YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Simons

lines on the record: 32
first: 2021-06-10
most recent: 2021-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The river Y by David James Duncan is probably the novel I've reread the most, and it is a meditation on self-discovery and nature and life told through the journey of this soul-searching fisherman in the Pacific Northwest, which is where I grew up. And so kind of the backdrop of the book is really familiar to me because that's where I spent my childhood. But it is just.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it depends on the situation. I think there's businesses that need capital that you need to blitzcale because there's an opportunity that was so large and so meaningful that if you're not chasing it as quickly as you can, somebody else is and the first to get there is probably going to be the winner take most. I think there's certainly examples of that. Then there's examples where, you know, I think capital scarcity can also benefit you. You know, we were forced to kind of fund the business from the cash register. And I think that created, you know, a discipline. It created a compelling need to really, really materially understand ROI. And so anywhere we are going to spend money, we are going to analyze the crap out of that just to make sure is this money well spent. You know, we could still be speculative. We could still experiment and try things, but every experiment was thought through, what are we trying to prove here and how do we know that this is working or not working? And I think if you're not capital constrained, potentially you're not doing that because you don't have to. But, you know, I think it's a horse's for courses thing. It really depends.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, it's back to the owl, right? You know, incredible people make incredible businesses. Even when I think about Alassian, like Alassian probably in Excel's portfolio was probably I'm guessing like rated as maybe a bee company because like our growth profile wasn't, you know, we weren't grown at 100%. We were not slow, but we were steady and we were really intentional about how we were growing. So I imagine like inside of Excel's portfolio, they would have seen companies that at our revenue size were growing twice as fast probably said, man, you know, there's other things that lasting could be doing to grow faster. Ultimately 10 years later, you know, we eclipsed a lot of those companies based on cores, strategic decisions we made and how thoughtful we were about really long-term growth and building the foundations for that durable long-term growth. And it was very intentional. We made choices where we could have really early on invested in the enterprise segment and instead of selling a $10,000 product chose to sell a $200,000 product. And again, the counterfactual is tough to paint what Alassium would have looked like, but I believe it wouldn't.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can create headwinds for that. I mean, it's really difficult to predict the future with certainty that far out. That's actually, I think, anytime you're writing a check, whether it's like early stage or even a gross stage, and you're saying, man, what do I need to believe about this company five or six or seven years from now when you're writing the check, that's hard. And it takes a lot of time and energy to understand the market and the founders and the product and the customers and the problems they're solving, but also just faith and gut and belief.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first check was a company I'd known for a while. It was a company called Century IO. They provide software to help developers monitor and fix errors and performance in their code and the applications that they're building. And so part of the big secular shift around software eating everything and the importance of software development, software development teams. So it was sort of one that I was close to based on my 12 years at Atlassian, but incredible product fanatical customers. And like at Lassian, you know, the ability to serve small and huge customers simultaneously. You know, it's kind of daunting when you write the first one. I think maybe the hard part about investing in general is you can, you know, it's easy to imagine what a company is going to look like two years into the future. Lots of investing is closing your eyes and building some assumptions around what the company could look like five to ten years into the future. And that's hard because so much can change, right? Markets can change. New competitors can kind of enter the market. You can have big tectonic shifts in a particular category.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opportunity to be blessed with the opportunity to learn about a lot of different markets and products and problems that you're solving is just exhilarating.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some dimensions, it is. I mean, I think what's hard for operators that move into investing, it's easy to sort of look at things through the lens of maybe what you do as an operator. And so that challenge is you can see maybe a lot of potential in lots of businesses based on what you believe would be the right focus or execution. And that's based on what you've been through and what you've built and what you've seen. That can be a challenge because I think I've seen lots of great businesses that potentially could be exceptional. And by the way, that's true of any investment with sort of like the right execution and kind of right strategy and right focus. But, you know, I think the day-to-day job I found thrilling, right? I mean, the opportunity to Splunk into different markets and different products and different founders and different stages of growth is awesome. I mean, having spent 25 years really single threading on one thing where I wake up every day thinking about one market and only the dimensions of that one company to have the opportunity.