Founders, Keepers - Tien Tzuo - Zuora - Episode #48

You gotta recognize what you're terrible at doing and, and, and, and don't do it.

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys. Today's guest is a true pioneer in the world of SaaS and subscription business models. He was employee 11 at Salesforce, where he served as head of product, then Chief Marketing Officer and then Chief Strategy Officer. He helped shape one of the original and most successful SaaS businesses in the world. In 2007, he founded Zuora, the leading platform for subscription billing and revenue. He took the company public in 2018 and early this year was taken private in a deal valuing the company at $1.7 billion. Zuora now powers recurring revenue for some of the world's biggest brands. Beyond Zuora, he served on multiple public and private company boards, helping shape the next generation of enterprise technology. In case all that isn't enough, he is the author of the best selling book Subscribed. It's about the rise of the subscription economy and how companies can adapt to that model. And I'm excited and honored to have him on just a couple of days ahead of the launch of his second book, Founders Keepers. Why Founders Are Built to Fail and what it Takes to Succeed. Please welcome entrepreneur, author, category creator, Tien Zuo.

Thanks, David. Thanks for that.

I'm so excited to do this. We've met a number of times over the years and I feel like every time I hear you talk, I learn something new. And so I really, really, I read the book, I'm like, this is going to be an amazing conversation. Let's jump right into it. First question, so the question I ask everyone, what's the one thing that you've done? It's a big or small that's had the biggest impact and you do again if you're CEO of another company in the future. And obviously best to tie it to something that we talk about. You know, that's, that's in your book.

Sure, yeah, let's do, let's do that. Look, maybe one of the bigger things that I think we've done, you. You call it category creation. We seem to get a lot of credit for creating this concept called the subscription economy. And you know, there's lots of articles and press that really use that term. It's a term we coined. So certainly bringing a big vision, being to communicate the big vision. Something I learned working for, for Marc Benioff is something I would take to the next startup. There's one bringing it back to the book, I would say when I started my, my, my founder, CEO journey, one of the most impactful things that that is in the book is how to build a team. And a lot of founders, right, we, we, we tend to be lone wolves. I know we'll talk more about that. And we tend to be, you know, marching to our own path.

Right.

Our own Dr. And so really studying back to say, look, at the end of the day, if you need to scale, you need to bring a group of people together. It's not sufficient just to have a vision. How do you bring a set of folks that are really, really good at what to do and then weave them together as a team? And team building is probably something I worked on a lot in the early stages of the company that I would certainly want to bring into any endeavor that I do in the future.

Now I've, I've been a customer of Zora. I've followed the company, you know, over the years, but I'm not actually completely familiar with like the executive team makeup. Is it the same team from kind of this whole period that stuck with you? How many iterations of the team has there been?

You know, it's hard not to, it's hard to avoid, you know, sports analogies. Right. And so look, you're always crafting the team. It has to be dynamics. And so there are going to be changes. If you look at it from a generational standpoint, I probably are my third generation of leaders. There's certainly people that have been through, you know, 10 plus years and if you look at the broader organization, say the top 50, 60 people in the company, I'm pretty proud that there is a lot of longevity. There's folks that have been here 10, 12, 14 years and, and so, but you want to blend. You want to blend. You want to bring people in with new energy, new skill sets, depending on the needs of the time. And so how do you insert a new person into the equation and really, you know, hold on to that cohesiveness of the team?

When you think about the early days of the company and you think about where you are today, like obviously vastly different businesses in so many different ways and vastly different world. What are the attributes you were looking for? Like, early. Most of the people listening to this are early stage founders. What are those attributes like in the early days that you were, you were looking for?

Well, look, don't oversimplify the biggest difference at, at at scale, scale can be 500 employees, a thousand employees, 5,000 employees in early days is when you look at execution, execution really is very, very different at different levels of scale. And I have this mental model that talks about, look, if, if, if the average number of direct reports is seven, right, then, then a one layer organization is one person, two layers is eight, three layers is 57, four layers is 300. And so those numbers, somewhere between those numbers gives you a sense of the breakpoint. Because a three layer organization operates very differently than a four layer organization. You've got people that they really need to be close to the problem, they want to be close to the product, the customer, whatever the issue is. But once they become a second line manager, third line manager, you can't really do that. You can't touch every single deal, you can't touch every single feature, you can't look at every line of code. And so you've got to develop different types of systems and structures how to communicate, how to bring people together. And so those are the biggest differences. But if you're like call it below 30 employees, you don't necessarily need to do that. I know a lot of advisors might come to you and say, you know, hire for scale, hire that VP of sales that comes out of this type of organization. You don't always need that in the early stages. But then what you have to be comfortable doing is you have to be comfortable making a change.

Right.

Because the person that got you from, you know, call a 0 to $10 million, 0 to 75 employees is not going to be necessarily the same person that gets you through the next phase.

Well, I love that there are so many investors that tell their companies that are doing 5 million of ARR, they say you got to go get that VP of sales. You know, get the person who's seen it at 100 million. And you have these founders going out hiring search firms and hiring people who ran a $200 million business at Google last year had never worked at a startup. And then the founder wonders why did it not work? You know, and the investors all upset and all.

That's often the story.

Right, right, right. But, but the thing you said, which I think actually no one I've talked to other guests about this, the thing you said which is super important is you have to get the person who's right for the right size and scale and trajectory. But then you have to be comfortable replacing that person at some time, most likely. And that's kind of that trade off. But that actually is a better strategy than getting the person today for the business that's seven years from today.

