#68: Bobby Pinero - CEO of Equals & Intercom's Former Head of Finance & Analytics

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This is Bobby. Bobby's the founder of Equals. Why don't you do the introduction? Who are you and what is Equals?

Sweet. Yeah. So founder, CEO. Company called Equals. Equals is. Well, it's a passion project for me and it comes from, you know, before starting equals, I spent 10 years as an analyst. Most notably, I was. I ran finance analytics. A bunch of different teams at Intercom joined when it was 20 people, left when it was 700 people and started Equals. Equals is a spreadsheet. It's a next generation spreadsheet. It's connected to live data, it's connected to data warehouses. We have a whole thesis around how collaboration around spreadsheets can be fundamentally better. And we've got a whole versioning system that sits on top of the spreadsheet as well. It's just a fundamentally better way for business analysts to work outside of Excel and Google sheets.

You got your girls home today?

I do, my kids. My daughter is home from spring break.

Nice.

She might pop in here at some point. Forgive me. That's great.

That's the best. And you're a dad, a founder and a dad, and you're working your ass off right now.

That's all I do, man. Working kids, I've got.

Did you. At what point in the Intercom, like from you being the 20th employee at Intercom to 700 when you left, like, how far into that journey did you think? Like, I want to go start a company someday.

I think I've always known that to a certain degree. So one of the most influential classes I took, so I went to Stanford. That was back in. I graduated 2010. And there was. Of all my classes I took there, there was one class that I really. One class that I really remember anything from, to be honest. And it was this engineering entrepreneurship class was taught by a guy named Steve Blank, very famous in the tech community. And the whole idea was, in 10 weeks, you have to start a company, you have to figure out an idea. And then at the end of the 10 weeks, you get in front of real VCs and you pitch the idea. And those 10 weeks were the most fun I had in college, period. At least from a work setting perspective.

Thank you for that.

And over my career, I've progressed from. I started at IBM, I progressed to smaller and smaller companies. You know, I think I remember when I joined Intercom, when I met Owen for the first time. I told him, Owen's the CEO founder there. I told him I want to be the CFO of a publicly traded company. And turns out that was wrong. Over the course of five, six, seven years, I figured out that wasn't actually what I wanted to do. I love the early days. I love the building, I love the starting things from scratch. And so I think it's always been something that I've wanted to do and pursue.

Does Steve Blank still teach that class at Stanford or is it over now?

I think he teaches it anymore. I think he's left that because I only knew that.

I only knew him through his writing and his book and obviously being at startups and founders say, hey, go read this. And he was like, from what I knew is the guy that really created customer development or whatever. But that's pretty wild to think that you actually sat in the classroom with him and probably. Are there any, do you have any like notable alumni from that that were in that section in that class? It could be.

No, there was. Who was. So Hitten Shaw was my mentor in that class, so I remember I got paired with him. So every group had a. So you were starting a company with a group of three other students and every group had a, like a mentor who was in the startup ecosystem and Hiten was ours. So I got to work really closely with him, learn from him. And then there were some big name VCs that came and we had to pitch at the end. So it's just. You just got kind of thrown into the fire. And I think I probably would have been more nervous back then had I actually known the stakes of what I was doing. But no, it was really fun.

What did you learn at Intercom?

I learned everything I've taken with me to build Equals.

We can spend some time here so there can be like a bunch of different lessons, but I wanted to start you with just a broad. Like when you think back at your time during Intercom, what are some of the bigger themes that you take with you today into how you run Equals?

I think I learned. Well, the thing that's coming to me now is I remember I was at an off site and there was a moment where we were having a conversation. It was an exact off site. We were having a conversation about various things and Owen turned to me and asked me for My opinion on something and I froze. And I didn't have like, I'm a smart guy, I have lots of opinions about the business, but I like froze in this moment and it was like, I panicked. It was like, you know, it was like a fight or flight type of response for me. And I tend to, this just happens to me. Like, I tend to get like nervous in big environments, big settings. And I remember Owen pulled me aside after that meeting and he's like, hey, look, like, this is an opportunity for you to better understand yourself, better learn who you are, better learn your reactions to certain things. And that set me down this whole path of just trying to understand who I am, why I work in some ways, why I get nervous in certain settings. And it sent me down this whole path of kind of self discovery and sent me down this whole path of trying to figure out what makes me kind of act in certain ways and what motivates me. And less like tactical lessons about business. Less like, okay, you know, every, every business is different. Every, you know, we can talk about like go to market motions and finance models and whatnot. But the thing that was like most real for me was just coming into myself and like coming into my own confidence and coming into, oh, shoot, like I actually, no, like I'm capable of doing some of these like amazing. Building amazing teams, hiring great people, building a great company. And so I think that the biggest thing I learned from myself was like just the patterns I have, how to trust myself in certain situations and the practice of like understanding who you are and what makes you behave a certain way. That's been like the most invaluable thing for me.