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I do find it tough. You are looking for, I mean, you're building out a portfolio, and the portfolio is going to be selective. In my particular case, I'm probably choosing four or five companies over the course of 12 to 18 months that I want to deploy a lot of capital into, but also deploy a lot of time and energy and attention. And so even though to that degree, it makes sense to sort of spend a lot of time qualifying out. It's hard. It's sort of like your time is inverted where the majority of it is filtering the things that you're going to pass on, you're going to say no to to try to find those four or five really special companies that you want to marry”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's more common. A more common mistake is companies probably wait too long versus doing it too early. I think history is littered with examples of great companies that didn't invest in a durable second act. And they're putting all their energy in the first act and eventually the first act runs out of gas or steam. And then it's too late. Then you're in sort of that wartime save the first act mode versus investing in the optionality of kind of that second product or that second act of growth. I think it's impossibly prescriptive about timing because it is so situational. But the advice I'd probably give always have some part of you, some part of the company thinking about new innovation, new problems to solve for customers in just investing in that. You know, and at last, our second product of confluence was created in year two of the company, which was incredibly risky. I think to diversify focus so early. But, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I think it was foundational to the company Alassie.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We basically just put on ice. And we said, we're not going to do those because this thing is so critical to our future and success. We're concentrating all of our energy on that thing and we're going after it. And probably that's the thing if I could go back in history and change, I would have developed that capability and matured it a lot earlier.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That focus and that ability to capture that value for a number of years. And I think as a strategic choice, that helped us competitively because we were a different shaped company for enterprises. We were still being adopted at the user level and brought into organizations. But the alternatives to us were all orders of magnitude more expensive with different distribution and sales models. And in the early days, they were growing faster than us, but we grew more durably. At Lassie and grew between 40 and 50% for more than 15 straight years. I mean, there's lots of things that I think I wish we would have done faster and earlier when you look in the review mirror. Velocity is the thing you always want to challenge. You're like, oh man, I just took us too long to do this thing. I think the thing that we did was right. We just should have done it in half the time. You know, over time, I think we got better prioritization. We got better at being declarative, but then making sure that the other things that we could invest partial time or sort of like bubble along.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't know. The counterfactuals are always hard because, you know, we made some pretty unconventional choices around strategy and where we were going. And it's always hard to say, well, what if we had gone right instead of left? It's hard to say, I mean, I'm proud of the choices that we made. We spent a bunch of time debating them. And there's unconventional things like, you know, we added a second product really early in the company's life cycle. That was a very unconventional and risky choice. But I think if I look back, had we not done that, we probably would be a very different company. Who knows? Like if we were just the JIRA company and not Atlassian has a portfolio of products, how different would we be? I think that we wouldn't be the company that Atlassian became. We also deferred focus on the enterprise segment for about 10 years. We were still selling into the enterprise, but we are selling differently to the enterprise and really not kind of maximizing the value that we probably should capture for the value that we were giving really large companies. We deferred.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same opportunity for independent software vendors or individual developers to build a whole bunch of extension value on top of your core product.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer base. And that was, again, a huge area of investment for us where we focused on making sure that the APIs and extension points were richer and richer and richer for individuals to do things with and small companies to do things with, but also that we created a way to marry customer with product that wasn't our own. And the goal for us is somebody solve the problem that actually a lot of our customer base probably wants access to. And if they do get access to that and it does solve a problem, it means that both the core product is more valuable to them and the core product from a retention perspective is even stickier because you've got JIRA and then you have three or four things that are built around it that are really valuable to the customer base. That value actually means that our retention is going to be higher and it becomes kind of a more meaningful sticky product to the customer overall. So it's just another example of even if you don't in a product like growth business you might not have the same opportunity with kind of resellers and value added service providers, but you could potentially have this.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it can be a little trickier if there isn't something for the partner to be able to do with your product. If your product is so simple and so easy that the barrier to entry in the product is literally a sign up form and I'm in and the product basically doesn't need configuration or training or assistance or help and there isn't something that you can stretch it around to do that requires expertise or prior experience, it's going to be harder. And it may be that then you have more of a partner orientation around reselling or training. You know, some other thing that the partner could do. But I think it's important to understand like if I'm going to build this network of affiliated relationships, what are they? And by the way, the other dimension that I mentioned was it was important to us is we had extensibility in Atlassium products from a really early age. And so one thing that partners could do is they could extend them and kind of build add-ons and customizations individually for specific customers. But third parties and independent developers could also use those same extensions to build products they could sell into our”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partners in partnerships, also understanding what could we do better inside of the company, inside of the program, inside of the products to enable their growth because their growth would yield more growth for us.