That's right. That's right. So much of the advice has to be context sensitive. And so what we try to do in the book is to come up with, with generic advice. Maybe some context is helpful if we're going to talk about the book. You know, I've been on my founder's journey, and I had my critical moment when we were about 150 employees or so, where in hindsight, I really feel. Felt like, hey, that was a make or break moment. If I hadn't evolved and grown and developed, who knows? The company can be there. There's a critical person during that time. This guy, Richard Hagberg, who is a, you know, he's an executive coach. These days I call him a founder's coach, but he's been doing exec coaching for about 30 years and maybe more in the last decade or so, he's been working almost exclusively with founders. And so he goes pretty deep with, you know, up to about 200 founders. But the unique thing about Rich is he's got a framework, he's got a system, and it's really based on data. So he collects Data on about 46 different competencies, leadership competencies, and about 100 or so plus personality attributes. And so when you work with them, he collects how you do against those 46 competencies. He collects what you are like against these personalities, and he's able to play back to you, hey, the reason you are the way you are, the reason you lead ultimately, you know, is it's based on who you are. And so given that, here's why people say you like what you like, here's the natural deficiency that you would expect to have given your personalities. And he's figured out really, that founders cluster. Surprise, no, not surprisingly, in a set of personalities that ultimately lead to a bunch of leadership gaps. And so what we found is the same things that make up a founder, you know, make us do. What we do ultimately are the seeds, right? The. The seeds sewn of our own destruction. So we, we call founders. They're like ticking time bombs, right? You know, may maybe a ticking time bomb, but without the clock. So when is it going to run down to zero? When is one of the things that made you what you are great at, what you do, what is what, when you're going to trip, trip up on it and, and what to do about it, right? How do you spot those things and how do you avoid that? And so we call the book Founders keepers. But that's the basis of, of things. And I know you read it and it's, it's a little bit self reflective, right? About who we are as, as, as people. And as.

It's amazing actually when you read it, you just, you, you. I can go to certain moments in time in my journey and like I literally am like reliving experiences, you know, as, as you're going through it. And so can you talk maybe just I want to get a little bit of the background on like how you, so you and Rich started working together. Like at that scale, we were about.

I think 130, 150 employees. So it was about 15 years ago. And that's when I started working with him.

And you've been working with him.

I have, I have. And in fact, I love his system so much that I put my executives through it. And so I have a leadership scorecard for every one of my executives. And Rich could even do things again. It's all data. So he can even blend things together and say, look, on a composite basis, on a group basis, here's a composite leadership profiles that you have. Are you balanced enough or do you skew too much towards execution? Do you skew too much towards relationships? And what are the skill sets that you really need to add to the mix on the whole team? And then what are the strengths and weaknesses of each other? And how do you, do you mean, you know, on each other as a team?

So let's talk about those attributes, the personality attributes. You know, the competencies that you mentioned before. If you. There's a lot. I mean, again, it is a very scientific. For as much art as there is, there's, there's actually this book has a lot of science to it, to your point, in your mind, in your mind, when you look at the founders you've worked with, because you've worked with founders, I know you've mentored people. And he's worked with so many people. What are the attributes? Like if you had to say three attributes, three competencies, maybe three of each. However you want to do it. Like, what are those things that stand out for the people who are the most successful?

Well, I mean, it won't be a surprise, but founders, they tend to be lone wolves, right? They're very comfortable going out in a specific direction that's on their own.

Right.

They don't necessarily need, you know, social approval in many ways. Founders are also very, they're very risk taking.

Right.

They embrace risk. Yet we also talk about the difference between a successful Founder and an unsuccessful founder. So when the risk taking is paired with good, strong decision making, it leads to a positive outcome. But what you see is some of the unsuccessful founders, they have the same level of risk taking. They don't always make great decisions. And that's kind of one of the things that, that gets them into, into trouble. And then the third thing I say is, you know, founders are very, very much able to, they, they assure, you know, standards that other people have. Right? They like to, they like to bust the status quo, they like to change the status quo, and they like to, to push for something new and in something very, very different. Now those same attributes, well, personality attributes, when you look at a leadership profile standpoint, they tend to skew very positively along the vision dimension. And so when you look at these 46 competencies and using, you know, some of these things that you see today talk about quite a bit in AI, but statistical analysis allows you to cluster these personalities or these, these competencies. And so you either most leaders are the lead by vision. So think of like a Steve Jobs is probably the classic one, they lead by execution. So probably the more classic one would be something like a Jack Welch or they lead by relationship, maybe a John Chambers of Cisco, more of your classic relationship driven leader of Meg Whitman at ebay when she was there. And so founders, unsurprisingly, skew really heavily towards vision, right? They're vision oriented, they can see around corners, they can communicate, they can evangelize, they can convince people to follow, whether it's its customers or employees are often investors. But when it comes to the execution dimension, you know, they're, well, tend to be very, very good. And then when it comes to relationship, it's a mixed bag, right. Some of them really don't have the same way of reading people.

Right.

They lack an EQ muscle, if you will. And those are the type of things that ultimately can get them into trouble.

Now for you, specifically you as a founder, I mean, um, I know you definitely had the vision piece. I mean from what I know you also have the execution piece. Is that, I don't know, the relationship piece, I, I'm not sure. But for the execution piece and, and the vision piece, for sure. And I, I assume the relationship piece. But is that, do you think that is unique? Do you think that is.

