it correlates heavily. I think it's like slightly. And I do think also companies can get themselves in trouble by raising too much money too early, mostly because they end up sort of pouring fuel on areas that don't actually need to be accelerated because you don't actually know what you're doing. And so I think it's dangerous. Now we're in a slightly different reality in which some companies that have raised at a higher valuation, they need to mentally prepare. They're going to work their ass off for another sort of two years now to basically get a flat round because they got such a kind of overvalued round. So if you're early and you pre-revenue and you got a hundred million dollar pre-money valuation in the previous round, you now need to get some revenue and you need to work.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I do. And I do think it's easy to see how if you have too many leaps of faith, then you can't do it. I think to me the learning was that if there are no leaps of faith, it probably means there are a dozen companies doing exactly the same thing. And if you were to do it, which I at this point typically don't, then you really are heavily betting on the operational excellence of that team. And so that's a different lens to say for the team.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Investing in things that are obvious, and it's really because they stay small and they come back to being almost entirely focused on operational excellence. I like that there's something a little bit crazy. I try to count the leaps of faith that I have to make in making an investment. If it is too many, I don't invest. But if there are none, I also don't invest. There needs to be something a little bit out of the ordinary, like I believe that for this to actually translate into something big.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Only as a limiting factor, but don't go overboard. My primary limiting factor is time. I invest versus taking advisory roles because I want to know the base minimum is you get my money and hopefully that's helping you build. Now on top of that, I want to be a value add investor and I want to learn from the journey. And so we're relevant and whenever I can, I take calls and I do a fair bit of those. I probably spend a day a week or so on angel-related stuff, maybe a little bit less. That is my primary limiting factor. Beyond that, I've veered a little bit because I do as much as I do now in direct angel investments. I mostly actually reduced my kind of LP allocation. You know, I find I do want to limit my venture exposure. And I think it's important to remember for me is most of my money is still in snake. Most of my money is in the venture, my business, like everything around me. I am in a high risk mode. And so in theory, the wise thing for me to do in the bank is to put all my money in some fixed income account and sort of get it there because really it's about don't lose this money that I have.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Cyber. And there are exceptions to that statement, but for the most part, I'm more passionate about sort of product led and those types of systems and cyber tends to be more top-down. I think you build your personal preferences, don't just think of it as an asset.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I think the biggest mistake angels make investing with VCs is underappreciating the different context, especially if you're co-investing with a VC that is primarily an A or a BC, and they're signing a seed check. For them, it's a very small bet. It's the opportunity to go ahead. For you, it might actually be as an angel, that might be your sort of primary check. I put a lot of weight into the diligence and the vetting that some of the venture firms that I co-invest with do. And so I do value that a lot. But I also want to contextualize it for me and to say whether that's important. And for me personally, while I expect a financial return, I invest largely for the learning, for the journey. I feel it helps me. First of all, it's fun. Second is it helps me actually in Sneak, helps me understand. I think it helps me be a better craftsman. And so I have all sorts of filters that the sort of the VCs don't necessarily have. My first filter is do I want to get on a call with this person again? Do I like them? And then is this an area that is of interest to me? Ironically, for instance, I don't invest that much.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “But you want to understand what the fit between your product and the go to market, and you want to put yourself in a position to get the feedback in the right direction.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think of it as iteration. I think there's almost like an element of hubris in thinking that you can get into your ivory tower, come out in a year and come out with some wondrous thing that is precisely right. It isn't really, I think, the best sort of bet for you to make. And I'm a believer. And I think what you need to do is you need to iterate. I think that is the sort of the speed of delivery. How quickly do you iterate? The faster you do that, the faster you learn. The faster you learn, the faster you're going to hit product market fit. So I agree with that. The one caveat that I would add is you need to be iterating in the right direction. I like to say that if you're good, then you optimize for the feedback you get. If you're not good, that's a different problem. And if you optimize for the feedback you get, you want to set yourself up to getting the feedback in the area that matters. And so if you want to build a product-led growth company and all of the feedback you get is from a dozen design partners that you work with in a top-down fashion with sort of the CTO, then you will optimize for something, but it's unlikely that you would optimize for getting a self-serve community-led product. You want to iterate quickly.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And have a conversation about it. And it doesn't really matter if you use the powers kind of framework. That's just a helper. It's about understanding what are your core sort of sustainable differentiators.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Most of them just don't consider, right? They think about things a bit more loosely, but I think people are unwilling to pick. They think this is important and this is important and this is important. And so they end up underestimating the things that matter most. And so especially in the context of success, at some point you feel like the world is your oyster. You can do a lot of different things. You go into them. So at the beginning, it's about product market fit. It's not about powers. So if you actually over rotate on powers, that would be the mistake. Over time, as you get something that is successful, I think powers are important because they help you pick the next thing to do. They help you ask, okay, if you're going to expand in X at another product or expand an audience, the best question to ask is which of your powers help you in that expansion? If the answer is none, then you really should pause and reconsider because basically you're saying I'm going to go into those areas and I'm going to compete on operational excellence merits alone. And so if you don't even know what your powers are, pause and go up.