YouSaid · the spoken record

Zac Bookman

lines on the record: 81
first: 2024-12-06
most recent: 2024-12-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I agree that's advice I tend to give around growth, believe it or not. I shrink your TAM. So guys like you, sorry, I'll pay it back to you since you think our industry is so boring. Guys like you want Tam Tam Tam. Like show me a large market so I know you could be a big company. And entrepreneurs actually need to get crazy focused. I wasted one of the many mistakes I made was, okay, we've got a little product market fit on transparency. Let's go to the UK. Let's go to Australia. And I got on planes. I wasted so much time. I went to dinners and I didn't understand my business. My business was state and local government in the United States. I got to shrink the TAM and then even shrink it further, get to budget sizes under this and over that. And every step we took to shrink the product market fit segmentation and to get more focused on the ICP, the ideal customer profile, our growth rate ticked up. And so we literally.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go crazy. So we're the type of company sell like mad. Get in front of your customers and prospects. We sing and dance in the aisles of the vendor hall. Most of our competition, they sit back in their chair and they're looking at their phone, watching the prospects walk by and just waiting for someone to come up to them. And we are like maniacal clowns. Like, come look at what we're doing. We're OpenGov. We're smiling. We're enthusiastic. So it sounds a little funny. It sounds a little hokey, but we bring the energy. We bring the passion. We engage with our prospects and customers like crazy. Number two is iterate. Iterate, iterate with the customers. This is discovery. You can read about this in the books, but it's just true. It takes time.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Occasionally it works. You have to build product furiously. And in my opinion, getting to a suite or a suite of sweets is the way to do it, at least in vertical software. It requires the proverbial, pat your head and rub your belly. Like literally, you now have a customer base on this 10K, 20K, 30K product, and you got to keep selling it or you're not going to raise your next round. You're not going to have any momentum. The employees are going to know something's wrong. And you have to do that while building a new product and a third product. That's the entrepreneurial hack. That's the magic.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Felt it in my body. This isn't working. We're going to be totally upside down. How do I reposition the company? And repositioning is just brutal.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product market fit is when you can make a customer successful comma repeatedly and profitably. A lot of people have different definitions. Marx is great. That's when they call you. It's when your prospects call you. I love that. But we got deceived. We signed up our first hundred customers. These were the five or 10K deals. And the company's upside down and I hadn't switched into a multi-product understanding that sweet, at least in our vertical, sweet beats best of breed. So it's a classic dialectic in enterprise software. If you want to build a Zoom, you got a 10x better product. If you have a big enough market, great. You can build an IPO scale company. But in a lot of these verticals, you've got to get to like workday level product or rippling compound multi-product company to get the ASPs working. And that's actually how you increase your at least strategic or total addressable market. I got totally deceived. Wow, something's happening here. I think this is going to work, but very quickly, I...”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that doesn't mean it's not rich. Look, your business is very difficult, too, Harry. It requires judgment and decisions. How are you going to get a 50x if you're raising at 100 million? You've got to have a big company. And by the way, most people don't understand $155 billion not how it works. They're clearly going to have to raise more money, which is massively diluted. And by the way, it costs a lot of money to run these companies. It costs equity to run these companies. Public companies are diluting multiple percentage points a year. What do you think some of these startups are diluting? And so it's amazing how much it adds up. So unlike you, on the other hand, somebody offered me the chance to put some money in XAI and I'm like, it's raising at $18 billion as a seed round. Well, now they're at 50. And it's like, this is a tough game. Some of the hot companies deserve it and their multiples aren't coming down.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between like 8 and 20 million, growth rates, we went from like 200K in revenue to 2 million. And it was like, okay, something's happening here. And I could go out and be like, oh, we 10x this year or something. But then it went like two to four and a half, four and a half to eight and a half, eight and a half to like 14.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a fairly, he was coaching. Two was hard times and kind of 15 and 16. We were overspending. Growth was slowing. We were learning about our vertical. We're not a horizontal SaaS company. We've got to go deeper. And I could see I was kind of losing the faith of my board. As in this company has revenue, but this is not going to be the next Pinterest. That was not a good feeling. And I don't know if I'd characterize that as a disagreement as much as I was like.