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Sameer Gandhi

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2021-09-02
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2021-09-02
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  1. “But while he's doing that, everything in the company today is being built to address that two or three years later. He's does not lose his sight or attention to detail on the present to get ready for the future. The reason why it's a memory is that I would notice that literally at every board meeting he could progressing on that sort of line or train or of thought or that vision. You're like, oh, we're closer. We're a little bit closer. And even from the beginning, we never really deviated from that. Like everything he's talked about is where we are today. It was scripted out a long time ago. We never told anybody, but we're not that far off for what we talked about very early on.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I have so many, but I'll tell you, I'm going to give you an anecdote. It's not quite a memory, but it's one of the things that has brought us together, George and myself. We both have this passion for racing. And George, as you know, is a pretty incredible race car driver. One of my memories, like every board meeting we start, we talk about what race we've done and what happened. We watch each other's videos. And it's just a common thing that we share. But it translated to the business. And I thought about this a lot. It's like, what is it about the racing that's also like the business? And part of that is you gotta be a really good driver, you have to be able to look up and out. You're not looking at what's next to you. You got your peripheral vision and everything, but the really good ones are already like way ahead of where you are on the racetrack. And so for George, like he does that driving, but he does that in the business too. And when you think about when you're listening to him talk and he's like, this is where the market's going. This is what customers are going to need. This is how we're going to solve the problem. And he's talking two or three years out.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “No way to choose one. We had a handful early days of just, I mean, just pivotal hires. I mean, I would just go with Bert as CFO was amazing. Carp, when he came in to run sales, game changer. A mole was a person we hired. Now he's head of product and engineering. He was an up-and-comer at Microsoft, not the obvious choice in terms of what he had run before. But man, you just saw that his trajectory was steep and he's been incredible. So like every single one of them without them, we don't get here. But I look at that and say like George found the right time and place to then go say like, I'm going to get somebody incredible for that role. And he managed to bring them in. And that to me is a consistent aspect of them all.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I looked at it. So I think the number one thing on this was like, man, we just whiffed on the cloud native concept and nobody's willing to do it. That was one where if you got that wrong, you know, and I think you see in my memo, it's like, well, if we totally botched this and we're totally wrong about this, we're going to build a nice IR company and we'll have a pretty nice outcome, but I didn't think that was going to be the case. But that was really like, that's a way to sort of justify it to yourself if you're writing a big check in a really, really early company”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I love this about George, and I've seen it with the best founder. So when George started the company, he was a visionary founder with some CEO experience. And the really, really great ones somewhere along the way, they go from founder to CEO. And you look at that and say like, that individual is a phenomenal CEO in terms of leadership, articulation of vision, recruiting a team, and then really empowering them to go do their thing. And then they become a public company CEO someday. And I saw the transformation, and there's not like a moment. The thing about like George, and I think other great ones is that they always know that it's a process of constant learning and improvement. And every time you see them, they've done something to improve themselves. They just know that they don't know everything and they're willing to learn from other people, surround themselves with a great network, listen is an amazing ability they have versus always transmitting. And I think with George, I saw that right from the beginning, and he was just like, just relentless.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Of examples of this, then you say, like, hey, I've got this investor that can ride with me through this whole journey that's committed. I have a deep relationship with them and their team, and they're committed to seeing it all the way through. And that we think is a great story and a great thing to deliver for these entrepreneurs versus a quick brown done by a crossover or hedge fund at the tail end.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, look, I mean, this is not new for us, and we've been doing it for over a decade, and it is a different kind of investing. You have to think about the team differently. You have to think about your investment decision-making process differently. You know, we launched our growth fund, our first one in 2008. We're on our sixth one today. This later stage vehicle, even though we expanded it just recently, it's our third one. And so, you know, we're just organizationally set up to think about it as what we want to do is be able to back these really extraordinary founders and companies right from the beginning. And so we're still writing a million dollar, half a million dollar seat check. But if you want to do the $200 or $300 million round pre-IPO, we can do that also. And you just have to understand that it's not just one giant fund. They're different vehicles and teams that understand how to execute the different investment strategies. And we do that under one roof. But if you're a George or someone like that or steward at Slack or Ryan Smith at Qualtrics, you know,”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “To shoehorn a late stage round into a growth equity vehicle that's not designed to go do that. And it caused us to go raise a different set of funds to be able to do this type of investing. And write a different kind of check and have a different perspective on this is the pre-IPO round versus the early growth equity round. And by the way, in some of these really, really special companies, those rounds can generate incredible returns. So like, you know, part of this is like, why are we not capturing more of that for Excel versus letting it go to the outside? That's really how we think about it.