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I think, firstly, it might be interesting to think a little bit about the exercise that we've done. So, what we've done was we took four primary competitor categories, and for each of those, we tried to write down the primary capabilities that we differentiate on in those areas. And then we thought about the capabilities we could build that we think that are sort of interesting to us. And then we, for each one of those, we sort of assessed, are they truly superior, significant, sustainable? And that was a good exercise, even if we've done nothing else and sometimes actually we've done it a few times, sometimes we've done nothing but the conversation, but it still distills your understanding of it. And I think that's very important. It's a mechanism, this and questions like, would this be more important in five years or not are things that I do with the product organizations and definitely with the labs organizations, which is very skilled in this now, to help us anchor in the future, to help us think about where it is going and where it is headed. And so that is very valuable. By the way, the hardest part is then distilling that into the top items. What is the one or the two items that you would pick for every sort of box?”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, we went pretty deep on it, and we've done sort of power exercises for different competitor groups, like our powers as compared to the dev tools that try to go into security versus our powers compared to the security players are a little bit different because the capabilities, what's normal in the ecosystem is different.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Brand power is very powerful for a tech startup or for a company that is building out, it's just so easy to claim that you have brand. I think the idea of brand is really to be able to sell the same product for a significantly higher price because of people taking pride for it. And so like, for instance, you think about Snake, you know, so Snake has a certain amount of brand power. There's a certain amount of fairy dust, sort of DevOps fairy dust that all the security companies want. There's a certain amount of that that people believe. But it's not a sustainable sort of superior, significant capability. I think that's really the sort of the risk with powers is that try to call everything a power. And that loses the sort of the whole kind of idea of defining and understanding your powers is that you know where to invest.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, for sure. I think actually I've had a couple of conversations with Hamilton, and so we discussed this. He ends up dissing his own brand and process power. So says both of those are just so easy to claim that they end up being a little bit loose in your definition.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And so that's why I think in use cases, I think in value propositions. And so who is it that you provide value to? That's the first question. If you don't provide value, then it's no good. And are there enough of those? And that eventually would they pay.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I think sometimes it isn't. To me, product market fit is really about when demand outweighs your capacity to satisfy it. Kind of can't hire people fast enough, spin up servers fast enough, whatever it is, the scale because demand outstrips it, then I think you hit product market fit. I think first to market, it's a little bit of a poorly defined term. For Sneak, there were at least two elements to it. There was the product user fit of getting to developers. And so I think we hit that one pretty quickly. And there was a lot of learning still about getting that done, but I think we got that. But it was very different between that and the product buyer fit, which is probably a bit more akin to product marketing if you talk about the business.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Legal license you give to your customers around the use of data that you have. It could be investing in some viral mechanism. It could be trying to invest in stickiness in switching costs.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think so, and I don't know the industry well enough, but it's an example of that of saying if people are already well incentivized to believe and stick to the existing system as it works, because that is what makes them powerful today than counterpositioning against them. And so I think per Helmer's book, the two powers that you build at Inception are cornered resource and the counterpositioning. And so you can come indeed with some unique knowledge or perspective or with a counterposition that is hard. That's like the innovator's dilemma hard for the incumbent to produce. I don't think you should focus on those, but as an investor, even at the early stage, I try to theorize about what could it be. And then once you've theorized that, you put that aside and you really just focus on product market fit and you have to get something working. Once you get something working, then you start tweaking. When you're getting to the point where you hit product market fit and now you need to scale some things and things like that, maybe you should tweak priorities. You shouldn't overhaul priorities, but you should tweak priorities for things that matter. It could be the type of”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Correct. So I think when I invest, I think about some theories about how you could build a defensible project over here. If this was to succeed, what is it? Would you have a network? Would you be accumulating some data? Would you be aggregating accumulating switching costs from within the customer? Is there any sort of counter positioning that you're doing it there? Are you doing something that incumbents, even if they see they would choose not to adopt like the Netflix blockbuster example, right? Or for Sneak, it was dev first. Dev first is something that is counterpositioned to the security industry.