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had a lot of disagreements. I'll tell you a few anecdotes. One, very early on, I had this boneheaded idea that we were going to create a network of governments across the country and we'll have the largest repository of public performance and financial data. And all the governments will learn and share from each other and they'll benchmark and they'll cut waste and improve efficiency. The problem was we didn't have many products. And you come for the tool and stayed for the network. You don't come for the network, stay for the tool. So I was putting our metrics up at our board meeting and saying we're going to get all these logos. The logos will just magically produce value over time. And Mark Andreessen was like, do you want to be a real company? And I was like, yeah, yeah, I do. I'm like a young entrepreneur. And he's like, because real companies measure revenue, not logos. And I was like, ah, got it. So I came back to the next board meeting and I'm like, here's our two key metrics. Logos and revenue gave me the same speech. He's like, real companies measure revenue. And I'm like,”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I think the guys at Rippling are doing something slightly similar. They're gathering founders. Some of these have subject matter expertise. Some don't. They're aqua hiring and we're doing product acquisitions.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About what the customer needs and what the product needs to have, you've saved years worth of work and you've captured tremendous subject matter expertise. And now you can pour engineering or R&D into the product, which is exactly what we've done. So we build organically, but also if we come across a company that we admire, we'll buy it and we'll double the investment in R&D on it.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get it. It takes years to discover exactly what the product needs to do, particularly for highly verticalized, highly specialized use cases. So we sell software to departments of public works and building and planning and finance and budgeting and procurement. If you're not sleep art, Harry, wake up. These are very specialized complex use cases with governmental accounting and like 12 bureaucratic processes that all have to be done and they're regulated and other things. If you just want to think up these use cases or just unleash AI and think you're going to build the perfect product, you're wrong. You're going to have to go through months, if not quarters or years of interactive work with the customers. So getting the first million, two, three, four, five of revenue can take as long as going from five to 25. And if you can catch a company that's managed to get some semblance of product market fit with a beautiful kind of fully multi-tenant stack that is done the years of discovery of”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spend less, grow faster. It's a weird law. It's probably my net out. We were single product essentially. And in that August 2019 round, we bought a company in the permitting and licensing space. And we did probably $90 million of transactions in like 45 days. That worked very well. And as we broadened our product suite, things started to work. The economics of the business started to work. Basically, you're paying all this money to market and sell. You're even paying a bunch of money to deploy. And if you have more product, more arrows in the quiver, you get higher ASPs for the same essentially cost. Everything started unfolding there. We ended up doing an acquisition one each year basically as we broadened our portfolio suite. And I learned this a little bit from John Chambers. M&A can be innovation. It's not just buying for customers or revenue. We don't even do that. We buy for product quality and adjacency and it jumpstarts the innovation.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Group in Tampa, Weatherford Capitol. It was at 210 pre, Harry, just five years ago. We just got marked in February at 1.8.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're first class, and they were an open gov early. I got into a bunch of trouble in 2019, so I'd overspent the whole way and I'd raised too much money. I almost lost the company a few times. I'm happy to cry on your shoulder about it. It was 19. I couldn't raise, got one term sheet after 30 no's and it was onerous pound of flesh. I went through the deal. I said, I'm not going to raise any more money. I'm going to get religion. I'm going to change everything. And I started reading all their blogs. They're very much on the raise less, own more of your own company. We want to be not conflicted as seed investors. So they want to go in at the seed. And I just was like, they get it. And they're right. And I know it's marketing for them, but they're actually just right. And very fortunately, before COVID hit or before people got with the program in 21, we started cutting. You saw the law at work cut more, grow faster. It was just amazing.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's irrational. The brand, look, are the Sequoia guys like amazing investors? They probably are, but it's probably also an incredible flywheel or network effect where if they invest in your company, it simply helps you recruit better talent and better executives. Maybe it helps you a little bit get some more press. And if you're selling into commercial or enterprise, maybe it's a stamp of approval for early adopters. But I actually think it's just helpful. So I do think brand name matters. However, for those who can like bootstrap, that's the ultimate, in my opinion. To avoid all of the conflicts that come from raising venture capital and to own much more of the company yourself, that's when I'm like tip of the cap and like very jealous. I don't know if you follow the founder collective guys at all.