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “At this point, you should really intimately understand it. And if you don't, that's a problem. But if you're inside, you should understand it. And so we can present a simple alternative, which is what happened in the CrowdStrike case. Like, here's a board member, an investor, understands the business, is committed to it long term. Here's somebody I don't know. What's the option I would rather take as long as they're comparable, right? Perhaps on terms, I think that a lot of the savage and sophisticated founders don't necessarily optimizing on numbers. What I've seen is that they optimize on relationships and ability to really be a steady stalwart investor through all the thick and thin. And it comes through from confidence in knowing that they're going to be there, right? And the individual is going to be there. And so I think that's the thing that ends up trumping and that's the decision that people make. And I think that's the decision that George made. And my only point of this is as we saw that we realized that, hey, we should have a later stage vehicle to enable us to go do these kinds of rounds as opposed to.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Every situation is different in terms of capital needs of the companies and their ability to go raise money. But I think non-dilutive, simple capital is something you have to look at pretty seriously, right? It's like it has a benefit. There's a cost to it, perhaps, but more of a risk that an overcapitalized business doesn't always have the same rigor in terms of how you run it as a company that's been capitalized thoughtfully. It's also getting ahead of yourself creates all these issues downstream potentially. But I do think that when we look at things and say like if there's relatively nondiluted capital with terms that make sense, we want to have the flexibility later on to do other things that it's not a bad decision to go take that money. Part of it is also when we look at this, and I'll tell you this is one of the things that came out of this whole crowdstrike experience is you get all these coming from the outside, but the reality is that we also have a great inside view on these companies, have a sense for what their real opportunity is and what the outcomes could be.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I felt like he would come out of that realizing that he had done a thorough process, done his analysis, and ultimately he would make the right decision for the company longer term. That's really what it came down to. And in the end, I was very grateful that he went off and sort of did the homework and then came back and was excited to have us always be in that lead spot or co-lead spot in the round. I think it just comes back to having him know that he has something. Let's just find the best outcome for the company. It's not just about us. It's really about the company having the right outcome.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I had a lot of people that said, What were you thinking at the time? So here's what I felt. I felt like he valued our relationship and the fact that we're investors. But I also thought, like, hey, look, he's a sophisticated entrepreneur. It wasn't his first company. He's smart. He wants to understand what's out there. And it's not just what capital and valuation and that sort of thing, which he obviously wanted to make sure that he was doing the right thing for the company. But maybe there were other investors that should be part of the syndicate. Likewise, you know, when I talked to George about it, I said, look, you know, like you should do your homework and make the best decision you could possibly make for the company. But I tell you what, I'm committed to it. I'm excited about where we're going. I'm willing to do it. Why don't you take my offer, my term sheet? You have it in your back pocket. So when you have these other conversations, go in knowing that your deal done already. And if someone comes along and offers you something much better or you think they're additive to the mix and you want to bring them in, it's just better for all of us. So I just think it was the right call for the company to end up at the right spot at the end.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, I think as we were getting into this, our relationship and our roles had changed. In the beginning, there was a lot of company building, and we were assembling the team to go to market. And I really worked closely with George on that. I think he always appreciated that we were very patient about what the long-term vision and outcome of the company would be. We're on the same path as him. It's like that early meeting where we could finish each other's thoughts. As we went along in this company, our clarity of what would happen in a year or two or three, it became more obvious and clear, and frankly, the opportunity became bigger. And I think he saw that we understood it as well and we were willing to be patient and go after that and build the company to pursue that.