7 Pieces of Advice Entrepreneurs Never Hear. That They Need to Hear.

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Okay everybody, welcome to workshop Wednesday. I know if you guys come frequently, you've seen a lot of me. Hopefully they've been helpful. But Saster Annual is coming up September 12th in the SF Bay Area. It's going to be great. If you want go to Sass, please come go to sass.com you can use my code jason20 for the best last minute pricing. But after we get back, there'll be hundreds of sessions at Saster Annual, hundreds of workshops, hundred sessions come do them live. But then we will start to cherry pick the best 30 or 40 and bring those speakers back. So starting October 1st, you'll see we'll take some of the best sessions and redo them again live. So you'll see a lot of, a lot of folks besides my face starting October 1st or so. But I wanted today I wanted to have to try to, to dust off something I did a while ago and update it for 2024 and then we can do some QA on this or anything related to it afterwards as as much as we want on today. What are the top pieces of advice that under Entrepreneurs never hear that they need to hear. And it is, you know, we keep. These are the mistakes that these are the things that aren't said in board meetings that aren't said to founders that people aren't told. And I know most of these. You guys know, you will know these seven. But I'm hopeful that one or two of these challenge you in a helpful way and help you course correct on something so you, you can do better. So let me, let me do this and probably 20 or 25 minutes and then we can open up to any questions that you want that's even a little bit, even a little bit related. And actually maybe all seven are this which is that every important mistake I've made in the this is from a Saster post in the last 15 years has been due to lowering the hiring bar. It leads to chaos, slow down, doubt and confusing inputs. Maybe all of these are about hiring because maybe nothing else matters even after a million of revenue. But okay, number one and I've written this a lot of times, I've said it a lot of times and yet every month I'm in a board meeting and this is what we're talking about every month from someone between a million and 250 million over the last quarter we're talking about this and this is really the best single piece of advice I can give to anyone scaling you know, when you start to have something it's even true of Saster today itself. When you have something, when you have a million in revenue, 2 million revenue, a hundred customers, 200. You don't have to be all that big. You know, you think it's about the competition and the future gap and that you don't have enough funding and all of this. And you know, know it's really not. It's really the fact that it's just attracting truly great talent to your company. The, the best engineers and CTOs will build better software faster than competitors. A truly great head of marketing or demand gen will actually get you more leads than the rest. A truly great head of sales will actually move the needle. We can talk through all of that later if you want. All that matters is people. And the number one mistake that people make is the time finally comes when they realize, hey, I've got those two reps hitting quota, I'm ready for the VP of sales. Hey, I can't do marketing by myself. I need a VP of marketing. I need a VP of Eng, of cs, of product. And you realize you need that person. It's most acute in sales, but it's in all the management levels. And one month goes by, two months go by, three months go by, four months go by and you get tired and you just hire Jason. And you know, you know Jason isn't great, you know, in your gut because you've been doing it yourself. You've been doing sales and marketing and product engineering. You know he's not great. And honestly, you wouldn't have hired Jason if he was the first candidate you met with. But, and you got to meet, you got to commit to meeting 30 for any role. You have to commit to meeting 30 candidates for. If you're not committing to meeting 30 candidates for any role, you're not taking the hiring seriously, you're not doing enough work. You're telling yourself you're recruiting, but you're not actually recruiting if you're not committing to 30 but you get tired and you lower the bar to fill a hole. We've all done it. We have all filled the hole with it. And it, it never works. It never ever, ever, ever works. That placeholder, that VP of finance that never really gets the financials done, that VP of marketing who talks and talks and talks but never really worked with the sales team and mostly wants to spend their time on LinkedIn, they VP of Sales especially that has like this great playbook and this 25 page slide deck and they can talk all about how they did it at Zendesk or Okta or wherever. But you know, they can't. You know, they're not saying anything. You don't know. You know they're not better than you at sales. 0% chance it works. 0% chance it works. Not only will they not work out, but almost always that functional area declines, sales gets worse, marketing gets. Leads go down, products slow. When you hire a VP of engineering that never learns the product. I see this all the time, I call them, you know, never hire a CTR or VPN engineer that wears a tie. Never wear the ones that tie the VP of engineering. Ctos that hire ties. They never learn the product. They never. They're all about process and strategy. They never learn the product. And you end up worse off. You end up shipping features more slowly and as painful. And not only that, that's the worst part. The second worst part is they hire people under them that never learn the product or never are great at sales or. And it gets worse and worse and worse. And third, they burn all the money because of it, right? They come in and they hire eight marketers under them or six reps that never close anything that becomes. And it's not. And sure, of course this happens with the terrible hires, but it really just happens with the ones that you're not sure are great because, you know, and we settle. And I guess the. The meta point is if you're at that point and you've interviewed 20 people, or maybe you pretending you've interviewed 20, but you've really only interviewed eight, and it's been five months and you haven't made the VP of sales higher yet, and you can't go on like this anymore without any help in a VP of Sales, no matter what, you're better off with nobody, anyone that's done this will tell you you're better off with nobody than a VP that can't really do the role. You're better off with no cfo. You're better off with no VP of sales. As painful as it is with your two reps that are driving you nuts, you're better off with two reps and you happen to be the boss than a crummy VP of sales. It's the truth. So just remember this and I'll go on. But this, this could be the whole presentation. You can't always be 100% sure. VP is great if you haven't done before, but it's got to be in the 90s, if not. And you know, they're not that. But you. But the slides are good. And they're bossed, they're good. You'll, you'll end up a year behind. Okay, second one. This is one that, you know, has become a real issue the last two years. It's become an issue because a lot of folks, because almost everyone has seen things get harder. Maybe not whiz, maybe not open AI, maybe not until a couple weeks ago. Sorry, who went down? Who took our airlines down? That was doing great. Until two weeks ago. Sorry, I got a little, getting a little tired. Crowdstrike, not crowdstrike, but most of us, even if it's gotten not that much harder, it's gotten harder the last. And folks are sensitive and sales folks don't want to be told they have to hit quota and marketers don't want to be told that they have to hit those lead commits. And founders are getting a little bit prickly. And I have found that in my ecosystem it's even founders are a little bit more prickly about advice. And I have found that founders have occasionally gone off the rail when they've been told the truth by their mentors and investors. And so I think this has always been an issue. Even I sometimes had some, some tough times dealing with feedback from my own mentors and investors. But just remember, this is just, it's, it's, it's, it sounds simple, but this, this the best folks out there, the best mentors and investors will give you advice that you don't want to hear. They'll give you advice you don't hear. They won't sugarcoat it. They won't sugarcoat it. You gotta be a thicker. If you wanna be a great founder, you have to be able to take this criticism. It's your job as leaders, as founders to take this criticism. And it's always been true. I remember back in the day at old days of Adobe Sign, Echo Sign, we were all SMB and we were struggling. We're coming up on a million in revenue, but, but, but the, the growth wasn't fast enough. We were running out of money. We had some happy customers, but the product wasn't there. And I went to talk to my old mentor who was actually the best sales leader I ever knew. And he was a nice, like a lot of sales leaders, not all of them, but a lot of. He was beloved guy, really liked. And I went, met with him, I thought he was going to give me a little pep talk like, go Jason, you're at a million, you can get to two. No, he kicked my ass. He kicked my ass. He sat me Down. He diagnosed this problem in about 90 seconds as now I'm able to do for most of you. I he, he'd done this before. He diagnosed in 90 seconds. He said, jason, how many of your who have you closed? And I said some of the big names we closed already. Even a million. British Telecom, GE Financial Field is like how many of them did you go out and visit last month? I said zero. He's like freaking go visit them next week. He's like, you're, you're gonna fail if you don't give it. Visit your customers. And he wasn't nice about it. He came down as a sales guy, did like a ton of bricks on me. And I remember kind of, I didn't say it that way, but I was kind of staggered after me because I didn't think I could do one more thing. I was broken. I was doing support from 12 midnight until 6am in the morning for our European customers because my 6 cause my success person refused to do it. So I really wasn't even sleeping at this point. Cause I was doing the swing shift on support. Everything was breaking. My founders were fighting with each other. One fired the other one. I had to rehire him. It was a mess. I'm like the last thing I can do is just start going meeting customers. But he's right. I had to do it. It hurt. I give you many other examples, but I see this happening today. And I'll also tell you most the other thing that's changed is most of the board meetings are at today. No one will say anything. None of the VCs used to be. If you listen to old timers, they'll all say how mean VCs were and how critical everyone used to be. Now it's