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be front stabbed or backstabbed. And he's like, I'd rather be stabbed in the front. And he's like, okay, go with Sequoia.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, there's a class of investors who almost against, maybe they want to, I would say, against their interest want to love on and coach and mentor all their founders and take them to dinner and get them together and all this stuff. And there's another class of investors who are like, I don't have the time of day. Like I wrote you a check, but I barely remember your name. I think the best thing to do is probably just be open, honest, and authentic about it if you're trying to build a brand as founder friendly, then sure, loving on everyone. Maybe that's in your financial interest. I have this, I didn't raise from Sequoia, but I have kind of a respect in the sense that I don't, look, if you're crushing it, they're going to spend a lot of time on you. And if you're not crushing it, it wouldn't surprise me if they don't remember your name. That's not a personal commentary. It's just a sense. I did get an anecdote from a friend who had term sheets from Sequoia and Benchmark, and he was talking to somebody about which one to take. It was kind of like, do you prefer to?”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, of course I saw it. And as soon as I got to understanding their business and where they're coming from, it all made a lot more sense. And it got a little bit easier. Andreessen Horowitz is managing many billions of dollars. Lonsdale's managing many billions of dollars. They're in a different game. It's about the very, very top 1% of 1% companies. It's probably like less than that. I'm an investor as well. And I understand this. It's like I can't literally spend time on all these investments. It doesn't make sense. It's literally a bad use of time.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Powerful for the entrepreneur, it might be powerful for the company, even the industry it's in. It doesn't do much for 20 VC. It doesn't do much for Andrees and Horowitz. And that's a really tough pill to swallow. You are incentivized to not care about me.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In single verticals, your business is so different from my business and something I feel pretty strongly about because a lot of entrepreneurs and founders want to just love their venture investors. And let's be friends and let's go to dinner and you're going to be my mentor and all this. And there's definitely room for that. But we are conflicted severely. Your business runs on a power law. Your business is about finding the next Coinbase or the next Uber. Maybe the next Pinterest. The reality is OpenGov's been quite successful, but it doesn't move the needle. It's a couple billion dollar type exit. That's not what you're in the game for. And it's really hard for an entrepreneur to understand that when you're starting out from zero, you're worth nothing. You're living on ramen. There's nothing in your bank account. And you're like, gosh, if I could get to 100 million in revenue or 200 million in revenue, if I could get a multi-billion dollar exit or even a billion dollar exit or even a 500 million dollar exit, that's”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stock exchange. It's been a Wall Street darling. Supposedly it's the 10th best performing stock of the last 20 years. And few people have heard of it and they print cash and it's an extremely well managed and impressive company. We compete against them. And that's an example of what can happen with growth durability. If you're growing at 25, 24, 23 and you're decreasing at that kind of rate versus you're growing at 50, 60, 70, but then one year, oops, we're growing at 15 and the next year we're growing at 8 and then we're not growing. And so that's one area to explore and your mouth is open and you're like, wait, I want to know more about that company. The other is the dynamics in your business, Harry, which are totally different than the dynamics in my business. And I'm not here to convince you to invest in OpenGov. I'm not even here to convince you to invest in GovTech. I'm not really. I think some of these verticalized markets are winner-take-all. I do think there's a lot of room to build big vertical software companies, but not many great companies.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two areas to take this conversation. I love it. One is durability of growth. The reason I think Cox was so interested in us and a lot of other kind of private equity firms are drooling over this GovTech space is the sustainability and durability of the growth. A lot of venture-backed companies, they get to 50, 70, 100 million, maybe 200, and they kind of crap out. And you see them orphaned as public companies in the post IPO land and they're growing at 15% or they're literally bobbling along not growing because they're selling new business to make up for the churn. And you see a company like Tyler Technologies, which you probably haven't heard of and most of your listeners probably have never heard of. It's the vertical incumbent, if you will, in GovTech. They do about $2 billion a year in revenue for state and local government software. And they trade at $25 billion on the S&P 500 on the New York.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer is paying you a dollar for the software or a cohort of customers a year later, how much are they paying you? That's gross retention of the same amount of software and net retention is overall increase in dollars, including from upsells and cross sells. A lot of companies think 80, 85, 90 is good, and there's companies in GovTech with 97, 98, 99% gross retention. So it's almost an annuity if you can really get screwed in and do it right. But yeah, we won't have the growth rates at, you know, 50, 70, 90 percent.