How Gainsight CEO Jamison Hill grew to $200M revenue and 1K customers in 2025.

what's up guys special guest today my guest is nick meadow with gainsight customer success software aficionado leading the company uh launched many years ago uh customer success companies the brand today a five-time forbes cloud 100 recipient their team is now nearly 700 people who have created the customer success category that's currently taking over their sas business model worldwide he's been named as one of the top sets ceos with a software report three years in a row nick you're ready to take it to the top awesome to be here nathan thanks so much you know we were joking about football last time you were on i think back in 2018 2019 we have the washington football team my team has passed dwayne haskins on to you guys i will say don't don't get too excited i'll just leave it at that okay he's doing okay the preseason surprisingly so i don't know but yeah he seems like he can't count on him so we'll center pressure chokes under pressure we'll we'll see we'll see anyways um you're on a tear so so i guess one thing that i want to sort of get focused on really quick your product lines it seems like you're expanding product lines very aggressively you used to just be like how do you comp your like customer success reps and now you have like way more product lines where is the product today how are you thinking about product totally i think a lot of people go through this nathan you've seen this from some other companies you've covered where you start out um solving a point problem and then you're like there's a much bigger problem to solve when we started out with gainsight the point problem was there's a new role in companies called the csm and they need to figure out which customers to reach out to how to effectively manage them identify risk and we'd still do that with a lot more to do there but why do people have csm teams they have csm teams to improve net retention in their company they want to keep their customers they want to get them to spend more money they want them to be bigger advocates that's net retention the number one valuation driver in sas is net retention and we want to be the company to help businesses improve net retention now to do that it's not just about the csm team because you need the sales team to learn how to sell new things to your customers the product team needs to build products that are easy to adopt and use from the beginning and so we went from a single product company to now portfolio products that we call customer cloud customer cloud and i think there's four key things here there's success engagement experience and expansion right yep so customer success which is where we started scale your cs team how do you not have to throw people at it there's customer experience measure how your customers feel about you in terms of surveys nps in application through email and then really deep and natural language processing to understand what are the themes that are coming up are people upset about your pricing model are they really happy with the sales experience number three revenue optimization that's all about now that you have these great successful clients how do you get them to spend more money so forecasting your renewals driving expansion identifying the cross-sell opportunity accounts and then finally product experience which says okay the most important thing is to make your product awesome because everything else doesn't matter if your product isn't awesome so in the app you drop in a small amount of code onboard your users more easily get them to try out new features get feedback from the user in the application and give them in-app support to guide them to the right experience to get them the most value out of your product and nick when you're thinking of these new product lines to go into i now understand the net dollar retention figures like the driving force it sounds like between your sprint cycles on the engineering side but there are as you know multi-billion dollar companies doing just like one of these things i mean look at pendo or product engagement right how do you decide what wedge to launch with in the product engagement category and then decide what order of operations is in terms of what you develop next on the product side in that category a great question and we when we when we decided to go to a multi-product the first thing we got into was px the the product experience area and there's great companies in their pendo walkman they're all very good companies what we heard from our clients over and over again when we asked that if we had a magic wand and we can do one thing to help driving that retention your company every cs leader said product every single one the number product better data about how people use the product better engagement in the product better feedback from the product and so we found a great company that hadn't really launched yet called app forensic we bought them integrated indoor suite and what we're seeing from our clients is they don't want a disconnected experience between what the csm is telling the customer what the sales person's telling the customer and what's happening the product they want all of that connected together companies like adobe splunk autodesk they want all of that stuff tied together versus being silos so it's you know there's great point companies in the space and they do other things that we don't do but we're the only company in the world that can really link together cs product and sales to improve net retention now the last time we came on the show was back in uh again july 2019. you shared with me at that point you guys were working with about 700 customers nick where are you guys today yeah we're close to i think about a thousand customers now a little bit more than that but the asp has gone up a lot too so sort of as you know nathan one of the things that happens when you're multiple products is you actually can drive a lot more spend from your clients as well so yeah so this is something i want to go