vcs are basically giving founders participation points, participation credit. Great job. Great job, Jason. We grew 3% last year. Good job. Keep at it, kid. No one wants to be critical. Everyone wants to be founder friendly. Everyone's worried about what folks will say about them. So your investors will are. You'll almost have to pull the tough advice out of them if you want it. But these guys will give you the best. So bear in mind, just build up a thick skin. And I just find in 2024, most of us have lost our thick skins after the last two years. Okay, third, one advice that founders don't get that they should get. This one's going to sound basic, but. But I don't think it is. I literally was just having a conversation right before we got on with the great cfo she had been part of two companies that went public and was thinking about joining a portfolio company I joined. So she'd been around and this was her top question. Like, how close are the two co founders and do they really want it for the next 10 years? This was great. This was like literally her first question to me after having done this multiple times. It is, it's harder now. You know what the, I don't, sometimes I don't even want to say what the bar to IPO is that I know it's a little bit discussed on social media, but you know, the last three companies to IPO, Klaviyo, One, Stream and Rubrik, we're all at 500 million, growing 30 or more at 500 million. Okay, that's, that's a while ago. Okay. And there you can IPO with less and you can get acquired for lots of money and all that kind of stuff. Don't get me wrong. But, but at least, for a lot of folks, we have to at least understand what this bar is. And you know, Even, even, even five, seven years ago, you know, HubSpot IPO did 100 million in revenue box. IPO did 100 million revenue. That used to be the bar. With fast growth, now it's 500 million. Now the companies are worth more. They're worth five times more. So the prize has gotten bigger. Even, even, even today the prize is bigger in SaaS and Cloud. But honestly, if the two of you, if your co founders, if you guys don't want it more than life, if it's not bleeding out of your pores for 10 years, I don't know that you're going to make it. So this is a question you have to ask if for some reason you haven't found your co founder yet. This should be the founder commitment test. It's a classic Saster post. I update the founder commitment test. Prove it by forcing yourselves, each of you, to do 10 year vesting. If you haven't started, here's a great test. If you're committed for 10 years, do 10 year vesting. If you're cool with it and your co founder is like, oh, well, I, I don't know, I want all my stock vested up front. I don't want to do the work. It's like you're not doing the math. Right? Right. This is, this is to protect the founders going long. So I love a 10 year vesting because it ties to this. But be honest, how badly, how badly do you want it? Do you want it because the prize Even with multiples being down, even with the markets are being down, the financial and other benefits in SaaS are bigger than ever. There's more. You know, there's. HubSpot went public at a billion today. It's worth 30 billion. But it takes longer, folks. It takes longer. So do you want it for 10 years? How. Figure that out. Okay. 4. This is a tough one. This is a tough one. And I don't. I've written this a few times. I, I don't see anyone talking about this enough. And I never see this in investor slides or board slides. You gotta do this. You gotta do this every month if you can. Every quarter, worst case. But ideally every single month, are you gaining or losing market share? This is a proxy for if you're falling in or out of product market fit. You know, especially if you do annual contracts, it could take you two years to realize you're falling out of product market fit. Because a lot of times, a lot of folks will renew because it's work to change vendors. The more SMB you are, the more quickly you'll see it. But, but we're not, we're not consumer, okay? People don't typically cancel our applications in 30 seconds. Okay? So it takes at best quarters to see the decay. To see the decay of product market fit. But the learning guys, and I know everybody knows this, but I don't see people being founders, being honest enough about it, or executives or leaders. You're either gaining product market fit or you're decaying from product market fit. You're on, you're, you know, and, you know, WebEx had a slow decay, and then that little app, Zoom, came in and then boom, right? It blew up. Zoom may even be slightly falling out of product market. Not in the enterprise, where Zoom is actually growing nicely, but it isn't growing for end consumers anymore. Is it falling out? Like, I don't know. But what you have to do is this little point on the bottom. If nothing else, in tougher times, easier times, middle times, you always have to be growing faster than your competitors. Now, if your growth, if, if you're in an impacted category today, your growth slowed from 100% in 21 to 30% today. That, that, that's tough. Okay? But you better go find out how your bigger competitor is doing, because if your growth slowed from 100 to 30, but your bigger competitor is growing 40, you're falling out of product market fit. You're falling behind the competition. If you're at 30 and your bigger competitor really is growing 10, okay. Well, listen, you can blame that on the market because you're still growing faster than them, but you should, at a minimum, be growing faster than your larger competitors, at a bare minimum. And ideally gaining share like more objectively. But however you do it, find out how, how quickly. Interview folks. Interview folks from the sales team. Do something kind of lame, which is, you know, do an interview there. Do whatever it takes. Track the number of employees. Do whatever it takes to figure out how much revenue your customers have and how quickly it's growing. And be brutally honest. If you're growing more quickly than them, and if not, it's you. It's not the market, it's you. And I just. I almost never see folks having this conversation. Okay, five. This one's a niche one. It's a subtle one, and it's not always actionable. But I'll bring it up because it is a top thing that's not discussed. If you are raising venture capital or plan to and you have choices and you have choices, and a lot of us don't have choices so much. Twitter and X advice is some sort of theoretical advice. Like 87 VCs all want to give you $100 million. Most, most of you will. It's hard to get one offer, okay? But if you have options, realize that bad investors can really hurt you. And I'll give you a couple examples. And why do I say this is? Because the bad is almost in air quotes. You could have someone from a very fancy brand, a very fancy fund. You could have someone that you personally like a lot, that you as a human like, but they might not be there for you. They might not support you. Um, and there's a couple ways that can impact you. One is just when you need to raise more funding, if your existing investors aren't supportive, it's really, really, really hard. Because listen, if you're whiz, everyone's going to want to invest in you as long as they can afford it. But if you're on the most of us will be on the bubble. Like, growth's good but not great or great but not perfect. It is hard. It takes time. And if you're a new investor and you and you're kind of interested in Amelia Startup, and it looks pretty good, but you're not sure you're on the edge. The third or fourth thing you're going to do is reach out to the existing investors and ask, do you love it? And the best question that folks always ask is this. One of your top companies in your current portfolio is it one of the best. And VCs have incentives to not act, believe it or not, to not be supportive in that situation. So you want someone that's going to support you. You also want someone that if you're doing okay but not great and they have the money, we'll write you a bridge check. We'll write you a bridge check. I will tell you about 18, like one of the fastest growing companies I've invested in. They're at 25 million in revenue, growing 10amonth now. Okay. It's pretty high if you compound that, right? It's not whiz, but it's pretty high. 18 months ago, they went through a really rough patch. I was the only person on planet earth that would put in and I don't even have that much money to invest. I was the only person. There are multiple multi billion dollar funds on the cap table. Not a single one would put the money in. Okay, so those are two sort of logistical issues. Will they support other folks and will they write another check? There's a third one and it's tough once in a while. I have to be careful that it's not me. Not literally, but figuratively. If you're too critical going to the prior point. But you know, a bad investor also can kind of create a crisis of confidence across your syndicate or even sometimes in your VPs. If they're too negative. If they're too negative. So look, I don't have all the perfect answers here. Doing founder diligence on VCS is actually surprisingly hard. You know, it's always going to be mixed or nuance. But I would say investors are a little bit like VPs. If you have more than one choice, one. If nothing else, slow it down. Anyone that tells you you have to sign a term sheet in 24 hours, if they want the deal, they'll always give you 48 hours. Ask for a little more time. Okay. And two, if you have more than one person at once invest in you, just like when you go to hire your VPs, don't you know, brands matter? You know, having Sequoia on your cap table is great. Having Andreessen on your cap table is great if that. But it's not the only factor. Slow it down. So many founders are blinded by that logo and they make the wrong decision. So just slow it down and figure out who's who. Who will be the most there for you. Okay, just two more and then we'll take some questions. This number six is the flip side of number one. Number one, which is Almost all that really matters, of all the advice founders don't hear enough is if you're not, if you're not 95% sure that's a great VP, don't make the hire. You will just waste a year and half your money. I could, I, I, I, I honestly could just, it would bore everybody. I could give that advice 52 weeks a year. That'd be the workshop Wednesday. Because we're all going to make, I keep making that mistake. Everyone makes that mistake. The flip side is, okay, you made a hire and two things are going to happen. They're, first of all, they're not all going to work out. I, I put this up on our, on our YouTube the other day, but I, I, I, I watched a slightly older Sasser annual session with Dev, who's the CEO of Mongo, was being interviewed by Jody Bonsal, who was the founder of AppDynamics with Cisco Bot for three and a half, 3.7 billion, is now the CEO of Harness. And he