Fundraising from VCs and Hiring VPs in 2025: AMA with Jason Lemkin SaaStr CEO

Hey Jason, Frank from Salesforge. So we are just an 11-month-old business and grew to about $2 million in ARR. So currently raising money, what would be your top advice for companies that actually do well during this downturn?

So you're $2 million in their first year growing quickly, right? First, uh, great, congratulations. Just assume you have to talk to more VCs than you used to. Don't play any games, don't artificially constrain the process, don't tell people they have 37 minutes. Be a little more chill and talk to twice as many people as you planned. I'll take some more questions.

So when you like install, the last 5, 7 years have been wildly different. Is there a kind of technique? So how you spot those kind of broken people in that?

I think there's a couple questions there. How do you figure out if they're any good at the role? Because everyone's happy, right? One, interview 30. By the time you interview 30, the top 3 will stand out. Two, if it's for a role you've never hired before, you don't know. Find someone that's great at it, truly great, and ask them to just interview your, your final candidate. Simple answers, but that sounds simple, but that always works. Interview 30 and find, if you've never hired a VP of Eng before, find the best technical lead CTO VP of Eng you can on planet Earth. Do whatever it takes and ask her or him if they'll just interview one candidate for you. It'll save you a lifetime of problems. In terms of the burden broken, I wish I had a perfect test on it. I like to just ask a lot of open-ended questions, but for— I'll tell you the one that's the best one for sales or product or customer success, sales, product, customer success. There's the number one best open-ended question on all of mankind since the dawn of enterprise software in the early 1500s. And the question is to sales, customer success, or product, what would you do your first couple weeks? Not first 30 days, 60 days, because then they're all thinking their plan, right? What would you do your first couple weeks? The best heads of product, the best heads of customer success, and the best VP of sales will give you the same answer. I'm gonna go meet customers. It's always the same. I remember the first great product, uh, my end of product, my, my ultimate full-time VP of product was a guy named Aran Iloni, who then became, uh, CCO at Gong, CEO and CCO at Gong. He's great. Joined very early with Amit, but he was, and, and that's what he did his first week. But another guy, the best that this guy that was head of product, ironically at SMB, at SAP, but because SAP had acquired a startup, the best product guy I knew, I asked him to be my interim head of product who found me Aran that went to Gong. And he started and I wanted him to meet with my engineering team and I wanted him to work out some friction I had with my CTO and I wanted him to work on our API and our documentation. He said, nope, I'll talk to you in 2 weeks, Jason M. Lemkin. I'm like, what do you mean, God? He's, I'm gonna go talk to 20 customers. I'd never seen this before. It was new to me. I'd never hired a true pro, a VP level product. And he came back and he wrote a whole memo of all his notes and learnings. And here's what SuccessFactors said, and here's what LinkedIn said, and here's what said, I've analyzed and here's all the issues and this is how we're gonna work on your product. You don't learn the product sitting in the office for 2 weeks on your own or just randomly sitting there. Customer success should go visit your top customer. First job, go visit your top customers. Sales wants to get into those top accounts, right? So that's the cheat code. For the broken and the bitter when they say, when they want to stay at home, when they don't say they want to meet customers. And not all of us love meeting customers. Not everyone does. Don't hire them. That's my cheat code is what are you going to do your first couple of weeks? Listen for go meet customers. Then I'm like, I'm leaning in. Thanks. Hi, my name is Phil. Thank you for a great conference. My question is, can early stage startups successfully run product-led growth and enterprise go-to-market strategy simultaneously? And if you can, what are the indicators that suggest they'll succeed? Yeah, this is made— too much is made up of this. I did like a podcast interview with Aaron Levy a little while ago, and I asked him this. He's like, PLG is just freemium with analytics. It's just freemium that you can measure. It's just freemium that you can multivariate test. We have been doing freemium since 1996, I think, since the first web apps came out. I think we make this too complicated, and early apps like WebEx was originally, I mean, I'm really dating myself. It was really even before my time, but the case study is interesting. You know, Webex was the first billion-dollar ARR SaaS company that blew up even before Salesforce. And they started off charging per minute because that's how telephony used to charge, right? And then they did this really stressful thing. They went to having a self-serve motion that was free with upsell, and they did this cannibalization. But my point is they've been doing that since 1998. Efax, which was an inspiration for when I create— we, my team created the web-based e-signature even before DocuSign. We copied eFax, which was freemium PLG. I'm really reaching back in time. So these are not new. Freemium is not new motion. And I did write a SaaStr post on folks that are PLG and SaaS. More seriously, if you look at folks, whether you— it's almost everyone that starts off self-serve or PLG adds more sales over time. Canva last week did their enterprise event. It's all about their new sales team, right? It happened. Asana started off all self-serve. Now I think then they went about 60/40 PLG, SLG. Now they flipped it. Now it's, I think it's 40% self-serve low end and 60%. So we all end up with this model. Not everyone, but maybe Squarespace and Wix don't have a sales team, but I think they might. And TikTok has a sales team. They're here. So everyone ends up with a sales-led motion. We talk like PLG is something new. It's not. It's something old that has better analytics and software today. People like us in the room, 9 times out of 10, we like to click and buy, don't we? So it's nothing new. It's nothing new. And certainly anyone on the developer side knows it's nothing new. And even open source is the most extreme version of it, right? It's PLG with no humans whatsoever. Okay.