deeper on because this is net dollar retention we're going to get meta well you like how i see what i did there so you were back then you told me that average rp was around eight grand or annual ac about a hundred grand i imagine you significantly expand that at this point yeah it's higher than that we're as we get bigger it's a little harder to disclose all the metrics now because you can imagine for obvious reasons we feel more careful but um yes it's significantly higher than that which means other people are both buying more of our core products cs but also more of those other products as well nick let me ask you sort of interesting question here if you could not add any new customers no more new logos you could only sell more seats and more products to like your current logo base how much could you grow over the next year well you know it's interesting that that um it uh if you look at our business there's a few factors that drive very natural organic growth there's more csms in the world every year and so that naturally drives growth of our rcs product right and then most of our customers about 17 of our customers have our px product today that means there's 83 still to go buy it so you can go drive more sales there we have these new modules revenue optimization customer experience and then we're launching more and more modules both organically as well as at some point probably some other acquisitions so i can't give you an exact number but it's significant there's a lot of opportunity in our base for sure so then if we combine all the new customers you're going to add here in 2021 plus the expansion historic ones you don't have to give me a flat number but what do you think percentage-wise you guys will grow at this year again these are the kind of numbers unfortunately i'm such a transparent guy i love sharing that stuff but now as you get you know further along you know for disclosure reason we can't share that stuff like we used to um but um what i can tell you is that we think that we grow in some ways gainsight is a derivative off of sas right so as more companies go into sas i mean honestly nathan you're the person that for me to talk to because all these people you're documenting and interviewing and your great list that you build all those companies at some point are like god we got to focus on that retention we got to do this thing called customer success who knows customer success they get to gain sight we've been fortunate to be the leader in the space and so there's this natural tailwind for our business which has been really really cool but one thing just piece of advice for entrepreneurs i think that as you know if you're in a new category the question nathan's asking is actually a really hard one because you can't just go to some industry report right nathan like that's something that in an existing category you go to some report that says oh the market is growing by x but if you are the market if you're creating the market you don't nobody else knows except you and so one of the things we do a lot of is look at primary data like for example bain consulting group did a study for us and found that csm kind of teams are growing about 30 a year overall that's that's include some that are going super fast and so i'm just getting started right and so there's a lot of data out there that helps us understand what our growth rate should be long term well again it's a hot space now what you you sit on all this data on other companies for someone listening right now that's maybe trying to scale and go between 10 million in revenue up to 50 million revenue what is like world-class net dollar retention for that size company in sas yeah yeah totally and there's by the way one thing about net retention is there's there's kind of two two big variables one is like your operations meaning your sales and customer success and all that that's my world the other one is your business model so there's some companies that have a consumption-based business model so snowflake 180 net retention right don't compare if you're like a classic kind of software seat model don't compare yourself to snowflake because honestly it'll just make you feel bad because that's a different business model so in consumption you see companies with a hundred fifty hundred sixty hundred seventy hundred eighty percent in in sort of more your classic subscription you know one 110 is very good 120 is like is really good 130 is like awesome right and so that's kind of the range if you're more of an smb player meaning selling to small businesses a hundred is good hubspot i think is about 101 and that's amazing and they're doing a great job and so you need to put yourself in the right comparative set we actually published a report on our website of all the public sas companies in terms of net retention and also what their valuation multiple was the point was to show there's a big correlation between net retention and valuation but when you look at it you should eyeball and look think about the companies that are like you nick if someone's listening right now going oh i want to maximize valuation and the highest value companies are ones like snowflake that are almost they're not really sass they're more like a utility line it's utility rising shouldn't everyone be moving away from sas and into utility-based pricing shouldn't every basketball player that is starting on the court be lebron james um right and the reality is some are bored to be lebron james some aren't i would argue that there's some businesses that actually naturally lend themselves to utility based pricing so if you're starting a company from scratch i do think the companies that are utility-based product led growth consumption-based pricing are the best businesses largely by the way i'm saying that inside's not one of those so i'm not saying you are not yeah yeah i'm not you know and we have very good business but definitely the outlier businesses mostly are in that sort of product like growth consumption based pricing etc but you know you have to sort of say