How Salesloft Reached About $50M ARR with 120% Net Revenue Retention and 100% Growth (Interview with Founder and CEO Kyle Porter)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Kyle Porter. He's the Founder and CEO of SalesLoft, the leading sales engagement platform delivering the best sales experience to customers. The company is recognized as the number one sales engagement platform by G2 Crowd and Atlanta's number one best place to work. Kyle, you ready to take us to the top?

Kyle Porter

00:15I am, Nathan. Thanks for having me, man. Glad to be here.

The Sales Engagement Market Landscape

Nathan Latka

00:18Yeah. How are there so many 100,000,000, 200, 500,000,000 companies in like the sales outreach kind of space?

Kyle Porter

00:26You know, I can't speak for all of them. I think there's a few that really have done a big deal in the marketplace. You've got the data providers, they're doing awesome. You've got some of the content providers, the Seismics and Showpads, and then you've got the sales engagement market, of course, outside of CRM. I I think those are the ones that have made a big, big splash in the market.

Nathan Latka

00:43So talk me through how you're kind of... Where you see yourself in that stack. Where are you carving out? Where are you winning all the deals?

Kyle Porter

00:49Yeah. Of course. So we we really invented this sales engagement marketplace. And what that means is companies come to codify their go to market plays. They take their reps, whether they're inside reps, field reps, customer success managers, BDRs, SDRs, and every single one of those has something they want to achieve with customers and prospects. They codify it into one place and then execute on all those plays. We hold those reps accountable to their activities, measure their

01:13success, analyze it, and help them produce better results ongoing into the future.

Nathan Latka

01:17So would you, I mean, in terms of like directly competitive, we just had Chris Cabrera on. I mean, do you see yourself essentially as again, same, basically a younger nimble version of Xactly?

Kyle Porter

01:26No, I mean, Xactly handles compensation, right? We handle sales engagement. So it's the activities that the reps are making to communicate with their customers and prospects to generate revenue. We become the phone system. We become the email system. We link up with social systems. We help you control offline communications. Do all that in one platform, and then what happens is reps are able to have more conversations, get a 100% coverage on their target accounts, no leads

01:50fall through the cracks, generate more opportunities, generate more revenue, upsells, renewals, that sort of thing.

Nathan Latka

01:55Very cool. Okay.

Kyle Porter

01:55So it's basically like an entire communications layer on top of the CRM.

Nathan Latka

01:59Mhmm. I wanna get back in, and we'll get into CRM and kind of some interesting stuff. You did it with Benioff and sales Salesforce and, and folks like that back in the day. But, before we get that, give me a general sense as kind of a size here. Right? So if someone wants to pay for your technology for a year, give me kind of your sweet spot on average. Are we talking, like, you know, a $100

02:13a year accounts, a 100 k, a million dollar a year accounts? Where's the sweet spot for you?

ARR, Growth Rate, and Customer Range

Kyle Porter

02:17So I'll give you the quick rundown. We were four employees with zero ARR in this product in 2014. We'll hit 100,000,000 next year, sitting around the 50,000,000 mark, growing 100%, 120% net expansion, and we significantly differentiate from our competitors in a number of critical ways. In terms of our customers, we are supplying to everyone from SMB to Fortune 500 enterprises, which is something I learned from Scott Dorsey at ExactTarget, full gamut, right? So it's everything from

02:45a 15 ks customer to a million dollar customer.

Nathan Latka

02:47Okay. And how many are you serving today?

Kyle Porter

02:49Thousands.

Nathan Latka

02:50Okay. Like... Okay. Like... So call between two and ten thousand, something like that? Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. And so walk me through... I mean, there there are different sales motions I'm sure you have for each of these different cohorts. So I wanna kind of go down a couple of those, here. You said launched in 2014. That was kinda zero revenue, zero customers. When did you guys write the first line of code, though?

Company History: 2011 to 2014 and the Pivot

Kyle Porter

03:08I started the company in 2011. We built other products up to that point. The company as it is today, our entire revenue stream, that launched in 2014. So I had different products, tested different product market fit, had a data product that went from 0 to 7,000,000 in about eighteen months that I canceled and completely changed the business on. So we had a different history in the company, but what you see in SalesLoft today launched in 2014.

