A founder scaling a multi-billion dollar company finds peer advice nearly impossible to find. They lean on investors and portfolio companies instead, citing Christoph Janss, who backed Zendesk early, as a crucial source for learning how to scale SaaS.
Where do you go when you have these really rare— there's not a lot of people are going through the stage of growth that you are at.
Yeah. So where do you go? Where do you go to go? I mean, to be totally honest, it's, it's a bit of a challenge as you get to the stage and scale that Clio's at. There is a, a vanishingly small number of people, especially in the local community. Even if you expand the aperture to, to Canada, there's, you know, a tiny handful of people. Toby's one of them. Yeah. That have seen this stage of growth and the scale of growth. One of the more valuable resources I've found in our investors that have portfolio companies that are at that next stage of growth that I can learn from. So even if I think back to our earliest investment round, a guy named Christoph Janss led our first investment round, or really was our first external investor in Clio. And his first angel investment, uh, prior to Clio was in a little company out of Denmark called Zendesk.
Wow.
They were kind of 2 or 3 turns of the revenue crank ahead of Clio, so we were $50 million, they were $100 million in ARR. And I was able to learn a ton about just, you know, the fundamentals of how to think about SaaS economics. There was no Jason Lemkin, no David Skok writing about this stuff. It was really almost an oral tradition of shared knowledge. And, and that was immensely valuable.
Don't make this mistake when hiring executives or you'll pay dearly for it - Jack Newton
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