Unlocking Product-Market Fit - Scott Voigt - Fullstory - Episode #65

We do anything we could to make a buck to build the product, but. But once we pivoted to Full Story, that was like, okay, we're, we're either gonna make this or die trying.

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 journ.

Today's guest is a world class operator, an OG in the Atlanta tech ecosystem, and someone that I have learned from over the years. Before his current venture, he held senior roles at a number of companies, including one as VP of marketing. At Silver Pop, which was acquired by IBM in 2014, he founded Full Story, which has become the leading digital analytics platform. They help companies understand how users interact with their websites and apps so they can improve usability, fix issues and drive better outcomes. Under his leadership, FullStory has grown to serve thousands of customers in more than 100 countries. Their platform processes billions of user interactions every day. He's raised over $200 million from leading investors and has become one of the most successful SaaS companies to come out of Atlanta. Please welcome founder and CEO at FullStory, CEO Scott Voight.

Oh, shucks. David, thanks. Thanks for having me, man.

I'm excited to do this with you.

Nice. I'm send that to my mom.

She's gonna be like, oh, okay. We're gonna jump right into it. The first question I ask every guest, what is the one thing you've done, big or small, at Full Story, that's had the biggest impact and you would do again if you're CEO of another company in the future?

These aren't fun. They're not fun things to say. But I think moving, moving people out fast when they're not fitting is the most important thing. And it's probably the hardest thing.

Because you're never, you know, it's the tweeners that make it hard or if somebody is a clear cut, not fit, it's easy to get them out. But when your spidey sense is telling you that something isn't working and that it is probably a people person and you've worked on it a little bit.

Getting.

Making that change as fast as you can is the right move.

Does it get easier? I mean, no.

Yes and no. Yes and no. And I'll explain. There's always the human side of that and you know that separating with someone is always going to, it's, it's going to sort of bruise your empathy muscles and hurt them in some way. And that never gets easier. If it does, then, I don't know, you, you start to worry that you're sociopathic. What does get easier is the, the muscle memory of how to do it. How to have hard conversations is something that you can practice. You can learn how to have a much more empathetic conversation. And honestly, you can learn how to telegraph it much better. So you're not surprising anybody. The mistakes I made, a litany of mistakes in, in my background is the surprise. We're going to make a change. That's never a good. We're going to make a change. And so having those conversations along the way where it's not a surprise at the end, that that is easier in.

That regard, I think that, that, I mean, I remember the first person that I ever had to let go, I was probably 22. And I remember I didn't sleep, I think, for like two days before. And when I told the person I was letting them go, I remember they were so surprised because I was so scared to tell them anything, to telegraph anything, that they were so surprised. I, I, I will never forget that. And they were upset, surprised. They were begging for their job. I remember. And I was like, oh my God, this is, this is terrible. And I, and over time, someone gave me the advice you just said, which I don't think anyone's ever said actually out of the 50 plus episodes I've done is, is to telegraph it so that when it occurs, it is not a surprise. You've been open about it. And when someone told me that, it completely shifted my entire way of thinking about the process.

Right. That, that is our job as managers. I mean, you can get academic about it. There's leadership, love leadership, rally the troops, say the words. And then there's management, which is trying to bring people along in their journey. So it fits with the journey that the company is on. And that is about constant open communication. We, we use the flavor.

Communicate with clarity is one of the phrases that we use at Full Story a lot. And that's part of it is, I mean, I was writing reviews this morning and I really try to push myself in review writing to not just spend on the easy. You're great, we get along, you're doing good work. Here are the things you accomplish. But like the, the deeper. This is where you and I don't communicate well. And, and that's okay, but we've got to work on just communicating better because usually if there's a gap, it's because we didn't we didn't talk it out well enough early on.

The other thing on that I, I tell people, I think for every manager, I, I'm pretty sure that firing someone, letting someone go has, I mean, in my experience, every manager I've ever worked with, like, that's the worst first thing, you know, as a manager, you never want to do it. And I think I tell people a lot. Like the experience. I had one experience where I let someone go, a salesperson who I loved, everyone loved him on the team. He just wasn't good at doing inside phone sales. And I let him go and it was so painful. And everyone was like, why'd you let him go? He was great. I'm like, he was. But he wasn't good at his job. I tell everyone this story and I ran into, at a bar at neighbors in Atlanta. I ran into his bar and he came up to me and gave me a huge hug. It was like a year later. Wow. And he said, dave, thank you so much for fighting me. I said, what? He's like, I now do outside sales for a plastics company, make three times as much money as I was making at Vocalocity. And he's like, I, that was just the wrong job for me. And I was like, oh my God. You know, I could have kept him and I could have said, I really like this guy. He's amazing, you know, but actually that process, he wasn't a good fit for the job that he was in. And, and, and, and anyway, so I, but it's such an important lesson and I think for a lot of people, you just don't, you avoid doing it because it's, it's so humanly painful.

It's human. You touched on something too that I think is overlooked. That is another thing that makes it hard is you, you want to part with people with dignity. Obvious, obviously. And again, unless you're a sociopath, part of that is the post parting process back to everybody else in the company. And you don't, you don't want to get them out the door and then be like, oh, that, that person. I mean, obviously some people will see it, but a lot of times people won't. People that are on their team or people that were adjacent to their team think, oh, that individual was a really solid performer. I can't believe you made that change. Or if, if you can do it in a way that's very graceful, it's there. It looks like their decision is now there's this tension where I believe you should always tell the truth. Is a hard standard to live by. But always tell the truth is the right mode. So everybody, you know, they just trust you because you're not going to lie to them. And so there's this blurry area of did you or did they? And it's none of your business. Everybod everybody else.

Right.

The decision that, that made. And you know, you're just gonna have to live with those kind of echoes and rumors and. But you do that in the spirit of dignity for the person that's going.

