Posts

Mark Roberge, the former Chief Revenue Officer at Hubspot, has spent 20 years in startups. As he told me a while ago, he has observed the lack of sales management and sales execution skills as one of the most consistent deficiencies limiting the potential of early stage SaaS companies.

Sales execution deficiency manifests itself at roughly the same time as product market fit. There might be 20-30 people at the startup which is generating about $1-2M in ARR with 2-5 salespeople. Most of the time, this startup is the first sales experience for both the founders and the sales people.

I remember growing up reading that a Coca-Cola cost five cents, and seeing the old New Yorker magazine covers with a price tag of 15 cents, and awing over the price of a Ford Model T of $850. Today, those prices are $1.99, $8.99 and $28,940 (for a Ford F150). I learned price increases like these are called inflation and took it for granted.

As I’ve lived through a few crises, I’ve tried to learn more about economic history and economic systems to answer questions like the one I should have asked: why is there inflation? Why should things cost more today than 10 years ago?

Recently, we welcomed Linda Tong, GM of AppDynamics to Redpoint Office Hours. This is a summary of what we learned from that conversation.

Linda’s professional journey has taken her across businesses of all sizes — from startups in hypergrowth mode to mature, multi-hundred million-dollar businesses. She started off in product marketing at Google, helping launch Google Chrome and Android.

On Wednesday, December 16th at 9:00 AM PT, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti, the CMO of Confluent, which was founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka® and pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform.

GC has led the rapid expansion of Confluent’s growth, marketing and developer relations functions. Confluent’s annual recurring revenue more than doubled year over year in 2019 and the company reached a $4.5 billion valuation for its recent $250 million Series E round. Previously, GC served as Vice President of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox, and also led Product Marketing for the Developer Tools Division at Atlassian. Both companies were at hyper growth stages during his tenure. Travis is Head of Founder Experience at Redpoint and was formerly SVP of Global Sales at Optimizely and VP of Platform Sales at Salesforce. Patrick is an investor on Redpoint’s Early team and previously spent time as a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn.

“It’s the Finals. It’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard.” After Game 2 of the NBA Finals Steve Kerr said this to Steph Curry as they walked through the tunnel to the locker room after a loss.

What’s true for basketball is also true for startups - at least in this case.

With all the news of unicorns and IPOs and acquisitions driven by the broader market, teams can fall into a trap to think building a startup into a success is easier for others.

For many years, I wrote notes on paper using the bullet journal method. It’s a method I still highly recommend.

Now that my days are spent exclusively behind a computer, I’ve been searching for the right note-taking strategy. I recognize that note-taking is like pricing strategy: you never get it entirely right, so you’re always inclined to tinker.

Niklas Luhmann invented an idea that’s taking off in many academic circles and beyond called Zettlekasten. The son of a German brewer, he published 58 books in 30 years and is heralded as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.

The rumor mill churns with whispers Salesforce will acquire Slack. This combination would be strategic for both involved for three reasons.

First, Salesforce and Slack share Microsoft as their most significant competitor. Microsoft Teams’ rapid assault and consequent market power into the corporate instant messaging market transformed the market dynamics in less than 12 months.

Microsoft has amassed the most extensive channel for SaaS companies, and each of these vendors pushes teams to current customers, many of whom are moving to the cloud and relying on Microsoft for guidance.

Despite the economic backdrop, startups continue to plow ahead. One of the biggest changes in the last year in the US is the Fed’s stated low interest rate policy for the next three years. What impact are we seeing in the market?

Theory says lower interest rates means investors should shift from less risky to more risky assets to find the same level of return. If the government lends at a low rate, then the cost of capital is less, so companies should be able to invest more at the same cost, and grow faster.

On Thursday, December 3rd at 11 AM PT, Redpoint Office Hours will welcome Linda Tong. Linda has lived an incredible path through startupland from Google, to startups, to the NFL, to AppDynamics. In some of our recent conversations, Linda has taught me about the differences in managing companies at radically different scales.

Let me tell you a bit more about Linda’s history. Linda and I worked at Google at the same time, which is when I first met her. From there, she worked for TapJoy, the predominant mobile marketing company as their Chief Product Officer. From there, she became COO at Nextbit, a startup founded by an ex-Android team working working on mobile devices. Then, she joined the NFL as VP of Product where she managed the product vision for the digital properties of all 32 clubs and the league. Today she’s general manager of AppDynamics.

“More activity means more business. Don’t overthink it, just act…The target is dozens of net new interactions per week, building many shallow relationships. They aren’t fake, just shallow.”

I have found this to be true. I like to think about it like Brownian motion: jiggle more atoms by talking to more people and there’ll be more activity all around you. Since sales is a funnel, the greater the activity at the top, the more sales.