How G2 Reached $80M ARR and 3,000 Software Vendor Customers (Talk by CEO Godard Abel)

Nathan Latka

00:00Founders, what's going on? You guys know I love in person events and they are back. The recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together, share intimate details, templates, KPIs, OKRs about their business, and it was something special, something special. We'd love to meet you in person. If you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule. The link will be down

00:23below in the description. If you're listening on iTunes, check this out on YouTube, you'll see the links in the description. Or you can just Google Founderpath or Latka next event. We'd love to see you in person. In the meantime, though, enjoy this recording. It's a good one. Please help me welcome Godard Abel with G2 to the stage.

00:43Take it away. Have fun.

Godard Takes the Stage

Godard Abel

00:46>> You bet.

00:47>> And I do wish is this mic working? Yeah. It is? Okay. Yeah. I was just saying, I wish I had big biceps like me.

00:56>> I asked him how he does that, and he said 3,600 calories in, 3,700 calories out. And I have some weightlifting. I'm more of a runner, so in my old age, I'm trying to stay skinny. But I wish I had those biceps.

01:10>> But what I'm here to talk to you about is, yes, building SaaS companies. And maybe just to get us going, it is Friday morning. I was at a lovely dinner. Thank you, Nathan. Great event. And love being with all of you. I I think I consider you all my brethren, my brothers and sisters in building businesses. I do often like to say, I think building a SaaS company is like being a parent. I also have three

01:32>> kids. And and I do think now I've built three companies, so three three SaaS babies. And I'm also now, I like to say uncle, where I'm chairman couple helping some entrepreneurial family. So I also have nieces and nephews SaaS businesses. And but I I do love building SaaS business. But just to get us going, like, please stand up if you're have started at least one SaaS company. It's probably why you're here, most of you, I assume.

01:59>> Woah. Don't fall over backwards. I didn't have that much wine last night. Yes. So all of you, yes. And then well, hold on. Stay standing if you've started two SaaS businesses.

02:12>> Oh, quite a few of you. Yes, I love it. Keep going back for more. And now sit down if you've started two, and keep standing if you've done three or more.

02:25>> All right, we still got three. I love it. And now how about sit down unless you've done four.

02:33>> Anyone? All right.

02:36>> Yeah, and that's why I'm here. And I've only started three as Founder, CEO, but now I'm also helped start two as Executive Chairman. And we have couple more in the work. So I love building SaaS businesses, and I've been doing it now since 1998. It's a long time. I turned 50 last year, so I'm getting old. But honestly, I also like being the old guy. It's actually I I find it much more relaxing. Because I remember

03:04>> my first company I started when I was 27, that was just full of adrenaline. I had bigger biceps. And, but I really didn't know what I was doing. It was just all adrenaline energy. I just wanna build something. And I was in California at the time, the Silicon Valley. Actually, started my first company, I think, in 2000. And that was still I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember 2000. Yes, quite a

03:24>> few of you. Yeah. But that was the.com era and super exciting time. And I was out in California going to business school there, and everyone was starting companies. I remember the time Jerry Yang came to speak to us. He was still a big deal. I don't even know if anyone knows who Jerry is anymore. But he started Yahoo, which was actually really big before Google. So just been a really exciting career in SaaS. And I

03:44>> have learned a lot, and I'm still learning. I think that's why I'm still doing it. I do also see entrepreneurship as a great way to keep learning, keep growing. And I think you can make a lot of money doing it, which is wonderful. I've enjoyed that. It's a great way to make a living. But I also think and frankly, Henry talked about that yesterday with Nathan, just an incredible story of creating a $20,000,000,000 business. I think

04:06>> he still owns 12% of it. It's pretty good.

Nathan Latka

04:08How much do still own of G2?

Godard Abel

04:10>> More than that.

Nathan Latka

04:12What's ARR right now?

ARR and Ownership: Quick Numbers

Godard Abel

04:14>> 80. Just over 80.

04:17>> There you go. Okay. I like Nathan's quick questions. Just like, I think same thing Henry said, always respect that about you. You just go right to the point.

Nathan Latka

04:23You're a storyteller, so I want to get the hard numbers out at the same time.