Nathan Latka

03:31I wanna talk about some of that pivoting, right? Because, so for example, job change alerts, right?

03:35You credit a lot of, I

03:36mean, that was one of your experiments, right? That's right. Some of these things, one helped you learn how to basically get to where you are today, but also I think a lot of them were also potentially lead gen. So tell me about one or two of those early experiments between 2011 and 2014.

Early Product Experiments Before the Core Platform

Kyle Porter

03:48We had all kinds of things. We had the job change alerts product, which would link up with your CRM, see all the contacts that people cared about, look on LinkedIn to see when they change jobs and alert you about it. We had news alert system. We had this stream. It was like Twitter, you'd open it up, and it'd be all the news articles on the companies that you cared about that you were selling to. We had

04:05the data product, which was the easiest way to build the most accurate and targeted list of prospects in the marketplace. But really none of those aligned with the vision of what I wanted to do for the purpose of this company. And they generated revenue, they generated leads, they taught us a lot in terms of product management, in terms of culture, in terms of what customers need. But at the end of the day, we started looking at

04:23what the best sellers were doing, and they were communicating with their customers in an authentic, sincere, but repeatable and scalable way. So we decided to build an entire platform for that. When you look at sales

Nathan Latka

04:34I was just gonna say, Kyle, and you... Yeah. You led with that. Tell me... Finish up with that real quick.

Kyle Porter

04:38Yeah. I was just gonna say, when you look at sales, it is a harmonious blend of two things. The customer demands this insightful, real, one to one human solutions oriented service from your sellers. But then as a company, you've gotta have something that's predictable, scalable, something you can forecast off of and count on in the future, right? And bringing those two things together is very, very difficult. Because what happens is people end up either shooting spam

05:04out of a cannon and being insincere in their sales communications, or they go way too rifle shot and they can't repeat it. And so we solved that with the sales engagement platform. That's what I learned through that journey.

Nathan Latka

05:14Take me back to 2014 because you are eating your own dog food here. You had Wayne, Anthony, Kevin in the early days, Sean and Chris doing demos. How did you know where to put a stake in the ground in terms of where to set Wayne and Anthony's kind of monthly quota at the start, which we'll talk about how they obviously beat that and you adjusted, but how'd you... The reason I'm asking this is there are lot

05:31of entrepreneurs listening, trying to make their first sales hire, and they don't know where to put the stick in the ground in terms of like quota.

Kyle Porter

05:37Well, you know, for us, it all boiled back to what was the purpose and why were we there. I had been in sales my whole life going back to a kid. I sold Beanie Babies and baseball cards and Olympic lapel pins during the nineteen ninety six Atlanta Olympics. Right? And I had this passion for serving customers and seeing the look on their eyes when they bought something that they needed. And what I learned in sales is

05:55that there were a lot of sellers doing it the wrong way. They were insincere. They were sloppy. They weren't delivering the customer the best experience. And I learned that that passion for delivering for the customer was something that I just absolutely loved. So I wanted to build a company that empowered sellers to deliver that incredible experience and do it in an authentic way where the buyer actually appreciated the sales communications. So that became the purpose of

06:17the business from day one. And as we did all these other things, you know, I kept looking at, is this fulfilling our purpose and mission? And that's why we made all those adjustments. But on the sales side, you know, I wanted someone to say, I'm quite evangelical with the way that I sell, I like to paint a big picture, and I like to transform the customer. So I brought Anthony on board, and he was super process

06:36oriented.

Nathan Latka

06:37Number one?

Kyle Porter

06:38Think he was right.

Nathan Latka

06:38Was he the first First

Kyle Porter

06:39seller that we brought on board. I had met him at Pardot. I started the company inside the Pardot offices with David Cummings, who we talked about earlier. And so I saw Anthony. I saw him working, and he just was a dog. He was

Nathan Latka

06:49a sales guy there as well?

Kyle Porter

06:51Yeah. He was. How much sales like two quarters in a row, and I brought him over.

Nathan Latka

06:55How much sales were... Did you close yourself before you felt good about passing that script to that system off to Anthony?

Kyle Porter

07:02Yeah. I don't remember the exact number. I would say it's probably somewhere around 150 k ARR, something like that.