Yeah, well, one of the things I, my lesson is after that first firing, I remember that it made me want to be so much better at hiring. I, I can remember the moment in time where it's like, I don't want to do this again. I don't want to do this again. And I'm going to get better at hiring. When you think about you've hired, I mean, how big is full story now?

Or about 450, something like that. But you know, we've done a little bit of this over the years.

Yeah, but I mean you've hired thousands of people. You know, in all your jobs and everything. What is it that you like when you think about your interviewing philosophy or structure? Like what, what. How do you approach interviewing? Is there one question that you like that's your question or how do you approach it?

Of course it's evolved over the years. I've really honed in on the practices of this book. Who by? The guys at GH Smart. If that's ever hit your radar.

Yeah, a couple other guests have mentioned it. I haven't read it yet. I need to read it.

It's, it's very, it's very good.

And there's no magic to the questions that you're asking. You know, you're putting people in situational questions. What, what is interesting about it is the follow up on the questions. They, they guide you to say, you know, oh well, who was your manager and what was their name and how do you spell that? And there's something about asking those questions that they would say, and I've seen it in practice is a bit of a truth storm. Now I may or may not go and do the ref check on that person's boss, but there's something about them really think, thinking about their boss that makes them just be a little bit more clear. And I think that will help set off flags. So that, that's kind of a technique. The book is worth reading. It's, it's a, it's a quick and Good read. You know, other things I've learned In our for CEOs, I think this is a really good move is include someone from your board as part of the hiring process for key execs. I do this for a few reasons. One, I actually value the opinion of my board. I had the very good board and they have pattern matching that I don't in executive levels, given the stage that we're at. And so they bring good point of view, but the other thing is they're bought into the process of the candidate that we're trying to bring in. And then, you know, finally, if you find someone you really like and they really like and you want to make an offer, almost inevitably that person is too expensive. And, and so you've got somebody at the board level. When I'm like, yeah, they're going to break the band and the board's like, yeah, that person's really worth it. We've talked to the recruiter and you know, we probably need to pay up for that person. So it makes it, it makes it.

A little bit better.

And if that executive, for whatever reason isn't a fit, you, I, I'm, I'm not doing it out of a defensive place. But then you can sit down with that board member. Like, what did we miss during the process? I mean, you interviewed him, I interviewed him. What did we get wrong about this, this executive? And I think that makes everybody more accountable as a team.

Both of those are really good. The, the one about going deep on.

I saw someone from GH Smart present at some CEO conference and I got that same tactic of who's your manager? Who was your manager? What's their name? How do you spell it? And then if I were, when I call, I think the exact word was when I call that person to ask them this question, what are they going to say? And it is. That was. Of all the unlocks I've had in interviewing, that was maybe the biggest unlock of the truth serum is such a good way to say like you say that to someone, you say, so the last review you did, when I call them and I asked them on the last review, what was the thing you really needed to work on? The answer can't be, oh, I work too hard. You know, which is usually people's answer. It's like it usually turns out to be. I started getting such different answers to that question.

Yeah, let's be honest, nobody's perfect. And when you're a.

50 person startup.

People that you're going to be able to recruit in are different than the caliber of people you're going to be when you're a 400 person, you know, a thousand person, whatever. They're different skill sets, and there's different talent levels that you're going to be able to get along the way. And that's been surprising. I, you know, it's obvious when you think about it, but back in the day, you think, I'm gonna hire the best individual in the universe and they're gonna want to come and work at Full Story. Turns out Zuckerberg's offering them a hundred million dollars and I get them today. So what you have to do is you have to recognize that everybody. Everybody's got some bruises, and you have to figure out what you're really optimizing for in the role, given the stage, given the, the tour that you need out of this person. And so having. Having this scorecard in your mind of what you really would like from an experience set, stage set, and then the personality attributes that are going to back that up. I think I, I've described it before as like, if you ever played Dungeons and Dragons. Not me, I was way too cool.

Okay. But if you play Dungeons and Dragons and you've got a character, you've got this little character card, and you've got charisma and strength and stamina and, I don't know, weaponry, whatever, that's how you need to think about these execs. And there's some people that are just so charming and they just don't work that hard. And there are some people, I'm. I have an exec right now that I've just never seen anybody work harder ever. Like, I like to believe that I work hard. And this, this person said, just hold my beer, and I am going to work on the weekends and on the night and all the time. And that's that individual superpower. And there are other places where, you know, they're adequate and there are the places they spike a little bit. And that's okay if it's balanced and it works for what you have and what you need.

Yeah. On the. When you talk specifically about the executive search and using the board and do you do those searches usually internally, or do you use a search firm for that kind of stuff?

We. We use a search firm. I always start maybe if, like, when, if you know that you're going to be out hiring an exec, you know, you usually sense it. It's not a surprise, like, you don't wake up one day or like, oh, my gosh, we need this. You, you kind of see it coming. And so I'll usually start to meet with prior to engaging a search firm some people in my network that I think might be good and inevitably they have jobs or whatever and it doesn't work. But you start to get an at bat on what good looks like. But we, we use a search firm. We've really narrowed in. Not exclusively, but we've used, grew a lot and we've used them across functions and I've been really, really happy with, with everything here. But we've used all, but we've used lots of them over time.

The, the first time, you know, again I think about my own experience. I'm like that first time that a board member said you should use a search firm and then told me how. And then I talked to the search firm and they gave me the price. I said to the board member, you want me to spend 100/,000 on this search like this? And they, they get paid no matter whether they find me or not. Like that doesn't even sound right, you know. But then when you don't. But then the next time I didn't use a search firm and I told myself I'm going to do it myself and I'm going to. And the search took, I mean, didn't happen actually never, it never completed because I don't have the time. I don't. So it's this really interesting dynamic where it's, you know, and then, then I had a search that I did with someone for an exec role where the, where the person from the partner said look, I'm going to put 10 people in. There's only 10 people in New York City that can do this job. I'm going to put 10 people in front of you and you know, one of those people is going to work and, and I, it was that experience. I'm like, I'm paying them for their connections for, for keeping me on track. Right. I mean I guess that that is kind of what you're doing because first time founders, first time CEOs when they get the first contract from a search firm, everyone's like, I'll get calls like Dave, is this the right number? Is this actually what people pay?