So.

When do you know what to do? Two things. First of all, if you don't start with a self-onboarding, self-procuring service, it's wildly difficult to start later, which we talked about. So I'm going to assume you're starting with a product that people can try and buy on their own, but you're also trying to sell it at the same time. Basically what tends to happen is by about 100 customers, you have a statistically significant distribution. I have done either on Zoom or in my office, this exercise with so many folks in the early days, CEOs of Checker and Algolia and Pipedrive with Owen from Intercom. So many folks, I've brought them in half million, a million, $300,000 in revenue, wherever I'm, I ask them how many customers they have. It's 50, 80, 100. So it's enough. And I do this exercise all the time, either on Zoom or in person. I write a pie chart and I circle a pie chart and I say, how many customers are small? How many customers are medium? And how many customers are large? I don't ask them to define it because different customers And they're like, 40% small, 20% medium, what's left? 40% big. And I'm like, okay, this is you. And actually, at one, if you're at $1 million, this will be you at $10 million and $100 million, unless either the market changes or you change it. And then what I do is I, and sometimes if they've gotten bigger, I'll do two circles. I'll do, where were you at $100K and where were you at $100K? Or where were you at $1 million or $5 million? Not in a meeting, but maybe over a board meeting. And you can see the trends change, right? It's fun to do it at $1 million, $5 million, $10 million. And see how those three, three pieces of the pie. If you have no medium or large customers, I would stay at the bottom of the market for now. Shopify stayed there for a long time, even though they're all about enterprise today, but they stayed at the bottom of the market past IPO. HubSpot stayed there intentionally. So sometimes the pie chart says stay low, right? But if you're asking the question, it's probably because you got like a couple bigger deals, but the team's complaining. I don't know if I really want to do security. I don't really know. They want this. I don't want to do the integrations. A lot of times folks that like self-serve don't really want to deal with sales or vice versa, right?

Now we've got bigger deals.

Yeah. Now we're building sales.

Okay.

