How Vendr CEO Ryan Neu grew to $94.8M revenue with a 225 person team in 2024.

all right we got a cozy little crowd we'll keep it a little informal I'll also share for the video so the talk today is about why velocity is the number one and I believe increasingly the only sustainable Advantage when building a startup so the key areas are one why that's the case it's because there's so much opportunity in the market more resources meaning there's a lot more competition I mean just out there we're seeing three companies that are competitors of my company vendor and I should have introduced myself Ariel Diaz co-founder and chief strategy officer at vendor before that I was three-time founder and CEO including company called blissfully which did SAS management merged with Bender about a year ago to other companies before that and so first is the fact that there's so much opportunity and resources out there makes for a lot of competition which is part two and then three is velocities the only thing that helps you stay ahead of that competition so first off opportunity is so abundant primarily because there's been an explosion of capital coming in in the last few years this has slowed down more recently but we're still seeing you can call it zero interest rate phenomenon which is a lot of startups going after increasingly relatively constrained pies so you'll have tons of money coming into it and in addition to Capital which we talked about we have better tools to build products faster so this is through technology more and more of the stack that you need to build a product is Plug and Play you can spin up a few you know npm install your favorite stuff spin a bunch of great technology up and you've got all this great tools at your disposal at disposal not just while you're building your product but also while you're building your company with all the different SAS products out there to help you run more efficiently help grow business to help find whatever Niche you need again a lot of those companies we're seeing here at all you combine these two things and it also results in just a lower barrier to entry it's easier than ever to get started with a SAS app a product to do one particular Niche start charging for it and you end up having you know a bunch of coalescing factors that result in the key Point number two which is the market is getting more and more competitive so to share a little bit of what we're seeing in some of the data that we we see so we see about a couple of percentage points of all SAS spend at vendor that we help process and we help leverage that data to help our customers save money to help find the right products and we see interesting data across two big categories one is project management category so this is well-known companies like Assan and Monday but also a lot of new entrants and over the course of one year we saw 30 increase in a number of unique project management products that were out there working on and this is a mature category that's growing at 30 percent a year not in terms of Revenue and users but in terms of number of products available for purchase that's a lot of products out there and the second category so this is on the sorry that was on the on project management is growing about 25 and another common cater which digital analytics is growing at 30 we actually see some of these companies here so you're seeing a lot of new entrants capitalize well leveraging these great tools so that results in this really intense competition that's likely going to continue to get more intense so the reality is you don't have to outrun the bear you just got to outrun your competitors and that's why velocity matters so much so velocity as the primary driver for overall success as you're out running not the bear but everyone else trying to outrun the bearer so one we're seeing anytime there's a new category that velocity lead doesn't matter after the first Head Start right and you see a lot of times where the category leader has a head start but that might last used to last maybe years but that cycle keeps compressing where that Advantage gets shorter and shorter and it's because of all the stuff we've talked about more Capital better tools better products faster marketing more distribution channels and everything else so that's not enough right being the category Creator is not enough that gives you maybe a couple of quarters of heads up so you have to just move faster and you have to maintain that lead and the ways you can maintain that lead is one through company culture so velocity means you're shipping you're iterating you're improving the product you're testing your channels and you're doing this all at a really quick cycle time so we and the word velocity matters here because velocity is speed and direction it's kind of the magnitude of how fast you're moving and where you're going and both matter and in some cases you might want to go slower speed but find the right direction and then accelerate and then at vendor we've actually created velocity as one of our four company values vendor there's the name of the company so we call it V is for velocity because we want to make sure that every day that we realize we've got a whole slew of competitors both direct and indirect adjacency is that could potentially get into the same space again a few of them are here with some booths right outside so therefore we need to make maintain that velocity accelerate what we're doing whether it's across product marketing internal decision making there's a lot of rubrics out there one well-known one is Jeff Bezos at Amazon says one-way door versus two-way doors so if you have two-way doors you can actually make that decision quickly because you can reverse it if needed whereas one-way doors you might want to be more thoughtful and deliberate so there's a few ways that you can build velocity into the culture and then another framework that's interesting is that if you think of a company as a group of individuals each individual is a little vector and velocity itself is a vector right the vector is a magnitude and Direction so the overall company velocity is going to be the sum of the vectors of individuals this actually talked that darmesh shot HubSpot gave from a fun conversation of Elon Musk it's kind of name name drop in some folks that believe similar things to show some uh you know reinforce ethos so if you think of it that way you want to to increase velocity you need to do two things you need to increase the magnitude of all the individuals in the company and you need to make sure they're aligned pretty well so this is how we think about uh about velocity so to kind of summarize again there's there's three big things more opportunities resources and tooling reduces the barrier to entry increases competition resulting in velocity being the only true sustainable advantage so I'm that's kind of the the bulk of it keep it short and sweet I know we're the first one and I can kind of switch it open to questions and we've got a little cozy cozy crowd here in a long time yeah [Music] things you pursue as a team like is that the okay Arts how do you think about that yeah it's a great question so a couple things that we've done especially when