YouSaid · the spoken record

Shoaib Makani

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19
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2020-02-07
most recent
2020-02-07
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1
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  1. “And then I want to finish on the next five years for you and for keep sharking. What's that exciting roadmap? Yeah, you know, we have an ambitious vision to both grow within trucking, but also to expand the scope of who we serve. We've become the leading fleet management system for trucking companies. We are the operating system for modern trucking companies. But there's more we can do for them. But we can also take what we've built, the hardware and software, the IoT platform that we now have, and extend it to both other types of fleets, but other use cases. And so we see really our future and our competency, our core competency as solving problems at the intersection of hardware and software. As I said, I've wanted to see this one for a long time. I had so many good things from John many years ago and then most recently from Somers and Alex. So thank you so much for joining me today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Ari.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Fellow by the name of Aaron Schaukraut. I've known him for many years and I find him to be one of the best partners to me in the business and many other entrepreneurs has an incredible ability to cut through the noise, identify exactly what matters, and deliver that advice in a very unfiltered and candid way. And so Aaron, to me, really stands out. I love that. Absolutely brilliant suggestion. What advice do you have for founders in the midst of regulatory challenges? That one was from Samesh. Yeah, you know, I think it's deeply understand that the regulation, both what is the current regulation and what's proposed. Regulation is constantly evolving, and you actually want to be close to where it's headed, not just to the current state. And then also, you know, engage with the regulators if you can. I mean, they are ultimately, you have to know who they are and what motivates them and what drives them so that you can anticipate change. So yeah, I'd say stay close to the people who ultimately make the rules that impact your business.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Of the interview being the quick firearound. So essentially, I say a short statement and then you hit me with your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to rock and roll? Let's do it. Okay, so I had a New Year's resolution to read more this year. So what's your favorite book and why? So maybe an easier question, favorite book of 2019. President's Award? It's a really good book, sort of documents specific presidents in American history that were faced with conflict. And really, I think it was particularly interesting because it reminds you how individuals have the ability to change the trajectory of the world, but also how unlikely and exceptional America is. What would you most like to change about Silicon Valley and San Francisco? Let more people in. This place can and should compound at much higher rates. Who's the single most underrated person in the valley, do you think? And what makes them so special? This one is really tough. I mean, there are so many exceptional people here and I know so few. But we recently brought on an independent board member.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And so it's really the focus then becomes on how do we get in, make trials successful, win these new logos, because we have a very predictable path to expansion from there. Totally. I mean, it's all in the hands of John on customer success then, I guess. That's exactly right. And that team has done an absolutely phenomenal job of serving our customers, both retaining them, but then also driving upsell. They're at the front lines of that. Do you think customer success should be involved in the upsell process? That's always a big one for me. Yeah, we put a lot of emphasis on the customer success team around that. They have a retention goal, but then also an expansion goal. And they're the ones that are closest to the account. They are the ones that understand the business that we serve most closely. And they're the ones that can actually surface both gaps in our product, but also opportunities within each account to serve. And they generate CSQLs, which then get handed over to our sales team close. And they do that in a very efficient way. I do want to move into my favorite.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think generally if someone is going to install your hardware, you're solving a problem that is very meaningful to them. It is not a, oh, I'll try this thing out and maybe I'll use it. If you get them over the hurdle of deploying your hardware, almost certainly you're solving a meaningful problem. And if you solve that problem in a high quality way, you're going to continue to stay in. And so while the threshold for winning an account is high, the retention dynamics are dramatically better than versus like pure optional software, what I'll call. And we've really architected our business around that, put a lot of emphasis on trials. We want to make sure trials are absolutely rock solid and successful because if we win a trial, if we get in and get them to trial our product, we win at an incredibly high rate. And if we win that trial, we stay in effectively and definitely. It's a perpetuity. And in fact, it's net negative from a revenue retention perspective. We expand every one of our accounts, every cohort all time.