Godard Abel

04:27>> No, and I don't want to talk about the numbers and making money because Henry's better at that than I am. But what I want to talk about is also everything else you can learn. And I think equally to me, it's how do you find meaning, how do you grow spiritually. And it's probably what's been really surprising, interesting about entrepreneurship is it has been also a spiritual journey of personal growth, learning. And I do think entrepreneurship is

04:50>> a unique platform to do both. You can do really well, make a lot of money. And I think you can really grow as a human. And I think if you build a really good company, can be a platform for others to grow as well. I'm sure you see that, but I love that our entrepreneurial family now, we've hired well over 1,000 people over the many years, but seeing so many of them grow with us. And now

05:08>> I'm also really excited helping them start their own companies. So it's also a wonderful platform we can create to make the world better.

05:16>> But my first job was as a McKinsey consultant, and there you get paid by the slide. So I do have quite a few slides, but mainly just pictures to hopefully help me tell stories. And so let's get going. Nine key lessons learned. And first, yes, I have five SaaS babies. There's actually six one in the works that I haven't announced yet. But my day job is G2 and I love building G2. And especially I also built

G2 Vision: Consumerizing B2B Software Buying

Godard Abel

05:43>> G2 for SaaS founders like us because my real inspiration was hating Gartner. Anyone here love Gartner? If you love Gartner, please leave the room.

Nathan Latka

05:54Godard, they just signed a sponsor contract, man. Help me out. All right.

Godard Abel

05:58>> I love them too. But they're just slow because I remember my first company, BigMachines, it took me nine years to get in the Gartner report and twelve years to become the leader. Now how many of you want to wait twelve years to become a leader? You didn't pay them enough. I paid them a lot too. I probably wasn't good enough at kissing my analyst ass. That was the part I also hated. And frankly, what I love

06:23>> doing, I love talking to customers. And that was really the idea for G2. Let's not have some analysts that can't eat the food. It says like a restaurant critic that literally can't eat the food. The analysts can't use the software. And they just stand outside the restaurant asking other people, how was your meal? And I'd rather ask the people eating the meal. And that's why we said it's kind of a Yelp for business software when we

G2 Becomes a Unicorn

Godard Abel

06:41>> started, and let's give the power to the customer and the user. So that was our inspiration. And it's really exciting to see G2 coming to life. We did become a unicorn last year. That So was one of my unfulfilled dreams as an entrepreneur. But my next unfulfilled dream, I do want to be like Henry. And so eventually, hope we can ring the bell. But we still have ways to go.

First Company: BigMachines and the Dot-Com Era

Godard Abel

07:02>> And my first company, BigMachines, as I mentioned, I started this in 2thousand,.com era. I was a 27 year old cocky kid. At the time, investors liked that because it was.com. And frankly, we were completely clueless. But I recruited four smart kids from MIT, Stanford, and we started out. We were able to raise $20,000,000 the first year just based on hype and the internet. And back then, VCs were not so critical. There were no metrics. There

07:28>> was nothing. You just had hype and a vision. But the vision was really inspired also by my father. My father was an entrepreneur but in a very different industry. He made pumps, industrial pumps. I was born in Germany and it was a good kind of small, what they call Mittelstand, a small German pump manufacturing company. And he was making these pumps. You can see a picture of a blue little Abel pump there. But they're piston membrane

07:51>> pumps, pumps for complex applications. And what really inspired my first company, I went home to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He moved us from the Pittsburgh of Germany, Essen, which is, if any of you are soccer fans, is right next to Dortmund, Borussia Dortmund, but the kind of Northwest industrial part of Germany. We moved to Pittsburgh because he wanted to start a US subsidiary. But I was talking to my father about the Internet. I went back home for Thanksgiving

08:15>> ninety nine. I was in the Silicon Valley, which at the time was called the reality distortion zone. Might still be that. But I think at the time also Jeff Bezos was already famous, and everyone was afraid of getting Amazon, which is still true twenty two years later.

