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Nathan Wenzel

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25
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2017-07-28
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2017-07-28
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  1. “Yeah, you know, I think it's all about growth. I mean, we've got the product set. We have our two components of our product that really lay the foundation for companies to operate their legal departments. We have customers kind of mid-five figure ACVs. And so just building on that, it's more of the same. I mean, that's how we raised our Series A. We said, look, I don't want to do anything different. I just want to do more of what we're doing now”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Sure. I mean, we hired two account execs very early on as we started hiring people, and so that one we definitely moved faster on. I think our SDRs, we move a bit faster on. I think you have a bit more objective targets to hit. And so if you bring people in quickly, then you're able to identify very quickly if they're able to hit those targets.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, I disagree with that one. I think the manager's job is really to find how their team can be successful. If somebody's not working out, then certainly you have to help them find something else outside the company. And I think you should do everything you can there. But also hiring, I think there are certain roles where you can hire fast, but other roles where you hire quite slowly. We took six months to hire our director of marketing for our first marketing hire, and we couldn't be happier. But that one, we certainly did not hire fast there.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, there's definitely the Saster blog. I've spoken to Jason and told him I needed to sweep the office for bugs because it seemed like everything he wrote was just spot on aimed right at us.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, you know, I think there were two. We went through, I was 35 at the time, and I was not the oldest. So I think the idea that YC is really just for 22-year-olds is kind of a myth. And then the other one there was you sort of think it's going to be this just a big social scene and kind of a big party. They're all business, right? You get there, it's pretty Spartan on the inside, and they only thing they want to know about is how you're growing.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think a lot of it is just, especially in the startup world, is building that successful business is the key. And I think everyone says that, but no one does it. So I think everyone says they believe it, but no one actually follows through on it.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You know, it's got to be only the paranoid survive, Andy Grove. I think that book changed how I viewed startups, and it basically gave me the reason for why startups can win over these large players that should just dominate them from the beginning.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's hard to second guess yourself looking back. I mean, the way that we got to be introduced to Rincon first seed round was I don't think you could put that together a second time if you tried. We had pitched a VC coming out of YC and they rightfully passed. We were not really ready yet. But one of the partners saw something in us. And so he made a personal investment. And so that was Leo Polovetz from SUSA Ventures. And then he's how we get introduced to one of the partners at Rincon because they happen to be on a board together. And so it's hard to really think about what you would do differently because you would lose the journey of how you got there. And I think that's important. I had one of the John Greathouse from Rincon. I was having a conversation with him and something came up and I said, well, you know, we're going to grow this business for you and, you know, we're going to make it a big success. And he just laughed at me and said, man, I'm in this for so much more than just the money at this point. And so when you have that level of personality,”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, I mean, we even had the advantage of our seed investors. We went to them and said, hey, if we don't get the terms we're looking for, can we raise a small amount of money from you? And they were on board. And so we knew we had not only the business to backstop us, but also our investors.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I mean, we definitely had a target list and narrowed it down, and we had suggestions of, well, have you talked to this VC?”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, I mean, we raised the $10 million round with emergence as the lead and specifically Santi as the partner. And I think a big part of that for us was just having extended conversations with him. Santi in particular had run a business. He had actually bootstrapped a business. And I don't think that's necessary or certainly not necessarily to be a successful VC, but it does give you a certain knowledge of how to operate a business, how to run a P&L, how to get revenue from the top to the bottom of the P&L when you really need to. And so that was a big part of what we were interested in. Plus, he's seen these kinds of businesses before. They've got great investments in this top-down sale. I mean, we were really particular. We actually were focused on not only just heavy enterprise SaaS, but also the top-down sale and then not a sales product for a sales team and then not a technical product for a technical customer. I think those sales motions are different. So we were fair.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Beginning of February, and then a month later, we had three term sheets all come in within a day and a half of each other.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So it was an interesting process. It was very different than our seed process. We had raised a $2 million seed round at the end of 2015 when we had found product market fit. We saw the growth coming. We started hiring the team. And we really went out and found one specific VC we wanted to work with. We worked with Rincon Venture partners. They're fantastic for us. And then as we approach the end of 2016, we thought, all right, well, the growth has been there. It's time to raise the A round. At that point, we wanted to run a very different process. early. We kept the list very focused on heavy enterprise SaaS top-down sale types of VCs. We didn't really give out a lot of information. We wouldn't give out revenue information, really just wanted to talk to the partners to identify who would be the best partner for us. And so we started pitching actually at the Saster Annual conference at the beginning.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I think there you look for successes sort of locally, right? You look for the wins in the customers that you have. You focus on internal items. You focus on your company. You focus on your customers, on your product. And I don't know that the macroeconomic condition really changes anyone's individual perception of whether you're a success or failing at any given moment.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I think there's just natural cycle to it and that people operate about greed or fear. And when you see the stock market run up, when you see the valuation in the private markets run up, it's going to revert to the mean. So any major downturn, you know that it's going to come back. I think in the real estate downturn in 2008 and 9, the financials crashed. I had a number of my employees and even customers ask, do you think we're going to make it? And that was sort of a weird question because, well, if we don't make it, then that means we all need to become farmers and hunters. So you're going to come back from a crash and you're going to come down from a bubble or from a peak.