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, you know, so this was seven years ago when I raised my seed round. And to be honest, I actually just left the hardware piece out of our seed deck. I said, we're going to build this free application that lets us get in with drivers and then we're going to build a freight marketplace on top. And along the way, of course, we built hardware that was absolutely critical. I mean, our mission was to connect trucks. And well, we got much deeper connectivity and we got paid for that connectivity. And so I didn't add that complexity up front. But then when we actually embarked on this hardware path, we built a competency. We got the right people and we demonstrated that if we got this right, it would lead to a very good high retention net expansion business that would still give us the marketplace opportunity. So we didn't depart from our story, but we had, I would say, a nice little SaaS business that we built in between.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I always look for those who are fundamentally curious about the problem they're solving. And really obsessed about the customer they serve, the market they're in, and the competition that they're surrounded by. I think it is really important to learn from others, both direct competition, but also adjacent comps, other companies in software in general. And so there's so many lessons to be learned and applied. And I think by studying the success and failure of others, you can be better yourself. And specifically when it comes to distribution, I think there's always an unfair advantage. I never want to fight a fair fight when it comes to sales. I want to have a leg up. And, you know, I'm constantly looking in our own business for what is our advantage. How do we actually structurally reduce our cost of acquisition? And it's not being better at ads, I can assure you that.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “They would tell each other, but then they would actually organically bring us into their companies. And so really that key insight and the appreciation of how important it was to have a distribution advantage led us down this very specific entry point and this specific path that we came to market through, which was give away a free application to the driver around compliance and then use that to then wedge into the broader fleet management opportunity.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I'd say one of our fundamental innovations is our distribution model, actually, and that was not accidental. I knew that convincing trucking companies top down to change would be hard, if not impossible. And also, I did not want to fight incumbents with a structural disadvantage. If anything, I wanted to have an unfair advantage that they couldn't replicate. And so, you know, I had seen bottoms-up adoption work in the enterprise for other companies when I was in venture, companies like Expensify and Dropbox and Yammer. And while truck drivers are a very different audience, we believe that if we started with them and solved a meaningful problem in their life, that they would self-adopt our product and become our advocates. And when you think about it, I mean, you know, professional drivers, truck drivers are spending time with each other at truck stops every evening and they're sharing. They're telling each other the tools they use. The challenges they face, the opportunities they see. And we believe that if we could get in with that audience,”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Officer searches or VP engineering searches. They know everyone in the market. It is their job to know who is good, who's not, who's available, who's not available but can be moved. I mean, they obsess over this and you want that individual on your side. Now, all executives search firms are not made equal. You want to go and find the best in each area of focus or in each role. But you absolutely want to leverage that. It's possible that you can build an executive search capacity internally, but they're not going to be exceptional. One individual is not going to be exceptional at four different types of roles. And so you do want, I think, to leverage the external specialist.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think one of the biggest regrets I have is not investing in talent acquisition early, both internal and external. I think next go around if there is one, I will hire a full-time recruiter from day one. Building a team is hard, and the impact of both a great decision and a bad decision on the talent front, both in the early days, even in the later stages, is just massive. And so the more time you can put in to evaluating, both attracting and evaluating talent, the better off you will be. And so when it comes to executive recruiting, you could argue that the consequence to both success and failure there is compounded because these individuals are directing others. And so you really don't want to get that wrong. And you don't want to limit the consideration set for candidates to those who you know or you're one order removed from. You want to go broad. You think about what the job of an executive search firm is. They're specialists. I mean, they just focus on CFO searches or chief people.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Know, I was not very good at leveraging our investors early on. I would send updates, but I never made a request. I was incredibly inward facing and believed that we could solve our own problems or it was really our job to solve our own problems. And I didn't want to burden others in some ways. And I think at that stage of the company, frankly, they were our problems to solve. Like no one else is going to help you figure out product market fit. If you think an investor is going to guide you down that, no chance. But, you know, once I knew that we were through that existential period, that the company would be something and that really the primary constraint would be the quality that people we recruited, I started leaning on our investors much harder. And particularly to help them, I asked them to help me identify the best executive search firms to push those firms that we would then engage to bring in the best candidates at the top of the funnel and then to help close our finalists. I mean, really, I think the highest leverage thing a board member can do for you.