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Make money on incident response services, it pulls through product afterwards, right? Because the next thing you're going to do is like, well, how do we avoid this in the future? So I think that's a really great way to think about an added component of services to a product business. But the one that you're talking about, I think the implementation services, that's the one that I'm very wary of in terms of how high a percentage it gets of the overall business. And I look at some other ones later, like ours that are very complex. They take long time to implement, but keep them under 20% or have a partner ecosystem, but it does tell you about product readiness and ability to adopt in a company. And so it's one, like you say, like we look at very carefully is it tells you a lot about other parts of the business. It's an indicator of a lot of other things.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, I think you got to break that down a little bit. So, you know, if you're talking about a software business, even if it's a cloud or SaaS business and there's services as it relates to making a customer successful, implementation services, I think we look at that very carefully because to me, if a percentage of that rises too much in the company, it really tells me that there are product issues at the root of what's happening there. And it's just too hard to onboard customers. And it takes too long. And therefore, it's just a drag on growth overall. And there's risk in that in terms of overall customer success. So I think it's an indicator. But then there's other types of services. So you look at the incident response services at CrowdStrike, which are it's a self-contained business. It's very high end. It's high margin. It's a very critical service because it's deliberate at the time when a company's had a breach and you're trying to address in that moment what they need to go do. We look at that and say like, that's a standalone business. It's not related to the product at all. In fact, it's an amazing business because once you”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's hard to do. And then it gets back to our execution conversation, right? Which team is really exceptional on that basis? And now the difference between the winner and the loser is going to come down to or second place, maybe not loser, is going to come down to the team that is just exceptional at being able to deliver across the board. And that's, you know, I look at the companies like the ones that you're talking about that are really good at it. And it's the well-instrumented, they understand the metrics, they understand the nuances of the business. They hit the numbers very predictably or beat them in a very consistent basis. They just understand where they are on the playing field. And that's the thing that's going to set people apart, I think.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I think it's a tough challenge. And I think if there's not a, you know, in a company like that, if there isn't some sort of conceptual North Star that everybody understands, there's a vision and then some sort of mission for the company and people are really bought into it and it's easy to articulate. It's hard because you're adding people at an incredible rate. Everybody's moving so fast. You're not all sitting around together. We're in a virtual world too. You know, if you don't have that commonality of purpose, I think it's really hard to go do. And when it's simplifying and people really understand what you're all about. And I think even in the CrowdStrike case, it took us a couple years to really articulate it. I remember the beginning. It was fuzzy. And we used to work on that and say like, how do we really crisply articulate what we're all about? I think these companies that are growing really fast and are managing to do it are able to get everybody on board with that same clarity of vision because it applies to employees in the company, people you're recruiting, but it's also like your partners, your customers. It's everybody in the ecosystem. And if it's”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Not like you're going slow, but you have to do it right. Are you willing to be patient to really make those correct trade-offs when the decisions come up? But look, I think your hopping example is great. It's a phenomenal company and we're investors there. There is a pace today that is different than what we were experiencing in 2013. And you have to be willing to live up to that pace. And if you're not, someone is going to take that opportunity from you. So we're very cognizant of that. And the speed component of execution is not lost on us. I just make the point that there's other parts of it that are also important.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it all comes in if you articulate what your longer term plan is. So something that George is really good at is he's able to talk about where the market's going and why he's doing things in the company that are going to be relevant two, three, four years down the road. But he does that at the same time where he's got this current focus on what has to happen in the quarter or the month. The combination of those two things is pretty rare. So I think if you have an entrepreneur like that or a founder like that and you understand and you're also a patient investor, you may be perfectly happy to take an investment in the company that maybe isn't the first one out of the gates but is really looking at owning that opportunity over the longer haul. You know, the ones that get the quick markups and are focused on the vanity metrics and the vanity valuations, maybe that's great in terms of a quick hit on funding or valuation or even a quick hit on exit. But if you care about building companies for the, you know, that are going to really persist, there's an element of you got to go quick.