Founder Interview
How Highspot Reached $100K Average ACV and 130%+ Net Revenue Retention with Hundreds of Customers (Interview with CEO Robert Wahbe)
- Interviewee
- Robert WahbeCo-Founder and CEO
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Avg Contract Value (2019)
$100K
Net Revenue Retention (2019)
Well above 130%
Total Funding Raised
$120M
Team Size (2019)
300
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Robert Wahbe during the interview at the time of recording and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Highspot’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways
- 01Average ACV across all cohorts was approximately $100K at the time of the interview
- 02List price was $50 per user per month
- 03Net revenue retention was well above 130% across cohorts
- 04Gross revenue retention rounded to 100%, between 99% and 100%
- 05Highspot had essentially never churned a customer to a competitor
- 06The company had raised approximately $120M in total, with the most recent round being $60M
- 07Team size was 300 at interview time, with a target of 400 by end of 2019
- 08The Sales Enablement Soiree conference drew 5,000 registrations, the largest in the sales enablement space
- 09Highspot served hundreds of customers including Slack, Airbnb, Dropbox, ServiceNow, Siemens, Amazon, Aetna and Twilio, which became a single customer with SendGrid after buying it
- 10The company doubled headcount from 150 at end of 2018 to approximately 300 in 2019
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Avg Contract Value (2019) | $100K | Founder interview, 2019 |
| List Price Per User (2019) | $50 per user per month | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Net Revenue Retention (2019) | Well above 130% | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Gross Revenue Retention (2019) | 99% to 100% | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Total Funding Raised | $120M | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Most Recent Funding Round (2019) | $60M | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Team Size (2019) | 300 | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Team Size (Prior Year End) (2018) | 150 | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Sales Enablement Soiree Registrations (2019) | 5,000 | Founder interview, 2019 |
| Customers (2019) | Hundreds | Founder interview, 2019 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue and Pricing
Highspot charged a list price of $50 per user per month, with an average ACV of approximately $100K across all customer cohorts. The company maintained a single SKU with no utility-based pricing or add-ons, keeping cost predictable for customers.
Customers and Retention
Highspot served hundreds of customers at the time of the interview, ranging from 20-person sales teams to large enterprises such as Siemens, Amazon, Aetna, Slack, Airbnb, Dropbox, and ServiceNow. Gross revenue retention rounded to 100%, and the company said it had essentially never churned a customer to a competitor.
Team and Headcount
The team stood at 300 at the time of the interview, up from 150 at the end of 2018. Roughly 30 to 40 percent of the team was on the product and engineering side, approximately 50 percent in go-to-market roles, and around 10 percent in general and administrative functions.
Funding and Capital Position
Highspot had raised approximately $120M in total funding, with the most recent round being $60M. Robert Wahbe said the company had not spent any money from its previous raise when it took the $60M round. Every raise came on top of a plan that would not need another one, and the extra cash let Highspot make decisions that were "a little bit more aggressive, still pragmatic", such as opening several geographies at once.
Growth Strategy
Live Events and Category Building
Highspot ran the Sales Enablement Soiree, which it described as the largest conference in the sales enablement space, drawing 5,000 registrations. The event was open to partners and even competitors, with the explicit goal of growing the overall category alongside Highspot's own market share.
Land and Expand Across Teams and Geographies
Highspot typically started with a division, a geography, or a specific team within a customer and then expanded to additional personas, regions, and departments. Expansion revenue was driven by new geos, new internal teams adopting the platform, and organic growth at fast-growing customer companies.
Serving Both SMB and Enterprise in One Product
Rather than sacrificing flexibility for simplicity or vice versa, Highspot built a platform that served 20-person sales teams and 20,000-person sales teams in the same product. This kept the product honest and created a viral motion as SMB and commercial users moved to larger companies and brought Highspot with them.
People Engine and Internal Career Progression
Highspot deliberately built a career ladder from account development representative to enterprise account executive within the company. Having SMB and commercial accounts gave junior salespeople a path to grow into enterprise roles, which Robert Wahbe described as building a "people engine" that goes "all the way from school": the company's best enterprise reps started out of school at Highspot as ADRs.