Yeah, so, so if you look at these three dimensions, they can, you can rate them high, medium and low. So there's 27 different profiles. If you just look at these three higher levels, know we call them pillars and Rich actually has a write up and, and so I happen to be a high vision, medium execution, low relationship. So if I just take the generic write up of what a, what a VML would look like and I read it and, and I, I read it to like my entire company and they start cracking up, right? They're like, this is you. And so there's a, there's a journey that you go on of self awareness when, when you start to engage with, with this material. Um, but that happened to be what I was. And so if you didn't double click on the 46 specific competencies, what I heard, and this is about 150 people, is I was doing a terrible job of prioritizing. And that was something I had to learn because look, I, I feel like I actually pretty maniacal about prioritiz, prioritizing, but I needed to help the company prioritize, right? That was a, a big, big thing. Systems and structures. I was getting a lot of feedback. Team building, right, was, was a lot of feedback that I was getting. Relationship building. I wasn't actually spending enough time building relationships with my executives and my team members. Something that I just had a blind spot about, like, you know, why do I gotta do that? And I've learned quite a bit that no, you actually do have to do these type of things. And so, and so we try to design the book like that. So out of these competencies, what we saw was. And the other thing that Rich does is he does interview all the, or your, your, the people around you, so your executives, your board, your investors. And so again, across the close 200 founders we worked with, we found, hey, these are the top 10 gaps, if you will. The gaps, the biggest differences between what your board really wants from you and what they say they're good at. And again, you know, you can see there's a set of common things. And so the second half of the book, we actually touch on those things. We don't touch on 10 specific competencies that make up the biggest gaps. And so one of them was team building. So I shared a bunch of stories in there. This is my, you know, journey of learning how to build good teams. But we have one on prioritization, we have one on strategic planning. Surprise, surprise. Founders think strategic planning. They go for a walk in the park and they is like, I got it, I got the new strategy. And they change it every week. Okay. Strategic planning is actually a process and an exercise of bringing people along. And you know, we give them a few techniques and tips of really how to do that.

Well, so I want to. You mentioned that you shared this back, I think you said with the whole company, like when you did this assessment, I want to get like super tactical for a minute here. You actually took it had like an.

All hands meeting and I did, I did. And so look, some context. You know, when I talk to a founder and I know you work with founders all the time, you know, usually I can get a sense and you kind of look in their eyes and say, are they, are they going through this moment where they feel like it's all falling apart or do they look, I got my strategy and I'm charging forward towards a vision. And what I've learned is if they're in that former camp, they're probably going through some inflection point in the company and they're probably going through some size inflection point. And that's what we were going through. Like, you know, the feedback that I was getting was we don't have any value. You know, the management is in an ivory tower. They're not in touch with the details. The left hand doesn't talk with the right hand. We love our culture. We used to have, but it seems to be going away. And I wrestle with this, right? I try to solve these problems, right. I try to say, well, let me write my values down and show it to the whole company. It just, it wasn't working. And so what I realized that, look, you really had to rebuild the whole company in terms of how they communicate what the all hands are. Clarity on the management structure, clarity on the prioritization structure. But one of the big cathartic events was I took the whole company to an off site and we just talked about values for two days. And everybody came into this thing thinking that, look, we are so disparate in our values. And you know, we had this exercises. We broke them in small teams. Everybody wrote five values and what kind of behavior the value should promote and what kind of behavior the value should, should. Should avoid.

Right?

Help us avoid. And it turns out when we read them to each other and we read every one of them, so there's about 200 meetings, if you will, but they all boil down to just like 10 values. And people realize, you know what, we're actually a lot more alike than we thought. But you had to go through that process, you had to go through that process for people to, to, to, to realize that. And so as part of that, one of the things that I did do is, look, I just want to fess up as a Leader, right. I'm not perfect. And let me just show you. You know, we just. I just did this 360. I collected a bunch of information. Here's what you're saying about me, here's the positives, and here's what you want me to work on. And again, I think that really actually helped shape the culture because that made it okay to talk about vulnerabilities and, and weaknesses and. And I. We got back from the offset, and I could just feel when I walked into to work the next day, just how different it was.

Right?

The whole company culture had literally changed overnight. People were getting up and talking to each other. The level of buzz was high inside the company. And so, you know, these days, I try to do that on an ongoing basis. Right? How do you foster a communication of who do we represent, what our values are, what our priorities are? And the big, big lesson for me that I try to impart with founders is, is it's not about you having all the answers. You like delivering it like, I don't know, like, like, like Moses, right? Coming down problems. It's about letting the organization communicate, talk, share, and then create a shared identity, if you will. And it's not a surprise, right? Ultimately, we all want the same things. We all want the same type of values. And, you know, we all want to innovate, and we all want a collaborative work environment and letting people talk about that and express it really builds the trust inside the organization. It's.

It's by you doing that in front of everyone, I can, I can also imagine for your leaders, it's to see that because you said you kind of had them all go through, puts a.

Little pressure on them to do, you know, to model the same behavior, which also is good for the company.

I really, I really like that. And the values thing, you know, I actually, I went through this process where, at Better Cloud, where we wrote down the values early on, and then people started saying, like, I don't feel that connected. Like, Dave, you wrote these values down. You know, I don't really feel that connected. And we did something actually smaller. Not the whole company. I wish I did the whole company. And it was like 30 of the top performers. And again, when we started writing it down, it wasn't. It wasn't really that off, you know, but it was just tweaking them a little bit and really making sure that they resonated with the people doing the work, the people who we were bringing on. And anyway, these things are so powerful, and I think at least for me, I never thought that investing in those early, I didn't appreciate the power that, that, that has. And when I talk to founders now, I'm like, write the values down, get everyone on board with them, put them on the wall as long as they meet. You know, recognize people for living up to them. And when you do that, it kind of takes out a life of its, you know, in a good way. It kind of takes on a life of its own. And you don't have to be around. Right. I mean, that was my experience is like, you can go on vacation, not be around. You can have a team that's five layers deep and people are still living those values.