You know, I, I think founder CEOs, I mean it's probably a bigger theme. Recruiting just really brings out is you, you're so at least high, cheap and scrappy. And so I just hate seeing the, the money go out the door for something that, because we're cheap and scrappy, I Feel like I can do myself. I recruited the founding team.

But somewhere along the way, you just have to let go of some of those things and realize you just kind of have to pay for this. I don't like it, but I don't know. I don't, I don't yet. I haven't engaged McKenzie yet, so I'm still holding on to something. Sorry, McKinsey. People listening right now, but don't come.

Around when you, when you think he's talking about the Dungeon Dragons thing, which I, I love that. Just visual of thinking, what, what. When I think about the people I've interviewed, when I think, you know, you. It's exactly that. Like, you're never going to get the. There's no character that has. Everything is like, you know, at the peak. And so you kind of look at, and you're like, okay, there's. There's going to be those things I'm looking for. And that, that there were people. Spike. If you were the Dungeons and Dragons character, like, where do you, where do you spike, where do you think you are really strong? And then as a follow on to that, you know, when you're hiring, are you trying to find people who spike in other places? Is that the kind of methodology or.

Yeah, let's. Well, I don't. I struggle to say where I think I'm good. I mean, but I am. I, I think, and I've had other people tell me, and I, I think this is relatively true, that I'm a pretty good storyteller. There's what you say and how you say it, and I try to put a lot of thought into both of those things. We, you know, last week we had the entire company come to Atlanta. We call it mid year Meetup. And, you know, that's my time to kind of recount where we've been halfway through the year and what have we got to do and put a lot of time into those talks in a way that they just don't come across stiff. Hopefully they're energizing. Hopefully everybody really hears the themes that we need to focus on. And I think that is a very important role as the CEO is to be able to, you know, tell stories. And it's one of those surprises, too, that they don't really tell you is that you're going to say the same thing over and over and over and over in every interview and every business development thing and every prospective customer. You're going to tell the story, a full story, over and over again. And I equip a lot that I. That I try to workshop new material all the time, feel a little special every time.

Somewhere along the way, I started adding, you know, Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy Buffett probably sang Margaritaville a hundred thousand times. But if you were, you know, you were out in Cocktail Cove and you heard him singing that song live, he's gonna put a spin on it that makes you feel like that's the first time. And so when I tell that full story. Story, I. I often say the Jimmy Buffett thing, trying to make it sound like that's the first time I said the Jimmy Buffett thing, which is kind of meta, but I really do try to just make it as engaging and interesting for everybody that's heard that story, because it's part of the job.

And where. Where does that. Did you. You said you work on that. Did that come from someone that you worked for before? Was that something that you. Because that is a. That. I think that's a really. It's a heart. It's a pretty hard skill. I mean, to. To. To. To develop both those. I think both the storytelling at a level.

It'S called almost like the lowest common denominator level that everyone in the org can understand and get behind. That's one thing. And then the second is to be able to repeat yourself while sounding like you're not repeating yourself. I mean, that is. It is much harder than it. Than it seems or sounds. You know, although you.

You've done it.

You.

And you know that feeling where you just drop. That you drop out of your head?

Yeah.

And there's.

It's.

It's muscle memory, and you're doing the thing. You're shaking your head, and I. I'm gonna meet with somebody that's listening to this after this, and they're gonna be like, he's doing that thing right now.

I.

I have. I think I've always kind of had it. I was that kid growing up that was. You know, I ran. I remember running for sixth grade class president, and my mom and I worked on that speech, and it had some cheesy joke about getting stuffed in a locker or something. And like, I don't know. It was workshop and material with mom. I'm sure it was good stuff. And. But I liked being in front of a crowd. I like getting a rise out of a crowd. I like trying to persuade. And so I've kind of always done that.

Yeah.

And I guess, you know, is it me self selecting into this role or the role self selecting for somebody that can tell stories? I can't tell you which of the.

Two is true, but I think when you get bigger and you get to the scale that you've gotten to, I think it's, I learned, I mean, I, when I, I, I had people who would leave Better Cloud or when I stepped down as CEO and I had people who would tell me, dave, I looked forward to our all hands meetings to have you pump me up. And I didn't, you know, and when I started getting some of those comments, I'm like, interesting. Like, I, of course I knew that I was there to motivate everyone and get. But, but people would say, like, I literally would look forward to getting on the all hands so that you would pump me up. Right. And you're like, wow, that if that was the only job I was doing, of course I did a lot more. But if it was the only thing.

At a certain scale, that, that, that energy you give everyone, that alignment, that storytelling is probably the highest ROI of your time.

Yeah, yeah. I don't, anyway, it sounds like you take, you take pride in doing it. You enjoy doing it. I, I enjoy doing it. You're right. Unfortunately, it's not the only aspect of the job. Otherwise you'd just be, I don't know, public speakers. We can just go around and meta, teach. I think that the other thing that for me, the Intersect, you know, I spike, I think on storytelling. Others have told me that other than that, I think I'm just a generalist for the most part. Like, I don't spike on anything else. And so I can switch context fairly well in the role. You know, I can go from selling to listening on other problems. I'm not a super technical guy, but I can kind of listen to them and see what are we not communicating well? Usually it's like, are we not communicating well? What aren't we communicating well? What are the facts? And just trying to problem solve is something that I spend a lot of time on as well.

So, so another thing, you know, on storytelling, I'm going to continue there because I think one of the things you've raised, you know, over $200 million, which I don't really, I don't celebrate myself because.