International Expansion Funded by Capital
Because each raise came on top of a plan that did not depend on it, Highspot could open several geographies at once instead of one after another: offices in the UK, France, Germany and Asia Pacific, without waiting for each one to generate revenue and fund the next. Robert Wahbe said a little more capital let the company be "pragmatically more tenacious".
Best Quotes
“We're well above 130%.”
“One thing that's amazing is that we essentially have never churned a customer to a competitor ever.”
“The way to think about it is we have no gross churn. It's... It rounds to a 100% for real.”
“It's it's so high. It's... You you can round it to a 100%. It's between 99 and a 100% and it rounds up.”
“We use all the channels, but we don't, right now we spend probably the most of our money for our particular audience on events. We actually have... We run the largest conference in our space, and we do that in The US, both East Coast and West Coast.”
“So we're more than doubling every year. We were 150 people at the end of last year, we'll be 400 people at the end of this year as one way to think about that.”
“Our list price is about $50 per user per month.”
“We're a pure play SaaS. What we try to do is help customer facing teams engage with customers, engage with prospective customers more effectively, which means we help them with what to know, what to say, and what to show so they're having the right conversation.”
“Follow your passion but even do it more tenaciously. In other words, if you have a passion to go do something, ... just do it now. So follow your passions, yes, and follow your passions on a fast timeline.”
What Happened Next
At the time of this interview, Highspot was serving hundreds of customers, had raised approximately $120M in total funding, and was targeting continued expansion across geographies and customer segments. Robert Wahbe expressed ambition to serve millions of people and grow the customer base into the thousands. This page is a point-in-time snapshot of the company as described during the recording. Visit the Highspot company profile for current information.
View Highspot’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction to Robert Wahbe and Highspot
- 0:50What Highspot Does: Pure Play SaaS Sales Enablement
- 1:45Pricing Model and Average ACV
- 5:01Net Revenue Retention and Gross Churn
- 7:39Expansion Revenue Levers and Single SKU Strategy
- 8:54Team Size and Organizational Structure
- 9:40Go-to-Market Structure and Unique Team Charters
- 11:36CAC and Growth Rate
- 12:55Sales Enablement Soiree and Event Strategy
- 14:12Competitors: Seismic and Showpad
- 14:14Total Capital Raised and Cash Position
- 16:47Customer Count and Path to Thousands
- 20:21ARR Target Discussion
- 20:29Famous Five Rapid Fire
Introduction to Robert Wahbe and Highspot
Nathan Latka
00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Robert Robert Wahbe. He's the co founder of Highspot. Co founded in 2012 after discovering the need to empower sales and marketing teams with sales enablement. As the CEO, he's passionate about leading the company and developing the industry's most advanced technology solutions that help customers win more business. Before this company, he served as corporate VP of the server and tools division at Microsoft. Robert, you ready to take us to the top?
Robert Wahbe
00:22I'm ready to take you.
Nathan Latka
00:23So are you a Satya Nadella fan?
Robert Wahbe
00:25Say it again?
Nathan Latka
00:25Are you a Nadella fan? You like what he's done at Microsoft?
Robert Wahbe
00:28I I think he's done really amazing work. I mean, he fundamentally has both changed the culture and made a lot of the technology more relevant. So he's doing kind of amazing things and I guess the company, if you talk to folks, they love it and you look at the stock price, it's, you know, richest company, most valuable company in the world.
Nathan Latka
00:43Are you still on that train or you get totally off in 2012?
Robert Wahbe
00:46I got totally off in 2000,
Nathan Latka
00:47bummer or maybe it was good at the time, who knows?
Robert Wahbe
00:49That's fine.
What Highspot Does: Pure Play SaaS Sales Enablement
Nathan Latka
00:50All right, all right, tell us about Highspot. What's the company doing? Are you guys pure play SaaS?