People want to know, just want to know, like when I interact with you, hey, do we have a sheer sense of a foundation that allows me to rely, you know, rely on your behavior, if you will.

Right.

And as a company gets behaved, it gets bigger. You don't always spend enough time with some of the people you're interacting with. And so having that foundation really smooths out all the different interactions.

I like it. I want to go from here to a little bit more of the strategy to execution conversation. There's a lot in this book that is very interesting and very powerful and useful. That area for me, kind of in the back part of the book, I thought that that was, I mean, I think everyone should, needs to read that and, and understand that and internalize that. Can you maybe just talk us through that section and how you think about that you mentioned a little bit here, but I really want to. It's that strategy, like you said, where I have had founders who are like, I'm going to go on a two day trip to the water somewhere and I'll come back with the strategy, with the strategy, you know, so maybe, you know, talk through that a little bit.

Yeah. And look, there is a lot of value and in going away once in a while.

Right.

I've worked with founders, like, okay, you haven't really stepped away from the job. I remember I met with one founder again. You could just sort of see in the eyes, you know, he was just overworked, overstressed, like, look, when's the last time, like, you know, you had some fun and he was single at the time. When's the last time you went on a date? And he was like, look, it's been like two years. And so I said, look, look, let's put all this stuff aside. Let's just, let's just go for a walk. And we went for a 90 minute walk, I got his life. And you know, and, and sometimes you got to step away because you got to have some perspective.

Right.

And, and it does sometimes help you see things that other people. But what you learn is, especially as the organization gets bigger, what happens is when it's a small company, when you have 30 people, you know, you're so close to the everyday work, it's almost like you have a thought and you can see materialize in the day to day activities. But once you get to 60, 70, 80, right. Once you get 150 people, you don't even know everybody anymore. And so you really have to let the organization own the strategy. And that's a process of letting them come together and build a strategy. Even if you feel like you know the answer, you.

No.

And so look, we were probably over a thousand employees.

That's a, I want to, that is a really important. Even if you know the answer.

Yeah, you got to let them come to it.

You got to let them come to it. That's a really important.

And I would say 9 times out of 10 you're right, it's not like they come up with something that, that, that's totally misaligned. But you learn a lot, right? And you learn that, hey, you have your own biases in your decision making. You have your own biases in your perspective. And if you let the groove come up, you know, you set a rough direction. If you let the group come up with something, yeah, like once in a while they'll be like, okay, that was totally the wrong direction. I'm glad you didn't let me take you, all of us there. But most of the time the additive tweaks that they add to the system is really, really important. It makes a much, much better product. And my big lesson was I had a chance to, to spend some time with Brad Smith, who was the CEO of Intuit at the time. He had just retired from, from that role and he had some time on his hands and he met with me and he showed me his strategic planning process. And he shows me this thing that's a 12 month process. There's like I tell you, a 12 month strategic planning process. Like my strategic planning process is like a two day off site in, in December.

Right.

You know, before we start the year. And it's just my FPA guy building a budget for next year. We argue about resources. And so I took a step back and said at first my reaction was big company, it's Intuit, right. It's not us. But he started describing what he did, he started describing, okay look, we can adapt this. So we implemented a six month process where we start the strategic planning process six months out. And so we figured out, hey look, what are the big things? What are the big trends? So the Intuit story, you know that Brad story shared with me, was mobile, right? Mobile was like a big, big thing at the time I was working with them. Any idea? It was maybe a few years before that. Today it's probably AI right, but what are the big changes that we have to really, really wrestle with? And then we create teams. We'll say, hey look, these are the three big things. We'll create three teams and go ahead and spend the summer because that happens to be our calendar. Hey, go work on these three things. Go find the best companies to talk. Just, just collect best practices, best information, how do you think about this? And then we come back in September and then we bring the board along, we do a board off site where you know, we present back and it gives the teams to present a chance to. The board says okay, what do you think? And then we tweak it, we refine it and then you know, surprise, surprise, right? A lot of change is already happening because you know, you know, we're back on these things and then we step back and realize, okay, if this is the strategy, then you know, what are the things that we need to do? What are the organizational changes we need to make, what are the skill sets we need to do? Again, this things really, really start to solidify when we go into the budget planning, the resource allocation process, you know that that's in Q4 and again if you're younger company you can try to shrink it into maybe three months, but it winds up being the same thing. You're just doing three month cycles versus annual cycles. You know, a lot of the ideas are already already put forth and so we're much clearer on what we need to do and we build that into how we allocate resources, how we design the organization. Organization shifts start to make, right? You pull out new leaders to new lead new initiatives. And so I'm a big fan. And so again, adapt this to what makes sense for you. At a thousand employees we said a six month plan really makes sense for. Oh by the way, Brad then spends Q1 going out there and evangelizing the strategy. Right? Angelizing plan, evangelizing this. And he has a whole system for doing that as well. And that I've adopted elements of. And so. Okay, I got that. So pulling back, you really need like a Cadence to the company. Right. How do you, what is the cadence that you want, given our size and annual cadence was. Right. And then how do you build a cadence that allows you to bring the organization along, allows them to translate. Right. The common set of directions into their day to day activity and then moving it forward. Right. And if you're an organization that uses OKRs, right. They start getting plugged into the OKRs, and then as a leader, you can start just managing to those okrs.