what are you right look if you're selling enterprise software that is like sold at chro and it's like a three-year contract you're not going utility-based pricing anytime soon don't even waste time on that that's just a total waste of time what you should figure out is how do you sell more modules to your customer etc right but if you're in the developer ecosystem selling platform technology you have to be some kind of utility-based pricing right whether you're twilio snowflake etc right and so it's more about what market are you in i think those markets the kind of subscription sas and kind of consumption slash utility are actually just very different markets makes a lot of sense pivoting back now to your founder's story and i think there's valuable data for anyone building a sas because it's thinking about ndr um your own business i mean you launched in 2012 you shared this last time on the show i think you guys raised up through 2017 about 190 million bucks one of the big changes though between the last time we chatted and now is you did a deal with vista equity in november of 2020. totally so we you know uh at that time we've been doing game set about eight years and been amazing and we reported that we had crossed 100 million of ar and all that so lots of amazing awesome super lucky um and everyone listening that's an entrepreneur knows that um if you you know if you really believe in what you do it's a long journey it's a marathon it's not a sprint and i really believe what we do and we think we can build something really big and so i wanted us to be aligned for going long and you know being a long-term independent company and vista is kind of showed up in this new category where they're not really private equity anymore and they're not your classic vc they're investing in companies that are trying to be these like long-term growers not you know gain sites never since the early days been a snowflake or a ui path to one of those you know 500 growth right that's just not who we are because we're kind of creating a new category but we have a very good growth and very actually now good great economics and everything else and you know vista really wants to invest in companies that are building for the long term and so we were excited about that as you know nathan when you run a team part of it is our team's been doing a long time so there's an awesome opportunity for people to take care of their families vis-a-vis liquidity and stuff like that i'm sure that resonates with people listening because you're going a long time and you've got to take care of people along the way and so the idea of being able to have an investment excited about the long term have our team be taken care of and then kind of double down basically for the next phase of growth which is what we're doing now many would argue if they compared the 100 million dollars in ar that you had to the 1.1 billion valuation that that multiple was a steal for vista when you compare it to like what gong just raised that would you know then you announced it at pulse why was your multiple higher yeah it's interesting it's funny i think i think it will be a steal for vista actually i think our business has done really well in the last six months so i'm actually excited for to be a steal because i think all of us will make out well i think some of this is you know you know you worked your ass off for eight years you want a nice price why didn't did you feel like you did a good job maximizing i think that i mean being open with you we did in november and the markets soared between november and and march or april so like you can't intellectually honestly i would have gone up a little bit more during that time frame so there's probably some of it and timing wasn't it could have been better on that front but honestly in the grand scheme of things that doesn't matter that much to me i think the thing that for us was like how do we build a five or ten billion dollar business i do think that our business uh again i'm trying to be transparent our business was not like growing seventy or eighty percent a year you know or gong is growing i don't know hundred two hundred percent thousand percent i don't i mean you went from 2019 67 million run rates to 20 20 100 million right i mean that's pretty healthy growth it's pretty good it's good totally yeah yeah and so the business is going well but we weren't at that like 100 growth and so we were like okay uh you know this is a great partner for the long term a lot of friends who are vista ceos who love working with them also one thing i think you know this is when you do a deal with a vista type firm it's 100 common so it's actually kind of hard to compare apples to apples to a classic venture deal where there's a preferred so i wouldn't i think optically it's hard to compare that valuation to others um but these are good questions i mean you always think about these as entrepreneurs i will say for me though long term it's just how do we build a really big company and drive value for our stakeholders and honestly everyone is we all you know do what more than enough in terms of financially well along the way and so now it's just a question how do we make this great for all of our stakeholders nick without going too deep on the common verse preferred stuff did you i forget did you publicize what the size of the check was from vista at the 1.1 or just the valuation of one just the valuation because the way that those things work is that they're basically buying out your existing shareholders not totally um but basically your existing shareholders will keep some and then sell some and then your existing employees will keep some and sell some or sell all or whatever so that's the way it works so i mean vista would have a very big check um into this um so yeah they have a this is very different than a venture round because they put a ton of money um on gain site at a good valuation so but great question nathan you know these are the things you wrestle with as an entrepreneur for sure yeah yeah yeah i mean i mean