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our particular case, it is about architecting a program that has clarity around the purpose and the mission and where you're aligning with the partners that you're recruiting into that program, what's going to happen. On top of that program, we didn't have salespeople in the field, but we had, at the time, what we called experts, we referred to our partners as experts because we wanted to signal to the market and to our customers that there are companies alongside us that have deep expertise in our products. And that's actually what you want. You want somebody that really knows how to take Atlassian products and put them to work inside of your business. And so we're going to represent not a reseller, not a var, not a service provider. We're going to represent an expert to you. We invested in developing that expertise in these companies. So we didn't have field salespeople, but we had expert managers around the world who were deeply focused on recruiting, enabling, assisting, helping, managing this network of affiliated.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of things that potentially a large customer would need help with that we could either choose to invest directly or we could choose to invest through a partner to service those kinds of things. And I think one of the mistakes maybe that companies make is, and I learned this in the company prior to Atlassian, there's a gravitational pull towards sort of the big service integrators, like the Deloitte's and the Accentures and sort of like the really big companies. And they take a lot of time because, again, they've got a cajillion things that they're focused on and lots of different technology in the practice of the firm that they're talking to. We focused on kind of more boutique, dedicated partners that we could invest and actually get more return on that investment with their focus and dedication to our products and our market. And then because we structured it in a way that really advantaged their ability to build a business in a market, they didn't need to kind of look around for other things to diversify their business. We gave them so much opportunity to grow. And then back to at the top of kind of this item.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you need market there. I mean, you need market for the partners to be able to grow their businesses. And then I think you need alignment around what they do and what you do and where you work together and where some of the rubs will be. In our particular case, part of the catalyst for building the partner network was this need that we weren't directly fulfilling in the enterprise segment with a need geographically. You know, we were selling online at US dollars. And so part of the value add that a partner could support us through is I can sell in euros or I can sell in Japanese yen and I can invoice you locally because you're going to buy online from effectively a US and Australian entity and you might want an invoice with a local address for tax reasons. That was sort of like one thing that the partner could fulfill. The other thing that was really symbiotic with our particular approach is there was a service opportunity in our products for partners to service. They could configure, tune, customize, deploy. There's a kind of a bunch.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Valuable to you over time because their focus is fragmented. They're now thinking about two companies or three companies or four companies instead of exclusively yours. And that requires, I think, fortitude and learning and patience and investment, but it's not easy.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you've got to believe that that alternative provides this sort of long-term durable positive benefit to the company. There's some tension in that. I think there's also tension in continuing to invest in it. Even if you pick channel as sort of one component of economy that you can build, I think history is sort of littered with examples of companies that begin to build out a channel as either greed or kind of the desire for growth becomes more acute, potentially the company can kind of push their channel down the value stack where early on the channel has the ability to kind of work with the biggest, most valuable customers and over time maybe a direct sales organization says, well, we're going to take that segment and run it directly because it's more valuable and important to us and you'll take the mid-market segment or the SNB segment. And what I see happen a lot is the channel loses opportunity. They begin to diversify and they say, well, actually, instead of exclusively focusing on building a business around this one software company, I actually needed more things in my portfolio. I need to de-risk my concentration on this one thing. And overall, if you think about it, then they become less.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe a big one is you have to have trust that a third party or a partner or somebody that's an extension of you can do things as well as you could. In some cases they're going to do things differently. In some cases they need to do the same things. And you know, we invested at last year we invested early on. We had built this self-service online e-commerce flywheel for customers to buy the product. And as we moved into the enterprise, we had an opportunity to either invest directly in building an enterprise sales organization or indirectly in investing in a partner network and a channel that could help resell our products into larger companies around the globe, but also service and support and configure and install and upgrade all those products. And that requires a lot of faith. When you're a young company, you could say, well, I know what I need to do. I know how to do this, and probably it's a more surefooted path for me just to do that directly. And it takes both faith, investment, patience in an alternative.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them, in addition to the technology and innovation, all of the other things that they've done as a business but has made them the durable, incredible business that they've become over generations.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I look for either the early formation of them or the ability to form them. And, you know, just I think the belief kind of in a founder or a company that there is an opportunity for businesses to build around your platform or your company. We drew a lot of inspiration from Microsoft, which I think is a textbook case here. And over the decades, they've done just an incredible job of continuing to build and grow economies around the Microsoft business across all the dimensions that I highlighted more. But I think if you look back on time, before they had the brand and direct reach that they have today, they had reach through this incredibly durable partner ecosystem and the customer economy built around getting Microsoft certified and having that sort of credential be part of your identity. And that takes, you know, I think there's different moves that they could have made early on, but sort of they chose to invest in extensions of themselves. I think those extensions have made”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to come from the expertise that you've helped them develop. They're all hustling on your side of the field. And that hustle and the growth that's related to it compounds like any growth. You build just these networks of people out in the world that kind of row in your boat for you. That can be incredibly powerful when done right.