Not that horn to be loud, but you have.

And that's not easy to do and especially from the investors that you've raised it from. And I think part of that is the storytelling. I think it's the ability to get them aligned kind of with what, with what you're doing. Can you maybe talk about early days? Was it really easy for you to fundraise. Like was that when you went out to tell the story? Was that, was that. Did you get the first yet? Not first yes but you know was it five meetings and you got a yes?

Well I mean true story. No. So I think you know this but for Woodsmers playing along at home prior to founding Fullstory the founding team of Fullstory worked for a year and a half on a product that was not fullstory. We had this incredible team of ex Google engineers. They're brilliant computer scientists. We were all in a room together. We were working on a product that was sort of a reboot of marketing resource management Help you run a marketing team better. It was a beautiful product and we hit the road and we tried to raise money on it and we were wildly unsuccessful. I mean just horribly unsuccessful. We met, I've told a story before but we met with this famous Boston based British venture capitalists who will go unnamed in, in this discussion and he went up to the board after we did our little song and dance and I was like.

Remarkable team to give you an A And he wrote an A on the board. It's just brilliant team.

Category. You're in marketing, there's so much time out there. A and he wrote idea. The idea you're pursuing is just utter garbage. He wrote a D. He like wrote a D. And we walked out of that room. This was one of the early pitches and we were like he just doesn't get it. He just, you know what? This person that's seen every business plan ever just doesn't get what we're doing. We're so clueless.

That was that it was a beautiful product. That, that product was a. I remember.

That product you remember home based.

I remember it very well. Remember it very well.

He, he actually his partner said to us the. My worry for you is that it's such a pretty product. It will cloud the judgment of what a bad idea it is. So we went, we went up and down Sandhill Road and we just got punched in the face over and over again. I am so fortunate that we did not raise money on that because if we, if somebody had. I mean I worked at a venture capital firm in Atlanta for a long time. I know the guys really well. They passed on the deal.

Nobody would fund this thing.

And so you. So, so from there I actually don't really know. I mean of course I knew all of that. I remember seeing the product. I remember like what was the what. So after that was it just like were were shutting down and starting over.

No, no. Haven't you ever read an article about being an entrepreneur? You have to persevere, David. Like haters are going to hate. They just don't get your vision. So we, there were many, many, many sleepless nights where we're working on this thing. And this is where you feel like if we just built this one thing into the product, it had changed the trajectory of it a little bit. A little bit. But our mind was constantly turning on, like, what could we do? It was different. And through trying to understand what our customers were doing in that first product, we implemented other product analytics tools and we hated them. We just thought they, these are not good because they suffered from this flaw of having to know in the customer's journey what was going to be an important moment. You know, if they click. We're trying to figure out what we needed to build in the product to make it better, but we couldn't get any telemetry on what people were doing into the product. And we have very, very smart founding team that looked at the prop, that problem of understanding customer interaction in a new way and devised this idea, this thesis that we could just capture all of the data and then make sense of it without having to say what is important.

First. Like, is clicking on this button important? Let's go write some code around this button.

Click.

Is clicking on that button and click. And so we just turn that paradigm on its head. We launched something, you know, that we called auto capture. And it was really a new way of ingesting data. And then that product had session replay in it and the world just wanted some session replay. And so we were turning the lights on for the first time and it was just night and day. That first product we were trying to push into the world and it was kind of doing okay. Session replay instantly solved a problem that people didn't know they really had. And when I went to, when we went to go raise money on Full Story, not Home Based, it was, it was pretty easy by comparison.

Was it the same? I'm curious, did you go to the same, any of the same investors that you went to for, for, for Homebase?

Yes, we did. We did actually. And Google Ventures was the first to do the seed. They stepped right into it and we're like, yeah, we'll do this. And so we didn't spend a lot of time on the seed. When we went and did the Series A, we took it for a wider, kind of a wider lap and met with some different people at Kleiner and they did the Series A. I mean, I remember that.

I remember the first time we saw Full Story. I think we were one of the first customers. I remember our support team saw that and they were like, holy, this is the, this is crazy. Like, I remember how. Yeah, exactly. They were like, we see the whole session. Like it was, it was this. I remember David Ardwick, the CTO is like, this is the coolest thing, like, you know that, that I've ever seen. And, and I, it's exactly what you said. It's just like the, the night and day. And I, I say that because I think it's important. Especially a lot of people listen to this, are first time early stage founders and people are struggling a lot of times with that product market fit and they feel like what you, what you said is. So I think the feelings, how you just described is like, if I add this, if we add this, if we do, that's going to be when the floodgates kind of open versus like our product is a V05, but people are literally banging down our door to get it and like use it. And, and you just. The difference is, it's so stark that when you actually have the experience, you know the difference innately. But I don't know if that makes sense. But that's when you're saying it, that's.

Like, yeah, it is very much that.

If you have an experienced product market fit, you're trying to convince yourself you've found it. For our first product, Homebase, the real danger there is.

There are plenty of products out there that are better workflows and better workflows. There are companies that are, that do fine being a better workflow, but that isn't a real pain, it's not a real painkiller. And so it was fine. People would use it, but they didn't get excited about it. We actually, we proved that we could build fullstory. We did not build it. We kind of were like proof of concepting it in the background. And I just put together a keynote presentation with like 10 slides on it and I went around and met with every SaaS company that I could meet with and just said, is this a problem? Is this a problem? If so, what do you do? You capture everything. Didn't have a name. Didn't even have the name. Full story. We called this the Cow Paths slide deck. It's still, it's still a great slide deck. And then I would say this is what it does. And I had fake videos of session replays in the slide deck that looked Kind of real. And was like, we're building it right now. You want to buy it? And it was so instant that, yes, we'll pay for that. That's what it felt like. It's like we. To call it a pivot is an understatement for what we did. It was truly like throw the old stuff away, work on the new stuff. And that was hard, but it was right.