asked this great question of Dev, who's a great operator, great operator, multiple operators, CEO of MongoDB. And he's like, what percent of your VPs work out to Dev at this scale? At Mongo, after all these years? He's like 60%. Dev said 60%. He said, that's high. You're lucky if 60% of your VPs work out. And it's just, it's hard, it's hard to get to know people enough. And even if you do get to know enough, the VPs often don't know what they're. Your, your executives often don't know what they're getting themselves into. They haven't worked there for 10 years. They don't know the situation's different, the dynamics different. They can't all work out. And so Even if you're 95% sure, and a lot of times you're not, and you make the hire anyway, but even if you do, here's the mistake that the devs of the world that Mongo don't make, but I would say not 80% of founders make 90%. Okay, maybe 93.6% of founders make. They give them too much time. You guys have done this at least once or twice. Give them too much time. Here's the truth. A VP that has not leveled things up in 90 days, they never will. They never will. This isn't to say that everyone should go in and triple sales in, in, in the first 90 days. This isn't to say that you can quintuple the number of leads from marketing, or that you can triple the velocity that you built, that you ship code for product and engineering, or that you're. Or that you know your NRR goes from 80 to 140 in customer success. It can't. It can always. Sometimes that does happen. Sometimes you can. A VP of sales can double sales nine days. Mine did. We've talked about it on Saster. But you've got to see something happen in those 90 days because the things they know, the people they bring in, the mediocre reps, they move out. If you're in sales, let's say you're VP of sales, you come in, there's four reps there. Okay, here's what the. Here's what even. Here's what any good VP of sales does. They analyze the four. Usually two. Two are hitting quota, two aren't. You move out the two that aren't and you bring in one of your friends that you know is great. Now you've got three performers instead of two performers and two failures. That inherently increases revenue just because the leads you already have are going to close at a higher rate for more revenue. Like that always happens with a great VP of sales. Revenue always goes up, even if there's no more leads, even if not else happens, they improve the quality of the team under them. And revenue goes up in 90 days, always 100 of the time with a real VP of sales. And this happens in every function. And I, I see so many startups, so many founders, so many board meetings. I go in and it's month 180 and nothing's changed in the area. And you know, Jason comes to present the VP of sales and he doesn't really talk about the numbers or it's all qualitative. And everyone likes Jason because he worked at MongoDB or wherever he works, but nothing's happening. Like it's never going to happen. It will never happen. You've just wasted six months. So I'm hoping you at least realize this in 90 days. Take if. If you've hired a VP and you love them, or especially if you didn't, and 90 days go by and nothing's improved, take a process check and in a perfect world, you would take action that afternoon, that day and say, I'm sorry, Jason, it's not your fault, it's mine. It was a mishire, it was a mismatch. You will go somewhere else and be much more successful in our company, but we've got to move on. I hope you do that on day 91 or even day 61. You can do it 91. But if not, don't let it go 180 days. Don't let 100. It never gets better that second quarter. Never, ever. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever does a VP get better. The second quarter does. This does. Now, do individual contributors under them sometimes get better in the second quarter? Yeah, here's the thing. Like, for example, this is true. This is true of any report for you for a founder. So if you hire a sales rep on your team and founder led sales and they don't sell in 90 days, it's over. Like, you got to move on. Now when you hire a great VP of sales and they hire 20 reps, they may say, hey, listen, Amelia is the best I've ever worked with, even though she didn't put any points on the board the first 90 days, trust me, it's going to happen. And that VP of Sales will backfill Amelia. And he's worked with her before, and he knows she's great. So your VPs can make some of their own decisions here when they have time, but not your direct reports. If they don't. If they haven't tilted the curve in 90 days, they never, ever will. And I can't tell you how many board meetings, how many founders I meet with at the door closes at the end of the board meeting with the executives. And it's been 100 days, and there's not. Nothing's improved in sales. And there's no. I'm like, how you think. You think Jason's gonna. How you think Jason's doing to the CEO? Jason's doing great. I'm like, okay, I don't mean to be that guy from the second point that gives you the bad news, but it's never gonna get better. I know it's terrible. I know. You put so much energy into this hire. And this is the other thing. We. We get so tired because it took us six months to find that vp. This is what I hear from a lot of founders, especially founders that aren't from hot companies, founders from outside the Bay Area. Outsiders. Outsiders will say, listen, I know that Jason's not doing great in sales, but took me six months to find him. I can't just move on. But you realize you're better off with no one. You're better off with no one. A related point, and then I'll do the final one and do. If a VP hasn't put any points on the board the first 90 days, if they haven't tilted the curve. More importantly, they never will. A related point, and this is what I'm seeing a lot more often these days, which didn't used to happen in SaaS and Cloud when, when, when we all kind of grew at the same rates. But now a lot of folks are seeing deceleration, they are seeing slowdown. And the question is, and it's hard. It's hard. Not only is it hard to hit the numbers, it's hard emotionally on us when sales gets harder, it's hard on all of us when revenue slows because it's not like we get to work less hard. I mean some people do kind of check out and work less hard these days, but, but it doesn't make a lot of jobs any easier. And so the question is, how many quarters do you give a VP to get us back on track because of the macro effects and the yen trade or this? Like it's never, it's never their fault. How long? Okay, so listen, you've got to give everyone a mulligan. Like if they've done well for a year and then they have a rough fifth quarter, you got to give everybody a mulligan. Anyone? That's great. If they prove the self are four quarters, of course they get an off quarter, but they don't. But after two off quarters I find that almost every role they've lost the confidence, they've lost the spark. They don't believe. I was at a board meeting the other day with a first time VP of sales who I loved, someone that had gone was like the sixth hire and had taken them all up to 30 million in revenue, all on his own. VP sales, first time. Love him to death, but, but it's been four quarters where he is, where every, not only are things flat, but he's negative now. He, every board meeting he comes, he's like, we can't do any better, we can't do any better. It's the market. And as great as he was, and maybe there's some other role for him in business development or strategy or customer success, you got to move on. It's two quarters. It's just you never get your mojo back across. You never get your mojo back, especially in sales, you never get it back. So you got to move on. I never see a VP with two bad quarters re accelerate. Just never ever, never ever, ever see it. Okay, last point. And this is only for a subset of folks. Admittedly, especially these days, most of us don't have the luxury of having millions of dollars in the bank. But some of you will. Can't spend your way out of a rough patch. Can't spend your way out of a tough patch. Never seen it work. This is if you are lucky enough to raise millions or even tens of millions or even more, a lot of folks are going to want to spend your way out of a rough patch. This is why you, you know, you open up, you know, you read your Twitter, your tech wrench, and you're like, this company raised $200 million. They ran out of money. A lot of founders you'll be scratching. How could you possibly raise $200 million and run out of money? Now, if you hired a thousand engineers and you're an AI company, you had no revenue. You could see how it is, right? With all the salaries and all the math. But how could a B2B company run out of money raising 20 million, 50 million? A hundred million, 200 million? The real answer, if you learn, is they try to spend your way out of a tough patch. Right? I was recently talking with the CEO of a unicorn that had raised a couple hundred million at over a billion dollar valuation. Couple hundred million. And the burn rate was 2 million with about 20 million left in the bank. How many months is that? 10 months. Right. I asked him what, what he thought to do because I like the CEO a lot. He's like, I. I just, I've just got to spend more. I've got to spend more to get growth back. Because growth had slowed. Even though he's got 10 months left, he's got 20 million left out of 200. He spent 90 of it. And he still believes he's going to spend his way out of this. I can't tell you how many times I see this. And you got to realize that it doesn't work. There is not this magical place. Maybe there's little pockets of B2C and E commerce where you can spool up, spend, and people will buy more of your jewelry. Maybe that's out there. I've never found it working. B2B. I've never found this magical way where if I spend two more million dollars of my scarce capital next quarter, my growth will magically go for 30 to 100 million. You've got product market fit issues, what we talked about. You've got competitive issues, you've got team issues. You cannot spend your way out of a tough patch. It's not the answer. And if venture capital seems alluring, if you haven't raised it before, you will realize later that it is extremely expensive, it is extremely dilutive, and it is extremely addictive. It is. If nothing else, do not get it. If you raise capital, spend it like it's your own money because it's addictive and spending your way out of your touchpad. There's a lot of probably psychological reasons they have that happens, but I think they're addicted. Just like people are addicted to alcohol or gambling, and they're just addicted to this fundraising and they, and they just, just like the gambler goes in. Listen, I don't gamble, but I watch the movies, right? The gambler goes in and, and, and like, they're, they're, they're, they're almost out of money. What do they do? They gamble even more.

