YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Denehy

lines on the record: 35
first: 2019-11-08
most recent: 2019-11-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Envision us as a de facto market leader. This is a hundred million plus ARR business, strong public market fundamentals, world-class leadership team, and probably still the coolest swag in the game. The best t-shirts and hoodies of any startup in New York.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just absolutely nasty out. And like they showed up, and it was one of those things where it was probably the first meeting of the VC that didn't feel like me pitching some dudes on the other side of the table. Like the two of them, we just hit it off right away and just had like a really fun, thoughtful discussion about how we want to think about building a company. And so by the end, in my head, I was like, I got to work with guys. And Bob shot me an email that night from his iPad. I was like, that was awesome. Be great to try to do something. That was that.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, the first meeting with Bob and Mike from Bessemer, I mean, that'll probably go down for the rest of my career as like one of the ones that's hard to top. They were emailing me trying to get in touch and I don't know why, but I just was like not being very responsive. Then when I agreed to meet, I told them that they had to come to my office. So it was the middle of December. And I told them to come to my office at four o'clock on a Friday. And these guys came down there, blessed their hearts at four in the afternoon in the middle of December. It was snowing, but it was the kind of snow, like not like fun snow. It was like the really wet, like sleet, just gross New York snow.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things. One, diversity. So just like to see more of it. And then the second is people are going to call me crazy. Lower valuations just take a lot of companies are getting themselves into situations that are going to be very hard to get out of. Hip checking the valuations probably wouldn't hurt.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, I mean, I've heard this a few times, but just put one foot in front of the other. None of this stuff is that complicated.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“investors behind you question from Bob at Besser how did you decide which investors to work with well there's two things so at the seed stage VCs always say they add value beyond cash but few actually do the best way and at the seed stage you need all the help you can get so you really want to VC that's going to be able to step up and support you well the best way to kind of call bullshit on people is just look at the size of the portfolio support team right you know when i when i met brad at primary”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person is really a star. Let's move them up into a bigger role. But these are things that you need to be thinking about constantly so that you don't end up with a mismatch of people and roles. Totally with you in terms of the dangers of that mismatch. I do want to dive into my favorite, though, Ron. You've listened to the show before. I love this. So it's the quick firearound. So Isaiah short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to rock and roll? Let's do it. Okay, so the favorite book and why? What must we be reading? Barbarians at the gate, 80s Wall Street. So, you know, what could be better? I love that. No, I've had it suggested by one other guest before and I wanted to read it back when they said it, but I still haven't because I'm shit at reading to be quite fun.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether or not they'll really be able to stay in that role long enough for it to be a good use of everyone's time. And if not, no worries at all, right? A company like ours that goes from four customers and five employees to 300 customers and 150 employees in less than three years. The surface area of the job expands so much that you can't reasonably expect most people to keep up. I mean, even if you didn't promote someone, the size and level of responsibility of their role in a really high growth company gets so big so quickly that you just really need to be thoughtful not about the title, but about the actual surface area of the roles and responsibilities. So we try to constantly look at our most talented folks or really look at everybody and say, hey, is now the time to potentially even write size the role? Take a little bit off their plate so they can do less but do less better or maybe we move them laterally into part of the org that can use their expertise in a higher leverage way than what they're doing now. And then in certain cases like, hey, if this”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That job. In terms of really getting kind of maximum efficiency from them in that. Brad that you're very passionate about leveling up managers internally. How do you think today about leveling up internally and what really works in your experience? I'll tell you what doesn't work. The worst thing you can do is have a talented person in the wrong job. And so typically that happens by promoting someone too fast. And that's going to be for two reasons. One, your challenge to actually hire someone from the outside and you say, hey, you know, so-and-so doing a great job. Let's promote her into the role. But you've got to be really honest about whether or not that's actually the right call. And so what we do is with every role, we just make a checklist of the non-negotiables, you know, the four or five things that have to happen for someone to be successful in that role. And so when it comes to the decision of are we really going to try to push someone up to that role, we can do a pretty quick assessment as to whether or not we think that person can be coached in a reasonable timeframe to hit most or all the marks on that checklist and based on how the business is scaling.