Yeah, it's tough to be any good at work if you don't know how you work and how you are as a person. You mentioned Owen at Intercom when I was at Drift. David, who's the CEO and kind of my boss and mentor. One of the books he gave me early on was Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker. And it's like 40, 50 pages. And I had only known Drucker as this kind of old school business writer that everyone in the business world talked about. But in this book he basically talks about like, you gotta know before anybody else can manage you or before you can manage a team or build a company, you have to be able to manage yourself. And he wasn't talking about the sauna and the cold plunge. He was talking about at work understanding how you are and how there's different types of people and we operate in different ways. And so for me, this was an interesting lesson, which is like, I was at Drift and I tried to become like, all right, I'm a Mr. I want to be the SaaS guy now. The SaaS growth guy. Now. I'm at this company, everyone's talking about this stuff, and I'm trying to fit in with everybody else. And he kind of pulled me aside. He's like, hey, man, like, you're a really good copywriter and a good marketer. Like, just be that and you'll be really good. And I was like, seriously? But don't you need me to know about, like, CAC to LTV and this ratio and this metric and this thing? And he's like, nope. He's like, if you focus on this thing. And he gave me this book. And in the Peter Drucker book, he talks about how it's much easier for you to take a skill that you're like a B or B plus in and become an A and become a top performer than it is going to be for you to be. Take an area that you're like a D performer in. And then even if you spend all this time, which you're not going to like, and it's going to be uncomfortable, it's going to be frustrating, you're still only going to be a C plus at the max. And so in a similar way, that was, like, really liberating for him to be like, focus on this area, and the rest is going to take care of itself. And I always kind of point back to that lesson of, like, everybody works differently, everybody operates differently. But before you work with other people, you got to be able to understand, like, who you are and how you operate. Even to the point now where if I joined a new company, I would be like, hey, here's my communication style. Here's how I am. Like, I would share that up front because we're all different, right?

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that. Just building on that. One of the things I think a lot about with Equals now is equals for me is this very intrinsic thing. It's this thing that I wish existed in the world for myself. It's this thing that is core to who I am in my story. And I think that the thing that. One of the things that I've learned over time is, like, when I feel the most nervous, when I feel like I'm most misaligned, it's when I'm trying to do things because I'm trying to anticipate what everybody else expects of me. What, like, you Said it's like I'm trying to be Mr. Sass, and Mr. Sass is like all these things that I'm seeing from other people. Other people are behaving this way, and I need to be that way because that's what people like. And the thing that I always try to come back to is what's the most true for me, what's the thing that is the most resonant for me? What's the thing that is the most authentic thing that I can say, the most authentic version of what I can bring into the world. And if I do that, then I feel like that both resonates and it's also the thing that just comes most naturally to me. And it takes all this pressure off of you. Like, you're not trying to be something that you're not. You're not trying to anticipate what you think other people are going to expect you to say, which is like a way to drive yourself crazy. And so, like, this journey for me has been, like, finding that intrinsic part of me. It's like, you know, okay, who am I? What is the most true for me? What is the thing that is that I want to say as opposed to what I think other people expect me to say?

And it's going to be tough to be in any leadership position if you're going to spend. And it's human nature, it's natural to do this. But if you're going to spend your calories and your stress and your worry about what everybody's going to think about you, it's going to be really, really hard to ever have a good night's sleep or to, you know, not be stressed. And, you know, I don't know how. There's many people, I don't know how they do it. It's not for me.

Yeah. And you're driving so crazy, too. And like, you also just. You won't be like, I don't know. For me, it's just not going to. It's not going to feel right, you know?

Yeah.

But I'll tell you, I lived my life a lot for a long time that way, where you're just trying to do what others expect of you or do the thing that you think is going to be the right thing based on what other people are asking you to do. Yeah. And so it's just. It's an exhausting way of being.

And do you feel like you're past that now and you're at a point in your life where you're. You're Comfortable working on it. Still something that you work on, working on it, yeah.

You know, every day it's just, it's something I have to keep coming back to, something I keep reminding myself and I think the more I practice it, the easier it gets, but it's certainly still practice.

All right, so there's a lot of marketing people that listen. Obviously you're a human too, but there's a lot of marketing people that will listen to this. Let's talk about Intercom and lessons. Just from a business and marketing standpoint, obviously they built an incredible company and brand and well past hundreds of millions in ARR. Probably what was the go to market approach that worked? I think a lot of people will know it was product. It was having a product in that niche. But I think there was a lot of. They did a good job with marketing in the early days and I think you were probably right in the middle of that. So I'd love to try to hear some of those stories if we can.

I think at the core of Intercom. Well, I'll tell you, the thing that I was most involved in was we were just all over our metrics from the very beginning. I joined probably before most finance and analytics people would join a company where 20 people, we were less than a million in ARR.

And so what are those metrics? So like if you're. What was the stack of stuff that you were managing at 20 people and a million ARR. Because there's a lot of early stage companies that are listening to hear that they had a discipline in that early is interesting.

Yeah, my job was, you know, a lot of finance, you hire your first finance, your first analytics person and a lot of, you know, a lot of people think that's just okay. We need to like build budgets, we need to build plans, we need to keep controls on our spend across the company. We need to know how many headcount we're going to hire, things like that. That was like a very, very, very minor part of my job. That was almost an afterthought for me. It was, you know, I thought of myself as somebody who could come up with ideas for how we grow as a business dive into how does our funnel work, what are people doing in the product?