Robert Wahbe
00:54We're a pure play SaaS. What we try to do is help customer facing teams engage with customers, engage with prospective customers more effectively, which means we help them with what to know, what to say, and what to show so they're having the right conversation. It's really any customer facing team. It could be sales, it could be services, it could be account management. If you're having that better conversation, that more relevant conversation, the hope is that you
01:21can, if you're sales, you're increasing revenue, if you're services, you're increasing customer satisfaction, if you're account management, you're increasing renewal rates, but fundamentally, you're giving that customer a better experience. We're not about automation, we're about helping people talk to people. It's all about empowering them. It turns out about half the company tends to be these customer facing roles our job is to make them better and more effective at their jobs and hopefully have the customers have
01:44a better experience.
Pricing Model and Average ACV
Nathan Latka
01:45And when people are hearing about your technology and going, man, I want this thing and they start paying, are we talking like a couple grand a month or more like, you know, a $100 a month, more like freemium kind of model?
Robert Wahbe
01:54So We're not a freemium model because one of our value props is we help a sales team, whether it's a 20 person sales team or a 20,000 person sales team, we're the single pane of glass so they know where to get their content, where to get their guidance, where to get their trainings, we take all the chaos out and make it really easy and it works kind of where they work. So we tend to be an
02:15implementation where it's either a division or a whole company or maybe a whole geography. We're not onesies and twosies cause we're trying to help the whole team work more effectively.
Nathan Latka
02:24Yeah, I wanna capture more of your backstory, but if I forced you here into an average just for the sake of simplicity and time, what's kind of average first year ACV look like would you say?
Robert Wahbe
02:33Well, so one thing that makes us a little bit unusual, which I actually really love is that we serve SMB, so we'll literally 20, 25, 30 people sales team, love those customers, we have lots of those, all the way up to Siemens and Amazon and Aetna and very large companies that have very, very broad tens of thousands of users.
Nathan Latka
02:52Yeah. By the way, I totally understand. There's a lot a lot of SaaS companies are like that.
Robert Wahbe
02:56Yeah. But actually, in our space at least, we have some competitors that mostly focus on SMB and mid market because they have, they've sacrificed a lot of flexibility for simplicity, and then we have a bunch of folks in the enterprise who've done the opposite, and what we've tried to do is really have a pretty easy to use platform that actually has flexibility under the covers.
Nathan Latka
03:15Well, want to talk more It about
Robert Wahbe
03:17goes all the way from, it's actually, what's also interesting as you think about, you know, your audiences, it's actually tricky to have both motions in the same company. An SMB motion and an enterprise motion are pretty different from everything from, you know, the product itself, of course, but then also demand gen services, renewal, all that is very different if you're talking about a 30K ACV to a 1,000,000 ACV.
Nathan Latka
03:41Yeah, so I wanna get more into that and your backstory over the past ten years. Right? But but again, if you look at a sweet spot ACV year one, I I understand you have a huge range. We don't have time to talk about every cohort. What would you say a fair average is?
Robert Wahbe
03:53A 100 is probably a fair average across all the cohorts.
Nathan Latka
03:57Okay, and paint that picture a little more for me. So someone's gonna pay you $100,000 a year, what's that team size probably look like?
Robert Wahbe
04:03Well our list price is about $50 per user per month, we can do that math and what you're doing probably is your, let's just do a typical initial implementation. We probably are now serving all of your sales, maybe your services team. We also definitely have a lot of marketing in there because marketing tends to be where you're publishing that content from, and we have sales operations and sales enablement also helping to make sure that the sales
04:31team is getting the right information. In fact, one the things that we think about a lot is how do you make sure that... You think about a company. You can step all the way back and say, look, there's three kind of big engines in most companies for the go to market side. There's services, there are sales, and there's marketing. And if you think about enablement, it's the gear in the middle trying to help those different things
04:53actually align and amplify what they're trying to do. Make sure they have the common content, common guidance, common sales plays, marketing plays, all of that.