And you. You had. I mean, that team, that founding team was one of the most impressive founding teams even to this day that I think of, from design to engineering to business. Like, you had the whole. Literally everything covered except for the CEO.

Everybody on that team was unbelievable.

But. But you kept go. If I don't. If I remember correctly, you guys during that period when you didn't raise yet, and you were. If I remember, I think with us, you're doing like, consulting work and kind of like doing stuff to kind of keep alive, which was. I still would. I mean, if I think about the full story. Story. That's a.

You guys were. That was a real. I'm sure. I. We never talked about it back then, but I can only imagine what a grind that was to basically keep the lights on, I guess, you know, with a bunch of very expensive people who all came from Google mostly, you know, and, And, And. And do that while. Like, how did everyone stay.

Together and motivated in that.

Yeah.

I haven't relived the history in a long time. It. We. We.

I think it helped that we liked each other. We. We knew that this was our shot and our time to try to build something new.

It was really hard.

And we were very lucky. I mean, those teams are true. I'll give you an example of some of the luck. And this kind of gets into why Atlanta is a great place start a company, or at least it was, you know, way back then. Is.

David Payne the. The Scout Mob guy? If you remember David Scout Mob, I think he's doing Neighborhood studios now. He just gave us his apartment. He was like, hey, Scout Mob's kind of taking off. Do you need a place to work? And we said that that would be fantastic. And so we had an office and there was a place to go every day.

And so that was just like Atlanta giving back. And then Ben Chestnut at mailchimp, we were doing. I. We were doing some light consulting for them, and it turns out that you couldn't work in an apartment. We hit the homeowners association. They're like, no, you can't. You can't have eight people showing up every Day. Get out. So we, we were. We were refugees looking for an office. And Ben was like, come, come work at mailchimp, which was like working in Won Chocolate factory at the time. And he put us in the room that was where mailchimp got started. Like, so much mojo in that original room. Now, Ben, he's told me since, was like, I was hoping you'd go out of business. I was just going to hire your good engineers. Like, you could hit bricks, but damn you, Ben. We survived.

But. But it was just one of those. It was just one of those things. And the other thing that we did is we did consulting. And so we, we had a little stuffed monkey that we would put on two people's desks and they would code for Mailchimp1 whatever they wanted. And we took the proceeds of those meager consulting dollars and we just divided them amongst ourselves to be able to pay. Not a lot of money to keep going. And yeah, I would do consulting. We do anything we could to make a buck to build the product. But. But once we pivoted to full story, that was like, okay, we're. We're either going to make this or die trying.

Yeah. I want to. I want to go back to the investors for a second. Like, did you.

How deliberate were you in going and choosing which investors that you wanted to work with? Or like many. I mean, at least for me, kind of in the beginning, you're just like, whoever's in front of you. Like, were you. Were you really deliberate with the investors you wanted to work with and kind of structuring your board, or did that just kind of happen by happenstance?

It happened. The seed was sort of happens. Happenstance. It happened quick and easy, and that was where we needed to be right then. And so this combination of Google Ventures and Tom Noonan in Atlanta, again, kind of head nod back to Atlanta being a good place. That came together really quickly. When we went out for series A, we took a pretty good lap around Sand Hill and. Which is just one of the coolest experiences of career, just running up and down Sand Hill. And there were people that we liked and people that we didn't. And.

You know, I'm. I'm old and so just getting a chance to pitch at Kleiner to Ted Schlein. John Doer was in the room. I think Mary was in the room was just like super cool. It was just the coolest thing in the world to have.

John.

We. One of the themes, again, kind of back to the Atlanta thing is we met with some other firms that were pretty interested. And they. A couple of them would quip like, you can't build a big company in Atlanta, which sort of was minorly offensive. I don't think they cared that they were offending, and I understand where they were coming from, but at the time, it was just like. And I remember when we did the. The partner pitch at Kleiner, we had a little extra time, and I said, you know, is there any. Any concerns you have? Like, the Atlanta thing? Do you want to talk about the Atlanta thing? And John Doerr slapped his hand on the table and said, we love Atlanta. And like, all right, this is great. And so Ted has been such a good board member for us. I mean, he's just seen everything.

And so, you know, good board balance there.

Yeah. And you have people like. So you have a lot of. You have a number of, obviously, investors. Then you have people like Alex Estevez, who, you know, came from an operating background. How did that come about?

So Alex had just moved back to the South. He had been the CFO at Atlassian. And this was right as we were going to build the board, I think, in conjunction with the Series C, we needed to have a board, and so we wanted an independent board member. And I got introduced to Alex, and we just hit it off. We and the team of fullstory, it wasn't just like a Scott Alex thing. We just really liked him. He is a great human. He is a cultural steward. Like, he just appreciates the intersection of how a culture will drive operations.

And.

Just.

We wanted Alex instantly. So I had to do some wooing. There was another company in the south that was trying to convince him to take a board spot. And it was, you know, lightly competitive at the time, and we convinced Alex to join us. And it's been. It's been great. We have. I just segue. We have a wonderful board. Like, I talk to entrepreneurs every once in a while that have.

Boards that have some contention on them, or you've got some, you know, some real table bangers or yellers, or we've. As we got further in our fundraising, we were fortunate in Series C and D to have some options of who we wanted. And we opted for chemistry on board over highest price. At times, not too much, but, you know, a little bit where.

We just felt like it was really important. And so it's a collaborative board setting. Talk a lot.