Nathan Latka

07:10You closed, the kind of founder Yeah.

07:13So then March new ARR, we're talking 2014 now. Anthony comes in, the quota is $48,000.

Kyle Porter

07:17I don't remember the exact numbers.

Nathan Latka

07:18No, no, you're good, you're good. But it's unfair because my research team does a great job, but in March 2014, right, you set monthly quota for Anthony at somewhere around $48,000 in terms of ARR. He, along with Wayne

Kyle Porter

07:30fourteen, we had hired other people too, because we had, you know, that the data product was taking off, and it was in the millions of ARR in 2014, right? So we had an organization at that point in time, and then we shifted them over to sell the new product. Now that was a story because what we had was we had this old product that was growing. It was easy to use. It was easy to buy. It

07:49was easy to understand, and sellers were making great money on it. Then I introduced this new product. It's not built out yet. It's evangelical. It's a new category. Wait.

Nathan Latka

07:57When when did you launch that second product, Kyle?

Kyle Porter

08:00End of two thousand fourteen.

Nathan Latka

08:01Okay. So this was when you essentially went from 30 customers and 200 k in ARR up to six sixty customers and $3,700,000 in ARR. That was... A lot of that revenue growth was potentially from that second product introduction.

Kyle Porter

08:12Yeah. Because in 2015, we were 200 k on the new product. Yeah. Thousand fifteen.

Nathan Latka

08:16So it

Kyle Porter

08:16was all the old revenue. When I tell revenue numbers now, I don't even bring in the old product at all. It's just all what we do today.

Nathan Latka

08:22Yeah.

Kyle Porter

08:23It won't be anything I

08:24even thought it anymore.

Nathan Latka

08:24Things advance and changing. And the reason I'm pulling this out is because I like collecting patterns. Right? And so there are people listening that are at that stage. We can now fast forward to where you're at today. Right? Which is there's a lot of people that listen that are in the $30, 40, 50,000,000 up to a $180,000,000 ARR range. So let's talk about... You said a 120% net retention. Right? Peel that onion back for me. So on a

08:43gross churn revenue level, what is that? What's expansion typically?

Net Revenue Retention, Bookings Mix, and the G2 Crowd Ranking

Kyle Porter

08:46High eighties, nineties, something like that. Yeah. And we're doing about fifty fifty on net new logo bookings and current customer bookings today.

Nathan Latka

08:53Okay. So growth right now is driven, again, fifty fifty between net... New brand new and expansion.

Kyle Porter

08:58Four... 45 expansion, 55 Okay. Net new logo. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:01So if you're retaining What

Kyle Porter

09:02do is we have we have a mid market team run by a mid market VP. We've got an enterprise team run by an enterprise VP. They both roll up to the CRO. Full organizations under them, solutions engineers, sales ops is is more centralized, and, you know, SDR teams for both. Right? And they just go to market, and it's primarily inside sales. Although the enterprise team, we've got a a handful of field reps. One of the differentiators

09:26for SalesLoft is we're in Atlanta. And what that means is is that I have a lower employee churn than any of the other companies in the category. Just the way things happen in Atlanta. How low...

Nathan Latka

09:36What is low? What is low? What's the actual number? How low is your

Kyle Porter

09:40Just Just barely in the double digits. I don't have the facts on me right now, but it's I have

Nathan Latka

09:45to ask you, by way. When you say lowest in the industry, I assume you know the number and you Yeah.

Kyle Porter

09:48Know how you that's what we hear from our investors when we report it at the board meetings. Right? So Atlanta gives us all of those opportunities, but we also have the offices in New York, London, Guadalajara, and in San Francisco. And so that gives us an opportunity to get out in the field with our customers, and we do that in the enterprise side. But it is... You know, it's a it's a growth market. If you think

10:09about sales engagement, engagement, it didn't exist two, three years ago. Right? So when you think of companies like Slack and Zoom, incredible businesses, but they're replacing old ways of doing the same thing. Right? With sales engagement, this never happened before. Right? The CRM didn't do these things. People had phone systems. They had email systems, but they didn't have one communications platform. Right? So G2 Crowd, really the only analyst in the category at this time. I

10:30know Forrester has done some reviews, but G2 Crowd has ranked us as number one in the category for the last three quarters in a row. Looks like we're there right now. And if you run NPS on all of those reviews, because it's a one through 10 ranking, right, it's like an 80 NPS on that, which is really strong, of course.