Right?

And, and then this is what founders do. They're gamblers and they gamble even more with that money. And they never rolled the hard seven or whatever the metaphor is. So you cannot spend your weight off a top patch. Realize this. If you're planning to go talk with your mentors, go talk with the one person on your board that isn't insane. Go talk to the VC that, that was your seed investor that didn't give you all that money and ask him, is this going to work before you do it? Can I spend the way of my, my, my rough patch? And the answer you're going to get is no. Okay, so those are my seven guys. Thanks. Thanks for that. And we can, we can open it up to any questions on this or anything vaguely related.

Okay. You got a lot of camaraderie in the comments, Matteo. I think you've had your hand raised for a while if you want to answer your question.

Thank you.

Hi, Jason.

Looking forward to see you in sester in a few weeks.

Awesome. See you there.

Yes, well, I have a lot of questions, but I think I'll just. If it's okay, if I can do two real fast.

You can do one and a half, but yeah, shoot them out.

Okay, thank you. The first one is. Well, I listen a lot to. Kind of like to the echo sign mafia.

Yes.

So I remember your first VP of Sales. Not first VP of Sales, this guy that was the former LinkedIn VP, Brandon.

Yeah, we've talked about him a lot over the years.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I have been listening to a few parts that he has been able to be in and he spoke like some things that, I mean, like, some things that really worked out for him. Maybe I understood wrong, was hiring folks just like fresh out of college, you know? So actually I was literally. I mean, I was looking to a pattern for like, from our own company and all of our top sales reps have been fresh out of college.

You know, what's your, what's your deal size? What's your ACV?

It's around like 40k annually, more or less.

Okay, okay.

It's not fully SAS, by the way. It's a little bit, much more services. So I'm not that.

Okay. And, and, but it, what's worked for you is kids straight out of school, right? Yes, like, exactly.

And, and that's the folks that I have been able to hire that are 28, 30 have been really bad. So what are your thoughts on that?

