Bob Tinker (MobileIron): Thriving in the Mobile Enterprise
Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, discusses building an enterprise mobile security platform. He argues the market was still early with 400-500 million enterprise smartphones then, and that picking markets with multiple hard problems to solve gives long-term advantage. He spent 1.5 hours a week cold-calling CIOs to land early reference customers.
Questions this video answers
2007
About 7 years
Went public on NASDAQ earlier that year (2015)
Exit about $450 million; Airspace grew to roughly $80 million/year by 2005
Nearly 500 of the Global 2000
Chapters
Hey, man. How you doing?
Mr. Tinker, thanks for coming. Appreciate it. So how are you?
I heard that.
Good. Excellent morning. Good morning. So there's a bunch of stuff I want to chat about on scaling and mobile and all of this, but there is a small chance that fewer people know they've used MobileIron than Box.
Right.
Even though just as many people may use them. So do you want to give us just 60 seconds or as many seconds as you want on the company, then we can go back in time a little bit.
Appreciate it. So, good morning everyone. I'm Bob Tinker, the CEO at MobileIron. MobileIron is an enterprise focused security and management company that provides security and management for mobile apps, mobile data and mobile content in the enterprise. The real core problem we challenge, challenge we solve is if you look at smartphones and tablets are exploding into the enterprise. People want to choose their device, get their applications, get their content and do it with a great user experience. That's where we come in. We sell a platform to those companies that help them do that and we have a large ecosystem of application content players around that join in that success. The company is seven years old. We were founded in 2007 and the news is we recently went public on NASDAQ earlier this year.
That's good.
Yeah, so good. So, Bob, you didn't actually found MobileIron when you were still a sophomore in college. I think like Aaron, or whatever the time is right before that, among other things. Right. You were with Airspace, which had a great exit. Right. In fact, back in the day, that was 400 million in like 05. Right. I mean, we got. That's. We fell out of our chairs back then.
Right. Yeah.
Seems like a lot of money.
Yeah, 450 million.
450 million. I mean, we were like, wow, right? People like, we are talking about it on the streets of downtown Palo Alto. I remember.
Right, yeah. No, it is actually interesting. Think back that. Yeah, this is my third lap around the track. Third lap around the track was a voiceover IP company in 1998 that really didn't get off the ground. It was too early. Second was Airspace, which, yeah, in 2005 we went from zero to about $80 million a year right in the gut of the post.com depression. And you know, we were one of the first large exits at Airspace, sort of before the technology market turned around.05. So after spending three years at Cisco, came to start MobileIron and seven years later, here we are.
So. Yeah, so tell me. So you do that. You join MobileIron founder, CEO. What are any particular learnings from aerospace and others that you wanted to do better this time? Right. I mean, we've got founders and CEOs here. What did you set out to do better?
Well, let's see. I think, you know, there are many things that actually my last company did really well, going from zero to 80 million bucks in three years. You know, build a good product, build to quick go to market, was able to ramp the business quickly. If I look at the things that I think we did differently, one was one of the challenges we had in my last company, and I think this is sort of good advice as you think about your businesses, is that airspace solved a big challenge, which was enterprise WI fi. But the problem was sort of, once we cracked that big rock, it was really sort of a lot of little pebbles left. There wasn't sort of a next big problem to go solve.
Yep.
And one of the things I love about MobileIron and the enterprise mobility market and the transition to mobile and cloud is that there are a lot of big rocks to go crack and there is no shortage of big challenges to solve, big problems to crack, and frankly, great businesses to build. And I think picking a space where you feel like there's not just one problem to solve, but actually a sequence of problems to solve is a way to build a really sustaining business.
Yeah. So that is interesting. I want to talk about that. But let's just go back a little bit in time because there's so many interesting things about MobileIron in terms of timing and history. So the sort of lay version of the MobileIron story is what's after BlackBerry. Right. How do we take the security.
That's where it started. Yes.
Of BlackBerry and do that on these emergency emerging mobile devices, like these iPhone things, these Android devices. Right. So obviously the right vision. Right. That was a good one. A lot of Money has left BlackBerry and gone to MobileIron. But you start off and there's a. Yeah, it's very interesting. But I mean, Aaron and I, we would have. We didn't get to competition. Right. And Vox has a lot of notional competition, a lot of competition in the press. But I'm going to argue MobileIron is much more competitive in some ways than box. Right. And I could be wrong and Aaron can challenge me, especially in the beginning. You've got so many competitions and some of your competitors got so big. Right.
How do you.
What have you learned through that process? Right.
That was true in the beginning, but it's not so True anymore. You know, give you a sense for sort of what happens. And again, going back to this thesis that if you're in a market where there's a sequence of hard problems to solve, it creates multiple opportunities to differentiate over time. And if you look at the very beginning of enterprise mobility, it was basically like, hey, look, people just want their iPhones and get their email. Right? And that was sort of phase one. And in the early days of the market, yeah, there were a lot of people sort of jumping in, trying to figure it out what was different about us. And this is a huge advantage for companies that are focused, is we were focused on solving this problem. We didn't used to do anything else. We purpose built the company and the architecture to go do that. But then the market evolved. It was no longer just about email, it was about apps and content and access to services. And all of a sudden the original platform we built was there to take advantage of that much bigger problem. So as a result, as the requirements of customers got more sophisticated and larger, the competitive landscape is actually narrowed. So we've seen our competitive landscape go from a large number of players back in 2008-2010 to four earlier this year. And I would argue now it's really two that can deliver sort of the full solution that's required. And that again goes back to this thesis that in a big market growing fast, with hard problems to solve, you can build a real sustaining business.