Nathan Latka

10:47You know, are healthy. By the way, I mean, you're in a great spot. I mean, great hot market, hot space. Right? I mean, you are in it. There... As an entrepreneur in

10:54terms of doing what you love and doing something big, I

10:56mean, you're you're right in the sweet spot, product timing, everything. Let me take a quick microscope to mid market segment. So the way you built your mid market SDR to AE to CSM, I wanna understand this a little bit. So do you right now kind of... Do you know what the ratio is between kind of SDRs, two AEs to customer success reps in that segment or no?

Sales Team Structure: Mid-Market and Enterprise

Kyle Porter

11:11No. I don't know the ratios. I... You know, we've got a a staff that's leading. I knew it when we were early on. We we actually had a heavier SDR to AE ratio than I think the market did in the early days.

Nathan Latka

11:20What does that mean? Like, had more SDRs per AE?

Kyle Porter

11:22Like, three SDRs to two AEs I see. Was our original setup when I was leading the team back then, right, as we brought on Sean Murray to run sales, I think it's more balanced to closer to... I think it's a two to one, two AEs to one SDR in the enterprise.

Nathan Latka

11:39Okay.

Kyle Porter

11:39And it's like three AEs to two SDRs in the commercial market. So I think that's probably roughly.

Nathan Latka

11:44Commercials mid market?

Kyle Porter

11:46Yeah. Well, we call commercial mid market and SMB.

Nathan Latka

11:49Okay, fair enough.

Kyle Porter

11:50Those two things combined and they're baked in. There's teams within there, but one leader.

Nathan Latka

11:54And then again, going back to expansion real quick. So you said 120% net revenue retention, you said 90% gross retention annually, which means you need about 30% again, expansion, right, to get up to one twenty. Where is that that expansion revenue, that 30%? Is is that consistent across both mid market or your commercial and your enterprise, or do you see enterprise being way higher?

Kyle Porter

12:11Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, the SMB markets have a higher gross churn than the enterprise market does. Right? But what we're doing is, there's two things that SalesLoft does that differentiate. One, we are serving all customer revenue facing roles. Right? So this isn't just SDRs and inside sales AEs, but it includes field reps and account managers and that sort of, you know, type of communicator. Right? So when we will sign up a customer and it

12:35might be SDRs and inside sales, then it will expand to the field team or demand gen team or the account management team. So there's a lot of expansion in there. And then the other one is is that when you look at SalesLoft, it's the only systems that... That's the full suite of sales engagement. So it's not just phone, email, the cadence engine, the calendar, but also includes coaching type tools like our conversation intelligence platform. So a

12:58lot of times customers will come on board, and before we acquired this conversation intelligence platform, they didn't use that, of course, so there's a cross sell opportunity to bring that in.

Nathan Latka

13:06Yep. What are your most powerful kind of upsell levers currently? Is it number of seats? Is it feature based upselling or some utility based metric driven upsell?

Upsell Levers and the Note Agent Acquisition

Kyle Porter

13:15In the enterprise, it's different departments or different organizations under the the the main brand.

Nathan Latka

13:20Seats.

Kyle Porter

13:21In the smaller market, it's it's... Yeah. Seats in both, but it's different departments in one, and then it's different roles in the smaller companies. So the smaller companies might start off with inside an SDR and add in the field or add a demand gen team or something like that. Whereas a lot of times in the enterprise, it's like, hey, we have this complete division. Now we're moving over to this other one that, you know, we didn't

13:41have purview into when we went to the deal.

Nathan Latka

13:42One way to grow, obviously, expansion... I I would consider a world class for expansion. Net revenue retention is about one forty percent. And one way to go from kinda 30% expansion up north is to go acquire other companies and then obviously put a pro forma together and cross sell, right, with your sales motion. And any talks right now to acquire any companies?

Kyle Porter

13:59No, we're not. We did acquire a company last year. We bought a company called Note Agent that played in the conversation intelligence space. So competitors of that product would be like Chorus and Gong. You might be aware of them. So we rolled that into SalesLoft, and that's part of the cross sell. But we've also included that in some packages depending upon the customer.