That's hard, man. This is a sale. Maybe you should be going more mid-market lower because that's quick. Yeah. That's what VCs say. They don't have to do the work. Look, the bottom line is I want to make, I want to keep this simple. It sounds like your pie chart's heavily enterprise. So if you're asking my advice, knowing almost nothing, should you go downmarket? Should you go PLG and mid-market and SMB? I'm gonna say don't. You've got no cust— if you have no, almost no customers there, think about the energy you're gonna put into that. And the other thing I do when I do this pie chart exercise, the 40/40/20 or whatever it is, what I basically say to founders, and this is, and I, I 100% believe this is true over many years, is this is where your energy should be. And sometimes when I say this, okay, but they're like, but yeah, like, but we're going more enterprise. I'm okay if you're 40%, 40%, 20% enterprise today. Where do you want to be in a year? And they're like, in a year, I want to be 40%, 50% enterprise, 25% mid-market, 25% SMB. I'm like, okay, great. Then half your product story points, half your product, half your engineering, half your marketing, half your CS, half of everything should be in enterprise and 25% should be here and 20, roughly. It's a framework, right? So you have to decide, this is the fool's errand we talked about. And sometimes founders, as founders, we have to do fool's errands. Sometimes we're right. Sometimes HubSpot was right to do CRM when everyone said it was silly because your customers are in marketing. That's a $700 million business today. They were right. So sometimes you have to do this as a founder, but your organic customer base isn't telling you this, is it? Break the rules if you need to. This is your job, but don't listen to your VCs. They don't know what they're talking about. They're not building the software. In theory, mid-market is faster than enterprise, but who cares? The thing is about long sales. Yeah, they're faster, but, but bigger deals are bigger. So we think it's better, but it's not because once you've been doing enterprise for a couple of years, you stop, actually stop caring about sales cycles. Because when you have one deal, it's really stressful. When you have 50 big deals with 6-month sales cycles and you have a good sales team, that's why we actually have pipelines and we say, okay, this one's going to close this quarter, this one's going to close next quarter, this one's in security review and this one's in a paid pilot. It's part of the cadence and it's not that bad if a $2 million deal takes 10 months to close, is it? So don't lead into, oh, mid-market, it's the O word, our VCs say it's not— nothing's easier. Let's summarize it with that. Nothing's easier. Everything's just harder. Thank you.

Hi, my question's about valuation multiples. You showed a slide saying that multiples are obviously down the last couple of years. We've got some situations now where we've seen some revenue that we haven't been classifying as MRR, but the margins are lower, but we've been billing clients consistently for over 12 months and that the MRR is over 100% on it. So we're now, okay, we could pull in an extra, let's say, I don't know, almost a million in ARR in that. We've got another enterprise customer who's coming on. So we can add an extra couple million to our ARR. It's going to drag down like our gross margin.

It will.

So I'd like to get a read on you in terms of like how investors are like, what's the—