it was public in the press there was a majority i believe it was a majority buyout right now exactly totally yeah so people can do their own math 1.1 billion evaluation they bought a majority you can be sort of guest check size there now nick it sounds like all of that though didn't i mean you there was enough lift left there after where a bunch of that went into the business that's right there's money into the business and there's money and we're going to be you know more i mentioned you know over time probably do more acquisitions and stuff so that's a big part of it too is somebody that can really invest in fact we sometimes when you know you think of like one of these big investment firms you say oh the company you must get focused on costs and cutting costs we we are so we started the year at 700 employees i i need to update my bio we're already at 900. one of your probably like 1100 or something so we're hiring more people this year than we have in our history um and so it's going to be yeah they're really doubling down it's one thing i'd say maybe as a closing because i know we're almost out of time the world of funding is changing so much i'm sure you see this too nathan like it used to be you have like private equity and then growth equity and venture capital everything's blown together and it's a great time to be an entrepreneur for everyone listening good luck i hope you get a good some good luck on your side as well and take advantage of this crazy time nick we've got 60 seconds left here i'm gonna put this is a capital question you have vista behind you vista race 14 billion dollar fund they better play capital they find an operator like you you just announced a partnership with gong but core is just off the market to discover org why wasn't gainsight acquiring course and bringing that in-house using vista capital great question we first of all that would have been too early we just did this vista deal so we weren't ready for that second all we're not really trying to get into the sales tech area um of course awesome company gong is a great company we're you know working with gong it's great um we definitely want to integrate those technologies we have a lot of other areas we're focused on that are not that today but that's a that is a good question i have a lot of respect for zoom info you know you've had henry on your show i think as well right and so um good luck to them all right nick let's wrap up number one favorite book uh godel escherbach it's a very nerdy math book number two ceo you're following or studying um rachel carlson is a good friend and ceo of gilda education which is changing the way employee re-education is done she's inspirational new 3.5 million 2.5 million dollar fund you guys set up to support that i think right yeah that's right we did this kind of retraining uh effort together thank you much three favorite online tool besides your own i would say uh i i gotta say like it's so cheesy but slack not just the obvious reasons but because i think slack really um gives ceos so much visibility as you scale and i'm so obsessed with the details of gainsight and with 900 people it would be very hard to do without slack how many hours of sleep to get every night eight hours my friend oh i i sleep i sleep married single kids married three kids wow and how are you nick i'm 44. last question what do you wish you knew when you were 20. buy amazon stock guys the customer success company gain site launched in 2012 they grew about 67 70 million bucks in a run rate raised caught 190 million bucks before doing a deal with vista last year as they broke a hundred million dollar rate at a 1.1 billion dollar evaluation now nick can focus on long term with a great partner over 900 folks on the team now over a thousand customers helping you guys sas companies everyone else drive net dollar attention with a suite of tools they're building out nick thanks for taking us to the top awesome thanks nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to 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hello everyone my guest today is nick meta he's the ceo of gainsight the customer success company he's a big believer in the golden rule and tries to apply it as much as he can to bring more compassion to his interactions with others under his leadership gain site was named the second fastest growing private software company in 2015 by inc magazine nick you ready to take us to the top i'm excited nathan thanks for having me all right so this is a fun space to be in um help me understand for folks that have not heard of you guys what do you guys do and are you pure play sass yeah so gamesite is a sas company and we help businesses uh be more customer centric so we think across almost all industries whether you're a sas company you're in the cloud you're moving to a model where customers have more power and you've got to make sure that you recognize that power and do everything you can to put that customer at the center of the business we build software that helps companies be more proactive with their customers people call that customer success software so they make sure their customers are getting value from what they bought they're liking their experience and ideally they stay with you and spend more money over time mm-hmm and then help me understand i mean you have a lot of different customer courts i'm sure we don't have time to go down to all of them but what would you do a sweet spot is an average customer's gonna pay you what per year to use you so we got started in the world of selling to sas companies so many companies folks listening probably run size companies are our sweet spot company is somebody that's moved to a sas or cloud model so building technology your customers might be paying you per month per year per transaction you want to keep them longer get them to spend more money our customers pay us anywhere from you know in the sort of you know 50 000 a year range all the way up to you know millions of dollars a year so solution kind of scales up and down from kind