This is exactly like my friend Will who was a VP of Ops at Drift. I joined maybe like six to eight months before him. He was a former VC associate in some way and then an mba he came in and I think everybody thought he was probably like the 12th, 13th person at the company and everybody Thought he was going to be like the finance guy. And he was like, everything but that. I was like, oh, the HubSpot cookie is not tracking on the website. And like, why is that data not getting into amplitude? And then like, what should the sales comp plan be? And like, hey, the CEO wants us to go after this new market. Like, does it make sense to be in France right now? Does that sound like your life?

Totally, yeah. I mean, and it was even more like. It was like, okay, I sat down with my coffee. So my co founder at Equals, this guy named Ben McRedman, he was the first engineer and he was the first hire at Intercom. He ran. When I joined Intercom, he was the head of growth and so I just sat down with him and we sat next to each other every day and all we do was just. He's like, oh, I'm thinking about this idea. And I would just pull up all the, like pull up our database and it's like, okay, let's see how many people signed up and did that? How many people signed up and sent an email within their first hour? Okay, does that mean that they're more likely to pay us, More likely to retain two months down the line? Okay, who signed up and in the first 30 minutes clicked on this or did this activity or tried this or invited the teammate or. And we broke down everything, Everything, everything, everything. And then it was, okay, try that. Let's build this thing. And then I'm going to tell you whether or not it works. And we're just going to insanely quickly build new things, try new things, measure the impact of it. And that was the thing that led to the whole Intercom didn't have. We didn't bring sales on for probably it was like another six to seven months after I joined. And then, yeah, like you said with. Well, it was like, I think I built the first integration into our CRM. I was like, had little like Python scripts that was like pull from our database and pipe it into pipedrive, which we used for a minute and then update the leads when they go to a different stage. And okay, we're tracking that and measuring all that and you know, built all the first versions of that.

That's amazing.

But you need somebody who, like, if you're looking for somebody, you need somebody who's willing to just roll up their sleeves and do all of that analysis, build all of that, support the team, but also be somebody who's like excited about growing the business and who sees their job as somebody who is a real partner to the business as opposed to somebody who's just coming in to like keep track of all the numbers.

Yeah. And this is why, like for the marketing people out there, I think one of the, and look, I'm not a CMO or head of marketing anymore. I haven't been in the game in a little bit. And so this, take this with a grain of salt, but like, I do think we over index from the marketing side of things. We over index in the marketer doing those, knowing those things as opposed to like, that's your role. Like, and there's ops teams now. And like, especially in B2B SaaS, this trend of like the high performing teams all have some type of ops centralized ops team. And it's like you have your Bobby and you have your will and you have your land and you have your, you know. So like as a marketer, if you're listening, it's like, should you be doing all those things or should you like free yourself up to do the marketing and do the creative stuff and like, shoot, I want to be sitting next to you and Ben at that table.

Yeah.

You know, coming up with ideas together. And I think that's where the magic happens. And I, I'm not saying that as a marketing leader, like you don't need to know the SaaS metrics in the funnel. Like, of course you need to know that. But I think to spend the time obsessing on being great at all those things when it's like if you're going to work at a high performing company, you're going to have partners in that area. You don't have to be the cfo, you don't have to be the head of ops, you don't have to be the head of sales. You all need to be able to work collaboratively together. And I think that's where this can get really fun. And also I wanted to shine a light on this because I think many people will be listening and be like, shoot, I definitely don't have that at my company. And that's the issue is, oh my gosh, I'm spending all my time doing the ops stuff, even though I'm the marketing leader. That's because we don't have an ops person. Let's make the case to go and find us that person. Like, do you remember why they got to like when you got that job at Intercom? Like, why were they looking for you at that time?

So, and I'll answer that, but the first thing I'll say is there's also Just a special type of finance and ops person. Particularly if you're, you know, an early stage company. Not all marketers are the same and not all finance and ops people are the same. And so it can be that you do have a finance and ops person. They're just not wired this way. And so part of it is making sure you find somebody who is wired. Wired this way. When I joined Intercom, Owen, I'm gonna chuckle out of this if he hears it, but the story there is, I think so. I got introduced to Owen and Mamoon. Mamoun was the investor at. He was at Social Capital at the time, led the Series A at Intercom. And the story I got at least was that the first board meeting after Mamoon led to Series A, there were like no metrics and it was, here's what our product vision is. And there were no numbers or anything like that. We need somebody to come in and orient us.

That's David Sacks's nightmare.

Exactly. And so I got connected because a buddy of mine who I worked with way back in the day at IBM, he ended up joining Social Capital and he connected me to Mamoon and to Owen.

And 10 years ago, June 1, 2013, Intercom, $6 million Series A. And speaking of the man himself, Social Capital, Freestyle Capital, and David O. Sachs invested in that round. Interesting.

Yeah. And so that was it. I met. I wasn't looking for a new job. I met Owen. He gave me the pitch on Intercom. I met Des, read a bunch of Des's blog posts, was just really impressed at the kind of depth of thought.

Did you get paid like shit for a while?