Investors are, investors are still a little stupid here. They shouldn't be. In the old days, in the old days, we were super gross margin sensitive. In the old days, people like when Twilio started to scale, everyone that was building software, like they were like, this is the Stripe of communications. This is an amazing company. and the VCs were crapping on Twilio because it had 40 or 50% margins, right? Both were right. Twilio ended up being an iconic generational company, and it also trades at a— traded and ended up after 2021, it ended up trading at a pretty weak multiple because of the margins, right? And so VCs in the beginning were very wary of these lower margins from blended products. And then I know you know this, some for in 2021, every— no one cared. No one, no one would really look at the gross margins. They just wanted the top line to be growing. And it— I didn't understand it as someone who's been in this space for a long time, but the public markets didn't care either. The public markets— I'm exaggerating slightly, but the public markets said, hey, Toast's hardware business that is still gross margin negative counts. Toast doesn't even count it in their reporting anymore. And Shopify got too big of a boost from its blended model, right? Shopify is epic. But its financial services margins are much lower than its software margins. Right. There's a number of examples. And so in 2021, no one cared. Today, the public markets absolutely care to an extent. Right. And a software company really does need to have north of 70% margins. But to be tactical, I would say a lot of VCs today, all they care about is top line growth today. So what I would do if you have communications, software, and other, I would be honest, and a lot of founders today aren't honest. I would be honest and I would just do 3 colors on your revenue stack. Say, listen, we're at a million, million in revenue today. Personally, I wouldn't even call it ARR, even though everyone does. We're at a million in revenue, $300K from software, $400K from messaging, and $200K from services, right? Shopify does it. Build.com breaks out their segment. People— Toast is very— look at Toast. I've written up on SaaS where they're very honest. About their different segments, put it in different colors in a pie chart, and let VCs come to their own conclusion. Some old-timers may say, I'm outta here, and that's fair, right? Or they may take a marker and only give you credit for the bottom line. Others will, don't really, won't care, right? There's literally a company I invested in, great founders, they're at $25 million in ARR today, more than doubling. Pretty good, right? But 20% of the revenue was pass-through zero margin revenue. Does that count? No. And I kept saying this to the other fancy investors on the board and the table. I'd be like, it's a good company, but 20% is pass-through and another 20% is basically 5% margin for merchant services. So really it's not a 20— it's a great company. I'm, I guess I'm old school. I think this is a $14 million company and they didn't care. And this company raised tons and tens and many tens of millions of dollars. And then finally, a couple weeks ago, one of the investors was like, wait, how does this work? And we totally restated the revenue my way. We totally restated the revenue and the revenue's 60% of what it was, right? Does it change the ultimate company? Maybe not, right? But the point— there's a lot of points of that story, but my learning is that even today, going to the opener, investors are still hunting decacorns, right? And so they, they're not gonna, they're not gonna give you credit because you're profitable. They're not gonna give you credit for lower growth because of macro issues. But what they will do is they get a little blind to hypergrowth. Like they're so de— because fewer companies are hypergrowing, the ones that are hypergrowing, people will actually be more forgiving. So be honest, but I wouldn't not share that revenue if it has gross margin. If it's 30% margin rate, if it's zero, like this past SaaStr revenue, I think it's sketch. Hi Jason. Thanks for organizing a great event. I'm going to ask the same question I asked last year. Terrific. Which is what are your thoughts of what the main themes you're going to be talking about next year at SaaStr? No idea. I don't know. I probably said that last year. I, the slides I made for the opener, really, it took me a while to synthesize the B2B2B, the B2B2C, the AI stuff. So I don't know. I'm actually, I'm the, I'm pretty bad at the, I'm pretty bad overall at seeing how businesses compound. But for example, I did this, I did a couple of these like roundtables with Harry Stebbings on 20VC and I did $50,000 with him and then $10,000 with a couple other top, top investors that we would have an IPO a week in the second half of the, second half of this year. So July, is July 1st the start of the second half? Do you think we're going to have 26 IPOs the second half of the year? I think I'm going to lose my $80,000. It's— I now, having said that, I'm right. I just think I'm going to be off 5 quarters, not even 1 quarter off 5 quarters. I was a little too bullish, so I was too bullish. So I don't know. The only thing that I'm thinking for next year, I am very tactically bullish on AI. I am not excited about the 200x ARR deals. I'm not trying to see if exciting things like Poolside that are worth $2 billion at less than a million. I'm not that smart to know whether those are good bets or bad bets. I do believe that any area of SaaS where AI is even a smidge helpful today, and let's not be cynical, that's even a smidge helpful. I am just tactically bullish that in a year it will all be better. And we're all gonna benefit from these, as long as your CTO can take advantage of it, going to our point, we're all gonna benefit from this rising tide. And I'm not crazy, I'm not AI crazy, but I am very excited to see the block and tackling benefits that we get in core B2B SaaS. So that's what I'm— and in fact, at SaaStr Annual this year, we're actually going to have an entire AI day and AI summit morning till evening, and it's all going to be about improving workflows with AI. We're going to have great— we're going to have CEOs of Klaviyo and folks from all the top leaders. But instead of talking about how to turn text into images and cartoons, and we're all going to talk about how it's changing B2B stuff we care about. So that'll be the first day, September. You can only come to that if that's all you care about. So I'm into that. But you can keep the cartoons and stuff. Thank you.