Net Revenue Retention and Gross Churn
Nathan Latka
05:01You can, Robert, we can measure this though, right, in terms of stickiness. And Elena was great before the interview, she sent over some retention metrics and adoption metrics, right, from G2 Crowd. So if you look at your cohorts, right, whether it's the SMB or the enterprise, and you look at kind of net revenue retention on any of those cohorts, I hope they're all above 100% at your scale, but how far above 100% are you pushing them?
Robert Wahbe
05:21We're well above 130% and
Nathan Latka
05:24Oh wow, that's, I mean I would put, by the way, I'd say that's world, I'd say 140 is world class. So if you're at 130 across most cohorts, it's pretty darn good.
Robert Wahbe
05:31And I think one the things we're really proud of, so we work hard to partner with all of our companies that we work with. So whether you're SMB, whether you're enterprise, we have all the right services and account management to really kind of work closely with you. One thing that's amazing is that we essentially have never churned a customer to a competitor ever.
Nathan Latka
05:51Oh come on Rob, how on earth can you actually track that and know that for sure?
Robert Wahbe
05:54No, because we work with them and so we basically don't churn very much. If you churn, it's probably because either you're not gonna use any solution because you're so small and you decided you don't need it, or you no longer exist.
Nathan Latka
06:04Yeah.
Robert Wahbe
06:04You know, you got bought M and A, and we have customers that have merged. Like for example, SendGrid, you know, Twilio bought SendGrid. Twilio was a customer, SendGrid was a customer, now they're a single customer. In some sense, we churned, but we didn't really churn. Now they're, you know, all one customer.
Nathan Latka
06:19Yeah. Yeah. That's that's uncontrolled churn. Right?
Robert Wahbe
06:21Competitive churns.
Nathan Latka
06:22Yeah. So so peel back real quick that net revenue retention onion real quick. So if you got one thirty total, that's made up of two components, gross churn plus like adding back expansion. Right? What what is the gross churn number on on the on the
Robert Wahbe
06:34The way to think about it is we have no gross churn. It's... It rounds to a 100% for real.
Nathan Latka
06:40Okay. On any of your cohorts, there's no one downgrading accounts or canceling completely? There's truly no gross revenue churn?
Robert Wahbe
06:45It's it's so high. It's... You you can round it to a 100%. It's between 99 and a 100% and it rounds up.
Nathan Latka
06:50Okay, fair enough. Then so you've got It's all about expansion. You then, I was gonna say then you have motions internally at the company where you have just dominated 30% expansion on average across these cohorts, year one to year two ACVs, etcetera.
Robert Wahbe
07:01Well, there's two things going on. In some cases, we start with a division or a segment like the enterprise folks versus the SMB folks in the company, or maybe a geo, like we win The US but we don't win Europe, etcetera, so that's one area of expansion. The other thing is we're really fortunate to work with some of the fastest growing companies out there. So if you look at like companies that have gone public recently, most
07:23of those companies are on Highspot.
Nathan Latka
07:24Can you name one or two of them?
Robert Wahbe
07:26Sure, Slack, Airbnb, Dropbox, ServiceNow. Right. And so it turns out those companies are growing at amazing rates, And so we just need to hang on if you will.
Expansion Revenue Levers and Single SKU Strategy
Nathan Latka
07:39All right, so expansion revenue, your big levers, your upselling seats and additional teams. Do you have strong feature based upselling and is there any utility based value metric upselling?
Robert Wahbe
07:48Yeah, so one of the things that we've done is we've kept it really simple, we have essentially one SKU, and so we're not doing add ons, we're not coming back in you and trying to continually upsell, we're just trying to give you the core product and then make sure you have great value and then you're gonna be a retained customer, which we love, and then you're gonna probably grow either because of new geos, new expansions, etcetera,
08:12or new personas. So we've been talking about new divisions, new geographies, there's also new personas. So for example, sales is using it, but now support wants to use it, or services wants to use it. That's another vector of expansion.
Nathan Latka
08:23Okay, but no utility based, like literally number, number of contacts in your account, number of something, nothing like that.