Did you get paid good coming out of the gate?

I got, you know, I was what, three years. Three years out of college?

Yeah, I graduated 2009. You graduated 2010?

Yeah, yeah. So I was still early in my career. It was. I got a slight bump from the last job I was at, but it was still a pretty early, meager salary.

I just, I was asking because, like, the evolution of working at a company like that is as the company does well and, you know, makes more money and raises more money. Like you can see exponential growth in your salary. But it's way.

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A different than joining a, say HubSpot or Salesforce, where you know what it's going to be coming in. There's a lot of variability in the comp and you're like, all right, I'm the 13th, 20th employee at this company. Like I'm making X now. Like My bet is that by the time this company is 200 people, like, I'd like to be here. And I, Yeah, I just. Because of the economy and everything now, it's like there aren't many people who are jumping. There are not many people who are going to take a pay cut to go get a new job today. And that's not how it was in, you know, 2012, 2013.

Yeah, I mean, for me, the rationale, like I didn't join for the salary, obviously. Right. For me it was, you know, I was very invested both, you know, I wanted equity and you know, that was the most important part of my compensation package. But that's not even how I thought about it. For me it was. I just didn't want to climb the ladder at like a medium or big stage company. This just wasn't interesting to me to like go step by step and like, you know, feel like I needed to like, okay, spend one year, two years, then get the promotion and spend another two years, get another promotion and just not, not interesting to me and can be for other people, but not for me. I wanted to figure out a way to take a leap in my career and that was it. And I. The rationale for me was, the calculus for me was either this works and I do that and you know, I think a lot of people or I just had the confidence that for me it was like, I'm going to make it work, figure out how to make this work or look, it doesn't work and I'll find another job. I'll, you know, try it again.

How did you think about as the guy in the middle of finance and ops and the actually at all. I'm sure it changes later in the company, but let's say in like the middle, the middle range. How did you think about some of the marketing and spending stuff when it comes to marketing that were not easy to measure? Like, I feel like you were very growth and funnel oriented, but there were also a lot of stuff that you guys did just because it felt like a good brand bet. And I'm just curious to hear your point of view on that and even like how you're bringing that stuff into equals and just in the lens that like I want to hear, I want marketing people to hear from a finance and ops guy.

Yeah.

How you think about those things?

I've probably, I've probably. Well, I've probably come more full circle on that than, you know, if you talked to me when I was in the depth of it at Intercom, I'd have probably asked for a little bit of grace as a finance and ops person, because one of the hard parts about being in that role is oftentimes it's you talk to a lot of, like, CFOs. You talk to a lot of ops people, and it's a lonely role. You're usually the one person. You're in an exec meeting. Everybody's coming up with ideas. Everybody's like, oh, we should hire this team to do this, or we should throw these billboards up on the 101 and we should take over this part station. And what if we do a world tour, which is the thing we did at Intercom? Who in that room other than me is thinking about how much this is going to cost and what our burn rate is going to be and all that fun stuff? So to a certain extent, I felt like my responsibility was to be the. I don't like to mentor people, mentor finance folks, or tell them to be, like, the no person, because I think that's actually the wrong way to do it. But in some ways, you do feel like you are that. And so I spent a lot of time in that role being somebody who was, okay, you know, we need to think, bring things back to models. We need to be able to, like, quantify, you know, okay, we ran a world tour. Like, show me the list of leads that we got for that. And did any of those leads convert? And are we getting paid customers as a result of that? And how sticky are they? So it's kind of the role that you have to play, and it's a hard role to play because you're typically the only person doing that. So I'd probably say to some extent, like, I was like, the quintessential kind of CFO that's like, okay.

And are you still now, though?

Well, now I sit here and I'm like, oh, yeah. Like, I want to put some billboards up like a BART station takeover. I'm like, that sounds amazing.

But maybe it's because you managed a P. L. Well, actually, shoot, I guess you did anyway. Maybe you did anyway. But, like, I feel like if it's. When you see. It's kind of like if I think of my money in a bank account somewhere, like, I know how much I have, and I know that if I want to go do X, I can do that. And it doesn't have to. I don't have to have a huge quantifiable return. Just from a personal finance standpoint. Yeah, like, you know what? Yes, I do want to like go to that hotel for a weekend and we're going to do that. But when you stretch that out and it becomes a huge, huge thing, like, yes, I would like to buy huge thing. And now it becomes like 20, 30, 40, 50% of your budget, then you're like, okay, we need to have a story around this.

Yeah. Yeah. Since starting my own company, I've just come to appreciate how much all of these little things matter. The branding, the positioning. I remember having a moment probably about a year into, a year into equals, where I was sitting down, having to write the copy for the marketing site and having to write the first copy of things that were going to go out to customers or prospects and you just have a whole new. And doing the first sales, for example, you just have a whole new level of respect and admiration for every field and the things that they do. And starting from a blank page is just so fundamentally different than like picking at something that somebody shows you in a meeting and or even just editing something. And so as a grumpy metrics oriented CFO to now a founder, it's just you come to appreciate these things and you understand the value of them and you understand the art behind them in a way when you have to do it in a way that you, you haven't before. So I don't know how practical that is, but maybe more finance folks should be in operating roles to understand that.

