How Thousandeyes CEO Mohit Lad grew Thousandeyes to $102M revenue and 1K customers in 2020.

hello everybody my guest today is mohit lad he runs a company called thousand eyes which empowers businesses to see understand and improve connected experiences everywhere the cloud platform offers unmatched vantage points through the global internet and provides immediate visibility and experience for every user and application over any network so companies can deliver superior digital experiences the company is central to the global war operations of the world's largest and fastest growing brands including comcast ebay hp 100 of the global 2060 of the fortune 500 along with five of the six top u.s banks and 20 of the 25 top sas companies mohit are you ready to take us to the top uh yeah i am look forward to it it's pretty it's pretty remarkable this what this all started with what a million dollar grampy got in small chunks huh yeah so it actually started with a 150k grand that was from the national science foundation and we chose it out of building the company based on really building a first version of the product and taking it to market versus raising venture money so that grant over a period of time over the next two years totaled about a million dollars but yeah small start well that's right and what year was that when did you launch so this was 2010 so we we started the company officially in 2010 and we launched the product in 2013 but we started selling it from early 2011 and we're just sort of acquiring customers making sure we really understand what what are the problems we're solving for the customers and then working on from there yeah so give us a good example here so people can really wrap their head around what you do because you obviously touch a lot of big brands but what do you specifically do for say one of the top six us banks yeah so uh we really help people understand how the internet works and how it's affecting digital experience and so there's there's several examples of how we help but the the one example that resonates a lot with folks is if you have an online asset let's say you're a banking site that you're reaching your consumer users that are all over the world and you're relying on this public best effort internet to actually reach them and we help them help our brands really have this google maps like view of what the red is and how can they actually route around it so you would be still able to get a great amount of reachability to your user base so that's one use case and the same technology also works when you're a large enterprise organization and you're going to cloud-based applications like office 365 and salesforce and all these apps that are outside because you're still dependent on this internet which is outside your four walls as a network so we're really helping people understand these complex environments and help them run their business and ensure the best digital experience for their customers and so what's an action someone might take once they start using you you make the you make the invisible visible they see red spots what do they do to correct the red spots so oftentimes the most basic things people get into when there is an issue is gathering 10 teams the app team the server team the network team the infrastructure team and nobody knows what's going on so just the starting point of where do we even start to look at where the problem is is really important so one of the first things we do is let them have a very clear understanding of the application is fine the servers are fine the network is a problem so the rest of the guys can go now the network team it's not your network it's the internet so okay now that we know that it's the internet which part of the internet and then you can understand how do you fix it so for example most online businesses would have multiple providers that they use at their data centers and once they know where the issue is they can move traffic away from one move it towards another if you're using a cdn and one of the one of the areas that the cdn has is problematic then you again help them understand what needs to be fixed so if a company has a highly trafficked pricing page and they want to knock a couple of milliseconds off the load time because that'll increase conversions by three percent they might use you to figure out how to get those milliseconds back yeah correct and like your application in your data center might be really fast but when it's transiting over the internet especially as it goes to regions like asia and africa and so on the user experience can be really bad because you're covering large distances over public environments and interesting once you know what paths people are taking you can start to make the experience better by optimizing around it interesting okay and give me a general sense here i know you probably have tons of different customer stories but i'm going to try and force you into an average just because we're short on time i mean are we talking average acvs here in like 10 grand 100 grand a million 10 million generally where do you play yeah so we we won't we're a private company so we don't share financials but we have a ton of customers that are anywhere from the 100k range to a few million dollars in annual spends okay so these are it's it's really important uh to be connected to your customers as as a consumer brand as well as to provide a continuous highly productive environment for your employees and so from a standpoint of the risk and the importance of the internet this is a big deal yeah so i want to talk more about that but let me in terms of security and things of that nature but first color the team for me what's the team size today uh the company yeah yeah so we're about to closing to 250 employees now and we're headquartered in san francisco offices in austin london new york uh japan as well and growing had a face fast space including a recent office in dublin that's great so of the 250 people walk me through your sales machines so sdrs aes customer success what's the ratio between all of them yeah so on the sales team in general and and this is sometimes it's a little hard to uh decouple a certain set of functions for example we have a customer support function that indicates that engages a lot with customers and they would be also helping sometimes in a poc if there's a certain element of integration working and so on but i would say the sales team at this point if i combine everybody on the sales side including str's and so on would be somewhere in the 70 200 range okay 70 folks there and then you know a big debate right now with with you know see you as i interview they're doing anywhere between 60 and 200 million bucks in arr the customer successful is really important to drive expansion revenue but people have tons of different models in terms of incentive structure some of them are quota carrying some are not some it's like a pool bonus how do you generally incentivize your customer success team yeah so customer success means different things in different companies for us customer success team is actually more of a technical team that solve issue so they're not the team that's renewing customer accounts they actually engage with the customers to drive adoption to make sure that the customers really understand how to use get the most out of the platform we actually accept we built that looks into uh taking care of renewals and that also is responsible to make sure that they're quarterbacking any kind of coordination and so on and that team you would incentivize them based on a renewals target which is fairly standard on the sas side of the world is that the ae that initially closed the deal that stays with the account or there is a pass off no so we don't pass off entirely because we work with enterprise customers and all our customers continue to grow so we need an ongoing relationship but we would add a team to the the team that would close the account but then we would have an account management team that would add on to it and they would be the quarterback for the relationship while the sales team will continue to engage and look our sales team is not transactional where they will disengage if there is no deal the the idea of the sales team is there they're invested in the success of the customer and oftentimes we don't have a customer that is buying in a quarter but our team is still engaged heavily to make sure that they're getting the most value and this is something that i think entrepreneurs should realize is you want to create some division of responsibility so the the account management can own the renewals but you never want the sales team to be only focused on new dollars and forget the customer otherwise you your the team's responsibility is to make the customers successful yeah 100 that's what these sdr to ae to customer success to onboarding is such such a critical relationship um that's helpful to understand um one of the things you know brian hogan when he came on talked really importantly about how pricing axes enabled him to drive significant expansion revenue and that was a critical moment for them because that's how you get really incredible exponential growth so for you you know i'm gonna i'm gonna say i'm a sample customer let's say i sign right now for a hundred thousand dollar acv account over the next year i mean what what what would you expect me to expand to in my next year's contract yeah so a typical customer let's say they sign up for a hundred thousand dollars they would focus on making sure that they can understand and improve their experience for like the two or three key apps that they care about or the two or three key apps that they're having some concerns or problems around and as they see value they would add more apps or they would add more coverage from...