Hi, Jason. Such a great event this year. Indeed, I think it was better than last year.

Good to hear.

So my question is, when it comes to marketing agency, on which ones underdeliver the most in the SaaS and the founders really need them? Is it Legion, Cold Emailing, BDR?

Which agencies?

Which marketing agencies?

Look, I— agencies are interesting. Mostly hiring agencies is the fastest way to flush your money down the toilet as a founder. I remember I invested in a third-time founder that I've known for years. Co-founded as CTO, a company that was acquired for over a billion. Last company was acquired for a couple hundred million, but this was his first time as a business CEO. And it's like a couple months in, things aren't working. He's, I'm going to get some marketing help. I'm like, great. He's, I'm going to hire the best agency in Southern California. Everyone says they're great. I'm looking at their website. I'm like, dude, and it's only $100,000 and we're going to do a big launch around this. And best one, 3 months later, he gets some really nice collateral and a really good 2x2 on the industry and zero leads. I just begged him not to do this. One of the smartest people I've ever worked with. I give you a million stories. Look, there are gems and I do believe like anything that is professional services, there is a gem. Find the best lawyer. It makes a difference. Find the best tax person, find the best marketer. Then sometimes they are at agencies, right? But hiring an agency per se, not a person, it's a way to flush your money down the toilet. It's true in marketing because all the marketing agencies agencies want to do is run formulaic AdWords, give you formulaic collateral, give you formulaic this. It doesn't work for startups. You don't have a brand. They want to flush your money down the toilet. Agencies for BDRs and SDRs never work, with a few exceptions. The reason they never work is because with 20 clients, you never learn the product. There were flickers of it working 10 years ago when few folks weren't working Cadence, and there were flickers of it working in 2021 when we bought so much software. And I'm not saying there's not someone here that, but if there, there may be someone at an agency that can, is almost full-time for you that could run the BDR playbook, but the regular agency trying to sit, they're trying to run the exact same emails, the exact same coffees, the exact same breakup emails. No one understands your product. No one can respond to a question. Better to brute force it yourself. Don't hire an agency to do it. Hire, if you can hire the person in-house, great. If you can find a person, but make sure they can actually do it. Not that they say they can do it. Too many agencies say they can do it. They just want a lot of clients and have them do the exact same thing. And that's more power to them. It's their business model, but it's a terrible idea. The one thing I'll say just for the broader team at Niche is that is my view. There are gems at agencies. And also when you go to hire your first head of marketing, if they actually had a lead come in and actually can do genuine growth, they can't do everything themselves. And a lot of marketers will want to bring in a lot of agencies. Don't let them. You got to back them. but always let them pick one. Most marketers have one agency, marketing agency they've worked with for 10 years, their right-hand person. At least let them bring in their— let everyone bring in one right-hand person for an executive. You have to, and marketers often will have one agency and whether you see it or not, you got to back them. Thank you so much for today.

So everyone here seems to be founders. I'm from a VC, but I, I'm fairly new to the VC space. We're fairly industry agnostic, but it's so technical that sometimes difficult to cut through how to find those gems?

How to find the best startups?

What's your perspective? Obviously a very broad question.

