YouSaid · the spoken record

Pierre Valade

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26
first
2015-08-14
most recent
2015-08-14
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Just building great product. That's what we do. That's why we want to continue doing. And I think this is what we can do to improve our contribution to the world is trying to build product that makes people life a little bit more easier by getting them to manage their time better. And I've just found the name of the newsletter. It's from Ben Thompson and it's called”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Just go, and I mean, for me, I was lucky enough to get a computer when I was maybe seven and I just, I think I just started to code because I wanted to change some parameters in one of the games I was playing.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “There are so many great people that have been inspired by, I think. Apple and Steve Job has always been one that I think have always built, you know, they've always focused on the product more than the business and they've really successfully managed to become a great business and building great products. So that would be different in the one I will quote.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, that's a great question. So I've just started to follow this guy. I just can't find his name. He has this, you pay for this newsletter every day. I just need to find you the name. I'll find you the name before the end of the podcast because I don't remember the guy name, but I read it every day. It's a daily thing. You have to subscribe. It's like 10 bucks on something. It's really, really, really good.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I spent quite some time right now. I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but I spent, you know, it's at least one of the few books I've read multiple times. It's zero to one from PTO TLEX scene. This book is very interesting. And I read it more than once.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Still, people working in Paris and in San Francisco. So we're very lucky that Microsoft respect a lot the way we're doing things and our work ambience, atmosphere, and the way we build those products. And they want to keep that. So for us, this change was made much easier because we were aligned on the things.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, I think it's less stressful, right? Because I have a boss and I used to not have a boss as the CEO of the company. Even if you have investor, when you're CEO of the company, you're the guy who's making the last decision, right? Like no one can just, everyone can blame you for everything and you can't blame anyone, right? So that's some stress that you have to absorb. Probably get used to it as you maybe grow or get more mature or you have more experience, but that was kind of stressful sometimes for us or for me specifically. And so you get less of that, right? Because I have a boss and so it's a different stress level. And the thing we're doing honestly is still the same in the sense that we're still trying to build the best product we can. So that doesn't really change. We're at the office in New York.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Some of them thought that we should go for more, but I also pick investors who really respect entrepreneur. And I think those investors that we worked with respect the entrepreneur decision at the end of the day. It's your company, it's not the investor company. And you're grateful for the money they're putting into it, but also really they respect your point of view and why you want to make a specific decision at a specific time. So we never got any argument with investors because I respect their point of view and they respect my point of view. And so if the founder wants to do something, the people I worked with and we've picked to work with, they respect that.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Because we could outp on the product or to build amazing experiences on mobile. And they already know how to make money out of that. They already are selling email encountering solutions to small, medium, and large businesses. So that was a good fit. And it's always a tough decision. For us, we knew that we had a price and we got the price we wanted and the vision were aligned and we liked the people we met there. So, you know, we say, okay, we should do it.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That's a great question. I think we didn't know exactly how we could take it from a great product to a great business. I think we've done a good job building great product. We didn't really know, oh, we could make money or turn it into this into a successful business. And those are really two different things. People build amazing business and I think sometimes they build a crappy product. We've built a great product, but we didn't really know a great business out of it. Those brands are well known and Microsoft is making a lot of money through them. We thought there was a good fit.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, I didn't do any business plan for that. I just say we have a product out there, try the product, it speaks for itself. So I was really almost kind of like arrogant about the fact that I didn't want to do slides. I was like, you know, we just spent time building the product. I'm sorry I didn't have time to build slides. But the product is there. I can look online what people are saying about it. What do you think? And then we can talk about the vision. And some people didn't like that and some people liked that. So I think it's like you will get no's. That's like 100% sure, especially I think as a first-time founder, like, what do you have for you? You have no track record. And I'm also very young. So I didn't have major work experience in a big company or whatever. Maybe that also. So you will get no's and we don't really care about them because you only need to convince one or two people.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I got introduced to because he built an amazing company and going through all this cycle to creating the company to IPO the company. So this guy is a great guy and I didn't know him, but I know of him. And so we got to meet him through James who kind of like sourced the deal. And I think this phone is just a perfect fit because we were not really looking for money, but I think they were looking for people doing interesting things in a productivity space. And they probably did their homework well and they found us and then they talked to us and they liked the vision and then we had a good match. But this one was more like we're not really looking for money and they came to us and we like those guys a lot and so we decided to go with them and then that's when we raised six million just before the summer of last year.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And you try to get an introduction, and then you set up a meeting, and then you pitch them, and then they tell you no, no, no, no, no, tell one guy say yes. So that was just a full month of me coming to the US and pitching people. So that was tough. I mean, it was the first time I was doing it. And just, you know, a lot of people said no. And so eventually we managed to get NextView and Rob and Mike from Rezolavisi or here in the US or great seed from people to invest in us and we closed like, you know, we raised another 1.9 million. And so that was like 2.2 million total for the first year of 2013. But that was a really painful process. I thought raising money would be easier, especially in the US. And I don't think it was easy. I think it's still really hard to raise money. So I wouldn't underestimate this.