Yeah, that is so I think that I. I had the same situation where I. I actually took, I think, two rounds where I took the board member. I wanted the firm I wanted at a lower price. And I really think too often as founders, everyone's doing math in their head and dilution and this. And I want to be able to say the highest price to the market and when in reality, you have to live with those board members for a decade more. I mean, if you're going to be really successful, you know, probably a pretty long time, and people are like, no, no, no, but that's the best. Or sometimes they say, oh, that's the best firm. Even if the partner sucks, that's the best firm. You're like, yeah, but the partner is the person who's going to be sitting with you, going through the ups and downs that you're gonna have to deal with. I, I think that is, I really think that's an important, like, reminder for people like the board dynamic. Not even each individual board member and then the board dynamic as a whole.

Correct. You don't really get to test the board dynamic to too much. A lot of the times they know each other and so that's, you know, that, that works out okay. We've been very lucky and the board dynamics have played out. But you are like, almost back to our interviewing conversation. You are able to get a sense for who is going to be on the board and what it's going to be like to be around the table and testing for that and asking questions on that is. Is important.

Ron Shaw from Stripes in New York is on our board. And he is such a wonderful board member. He's an investor and he's a board member, and he is a collaborator. And I text with him all the time.

You know, and he helps me solve problems. He helps open doors. He does all the things. It just, it's great to have somebody like that.

Yeah. Let's talk about Atlanta, because I, you know, I, I love Atlanta on so many different levels.

And you think from your, your apartment in New York City.

Yeah, well, if I didn't live in New York City, I wouldn't be married. So. So I think that was, you know, that was my move back here. But, but I love Atlanta and I, I really, I think those years that you were starting, that I was starting, that Kyle was starting sales, it was like all kind of in that same time. And there really wasn't a lot in Atlanta at that time. There really, there really wasn't too much. David Cummings hadn't started ATV yet at that point, and it was still, like, really early. But you were there. I mean, you were really building. I'm here at Silver Pop, which is another really amazing story. Right. And, and, and so you've seen that journey in Atlanta. Can you talk about what that's kind of been like and, and what it's like today? Because I think it's like, pretty different from when we started. Yeah.

I mean, well, you know, at the risk of grandpa telling too much story, I graduated from Georgia Tech in 1996 or 7. I should know that. But right, right around that era. And when I came out of school, I joined a startup and I think it was like nine people headquartered in Athens at the time by a guy named Trip Rackley, who's, who's built a ton of things in Atlanta. And we were one of the first Internet banking companies of that era. We, we would go to community banks. I like, I was a Sales rep in 1997, and I would show up at rural Mississippi at a community bank, and I would say, you're going to have a virtual branch one day. And they're like, what? I was like, there's this thing, the Internet. Let me explain. And so in that. And that took off and there was that era, that sort of late 90s era of tech companies in Atlanta that somebody should write a book about it. It's not going to be me, but, you know, security first or S1 in front. These are companies that went public in Atlanta and they were, they were great company. I was fortunate to then go and work at Nora Moseley, which was the largest venture fund, and I was the lowly analyst in the back of the room. But hearing from the six, seven partners there about the prior eras of technology in Atlanta, Scientific Atlanta, and, you know, the cable world that was up in Tech Park. There was a, there was just a lot of technology stemming from Georgia Tech back in the day. And there have been eras of it over and over again. And you and I were fortunate of being sort of that post.com re Rise of Technology in Atlanta. And I think that there's an. There was the Security chapter of Atlanta. And so there are these different camps of good entrepreneurs around Atlanta. You and I were in a little bit of a different camp for whatever reason. And if you look at what's happening now, take Garrett, right? Garrett itself. Flock Garrett. So I worked for this guy, Trip Rackley, and helped him take that company public. I didn't. I was a lovely guy. He took it public.

Garrett worked for Trip for a while at a different sort of company. And then when he left, you know, he went out on his own. And so you're just seeing this, this pattern of Georgia Tech, people that have created interesting companies in Atlanta.

And now, I mean now the ecosystem is real. I mean there's money in the ecosystem. There's. There's people who've done it before who have been part of companies that have done it before. There's multi time founders. Like, it's really, it feels, I mean.

I'd say, you know, from a venture perspective it was probably one of the hardest markets to raise money 15 years ago. And it seems to me like it's, I mean with Venture Atlanta and all the things that are happening there feels like it's. More firms are telling me like, oh, we're opening an office in Atlanta, we're good. You know, it's like, it feels like there's, there's it's a real, I mean, I know it's been around to your point for a while, but it. Maybe there's been this inflection point in the last, I don't know, you know, five years, 10 years.

Yeah, it does feel like things are trending well for Atlanta. We've got some good companies.

And there have been some good exits too.

Right. Okay, so I want to second last question this section that I'm going to get to your personal background, but the question I ask every guest. What is the biggest challenge that you've faced since starting fullstory and how have you overcome that challenge?

If you have, there's, there's sort of a joke sometimes at Full Story. You remember that show Ozark?

Yeah, I know Ozark. Yeah.

Like everything is good for a second. And then next season on Ozark and so I mean it doesn't feel like it has been a straight line up. I, I promise you that the, the first thing that pops into my mind of the harder things that we've had to go through. Um, and we don't, we don't talk about it very much. I'm just going to allude to it. I'm not going to get too much in the weeds. But along the way, one of the founders of Full Story left fullstory and.

That was hard for everybody involved because this person was such a core part of everything at the company.

You know, season changed, things change and there was just, it was emotionally a toll for leadership, it was emotionally told for the company. And it, it sort of brings some questions like why and what you can't unpack all the things all the time. But we really have pushed through that. You get to a stage where you realize, and this is absolutely true of me, it should be true of Every good company out there, the company is more important than any one person by a long shot. The company is the ideals of the company, obviously the product of the company, the customers of the company, the trajectory of the company. And every person should be able to be cycled in or out of the company. If you're doing it right, I could get hit by a bus here in San Francisco tomorrow, today, hopefully not today. And Full Story is going to be just fine.