That's a big question. For VC, you either got to find the ones that other people don't find, or you got to win. You got to win, right? You got to be in all the deals and find a way to win, to beat the other people, right? The later stage venture is all things, the more it's about winning, right? Because you're in every deal. I remember someone, I forget who, years ago told me I think they joined Andreessen Horowitz fairly early, right? And they didn't care at Andreessen whether they ever did a deal. They weren't obviously at the top. They were just going to get fired if they didn't see every deal in SaaS at the time. That they just needed to make sure that no one got funded on TechCrunch or StrictlyVC that Andreessen didn't see. And this turns out to be true at many other funds. We got to see everything. The earlier you are, the smaller you are, that's, that becomes impossible, right? But so you got to either find things that other folks haven't found. And places like SaaS are great. I've talked to so many folks here that are doing millions that are bootstrapped. That aren't on any other radars. It's one way. Or build a network of feeders. If you're not, if you're not super early stage, unless you're pre-pre-seed, there's always someone earlier than you. And, and the best A investors, like if Christoph's still here, Christoph and I started co-investing years ago when actually I, he used to be super early and I could invest after him. Every great SaaS VC wants to go meet with Point Nine because they just want to see what the hot stuff is. Everyone comes, hello, Pavel, what's on, what's new in the portfolio? How many of these do you get? 20 or 30 a year? All the time, right? Because it's a way to hunt the, and you can do it on media. But so my point of the story is another way to do it is just build the relationships one stage earlier, right? And it's funny, when I started investing, I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a pretty good brand, right? And all these associates and principals and others starting, when I was working in sales, they would just show up at my office and I didn't get why, but they were looking, it was, this is their job. And they were like, hey, maybe Lemkin seems to know a few things when SaaS is— what are you looking at? What's in your portfolio? And I thought that they liked SaaStr or something and some of them did, but they just, this is the job. They look, does someone have enough juice, enough whatever, and you got to be all over them. And so you're early in your career, like, how can I do that? But these, they all did it. They all should, but not everyone did. Some of these relationships have lasted for many years, right? Like I met Teddy Wardi, he runs SaaS@Insight. He was a junior VC at the time, sat on my doorstep, right? I'm like, oh, come on in, kid. Has gone on to be one of the best successful. He's in everything from Wiz on down, sales left with me. I'm pretty good. He started off as the kid coming by to see who this SaaS guy is. Not that I was necessarily the perfect one, but it's just, there's always someone downstream who's always hunting. And so the, These aren't perfect ideas, but it's a hustle and sales game. This is not, it's not, everyone thinks for what it's worth to be cathartic to founders. Everyone in venture thinks until they realize how it works. They think it's a game of thinking about it. All the great ones come by our office, all the Datadogs and Wizzes and HubSpot. We see all of them. We get a couple months to hem and haw, see a few reports, decide, is that Brian Halligan really going to go? I don't really like MBAs. Something really gonna happen. No, it's a friggin' hustle. It's a sales business and a hustle business for almost everybody. And the only folks that don't have to hustle like that have massive inbound. And there's only a handful of folks where the founders pick them. It's only, it's very rare.

Almost ruling your point that most marketing agencies flush down your money. Not all, but, but also context. I've been and run like a 7-figure B2B sales enablement agency, that's our biggest challenge, right? We tell people like, hey, don't give us all your money. We don't know what we're going to do in 3 months with you. The biggest challenge is trust and other agencies and other sales leads promising the moon. And so, are we going to find product market fit for you? We're going to flood your calendar with—

an agency cannot find product market fit for you. That, that, that's my story with the CTO. That's what I missed in the story. Really, he hired them to find product market fit for them. And that's the great sucker bet of all.

So. What would you advise a person like me that doesn't want to promise the moon, AI-based shortening sales cycles, 2 weeks with cold emails, whatever? The, the promise is that it's not gonna work.

I get the competition. Here's the cheat code. If you wanna build an agency, if you wanna build a services business, or as founders, if you wanna hire someone to help you, here's the simple, the, the simplest cheat code. And this is why it's hard to run an agency. If it's the principles and take the meeting. If it's the found— if the folks running the agency, every time I get— someone reaches out to me for a need I have, we have a lot of needs at SaaS. We only have 9 people. We have a lot to do. And sometimes I'll get a pretty good email from an agency and at the bottom it's business development associate, or they want to screen me. No, you can beat out 99% of the agencies and you can decide if one of these fractional resources is worth the founder is do I get the principals? And agencies don't scale because the principals only have 50 hours a week. And so there's an overlap where you still get the principals, right? But Taylor and Caitlin run this Cred PR agency. There's Taylor right there. If you want to hire folks to help you with speakers and speaker content, hire them. They're the best. I've worked with all of them, but here's why we're lucky that they own the place. This is their 5th SaaS arrangement. So I don't want to talk to their BDR. If you're lucky enough to trick someone that's a principal, that's good. That's the cheat code. So if you want to deliver. Be that person. But the problem is you can only have so many clients, right? And every agency deteriorates when the principals don't do the work. But also, how do you scale if the principals don't want to do the work, right?