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the earliest days of the company, in the formation of the company, as you're building the product, I think you should be thinking, what are the economies, the extensions of our business that we can invest in that will have transitive properties back to our own company? And, you know, when we thought about it, even sort of one of the examples that I mentioned, a partner economy of resellers and solution providers, we, I think at Lassian now probably has over 500 of those. And these are individual companies that are hiring and creating culture and exploring dimensions of Lassie's market that Alassian doesn't have the time or capacity to really think through. You know, I think if you're a company that thinks about that and you architect it right, you're creating kind of these independent businesses that think exclusively about your business. So your growth is their growth and vice versa and they're cheering fanatically for you and they hustle like on your behalf. So whether it's a partner that's doing some value added service that I mentioned or developer building something on top of your platform or a customer champion that believes that their next pay increases.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment. Each of those that I mentioned have their own unique built-in network effects. In transit of properties back to the business.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is true for any company, consumer companies, as well as enterprise companies. I'll focus on enterprise companies with the one I know best, you know, Atlassian as an example. We were very intentional at Atlassian in thinking about the economies that we could help build around us, a partner economy of resellers and service providers, a marketplace economy of developers and independent software companies building add-ons and extensions to our products that fill a need for our customers that we weren't filling a job economy where the credentials and expertise people could build around our products was something that they'd get hired for. They'd get their next job because of that and on and on. Eventually your alumni network is an economy. The culture and the people that you grow up through your company that move on to other companies are part of the company or the economy that can thrive around you. You know, I think the word economy is really important here because there's livelihood incentives, motivations, values, the need for management.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day. We listed on the NASDAQ. I put it next to the NASDAQ button and sent him a picture. Still, I keep that little owl on my desk, you know, as a reminder of the friendship that Alex and I formed in those early years. But to me, it's also a reminder that incredible people make incredible businesses.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a personal story. Alex and I were in the Foxhole together in the earliest years of building Atlassian, and much of Atlassian's young operational maturity, he deserves a lot of credit for building. Alex left Atlassian to move home to the East Coast with his family and gave me a parting gift. This little brass out actually I've got it here on my desk, this little figurine. He gave it to me as a reminder of both our friendship and what we've been building together. And as a reminder of the power of observation and wisdom. And he probably said something more pithy than this. But you know that old quote that you probably learned as a kid, a wise old owl sat in an oak the more he saw, the less he spoke, the less he spoke, the more he heard, why can't we be like that wise old bird? Anyway, you know, fast forward a number of years, and we finally went public in 2015. And along the roadshow, the two weeks of the roadshow, I brought that little owl with me. And Atlassian had come so far. And a lot of it was because of Alex in the early days. And I wanted him to be there for that part of the journey, even though he'd left the company. And when we got to the listing,”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a young kid from a small town on the coast of Washington State, and I'd gone to college in Seattle, but Seattle at the time was a pretty small and provincial place, so to suddenly land in Seoul Korea and Tokyo and Burma was incredibly eye-opening and just an incredible experience. Opened my perspective a lot, taught me, I think, to look for and appreciate differences, helped me to listen more carefully. I mean, when you're in places where they're not speaking your language and they can speak part of your language way better than you can speak part of theirs, you really have to tune your ears and you have to slow down and kind of connect with human beings on a different level. So that taught me a lot, I think, and helped shame me. I was in my 20s for a period of time, kind of all over Asia, playing piano. And so sort of the other superpower that I kind of took out of that experience was I learned how to play my way, the Frank Sinatra song, and every key. So whoever wanted to sing it could on demand.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've spent the last 25 years building companies and the last 12, I was at Alassian building out Go to Market and the Business Operation there and joined the board of HubSpot, a company called HubSpot, about four years ago, just got a lot of gas in the tank from Billy to help that company in that particular capacity and that role. And at the same time, I began investing personally in younger companies and mentoring and meeting founders. Both of those two things I drew a lot of energy from. And so after 25 years of building companies, I could choose between rebooting and single threading on other company that I could help build and grow or taking the accumulated merit badges and experiences and scar tissue and trying to be useful across more dimensions in a bunch of different companies in different markets and different founders and different stages of growth. And that's what I was attracted to.”
2021-06-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source