of companies 50 75 employees all the way up to some of the biggest companies in the world that's very cool and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch uh we launched six and a half years ago okay so about 20 20 12-ish yeah 2013 february april 2013. and when was that when the first line of code was written uh no we've been working on it probably for about a year and a half before that okay so i always like to ask this how much money did you guys burn before your first dollar revenue building mvp not you know i'd say probably a few million bucks three three million bucks on that range okay so something yeah so someone listening right now that's out of school launching their company they're going well gosh nick must been rich i can't afford to burn three million on my mvp so what'd you do did you raise on day one or you're just really rich we add venture capital there you go yeah all right so how much have you raised a date we've now raised about 155 million dollars today and why was the capital needed i mean why couldn't you bootstrap this yeah in in enterprise sas businesses in general because you sell you have a longer sales cycle and you you have to build a sophisticated product typically they do take a lot of money because you have to spend a lot of money up front and you get those customers to pay you over time i think it's even more so when you're creating a new category we created this category people call customer success and there's a whole new job associated with it that we've helped to kind of popularize when we got started it was a brand new category so you have to do a lot of stuff to make people aware of the category in our case to get people to hire customer success managers build the product so building a category is definitely expensive but hopefully it'll pay off are you generally so i've interviewed maybe 60 ceos that are doing between 50 and 180 million in arr and there's a trend i'm seeing where a lot of them are now experimenting with actual quota carrying csms based off the csm's responsibility to drive expansion revenue tied to an activation metric uh you generally in favor of that move or you think it's gonna be detrimental no i think it's it's situational but i'm in favor of considering it if you have a business that is a very long deployment cycle long contract and very high touch you may not need to do that because the csm can really just focus on value and making sure customers adopt but if you have a business that's a little bit higher velocity and you can start from a small amount and just keep expanding a lot of companies do give their csm some incentive for expansion some people go in between where they say it's not about like a commission on the expansion but maybe you give leads to sales and you get kind of an incentive for every lead you give back to sales to do upsell yeah no i mean the reason i ask is the most effective companies i've interviewed they have very strong pricing axes worth there's a seat based approach based upselling and the most important one utility-based upselling this is you know this is like twilio api you know calls per month kind of thing right and so csms are typically the ones that drive that activation or you call account managers whatever i'm just it was helpful to get your insight there on how those folks are being incented well nathan it's a great point because if you have a business model where people pay you as they consume like a consumption-based model like twilio which is we're proud to have as a gain side customer in those businesses that customer success motion is the growth motion right that's exactly right in other businesses where you sell a long-term contract customer success is more about value and all that so a lot of it depends on the type of pricing model that you have yeah okay very good so you put in three to five about three issue if the mvp up on the up on the ground and then uh 2012 as first line of code 2013 first paying customer right okay and how did you get i mean walk me through that story how'd you get your first 10 customers be specific yeah well it's funny i think that's probably quite similar to a lot of folks where it's a lot of just like friends that are willing to try out your stuff you get you meet somebody they meet somebody else so for us specifically we were fortunate that one of our first customers was marketo which probably many of the listeners know marketing automation software not part of adobe at the time it was a few hundred percent company and actually we the person that ran customer success of marketo was so enamored with what we were doing that he ended up joining us as one of our first executives his name is dan steinman he's still with us today and so we ended up basically hiring somebody from the field that we were selling to which was a very powerful thing can't recommend it enough if you can have somebody in your company that's been in the shoes of your buyer so marketo ended up being one of our early early customers a number of other companies exactly which is a company that went public was taken private by vista we have several we got it wasn't one of our first ten but probably one of our first hundred was box was probably one of our first big customers and kind of marquee names and in every one of those it's interesting how tightly connected the customer network is you know so the marketo folks know the exactly folks knew the box folks and once you have success one place it helps build on itself and i think that's one thing that's why it's so important to get those early customers right because they all know each other and that network is very tight yep and guys if you want to learn from chris uh we just had him on from exactly in episode 2028 he talked aggressively or a lot about how they're incentivizing their cs reps obviously it sounds like the tool they're using or that at least they were using on the back end of that is was uh was gainsight they're still using yup there's all those things they're still good that's good so they've got you know exactly has