Fynn GloverCo-Founder & CEO, Schematic · Co-founder & CEO of Schematic | Runtime monetization infrastructure for SaaS & AI companies

Koala co-founder/ceo Tido Carriero on pricing lessons from his time at Segment

20 Nov 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment, Koala co‑founder and CEO Tido Carriero explains why pricing is the only business lever that touches every function—from sales and customer success to product, engineering, and renewals. He argues that the CEO should actively shepherd pricing decisions because they affect how the company interacts with customers and how engineering meters usage. Carriero notes that Koala traditionally makes major pricing overhauls roughly every two years, a cadence he now views as too reactive. While the company executes these large updates well, it has lagged on running smaller, continuous pricing experiments that could provide more data‑driven refinements. The takeaway is that pricing should be a continuous, cross‑functional focus rather than a periodic, reactive exercise.

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I think it's the only thing at a company that truly touches every single function. And in some ways, the CEO actually needs to like shepherd, uh, you know, pricing. Like, deeply affects the sales team, it deeply affects the customer success team, the renewals team, it deeply affects how like product like, you know, shows up, it deeply affects the metering you need to do on the engineering side, to, to name a few. And so I think when you change that relationship with a customer, it needs to be very well thought through and obviously the more you've tested it, the better. But I think the reason it was reactive was like, we really only felt like we could make these changes every couple of years. I think maybe the retrospect thing is less that these major shifts should have been happening more often. And we did actually have a pricing function and we had a lot of these things. And I think we, we executed well every 2 years doing a major update. The thing we executed less well on, in my opinion, is we didn't do as much like smaller experimenting.