08:30>> As I was talking to dad, I'm like, hey, how's the pump industry going to be disrupted by the internet? And he's like, well, it's disruption. And he just said it's not because I sell these complex pumps. And every pump, we have to configure a different pump with based on the flow rate, pressure, viscosity, chemical composition of the fluid. We have to configure different pump motors, couplings, housings. And there's no way I could sell it online like

08:54>> a book. But then I had the idea. I saw what Dell was doing. And Dell was one of the also most successful entrepreneurs in the '90s. But Michael Dell had started selling PCs online. And PCs were also very configurable. You can choose your memory, your hard drive, your screen size. And behind the scenes, they had a configuration engine that allowed you to price it in real time, make sure all the components fit together, and even order

09:14>> it online. And so the basic idea for BigMachines was let's help my father do the same thing. But my dad only had two IT people. They didn't know anything about the internet. They didn't even have a website. And they also were really just focused on their ERP system. And so really decided to build it what today you'd call the cloud. I think back then we called it on demand software because we said, hey, let's just take

09:41>> the hosting, all of that stuff out of them. But back then, it was still really hard. We had to raise $21 because we had to buy Sun servers, Spark servers, Oracle database licenses, build our own. At first, it was like in our office. We had a big server room. And then eventually went to colo. But all that stuff was super hard and super expensive. So you also had to raise you literally needed millions just to get

10:00>> this thing live. And then we did get live with a ton of hype, hired like 70 people. And I was 27. I'm like, wow, we're going to go public in a year. I remember one of my first investors was John Sculley. You have to be old to remember him. But he's sort of infamous. If you watch like the movies about Apple, he's the guy that fired Steve Jobs. So that's not a great track record. But he

10:22>> was very famous at the time still. And, you know, so he he was my first investor. And then once I had him invest, everyone he and his advice to me was just like, just think about how you go public in one year. I was like, that sounds awesome. So we hired 70 people, didn't know what we're doing. And frankly, in hindsight, was a really bad way to build a SaaS business because I think in hindsight, certainly

10:43>> realized in one year, you never build a good product or a good company. But then and our journey got much harder. So a year into it, all of a sudden, at the end of two thousand, I'm like, great. We'll raise our next round. But all the VCs then were like, no, you're a young, dumb, clueless kid. And the Internet was a fad. And it went into like dot bomb. That's what everyone was saying. And then I'd

11:04>> call on customers like, hi, we're from bigmachines.com, eventually dropped to.com. They're like, when are going bankrupt? And then 9/11 happened and all these manufacturers were like, well, I'm not investing in anything. And the internet was a fad, so goodbye. So I think for a couple of years, we were only selling like two or three customers a year. Think my business plan to my investors was like, we're gonna sign up 50, then 100. And really it

11:29>> just wasn't selling at all. So it's a very painful time. And then we had to cut way back, did like several layoffs, went all the way down to 20 people. And it was also very depressing. I remember I just felt all this failure because my father actually had convinced him to become my first customer and investor. So I'm like, oh, I'm gonna lose all my dad's money. I had recruited my friends from MIT, my best friends.

11:50>> I'm like, I'm gonna ruin their careers

Lessons from BigMachines: Perseverance and Salesforce Partnership

Godard Abel

11:53>> and we're gonna go bankrupt. That's kind of what it felt like. So very hard time. But then I think in 2003, we kind of had our come to Jesus moment because my co founder and I, Chris, we sat down, we're like, we have $1,000,000 left, we burned through 'nineteen. We only had $1,000,000 in revenue. And we're like, clearly, we're not going be able to raise any more money. And so it's either do we give the last

12:13>> million back and quit or do we keep going.

12:18>> And ultimately, we did have about a dozen early manufacturing customers. They were having success. They were actually accelerating their sales quoting, selling online through their distributors with BigMachines. And we're like, eventually the market will come. So we decided to persevere, cut the company down to 20 people. And we're like, okay, got to cut it to a point where in a year we can actually get profitable and cash flow positive because we'll never raise more money. And

12:38>> then we did pull that off, we just started selling one deal at a time. We actually got cash flow positive. And then I think the other really smart thing we did, well, one, we figured out how to sell the product, I'll talk more about that, but I hired Matt Gorniak, who's become kind of my best friend. He was a young sales guy at the time, but he and I really figured out how to sell together, he

12:58>> became our CRO. And the other smart thing I did at the time, I went to talk to Mark Benioff, and he was just Salesforce was still private, but I remember I met him at a Salesforce event in Chicago and I'm like, Mark, I think we could partner because we were using his CRM. And at the time, it was really only for SMBs, maybe mid market companies. But I said, hey, some of your customers are going use

13:18>> sales quoting tools, sales configuration tools, people has one. And he said, great, let's partner. So this was before the AppExchange. I think they had like Apex, Apex. So we partnered with them. And then for a couple of years, it also didn't work. I think first year we partnered, we had like one or two joint customers, but then all of a sudden by then it turned a corner because Salesforce started moving up market. And I remember

13:41>> our first big deal with them was with Ricoh, the big copier multifunction printer company. But they were looking at Salesforce and Siebel. And they said to Salesforce, unless you have a configurator, we're not buying your product. And then they called us. And so they started bringing us in a lot of deals and business really started growing. And so eventually, it actually turned a big success. And we did scale it. We never raised more money. We actually

14:04>> scaled it cash flow positive and ultimately had a great exit to Oracle.