we're building okrs for this year is try to figure out which ones are high confidence areas that you're pretty sure on the goal and you just need to get there faster and then it's really about operational efficiency building the right team uh getting the right folks to move faster into a known kind of good Hill to climb but there are other initiatives where you don't know enough and in those times you probably want to slow down and more and be more of like a way finding mode uh we have one of our okrs is here across the company and we're a post-product market fit you know raise 200 million dollars uh you know 400 company but one of our okrs for this year includes finding product Market fit in this new initiative right we'll start talking about it more publicly in a bit so in that category velocity is more about Direction finding than it is about speed and and increasing that whereas there's other areas where we've got a mature sales team 100 people we've got a really aggressive product roadmap we've got 100 people there too and it's around build a road map that we're really highly confident in how do you build that with high quality and velocity on the product how do you build a marketing channel that's delivering the pipeline that we need to go hit our aggressive sales goals so those are kind of pretty clear waypoints and we're just moving fast increasing speed towards a known Direction and there's others where we're in kind of exploring we're moving slowly we're finding product Market fit we're kind of heat seeking and then as we get more signals we can start increasing the speed so we think of those as different you know how fast that's a great great question and I found it through this together very quickly so there's some a lot of fun deep depth in here so it depends a lot on the the department so if we look at product versus like sales those are kind of like two big categories where we know where we're going and it's all about increasing the speed so for product it's hard to put a number on it measure and I think there's there's a lot of potentially bad effort to over to create a number more too specifically but conceptual the way we think about product velocity is how quickly are we shipping high quality products to customers how quickly are we adding customer value not how quickly are we writing code not how quickly are we shipping features but how quickly are we delivering customer value and that's the unit now you know measuring that is a little nuanced because it's well you know there's ways there's indicators of you know feedback and product board and customer satisfaction and feedback to customer success but in general the the unit is customer value and then the measurement of that gets a little squishy sales and marketing is much more straightforward the unit for marketings pipeline generation right in a sales Lab company the unit for sale Bud for sales is revenue right or ARR you can kind of slice it in you know first year tcv um now now the fun the the funds Parts all right I'm gonna I'm gonna give uh come on in we're going to give a lightning summary there's some fun stuff in here okay yeah round round two I'll I'll breathe through this uh these slides are also a little wordy sorry about that for the new folks I'm Ariel Diaz co-founder Chief strategy officer at vendor previously was co-founder and CEO at blissfully a early SAS management platform we merged with vendor about a year ago so now I'm co-foundering two strategy there and before that was enough did uh you know three-time founder CEO been doing startups for for a while and I believe that velocity is the number one and increasingly the only sustainable advantage in the startup ecosystem so we'll talk about three big reasons one is there's more opportunity and resources and funds than ever two resulting in much more competition three which means you can only win by increasing velocity so one Capital we've all seen this massive boom in capital the zero interest rate phenomenon so that massive increase in capital results in more companies uh it also has led to a lot better tools to build and sell whatever you're doing it has reduced the barriers to entry as all these things combine so every category what used to be a category with one actually I'll switch there so so that results in the market getting a lot more competitive a couple of data points on the competition that we see at vendors we see a couple of percentage points of SAS spend uh across the world uh project management category the number of vendors let alone the growth rate has increased 25 year over year so and that's a mature category in digital analytics it's been it's increased 30 another mature category bi and these are products that increasing are harder to differentiate but you're still getting new entrants coming into the space and so this increased competition because of more fund better technology to build products faster lower barriers to entry means that every category gets much more competitive and the first mover advantage gets lower and lower so the good thing is you don't have to outrun the Bear right competition is this mass is the bear you don't have to run the bear you just have to outrun your friends right because the bear is going to catch catch someone so you just have to outrun your friends and the way you do that is by building velocity into how you build and run your business because of all the factors so and then a couple of things one category creation it used to be maybe a multi-year head start now it's a few months right the number of categories we have three competitors a vendor here we've got multiple people in the security and kind of stock to automation here so that Head Start goes it is months maybe Quarters at most these days so that's why velocity matters so much two ways to do it you kind of embed it into your company culture we were talking about some of the kpis and how you track that for product for sales for marketing and the the reason to think about that way is because the the company essentially is a you know if individuals are vectors right and velocity is a vector of you know speed and and Direction the company is the sum of all those vectors right you add vectors by summing their their magnitude and their Direction so there's two ways to increase velocity one is you get people aligned in the right direction and two is you get them to increase the magnitude of their own kind of speed their their effectiveness and if you do that over and over uh you can really build velocity into into the company and otherwise it's just going to be really tough because there's a lot of other people that are working working on this so like the old saying right in Africa every day a line wakes up and if it doesn't outrun the slowest gazelle he goes hungry and every day a gazelle wakes up saying like if I if I don't outrun the fastest lion right I'm not going to see the next morning so the either way whether you're a line or gazelle you're running every day you're running so you just have to realize that that's kind of the only the only sustainable Advantage so thank you hope that lightning version was was fun and happy to get another couple minutes for questions if anything jumps out [Applause]