Well, look, it's, my thoughts are nuanced. I'm struggling to relearn some things today. Right. And I just think so many of us in tech have changed so much the last two and a half years and folks are jaded, folks are pissed off. Folks, many folks really, that were selling, especially in 2021 and late 2022 when it was easier in second half of 2020, they haven't recovered. They haven't recovered because of how much harder it was. Right. It wasn't even a bubble because the markets justified it. But those good times lasted so long that it became just times, not good times. It became normalized and they can't recover. And so a lot of the folks you're talking about that are 28 and up, they, they're pissed off or they don't want to work in the world we are today and they don't want to work harder. And that's what I think Brendan's saying. And honestly, it's a closed door conversation I have with almost every revenue leader is they don't want to hire these broken, angry, pissed off people. They don't. Okay, now and just don't. If I had to, if I had to do a different presentation of who not to hire in sales today, don't hire the bidder, the broken and the angry. It's not their fault. Don't hire them. Do not. No matter how good their LinkedIn is, no matter where they don't hire the beard or the broken or the angry. So what? So, so listen, does that mean you should hire all folks that just graduated this year because they didn't live in 2021? I mean, maybe I, I kind of am feeling that way myself. I kind of want to personally only want to work with people that, that, that, that weren't even in the workforce in 2021. But on the other hand, if you need domain expertise or senior folks, it's also not Practical. Right. So look, the, the folks that are fresh out of school, they're hungry, they're malleable. The they want it and they, they're not. They're not already kind of think that stuffed up. Too many folks in sales think things don't work things those work. I mean we had someone who I love. We have a tiny sales team at Sasser, but it lets me keep kind of running the lab and running experiments. We have someone who I love, who I've worked with for many years, kind of pre joined our sales team. He never even joined. He pre joined. Right. And at the end of the first day he came with a list of 10 things we were doing wrong and how he was going to do everything differently than how we do it. Now we're 10 people doing 20 million a year. We don't have time to deal with his issues of why everything we're doing is wrong with 10 people and why he's going to change every single process we're doing because he knows best. That's the problem with the these, these folks today. And you don't want to hire them. But listen, the bet you know that the best hires of all are the experienced but young at heart. That's the magic. Two by two. Can you find the person with 10, 15, 20 years of experience that has the energy of someone with three? Right. That's the Goldilocks thing. Can you, can you find them where they're not bitter or broken or burnt out or only want to manage managers who manage managers and managers. Right. Those Goldilocks hires, they're rare but you know that's. I would try to find one or two for the team. If you're hiring all 21 year olds, I would hire a 41 year old or a 51 year old that is truly young at heart that, that, that bounces off the room like, like someone half their age and if they have a little bit of experience. You want yin and yang on the sales team, right. So, so long way of saying if nothing else, don't hire the bitter or the broken. But if you can hire some experience onto this at 40 kcv, this isn't 2k. This isn't a one call close. So there is some benefit from having some experience on the team. That that's my best answer to figuring it out today. So thanks for the question.

Great answer. Thank you very much.

Cool.

Thanks for that question. I know we've got a few hand raisers but I'm going to try and go in as much of an order As I can. So I think Marin, you've got a couple questions for Jason if you want to come off mute.

Hello Jason. Me again. Hopefully with a better connection but basically like on the, on the point about mentors. So for me as kind of like a seed stage founder, like who would be the opt. What would be the optimal profile for a mentor to. To get? Basically like how would you go about finding them and in what way would you compensate or not them for. For the advice and for the help they. They give you. I'm interested in. In the ones that would you know, be strict but be acting in good faith. Yeah. Like you. So. So okay. So listen, where do I, I would, you know I would try to find two mentors if I could. Ideally one is someone in a very similar industry. Maybe even a peer that's something like 24 months ahead of you. Okay. Okay. I'll give you an example. I'm on the board of a. Of a. Of an e Commerce company at 70 million in revenue. Okay. And that's a lot. That's great. Right. But there's a whole set of issues they're facing now about going up market and going multi product. All these issues we just brought on this guy to board in the industry doing 150 like it was the best board meeting we've had in three years. He was, he pushed on everything we've been taught and distilled it all and it was an ass kicker. The comments were like. They were tough. Like going to our points CEO had to be tough because it was actually the most critical board meeting we've ever had. Even though it was just the outside director but he was two years ahead. He's like you got. You should think about dropping this. You're too slow here. You've got to do this. And it was the ass kicking we talked about and it was great. So that's literally. And they were friends since the early. They've been friends for five years. But he came on the board and it was different because actually even though they'd been friends he'd never really been on the board or an advisor. So. So that the type of feedback he gave was very different because the role changed. Right. So appear 24 months ahead. 10 years ahead is too far. Right. And don't hire someone six months ahead because it's just you. It's just too close. Right. So that's the one I would fire. And listen. Okay. If you network with enough people in your industry someone and you're likable eventually someone will want because they'll get something. Because you'll also be doing something they're not doing. So they'll want to mentor you at some level because they'll get something out of it. You're the next generation. You're further ahead in AI. You've got a fresh approach, you've got overlapping customers. So you'll get someone at, you know, a few years ahead of you that wants to do it because there's something into it. Right? This 150 million guys said, listen, this one at 70, they're doing some things we're not doing. So I'm learning. Even though that he's learning from me, I'm learning. This is worth my time. I'm learning from him. Right. The second one you should do is if this works in your career, just go find the best boss you've ever had and make them your mentor and give them shares. The best boss you've ever had. Maybe that's not who you need in four or eight years, but just go find them. And how do you compensate them? Look, I mean, you know, there's some rough metrics. You know, in the early days, in the very beginning, outside, if they're a director, they usually get 1%, which is a lot. As you scale, that typically declines to about 0.2%. So it goes from 1% to maybe half a percent at the Series B to like point 2% in the growth phase, like 1.52 for board member. And then as you like in the IPO phase, it's not really about percentage about equity. I mean, it's about value of the equity. So you try to give someone a couple million dollars when you're going public, and hopefully the stock goes up 10x for that couple million, vesting over four years. Right. Becomes 20 million if a 10x. And if it goes down, it becomes very little. But, but that 1%, half percent, 0.2% for board is for advisors. It really varies. There's no magical thing. I think though, that if some like, I, I think this like 0.2% in the early days for, for, for like the best one is a good thing invested over four to five years. So if they quit, it's really nothing. Right? That's a good framework. Some folks, maybe more, some folks will be less. You know, this 0.2 to 0.1 in the early days for just two people, it's. It's a bargain, right? Sure. Yeah. And if it needs to be more and invests and they're great, just give more. Like it's it's, it's either they're either worth more or worth less or they're not going to be worth what you give them. It's either more or less. Right. So good questions. Thank you. Okay, cool. Thank you. Cool.

Awesome.

Let me go to Stosha. Sorry if I said your name wrong.

Alex.

Hi Jason. Thanks for weekly zooms are very, very insightful and you are probably the only one in the industry who's doing this, this kind of like high level content. My question for you is related to marketing agencies. So basically outsourcing the demand gen toward the marketing agencies as a strategy to throw all your money down the drain, Is that the question? Or to lose. Is a strategy to lose all your capital or half your capital? Is that the question? How much will you lose? That's what I'm asking. Are there any good agencies? No, no, no, no. There are, there are. Listen, there are good agencies out there. I don't mean to, to say that. Is there any agency on planet earth that before you have a brand, before you have 5, 10, 20 million in revenue can magically get you customers part time with a junior resource that you can't get on your own? What do you think the answer is? When I describe the part time with a junior resource that doesn't know you or the industry? How many leads are they going to get you? None. And okay, were the rare exceptions one, you're working your. The principles work for you. No business development, no anything. It's a small agency. Emelia was the VP of demand gen at Brax. She's on her own. She's got a handful of clients and it's her. It's not her team, it's her. That's not going to work great. But I'll still take that. Right? Because it's her. So any agency where you. Here's my role for a startup or frankly anyone. Any agency where you have to go through anyone is business development or sales in it. 0% chance, small percent chance if the principals are doing the work. Okay. So that's for you in the founder led areas. Now later when you hire a real head of marketing or even a CMO that's hitting their numbers. Okay. That's taking you from 10 to 20, 20 to 30, whatever. Right. Even 5 to 10 and you have budget. Okay. Most marketer, senior marketers have been around for a while. They have one or two agencies they have worked with over the years and they know are good and they have worked. Let them do it like that's their team. Do they want to in source, outsource, whatever, mix. Like it's. Maybe it's not who you would use, but they've worked with Guillaume for years at his SEO agency and they trust him and they'll hit their number. You got to trust your team to pick their agencies. So long way to say this. Most marketers have one or two folks in their back pocket that they know. Work founders. 0% chance if sales is involved, small percent chance if the principles are good and they'll do the work themselves. But there's no short, you know, there's no shortcuts. Right. So good question. Thank you. Cool.