That is a really, that's an important lesson for everyone to hear. I think it's an important lesson to what you said there that I, if you do it right, I think too many times, I don't know, as founders, you think I'm the person keeping this thing running. Keep, you know, and you've got everything on your back and you're the one. And in reality, actually if you're doing it right to your point, you shouldn't need to be the person in the seat to make the company successful. Especially when you get to some scale. You really shouldn't be, you know.

No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where, where is Full Story in three years from today?

It's, I think it's harder right now to predict the future than it ever has been because the, the future seems to show up each week.

I said earlier in this discussion that when we started fullstory, we came up with this idea of something we call auto capture, which is just a different, it is a different and correct paradigm of capturing digital interactions. We just capture it all and then in a very unique way. I don't even say auto capture anymore. We said that 10 years ago. And then I had a bunch of kind of semi clone competitors were like, oh, we like the marketing sound of auto capture. We're auto capture too. But they're not. They're just like sleight of hand, hand cutting. It really drives me crazy. So what do we, what do you do? It's a tip for founders. Name it something that they can't claim and then make them prove it. So we're full capture capital F U L L capture tm, which means we capture this data in a very, very unique and powerful way.

And I, I go into that, that monologue because we are in a moment now where the systems can actually take advantage of all of that data. It's not about hitting play and see what your users do. And over the course of the next three years.

Having all of that data available for systems to learn and understand and change experiences.

For every digital interaction.

I never thought. I get it. I get it. I never, I didn't even think about that right now with all that. That was the, that is the challenge when you have somebody doing full capture is you have to process what's being captured.

So the first 10 years, yeah, the first years of 10 years of full three have about been about empowering humans right. To sensitive data. Every human in the world can watch Netflix and so they could come in a full story and hit play and be like, oh, that user was confused. The robots can watch the same, watch the same thing, interpret that same data that a, that a user could at scale. And so if you've got.

Millions of people coming across your site every day to know David was confused and unhappy and was really looking for this follow up with David. Yeah, is that is going to happen? And we, I really believe we are the only ones right now. Other people will catch up for sure, but we are the only ones capturing and activating data in the right way for AI systems to take advantage of. And we do that not just for consumers. Like you know, we, we were horizontal SaaS when it was cool to be horizontal SaaS, hard to be horizontal SaaS in the enterprise. Because you want to tell, I've got airline customers and I've got, you know, I've got retail customers, I'm got big software companies. You want to be bespoke for them. But so we deal with visits and we are really good at distilling down the essence of what a visit is so AI can start to learn the patterns of those and improve those. And so in three years, I think FullStory is much more of a data company than a SaaS platform that people are logging into every day will still be that.

I think that we are going to be the leaders in the world of capturing digital visits and interpreting those digital visits to distill the insights from them. And we will do that at scale. Whether you're an employee logging in to be an official employee, we can help you be a more efficient employee. We can unlock what agents are going to do for you. Or if you're a consumer trying to, you know, buy a pair of swim trunks, we're going to, we're going to be able to help the retailers that are trying to sell you the swim trunks.

I never. And you have so much data over so many. And just like to your point, I mean all the sessions and all the kinds of products and websites and applications, that's, I mean that was when we, when we were using fullstory. I mean, I think, you know, we were basically using it to do proactive support. Yeah.

Years to talk. You blogged about proactive, proactive support. You were one of the first people that did that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was. But this, now you can actually do that at scale without the human beings having to monitor what's happening.

We're seeing it right now. We, we just launched something quietly where it will summarize a session. Okay. But we, using full capture, it summarizes it in a pretty elegant way. And we've got customers now where if you think about, you go to a site, you're trying to do something, it doesn't go great. You go to the chat window, you start typing in the thing that you just tried to do for 20 minutes, that didn't work and that is a shitty experience. Fullstory now summarizes what it is you are trying to do. It pre feeds it into the support ticketing system or the AI knowledge based systems. So the bootstrapped answer is already there. We got a telecom company right now that I will not name because I don't know if I have permission. But you, you go try to buy a phone and you get a little confused and then you go to their, their help page. Now normally there's a big call us now button or a chat with us now button ahead of both of those are. Were you trying to. Why don't you do this? And it's deflecting calls in a material way.

It's awesome. It's awesome. It's literally what we used it for back then. I love it. But at scale and automated.

Okay. I want to transition to you quickly. So you talk about kind of growing up and running for class president, all of that. And would you say like always you were a leader? You always, you said it kind of came naturally to you. Is this, did you always envision yourself being a founder, CEO? Is that, did you grow up around that?

Like, I didn't actually. I mean I, I will break it into pieces. I know I didn't imagine being an entrepreneur. I don't know that I imagined being a CEO or not being a CEO, you know, when you're a car. I was a college person like everybody else. Well, not like everybody else nowadays, but like, I don't know, I was just like college guy and I was going to go be a consultant and I got very lucky on the path that was laid out where I fell into early stage technology. I liked early stage technology. I was around some really smart people and I just was able to kind of progress through that. I, I did always like leading. I liked being in, in front. I wasn't, I'm, I'm a fine follower. I, I not very good at being quiet and I felt like I had good ideas and so I wanted to share those ideas.

And did you have a, like a real mentor or role model that you. Early in your career or now?

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be the cliche answer probably. And that I was very fortunate that my parents, both in different ways, were, were great mentors. My dad was a Hewlett Packard corporate person for 30 something years. Like he was, he was an enterprise guy, ascended fairly high up into the HP organization. But he's, he worked a lot and so he taught me. You work a lot. I would go with him on the office to, on the weekend and so I just understood. You went into the office on the weekend. And.

My mother in her own right, you know, kind of nudged me along to, to.

Get, get in front of the room, say things, be a leader, hustle. She hustle was a real big thing for her. And so I always had jobs. I was, I was always taught you work hard at jobs, you go in early, you stay late, you, you make yourself an indispensable person is kind of some of the phrasing that you would, you would hear at the Void household over dinner. Once I got into the professional world, I can't say that there was any one person. I've been fortunate to be around so many great leaders and you just take a little bit from each one. I was really, really lucky in that regard.