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're going to need anywhere from one to three months to put all pieces in place, right? Get their key hires made, get processes rolled out and clear data that they need to actually start executing on the plan. So before you know it, the thing that they signed up to do is right in front of them. And the right hires, the right executive level hires are going to understand exactly what they're walking into. And they're going to see really clearly if the plan that you're asking them to sign up for is ridiculous and untenable or you're being a thoughtful leader and you're saying, hey, you know, it's 2018. Here's my 2019 sales plan. Here's where we are today. And here's what I'm expecting you to do wouldn't come on board in two or three months. That's a different kind of conversation. But again, I mean, this is why you've got to start so much earlier than most people would logically think because by the time it actually gets there, that's when you're going to need that person fully up and running and doing their job. Speaking of being fully up and running and doing”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes six to nine months, and then you're kind of raising again three months into that person joining and they haven't onboarded and ramped up to the max. And actually, you kind of haven't got the most out of them. So far, how do you think about that aligning it to fundraising? Should you start the recruitment process pre-fundraise? And then what do you do if it goes successfully and you have to hire them quicker and then there's the cash flow question? How do you think about hiring around fundraisers and how founders could navigate that? Yeah. And again, kind of going back to even mistakes that I made in the early days of this company of Electric is you've got to start ahead of the fundraise and ahead of that next inflection point because you're going to find yourself having been caught flat-footed and needing to execute on a plan that you just simply don't have the people of leadership to do. And so keep in mind all this advice is for companies that call it like Series A, seed moving on to Series A or Series B. But if you start hiring six to nine months out, by the time the person actually starts.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too that, and this is something even with electric, I completely underestimated in our early days and didn't get right. But it's going to take three to six months to hire a VP level or above person. Sometimes you'll get lucky, you'll hire them faster, but for the most part, it's going to take three to six months for you to hire this person. So you can't start recruiting in Q4 for things that you want to have happening Q1. You need to start six months earlier, otherwise it's just, it's never going to happen and then you're going to be behind the eight ball.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, people just need to understand that a company isn't like a real thing, right? Like a company is a concept. In practice, a company is just a group of people that show up every day and agree to work on a similar set of things together. So, you know, if you view a company as a collection of people, like the quality of your execution is entirely based on the caliber folks hire. And so the plan that you put together and the P&L that you look at on a spreadsheet has to map directly to the people that you have faith are going to be able to own each part of that plan. And time moves fast. And so you have to get really far in front of that. Your first 5 to 10 million in revenue can come from a lot of individual heroics, but beyond that, you need really scalable processes and teams with bench depth and predictability with respect to the outcomes they're driving. And so you'll never get there if you aren't proactively bringing people on who have done it before. And you just really need to understand.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the most important thing is you got to just trust the process. So if you have a big deal that doesn't go through or big customer churns or employee that leaves or whatever, the most important thing is to really just stick to the things that you know work and be really honest about the things that aren't working and make sure that you're being responsible in the way that you're tackling the things that aren't working. And just trust that if you sort of look at your situation and say, okay, we know what's on fire, but we do have a plan and we are chipping away at it. We know what's working and that stuff's continuing to work. Then when things do blow up in your face, you can be a little bit more level-headed about the whole thing because you can put it in context of what's working and what's not and just have a little bit of faith in the processes that you set up.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of 2017 and 2018, and actually, even the early part of this year. So the job kind of as illustrated by that, it changes substantially from stage to stage. And for electric being three years old, all three scenarios I've described have all occurred in sort of 12 month sprints.