Yeah. And I even just, I think like what you said is also healthy. Is just like everything kind of should have a story. Like why it might not need to be a specific, like direct response metric, but like, yeah, if you're gonna go spend a bunch of money and do an intercom world tour, like, you do need a story around like, well, why did we do this and how did we drive business? But I, I do think a lot of people get lost and like, it has to be like, oh, the outcome was X and that is better than what we spent. And so we won. Where it's like, no, there can be a story which is like, yes, we did. We got some new customers. We also had a really good meeting with this one customer who was going to churn and we got all these videos for our brand and like, it was a buzz on, you know, there was a lot of buzz on Twitter and I met this investor that I've really been wanting to talk to. Like those. Okay, cool. That sounds like it's worth it. And I think you gotta be able to think, like, think strategically a little bit more than just like, what's in the spreadsheet of what's in the metrics. Like where does this fit into the story? And I think that the marketing person has to be able to talk about marketing from a business standpoint, not just from a marketing standpoint. What is the role of marketing at Intercom? We want to do X, Y and Z. Anyway, you mentioned branding and positioning of Equals. I think you guys have done a really good job with coming up with a. Not to be corny, but cool, innovative. It feels fresh, it feels new. Talk about where does that stuff come from? And you mentioned that it is so important. Why do you believe it's important to equals and why are you focused on that? Why are you investing there?

Oh, I think it's so important. I mean, for me, look, it's fun from like an external perspective. I'm incredibly proud of the website, the brand, the way we talk about ourselves, the product. I mean, just unbelievably proud of it. But I think for me it's, you know, it comes back to like this extrinsic trade off and it's. I started Equals. You know, I've always felt like I needed to put a creative, like some version of my creative self out into the world. And Equals is the vehicle that I get to express myself creatively. Artists have their art, musicians have their musicians. This is like the thing that I put into the world alongside the whole team that we've built. That's an expression of us and our brand. And the way we talk about ourselves is like the ultimate expression of that. And for me it's. We put a lot of work and a lot of time and invested a lot of, you know, invested resources in coming up with something that just felt so true to us and representative of us. I didn't want to go to like. Like Linear right now is like a really hot style and like startups are ripping that off. And for a.

Linear. What does that mean? That's a hot style. Should I Google that?

Oh, it's coming Linear. They've got a company, they're branding their. You know, if you go to their website now, like there's like, you know, a million startups now.

That is it. Linear app. Yeah, Linear is a better way to build products.

Like they're, you know, a lot of people talk. There's a whole. Oh yeah, a lot of startups are kind of copying that same style. Dark and for a while it was like dark mode.

We want to sell to the enterprise.

Yeah. And for a while, you know, I mean, Intercom got A lot of copycats as well over the years, I think Strike like who kind of style. Well, just remember that the diagram of the old way, new way diagram that Intercom created.

Intercom created that. There's no way, there's no way that's true.

Okay, well that was one of the first incarnations of that I saw. And after that it exploded all over the place anyways. No, for me, for us it was just, it came back to like, what is the most true and exciting representation of us and what we're trying to do. And if we can build something that we're excited about. And I think to a certain degree, like as a founder who is also the end user of the selling to the end user of the same end user, it's what they were. I have a bit of an advantage in that, like I can kind of be really intrinsic about what it is, that how we represent the product, how we show it, how we build, brand about it. But for me, it's like it just needs to be something that we're excited about, we're passionate about, that feels true to us. And if, and people can feel that, people that resonates with people. And so we spent a lot of time just, is this us? Does this represent us and what we want to build and the story we want to tell to the world? And that's it, that's at the core of it, you know, some of the smaller details, you know, Ben and I talk a lot about, we really focus on showcasing the product. You end up on a lot of marketing sites, particularly for startups, and you don't know what the product is, how it works.

Show me the damn product. I have no idea what you do. Why can I not see it? I don't understand.

Yeah. And so I remember we launched our new brand, our new site and we had screenshots of the product all over the place. But one of the things that we changed from the original site we had was in the original site we had a two minute demo that was like the keynote, the main highlight. And that super resonated in the new site. We took the demo video down and conversion went, conversion went down like 80%. It was insane.

People love you. It's because it's your video and it's the video.

And it was like, we were like, okay, how do we incorporate the video? How do we put it again front and center. It's like, show the product, show what it can do. And still to this day I go to events and dinners and people are like, oh yeah, I've seen your demo video. It's you know, and so I think a lot of folks and the demo video by the way is just straight product. It's not like fancy cuts and you know, music and highlights and this and that. It's just, hey, here's me building a little model, doing a little thing, showing you all the different things that equals can do. And I think a lot of people just, they overthink it or they, they don't do a good job of like just showing the product and articulating what it is well.

And you think, especially if you think about you're the end user, you're the buyer, like how would you feel landing on the site? You're like, come on, come on, show me, show me, show me.

Right?