The, there's a lot here, the, the thing that you said, which I want to. Maybe there's so many different parts of this trying to. The, the evangelizing once this is done and once you have this plan. Can you talk about that? Because, I mean, some people are not doing any of this. Some people actually come up with the plan, but they don't. They don't actually tell the company or they, they tell them, but they don't actually explain. Can you like, talk about what, what do you do? What, how have you adapted what Brad does, you know, did to evangelize these plans once they're done?

Yeah, I mean, when, when I'm working with the founder, you know, you try to bucket things, right? So there's definitely a class of stuff where you as a founder have to get up there and present, right. And you got to say the same thing over and over again. And that's probably a discipline that, you know, you know, Betty off who's. Who's obviously a classic founder pounded into, you know, me, a bunch of us just repetition, right? End of software, end of software, end of soft, over and over and over again. And you know, we do that a lot, right? So you really got to say the same thing like, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 times across the organization. You got to get. I'm good at that. You get bored of it, then you gotta find 20 different ways of saying it so that you don't get bored of it. But then there's another half which is don't say anything. You gotta be in listen mode. And so Brad gave me this, this, this framework that says, you know, when he goes into a region department, a group of people, he basically tries to figure out, hey, is this group. And I might be butchering the words.

A little bit, right?

But is it a level one, level two or level three? Level one is like, okay, they're not really listening to the strategy. They have a whole bunch of gripes. They're just griping. And he joked about, like, they're just griping about the toilet paper in the bathroom, right? Level two is they understand the strategy and, but they haven't quite translated yet into their everyday activity. And level three is like they're, they're on the move, right? They're saying, hey, here's the things that we're going to do, right? To actually improve on the strategy or align to the strategy. So they've translated that. So that's a simple, simple framework. And then again, in a bigger organization, your role as, as, as the leader is just to, hey, just sense where, where does this group sit? Is it sitting level one, level two, level three? And then what's great is, you know, usually you drop into a, into a remote region, you want to meet the leader first. And Brad gave me this tip, I said, no, meet with them last, right? Go do all your meetings, go figure all this stuff out and then just compare notes, compare notes. And he says, look, if I'm dealing with a leader that has a level one group, a level two group or level three group, I have very different conversations. And, but you can see there's a systematic way of doing this. There's a formulaic way of doing this, right? It doesn't mean it's boring because every situation certainly is very, very different. But how do you have repeatability in how you manage the organization and how do you just have a framework for how to, how to think about that? And as founders, I find, you know, because we tend to be these days, you know, more product folks and data folks, right? And that's what I love about Rich's framework. At the end of the day, it, there's a date there, there's data to back up these things, and there's frameworks of how to approach some of the big problems that you're dealing with on a day to day basis.

So another, another thing as I was going through the book that I really liked and I want to key in on is learning how to say, you know, learning how to say no, you know, or when you're thinking about prioritizing. What I see is I've been helping some companies do their strategic planning the last year. And I see, you know, when we get to the end of the day, they've got like 400 priorities. And I'll, I don't know anything about the business. And I'll basically say, so you're gonna, you're gonna do all of those things? And like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're gonna do all of those things. I'm like, that sounds like you need like three times as many people to do that and four times as much money. From your perspective, like, how do you do that? Like how do you say no? How do you prioritize? How do you put push back? But also like you were saying before, let them kind of let them loose. How do you protect against yourself? Like for me, I was the problem for a lot of the time because I was the visionary and I was like, we're going to do all these things and in reality we did 50% of them. Like, how did you handle that?

Well, look, I mean you touched on something that was really interesting, right? At the core of it, the question is, are you the problem, right? And so, you know, so, so the book talks about what makes founders a founder. It talks about what's the difference between a successful founder and unsuccessful founders. And you know, we, we looked at the personality profiles, right, Tied to the competencies. We clustered into five key things, four key things. But there's a fifth one that was a little subtle. It was about self awareness. And you know, that seems to be a huge swing factor between founders that are successful and founders that, you know, blow up. And the self awareness is a journey. And you know, you, you, you are good enough to admit it, right? A lot of times the problem that the organization has with prioritizing is you're coming in every week with a new idea. Because that's what we do, right? We're out there looking for something. We want to iterate, we want to experiment, we want to express our ideas. And so again, you know, again, this is all scale. So if you're trying to find product market fit and you're 15 people, then okay, every, you know, everything's, you know, everything's possible, right? But once you're sort of lock in and you're trying to get from call it 3 million to 10 million ARR, or 10 million, 100 million or 100 customers, a thousand customers, you kind of have to let the organization execute. And if you can't help yourself, then you got to create a lab environment, right? You got to have your, you know, careful, right? Because you don't want to create haves and have nots in the organization. But how do you release your energy of experimentation without letting the company remove, you know, take their eye off the ball? And so one big thing is to find execution oriented leaders that roll into you in, in many ways hand the keys over to them, right? And this is where understanding teams and understanding all that and how you play into the team is really, really important, right? Letting your organization say no to you. And so they can't say no. They don't know how to say no because. But they don't know how to say no to you. You know, letting them do that.

Right.

And you know, crystallizing the priorities on the sheet of paper and honoring it.

Right.

Honoring and letting the conversations go back to how are we doing against those priorities. Right. So those are a lot of the techniques that like, you know, have some self awareness, right. And then understand what your gaps are and then build the organization.

Right.