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's when you start managing managers, but you're still involved in a lot of the day to day. From a context switching and just a sort of hair on fire standpoint, like this is less hard, but it still involves a ton of decision making every single day. So like at this stage, that's really where the decision fatigue can really set in because people are just walking up to your desk all day. Like, what do we do for this? What do we do for this? And ton of exception handling. And so that's a very real thing. The stage that I think tends to come after that, and this is sort of where an electric's at right now is when you start to get to sort of that early growth stage, the eight to ten million revenue on up. And as a CEO, most of your director reports are other senior executives. That's a great place to be because a lot more of your time can be spent thinking strategically and really helping your leaders solve their most important problems of the day. But this is a really hard point to get to. I mean, I felt like my hair was on fire nonstop for most.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably one of the areas where a lot of first time founders, even in my case, third time founder, those transitions can be abrupt. So David Philidis from BetterCloud actually wrote a phenomenal blog post on this the other week. So I'm actually going to borrow heavily from that because I think he just absolutely nailed it. The early days, like the sort of one to 30 or 40 employees and the zero to one to two million, as a CEO, you're a player coach. So you're doing a lot of jobs as an IC, but you're also managing maybe some frontline folks and you have CEO stuff to do and it's brutal. Like the context switching is just nightmarish and you're doing a lot of stuff that you're not ever going to be good at in the first place. So I just, having done it now three times, it is so easy to get fried at this stage because there's absolutely no consistency with what you're doing. And everything's a fire that needs to be put out. The next stage, company gets a little bigger. You've got some product market fit. There's some repeatability around the revenue.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We care about each other's wellbeing and mental health and all that good stuff. But when push comes to shove, we have extremely clear goals, extremely high standards, and everyone's expected to deliver. And so it's so much easier to walk into a situation where you're upholding really high standards and a high level of focus if people are actually having fun and feel cared for and supported. My wife, when she listened to this, is going to be laughing because I don't know anything about sports, but I read a lot about P. Carroll.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a classic Brad comment. So ruthless execution sounds a lot more hardcore than it is at Electric when we think about execution. It has a lot more to do with upholding high standards, having excellent focus, delivering in a consistent way. And so that execution really you can kind of think about it more just sort of like how a sports team might train for something. And so in terms of how you balance that with culture, I kind of like to think of our office sort of like the Seattle Seahawks locker room when Pete Carroll became a coach, right? So Pete got to the Seahawks and the first thing he said was, hey, there's not going to be any yelling in this locker room. No name calling about language, no insults. He got all the players doing yoga and talking to psychiatrists and stuff. And it was like pretty out there for my NFL standards. But they went to the Super Bowl, right? They didn't win, but they got a lot closer than they had before he joined. And I think it's kind of a similar thing here, right? Like we laugh a lot in crack jokes. We play music all over the office. The team goes out.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. The two actually really, I think, are self reinforcing, like you as a leader have to exhibit a lot of strength in order to sort of have the courage to just own up to things, whether you're dressed or just being honest about things not going well. So a lot of that vulnerability comes from actually a position of strength, not weakness, is something I believe. But then separately, humans categorically aren't stupid. And if all you're ever doing is talking about things in a super positive light, most people know that that's not the case. And as a result, are going to say, hey, I'm like not getting the full story from this guy. So I think what we've all seen is that some of the strongest leaders are also quite vulnerable and quite transparent about how they're feeling. So again, I think that those two things are self-reinforcing if approach from the right angle.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For like the first part of the call. And I know that he's been through some really tough stuff on his end. So it was like at that moment, it just like sort of totally broke the ice. I'm like, all right, well, if this guy's basically laughing at me and sort of, it's really not that bad. And it all came obviously from a good place with him. But you got to have that crew of people that had been in your shoes before that you can just be honest with.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, I mean, that's actually probably one of the biggest benefits to having a co-founder or co-founders, right? So for the 10 years that Rudd and I worked together, there were some pretty serious ups and downs. And the thing that he and I were always able to do is no matter how gnarly it got, we could always just log in a conference room, close the door, and just sort of look at each other and be like, ooh, man, this is sticky. What do we do now, right? And kind of laugh about it. Now with electric, I don't having kind of started this one solo. And so when things get really tricky, it's always great to just be able to pick up the phone and call someone who's not affiliated with the company in any formal way. I mean, my very close friend Josh, who's a multi-time founder now, I remember calling him a while ago and we had some stuff we were dealing with. And I was really bent at a shape and kind of didn't really know what to do. And I called him and he basically just like made fun of.