Nathan Latka

14:16Was that a... I mean, was that basically, like, you didn't have to put any cash for that deal? Was it like an equity kind thing or was it a real acquisition with real I mean, I I...

Kyle Porter

14:22The the founders can tell that story if they want to.

Nathan Latka

14:25Were they bootstrapped or they raised capital?

Kyle Porter

14:27They were bootstrapped. Yeah. They hadn't raised any capital.

14:29Okay. They're still here. They're employees of SalesLoft.

Nathan Latka

14:30That's very good. Okay. Fantastic.

Total Funding Raised and Cash Position

Nathan Latka

14:32That's good. Okay. Good. So upsell, I understand that. Expansion, that's great. Obviously, you raised capital. What's the total figure today?

Kyle Porter

14:39140, I believe.

Nathan Latka

14:40Yeah. So how do you... I mean, look. Obviously, it's a sexy number. You get all the TechCrunch headlines. You're a smart content guy. You know how to use it as leverage, but obviously, you wouldn't do it unless it really helped you drive the business. But you also have to manage dilution. Right? So some people might look at that and go, oh my gosh, they're doing 140 today. Their ARR to funding ratio is like one to three,

14:57right? They've got 50,000,000 ARR, 140 raised. You know, Eric just went public with Zoom and it was opposite, right? His revenue was double what his total funding was, right? So how do you get your revenues to catch up to your total funding raised?

Kyle Porter

15:07Well, first of all, gotta think that the biggest investment that we ever raised just happened. We had cash in the bank when that happened, so we still got tons of cash in the bank. Yep. So there's a difference between ARR to money raised. You could look at ARR to money burned, and that's a totally different ratio. Right? So we're still sitting on half of that money or more. Right?

Nathan Latka

15:24Half of the half of the 140?

Kyle Porter

15:26Yeah. That's just in the bank. Right? So that's the first thing. But I think when you come to investors, the the biggest thing for me is, they gonna take this business to the next level? And I just absolutely love the investors that we've saddled up to. And if you think about it, Zoom, biggest shareholder of Zoom from an investor is Emergence Capital. Right? And Jason Green, he's on those board... In those board meetings. Jason's in my

15:46board meetings. He's one of the biggest advisers to our organization. But by the way, Zoom, you know, incredible company, once in a lifetime opportunity. But again, Zoom is a replicative business. That market existed. They came in with something absolutely better than the

Nathan Latka

15:59Cisco That's Webex I love it, right? I mean, everyone says you have to have a new idea, and the fact is you can just out execute.

Kyle Porter

16:04Oh, yeah, it's absolutely great. I mean, incredible. Incredible business. And I think that one of the really cool things that Eric did with Zoom is the r and d spend as a percentage of revenue because of the China connection.

Nathan Latka

16:15Wait. Tell me tell me tell me more about that.

Kyle Porter

16:18Well, I have to pay US... I I pay US engineers. He pays Chinese engineers. I mean, that's... You know, there's a difference there. Right? And there is arbitrage. Love my engineers, and they're fantastic.

Nathan Latka

16:27Yeah. You would see so... There there are so many different ways when you look at arbitrage on development teams. Obviously, he was China, but there are so many, even Canadian companies using SR&ED, right, and getting 60% rebates No, from the

Kyle Porter

16:38it's just

Nathan Latka

16:39that we don't have this kind of leverage in The US anywhere. There's no... Like a government in China and Canada will essentially pay 60% of developer salaries if you're spending it on R and D. So it's subsidized. Right? Like, don't have that. Right?

Kyle Porter

16:49Yeah. We have some R and D tax credits, but they don't... I mean, they're at single digits.

Nathan Latka

16:52Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Very good. So one forty raise, 70 in the bank. You're being smart about growth. How aggressive are you being to acquire new customers? Are happy with a twelve month payback, or are up to twenty four months? What are you looking at?

CAC Payback Period and Growth Efficiency

Kyle Porter

17:03Just shy... Like, thirteen, fourteen months right now.

Nathan Latka

17:06Generally moving up, like, more aggressive or less aggressive? What's the trend? Which way are you going?