So basically pitch that you're small enough to still be able to give the principals the clients.

Pitch that I will be there. You, I, listen, we chatted for 60 seconds. I know that you're smart and have passion. If you told me you would come to my office and work in my office and you would be my outbound program, I'd give you a shot. But if it's, but if you want to hire me so that two kids you found down the street are going to do it, I'm out. So that's the summary. And that's what I would look for as founders is will the principals do the work? It's just very, it's very rare. So thanks for the question.

Thank you so much. Challenge accepted. All right.

Yeah. Hello.

First of all, thank you for all the sales content, this Astro. It has helped us so much.

Good to hear.

I'm looking for now in the implementation side, so the question is practices. What should happen after you close the deal?

Look, there's a lot of best practices which I'll allude to, but it can be hard if you have too many customers. But I love one eye-opener for us at the second SaaS Annual. We had Peter Gassner, who is the founder of Veeva, which is worth $35 billion. It only raised $3 million in primary capital. It's worth $35 billion. It owns CRM and content management for pharma and biotech. It is like the Salesforce and more for biotech. In fact, he was the VP of technology at Salesforce and said, hey, they're not really doing life sciences. I'll go do it. I'll raise $3 million and build a $33 billion company. Kind of a cool story. And, but they're very enterprise. They're very, they're all 7-figure and 8-figure deals. And I asked Peter, you can see it on our video, what do you do with new customers? He's, I'm paraphrasing, but it's, we do a 45-day call. I do a 90-day call. I do a 180-day call myself at that time, me and my team. And so that's a, doing these 3 calls for real. Is, I think, a great framework. Then back into what the KPIs are under it. People don't do enough of these calls anymore. Or the most— the saddest thing is in CS, folks still talk about doing QBRs quarterly. And I ask a lot of CS folks, how many of your customers show up for your QBRs? How many do you do? 1 in 10? Doesn't count. Force it to be documented. Force senior leadership, at least with your bigger customers, to do 3 calls when they start so that you can hear what's happening and surface the issues. Nobody really does that. And then here's the thing. And then, and I think we, we might have talked about this earlier, and Sam Blan alluded to it in the morning, measure it, measure how, what percent are being onboarded in the fastest possible time and make that a core KPI to drive it up. Almost all founders find that fewer of their customers are onboarded as quickly as they think. Fewer. They're often shocked that they sign a customer and they just assume their team's gotten them up and going and they find out, well, it's been 60 days, it's been 90 days. And they're instant churn risk, right? If they don't deploy. So figure out what, whether it's 15 days or 30 days or maybe 60 days, if you're enterprise, figure out what your goal is. Ideally, 90% or more of customers are onboarded in the shortest period of time. Measure it constantly, talk about it every week and use that to spot the, the sub-issues and the sub-KPIs. So thanks for the question. One more, are we done? All right. One last question. Thank you.

Hey Jason, Frank from Salesforce. So we are just an 11-month-old business and grew to about $2 million in ARR. So currently raising A, what would be your top advice for companies that actually do well during this downturn, looking to raise an A, doing really well?

Okay, I'll give you two, I'll give you two pieces of advice. So you're $2 million in their first year, growing quickly, right?

Yes.