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just say, okay, where do we need to get to? Like, what does sort of quantitatively and qualitatively success look like, separate from what you think you can and can't do or what's possible or not possible? But like what in a perfect world would that next phase look like that wouldn't involve us having our back against the wall and then just walk back to where you are today and get maniacally focused on bridging the gap from now to this new set of objectives? What I found is that it's not nearly as daunting when you reframe it like that. And then as you go to that process, like just stop feeling bad for yourself, you're probably good. You won't actually die, even though it might feel like it. You know, just be super honest with everybody, get a plan together. And then this fucked situation that you're in, like just wear it like a badge of honor and make your team feel that way. And before you know it, things should start turning around.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've thought a lot about this, particularly our last two companies were at times days away from running out of money. And I think the most extreme case at Swarm, Rudd's wedding was on a Saturday and we were going to have to lay everybody off on Monday. And so two days before the wedding, we got a wire for 300 grand. And obviously didn't have to lay anyone off. So definitely had a lot of experiences that have formed my perspective on this. So the first major takeaway is you just have to be honest. If you're running out of money or your product sucks or your team hates you, you just got to acknowledge that. I see a lot of founders that lie to themselves until the very end or blame other people. But fundamentally, you're the CEO. So it really is all your fault. Don't hit it twisted, right? So that being said, until the last dollar is spent, it's not over. What I've always found is that whatever shit hits the fan, the best thing you can do is take a step back, divorce yourself from the current moment, take out a clean sheet of paper.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, capital markets have become very founder friendly, as you know, therefore giving teams a lot more time to operate on their own schedule. The cost of running a software business is the lowest it's ever been. So it doesn't necessarily cost you a lot to run a pre-revenue business or a low revenue business for years at a time, even if you want. But at the end of the day, you have to build a business, not a university research project. So there's a point at which you need to get the show on the road and engage in meaningful commercial activity. And so some of these companies that have effectively been in beta, and I'm using air quotes, you know, for years, they might be successful to the extent that they have an elegant product that many people like to use. But as businesses, they're probably not all that compelling yet. They may be showing a lot of promise, but ultimately look at the scoreboard. There's revenue there, a lot of revenue, then great. But if not, then it's hard to argue that they're a real business yet.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, just reflash the software and the router to listen for Wi Fi antennas rather than broadcasting a connection. And at the time we thought like this is so freaking simple. There's no way it could be this easy to build an analytics, put traffic analytics sensor just using a hundred dollar Wi-Fi router and having our head of engineering spend a few weeks rewriting some code. But I'll never forget it. We did exactly that. We reflashed the device, plugged the router into the wall in our office, refreshed the dashboard, and boom, there it was. We could see analytics and people walking around their own. That is cool. And then we were able to, you know, we were able to sell that product to probably, I think, our first 50 or 100 customers. It was a lousy product, but it was good enough for the early adopters to see what we were trying to do and prove that there was a business there.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, form is a great example. We knew we wanted to measure foot traffic in brick and mortar retail stores and surface the data in a dashboard so that store owners could see when they were busy or slow and if their marketing was driving foot traffic and all those sorts of things. We knew that every cell phone had a Wi-Fi antenna. And so we thought that that was probably the best way to measure the foot traffic. You know, use cell phones as a proxy for people. We could have made that problem as expensive as we wanted from an MVP standpoint. A number of other companies in the space turned it into a very expensive problem. We just didn't have the money to make it an expensive problem. So we postulated and Rudd and I not being RF engineers, so our non-technical brains sort of figured like, hey, we could order an open source Wi-Fi router for $100. And our head of engineering could probably rewrite some of the code in the firmware. And then we could probably write a basic integration to pull the data out. With that, we could”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always, and it is for every company, right? I think most good engineering teams sort of look at technical debt like a credit card, right? A balance of zero means you're probably not leveraging it enough. And if Amex, $150,000, that's probably not good either. So your stage of business, there's a sort of technical debt balance that you can determine is reasonable to carry. But it's certainly a challenge, even with the best of intentions and even proactively addressing technical debt, you're always probably going to wind up a little more than you want, but you've just got to be thoughtful about where you decide to maybe skip some steps for now as long as you're intentional about revisiting those things later.