Robert Wahbe
08:30And in fact, you know, we store all your content, all your guidance, we integrate with all your training and learning platforms, so it's all sitting in there and there's no utility based pricing on that. We have millions of videos in there, we stream those videos, all that's included in the price. It's really about trying to keep it simple for that customer so they can predict the cost and we just now can talk about the product and
08:53not talk about all these different options.
Team Size and Organizational Structure
Nathan Latka
08:54Yeah, look, a lot of upside to simplicity, nothing wrong with that, I love that you're doing that. What's the team look like today, how many folks?
Robert Wahbe
09:01We will end this year about 400.
Nathan Latka
09:03How many now though?
Robert Wahbe
09:04About 300.
Nathan Latka
09:05300, and what's the breakdown? Like how do you set up the... Of the 300, how many of our sales marketing, something related to customer success?
Robert Wahbe
09:12We're a pretty common configuration, so you know, we have 30, 40% kind of on the product engineering side, and then we have about 50% as G and A, excuse me, as a go to market, about 10% probably G and A ish, but a fairly standard, we benchmark against various companies in our cohort over their lifetimes, know, Salesforce's, ServiceNow's, Workdays, etcetera, and we are a fairly typical configuration, nothing special about our percentages.
Go-to-Market Structure and Unique Team Charters
Nathan Latka
09:40You're not doing anything unique with SDR to AE to CSM ratios in your SMB or mid market enterprise cohorts, you're pretty much following the standard playbook?
Robert Wahbe
09:48No, don't. We have fairly standard ratios at a high level. We don't follow the standard playbook actually.
Nathan Latka
09:56Okay, what's the biggest difference between you and everyone else is what?
Robert Wahbe
09:59Yeah, so one of the things that we do is we, so if you think about the go to market teams, it's at a very high level, we think about those teams differently. We think about actually a number of top level teams. We think about marketing, everyone does. We think about sales, everyone does. We think about account development as a peer, that's unique or relatively unique. And we think about what we call growth as a peer.
Nathan Latka
10:24What do mean as a peer? You mean like a beachhead? I think about services.
Robert Wahbe
10:27In other words, conceptually Robert. Robert. Sorry.
Nathan Latka
10:29What do mean by... We don't know what you mean by peer. You mean like a beachhead, a focal point?
Robert Wahbe
10:33No. I mean, think about the top level teams. Yep. Marketing, account development, sales, services, and growth are all top level teams that report to me.
Nathan Latka
10:43Okay, so when you say peer, you mean you think of them like equal teams? Yes. Same level, peers.
Robert Wahbe
10:47They all have equal charters.
Nathan Latka
10:49I see, I see.
Robert Wahbe
10:50And that's really important to us because, so account development is a really, in our mind, a very unique function. If you look at how, startups work typically, account development starts either in sales or marketing, and then for the next ten years it bounces back and forth between them because it's a little bit marketing at the top end of what they do and it's a little bit like sales at the bottom end of what they do in
11:12terms of talking to customers, and then eventually the career path is off in sales. It's popping back and forth, it's neither one. We have account development as a full charter equal to sales, equal to account development. Services is part of that go to market, they're part of how we think about engaging with the customer. And then finally, think about operations and enablement across the entire go to market. It's not sales ops and marketing
CAC and Growth Rate
Nathan Latka
11:36Robert, this can be expensive, right, to get new customers onboarded, like your fully weighted CAC. How aggressive are you being with that? Will you spend the full $100,000 to get Our a new $100,000 at
Robert Wahbe
11:44CAC is fantastic.
Nathan Latka
11:45So so again, what... To get into a $100,000 a year account, will you spend that full $100,000 upfront?
Robert Wahbe
11:50Yes.
Nathan Latka
11:51Okay. So are you pushing it higher? Will you go up to twenty four months of LTV on So
Robert Wahbe
11:55our CAC is, you know, we, I'm not gonna reveal the CAC, but our CAC is excellent. It's world class right now for our stage, and when you look at the model as we, right now we're growing so fast, obviously that cost CAC. If you look at this model as
Nathan Latka
12:09Hold on Robert, sorry, I try and stay away from like a... Just big words. When you say growing so fast, what do you mean by that?