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Think it's not just like a thanks, but no thanks. I've heard you. I understand where you're coming from. But here's where I depart. Here's why I believe differently. And, you know, I actually really like written communication for this reason because you can refer back to it. You can be very specific about it. And so we'll exchange memos. And I will document regularly the state of the business. And it's not just here's our ARR, here's our CACLTV. I'm talking about like the deep strategic thoughts and almost this dream of consciousness. I'm keeping them updated on the state of the company and the state of the market so that they are constantly accumulating that context and so that when I go to them with either an update or a request, it's not, I don't have to remind them. I don't have to reset that context. They already have it. And so I think it is that stream of consciousness constantly being updating and communicating and being transparent that gives you the credibility to ignore it at times.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Absolutely. And the reason being, well, it actually depends on the origin of the company, right? You could have a key insight that was really close to the work you did in a past life or in your current life that you then want to develop. And then it's, well, you've already spent a lot of time identifying the idea. In fact, perhaps your own career or your own life you've identified the idea. But unless you have that key insight inherently, I think you have to sort of zoom out and look broadly for markets opportunities and be somewhat agnostic about the problem you solve. Because if you come in with biases, you're going to really, I think, condition your potential. And so you zoom out, you figure out the markets and ideas that are interesting to you. And then it is important, I think, to really spend time validating up front rather than just diving in and building. And the reason there is.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, I think venture definitely has made me a better founder and CEO. What's unique about Venture is you sort of get paid to evaluate companies. You look at hundreds, if not thousands of companies a year, you know, the good, the bad, and some ugly. And along the way, you sort of acquire a taste for the types of businesses that can compound at high rates for extended periods of time in a relatively capital-efficient way. And generally, those businesses have a strong emphasis on technology. That's where the leverage comes from. And so when I started thinking about the markets and ideas that I would pursue, I applied that mental model that I had developed to the opportunities that I considered. And I think venture doesn't by any means guarantee success as an entrepreneur, but I really do think it kind of makes sure that you don't, at the minimum, pursue bad ideas. And that does improve the likelihood of having an outcome.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think generally throughout my life, I have been fairly risk-loving. And I think it stems from perhaps a fear of regret or even fear of repetition. But I don't arbitrarily seek risk. If I take on risk, I generally want the consequences to be high. I think expected value really matters.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Was through electronic logs. The regulation that actually limits the hours that a truck driver can work. And so the more time I spent on it, the more confident I became that our key insight could actually be realized. And if we did realize it, that the consequence to success would be meaningful.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Coastal Ventures. And he actually needed to replace himself so he could leave to start his own company. That's kind of an unwritten rule there. And one thing led to another, and I was convinced to join KV to invest in early stage technology companies. And it was really at KV that I got to go deep on my interest in logistics. I led some of our investments in the consumer on demand side, but on the enterprise or commercial side, I just didn't really see any companies that compelled me. And I kept digging and specifically focused on trucking, given really just how foundational it is to the economy, but also how completely underserved it was from a technology perspective. You didn't have Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or VCs really hanging out at truck stops. Eventually, I came across sort of the key insight that to build an electronic marketplace for freight, you had to first bring the drivers and trucks online. I was generally a supply first marketplace guy, and that was really the key insight. And the way that we would connect supply or that we could connect supply.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, so coming out of college, I knew I wanted to build things. So while most of my peers were going into banking, and this was 2006, so really peak finance, I instead joined Google and specifically I joined the Google Checkout team, which was effectively a very well-funded startup within Google. And checkout wasn't particularly successful as a business, but I learned a lot about what it takes to organize and direct a group of people around a common purpose. And coming out of Google, I knew I wasn't quite ready to give it a go. So I joined a startup called Admob that was on its way. And where I could see what hyper growth looked like. And ultimately, AdMob was acquired by Google, so I did a bit of a round trip, but really it didn't have any intention on staying at Google. And this was 2011. The economy had bounced back. And I was actually starting to look for problems that I could solve and think about the people who had want to solve them with. And by total chance, I was introduced to a guy named Rami Adib, who at the time was a principal.”

    2020-02-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source