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Zach Perret

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2024-10-16
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2024-10-16
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  1. “Yeah, and you can do that, but it becomes over processized, and then everyone starts to try to hack the process as opposed to really finding the unique insight. I'd rather just let people go run at a thing for a while and usually they will come back and say, hey, this is just not going to work. Or like, hey, there's something very real here. They might come back in a week and say, like, there's something very real here. And like, I have a customer that's chomping at them to buy it. Like, I really need to fund it now. I don't want them to wait 18 months to come back and ask for more resourcing. On the flip side, no one inside the company wants to go off in a foray for like three years finding nothing.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, if you if you try to over-processize that, then it doesn't really work. Like a lot of people try to run an internal VC style model, which is like, you know, we'll fund you for a million bucks for a year.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You help them figure out how to get to there, like, at least in our case, to get to their first design partner. So they need like one or two customers that are willing to go experient with them. So we've done this a lot. This is like how we think about a lot of new product development.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, like a product manager, whatever the smallest version of a sufficient team is. So it's a product manager, an engineer, maybe a few engineers, maybe designer if you need it, maybe data scientist if you need it, depending on the type of product. And you just send them off into the ether. And as a founder, your job is you need to give them sufficient food to continue to exist, like sufficient resources and attention that they can continue to exist. Sufficient protection that they don't get killed by what I call the DDoS attack, where If we have a new product that we're working on, if we tell the whole company, we have a thousand people now, 950 people are going to reach out to the team saying, I'm super excited, how can I help? 950 messages saying I'm super excited, how can I help actually like DDoS is the system and they're thus not able to move fast with this atomic team, you give them sufficient resources, you give them sufficient protection, which oftentimes means ignoring them or hiding them in some sense from the rest of the company, and then”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, in the early phase, it's very easy. So you build an atomic team as small as possible. You say they go off and figure out if there's something to build here. And I've done that, by the way, with tons of other product areas too.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “In the long term, yes. It kind of depends on the horizon and scale of the business. Like in the short term, like if you're a founder and you're amazing at finding product market fit, like actually, no, that's the best thing. Just go spend your time with product market fit. And the mid stages is about like, can you build an effective company? In the long term, like when you look at the CEOs that are truly the best 10, 20 year public CEOs, they're the best resource allocators.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Every one of the new things that you're doing, the product team that's working on it wants the salespeople to sell their thing. And the salespeople are getting internally lobbied. Like, hey, sell my thing, sell my thing, sell my thing. And they're disappointed when you don't sell their thing. And then the salespeople then have to go explain it to the customer. And all of a sudden, the salespeople are explaining the thing to the customer. They don't know how to sell. So they're like, all right, well, then I got to like bring the product people to the sale. So it becomes this like really complex go-to-market motion. And you have to go from having a single sales scene that knows your products in and out to having specialist sales, having a technical account managers that are coming to things, sales engineers that are coming to things. It starts to become this much more complex model.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Think it's hard to do all the things that we did simultaneously. So launch three new business areas go from being a single product to a multi-product company. That is really hard. Going from one to two products, one to two major product areas within a company, super, super hard because you have to figure out how do you sell, how do you balance your sales resources across the two, how do you change your brand? How do you explain to your customer that you're now not just doing one thing, you're doing multiple things, going from one to two would have been the right answer. And then maybe we could have done the next two at once. But going from one to four, it was super hard. I have this analogy that I use internally is like, it's going to be a little gross. It's like a snake that eats an elephant. And you can see this elephant like slowly digesting through the snake. The correct answer is like a snake that eats three sheep. You one and then the next and then the next. But like doing one thing where you have a gigantic amount to digest within the company super hard.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Without did we build products because of the acquisition? No. Now, the one thing that I did wrong there was we launched three new business areas at the same time.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, yeah, it was my leadership team and I, it was right, we were doing this off site because you didn't want to be in the office and we were sitting in my living room. And I'd had them all there. We had this offer and we were going through like the pros and cons of it. And, you know, we went around. We talked about what people were thinking. And then I kicked them all out. And I was like, like, I need to think. I'm making this call at the end of the day. Like, I've gotten all of your input and I just need to think. And it was like me sitting in my living room. You know, my wife is out of town. And I'm just kind of alone sitting there. And ended up making what I think was a 5149 call to say like it's the right answer to sell the business for a variety of reasons at the time. A year later, we had that same meeting, same group of people sitting in my living room having the same style of conversation. And that was a like, you know, 99 one decision. I was like pretty certain that the right answer was to walk away. I just wanted to make sure that everyone else was aligned. And what had changed in that innovating period is that our business had grown quite massively. We'd reached this escape velocity. And the concept of digital finance had really taken hold as something that people couldn't really live with.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I don't think that there was that specific question on my mind. The question that was always on my mind was Are we undershooting the long-term opportunity by being part of another company? And for every founder that's ever thought about selling their company, like that's the key question that they're probably asking themselves. I don't think that most people immediately orient on value for the acquisition. Like, sure, yeah, it reaches a threshold and the dollar value starts to make sense. But I think when people really go through that agony around selling a company, it's much more about like, am I creating the long-term impact? Am I fulfilling the mission? Am I achieving the vision that I've set out? And for me, it was always about that, you know, making the decision to sell the company to visa, that was one of, if not actually the hardest decision that I've ever made. Do you remember?”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So, for those that aren't aware, in 2020, we signed paperwork to sell the company to Visa. In the intervening period, the regulators in the U.S. had investigated it to say that, to kind of ask the question, was Visa a monopolist and was this a kind of monopoly creating transaction? And the amazing opportunity we had within the business was we'd grown quite massively from 2020 to 2021. COVID had been a huge tailwind for us. And we had the opportunity to actually walk away at the end of that deal. And so elected to do so. But no, we started working on the new product expansions before that acquisition.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of the podcast and amazing how long you've been doing it and how impressive all of the episodes are. And kudos to you as an amazing interviewer.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think it's going to be one of the blog posts that is the most misused and actually causes a lot of the worst behavior in startups for a long time. OKR is another one. OKRs were built from manufacturing. We don't manufacture software. I think that raising money is like a big waste of time. So we try to raise money as infrequently as we possibly can within Plats. Angel Investing actually, I think, is very distracting to founders.”

    2024-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source