In a way that the organization is getting what they need from a skill set standpoint. But you're not so stifled that, you know, you get bored or you get disengaged or. Because that's not going to work either.

Do you, when you talk about building that execution oriented team around you, who, who do you have around you? Obviously of your executive team, do you have like a chief of staff or you know, like who runs, you know, is it, is it your cfo? Do you have a third party moderator advisor, like who helps you kind of keep all of this on the rails, essentially, like the planning process and, and all that?

Yeah, so I've gone through all iterations. You know, these days we just went private. So I just took, I decided, look, it's just, it's also aligned to what we do, right? We're very much about empowering finance department, accounting departments, right. So they can elevate in a role that we believe they need to take given all the complexities around business models and everything around us. And so I've centralized it under my cfo, who is now my chief operating and financial officer. I was reading something again, you know, it's, it's, it's like, hey, Benioff just created a CofO. You know, I'm, I'm trained to like, every time he makes a move, I try to like, you know, take it apart. What is he doing? And, and so there's like, hey, this one makes a lot of sense for us. And you know, we're obviously totally different scale than Salesforce, but, but I, I liked a lot of that, right? And it really allowed me to centralize the operations of the company in more cohesive way. And so. But you know, previously I had a head of strategy and operations. We did an incredible job the last four years. And that was really important during that phase. And that phase was sort of the COVID phase, right? It's just how to even manage through all that. And then when we were smaller, I had a fantastic chief of staff, you know, classic McKinsey guy, right? But really able to bring people together.

Right.

Really able to structure these meetings. And he did a fantastic job for that fees.

But you always had some. You've always had some.

You got to recognize what you're terrible at doing and don't do it.

Yeah. What actually and we're talking about Betty off a couple times here. Like what is. If there's. What is the one thing you've kind of taken from Salesforce you think that is if you look back like really played the biggest part in your success.

Well, I mean look, there's a whole bunch of things, right? The whole idea of alignment. We don't exactly do the V2 mom, but I certainly understood the power of the V2 mom and the need for alignment right before you get into the execution. And we would have a two day off site. The whole technique of off sites, I do quarterly off sites and that's something, you know, Fede off is maniacal about that. I don't see a lot of other folks do but really taking a step back with your leaders and just kind of resynching every quarter. We would do a V2 mom in the early days. We would spend two days on the V and never even get to the mob and drove us crazy as execution oriented folks. But I get it now, right. I get it that it's about alignment. He really wants to see a group of people have a shared vision before they start know executing otherwise they're going to be pulling in different directions. Another one certainly, you know, it's kind of interesting, right? We're known for the best sales deck ever. Andy Ratcliffe took one of our decks and then turned into this, this blog post. But look, that was just a technique got from Benioff in terms of tell the story over and over and over again. But it, you know, but it's not about. It was never about like trying to create a fake story, right. It was always about like what is the problem we're trying to solve. We're trying to get people to use custom objects way, way back in the day.

Right.

Which eventually led to this whole app exchange thing. We're trying to get people to understand that there's a difference between, you know, software in the cloud and, and the phrase in the cloud didn't even exist back then. And so you're just trying to explain to people what's going on but do it in ways that are simpler and simpler and simpler and eventually, you know, the, the right story messages come out of that. And so that's a discipline that we do and understanding that that's not something we used to joke, you know, George Hu was a big, big part of the Clarence that, that we would have to do 25 versions of a, of a keynote deck.

Right.

We would number them and you would actually see the numbers get up to 22, 23, 24 before it starts to feel.

Right.

And so the power of iteration and doing it over and over again until you get the story right. Right. That's what led ultimately to, you know, the best sales deck ever.

Right.

Which you saw Andy took was probably, you know, version 24. And then we probably did another 24 versions after that. And so, you know, that's, that's, that's a big, big lesson.

Yeah. That, that sales deck was amazing. I, I mean, we modeled our decks off of that. I still model like that. That was, that was amazing. And I, I get that. I think the power of. It's all back to your point about alignment, making sure everyone knows, like, this is the story we're telling it' how do we tell this story? How does everyone else tell the same story that you're telling that, you know, the, the founder is telling? One thing you said to me, I'm. We haven't prepared for this. I'm just curious. Like, one thing that you said to me when I remember we had a dinner, this was many years ago in New York and we were talking about one on ones. And I think I mentioned you. I have like, my calendar was like 8am to 8pm I one on ones. I had every meeting I was in, everything. And you said, dave, that's not positive. Like, you're, like, you should actually try to get your calendar to be as empty as possible so that you can dive into things when you need to spend the energy there come. Really, you know, and you gave me this advice that I went back that next day and I started canceling meetings. I started. And it was actually a very helpful thing because I was so in the weeds on everything that I couldn't actually jump from things. I couldn't be strategic. I had to be. Can you talk is. I don't know if that is something that, you know, you've kind of maintained, you know, as the company's gotten bigger and all that. But, like, that was for me, that was amazing advice.

Yeah. Look, as a founder, you're going to work all the time, right. Even when you're not working, hopefully you're present with your family. You're in the back of your mind, you're thinking about it. Right. So that's never going to go away. But, you know, if you look at my calendar through weeks from now, it's relatively empty. And I tried not to have regular. There's fewer regular meetings. I have some that are, you know, that are sacrosanct.

Right.

You know, I jump in on Monday, calls the sync, calls my functional leaders. You know, obviously my off sites are really, really important. Obviously my boards is really important. You know, when you're a public company, we have a quarterly cadence and you know, you're honoring your investors and those are. Things are always going to be there. But I like to try to keep my calendar empty now, the day before.

