Pendo Passed $200M. The Slide That Explains It Is From 2017.

The prop on stage was a photocopy of a paper check for $597, the customer name blacked out, mailed to Pendo in 2015. Neither man could place it at first — co-founder Eric Boduch guessed a company called ShowClicks, Nathan Latka confirmed he was right — and a room of SaaS founders applauded the first check Pendo ever took in. The next slide was Pendo’s revenue graph through 2021, which Latka said he had gotten permission to put on screen the night before. Pendo, he told the room, was now doing more than $200,000,000 of revenue.

The conversation happened on stage in September 2024. Latka dates it himself by noting that Todd Olson, Boduch’s co-founder and Pendo’s CEO, had been on two years earlier — that tape is logged September 2022 — and Boduch talks about capital being “a lot more expensive than it was a couple years ago largely because of interest rates.” He had already left the company by then. The video went up that November.

A $597 check, mailed from Pittsburgh

Pendo’s first revenue arrived in 2015, with what Boduch called a very little bit at the end of 2014. The entry price was $99 a month, and what you got for it was, in his words, “the product was, like, you know, 1% of what we offer today.” That is how the $597 resolves: six months at the entry SaaS price, not a year. Customers were still mailing physical checks, which is what half the room was squinting at on the screen.

The first market was not Raleigh. Boduch was a remote founder living in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh — a good tech town, he allowed, but not a SaaS capital — was Pendo’s biggest market for a stretch. Then Raleigh passed it, then Boston and New York, then San Francisco, and “it all kinda started to look like SaaS distribution.”

Before any of that, the two founders had to settle equity, and Latka put the question to the room as a riddle: what is the most dilutive moment in any software company’s history? Boduch answered it in two words. Co-founders.

• The company before Pendo — Boduch started a web consulting business out of college and hired Olson as his first real employee, then gave up 20–30% of his own equity to make him a co-founder. He did not have to. “It was just fair.”
• Angel money at that stage — roughly $500,000 to kick-start the consulting business before the pivot into product.
• At Pendo, four co-founders — the plan was a straight 25% each. An investor insisted the CEO hold the most, so the split came out a variant of even.

The Q4 2017 scorecard

Latka did not want the last mile. “I don’t wanna spend the next nine minutes grilling Eric on how he’s gonna grow from 200,000,000 to 300,000,000 of revenue,” he told the room — inspirational, less relevant. So he asked Boduch to go back to the year Pendo was at $13.4M, which is where most of the audience was sitting. Boduch went into his own archive and pulled a real deck: marketing results for the fourth quarter of 2017.

The line item that carries the section is a co-marketing webinar with UserVoice. Pendo put $6,500 behind it and wrote a pro forma expecting 300 leads. It returned 1,272, at roughly $5 a lead, against a cost per lead many times that on every other row of the slide.

Cost per lead = program spend ÷ leads$6,500 ÷ 1,272 leads, or about $5. The same slide shows 13 opportunities and $249K of pipeline off that webinar.

Boduch did not oversell it. The pipeline number was low because webinars brought smaller deals, at least then; the metric he would actually defend is dollars per opportunity, which he says normalises against the other channels. The leads still paid for themselves elsewhere: a mailing list, a community, brand. “Leads is a great early indicator, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” he said, and challenged anyone who quotes marketing-qualified or sales-qualified counts at him to show the pipeline instead. It is the same argument that makes acquisition-cost benchmarks hard to read across companies: the denominator is whatever each team decides a lead is.

Advisers and board members told him webinars were over. He kept running them anyway.

“when they stop working, we’ll stop doing them. They’re really cheap to do.”

Eric Boduch, co-founder, Pendo

The same slide records what he cut. A third-party outbound program bought purely to set demos came out in Q4 and moved to the BDR group inside sales; live events, website demos and a couple of other rows read as not applicable because the spend had already been pulled. Ranked by pipeline, the channels that mattered that quarter were the website excluding social, then webinars, then events. That is the entire machine at $13.4M of annual run rate, and Latka’s framing was that it doubled the following year to $28M.

$32of pipeline per marketing dollar, Boduch’s figure for that era

Fifty-fifty against WalkMe

The last slide Boduch brought came from the same deck: a bar chart of head-to-head win rates against a single competitor, generally WalkMe. Pendo had been winning slightly more. Then a quarter came in at fifty-fifty.

“Fifty fifty sucks. It’s like a tie in, you know, baseball.”

Eric Boduch, co-founder, Pendo

What Pendo could not do was close the product gap. WalkMe had more advanced guide functionality — branching, and more — that its sales team was pushing hard, and Boduch is candid that he could not fix the areas customers were arguably asking for, even if he thought they did not really need them. So the team spent a short, concentrated period on positioning instead.

The story never named the competitor. It simply argued that if you are putting guides into a product for onboarding, learning, technical support or service triage, you need the analytics underneath to know you are showing the right guide to the right person. Messaging, positioning, sales training — and, Boduch says, the win rates moved. The takeaway put to the room was mechanical: keep a kill sheet for every competitor, features down the left, how you win or lose against each, in the hands of every rep, edited weekly.

Then he did the arithmetic that makes product marketing worth arguing about. A positioning change might be worth a million dollars of extra revenue — nice, but not thrilling on its own. At the revenue multiple Pendo was raising against at the time, which he put at around fifteen times, it is a $15,000,000 change in enterprise value.

“invest in product marketing, you know, figure out how you can change your win rate, make sure that salespeople are trained, and it’s worth a lot of enterprise value.”