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Potentially, although now that has grown. So that's the cornet resource kind of power. And do you have some sort of very unique set of skills that nobody else can have? And are they indeed superior and indeed significant? I think specifically right now with AI, space is moving fast enough and there are enough people that it's not really a cornered resource. It can be a necessary and a valuable capability, but I think it's hard for that to be alone. But what I do think is critical is to think about how does this business become defensible. So if you assume success, if you assume you found product market fit, which absolutely should be consuming 90 plus percent of your attention should be on product market fit, not power at the beginning. You have to build something of value to then sustain and differentiate.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I think at the beginning you can't be defensible, you have nothing. I think maybe the only exception to that is if you have very unique knowledge in the fast. That maybe that's”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I mean, so I'm a big fan of the powers framework. For those who don't know at a high level, it just talks about how do you deliver value to a customer, eventually forming as a free cash flow in a way that is sustainable, superior, and significant. So something that is truly better, it's truly superior, it's significant, it matters that it's better at whatever it is that it does.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And so the effort of picking up a solution needs to be proportional to the pain that you're sensing. So it's really all about friction. And so I think those are the two primaries. If something is high frequency, high pain, it's all about comparing it to the existing solution because there's no way that they're not doing anything about something that is high frequency, high pain. And so it's all about the better mousetrap. It's all about differentiating from existing approaches to solving it. And if something is low frequency, low pain, and maybe that's like a version of some of the vitamins, then it can't be your lead. At best, it can be a feature, but it can be the primary thing that you're doing.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “It is better to have a nerve. It's better to have a pain that you're addressing when you're talking about the primary. I like to think, I have this two by two in my head, which talks about kind of pain and frequency. So if something is low frequency, high pain, something that may be like a big incident that happens or maybe building your sort of RBAC system or something, then really you need a strategy that is all about presence. It's high pain. So when it happens, you need to be there and be available. If something is high frequency, low pain, then it's all about friction. It's something that always bothers you a little bit.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I think it's always a bit of a balance between them. And so best of breed products for the point activity that they provide are presumably better. They're best of breed. I think right now there is a lot of platform consolidation. I will admit that Snake is benefiting from that now that we have the breadth, but I think a lot of it is from just from cost savings, single vendor relationships, things of that nature. But I think there are ways to build a platform that actually makes it truly better in total if you make your products work together. It really, it again comes back to that notion of how much additional value, how differentiated you are. If you're a point best of breed product that is twice as good as the generic product, you probably will still succeed, like companies or customers will still want to use you as long as you articulate that value. I think what maybe has changed is the appetite for a product that is 20% better but is indeed separate and has all the overhead of having another vendor and another solution implemented.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Times and I say it all the time because people confuse this with they say ROI, they say features, you know, they say they talk about the technology, they talk about just finance. All of those are not important. What's important is the value to the customer. All of these things are just symptoms of it. And so you really have to understand what is the value. And my favorite statement to customer is to say, look, if we align on the value that we provide you, we should be able to align on the price. So I think if you figure that out as a company, what is the value you provide? Now it's just an articulation element. It's about how do you get that message across.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I think a lot of the fundamentals that got us to sort of the PLG movement is the fact that modern organizations rely on unempowered workforce that can make decisions and move quickly. At the moment, everybody's looking for places to cut. Empowerment is not the word of the day and things get centralized. If you're a startup, you have to acknowledge that in the current reality and you can shift your messaging a little bit to focus on, for instance, productivity or cost savings that this product can provide. But it's a little bit tricky because you might get lured down a path that is not product-led, that is enterprise, even though your market is really best situated to be one with product-led. So it's a bit tricky. I have a few angel investments like that, and it's not easy. You have to make a case-by-case decision. But I think fundamentally, over time, I still think product-led, empowerment-oriented solutions that focus on the user versus the buyer are important. You have to help your users communicate with your buyers. You have to help them understand what is the use case, what is the value proposition. I've said use case probably already a dozen.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “It's really tough. I do think this is a bit of a tough moment for PLG companies. I still think that it's a temporary reality. And so you have to think about...”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Call it a day. I think you have to have an understanding. To me, it comes back to that sort of first principles thinking. And so you have to break it down and says, why is it not working? If the answers are only, if only I built this feature, if only I talked to that person, then I think you're missing something. So I think if you're just churning, if you're just trying to hit in different directions, then it might indeed be sort of a problematic sense. You have to have a theory of change of what is it fundamentally that is causing my current situation and what am I doing about it to significantly change it, whether it is reach, whether it is core product principles, and therefore which use cases do they enable, whether it is indeed different sort of buyer persona than a user persona, et cetera.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Amount of money, and that was great, like really all around. And that set us up and allowed us to get to the point this was still eight months before we got to 100,000 ARR. But then four months after that, instead of 100,000, we were at 650. And a year after that, we were at 4.5 million. And so basically roughly two years into a bit years in, the dollar funnel started going to the right direction.