been able to drive 30 expansion revenue and a lot of that is tied to their csm's and their ams uh so 130 net revenue retention there so it's something is working nick congratulations thanks well they're a great company all right um so let's go back so those were your first couple customers how many are you now serving today we have about 700 customers now and it's kind of a who's who in technology so publicly traded sas companies like an octa or workday or twilio or docusign big companies that have gone to the cloud like an ibm or an adobe or a cisco as well as companies in other industries that are moving to a more digital business model you know ge as they move to more digital model adp the payroll software company so companies that are coming into software and trying to adopt the practices of software companies like customer success yep now churn is obviously critical in any size company you actually have it yourself but you also this is what you help people manage as well so i i know you'll i you're the you're if i'm going to ask anyone these questions it's going to be you so if you look at your past 12 months and you look at gross revenue churn what has it been for you and how do you try and mitigate it yeah so we we don't report exact numbers but we've had in the net gross retention in the 90s so very good gross retention um and uh generally speaking our customers have been willing to partner with us for very long period of time and that that's been very consistent over the last you know four or five years the the reason i think that's happened is obviously with every business it starts with your market and your product right you got to have the right market value prop and product and obviously we iterate a lot on that and then on top of that we of course have our own customer success methodology and by the way we're not perfect we we just like all of our customers are constantly learning one of the things we've tried to do is be more prescriptive with our customers that's when i think i tell every cs person it's not just about doing what your customers tell you to do it's not be about being nice it's about actually helping them get to where they need to be so with gainsight we realize that we're the experts at customer success we need to create a methodology and how you should use gainsight what are the best practices we turn that into a table we call it if you remember high school chemistry class we're going to go back in time for a second remember the periodic table of elements yeah you've got your 14 elements we've got our elements as we built these elements of how to do customer success at world class levels and we basically put that and canonized that and that's really catapulted our customers forward to value much more quickly of your 700 customers how many of them pay for more than one of the 14. so we don't charge based on elements it's a very logical question we actually sell the platform kind of as a platform and then based on the number of users more like you might buy sales for us the elements are just good ways to get value out of it oh so you don't upsell based off feature set then no i mean we have some advanced features now but they're not really tied to elements it's more like um upselling for you know new modules and things like that interesting okay so what's your most effective upsell module is it number of seats yeah it's seats um but it's really seats driven to use cases so when people buy gain site just like probably many products that are listing now they buy it initially for their csm team but then the sales people want to know what the cs team is doing so we might buy sell seats to them or the product team wants to know hey how do i make my product better and by the way that's a good segue we also launched new products because we've now built a suite we call the overall suite customer cloud and the idea is we want to make every department centric so we customer-centric so we built a product that's all about helping product teams build more customer-centric products sales teams sell a more customer-centric way so now we have different kind of products for different functions within the company okay interesting and then um so so what about we talked about twilio earlier any kind of utility based or consumption based upsell model or no not today no it's really kind of basically users and also like the number of customers you're managing but it's not a consumption based model today okay no consumption interesting and then okay talk to me about team how many folks on the team today so we've got actually a similar number about coming up to 700 employees okay um it's very global we're we really believe in kind of the distributed model so folks all around the world big team in india and a couple different cities folks all throughout the us london and other places as well and what is i mean how aggressive today right your stage can kind of company how aggressive are you being to drive growth in terms of burn i mean you happy burning a million two million a month or give me a general sense of where you're at yeah i think it's in that rough range that you just said um uh we are aggressive probably not you know if you kind of plotted everyone we're not at the extreme of aggressive but we're not yet a break even right um but i think it's all as you know very well it's all about just understanding where you're gonna be growth wise what that burn is what's your customer lifetime value um and and very specifically you know we want to get to the point where you know next couple years when you look at us you probably familiar with rule of 40 where you take the growth rate minus the burn rate as a fraction of revenue and a lot of the best companies have that metric be above 40 we're you know we would like to get to that point where we're if we're burning money it's because we're going super fast and if we're not going super fast we're making money right and that's that's the ultimate balance everyone wants to get to yep uh and guys it's not just the best companies in fact if you