And especially like the customer that you're focused on and the product use case, it makes sense to lead with the product. And yeah, if you go to Equals app, which I was just looking at, it's just like a screen share type video where like your head is in the corner, you're demoing and it's the actual product. And I do think a lot of this comes back to you having a strong vision. And this is why I talk about so much like just how marketing and the founder have to be in lockstep. And a lot of the questions that I see in Exit 5 community and around is like, it's just so clear that there's a founder without a vision there. And if the founders have to have a vision for marketing, but if the founder has a vision for the company, then they do have a vision for marketing. And so I can draft off of you if I see you have a vision of like, okay, these are the companies that you think are interesting and actually the five year play is like this is really what you think. Like I remember like when I was at Drift in the early days we'd be doing one specific thing like sales chat, but I'd be on a one on one with David Cancel and he'd be telling me this like crazy vision of like no, but see the real reason we're doing this is because of this and this and like those are the intangible ingredients that like okay, now I know, I know how that's built into how we're going to go do marketing. And I do feel like as you grow and scale your team obviously like it's going to, you're going to want to like continue to remove yourself from marketing, maybe the day to day execution of stuff but like back to the Brand and the positioning and the story. If this is you and this is what you do, like, I think you always gotta be, gotta be close to that. I actually just saw this morning somebody posted in the Exit 5 community like, hey, who owns the company Strategic vision and is it sales or marketing? I'm like, it's neither of them. It's the CEO owns the strategic vision for the company. Like, what are we talking about?

Totally. And for, particularly for startups, I mean, your early adopters are buying the vision, like they're early adopters. And I mean, I'll tell you, the first equals been out in the world for 10 months and the first six months worth of users, even users today, there's things that people want to do in equals that they can't do and they, but they use equals because they're like, I get it, it's coming and I get where this thing is going and I get what it will be and I want to be a part of this. And so if you're not, if the CEO isn't telling the vision and your marketing team is not telling the vision, how are your customers going to understand that? And so it's particularly important in those early stages where those folks are buying into the vision, they're buying into the promise of what the product can be in addition to like the very specific pain points that you might be solving for them immediately.

How do you balance telling the short term? And you might not have an answer for this because you're still in the early stages, but I'm just anticipating a question somebody would ask if they're listening. How do you balance the short term and the long term stuff? How do you balance. Here's what we can do today and here's what we can swipe your credit card for today versus where are we going? I think a lot of marketers at startups struggle with how that should fit in in the story and where.

Yeah, I don't know that I have a great answer there. I think the thing that like our answer from an equals perspective is we invest a lot, a lot, a lot in R and D. We're a product first company. And so our answer there is we're just shipping all the time. Shipping.

But what, but what does that mean? Like, are the product managers and engineers, like, do they help you create the vision? Because it's like, hey, you own this product, you're out there researching. Like, the ideas are not just going to come from you, they're going to come from the people that are actually like doing the Building. And when you're immersed in that area, you start to say, oh, well, this company does it this way. But here's what's really interesting. And, like, is it a little bit of a. In the kitchen with engineering and product where this is happening?

We do. I mean, we kind of. I'd say we're. We're relatively split. We do, you know, Equals. We're two years into Equals. And Equals today looks almost exactly like we expected it to look two years ago. Like, we're not necessarily one of those companies that we just. We pivot every three months and we're going to try something new and do like, you know, Equals is a big product to build. It's a hard product to build. And we set out to build it, and we had a lot of conviction that if we did build it, it would be something that would work and resonate. And so there is an element of, like, we know what we want to build. And so I'd say probably like 50, 60% of our roadmap is just things that we've known for a long time we want to build and want to work on. And then the rest of it is, yeah, we talk to our users, we've got success and support people. They're bubbling back all that feedback. We don't have a marketer right now. We'd love. We're hiring for a product marketer just to plug that quickly.

But I mean, hold on. You got to do a better job plugging it if you're going to shoot a. If you're going to. So Equals is hiring for a product marketing person right now. Yeah, we'll get this episode out in the short term. And you can either go to Equals app and go to careers. I'm looking at this right now. Or you can go Bobby Panero on LinkedIn and LinkedIn or Twitter.

Yeah, yeah.

But don't send him any nonsense. If you're going to hear about this job, like, please come correct. And you know, this is not a. Hey, I'm not a product marketer. Like, I posted that I'm hiring for Exit five, and I got, like, a lot of great people, but I also got. People are like, hey, I'm. I'm totally not the thing that you were looking for, but I can work really hard and I will do a bunch of great things. Don't send him those messages. Like, if you're a product marketer, if you're a hungry product marketer out there, reach out, appreciate it.

It's a critical role for us. I mean, the thing that's worked super well for us have been launches and showing the product, and we have a. A really fun role in that. Equals is very horizontal as well. So we saw lots of different Personas. So product marketing will be a. A critical, critical role.