Right.

You know, like the calendar will fill up, but.

But.

Or if not, I'll just spend my time like, okay, what are the things I. I'm losing track of and call people. Because you're trying to organization, you're trying to understand what's going on, trying to get a pulse of the organization. And when you're just going from meeting to meeting, especially these days on zoom, you just don't have time really, really to do that. And look, I don't think this is just true for founders. If anything, I say, you probably were able to go back and blow up your calendar and just change things. Right. What I find is executives often have a hard time with that in their organizations. And so we have a lot of conversations. You know, I know when I, when I talk to my executives, sometimes I do say, okay, well, pull up. I don't want to look at the calendar next week. I want to look at it three weeks from now. And, and if it's all full, I don't know how to have time to do anything that I'm asking you to do. And so, you know, we got to figure that out. Like, now tell me about your leadership team. You know, do you really need to do this? And again, we're outside of scale now where, you know, I shouldn't be doing that with anybody. That's a direct report of mine. But I'll do that often, you know, with the BP layer or.

Well, I just want to tell you that advice was amazing. And you know, I don't know if I, you know, I tried, but I, but I, you know, it was like you said, it was never like I had empty days is just the difference between having them scheduled, pre scheduled with every recurring meeting and being in everything versus having the opportunity to focus on what matters at that time. So let me ask you a question I ask every guest. You know, if you think about this journey of Zora and it's been so successful in any way you measure it. What has been the biggest challenge you've ever faced over this, this journey and how have you overcome that?

Well, every product has a challenge, right? Every space has its unique challenge. Again, early days call it the first 10 years of Salesforce, probably the first. The two challenges and which one's one? Which one is two? One is getting companies of trust, the Internet, right, because it was so early. And two, getting companies getting salespeople especially to use the thing, right? And if we hadn't conquered those two challenges, and we had to conquer those two challenges repeatedly, right? We would go into financial services, it'd be the same thing. We would go into Japan, it be the same thing, we go into to, to, you know, government, right? You know, state and local and federal and it would be the same thing, public sector. And so with, with us, billing is not something that people quite understand unless they come from a telecom background and they think billing is something the engineers build. But billing is actually this operational system that sits in between all these different things. And when you look at a telecom company, it's the most important thing. And so in a B2B SAS company, the operations of the company are really run by ultimately, I think especially because this touches money by finance, right, by the finance department, by the chief accounting officer rolling into the cfo. And so we really have to help companies understand that. And in a B2C company at scale, it's usually an operation technology, but it's not pure technology. In fact, if you just let your engineers build it, they can't keep up and it really starts to hold the company back. And so look, that's just an example. But over the years if we just simply try to build a product and sell, wouldn't necessarily click. We had to do a lot of evangelism and education of the industry. And so this is why, you see, look, why we get better and better and better at it. And so this specific company really was about tackling new things, not just being able to take, hey, look, here's how the product works in the old on premise world and the transplant to the SaaS. What we're seeing now is, okay, here's how the product works in the SaaS world, let's transplant it in an air, right? For us, there's a bit of an intersection between, hey, we also have to help companies understand business models. We have to help companies understand organizational structures. It's really, really important, important for us to partner with the likes of Deloitte and PwC as a world. And so at the end of the day, our company, what attracts the culture of our company is folks that really want to, to feel like they're changing the world, right? They're feeling like they're showing the world a different thing and then signing up for that journey, because that's not necessarily a straight line journey. But ultimately, you know, you go through a lot of, a lot of growth, you go through a lot of accomplishments and you go through a lot of personal development.

You kind of touched on this a little bit. But I want to like, where is Duora in 2028? You know, fast forward three years, you've done some, you're starting your strategic planning, you know, or you like, where, where is, where is Zorn in three years?

I think, I think we've got to take our, you know, in many ways we feel like what we've done so far has really given us a foothold in the, in our customers. We probably, you know, have a, you know, zoom. We're using some variant of zoom in. And look, we know that what we do for them is really powerful, right? We know that for them to do that without us would cost too much or take too much time or use too many resources and the probability of failure is high.

Right?

And we know this for whether General Motors or the New York Times or whatnot, but we feel like we have to continue to expand, right? That there's all these other things, right? So you can. It wasn't sufficient just billing. You have to do revenue recognition. It wasn't support. It's sufficient just to support usage and subscription models. We also have to, well, what happens if you sell a physical product? What happens if you sell professional services on a time and materials basis? What if you happen to sell, you know, large scale projects like construction projects, right? How do you, how do you all bring that into, into the mix? And so we're on a journey really to say, okay, I've been pretty successful so far, but our customers continue to have greater and greater needs. And well, in 2028, we want to be able to say we truly run the businesses of, you know, the biggest and best companies in the world across multiple. All these disparate industries. And we feel like we have an opportunity to do that. And that's why we said, look, given that we're just not about running the clock over and over again, right? Running the same cycles over and over again. And we wanted to take the company private, right? To really get back to really focusing on our customers, focusing on innovation and focusing on that 2028 target versus, say, what are we doing two quarters from now?

I love that I want to transition a little bit to your background. Did you always know that you wanted to be a leader, a founder? Like, is this in your DNA? Like, where. Give me a little bit of your background. Where are you from? Like, you know, what, what, when did you know that this was what you wanted to do?