Kyle Porter

17:10It's hovered. We see it kind of go up a little bit and down a little bit as we get... When we do our annual conference, it goes up that month, that quarter, right? And then it goes back down, then it goes back up at the end of the year. So I think it's been pretty stagnant, but, you know, we continue to invest in growth, but we do it in a healthy way. You know, we've always been

17:27focused on efficiency, and, you know, we don't want obviously a heavy amount of dilution when we raise our rounds. And so, you know, I think, you know, for us, it's it's been... That's always the balance you have to look at in the businesses. And the other thing is because it is a new category of business, these enterprise organizations, they need some evangelical sale in a lot of these scenarios, and there's other hurdles to get through in

17:47terms of procurement and legal and IT. So we're just making sure that we time the market as best as we can. And, of course, you know, that's that's always, you know, a little bit of a crapshoot, but we've learned to do it pretty well.

Burn Rate and Path to IPO

Nathan Latka

17:56That's good. No. And look, the biggest expenses, obviously, are headcount, marketing, and sales, obviously, look to scale. How aggressive are you being in terms of burn? You're talking like 5,000,000 burn a month or more or less?

Kyle Porter

18:04Less.

Nathan Latka

18:05Less. Okay.

18:05Fair Fair enough.

18:06Do you think you'll scale up to that level with the new new raise or no?

Kyle Porter

18:10No. I mean, all of our financial projections have us with the possibility of taking this round to be the last round. Now that doesn't mean we might not raise again depending upon the market

Nathan Latka

18:18Last round before IPO?

Kyle Porter

18:20Yeah. That... Last round before that. You know, we... We're building the business to be IPO ready. I'm not telling my employees that it's IPO or bust because I wanna, you know, make sure that they know that we can still have a great business if we don't do that. Who knows what happens in the macroeconomic climate? You've got crazy things happening with the president. And so I don't wanna, you know, put all our eggs in that basket,

18:37but we also didn't build this company to sell it. I built this company to transform the profession of sales forever, and that's what I wanna do so that forty years back... You know, forty years from today, when you look at the timeline of sales, you'll see a giant SalesLoft stamp, like right in the middle of it.

Nathan Latka

18:49I love the vision. What's the team size today? How many folks?

Kyle Porter

18:51A little over 400.

Nathan Latka

18:53Okay, a little over 400. And then you said you're at about 50 in terms of run rate today, 50,000,000. Where were you about a year ago? Do you remember?

Kyle Porter

18:59This time a year. A year ago, it was probably '26 at five, 20. Yeah. Something like that.

Nathan Latka

19:05'25. Okay. Good. So, I mean, I mean, the re... It's always interesting to companies your scale. Right? You can... You know, the two x two x year over year gets harder and harder, obviously, the bigger you get. Right? So it's it's like, how

Kyle Porter

19:14do you less than a 100% year on year from today?

Nathan Latka

19:16Oh, yeah. So not that much. If we go on 50 to a 100... Yeah. So you're trying to... You're basically telling your team, hey, guys. Makes it more difficult. Exactly. Yeah. You're telling your team, hey, guys. Listen. We're... It's not IPO or bust, but we're hoping, you know, mid next year ish, we're in a position to, if we want to, do it.

Kyle Porter

19:28Well, I think, you know, companies are getting a little further than the $100,000,000 mark when they file for IPO too. So, you know, I don't think we would look at filing at that level when we were... If we were there and wanna do that. I think it'd probably be one forty, one fifty where you start having those conversations.

Nathan Latka

19:43Interesting. Okay. Last question here about

Kyle Porter

19:45can change, I've got a CFO who knows way more about that than I do.

Distribution Channels and the Sales Hacker Question

Nathan Latka

19:48Fair enough. Good asterisk there. Last question here. Distribution channels are critical in any SaaS company. And one the I love to look at is how founders play arbitrage games on their distribution channel. Sales Hacker was a distribution channel for you guys in terms of similar web and Alexa data in terms of traffic drive... Driven into you guys.

Kyle Porter

20:04Thinking about one of my competitors because No. No. Sales Hacker is owned by someone else.

Nathan Latka

20:07I know. If you let me finish the question. So they were acquired by Outreach. And so my question to you is why did you let that distribution channel get away? Were you okay sitting out with that acquisition?