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Go the fastest, right? So when you say speed, we weren't the first to do next gen AB as an example, but we did it better even though it took longer. And that set the company up to really be more of this platform company that is today. So when I looked at it at that 10 million first year, but I really looked at was he's built this incredible engineering product org and he's already thinking five years ahead and he's building things that are going to enable him to really deliver on the cloud native promise for security rather than taking his eye off the ball and doing some of the quick things that could have been”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I like that you call it speed of execution. So I would rephrase it a little bit. And speed is a component of it. I think look at execution overall in terms of the quality of it and some element of that is speed, but it may not be that you're the fastest. You just have to be the best at different aspects of executing your plan on your business. And some of it might actually be that you're taking longer to do something, but it's the right way to do it and you didn't take the shortcut. You took the harder path, but it's the one that sets you up for longer-term success. And one of the things I'll point back to is I wrote this blog post when the company went public. It really talked about in the early days how George was very focused on doing things right, what we called it was do the hard things first. And part of that related to he had this longer-term vision of what the company could be, but it meant that you had to lay the foundation right in the beginning. You couldn't take the shortcut because you'd never be able to go back and fix it later on. It's really difficult to do. A lot of that was in product decisions. It was a team and organ decisions. And we didn't necessarily”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Subscription and incident response are already big enough categories where you can create a company that can have a nice outcome. And so we felt like the downside was protected, but we were going after the bigger opportunity. So I never looked at as a three to five X. I looked at it as we're investing in a company in the first round when we did it. It was 150 posts or something like that. Is there a legitimate chance it could be worth one, two, or three billion and felt like that was a pretty legitimate chance? That looks very different today, but that's what we thought in 2013.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I think it's a little bit different. I mean, I get the 3 to 5x. That's nice in a base case, but when you're making an investment like this, and for us, we had made it as early growth equity investment. So it was a pretty risky one from that standpoint, just given the maturity of the company. But, you know, the way we would look at it or the way we did look at it then is if all this works and we're right about cloud native, if we're right about endpoint being reinvented, then there's a chance for a number of companies to be successful. And we know that multibillion dollar companies have been built in the past on endpoint. So there's already the existence of companies in this category that have gotten big outcomes. So for us, it's like if this all works, then we know that the outcome is measured with a beat, right? Some number of billions. Then the question is from a growth standpoint, a growth equity standpoint, is there a downtide scenario that still enables us to achieve a good outcome? And part of that in the case of CrowdStrike was back to the idea that threat intelligence as a concept.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “No, look, I think it's back to what we talked about on the timing. I think we had a scale that was longer than it was. I don't think it was not five years, but we felt like, hey, we could be pushing cloud and having a slower adoption cycle around the Falcon platform, which is really the endpoint product platform. And the way that was mitigated for us is that the company was doing really high-end incident response services. And so there was a bridge to get there as opposed to, you know, you're trying to sell a product that the market's not ready for. It felt like we had a transition period and we could absorb some of the slack on the market timing by offering the IR services, which in and of itself was a really good category, right? There were companies that Mandian, as an example, highly successful in that particular category. So we had some downside protection, even though the long-term vision was really just Falcon product. And, you know, doing the cloud-based endpoint protection. But yeah, I think, look, I mean, if you look at that and say, again, if versus when, what's the question? And we felt like it was when, it really came down to.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Like a hack or an intrusion, like there was so much bigger. So companies had to do something different. They just weren't going to be able to sustain the way they were doing in the past. So we kind of counted on that happening to sort of push the cloud adoption further along.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, look, I think, and if I was going to give you numbers, if we really felt like, hey, this is five years plus out, it's probably too far out for what we were trying to do with a crowdstrike type of investment, which is really, you know, it's a go into market investment. It's not an early development stage company. It was like ready to launch a product. And so if you're waiting five years, it's a lot of time to be sitting around. I think there's other types of investing where you're willing to go that far. Look, I think we really look at it and say, like, it's got to be within plus or minus a year or two. That's the right way to look at it. If you're later than that, you're too late and I think if you're earlier than that, it's just a different kind of investment. And with this one, here's why you can feel like you might get cloud adoption happening sooner. It was so much pressure around the kinds of attacks that companies were facing. Like think about the difference, you know, in 2013, now you're talking about organized crime or state-sponsored threats and the sophistication in the backing and the capital behind it and the risks and the benefits of pulling off something.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “It could take a while. And you're right. It could have been five years longer. I would not have been surprised if it was five years longer. It happened faster than I expected, but we went in thinking it was like, this is the long term right approach, but we're going to have to be patient because it could take a while before companies are ready to adopt.