Thank you. Let's go to Michael next. I'm going to add you in here.

Thank you, Jason. Great session. We talk a lot about founder led.

Sales, Procure, Pay and close. It's Airbase. Airbase? Yeah. You just got a free commercial going out to almost 100,000 people. When this goes through the podcast and YouTube and there you go, come back as a sponsor. It's Airbase. Amelia, how do we say it again?

I still have an Airbase water bottle.

Is it pay close? How does it go to Airbase Amelia? Procure. Let's do it slow again for the, for all the folks that will listen on the podcast. Procure, Pay close. It's Airbase. Okay, what's the question?

So we talk a lot about, we talk a lot about founder led sales. What advice for the technical audience. You know the technical founders do you have for founder led marketing, right? It's out of their comfort zone. They're an engineering product mind.

Look, most founders think, listen here, here. The best advice most founders are, unless you come out of a marketing background, they're pretty bad at this classic toolkit, right? They don't know how to do all this growth hacking and fake spam emails and lookups and stuff. But most founders are okay. Are, are okay at kind of like the visionary part of marketing. Like, where's the market going? What's the real value? How are we changing? Like most founders are pretty good at like, listen, the, the procurement world is pretty state. It's pretty boring. Here's how it's changing. They're pretty good at that. This, founders are pretty good at that. So what you have to say, of all the things that you don't know how to do in marketing, what's the best thing that you can do to get that message out, right? And so the classic thing that a lot of founders who know nothing end up doing is content marketing, right? So like Brian Halligan and Dharmeshan the early days, they challenged themselves. I think they each wrote, I can't remember. They did this disaster session together. They either wrote, either wrote two blog posts each a day or two, a week or two, something. But they forced themselves every single day they had to write content about this. Was it perfect? No, but was. Of all the things they didn't really know, it was the thing, the one thing they were good at and could explain how to do that. The limited types of things HubSpot did in the early days, website grading and SEO didn't even do marketing automation in the beginning, right? It wasn't even HubSpot we have today. So, like, what are the things? And don't. And so that's like, figure out what's the best thing. And so like, don't do, like, don't do a podcast if it's not the best thing. It's so much time to set up a podcast. Like, I think actually the lamest thing you can do in marketing today is podcast. So many people want to do. I get emails and they need like, I mean, a million knows this because we work with big companies. They need like 11 people on their team to do a podcast. It takes them like eight months to set it up. They do like four, it gets eight downloads and they quit like that. You don't have time for that. But listen, if you really think you can build the best podcast in your industry and are committed 52 weeks, do. If that's your best idea, do it. Content marketing, do it right. If, if you're good at, if you're, you know, if you're good at abm, like, whether that's sales or marketing, if you're good at outbound, just do more of it. Like, it doesn't have to be great, but if you're pretty good at, like going to LinkedIn and finding the world's perfect Airbase customer and writing them the world's perfect email. Like, here's why Airbase, it's a crowded space. I know you're probably using these other solutions. Here are the three reasons why your top two competitors are using Airbase. And here's why. Actually, we're better than the 88 folks that seem the same as us. And if you can write the world's best email, then that's a superpower, right? Instead of that crappy email we get 100 of each day, isn't it? So look, you know how to present. You know how to tell the world why you're the why you're changing it and then just figure out the best medium to do it. And even though it's not, it's. It's not going to work that well. It's going to work if you do it every single day. Like the Dharmesh Brian example. That's my best bet, my best idea. And don't, don't do the stuff that doesn't work. Don't. Or that you don't understand. Just don't do it. Wait until you hire someone to do the stuff you don't understand or how to do. Don't try. You can do an. Like do a. Sure. Do a quick experiment. Right. But don't become Mr. Clips if it's not you.

Yeah, I mean we're lucky that Tejo, our founder is very comfortable being a spokesperson, getting out there doing interviews. But I think for a lot of technical founders, they don't want to get out of there. They're very introverted.

So they. Yeah, but you know what? They, you know, I'll tell you for the technical stuff, like some of the more successful like developer focused startups I've invested in Algolia and Revenue Cat. Right. They were, I mean very different but they were both. If you look in the early days they were great at these content marketing. Revenue Cat wrote this early post as developer like Rev, the Revenue Cat team, they automate 30% of mobile subscriptions. Okay. And they actually did it even before their company. They did another company before. So in the early days of 2018 they were experts on managing mobile subscriptions and they wrote this post about how it all worked in iOS and Android when nobody really understood it. And so many people wrote this. It wasn't the world's best. It was a good product pitch. I wrote it up on Sas. You can search for it but it really explains something. Everyone read on this on how to do payments on mobile, right. Similarly, in the early days of Algolia I remember when it was at about $10,000 a month in revenue it back then it was a very narrow search API but for small object search it was like 50 to 100 times faster than elastic 20 to 50 times. But they only did this little thing and they wrote this great piece of content explaining ex like we love Elastic part. You know it's the company isn't but the product's open source. It's terrific. There's this one area where we're better this one area and they showed all the data. Here's the type of small object search where we can return all the E Commerce searches in 8 milliseconds and elastics goal is more horizontal and it takes 10 times longer and they don't find the object. And so we're not saying use us for this, don't use us for this, don't use us for that. But here's the exact data on where if if speed matters for E commerce search in 2014 and everyone read that stuff right. And so that those are some canonical pieces. Did they know in revenue cap they're still primarily PLG today right as they're coming up on 50 million Algoy actually the founders forced themselves to do outbound in the early days but but both of them found that as engineers they're comfortable typing type not just typing code but typing data learnings the schema for mobile subscription revenue cat or the exact honest data of in this one area how do we compare to elastic not overall where we're where we're not better but they're very comfortable with data saying here's one area where 10x better that 10x feature things magical. So that's an example. Right. So thanks for the question. Thank you. Awesome.

Cool.

Robert, if you're still there, I'm going to come add you in. So let me see if you'll come up here.

Hey. Hey guys. Hey Jason. Thanks for this lovely session.

Thanks for joining.

Yeah, thank you. This is my first one and I'm also looking forward to meet you guys. On the Sester event in September. I was having one quick question for you. Yes. What would you advise a founder for a startup? What would you advise to take the steps to to do a good or great product launch? How would you, how would you see that? How would you advise someone to do it rather than just pushing the button, putting on the market and then struggling to find clients and customers and so on and so forth.