The other spend he defends is brand, started early and funded heavily. Pendo bought a conference. It branded a colour: pink. “everyone thought of Pendo in pink,” he said, to the point that people would tell the company they had seen it at events it had not attended, because someone in the hall was wearing the colour.

$468.3M, and a founder who could not count it

Latka’s rapid-fire round produced the most honest number of the hour. How much has Pendo raised in total? Boduch: “it was higher than I could count.” Pressed, he guessed around three hundred million; Latka offered a couple of hundred million. Asked the last public valuation, though, he was exact twice over — $2.6 billion, both for the last public mark and the last private one.

• Nov 2014 · Seed $1M, led by Core Capital and Contour Venture.
• Mar 2015 · Convertible note $1.3M, recorded on an SEC Form D with no accompanying press.
• Oct 2015 · Series A $11M, led by Battery Ventures.
• Dec 2016 · Series B $20M, led by Spark Capital.
• Jul 2017 · Series C $25M, led by Meritech Capital.
• Sep 2018 · Series D $50M, led by Sapphire Ventures.
• Oct 2019 · Series E $100M, led by Sapphire Ventures at a $1B post-money valuation.
• Jul 2021 · Series F $150M, led by B Capital Group, at $2.6B.
• Nov 2021 · Secondary $110M, led by Thoma Bravo, at the same $2.6B.

Nine rounds, $468.3M, and the guess on stage was low by more than a third. The valuation he named on instinct is the one on the record: set when the Series F closed in July 2021 and reaffirmed four months later when Thoma Bravo bought $110M of stock from existing holders at the same price. No priced round has been disclosed since.

The revenue rows GetLatka holds for Pendo run alongside that ladder. $3.8M recorded in December 2016, the month the Series B was announced. $15M in September 2018, at the Series D. $31M in October 2019, at the Series E. $62M in December 2020. $100M in November 2021, then $130M by the close of that year. $200M as of January 2024, still $200M when the row was refreshed in September 2024 — which is the figure Latka read off the graph on stage.

One number on that ladder argues with the tape, and it is worth showing rather than smoothing. Latka introduced the 2017 deck by saying Pendo was at $13.4M “right now” and then doubled year over year to $28M. The $13.4M is on the record, logged 1 January 2017 — twenty days after a $3.8M row from 12 December 2016, which is what the ledger looks like when a figure given for a whole year lands on the first day of it rather than twenty days of three-and-a-half-times growth. The $28M is not on the record: the next dated row is $15M in September 2018. The stage version and the ledger version of 2018 are not the same story; the years either side of it agree.

Headcount is less contested: 376 people recorded in December 2019, 975 in September 2022, 970 in September 2024, 1,043 in November 2025. On the exit question Boduch was relaxed — there are buyers for a company at that price, he said, naming the big private equity firms and the big software providers as categories. He knew of no Vista term sheet ever reaching Pendo, and his explanation for why the interest never converted was that a term sheet needs someone who wants to sell. Olson, he said, would love to take it public and have another public software company in Raleigh.

What stopped working

The arbitrage closed

Boduch left in 2022, at what Latka put at roughly $130M to $140M of annual recurring revenue, and now runs a venture studio, 24andUp, that has four companies going and three that have raised outside funding. Which makes him a useful witness on whether the 2017 machine still runs. It does not.

“We were getting, like, every dollar we were spending, we’re getting $32 a pipeline. I’d be shocked if people are doing that today.”

Eric Boduch, co-founder, Pendo

Nobody is buying that ratio in Google AdWords now, he said; the marketplace has got expensive. Outbound and BDR pipeline has got harder. What is working is social — influencers, the CEO as the influencer — and his advice on it carries its own expiry date: jump on it today, because at some point everyone will be doing it and it will stop working. Underneath all of it, money costs more than it did, largely because of interest rates, which is why he now describes go-to-market as an optimisation function rather than a growth budget. A CEO should know where the next dollar goes and what every assumption behind it is.

His test for hiring a head of sales in that environment is that the candidate arrives with the model already built, and with the rest of the company signed up to it.

• Pipeline owed by marketing — how much the marketing organisation can generate for the enterprise group, agreed rather than assumed.
• The hiring plan behind the number — in his example, to grow $4,000,000 next year, three people, arriving in a stated time frame.
• The attrition he is planning for — losing one salesperson, which for him was a rate of around 20%.
• Buy-in from the other functions — talent acquisition and marketing explicitly agreeing to what they owe the plan.

And then the plan meets the market, which is where his last point lands. You build the model, you set the quota, you write the hiring plan, you fix an average sale price — and then the market tells you something different, and the only thing that matters is how fast you can see it and adapt.

“There’s a Mike Tyson quote I like these days. Right? Everyone has a plan till they’re punched in the mouth.”

Eric Boduch, co-founder, Pendo

Sources — Eric Boduch interviewed on stage by Nathan Latka, “Pendo Shares Board Deck Slides, Breaks $200m Revenue, Lessons with Co-Founder Eric Boduch”, recorded September 2024 and posted that November; the GetLatka company database (dated revenue, headcount and funding rows for Pendo); FinSMEs, November 2014, on the seed round; GlobeNewswire, October 2015, on the Series A; Pendo’s own release, December 2016, on the Series B; TechCrunch, July 2017 and October 2019, on the Series C and Series E; PRNewswire, September 2018 and November 2021, on the Series D and the Thoma Bravo secondary; Bloomberg, July 2021, on the $150M Series F at $2.6 billion.