Robert Wahbe
12:16So we're more than doubling every year. We were 150 people at the end of last year, we'll be 400 people at the end of this year as one way to think about that.
Nathan Latka
12:22Okay. That's expense growth though. I hope revenue growth is also reflective of that.
Robert Wahbe
12:26Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
Nathan Latka
12:28That's what's way more fun. Right? I'd rather have one employee and a 100,000,000 revenue than, know, 100 million employees and $1. Absolutely. Okay. So CAC is world class. Again, I'd say world class in your stage anywhere between call it sixteen and eighteen months. It sounds like you're right in that sweet spot. Most of it though sounds like your CAC distribution is tied to this headcount. These kind of four peers you just went through. Are you doing
12:47any, a lot of direct paid spend?
Robert Wahbe
12:50In terms of demand generation?
Nathan Latka
12:52Yeah, Facebook ad, Google ads, sponsor conferences.
Sales Enablement Soiree and Event Strategy
Robert Wahbe
12:55We use all the channels, but we don't, right now we spend probably the most of our money for our particular audience on events. We actually have... We run the largest conference in our space, and we do that in The US, both East Coast and West Coast.
Nathan Latka
13:09What's it called?
Robert Wahbe
13:10It's called the Sales Enablement Soiree.
Nathan Latka
13:13And how many people show up?
Robert Wahbe
13:145,000 registrations this year.
Nathan Latka
13:16And how do know, how do know that's a large, like what space are you saying that's the largest in? Just sales, tools
Robert Wahbe
13:20in Sales enablement, enablement. There's no conference even closed.
Nathan Latka
13:24Okay. Who's closest behind you?
Robert Wahbe
13:27Oh, there's no conference, I mean probably Sales Enablement Society does a conference and it's probably 600, 700 people.
Nathan Latka
13:33Interesting, okay. Do you put people like
Robert Wahbe
13:37By the way, soiree is interesting too as approach to the market. So this category is kind of the oldest new category on the planet. It's been around for twenty or thirty years, but it's been reinvented by us and our competitors. And so there's two things we're trying to do. One, of course we're trying to be a great product and a great partner inside the category. We're also trying to grow the category. So in the sales enablement
14:00soiree we actually have both our partners and our competitors in the soiree. So we allow our main competitors to have booths and to be in that space.
Nathan Latka
14:10Who are those people?
Competitors: Seismic and Showpad
Robert Wahbe
14:12Our big competitors are Seismic and Showpad.
Total Capital Raised and Cash Position
Nathan Latka
14:14Seismic and Showpad. Okay. You launched the company in 2012. You've raised a bunch of capital. How much capital have you raised to date?
Robert Wahbe
14:20About 120 plus.
Nathan Latka
14:22And the most recent one was when?
Robert Wahbe
14:2460,000,000 a little bit ago.
Nathan Latka
14:25Okay, June ish timeframe. When you're raising at your level and you're putting together all your pro formas and your planning, are you typically trying to raise for sixteen months burn, twenty four months burn? What timeline are you giving yourself?
Robert Wahbe
14:36We wanted to, well actually, and every time we've raised, we have a plan which allows us not to raise again. And what raising lets us do is be a little bit more aggressive on those plans. So right now, again, with our last raise, we didn't, we hadn't spent any money from the previous raise.
Nathan Latka
14:52Okay. Which... So so just to be clear, that means you still have $35,000,000 in the bank account.
Robert Wahbe
14:56Plus more now, plus another 60.
Nathan Latka
14:58Yeah. Well, now plus 60, which obviously a good position to be in. Yeah. Why take the dilution if you don't need the cash?
Robert Wahbe
15:04Because for a couple reasons. One is when you think about a company like ours, you know, you need to be conservative with that cash to make sure that you have the right burn, and that if you need to, you can become profitable, that's a necessary thing. And so if you have more cash, you can start to make decisions that are a little bit more aggressive, still pragmatic, but aggressive. So for example, we can open up multiple
15:27geographies simultaneously instead of doing them in a serial way.