Look, I don't know, I, I will, I, I, I don't know that I have the perfect answer this one. I will just tell you a couple learnings. First of all, it's funny there was a little the CEO of Product Hunt did this thread. You might have seen it on Twitter this week saying you can launch more than once on Product Hunt. You can. And I forget who they had linear or someone said we launched five times in Product Hunt. So much in the way like safes changed fundraising. Now folks will raise like a lot of little safes when it used to have to be a seed round. I don't think there's such thing as one launch anymore. You can launch multiple times and media has changed right it is harder to get attention and no one really takes. There's so many apps. People don't. You know, in the old days, I mean, I don't mean to date myself, but there were so few SaaS apps in the old days. Like, you know, you could read every single new app on TechCrunch, like every single app that came out. So a launch was so important because you got your one article on TechCrunch right today there's just a trillion. So I don't even think it's a linear thing. You can, you can do a launch. So look, I don't have. I also think that's why a launch is no longer a magical moment. I don't think this is Twitter at South by Southwest where you magically come out of someone and people are like, wow, I want to use your procurement software because your, your launch was so exciting. I, you know, I, I don't, I don't, so, I don't, I don't know. It could be sequential. I think just. There's only two. Two. I can only give you two minor pieces of advice and maybe this is not the best. I'm not the best answer of this question. One is the one thing I know is if you are going to put all the energy into having to launch right Team energy, market energy. Don't launch with a crummy product. This is where I think there's bad advice on the Internet. Launch with a truly sellable product. It cannot be, it's going to be feature poor. It's not going to do everything. But whatever you do, whatever it does do, it better be great. One thing, it better do one thing great because you're wasting your energy if you, if you're not good enough. So I know everyone, I love Y Combinator. I love everything but this, this build fast and launch it thing. I don't know, man. For most of us, it's too risky to have a bad launch. Both and I wrote this post on Saster, both of my startups. I launched too early and it was devastating. It was devastating with Adobe. They're both a while ago with Adobe. And next time we launched, we launched, we got a ton of traffic. I hacked it. I, I did this a few times in the old days. I would get lots of PR on New Year's Day because there's no press on New Year's Day. So I would ask everyone to write me up on New Year's Day. There'd be nothing else. And you, you'd get a much bigger lift launching On New Year's Day. I think it's probably, I think that's still a trick today to launch on a holiday, right? If you, if you can get someone to write you up. It's like the articles in the Wall Street Journal on the weekends. They're all, they're all like articles that, that, that you could write 80 you could have written a year ago. Reporters get tired, so if you give them a free article on New Year's Day, it can be kind of a mitzvah. But, you know, the, the product just didn't work well enough. It was too slow. Part of the product didn't work and I just wasted all of those users. Right. In my first startup I launched shortly because we were both times. It's frankly is because we were running out of time, which was true. Really weren't the first one. We had a, you know, could have been a $10 million customer and we shipped them a product that was just too early and didn't work at all. It took me three years to get them back at all. So I'm really against launching too early. I really think you have to be careful with some of this advice on the Internet, but you can launch multiple times and like the last thing I'll tell you, and this, this is barely helpful. But since this launching thing, like being on product hunt isn't magical. Being in media doesn't even matter anymore. Like, no one reads blog. I mean, people still read Sasser, but it's all from SEO and searches. No one types saster.com anymore. It just doesn't happen. Right. The world's changed, so I don't even know if a launch means anything. But there are always leaders in your industry who, if you're, if you can tell a good story like how you're disrupting history, they will get interested. There are always folks with some following, some stature in your industry that will take that call. So if nothing else, I would invest my time, I would identify 10 folks that are leaders in my industry, talk to them and ask if they'll write something. Write an article, write a blog post, write a LinkedIn post, write something. One that will get you some attention because they're thought leaders too. You can thoughtfully recycle it. You can turn into content on your website. You can retweet it and relinked in it, and repost it. If someone in your industry that's influential writes a great piece on launch day. Here's the beauty to social media today. You can just hit repost on LinkedIn 365 days a year. You can just put that one to the top of your feed ad nauseum. It is so easy to retweet and repost stuff. It's a gift. You don't even have to. You don't even have to move it over to your site and move it to your collateral. You can just retreat or repost that thing forever. So I'll break here. My best idea is to get 10 people that matter in your industry excited to write about it. And I think that content, rather than some random article that will disappear in 30 seconds or a tweet, this is enduring, right? The industry, the folks, industry leaders feedback will be enduring for you.

Thanks Jason. Yes, yes, that's absolutely correct. I was thinking about this and I was thinking about some teaser effects but anyway, maybe we can catch up more on the event. Thank you.

Awesome.

Cool.

Well I'm going to add Karan here and then I think we've got time for one more question after that and sorry, let me add you back Jason. I lost it. There we go.

Hey Jason.

Hey, thanks for the time.

No, I really appreciate all the nuggets of wisdom. Been following you for a while. Met you at SASA last year.

Oh great.

So Jason, we are in the GTM space building an all in one go to market platform with an agent aisdr.

Great. A competitive space.

Yes, it's a super competitive space. We've been growing well like we went from 300k to almost 2 million in the last 9 months.

Awesome.

Wanted to understand like because it's a cluttered space, we have a very clear differentiation on like going deep into ICP and then aggregating multiple databases like Clay and then doing a lot of work on events and other things. How do we build the brand and the positioning. We are getting great results from our clients. A lot of love growing at a decent clip. The only thing now for us is hey, how do we go to the next level in terms of building the brand and containing the momentum?

Well look, I don't have any how many magic answers to your questions but I will give you two, two tips but I don't have any magic answers. One is there's an old Saster post I re update with some frequency on a mini brand and just realized the best way to build a brand in SaaS is to get to 100, 200, 500 happy customer sub number and it usually happens earlier than we think. It usually happens somewhere around 2 to 3 million in revenue where sure, you know Mark Benioff. Hasn't heard of you if you're in the sales space. But people in the industry start to hear about you, right? I think people started to hear about Clay and Apollo and others when they were just at a couple million in revenue, right? Because it's enough that people start. Especially if you're in an industry where people talk. I mean it's probably true of almost every category frankly. Or you start to get a mini brand about just a couple million in revenue. So realize that it will like you're going to have 99 problems but this one will solve it self a little bit. If you just make a couple hundred customers happy, however you get them, content marketing, outbound, inbound, leftbound, right bound, that will get you to a mini brand and then you should nurture it. Make sure you have good customer success, make sure start to do steak dinners with customers, start to do events, start to bring folks together so that they can create a virtuous cycle. But number one is just getting to enough customers that you have a mini brand in yours. Like there's so many AI SDRs out there, right there. There's so many products, a million. But, but people do are interested in it, right? If you get 500 customers, you're going to be in a lot of conversations even if you do nothing for marketing, right? So, so, so that's number one, the number two one, which I know folks know, but they don't do enough of it. And I know it's worked, but be present. Don't write dumb LinkedIn comments on everything I write. Don't, don't, don't like do dumb things. Don't like respond to every tweet with oh, you like sales. Use my AI thing. I'm gonna block you or mute you anyway or leave you from the thread. That stuff doesn't, that's dumb stuff. But what, what I mean is be a good person and be present. Like if you're like participate at Saster Annual and be around, participate in everything. Like show up everywhere. Like when you talk to marketers that do a lot of field events and stuff, there's really two strategies that marketers, because we work with a lot of marketers. I didn't know this until maybe four or five years ago, frankly. There's two ways that marketers that have big budgets do events like big events like Dreamforce and Saster and Inbound and stuff. One is go big or go home. So they put a lot of money into one event, right? And they're like I got to be at RSA I got and they, they buy the two million dollar booth at RSA because it matters in security. And there's, there's reasons that's important because the biggest events people with budget come, right? They come to RSA to decide who they're going to give millions and millions of dollars to. The other one that a lot of folks do is and I see a lot of folks that are developer centric, really good at this is they do a horizontal strategy and they make sure they're everywhere and they don't blow 2 million at RSA. But they put 20k at 100 events. Now that's more work. You've got to show up, you got to be there. But I remember like Algolia, we talked about Algolia and revenue can Developer. They both have run this playbook. Algolia ran in the beginning. Every developer event that was there they would be there with, with, with the table. Right. Revenue cat is that since they brought on a new marketer who's great, they're at every single event that is in payments or billing or developers with everyone. They're 100% of them. They're always there and being present. If you have a mini brand, it's just magical because they're always talking about you always look bigger and better and stronger than you are if you're there. If you don't show up and your competitor is there, they're going to talk about your competitor, aren't they? So don't do the dumb things, don't do the stupid comments like people that doesn't work. But whether it's however you can do it, just, just, just be present, right and be gracious and these aren't perfect answers but I don't see people doing either of these that much. So thanks for the question. Thank you. Cool.