Where you're at right now with Equals is like a fun time. And I'm not saying this because, like, I'm an advisor with Equals and we hang out and stuff, but I'm saying this because from a marketing standpoint, this is really similar to, like, the role that I joined Drift In. It's like they had a bottoms up model where people go to the website and sign up for the product. And the company's growth was driven through product launches and iterating based on customer feedback. And so it'd be like, boom. Slack integration. Launch HubSpot integration. This thing, this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing. And so every one to two weeks, it was not like, oh, what should we be doing in marketing? Was like, nope, here's another product thing coming. And if you go to Bobby's LinkedIn, you can see how crazy they've been shipping. And so, like, and this is just good, I think a good note, a good side topic, which is I believe that you can create your own momentum through shipping, product and marketing. And, like, having that. I think you guys have seen that in the first 10 months of your company. And so to find a marketer who can help you scale, that would be great. It's interesting, though, to hear you say, I don't hear founders say that this often, which is like, you can't, you know, what you have to build. So why don't you just build it then? Is it. Is it. Is it a. Is it an engineering problem? Is it a money problem? Like a challenge? Like, what. Why don't you just go do it?

Well, we're trying. Yeah. So we're hiring. We're hiring.

I mean, like, I actually don't know enough about how products get built. Is it like a technical problem that, like, you know, you want to build this, but you don't know, like, how to build the steps there yet?

No, I mean, it takes us time to Onboard engineers. It takes us time to, you know, bring on. Folks, Equals is also. We have the benefit of Equals is it's a really fun product for an engineer to work on. It's not your typical kind of SaaS app. Like, there are very few engineers out there that get to work on it. And a spreadsheet. And a spreadsheet is like a really Hard technical problem.

That's what makes it fun. It's a hard technical problem.

Yeah, like for an excellent, and for an excellent world class engineer, this is, it's a really exciting product to work on. It is hard. So. And the nature of the product also is that as, as you build more and more and more, you know, think about spreadsheet, right? Like everything touches everything. So if you build conditional formatting that touches not just. Or if you build like formatting a cell, you have to think about how you format a cell and how that connects to keyboard shortcuts, but also how it connects to like when you insert a row, when you insert a column. What happens if you conditional format over that format? What happens if you, you know, insert a chart on top of the formatting? Like it's all interwoven and interconnected. And so it's just this really complex system. It gets more complex as you build it out further.

But engineers love that. I don't know anything about engineer hiring engineers. Like, engineers love working on problem. Like they want the sticky problem, they want the challenging problem.

Yeah, they want. A lot of them, I think are think about like your typical SaaS app. A lot of it's like, okay, build a UI on top of a database, push data from one place to another, do this button, you know, it sends data here, you return this data, you send this email to a user, you notify them about this, like, pretty simple. And so a product like Equals is just, you know, again, it's very rare to find something like this where you get to work on, you know, algorithms and you get to build the calculation engine and you get like really hard front end challenges. So again, for the absolute best engineers out there who want to learn, who want to grow, who are excited about learning the kind of bleeding edge of technology, Equals is a really exciting opportunity for them. That's how we've hired, we've hired the absolute best engineers on the planet. That's the only way we've been able to build Equals. Remember when we started equals, I pitched 50 VCs for our seed and talked to probably another like 50 to 100 founders, some of the best technologists in Silicon Valley. And you know how many people told me we're absolutely crazy? Absolutely. There's no chance. You know how many thousands of engineers Google Sheets has, You know how many thousands of engineers Microsoft had? You've never come close to building anything like Equals in the browser. Are you kidding me? And yeah, in about a year and a half we've launched something that I Think most people were shocked we were able to do.

Do you get a lot of those questions or well, how is this different than how's this? Why is this better than a spreadsheet? Or here's another startup trying to do the spreadsheet thing. Like, how do you handle those questions?

Yeah, there's certainly a lot of dead startups that have tried to take on the spreadsheet in one way shape or another. The thing I'd say that's fundamentally different about equals, and I think what's resonated with people when they find us is every company, every spreadsheet company that's come before us and I, you know, I remove things like airtable and smartsheets from the equation because those are different use cases. So Equals is intended for doing, working with numbers, working building models, doing reporting, building ad hoc analysis. Airtables like the spreadsheet as a database or smartsheets with spreadsheet as a project management tool. But every spreadsheet company that's come before us has kind of viewed the spreadsheet as like, flawed in some way, shape or form. They said, hey, the spreadsheet's wrong. We need. It's wrong because you have complex formulas or because, you know, actually there's a better way to do pivot tables or there's a better way to do this and that and this and that. And our whole thesis is that actually the spreadsheet's right. The spreadsheet's the best way to do analysis. Every meaningful business decision that I've ever made has happened out of a spreadsheet. For the love of God, every data tool that's come out over the last 10 years. Stop trying to take me out of the spreadsheet. Stop it. We don't want another BI tool, We don't want another notebook. We don't need another spreadsheet alternative. And so our view is actually, let's just build a spreadsheet that works just like Excel in Google Sheets. Let's meet people in the thing that they've spent the last 40 years learning how to use. You can jump into Equals, you can use it, but let's just build it for this generation's work. So it's connected to all your databases, it's connected to where you get your data as a company. It's connected to where you and your teams do your work. And it's modern and it's, it feels light to the touch. And it's, you know, this thing that, you know, every other team, as somebody who does analysis. I look at all my peers and I say, you know, engineers get GitHub, they get. Marketers get HubSpot and Drift and Intercom.

What do you got? QuickBooks?

Yeah, designers get Figma.

And I'm like here.