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I think just more generally speaking, market timing, if you get it right, it covers up a lot of other deficits in a business, right? If your team is incomplete, your product isn't quite there, if your execution is not stellar, you can cover all that stuff up if you just hit the market at the right time for a while. Eventually, it will catch up with you or somebody will do it better. And so we're always, we're very much oriented at evaluating opportunities to see and really assess where we are from a timing perspective, but all the other aspects of the market too. What are the dynamics as it relates to the existing players? How are other competitors thinking about it? Is there something that says that the timing today makes more sense than it would tomorrow or yesterday? All those things factor in, we really start there before we think about technology and products and things like that because the thing if you get timing wrong, it's hard to overcome that with any other part of the business. And then with CrowdStrike, it was a sense of not if, but when. And so we were pretty pragmatic going in.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Go outside the four walls. They're not going to trust it to be in the cloud. And George had this vision of like, this is the only way to solve the problem at scale. And he was so committed to it, just like relentlessly determined on this. And we also felt like the same thing, the way to reinvent the endpoint market was to take a fresh approach to it. I think it was a bold kind of assertion that that would happen, but that was the bet we wanted to take. And it lined up with just how he was thinking about it.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Look, so I think when we looked at this, there's a couple things that were really important to us. And if you go back and evaluate what was happening in cyber at the time, endpoint hadn't really been touched. People were really innovating on other parts, you know, network security. And I'd been in this company source fire that had done some really innovative stuff around intrusion detection and then just general network security. But endpoint was still like this legacy, very brittle antivirus kind of stuff that you remember your Mac takes forever to boot up or your PC, you know, bogs down, that sort of thing. And we just looked and said like, that's got to get reinvented because the threat landscape is so much more sophisticated than it was when these things started. Everything else that we were seeing in that time was all about how do we move legacy on-prem to cloud in a pure cloud native way from the beginning, the business, and the product architected for that. And security was one of the ones that people felt like that's never going to happen. No one's going to want their security.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I totally do. Look, there's advantages of the remote, and you got to blend the two, and I think we're going to a world where those things live side by side. But, you know, the feel of a company, it's really the right word. It's the feel of it when you walk through the beginning, tells you so much intuitively. And I personally enjoy that, and I do miss that, and I'm glad that we're able to get back to it.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It was great too. It was like what we like to see in these companies early on, small office, really gritty, scrappy, small team. And it was just, you know, had that good vibe of the startup, you know, in the very, very early days, which is why we like to go visit them. You know, we get to take the sense of it. You get that palpable feel of what it's like to be in the company.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I don't think there was one unlock Harry, but I think it was more like we could finish each other's sentences. And so we talk about the opportunity, why he was building his products that way. He was cloud native at a time when that was really revolutionary step to take. And he was so committed to that concept. And we said, yeah, we're big believers in that. I would say something, and then he would jump in and finish it. And then he would say something, and I'd finish it. And we just realized that we were talking the same language about the opportunity. And it didn't make sense to stop the meeting because now we got into the creative riffing of what the company could be. That was ours.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And I thought, well, there goes like 10 minutes of our 30 minute meeting, and you can't see. Let's see how this goes. And I think, you know, one thing led to the other, and we just realized that we were really on the same page in terms of longer-term vision for the company, what the opportunity was. And the meeting just took two hours.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yeah, this is one of those ones that's gotten to be, I think it's embedded in the lore now. It probably wasn't 15 minutes. I flew down to Irvine with a couple of the other guys here, John Locke, had gone with me and Nathan Naparco. And so I'm sure we had a 30-minute meeting. You know, this was one of those companies that was very stealthy. No one knew what was going on. It was supposed to be a good team, but they weren't really talking much about it. It was very unwraps. And we kept calling George. And so really a longer story about we just knew that they were up to something interesting and we had a thesis around endpoint. So we wanted to meet all the companies. Finally, he kind of relented and agreed to a meeting. And I think part of it was that he looked and saw that we had a long history in investing in cyber and thought we could be helpful to him at some point. So it was the one meeting he said that he would agree to take. We flew down there. He was late because he had an eye doctor's appointment, the one where you get your eyes dilated. So he came in with these big shades on, you know, the sunglasses you have to wear.”

    2021-09-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source