14:12>> But that was, I think, really our formative years was just learning how to sell. And I do think you learn the most by pain. Just like your kids, you put your hand on the stove and it really hurts, but then you don't do it again. And the second company, yeah, we learned a lot because after we sold BigMachines to Oracle actually, after we'd started G2, we decided to do another one. Because right after Oracle bought BigMachines,

Second Company: SteelBrick and Rapid Scaling

Godard Abel

14:36>> we're like, wow, there's going to be a big vacuum in the Salesforce ecosystem. And there's still a big need for sales configuration quoting tools. So we decided to build another one. We partnered with Max Rudman. He was already building an app called Code Quickly. And we started at the beginning of twenty fourteen, that's Max and I. That was our ribbon cutting. It was like a really shitty office in the Chicago Suburbs, suburb called Highland Park. But

14:55>> I think we actually had two rooms. One room had like eight people. That was G2. And then we opened the back room. And I remember the heating system in the building didn't even work. But then, and at that time, Max's original product had about 1,000,000 ARR. And then in two years, we scaled it. Actually, we beat that plan. That was a plan. But we scaled it to 16,000,000 in two years and got acquired by Salesforce. And

15:16>> we did like the double double. VCs love that. We double every six months. And the first company I never hit my sales plan, I think, for seven years. SteelBrick, we never missed. It was while I was running it, I think, 17 quarters in a row, first as a startup and then inside the Salesforce. So that was just incredible. And I think the big difference was, well, one, product market fit was much better, clearly. By then, the

15:38>> cloud was a thing and people needed CPQ apps. But also, we just knew what we were doing. And we were able to take the whole team and everything we learned the first time and just do it so much faster. And now G2, that is my focus, my day job. And G2, we'd started, like I said, in parallel to or before SteelBrick even, but it was going so slow that Matt and I decided we wanted to go

G2 Origins: Cold Start and the Review Problem

Godard Abel

15:59>> build another company. Because for a couple years, couldn't make any money at G2. And we had this great vision, let's build Yelp for software, but then we realized nobody wants to write reviews. And then I think Yelp, their founder, did some great blogs. He's like, yeah, 99% of people only read reviews. They never write them. And I thought about it myself. I'm like, wow, I never wrote a review until I started a review company. But I'd

16:19>> read them. I'm like, this is great. TripAdvisor, Yelp, it was all like a free resource to me, but I was too busy to write them. And that's what we realized with G2. We're like, F, this is hard. Nobody wants to write reviews. And I think our first, we launched it at Dreamforce. We just put out a booth because we decided to start with Salesforce and partner apps. And then we were just handing out $5 Starbucks cards

16:39>> like, hey, please write a review. And we did that. I think at Dreamforce, we got like 1,000 reviews. We went back to our office. I remember it was like October. And we looked at Google Analytics, we had one person on the site, literally. You know that Google real time analytics? And you see one.

16:56>> And then we got really excited because the second one popped up in Europe. We're like, wow, two. And then I'm like, oh shit, it's my dad.

17:05>> So it was a hard business to build because we had this massive cold start. And so actually that's why I went to go build SteelBrick with Matt because we're like, we like driving revenue. But then my Co Founder Tim did a great job while I was building SteelBrick scaling the company and eventually we got past this cold start and obviously really excited because how many of you are G2 customers?