Look, I mean, you know, I work with a lot of founders who just started their company outside of school, out of school. Seems like it happens more and more these days. I wasn't like that, right? I worked at three companies. I worked at Oracle, I worked at a company called Cross World Software. Again, these are all Oracle variants, if you will. And then obviously at Salesforce. And so I found early on that I really liked business applications. I like building business applications, I like implementing business applications. I like working with companies, right? But I'm also liking, you know, like, technology. So Oracle was really trying to figure out what this new thing called a relational database, right. Client server computing was about. Across world was trying to figure out to build an integration layer. And then technology probably wasn't quite ready then, right? And so it didn't quite click. And Salesforce was obviously, you know, what do you do? This about the Internet and this company is about the subscription model. So I've always wanted to lean more towards the technical challenge at the time. But you also want to grow. And, you know, there was a point probably in 2007 where I was doing great as Salesforce, right? I could have stayed there for another 10 years, but it just felt like on a personal growth standpoint, once you have an idea in your head, right, you want to go pursue that. And look, ultimately, hopefully that's what founders really see. I'll tell you at investment had a chance to meet a company, a founder, and, you know, probably late 20s, early 30s, and I got introduced to him. My first question was, hey, you know, what do you think? Do you think you want to, like, build this a little bit, then hire a professional CEO or hand over the reins and really stick with the product, or do you want to go the distance? And he's like, look, I think I want to be CEO. I want to, I want to, I want to go the distance. I was like, great. And sign me up, right? Because, you know, he was in there for just that personal development, personal growth journey. Knowing that it's going to be hard knowing that he doesn't know anything about sales, but eager to learn. And, you know, when you run one of these companies, every, every day could be different, right? And you don't. And so if you enjoy it, if you want to grow, if you want to continue to do so, finding a big, big space, right, that has a lot of innovation, a lot of change and, and really being a plant your flag in it and saying, hey, here's what I want to do. It's, it's a fantastic journey.

What, like deep, deep down, what is it that drives you? Because to do what you've done with Zora, like just over this period of time and go through the ups and downs of the market and everything, it takes like something deep inside, you know, like what, what is it that, that drives you?

Well, look, I mean, people ask maybe a different question, which is what keeps me up at night? Or what are the low points, right? And the low points are when you feel like you let down, you know, your employees, your people or you let down a customer, those are the low points. Anything else you can kind of figure out, right? And, and so, you know, I think ultimately what drives me is, is there's a big idea. The idea allows me to, to bring a collection of people together that are committed to the idea. There's the energy, right, of trying to figure this out together again, whether it's on the technology side, on the go to market side, on, on the finance side and, and then really, you know, I love software because you do get immediate feedback and like applications because you know your customers, right? If, if your product is not working, you're going to know, right? They're going to call you up and the bigger the company, the more forceful they're going to be. And, but that, that give and take and, and, and getting that immediate feedback is something that I think, you know, know that I thrive on and we thrive on. Not to say that B2C software doesn't have its own, you know, positive zone benefits, but we like the people aspect and I certainly do as well.

Knowing everything, you know, today, all your experience. If you go back and give yourself one piece of advice before you started your first job at Oracle, what would that piece of advice be?

You know, I don't really look back, I'm not a very every person, but you know, when I'm asked for advice if you want to be a founder, right, so if you're, if you're watching this video, listening to this podcast and you haven't quite taken the plunge yet and you know, you want to work for a few years, I'd say really not worrying about Your career, Right. Not seeing your career as a straight path. And so in hindsight, I think what I stumbled onto is I get bored easily.

Right.

Ultimately, maybe that's what pushed me to be a founder. So I, I really manage my jobs and every two years I would switch, right. I, I don't switch companies a lot, but I certainly switch roles. And so at Oracle, I was, I started off a consultant. I was a sales engineer. I was in sales.

Right.

At Salesforce, I mean, I just did sales for the first six months, but then I ran product for like, I think three, four years. I was chief marketing officer. I did a whole bunch of special projects for a while. I think I had the deepest enterprise software or enterprise sales experience outside of Benioff. But then, you know, we hired a great group of folks and so, you know, move around, move around and learn different parts of the company and just enjoy being a sponge. And when you feel like you're ready, I think it'll happen naturally.

I like enjoy being a sponge. I like that in terms of the book, it comes out, remind us what I think. I think couple days, right?

Yeah, yeah, the 20, 20, 23rd. I think soon.

Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm, I'm, I, I'm, I thank you for sending. You know, I'm happy I got a chance to read it before it gets published. It's awesome. I hope everyone takes the time to read it. If people want to get in touch with you, what is the best mode? You know, is that what's the best channel?

You know, I'm not on TikTok, but I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn. Could probably guess my email, right? It's just teen. Zora.com we're about to set up a founders keepers website, you know, for founders that want to learn more and hopefully we'll publish some online tools and self assessments and, and Rich is also willing to scale his coaching practice. So if you're somebody out there that wants to coach founder, I'd love to hear from you. And you could be an ex founder, you could be an executive that worked with them. You could be a vc, right, an investor that works with a lot of founders. But you know, Peter Fenton, who did my first round at zora, did the forward in the book. And look, Peter's always had this ethos of serving the founder, right. There's no greater glory that talks in superlatives, right, than being a service to the founder. And I certainly feel like that, which is why I enjoy working with founders too and giving back but if you're interested in helping founders become founders keepers and the ticking time bomb, we'd love to talk to you.

Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for the advice you've given me over the years. There's so much from this, from the conversation, from the book that people can take. So thank you for doing this.

Of course. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

It was awesome. It was awesome. Well, if you're listening, I hope you enjoyed. If you did, please share with your networks. Please buy the book. You're going to love it. And we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.

Sam.