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You know, it's a challenge. I mean, for us, we were net zero burn for the first year and a half. Our personal burn rates were not net zero, but our company net burn was near zero. Once we raised money and found the fit, we actually dialed up our spend a bit. And then more recently, we've added several people to the team. But we always keep an eye on what it would take to become profitable. And we know where that number is. I think one of the things that Jason Lemkin promotes is always knowing your zero cash day. I think that's important. What's the day that you become profitable? And if you keep your eye on that, then you can dial up burn to really, I think, as high as you can at knowing where profitability hits.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, so I'm 39 now, so I'm old enough to have been through the dot-com boom and bust in the late 90s and early 2000s. I was coming out of school in 99, so I hit at a great time and then watched the company go from 10,000 people to zero because they spent themselves into the ground and their customers were all equally unshaky financial conditions. And then as we grew our consulting business and then 2008 and 2009 saw the real estate market correction, I think this idea today that VC money is just always around the corner and if you need more money, you just go and ask for it. It's a dangerous assumption to make. And we've already seen companies that have raised tens of millions of dollars just disappear overnight because they thought this never-ending supply of money would just be available to them. That's something that's hard to shake if that's the only thing you've ever seen.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, they all said no, so that was pretty easy. I mean, our prior business, so we're first time venture-backed founders, but not first time founders. And so, you know, we didn't really know what we were doing. We applied to Y Combinator a bit just to go through the process of the application. And when they said, well, you're accepted for an interview, I said, well, fantastic. We get 10 minutes of free consulting from some of the best in the business. And so, you know, once we got through the program, we pitched one of the VCs that were sort of interested. They were outside the Bay Area, so they were a little bit more okay with our mindset. And I literally had in the first iterations of the slide deck that we would just slowly add customers one by one and occasionally get large customers, and then we would start to grow. And that's not something that VCs want to see. So yeah, it did not work well.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I think that depends on the stubbornness of the founder. I mean, I think the one thing that maybe I do better than most people is I'll just keep putting one foot in front of the other longer than anyone else. And so, and it really is in those early days just a mental process to try to get through. And so the slow and steady, it's something you should do as long as you believe that what you have is going to work. So we would get customers. We would get them for different reasons, though. So if we were not growing at all, that would have been problematic and we probably would have figured out something else. But we would get customers.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, you know, I think it's probably all the businesses that I don't know how to run. So consumer and then there are great businesses out there like Atlassian that have just thousands and thousands of customers and probably more where they're able to, the effort it takes to buy the product and to use the product is very low. Anything that's more like an app that you can just start using, I think your best bet there is to just move as fast as you can and get as many people as you can using the product so that way you can iterate from there and make it better.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “You know, I think in SaaS, especially in enterprise SaaS, it's probably okay to start that way. I wouldn't recommend continuing that way once you've found your fit, but it seems to be okay there because the idea of move fast and break, things really doesn't work if you need to be Sox compliant and if you're asking your customers to trust you with their financials. In our case, we really sit at the intersection of the CFO and the general counsel. And so that slow and steady is probably the right approach.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think now there's a lot of talk about how startups can grow efficiently. But when we were coming out of YC in 2013 and into 2014, that really wasn't the sort of dominating mindset. Yeah, we actually got some advice and it was very good advice from a well-respected VC. And they said, look, take the money that you have raised, go hire four interns and hit the phones. And if the product sells, then great. You know you've got something. And if it doesn't, then you shut it down and move on. And it was great advice, but we were right not to follow it. We knew we had something and we knew we just needed to get to the right product market fit. We knew we needed to get to the right sort of milestones in terms of customers and feature set. And so we took our time. We spent 18 months to get it right. Once we saw that it was working, we took another six months before we hired our first employee. And it was definitely different. Most of our YC batch mates were not followed.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I think mentally we were all in. Our customers were not as enthusiastic when we told them what we were doing. They said, well, fantastic. We will give you a statement of work and a requirements document. And we said, well, no, no, this is software. So you log in and you start using it. And they said, no, but you're the development team. And well, yes. So we built this product. So that was one big challenge. So we had to reset from these very large companies and Fortune 100 companies that were our customers into very small startups. We built software. It was just the two of us. We paid ourselves very little. So that was not a fun period of time. We could grow a little bit. We could add customers, but never for the same reason. And there was always a temptation to sort of fall back to just we can bill a few hours and not have to burn through our personal savings this month.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Or cognose, and you needed it to do something, you'd call our team. And we actually grew that business as a services business for 10 years and then ultimately found ourselves in legal departments across several companies, saw that the data was all the same, saw that the software was just universally not great, and then set out in 2013 to launch simple legal the software company.”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, I'll tell you, it was a little bit of maybe a 10 year accident. My co-founder and I met each other on a consulting project, and this was back in 2002. And so he and I really just kind of clicked and we found that we were doing the same projects over and over again. And we said, hey, well, let's turn this into the product. Even that then took 10 years of running our prior business, which was a consulting business focused on dashboards and business intelligence. So if you And”

    2017-07-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Construct Your Fundraising Process To Get 3 Term Sheets in 36 Hours, Why Slow and Steady Can Be Best For Startups & Why All Startups Must Know Their Zero Cash Day with Nathan Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ SimpleLegal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source