Chase, do you have time for one last one?

We can do one last question, then we'll wrap. Thank you.

All right, Ashish, I'm going to add you for our last question.

Last bonus question.

Thanks for taking my question. Love your work. What's about 99% of your videos? I'm too broke to travel to the actual event, so.

Well, next year. Next year you won't be. You'll keep growing. Yeah, yeah.

100% hopefully. Or maybe you guys will come to Middle east. That makes it easier.

But yeah.

So we're building a B2B2C fintech in Saudi and the UAE which provides open banking solutions to large retailers. Basically allowing consumers like you and I to link our bank accounts directly to loyalty programs for automatic rewards. It's super regulated. We need a special open finance license with minimum capital requirements of about $300,000. And we've got like small angel checks, you know. But we face a lot of rejections from VCS who want to see traction, they want to see revenue even though.

Well, you're not, you're not appropriate for 99% of VCs.

Yeah, no, but I'm pitching to the ones that call themselves pre seed. But I think in this side of the world, like people don't you need pre.

Precede.

Yeah, it's kind of like a rare commodity over here.

Well, tell me quickly the question and then I'll give you a few thoughts. Right. It's the question where do I find funding?

No, no, it's basically like do we continue raising like small kind of angel checks, you know, 25, 50k at a time or do we kind of pivot to become. Not pivot, but just take a longer road, become like the hundredth white label loyalty solution provider, get some traction, then go back to VCS and then raise and then, then stay true to the mission.

Look, I don't know, I'll just, I'll just give you two comments that are not perfect. Answers your question, then we can break. One is just realize for folks in general you've realized this, right? First of all, 99 by dollars. 99 of VC dollars goes to series A and later by dollars. Okay, so that means almost everyone you're if you're before, forget about seed. If you're not even series A, that's not by deal volume but by dollars. 99 of it goes there. It's stripe raising OpenAI, raising billions of dollars and that cascade whiz raising another round of 22 billion. That's where most of this venture capital goes and the early stage stuff, especially in B2B most I've been doing this for most B2B seed investors precede. Investors still want 8,000amonth in revenue, 10,000amonth in revenue and they want you to be growing quickly. They're not really formation stage. If you're six guys at a stripe and you were the top team or your three developers out of open AI that were the crack team, great because you check you're going to get credit for it. If no one's ever heard of you and you don't have that 8 to 10k in revenue, 99.99 of investors. Venture capital is not hoping. It's not designed for hope and a prayer venture cap. This is misunderstood by so many folks. Venture capital is designed to take measured risk at different stage. Growth investors take measured risk before the ipo. Late seed investors take measured risk that that early but real traction will be maintained. Right. Late seed investors invest between 100, 200k and a million in revenue. You've already got customers, you're referenceable, you can do diligence. Right? And so they're all taking measured types of risk. Venture capital is not designed. I mean, true angels are angels, bless their souls. They're angels. They come in and you have nothing and no revenue and they pay a price that is always too high. Even if you're at a million pre. You're really telling me your pre revenue nothing company is worth a million dollars? That's worth nothing. These are angels, bless their soul. But 99.99% of the industry are not. They are taking here. And I know you know this. They're taking measured risk. Understand that. And, and so don't beat yourself up or. And so the earlier you like and so the other related point and then this will tie to the second one and then we'll break. The earlier you are in, the more you got to just hustle even more and talk to even more people and find even more folks that will take that risk and the more personal it is. And you know, there's a reason even Jeff Bezos had to raise a lot of money from mom and dad, as did Bill Gates. Like this just it was not everyone saw it in the early days at Microsoft and Amazon. Okay, now having said all that, you've already raised some money, right? So you're a hustler. Like you're a hustler. And so you're saying, God, this is frustrating. Should I raise 25 and 50k checks or should I wait and go bigger? I mean, I don't know the answer, but what I can tell you a great thing. And we did talk about this earlier today. You know, it has changed in investing, not just in the Bay Area, but all across the world. It is more okay to raise lots of little checks. It is okay to raise lots of little safes and notes and stuff. It used to be an anathema. It used to be a negative. Right? It used to be there. We know when I started investing in 2013, Hunter Walk wrote this and I. We wrote the same post at the same time. He said homebrew, which is wildly successful. And he wrote this post that a second seed is usually a sign of death. But here's when it works. And when I started investing, I Didn't know second seeds were terrible. So I did second seeds in pipedrive and Algolia that were all worth billions and salesloft. No one told me second seeds were a sign of a failing startup. So I'm like, I'll do all those are good ones. The world. So. So listen, I don't think it's binary. Raise them. If you can keep raising. Today, a lot of folks raise, raise dribs and dabs, and it's slow and it's frustrating, and sometimes they go years, and finally they reach that escape velocity. And finally it gets easier. And sometimes. Sometimes it gets like. When Ben Chestnut came to Sasstran, it was like I couldn't even ever. Why was. Why is Mailchimp the most successful bootstrapped ever? Right. No capital to 12 billion. He's like, no one would give me money until I didn't need it. Yeah. He's like, by the time any VC would give me money, I was already profitable and didn't need it. So. But. But my point is, like, hopefully that's not. But they. They even. They went through a phase transition, right? Unfundable. Unfundable, unfundable. That fundable. So hack it. My best advice is don't overanalyze it. If you want it badly enough, if you want. If you're willing to, you and your co founders are willing to do this for 10 to 12, 15 years. Do what it takes. And if that means banging your head against the wall and running around in the Middle east raising a lot of 25k checks, well, many folks even better than you have done just that to raise the early money. Right? So. All right, thanks, everybody. Really appreciate the time. Thank you.

Thanks, Jason. Thanks, guys.