Nathan Latka
15:31Congratulations on the EMEA launch in February, it sounds like that went well.
Robert Wahbe
15:35Yeah, so we have The UK, France, Germany, we're able to open up all those offices, including Asia Pacific, and do those without having to have an office established, have it generate revenue and therefore fund itself, and then open the next office. With a little bit more capital, we're able to be pragmatically more tenacious and
Nathan Latka
15:52a I little more like that, well said.
15:53How aggressive will you be? So with your current kind of capital structure, your growth plans, how you see the market, mean are you comfortable going up to $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 a month in net burn or no, you won't you won't push it that hard?
Robert Wahbe
16:04We don't need to.
Nathan Latka
16:05Mhmm.
Robert Wahbe
16:06We... It turns out, as I said, you know, we're growing... The headcount is commensurate with our revenue. We're growing our revenue very well so we don't have to burn something crazy like that.
Nathan Latka
16:13Well, just be clear, I don't think I don't think it's ever a question of need to or not. I think it's a question of do you see the pragmatic growth, and if you convince yourself of that, you'd spend more money to drive the growth.
Robert Wahbe
16:22I think that you know it's always a balance, growth is great, but you also have to do that with excellence, so you have to scale the team, you have to scale the culture. We think about our people engine, we think about our customer engine, we think about our product engine. All those things have a natural set of physics that you can't go beyond or you're to have a problem. And so we're trying to scale as quickly
16:45as we can, but with excellence.
Customer Count and Path to Thousands
Nathan Latka
16:47Yep, no, that makes good sense. Think again, it gets all said. So launched in 2012, you get your first customers in the door. What are you serving today? How many customers are you serving?
Robert Wahbe
16:54Hundreds of customers.
Nathan Latka
16:55Okay, hundreds. I mean, you on a model right now that you feel like you can get that into the thousands or are you more focused on growing wallet share across a couple 100 enterprise customers?
Robert Wahbe
17:06No. We'll have... We're growing customer count. We're doubling we're doubling every metric including customers. So we'll we'll go into the thousands quickly.
Nathan Latka
17:14Oh, I'm just gonna say, I mean, eventually, have all the Fortune 1,000. Right? And it becomes a question of do you build SMB, like more SMB, invest in more SMB tools, or do you just triple quadruple wallet share and expansion revenue becomes a more important part of the story? It sounds like you're saying, no. You're happy to go downstream more, sell to a higher volume of mid market SMB.
Robert Wahbe
17:31I'm saying and not or. So in other words, I absolutely want to increase that wallet in the Fortune 1,000 as you said, but I think it's also important to continue to expand the base of the pyramid and there's number of reasons for that. So the first is it keeps the product honest. You know, if you just started the Fortune 1,000, it's so easy to build an overly complex product. You see that in a lot of enterprise
17:51software. By having to serve SMB in that same exact product all the way up to enterprise, it keeps the product team honest. That's one really key point. The second key point is that our category of enablement is really on fire. It is more than doubling or tripling broadly across the world. So it turns out one of the challenges that we have is for our SMB and commercial customers, very often we find that they have now moved
18:14to a bigger job. There's so many jobs open around enablement, so it's great for us to have SMB commercial enterprise strategic because our customers are moving up and they're bringing us into those accounts. So it's a very good way to be viral.
Nathan Latka
18:27It's a great engine.
Robert Wahbe
18:28Move around.
Nathan Latka
18:28Yeah, it's a great engine.
Robert Wahbe
18:30And there's a third reason, and this is also important. So I talked about the three engines, the product engine, the customer engine, the people engine. One of the things we really care a lot about is inspiring and developing our people, and if you think about sales, what I want to be able to do is take someone out of school, have them trained as an account development rep, so BDR SDR type role, and as they mature, they
18:51can become an AE and then go all the way up the chain. I can't have that transition if I'm going from ADR to enterprise AE. So the fact that I have these lower accounts helps me build a people engine that goes all the way from school. Our best enterprise reps literally started out of school here as ADRs. What do
Nathan Latka
19:08you what do you set... When you're bringing people on your sales team, and I I just realized we're out of time, so hit me with quick answers here if you can. Do do you set your salesperson profitability at like five x in terms of their quota relative to their earnings at OTE, or is it more like seven, eight, nine, 10 x?