G2 Today: 3,000 Vendors and Premium Marketing Tools

Godard Abel

17:25>> Quite a few. Thank you. You all can be. But we do work with 3,000 software vendors now, including Henry and ZoomInfo, but to help them. And obviously G2 in some ways is like Yelp, you can be there for free. You can be number one. Committed to that if you have the best reviews and most reviews. Like Slack has been number one on G2 for many years. They've never paid us a penny to my frustration. But then

17:47>> we try to upsell Slack and others premium marketing tools that hopefully help you drive more growth. But so it's really exciting to see G2 coming to life and hope to work with all of you to validate your apps and help you become the leader in twelve months, not in twelve years. And what have we learned? So number one,

Growth Tactic 1: Ride the Software Industry Wave

Godard Abel

18:09>> what have we learned about growth? Then I want to talk a little bit about what we've learned about talent. And finally, what are some of the great lessons I've learned from Marc Benioff and others? And so number one, ride big waves. And I think we're really lucky we're all riding this wave, software's leading the world. Marc Andreessen said this in 2012, right when we're starting G2. And I think it's been so true. And the beauty of

18:32>> it is I think it's going to continue. So I've been really lucky. My whole career, twenty plus years, has been in the software industry. It's just been growing. It's like the ultimate tailwind. And frankly, I think the only mistake I ever made was selling my other companies because they've all just gotten more valuable because this market keeps growing. And the good news for us, think it's going to continue another thirty years. And this is, I think,

18:49>> some Battery Ventures data. But the market's going to 10x again. So frankly, I like to think of it, if you do nothing, your business will be 10x bigger. And I think this is really cool, those software industry. Yes, we have over 100,000 apps now on G2, and it just keeps growing. So I think we all have this amazing tailwind because there is now purpose built software for every industry, and you all are creating it. We were

19:11>> just talking for tax advisors. It's amazing entrepreneurs just keep building better and better apps for more and more business and functions.

19:20>> And I think a part of our strategy is also we'd like to partner with giants. Like I said, our success. I'm very thankful to Marc Benioff because really, thanks to him, BigMachines and his ecosystem. Same thing with SteelBrick. Now they're also an investor in G2. But I think partnering also with giants, we partner with AWS Marketplace. We partner with Microsoft Azure. We partner with IBM Red Hat. So three of the four largest cloud marketplaces in the

19:42>> world are now powered by G2 reviews.

19:46>> Because not everyone comes to g2.com yet, and so we said, hey, let's put it where the buyers are going. And so now your reviews that are on g2 dot com will also go to these marketplaces. And I like to look at this as a $1,000,000,000,000 arms race between Microsoft, Google, Amazon. They're all literally, I think, betting on trillions. And if we can be in the middle of that arms race and you can be in the middle

20:08>> of that arms race, we'll all grow. And I think the hard lesson though I learned at BigMachines was initially my vision was way too broad. That's actually the original business plan. I made it with my father at our country club in Pittsburgh. And just that was like a front and back of a table reservation card. That was my original business plan. And we kind of said we're going to everything. We're going build a machinery marketplace. We're

20:31>> going help manufacturers sell. We're going help people buy. And in hindsight, it was like 50 products. So we're going build them all at once. We'll build them all in a And I always say it was way too broad. And so I learned the hard way. We had to shut down our eBuy, shut down our eMarketplace until we just said, hey, let's just focus on what we call eSales, which then became CPQ. And I think that's probably

20:50>> one problem. I think my least favorite pitch from entrepreneurs are like, how are you going to win? I'm like, when you say, oh, I'm going have a lot more features than all the incumbents. And I think now the more companies we build, they try to make them as narrow as possible, like just start with one thing and do that better than anyone else. And I learned that the hard way.

Growth Tactic 2: Build a Scalable Sales Playbook

Godard Abel

21:10>> And I think then once we started growing, I think what Matt and I learned, how do we make this thing scalable? And I learned a lot there from Salesforce. There's Dave Rudnitsky. He kind of was famous. He published the original sales playbook. But I think having a playbook because once it went beyond Matt and I, we started hiring tens, hundreds of reps. We're like, hey, we have to have a playbook. And so that's still something we

21:29>> do today. And it was something probably I also wish I'd always done earlier, like start investing in enablement, start investing in process. So as you start to get to tens, hundreds of reps, you have a playbook. But I think don't get too rote because I think the best selling is still an art form, and I love selling. But I think being able to audible. You want to process, you want to plan, but then you got to

21:50>> feel the vibe and go with it.

Growth Tactic 3: Partner and Acquire Strategically

Godard Abel

21:54>> The other thing we learned, especially from Marc Benioff, is acquisitions are a good way to accelerate. Or Henry has been doing this incredibly well, ZoomInfo. But I also think the best way to make acquisitions happen is to partner first. And certainly that's what Salesforce does. You get to know each other. You actually make sure your products work together. Do customers love them together? And then it can lead to very natural acquisitions. So we did one at

22:14>> SteelBrick, where we went from CPQ to quote to cash. We bought a billing company. That was a great partner of ours. And that really expanded the vision. Now it's Salesforce Revenue Cloud. It's CPQ plus billing. And then also G2, we've done a couple. Siftery, that brought us G2 Track, G2 Stack. So it's an exciting way to expand your footprint more quickly once you have momentum, once you have money.