Kyle Porter

20:16Wasn't really a distribution channel for us. That was just a content marketplace. I mean, we paid, like, we we sponsored their conferences and went to their conferences, but they weren't that much... They weren't, like, higher ROI than the other conferences that we run or anything like that.

Nathan Latka

20:29I know. And if spending if you're spending...

20:31That's my question. If you're spending money there, you were doing it because it was making you some amount of money. And I'm just curious from an aggressive or defensive perspective, why do you let a distribution that you were paying to be in get away to a competitor? Do you just not see it as... It wasn't as valuable to you as it was to Manny?

Kyle Porter

20:44Yeah. I think so. And they already had a relationship. I think Manny, I think they were investors in each other's businesses, so that that was kinda already baked in from early on. But for us, I mean, there was other channel... There were other channels that were equally as effective. And I think Sales Hacker for us was more of a brand play. You know? Hey. We wanna connect with our customers. I I would go to Sales Hacker and speak,

21:01and the biggest benefit was I get off stage and meet with 15 of my customers, get to shake their hand and say hi. Right? But then we really started picking up and investing in our own conference, and that was 1,400 people last year. So, you know, that that ended up eclipsing the other conferences that we would go to in terms of being able to bring our customers and prospects into a place and spend time with them.

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, and Tools

Nathan Latka

21:18Good stuff. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Kyle Porter

21:22The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. Organizational health is the biggest differentiator a company can achieve.

Nathan Latka

21:26Number two, CEO you're following or studying.

Kyle Porter

21:29It's hard not to follow Benioff. I like the CEO of Southwest. I forgot his name, but I... I've read all of his articles.

Nathan Latka

21:36You're not in acquisition talks right now with with Benioff, are you? No. Nothing with LinkedIn either. It's your it's your third most used module. No? No LinkedIn or Microsoft?

Kyle Porter

21:44Not in acquisitions talks with anyone. We're not building this business to sell it.

Nathan Latka

21:47Alright. Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building your company besides besides SalesLoft?

Kyle Porter

21:52I mean, the Gmail suite. You know? I mean

Nathan Latka

21:58Number four, how many hours of sleep you get every night?

Kyle Porter

22:01I target six.

Nathan Latka

22:02Alright.

Personal Life, Purpose, and Closing Thoughts

Kyle Porter

22:03Six to seven.

Nathan Latka

22:03And how old are you, Kyle?

Kyle Porter

22:0537.

Nathan Latka

22:0637. In situation, married, single kiddos?

Kyle Porter

22:09Married, eleven years, April. Son, two, Clark. Daughter, five, Brooklyn.

Nathan Latka

22:15I thought you were gonna say married and 11 kids, and I was going, cow. This guy's a machine. Alright. Last question, Kyle.

22:21What do wish your 20 Couldn't

Kyle Porter

22:23have done it without my wife, by the way. All entrepreneurs listening to this thing, having someone in the trenches with you, she never once complained. I went fourteen months, no salary, invested all my money into the business. Never once you should get a job. This thing's crashing, always there by my side. Number one sidekick, lover to death. Lucky,

Nathan Latka

22:39lucky man, Kyle, lucky man.

22:40All right, take us back seventeen years. What do wish your 20 year old self knew?

Kyle Porter

22:43You

22:46know, I think it's about purpose. Right? I've got this written on my wall right here. It says my purpose is to grow and equip others to do remarkable things and lead significant and fulfilled lives. And that... I I started to realize that when I was 20. And I grew up fast because I got in some trouble and I had to change my life. And after that, it was wake up every day with that as my mission.

23:05I wish that was my mission when I was 16, 17.

Nathan Latka

23:07Guys, Kyle Porter, SalesLoft, playing in the sales engagement space in a big way. $140,000,000 raised to, again, grow the company. Now serving thousands, call it between two and ten thousand customers, doing about a $50,000,000 run rate up from $25,000,000 just a year ago, burning less than $5,000,000 a month to drive that growth. A 120% net revenue retention as they look to scale, paying tax anywhere between kind of fourteen and sixteen month payback periods. Again, healthy growth,

23:29healthy scale, healthy economics. Kyle, thanks for taking us to the top.

Kyle Porter

23:32Thanks, Nathan. Have a great day.