What, what is it that drives you? I mean, you, you know, like you say work hard and I, I know you well to know that you have worked really hard and you know, made a lot of sacrifices and like, what, what is it at the core that is driving you to do that? Like for me, I always tell people, when people tell me I can't do something, that's basically all I, all I need. And then I'll work for like the next 10 years to prove them wrong. But like, what is it that that really motivates you and drives you?

Yeah, I, I think it's just that, um. Can it, can I do it? Just, I don't, I don't know. Why can't I do it? Let's just keep trying to see if we can do it.

Try not to ruminate too, too much on the future. It's just like in the short run, can we do this thing that is in front of us and let's do that thing and I Like, I like learning new things. And one of the, the I don't know that I would have understood this as much as I do now is this job changes all the time, and so you get to try new things. And I really just, I enjoy that.

So you have, like, it's the achievement thing of, like, I, it's funny because some people tell me, like, Dave, you told me your goal was to get to this, but then you get to the goal and then you say, no, the goal is this. And then you get to that goal and you kind of never finish. I'm like, yeah, I guess that is a, that is my personality of. And I think actually a lot of people I've interviewed have a similar. It's like it's never finished. You just want to keep saying, can I do this thing? And then you get there. You're like, okay, well, I did, so I might as well just keep, keep raising the bar. And you're never really satisfied, which is not good necessarily. But also, yeah, I don't.

Do you do this, do you do that thing? I'm curious if.

Sort of the. In one day I'll rest.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's always like that, right? I think it's, I mean, I've seen my dad do that and he's, you know, 70 something. It's still like, one day I'll stop, you know. One day.

Yeah.

And it's, I think it may just be how some people are wired. I don't know. You know, I stopped being kind of trying to figure it out and just say, like, I think that's actually.

To the point of spiking and where am I strong? That, that may be my, my strength.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't know. I'll, I'll try to introspect on it. I, I, I really, I have been a very lucky person. I hope to continue to be a lucky person. I, I like, I don't always like what I do. I like what I do more than I don't like what I do. And I think, you know, I think that's, you know, that it's not going to be rosy every single day. There, there are times.

But when it's good, it's, it's really good and it's fun, it's energizing. You're building new stuff and you're doing new things and it's just, that's good.

Last question. You go back to the very beginning career before you started your first job, knowing everything you know today. What's the one piece of advice you would give yourself.

I've actually been reflecting on this a lot. For whatever reason, I think it's because my kids are hitting that age. My son is 17, my daughter is 21. You know, they're stepping into their professional life and so they get a lot of dad lectures, probably more bad lectures than they would want. And so I try to, you know, I, I give them that you work hard talks that I was brought up to have. But I also try to think about what are the secrets to life that I really wish I had understood when, when I was younger.

And I think there are these two themes. One is it's going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay. If you don't, if you don't succeed at everything, if you again, me to my kids, if you aren't a CEO, if you aren't, like if I get.

I get canned tomorrow, maybe I'm doing something. I tell, I talk to the board a lot about this. Like if I'm not doing, if I'm not the right person for the job, that's fine. Just give me a heads up so I see it coming. But tomorrow, if I get just ousted for whatever reason, that's going to be okay. And I think it's too easy for young people today. I think this is true of me to conflate your profession with who you are and your contentment in this world. And I think that you need to recognize that you can be content with much less than you think you need. And that means professionally, you know, whatever your title is, whatever the number of people you manage, you can be content with less of all of those things. You can be content with less money. You can, there's a real rat race to all of that. And it's kind of gauche to say that you don't need to chase it.

But I think it'll be okay.

I, I think that, that part about the rat race, you know, I think social media, we don't have to go on a long thing, but it, even LinkedIn, you know, it plays into it so much because just all you see, if I look at LinkedIn right now, all I see is the fastest company ever to this the most rich person, to this the title of this the new job, of this the new. And you're, it's like, and then on Instagram it's even worse. And then you just have this feed that you're getting in like a constant thing that you're not good enough, you know, And I, I, I always say to people like you're only seeing what people want you to see. So if you of course select only the best things of everyone's lives and put them together, no one is actually doing in real life, you know, but you can't, you can't discern that even for us. I mean even when I start doom scrolling LinkedIn I'm like what the, what am I doing with my time? You know these people are doing this and this and this and it's, that's really good advice.

Yeah, I mean look, it is the I, I, I picked up meditation just cliche CEO moment but I picked up meditation fairly early in to full story to just help with stress and try to figure out how to sleep better. And that's a practice that I still lean on a fair bit. And I think there really is something to that, to being able to understand the voices, your own voices in your head. I know you sound like a crazy person, but to really be able to create some space there and I say that because I think you can, you can really understand that you can be content and happy without all of the things but that's an, that's an inward thing and I think so many people look outward for what they should be content about. That's what I try to impart on my kids especially and I know you have children too in a world where AI is on the rise and I'm not a doomsdayer. But I do think there is a very realistic scenario that there are fewer white collar jobs out there in five years, 10 years, 20. I don't know what the timeline on it is and if this, this, this rise of look at me, I'm important on social and I ain't got a job because there's no jobs to be had. The only thing you can have is being content with the people around you, who you are.

Yeah, I think that that's wise word. Live it as much as I should that do what I say, not what I do.

Scott, thank you so much for doing this. You were one of the first people I wanted to have on, on this show. So I'm happy that we, we were able to make it happen. And, and yeah, thank you very much for doing this.

It's always a pleasure. Chattan we should do this with cameras on.

I know I'm gonna be in Atlanta. Hopefully I'll be there for Venture Atlanta. So hopefully I'll see you there and yeah, well for everyone listening, I, I, there is so much to take from this conversation. I hope you enjoyed if you did Please share with your networks 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 Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.