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So it depends. So the first run we did right after we launched the app in 2012, we gather some money from friends and people I knew in New York. And then we had a small amount of money just before releasing the app. And those are just purely based on relationship that I had. And then right after we shipped the app, we had good momentum. Like, you know, a lot of journalists were talking about the app. It was also when mailbox got lunch and I was also, you know, good traction for us because mailbox was for email and I was also for calendar. And so we were able to raise money. But that funding was just me going through a full month of meetings. So I have my Google Docs spreadsheet and I have the list of all the people that can write you a check and you try to find someone who knows.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That's the way we approach it. I don't try to generalize too much. Maybe the other situation where you don't want to do that or you want to do it differently. But in our case, we've been very naive about the fact that building the best product will win. And, you know, I don't know if we won, right? But at least we're proud of the work we're doing every day and we're building something that when people are using it, not everyone will stick to it, which would be fantastic, but we're not there yet. But the people will stick to it are really excited about using it and really love it. And so we're proud of that at least. And we're not as good as about building a business or making money, but we very candidly think about just building the best product and see how far this can take us.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I mean, at least it has to convince us first, right? And then when we convince, we try to convince other people and we try to friends or we bring people into the office. We know I have a full-time design researcher who helps a lot to bring people into the office and get feedback from new users or existing users on new stuff. But we have to lob it ourselves first because we're using this app so much every day that it's very easy for us to know if we start increasing crap or if we start to improve the app really.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So people are actually really good at knowing when something works or not. So we kind of leverage that to build stuff or sell that we use. And we see if we like it or not. If we don't like it, it's never going to be released to the public. If we lack it, we think that this is going in the right direction. We work more on this and we refine and polish.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's just so hard to try stuff when you just can't live with it, right? Especially when you're building mobile apps or watch. What we do well is that we just, you know, we're not smarter than anyone else. We're just trying a lot of different things and see what works. And that's very interesting because I think as a user, when you're using a crappy website, you know it, right? You know it's just, it doesn't feel right when you're trying to book a plane ticket or a train ticket or another experience that doesn't work very well. You feel the pain.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, yeah, we look at that as like it's very interesting because Watch is probably the device that you associate the most with time, right? The watch is like device where you will look and see what time is it. And so we thought about this as like, oh, this is really interesting because it's probably the device that we should own the more. And we prototype it a lot and we, the way we work at Sunrise is really by building stuff and trying it itself until we think we're happy with something. So we don't spend a lot of time trying to think too much about concept or ideas. We really want to see them through a prototype or something that I can use, the team can use and we can get feedback on. And that's, I think, the way we're building product here is by actually building a lot of prototypes. And the what we worked a lot on the watch, we decided not to release it before we could have our self watches because”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So on that type of things, we don't really expect them to come back to us and say, you know, I wish I could do X, Y, and Z because no one even thinks that's even possible and that's our job to come up with that type of new features.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We always got a lot of requests for new integration, like other apps that people want to connect to RunKeeper, their sport app, they want to have more and more information in their calendar. For a while, of course, we got the feedback that we needed, the Android app because it took us like a year to build it. So people were asking for it a lot. No, we are on iOS, iPad, iPhone, Android, Android tablets, and we're also on desktop, on Mac and web. So now we're covering a lot of that. I think people expect us to help them on stuff like transportation time. That's something we're really interested in. It's kind of like, no, we've come to the point where we're spending up time building the foundation in what we think is a much better way. And we can think about building and stuff that people don't even expect in their”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Design in itself is a big feature. It's always hard to pinpoint what makes Sunrise Unique from the design point of view. It's a lot of the interaction, the UI or where crafted is it. From just a future point of view, I think, yeah, the integration with other calendar, the fact that you can connect your Facebook events and the show up directly in Sunrise, a lot of people love that they can connect Evernote and reminders will show from Evernote directly in Sunrise. Also, what we have as a feature that's called interesting calendar where you can, you know, if you're a fan of Manchester or Chelsea, you can get all of the League One match directly into a calendar and you can kind of schedule things with your friend directly from there without missing any match or stuff like that. So those features have been really, really popular in Sunrise.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, that's a great question. I think for us, it's really about design and UI user interface and user experience. I think the people who like Sunrise and use it or people who want to use really well-crafted product, they pick the app that they're using very specifically. They care about great design. And that's, I think, what Sunrise is primarily known for as a brand and as a product.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So we quit four square n of twenty twelve and we had to go back to Europe because we didn't have any visa at that time to stay in the US because we quit our job. So we had to go back in Europe in the winter of 2012, 2013. And then we launched Sunrise February 2012”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And we don't think it's giving us a lot of value out of it. And very candidly, we started working on this and trying to improve through design, connecting the calendar and sunrise to other apps like Facebook, Evernote, Tripit, stuff like that. And we started to decide and build a company and try to see how far we could take it.”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, sure. So I was born and raised in Paris and I moved to New York right after school. So about five years ago. And to be honest, I always have a really bad memory. So I'm having a hard time remembering things or when I should go and hang out with friends or when I have dinner or when I, you know, I plan something. And so I was already before sunlight as a big hound or user myself and I just thought like, you know, this thing is just not great. I mean, you can just put stuff in your calendar, but it doesn't give you that much value out of it. So I was still using it, but I felt the pain as a user and I wanted to like at some point I knew I wanted to work on it to try to improve it. And then while I was in New York, I met with my co-founder, Jeremy, which is one of the most haunted designers I've ever worked with. And we were working together at”

    2015-08-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 08: Pierre Valade, CEO @ Sunrise on Being Acquired By Microsoft for $100m and Building Beautiful Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source