look at all the publicly traded sas companies over 80 percent of the total market value is inside of companies with e40 or higher less than 20 of the value is e40 or lower so that is definitely a target as you look to ipo you guys are going to ipo the next couple you know call it two three years well as as you probably hear from all ceos i feel is not the goal it's just the step of the journey i i will say it this way as he smiles i love this job this is the best job i've ever had i don't want it to ever end i'd like to keep going and so the companies that want to keep going often that that ends up being a part of the journey yeah um we want to build a company for long term let me ask you a different question i mean what's your next you know typically people think about growth of companies and kind of stages right there's your first dollar revenue first 10 maybe 15 then it's like 100 and then past that you're like in reggie kind of sphere with c event where you're like how do i get to a billion in ar so for you like i mean what's the next big uncomfortable goal is it 100 or 50 or what yeah it's it's actually more about our strategy so the big thing we're doing right now is going from one product to a suite of products and people on the podcast you may either have done that or you're thinking about that i think it's a radical change for a company reggie and sivan who i know wells done that long time ago and they really catapulted their company to growth so we moved from this one product for cs teams that most people know us for to this suite that we call customer cloud i mentioned that we have a product for product people for sales people and that change is so systemic in a company because it changes the way you market the way you sell the way you do planning how do you organize yourself and we're just figuring it out now so if people are listening and want to give me advice i definitely would soak it up that's the big step function for a company you know i was moving to a multi-product company well and it seems like you're having success right so 700 customers at you just said earlier kind of you know people are caught 50 000 or north in terms of acvs that puts you nor i think probably well north of 2.1 million bucks a month right now in revenue is that accurate it's significantly higher than that our average customer is spelling spending well under the six figures so oh so 50 so people can't 50 000 a year is not that's not an accurate figure 50 000 where you could start but the ab if you kind of as you probably know you do you're out you have a bunch of people 50 yeah with lots of people spending millions of dollars right so you do the averages and yeah okay fair enough so if that's if that's more like a we'll say north of 100 grand 700 customers six grand a month that's north of call it four million a month in revenue or almost call it 50 million ar when do you think you hit 100 million can you do that next year you think you need more time uh yeah no we'll be there uh in that time frame okay interesting and so next question on that right obviously you're managing burn rate you mentioned exactly you mentioned reggie why haven't you sold a vista yet well i hear about the experiences that actually i will say vista's tremendous like people uh private equity firms uh kind of get a bad rap i think but i think some of the progressive ones like vista have done a great job of still allowing growth even inside the kind of private equity world um vista actually is a great partner to gain site a lot of private equity firms have gotten the point where they realize a lot of the value in their portfolio is about getting customers to spend more money right so you think of us event you think of it exactly so much of the value vista is going to get is getting that net retention rate up so vista's been a great partner to us in getting gain site in a lot of their portfolio we have a lot of respect for the private equity firms um in terms of you know who we partner with we have amazing investors right now you know battery bank capital ventures bessemer salesforce lightspeed insight um summit and so we're very happy with our investors but we have respect for all the pe firms out there nick but in this world if you're not doing some kind of activity whether it's a raise a sale a debt or something every one or two you call it 18 months you know something's probably happening now your last raise with what was with lightspeed 52 million in 2017. so i would bet if i was a betting man something is happening right now are you mean are you looking to raise capital right now are you in acquisition talks with vista or another private equity firm no um on the ladder um we are doing something right now uh selling to our customers and serving our customers well and make your importance so good guys i mean he's so good this is good nick you gotta get into you gotta get to pittsburgh politics here soon exactly we'll talk about the steelers that we can get real or no no actually i generally mean that we've we really really focused on making our business and and um so um we want to just run this for the long term interesting um of the 52 in 2017 was all that going to operations or was any of it secondary for early liquidity for early you know employees operations it was all operations okay so then maybe i mean one thing at this stage i see see is do all the time is do you call like a 60 80 100 million kind of raise where some of that's going to early you know employees who sacrifice comp for equity would you do would you do something like that yeah i mean i think those kinds of things are the types of things you you want to do to make sure people are incented for the long term being transparent it's not something we're doing right now yeah but those are the types of things i think companies do do to make sure you have the the gas and the fuel tank both for the company as well as for the employees so i i do respect companies that do that last two kind of rapid fire questions and we'll wrap up growth rate past uh 12 months call it 