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, everyone was in ZERP absolutely smashing it with 70, 80, 100% growth rates. And now those same companies are growing 10, 15, 20%. And we're growing faster than them. And I'm kind of like, hey, just a little engine that could.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, basically. But look, I've been laughed at since we started the company in 2012. And when we were raising money, the number of times people said, basically, you were more artful, but government, no thanks. I came to Silicon Valley to get a wafer from government. Or good luck with that. Or it's all ways fraud and abuse. No thanks. And that was a little contrarian on our part. We're very, very mission driven. Our mission is to power more effective and accountable government. We're probably naive and a little thick in the head, as you would say, but the customers will partner with you for life if you make them happy. And that's called stickiness. And the whole game in enterprise SAS is high gross retention. Let's just be clear. The whole game is high gross retention. You look at a lot of companies if they're in the 70s, 80s. Good luck. I don't want that business. I'll take ours in the mid to high 90s. And so there are a lot of attractive things actually about this little corner of the world. And we were growing steady.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can, yeah. I look at like tanium. I remember when they were like in their major growth curve, they were charging massive prices, you know, $5, $10, $20 million prices. Look at Palantir, for instance. I remember Michael Ovid's talking about the first deal they did with JP Morgan. They went into the room. Supposedly, I wasn't there and they discovered a huge amount of pain on a big kind of mortgage program that they were working on in combating fraud. And they said, we think we can save you $100 million. And JB Moore was like, we want it. And they're like, great. We'll take 10% of what we can save you. And JB Moore was like, no, no, no, we'll pay you a few million bucks for the software. And they were like, no. And they got to a stalemate and they walked.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 years ago, 25, 50, 75. It used to be like, all right, get to 100K. Now I think kind of big league enterprise salespeople think 100K deals is like tic-tacs and we need to be targeting seven figure deals. Mark Andreessen said to me something along the lines of you want a big company, charge high prices. You want a medium-sized company, charge medium prices. You want a small company, charge small prices. There's a lot to that. He actually said there is no upper limit on the price of software. It's just the quantity of software and the pain that you're discovering and the value you're creating. It's an interesting business from that perspective.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you're selling enterprise software, you're basically breaking into organizations. Organizations are filled with people and people disagree with each other. When you're building a business, alignment is the most important thing you can get for execution. And when you're looking at a customer, how do you get them aligned on buying your product? Well, you have salespeople. You have marketing. You might have customer success or professional services. You're breaking down the walls. You're trying to create alignment. And that's expensive. People are super expensive. And you're not going to make up the cost of sales and marketing by selling 10K software unless you're like a Dropbox where you can, you know, or some product-led growth phenomenon. And there are a few of those. And I think we all wish we'd had a company like that. If you can do that, more power to you. But even when they get to a certain size, they start trying to break down the enterprise. And that means you got to have an enterprise motion, which means salespeople, which means expensive, which means sales cycles. And the ASPs have to.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like a wilderness period. And look, some companies come out of the gate and these entrepreneurs, they get the kudos rightfully if they just shoot off. And there's a lot of companies that just bobble along in the wilderness. We were one of them. As I look back on our first few years, I don't know what we were doing. It was a learning period. It was confusing because we actually came out of the gate selling about a year in, but we were selling $5,000 software, $10,000 software, transparency reporting. It was kind of a political sale. Governments would buy it to show off the data in their 30, 40 year old ERP green screen systems. And I got tricked into thinking it was 1999, sell it for a loss and make it up on volume. And I realized a year end, oh my God, we've got to broaden the suite. We've got to get average selling prices higher. And it wasn't really until probably five years into the company.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm an LP in legit funds. Where's the money? Where's the money? How many years has to go by? People think these companies take like five, seven, nine, ten years. Not true. They take like 15 to 20. That means your venture fund takes 15 to 20 years to distribute the money. Your business runs on a power law. Your business is about finding the next Coinbase. OpenGov's been quite successful, but it doesn't move the needle. It's a couple billion dollar type exit. That's not what you're in the game for.”
2024-12-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source