Robert Wahbe
19:22It's more like it's a little higher. It's higher than five.
Nathan Latka
19:24It's higher than... Okay. But between five and ten is... I I... Most people say like six or seven. You're in that range?
Robert Wahbe
19:28In that range.
Nathan Latka
19:29Okay. Fair enough. And then again, launch 2012 scaling the business. You're happy to go into the thousands of customers. I mean, do you think that happens this year you break a thousand or maybe that's more like next year when you really start Next to year. And then look, know Yes.
Robert Wahbe
19:42Very big customers too that we launched.
Nathan Latka
19:44Yeah. Yeah. After you get to the scale you're at, again, in terms of what you raised, right, a $60,000,000 round sixteen to eighteen months from now, mean, what are you thinking? Are you thinking $100,000,000 mark first? Are you thinking potentially IPO? You thinking just get to breakeven?
Robert Wahbe
19:56Oh, I think this... So it turns out if you think about what we're trying to do, which is enable all the customer facing teams across essentially most industries, across most geos, this is a massive market. And our goal is to be a significant player in that market. It's not about profitability, it's not necessarily about IPO, it's about trying to serve as many of those customers as possible. Our mission is to transform the way millions of people
20:19work. We'd love to have all those people as customers.
ARR Target Discussion
Nathan Latka
20:21Do feel like you can break 70,000,000 in ARR by the end of this year? Is that a stretch goal? It's a little uncomfortable.
Robert Wahbe
20:25Stretch. Yeah.
Nathan Latka
20:26Okay. Next year?
Robert Wahbe
20:28Sure. Oh, blow past.
Famous Five Rapid Fire
Nathan Latka
20:29There you go. He says with confidence. On that note, Robert, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Robert Wahbe
20:35Right now I don't buy a favorite business book, but right now I'm reading Culture Code, which I Number
Nathan Latka
20:39two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Robert Wahbe
20:43A CEO that I'm following or studying. I've been actually following Slack CEO, Zoom CEO,
20:49Satya is always interesting to follow and talk to. All all things are very good.
Nathan Latka
20:53Number three, is there a favorite online tool you have for building your company besides your own?
Robert Wahbe
20:59Oh my gosh. There's... We are a pure SaaS player, and boy, we use almost all the SaaS tools. We live in tools like Slack. We live in tools like CRM. So Salesforce for us, we live in so many of those tools.
Nathan Latka
21:12Number four, how many hours of sleep you get every night?
Robert Wahbe
21:14I'm an old guy. I I get eight hours of sleep.
Nathan Latka
21:16How old are you, Robert?
Robert Wahbe
21:18I'm 55.
Nathan Latka
21:19That's not old, man. You got you got another fifty, sixty years. Alright. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?
Robert Wahbe
21:26Married, two kids, two dogs, cat.
Nathan Latka
21:29The whole thing. Alright last question, what do you wish your 20 year old self knew?
Robert Wahbe
21:36Actually my 20 year old self I would say, which I did, follow your passion but even do it more tenaciously. In other words, if you have a passion to go do something, don't wait three years to do the safe time to make that transition, just do it now. So follow your passions, yes, and follow your passions on a fast timeline. There's... You never look back.
Nathan Latka
21:57Highspot.com sales enablement, serving hundreds of customers today. Average ACVs in the $100,000 range. Hoping to break that $70,000,000 mark here in the next, call it, four to six quarters as they look to continue to scale. $120,000,000 raise. Team of 300 right now, hoping to grow to 400 by the end here of 2019. A 130% net revenue retention. That's on 0% gross churn. Pretty impressive actually. CAC in the ballpark you'd expect sixteen to eighteen months again as
22:22they look to continue to scale. Robert, thanks for taking us to the top.
Robert Wahbe
22:25Thank you.