30 40 50 percent or where you generally fall yeah in the higher end of that range okay yeah fair enough and then um cac so to get a new hundred thousand dollar your customer how aggressive willing to be happy with the 12 month payback or what yeah you know i think in enterprise it typically is like 12 to 18 months in that range i think that's pretty common our customers a lot of them are spending a lot of money so we end up it fluctuates kind of quarter to quarter but that's the rough range okay interesting all right wrap up with the famous five here number one great great question nathan you asked more questions than my mom does on my typical check-ins if your mom asked all these questions i would hire her immediately to write for me on sas girls me about ipo all kinds of stuff so i love love her she keeps me honest that's so funny no no i mean look i wish i had data like this when i was launching my first sas company so i appreciate ceos we've got almost two thousand now more than two come on and be so transparent like you were so i appreciate it no problem all right wrap up here number one what's your favorite business book five dysfunctions of a team um that's an amazing book if you haven't read or encouraged it's very quick it's a parable about a management team and some challenge they run into and you read it thinking oh this could be totally different than my company and then you read and you see little shades of your own company and the things you can work on and obviously the only other one i'd say is customer success the book we wrote about the topic of course that's my other favorite that's the five dysfunctions is the one i'd recommend what's what's the actual book title of your yearbook it's called customer success oh okay and you can look it up on amazon it's actually become a better on amazon for business books and yeah very good all right number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah um i think that i'll give you kind of two different ones maybe at different altitudes so satya nadella obviously a legendary with what he's done with microsoft i've never met him but from afar i think the combination of the fact that he's driven the strategic change of microsoft but also that people like really gravitate towards his leadership style i've heard he's just such a humble person very approachable so definitely somebody i admire and they just pick somebody that's maybe some folks might even know that's um i just really admire and i've gotten to know well jen tahada who just took pagerduty public she made she's amazing ceo balances uh caring about her team but unbelievable execution focus so those are two i'll pick no guys if you want to hear more stories about satya yesterday's episode with omar uh voicia he worked directly with microsoft before he spun out and shared some very interesting stories about how satya does right after a meeting so go listen to that episode if you want to hear more about that number three nick what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides gainsight yeah besides getting i'd say the one that like i thought about this question linkedin it's so obvious but i gotta say it is just so universal and of course using it to look up people and all that but specifically to get your message out there if you haven't thought about that if you're not doing more on linkedin for business folks i just think it's it's an amazingly powerful tool to connect with your customers and your audience number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i am a huge believer in sleep i believe all that research and all that so i as long as i can fall asleep sometimes i you know toss and turn like a lot of people but i target seven eight hours a night that's good and uh how old are you i'm 42 years old 42 and situation married single kids married uh for 19 years this year uh we've high school sweetheart and we have three kids amazing amazing all right take us back to your 20 year old self what's something you wish you knew all right a few things um apply for a job at amazon or buy amazon stock those would be good decisions 10 20 years ago um i think that you know you're always rushing to get things done um and it's interesting there's an expression i love which is the days are long but the years are short and it's interesting like that kind of conundrum that like getting through everything feels like it's a slog and then you realize like i'm 42. so you know 20 years went by pretty quickly post college um and then the last one i'd say um this is being really honest and we're big into vulnerability our company i'm personally i'm i'm the kind of person who's very like constantly like hey are you achieving enough are you doing enough am i successful enough um i don't feel like i am i haven't done as much as i should and a friend just a few months ago who knows me very well gave me a little card and it said you are enough um you were bored it says you were born enough nothing you can ever do nothing you can ever accomplish will change who you truly are and i think that idea that you are enough and i think a lot of people struggle with that am i enough that's i still haven't totally figured it out but i think that's what i try to tell myself every day guys there you have it gain site helping you sas companies and other companies retain more of their customers more of your customers deliver more value they're now serving over 700 customers contract sizes all in the six figures kind of low to high low to mid six figures so call it north of 50 million bucks in ar he says next year they'll definitely hit or hopefully hit more than 100 million bucks in terms of ars they look to continue to scale with their team of 700 people 10 gross annual churn again that's max uh spending up to call it 16 12 to 18 months of lifetime value to get the the customer in the first place burning caught between one and two million bucks a month to do that with 155 million dollars raised nick thank you so much for taking us to the top yeah awesome great talking to you thank you so much