22:34>> But I think what I've done poorly so far, and I would do better like Henry, is I think we haven't been thoughtful enough about integration. And so I think that's something we want to do better going forward. In terms of talent, I think when you're starting and you've all had this. Henry talked about it yesterday. At the beginning, frankly, you can't afford experienced people. You don't want them. You just want young, smart, hungry people that will

Talent Strategy: Hire Young, Breed Your Own Leaders

Godard Abel

22:55>> do anything. At the beginning, need that. You need all rounders that will just do anything, go through walls and figure it out. And then I think the best talent strategy for me has been across companies. We've built what we call our entrepreneurial family. But we hire them young, smart, fresh out of school, clueless. Then they learn with us. And then we keep building together one company, two companies, three companies. And this was our team at SteelBrick.

23:19>> And I think what was cool about SteelBrick, think of the 200 people we had when Salesforce acquired us, over 100 were with us at BigMachines. And they were totally dialed in. We loved working together. And I think there's nothing like breeding your own talent and then keeping the family together. And yes, don't use recruiters. Although I have a good friend, Nick, who runs Hunt Club. I do use recruiters now on occasion. When you really need specialized

23:42>> executives, specialized hires, but in general, think and also Henry talked about this. All his best salespeople hire his SDRs. And I asked him in the breakout, what's your criteria? He's like, we don't have any. Well, he didn't quite say that. But you just hire young, smart people and then see who grows with you. And that's a much better way than using recruiters. And we do have now a very global team at G2, six fifty people. It's

24:05>> also going global.

Evolving Leadership and Culture at Scale

Godard Abel

24:08>> I am quite we do have a team in Kyiv, and I am feeling quite sad right now. And I'm sure Nikita will talk about that more, but it is a horrible time. But it's wonderful to have talent everywhere around the world and growing. And I think once you have your team, we learned also to really be conscious about culture. When I started my first company, I wasn't conscious about culture at all. It's like, hey, let's just

24:33>> start going. But then the second company, we realized from the beginning, let's be really clear about our culture. And so we defined a peak culture, which has been common at G2 as well as at SteelBrick. In high level, we just said we're the good guys. And we had a competitor. Well, not that didn't use their name anymore, Apttus, they were the bad guys. But we generally believe, hey, we're going take better care of our customers. Our

24:54>> customers are going to love us. And it's all about heart and really caring about your customers, caring about your team. And so our goal is always to have evangelical customers, have inspired employees, and also have our investors not just get a good return, but have them proud to be associated with us.

25:13>> And that has had a great impact on our eNPS.

25:18>> I think the other important thing is we have authenticity as one of our core values, but I think also being very authentic with your team. And you want to be bigger, you want to have process, but I think you still want people to feel the human connection.

25:34>> And I think the other thing I've learned the hard way is leadership does need to evolve. I think you've all been at the startup days where everyone knows everyone. It's actually super fun. You know everything. You can solve every problem. But then you quickly realize, once you get over 50 employees and this is all also from Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder. It's part of Blitzscaling, great book. But you get bigger, all of a sudden you can't solve

25:57>> all the problems yourself. You don't know everyone anymore. You can't coach everyone. And then I think we're now going to the next phase where we're becoming more of a city, where really I feel like I can't solve. I don't even know what most of the problems are anymore. And you really have to build a team that will solve the problems. And your job becomes much more alignment. And this is something I've gone through. It's also kind

26:17>> of painful because I think a lot of you might have this where you find your co founders, while they're amazing, they don't scale at some point as leaders. And so I have made a lot of changes. I brought in a whole new leadership team the last year, new Chief Product Officer, Sarah, new Chief Revenue Officer, Mike, new CMO, Amanda, new Chief People Officer, and I'm looking for CFO. So I've kind of found, wow, once we hit

26:40>> five six hundred people, it just needed more mature leaders. And I'm starting to build an office CEO, very inspired by Marc Benioff. Because I was like, Marc, how do you do this? And he's got a whole office of the chairman, like 30 people, chief of staff, that just help him drive his initiatives and his impact, make sure he's prepared, follows up for every meeting, runs his V2 mom, his alignment. And so I'm starting to build that

27:01>> myself.