And I'm like, oh, I get Excel. Excel's been around for 40 years. And I use Excel the same exact same way that I would have 10 years ago. I fire it up locally on my machine. I'm pulling all my data in manually, I'm sending emails V1, V3, V7, V7, VBP. Like it's a disaster.

So, you know, everybody's always told me that inside of a startup, the finance person always had the. Was the only person without the MacBook because you needed Excel on it.

Yeah, yeah.

And you needed it on the desktop to process the amount of data. Can. Equals can do that in the browser.

Equals can do that in the browser and you can use a Mac and it's amazing.

And your computer is not going to be like.

It'S not. And you know, one of the benefits of Equals two is you can aggregate all your data before you pull it in. So in Excel, right? It's hard to do that. You're limited by. If you pull a Salesforce report, you pull a Salesforce report, however it is and you have to drop it into Excel. With us, you can put filters, you can do things to it before you bring it in the spreadsheet. So you minimize the probability of working with behemoth type of data sets.

All right, I want to wrap up and talk about get your perspective on the from a CEO, somebody who raised money last year, you've raised money from top tier VCs. 23 million from Christina Shen at Andreessen and David Sacks at Craft Ventures. It is by the time this podcast will be out, it'll be April 2023. So the beginning of Q2. What's your view on the market? What are you all seeing or what guidance are you been given on how to grow this company?

Right now there's definitely a lot of doom and gloom. People are bunker down. Give yourself lots of Runway. We fortunately do have. We raised just a few months ago and so part of that was opportunistically it was like, look, this down cycle might last a couple of years and so we want to make sure that we have enough cash on the balance sheet to weather that. So I'd encourage everybody to be thinking about trying to weather the next few years. The thing that I'd say that's maybe A little bit different is, I think people can take that a little bit too, too literally. And you still need to remember that you gotta post great numbers and great companies are gonna get funded if you're hitting great revenue numbers, if you have great retention rates, you're gonna get funded. And so don't try to just weather the storm and put yourself in the worst of both worlds where you're coming out of this in two and a half years and you haven't invested in growth, you haven't invested in product, you haven't invested in the things that you need to do to be an exciting and appealing company. And you're trying to raise in an environment where it's not, I don't know, that water will be back in like the 2021 days, but trying to raise in an environment that's not as exciting. So just make sure that you're setting yourself up to actually be able to raise when you need to. So making the right investments to actually grow and hit numbers that would be exciting because great businesses will get funded, period, full stop.

Seems like a good time. I mean, this is. There's a lot of stressed out sales and marketing people, but I think if you're at a company that has Runway like you do, for example, it's almost like a good time to be there because you're like going to build the foundations. And so it's almost like different than four or five years ago where there was a little bit more growth at all costs. You're going to now have to have the beans counted pretty tightly and then build on that foundation. And then maybe in a year, two years, three years, then you can go do the stuff that might not have the direct impact on the business. In some ways it is good from a business fundamental standpoint of let's do things that we know are driving business for us. And there's a lot of fluff that. There's a lot of fluff that can get cut, right?

Yeah, and there's definitely, from what I've seen, seeds and series A's are certainly easier to come by these days. And I think that's by nature of just the timeline over which they are, you know, expected to kind of yield anything. So people are looking at that and saying, okay, over the course of the next four or five, six years, things should correct. And you know, maybe we're probably not back to where we were in 2021, but, you know, at least they can start to imagine a world where they're getting a nice return on their investment. It's the series B, series C, series Ds, where things are kind of crunching up and there's really just no activity there. So, you know, if you're thinking about where you are in your company's life cycle or which company to join next, I think that's an important thing to kind of think about.

The return to rigor.

Yeah, yeah, it's happening. Finance teams are feeling it. I'll tell you that. They're being asked to dig in and really understand, stay on top of their.

Yeah, right. Like, it's. It's tough because, like, you don't own any of the things, but you got to dig in and be like, well, we got to cut this, and we got to cut this. And what's the roi? You know, what you're. It's like the. It's like the. The auditors are here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you gotta be the bad guy in a lot of ways.

Well, then in some ways, it's good for you to just. You don't have to have. Obviously you want to grow right now, but, like, you can have a. A little bit tighter focus as opposed to just trying to do everything right now. And, you know, the tale of the last three to five years was like equals would raise a hundred million, and you'd go try to hire 200 people in the next, you know, year, and it just would be crazy. And that's when everything breaks.

Yeah. I mean, not gonna lie. That sounds fun too, though.

You wanna do that? You're crazy, man. Yeah, well, maybe in your case, because you know what you wanna go build. If you could snap your fingers and have 50 engineers right now, you'd be good.

Yeah, no, but I mean, the reality. Offset of that. The reality is, like, you get way ahead of your speed.

So, yeah, let's find the product marketer first, and then you can go do all that crazy stuff.

That's serious.

All right, Bobby, we gotta go. You gotta go back, do some CEO stuff. Thanks for hopping on the podcast. I hope you get a bunch of messages and comments, and I just enjoy talking to you. And maybe. Maybe we'll do another one of these in six months. We could do a little update.

That'd be awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Dave.

See you, man. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

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