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, until you have product market fit, you don't have a business. So your only job as a founder at that point is to define a problem and then design a solution that people really like. That solution typically can be cobbled together with open source or off-the-shelf tools in the beginning. So when your pre-product market fit, you generally don't get bonus points for building things from scratch. So really that pre-product market fit stage has more to do with solution design than it does with engineering or at least it should.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better business over time. So, what does the end state look like? Our Run and III's first company was an ad network. So no matter how excellent we were at our jobs, our biggest publishers would outgrow us insurance. And due to competition, fixed costs, talent, our margins would actually get worse over time. So it was a mediocre business at best. But we just never thought through, you know, we weren't seasoned enough to actually think through that before we started it. And then with Swarm, the technical complexity of delivering place-based”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Repeating with electric today. Yeah, well, you know, if we had three hours to discuss this, I could probably tell you all 150 things or more that I think we got wrong. But the three biggest things that I constantly think about and when I give advice to other founders that I constantly harp on is the first is the solution you're delivering has to be a need to have, not a nice to have, full stop. You know, if your business is just clever marketing or it's just jamming something down a customer's throat with an inside sales team, you're going to struggle to build a really valuable enduring business. And for example, Swarm was an awesome tool. But if a retail store didn't have foot traffic analytics, it didn't matter. The show went on, right? So that was a lot of the challenges we had in that business was just due to the fact that our customer didn't need the product. The second thing is you really need to play the economics for it and make sure that you actually have a good business. You manage to get to product market fit and build something that people like. Is there a real business that ideally becomes a”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With adventure back company, particularly a B2B SaaS business, there are a lot of commonly accepted metrics of what you need in order to be considered to have gone to the next step, right? So at the seed stage, you really need to prove that you've got product market fit or at least sort of the early markings of product market fit and a revenue model that's beginning to come together from seed to A, then you really need to see that there's some repeatability in the go-to market and that there's pretty strong product market fit. business you're running and stage that you're at particularly if you're venture backed those inflection points can often be relatively easily defined nothing's perfect revenue as a marker for product market fit on its own is probably a lazy way to look at it but most investors are pretty vocal about what they want to see in the next round”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speed and focus for sure. We got a lot of stuff wrong, but we were not lazy and we were always very clear about what the next inflection point needed to be. And everything we did was in service of getting to that next step. I mean, it goes without saying determination. Obviously, you know, there were definitely those days where we would think, wow, we're totally done. But the fact that we always move fast and we always move with focus was something that I still carry with myself and my team here today”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then sort of fast forward to the aha moment with Electric. I was actually running my last company in San Francisco. This is maybe 2012. We were using software for benefits and payroll. And it was a lot easier than doing it the old-fashioned way. And so then when we had a whole bunch of IT stuff that had to get handled, I just thought to myself, well, hey, if you can automate HR stuff with software, why can't you automate IT stuff with software? Every company needs this, right? But I had another company to run at the time Swarm, right? So I just kind of put the idea on the shelf for a couple of years and then fortunately we had a great exit to Groupon two years later. And I was able to revisit the idea for electricity.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, when I was a teenager, I just didn't really see why I couldn't start my own company. People said, you can't start your own company. You're only 16. And I was always like, why not? And so the light bulb went off for me, I think, one night early on in high school. I realized, hey, I can do whatever I want. And the next day I started my first company, producing mountain biking videos.”
2019-11-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Pre-Product Market Fit Is About Systems Design Not Engineering, The Right Way For Leaders To Approach Wartime Leadership Today & A Guide To Recruitment Forward Planning with Ryan Denehy, Founder & CEO @ Electric · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source