27:04>> And I think in hindsight and I'm probably like most of you founders. I love my co founders. I love my team. And then I'm oftentimes, in hindsight, I wait too long to make changes, even when I see people struggling and not being comfortable as the job gets bigger. And so I think don't be afraid to make the changes. And even don't be afraid to have people leave because sometimes you're like, oh, this person's indispensable, even if

27:25>> they're not in the right job anymore. And I've always found everyone is replaceable ultimately. And in terms of stealing from the best, yes, Mark Benioff, he's still my idol as an entrepreneur, impacting the world. But I think one thing he's always used is a V2 mom. That's his first V2 mom. He's got a great blog, but it's his alignment tool.

27:43>> But just writing down every year, every quarter, what are your key priorities. In some ways, it's like the OKR, but it's better. And we define one every year. We actually spent a lot time on We started the leadership team in November. We spent three months. And there's also a 10 page narrative now where we define our vision, our values, our key methods, our key initiatives. We set measures for everyone. And then we report on them every

28:06>> month.

28:08>> And I think that's the other big thing. Think especially as your company gets bigger, don't assume your team understands what you want and what vision is. And so I think also just communicating constantly what's your vision, what's your values, what are your key initiatives has been really important. And now we have a whole cadence I learned from Mark Benioff. But how do we do monthly operating reviews with each team, each part of the V2 mom, obviously

28:31>> quarterly board meetings, all hands meetings. But I think now we've really formalized how we communicate. And I think people say this, and it sounds pedantic, you can't communicate enough, but it's true.

28:42>> And conscious leadership, I think this was during my first company. There I am in 2009 with my baby daughter, Maddie, my wife, Stacy, and that's our BigMachines team early days. We had really ugly branding. Didn't have a good CMO. Didn't have a CMO, but those look like construction jackets. The what?

29:04>> Lederhosen, yes. That's, yeah, Halloween going back to our German roots. Although I'm actually from Northern Germany. It's funny. I came to America. Everyone's like, where's your lederhosen? I'm like, we don't wear those. But I I played the part. But the reality was while my life was in a lot of ways great, like, I had this talked about it, but I had this constant fear of failure and anxiety, which is very hard to deal with for a

29:27>> few years. And then luckily I met Jim Dethmer. He's curated this whole conscious leadership movement, conscious. Is. And ever since then, 2008 through YPO, met a coach, Conscious Leadership Coach, Jim. I've been working with coaches ever since. And it has helped me, I think, much better lead, much better connect with people.

29:46>> I I think in hindsight, was kind of abusing myself. My first company, was beating myself up all the time. I'm going to fail, I'm not doing enough. Frankly, then I would eat and drink too much to try to stuff my anxiety.

30:02>> So I think what I've been working on ever since is being more conscious, meditating, breathing. For me, it's working out every morning, but doing something to take care of myself every day. No matter how busy you are, even ignore emails, take some time for yourself every day. That's been crucial to me. And last but not least, we're also now applying the Netflix no rules rules. I've gotten to know Peter Riley. He runs leadership development for Netflix.

30:30>> But also, and I think this is what I mentioned, don't be afraid to make changes. But now we do this formally at least once a year. We just do it with all our leaders. Hey, are they still a keeper? And really keeper test in high growth companies is only true for a year. Are they the right person in the job right now this year? And if not, either realign them to another job or move them out.

30:47>> And I think we're just getting more disciplined about that. And we just did it. And actually the last inspiration is, yes, we are, I do like to say entrepreneurial family, but also what Netflix says is, you know, you're truly a family. And I like to say, hey. The drunk uncle at Thanksgiving gets thrown out because we do wanna be a high performing team. And I am from Germany, and this is a 2014 World Cup winners. Amazing.

31:11>> But they had a really high performing team. The reality is in 2018, Germany got knocked out early at the World Cup because they refresh the team. And I think it's like a sports team. Every season, you look at your roster again, and you know, and you do make sure you have the right talent and the right jobs. And sometimes that's hard, but I think it's critical. Especially in the growth company, your needs change every year, and

31:31>> make sure you have the right keepers in every job. So don't delay.

31:37>> Thank you.

Nathan Latka

31:38Guys, give it up for Godard.