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think you have to be careful around how quickly you lean into a preemptive notion. Preemptive and the idea of sort of VCs coming along and saying, hey, maybe I want to, I want it so bad, I will pay up ahead of time is very ego boosting and it feels very good. And then you also know that you don't want just one horse, like you don't want just one bidder. And so it's very easy to say, why don't I talk to everybody now? And when you do that, you're sort of going a bit all in and I think you can really believe some scorched earth. I think for us, if it wasn't for Ed Sim and Bold Star and like him and Elliot being believers, and they basically topped us up, we did get some offers. We just didn't get the right offer from the right investor. And I had a whole personal thing. My father-in-law passed away literally during the same sort of week on it. And I was thinking of whether I take VC calls from the Shiva. It was an intense period. And they stepped up and says, look, we see it. We believe it. We think you're sort of on the right path. Why don't you take this sort of smaller, this bridge check on the best valuation that you've received in these sort of terms sheet by a smaller?”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So I had to reaffirm the conviction. I had two primary moments where I had to do that. One was I had an advisor who was, I really think of him in high regard, who heard he wasn't super involved, but heard the conversation doing it and says, guy, I think you're fucked. You're basically classic dev tool pitfall, which is you get a lot of developer love, but nobody's willing to spend money on it. And really, I was pissed. I was really annoyed. I came back. This was San Francisco, flew back to London, and basically spent sort of the weekend fuming and thinking, am I? Am I doing it? And the bottom line was basically reaffirming the conviction that I would rather crash and burn than pivot to just focusing on the security audience in that I don't want to build just another slightly better mousetrap. I want to build something that matters. And what matters is breaking through to developers. And so that was a big one. Then I guess sort of a similar, maybe a little bit more frequent case is even before that I had a whole horde of VCs come along see the thousands of users outside see the visibility.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “We basically successfully got developers to embrace this, and then at some point we sort of opened up the payment gateways and allowed people to pay for it, and nobody did. And then we worked through it. So maybe about a year into the company, we had G8. We've had the beta out for about nine months. And we had thousands or maybe tens of thousands of users at the time. And we opened up the online purchase and nothing, like a minimal minuscule trickle came in. And really, a year later, we were still at 100,000 ARR in the bus. So at this point, two years in and many millions of dollars burned and tens of thousands of users.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I think it depends. You have to assess your market. And I do think that I had a certain depth of understanding in this one. And so I thought the most difficult thing, the biggest thing to prove was that developers will actually embrace this security solution if you build the right company, if you build the right solution. I entirely underestimated the gap between getting that to be successful, which we did, to actually getting a commercial business going. What was the gap?”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Amazing how sort of his story remembers the successes and sort of the failures. I think what worked well at Snake from the beginning is getting developer adoption. And so we were very focused on the most important thing we're looking to crack is get developers to embrace a security product if we figure that out, revenue will come.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “You have to choose. You can't be everything to everyone, or you'll be pretty crap at all of it. Your platform can have a vision, have an aspiration of being everything to everyone, but it has to have a specific subset of users, a subset of the market for which you're amazing at the beginning. And there's a variety of reasons for it. On the product itself, it's because almost all of these problems are more complicated than you think they are. As you unravel it, and as you kind of really think about the customer's entire use case, then you learn that there's a lot more that they need to build. But even beyond the product, it has a good market element to it. Do you want to find a group of people that talk to one another? That's the whole idea of getting a certain flywheel is you get a certain momentum. And so you have to pick a slice, be amazing at it, and evolve from it. And that piece needs to be big enough and small enough, right? It needs to be big enough to care that it can feed you for a while, that it can be an important enough anchor, and that it can be a good step for adjacencies as you expand. But it needs to be small enough that you can make...”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I think messaging naturally evolves. There's just the practicality of getting better at saying the same thing. And so if you find yourself being on a call and saying, I like phrasing it this way, although on the website I say that way, maybe you should change what's on the website. The second thing that happens is your product evolves and so your value proposition starts from something a bit maybe more narrow, maybe it shifted, maybe it expanded, and so you're sort of messaging evolves. But then also the market evolves and changes. And that's maybe over a longer horizon. But I think a good example of that, again, in sort of Snyk World is at the beginning of it, we had to convince people that they should engage developers that developers can and will own security. And today, I think a lot of that is accepted. And now the conversation and therefore the messaging, the problem they have is more, how do I do that? How do I scale that? And so the messaging has to adapt.”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It evolved minimally to develop fast, stay secure, but it always focuses on like the thing that you want to do as an organization, and then how do we help you address it?”

    2023-05-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Being First To Market Does Not Matter, Why You Do Not Have Defensibility on Day 1, How to Analyse Market Size and Present it to Investors, Vitamins vs Painkillers; Do Vitamins Survive Recessions and Good vs Great Messaging with Guy Podjarny @ Sn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source