Two things. First, uh, great, congratulations. Just assume you have to talk to more VCs than you used to. Don't play any games, don't artificially constrain the process, don't tell people they have 37 minutes. Be a little more chill and talk to twice as many people as you planned. There's a lot of reasons people, those type, for any AI, those types of metrics, assuming everything else, you, you probably have an 80% chance of getting funded in 2021. Today, maybe people are gun-shy, maybe they're scared to invest, maybe they only wanna do infrastructure, maybe they don't, maybe they're, everyone's tired of sales investing, right? Even me, like my third or fourth investment was Salesloft, which sold for $2.5 billion. I'm tired of sales after that. Like, I'm not, I'm bored of the, I'm just fatigued from the category. So there's just so many variables in this. We talked about it at the opener. There's just so many segments of the world and not everyone is in market. Not everyone is receptive. And you say you're AI, right? But you may not be the type of AI people want. They may want OpenAI or Cohere or Perplexity or DeepL or, so you think you're AI, but you're not necessarily the flavor of, talk to 2 to 3 times as many folks is my one advice. The second advice, I wrote this up on Twitter the other day and then I got just hazed on Hacker News, but I was right. And I wrote about, or there were two things I got hazed, but I got a lot of positive engagement, but I wrote, one of them was, one of them was about how a founder sent me a deck in May that was dated March and I was hazed for being too critical. But my point is there's so many wrong things. First of all, they've been fundraising for two months. Okay. But at least pretend like you're not struggling to fundraise. 3, at least pretend I'm one of your first choices. Obviously I'm not even your top 20 if it took you 2 months to get to me, right? 3, you didn't even read it? You didn't even read it in 2 months? You didn't even update it, right? So I got hazed on that one. The other one I just got lightly hazed on, that was all over Hacker News. The other one I got lightly hazed on is I, and I point these all out to be helpful. You can see why, like you can say, hey, that doesn't matter. But it's also a reason I passed. And if I passed because you had March 2022, 2024 at the bottom of your deck, So is someone else that has attention, someone else that has limited time, someone else that has a decent portfolio. So you can make fun of it and give the guy more, another chance. It's not a meritocracy. It's a brutal business investing. It's almost impossible to make money. So when things look off, so anyhow, the related point, the second one I got hazed on was this person came in that was at $2 million and was growing like 80% and not accelerating. Okay. So just below the line, but the email was really good. This was clearly a great founder. To who was in a vertical SaaS category with not a lot of competition, unlike you. And you could say, look, I know it's not quite there, but there's a really cool category. I have personal passion around it. I'm interested in the emails. Really good. They clearly understand this niche category that probably nobody does. Once in a while, those accelerate. They never really do. But you sometimes you get excited about one that's on the margin in venture. Sometimes you get excited about one that's on the margin, right? You get excited almost because you have passion around it or you love the founders. And so you, you give 'em a little slack. And they said at the end, they said, we're raising at least $10 million. And the problem was it was too much money for me. The one problem was they didn't go to my website, which says I only write up to $4 million checks. That's a fail to not do the right, but they all knew about SaaS. It was the greatest email and all this stuff. So you, they should have read the website. But my real point of the story is it was a, it was too much money for me, but if she'd asked for $4 to $5 then I would have probably leaned in when, or if they asked for 10, but everything was great. I'd be like, I'll find that. I'll call Christophe. I got my buddy. I got another 5. No problem. Like I'll get all my friends. I'll get all my friends together. If you're the next Wiz, right? You can ask for too much money, but here when you're, so my point is be, be a little conservative in your asks. Don't be so aggro in your timeline. Don't be so aggressive in the amount you're raising. There's some minor negatives for asking for too little, which implicitly might ask for a lower valuation. There's some minor negatives for not telling people they have an hour to decide, which is they might not ask or get off the can, but be more chill today, be more respectful, be conservative on how much you ask. You can always raise more. You can always raise more than you ask. And those things will just increase the odds in stressful times that you raise the money. That's my best advice.

So much.

Yeah. All right. Thanks everybody for the time.