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Rujul Zaparde

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62
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2024-04-24
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2024-04-24
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1
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  1. “Oh, it's easy. Well, you care about things like optics. You care about are the metrics all going up. You know, like all these little things. And when you actually are just like, you know what, I just want to build a really big company. You're just here to make the thing work and you want to protect your own time. And actually, when you do that, everything actually does start to look better, but it's the mindset.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “They owe us nothing in the world. Then they actually have this problem and they're willing to pay. And we're going to charge real money for it. Now, of course, when you're starting out, you have zero customers. Of course, you don't charge that much money. It goes up over time, but they're going to pay. And something material for us at the time. And I think a lot of the times, this is my second company, but I can just see how different my mindset has been this time around than the first go around. But like, you know, early on, you're like trying to keep your investors happy. You want to like make it feel like it's working. And the second time, or at least for me, it was like, look, we were just here. We want to build a generational company. We'd rather just know this is a bad idea quickly. So we can go.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So Lou and I were very strict in our thinking. We had decided look, at the end of the day, if we pick an idea, we're going to work on it more than anybody else, like we don't want to waste our own time. So what we're going to do is this. We're going to make sure that the first 10 customers we”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think there's a couple of common mistakes, sir. One, getting free customers or design partners, which is I think you use Femism for a free customer.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think it comes down to repeatability. Really, everything about building a company is about, in some ways, it's about repeatability. It's like, okay, can you do this? Then can you do more of it? And then can you have other people do more of it? And then can you have even more people do more of it? And maybe quality degrades, but it still works because there's enough fit pull from the market. And so really the question would be, are you able to repeatedly use that same type of pitch and narrative to the same type of person and yield the same type of result? And if the answer is no, then that means you kind of haven't figured it out in some way.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “You absolutely should if you need to not close a certain type of customer, you should fire a customer. It happened to us when we were about a year old, we signed a customer that had hundreds of thousands of employees sort of a pilot type engagement. And I realized the company was only 15 people or so, 12 to 15 people very quickly in implementation, I realized, wait a minute, because I would go to every implementation call at the time. We're not going to be able to make this company successful without sacrificing an extremely, extremely large percentage of our roadmap. And it's just not the right thing for us to do as a company. And so I had a really great call with our champion there. And I was like, no, I appreciate, I respect the fact that you're telling me that you guys can't make a successful right now and call us when you're ready. And then we call them later, you know, a year after that. But that was a tough decision at the moment.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Because we didn't know, are we going to sell to IT, legal, procurement, finance, right? Like all these people have to approve things that people are buying, but who's going to really like be the actual ICP buyer? It might sound intuitive that, yeah, of course you would be selling yourself go to procurement and finance people, which is the case, but it didn't feel that way. In fact, our first handful of customers were IT, which was actually an interesting signal.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great question. So, what we actually did, so we were actually quite wrote in our approach here. Every week, actually, initially it was every day because we had so many calls and then we were like, we don't need to review this every day. We did it every Sunday. We would write out our quote-unquote investor pitch, which is like a couple sentences of like what zip does, but the investor view of it. Yeah, talking about like the market, that kind of thing, and then the customer pitch. At one point where we're looking at both of those in one Google Doc, every single day, and we'd be like, what did we learn today? Like, would we change how we frame it? And then we would test it for all the calls that we would do the following day. Then it got to a point where like, no, we don't need to change it that much. Let's review this every week. And so we basically had this process where we were constantly reviewing. Then as we started to talk to more people, we sort of morphed this and literally built an Google sheet and morphed it into ICP. Like we had different ICP potential ICPs as the row as each row.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It was relatively quick, but it took us maybe six, seven months to sort of convince ourselves and be able to better explain what we're doing to our prospects. So to your point about product marketing, you have to start with the positioning and the messaging. And that probably took us six months. Once we started to figure out how to like explain what we're doing and clearly differentiate it, it certainly accelerates it.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You'll eventually get to the latter, but I think first off, like, I mean, given how much capacity you have, which is basically nothing when you're starting out, you have to find, and it's actually healthy that you don't have that many resources because it's the forcing function to say, what is that one thing, the one pain point that somebody will be like, you're right, I need that thing. It doesn't exist otherwise in the world for me. Because what actually happens is when you have a platform, other people have platforms too, and they all do everything. But then the question becomes, how do you differentiate your platform from somebody else's platform? And you'll actually always come back to that one thing that you started with, which is, hey, no, no, no, this is the thing that makes us special in the world. No one else does this anywhere near the level that we do. That's why our platform is better. Sure, we do a lot of things that they do too, but this thing is different. And it's your wedge. It'll always be your wedge.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's a great point, it's an education problem. It's challenging, and you have to select in people in and out. Like most people won't get it. And that's okay because if they all got it, somebody would have started your company already. You have to like filter out. I think this person is just not. They're not there yet. They're a late adopter or whatever. It's okay. One day they'll buy, but not today.”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In a sense absolutely, but there's a pro and a con the pro is that, well, if there's a lot of parties in the space in general, that means it's a big space and there must be some real pain here. And so for us, it was like, huh, there's enough here. We're not taking on like market risk, but what's the unique insight we have based on the problem?”

    2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source