And I just add on to that kind of knowing Bob's space pretty well and kind of ours. Like the best thing that tends to happen is a big incumbent, like an IBM buys one of your competitors that just whittled down the field, especially in.
A mobile and cloud world. It just their gear ratio.
I bring that up, but decided to leave it be. But that more times than not that's a boon, isn't it?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wish for that for Christmas every year.
Yeah, well, you know, and digging on that more. I think there's a bigger theme. All of us, maybe not you, Bob and Aaron, but all of us mostly as founders, I think we worry too much about competition and maybe we think about it too tactically sometimes. Maybe. But what do you think about that, Bob? How much time should we spend agonizing over press releases and competition and the big deal.
Right. The most important thing is to pick the right market and focus on what the problem is you want to solve. And if you do a really good job at that and build a great business, the competition will take care of itself. What I find is that particularly in market inflections like the one we're in right now, those that are focused tend to win in the long run. And particularly when you're seeing a shift from sort of the old PC era that changed every five to seven years to the new mobile and cloud era that changes every six to seven months. Building your company with the right gear ratio to be able to move at that speed is actually a long term sustainable competitive advantage that, you know, frankly you can look at a lot of the legacy players and we don't call them competitors or we look at them as legacy players. They're coming from the old world, trying to move into the new world. Whereas if you're purpose built for the new world, you have a huge competitive advantage. So in that case, we don't obsess about the competition that much. Clearly you have to pay attention to it, you want to learn from it, it matters a lot. But meeting customer needs, solving a hard problem, building a good business, the rest of it will take care of itself.
Yeah, question. So I think most of us here, even if we're muchly mobile, Right. We're not as mobile as MobileIron.
Right.
Even box, I think, isn't 100. I mean, box is maybe 70% mobile, but it comes from a desktop route and a lot. And the data entry side of Box is often on a desktop. The hardcore stuff, Right. Bob, you're mobile enterprise, right?
Mobile first.
All the way mobile first. Right. So a couple questions people are thinking about it. One I don't know. The answer to are economics.
Right.
So the thing about a company like Box is it's kind of easy. There's certain buckets for traditional SaaS companies. Salesforce is like 200 bucks a month. There's apps that are like 80, there's 20 and then there's five. Like how do you figure out pricing in economics, in pure mobile enterprise? Is there any? Because there's not as many comps. Right?
Yeah. You know, I think the answer to that one is it depends. It depends on what your product and service is.
Yeah.
I think one of the early challenges the mobile industry had is that mobile was widely viewed as an appendage off something else.
Exactly. Right. So I don't want to pay anything for an appendage. Right.
A dollar. But here's what's happening that I think is sort of signifies the sea change that we're all part of right now is that the world is inverting where the primary computing platform that users are using to access their services and get their work done is shifting to both mobile and cloud. And as a result, mobile becoming the primary computing platform, mobile's becoming core, mobile's becoming strategic. If you look at, you know, we have nearly 500 of the Global 2000 as customers. Right. And I was on the phone talking to the CIO of a large natural resources company. And, you know, three years ago, when we started working with them, mobile was tactical. It's like, all right, how do I get people iPhones and iPads and sort of let them do basic stuff, but now their core business applications, their erp, their content, their CRM, their core DNA for how they get their jobs done, and their business is actually wired into mobile. So the CIO said something interesting, which is that mobile has now become one of my five priority one IT infrastructure services. And at that point, the value proposition changes. So I think to get the pricing, it depends on what it is you're doing, but I think we're all in the midst of this transition where mobile is going from sort of appendage to core, and the value in the entire market, whether it's market cap of public companies, software revenue value from traditional legacy companies, is all migrating to those that are part of this next generation IT stack that's being built right now.
Yeah, no, that. And do you think. And I'd love to get Aaron's thoughts too, if you have an entrepreneur here that's truly mobile first. Right. Do you think there are a lot of. Do you think it is Easy to charge $20 a month or $40 a month for truly a mobile enterprise workflow application? Do you think the markets are there.
Yet at that price level? Not yet, but you can see it coming. Because what happens is the distinction between what was mobile and what was not mobile starts to go away and it just becomes. What's the best way to do what you're doing at that point? The price is the price.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And, Aaron, if it's in the S1, what's the average like per seat price of box these days? Is it disclosed?
We do not disclose the average, but it is high for some, low for others.
Yeah.
You know what I would say, wow.
That was super helpful.
Do you think.
It'S straight on that information?
I don't want to harp on it. If it's. I know. I think the ACE ACV was disclosed, but, you know, it's in the traditional range of an application of its peer set. Right.
It's traditional, yeah.
Can you charge 20 bucks a month for box or whatever it is variable Only, Yeah.
So just to be less coy, we see some customers that at massive scale, maybe at 5 or 10 bucks a seat and then some customers who are super regulated and they have very specific strict workflows, might be $35 per seat on a monthly basis. And the only other thing is that your question is sort of dependent on knowing the application. If you are building an oil rig management application for the iPad, you could probably charge 1,000 bucks a seat. That's per month. It's all depending on how mission critical is the use case and what is the value you're driving in the business because of that.
Yeah, yeah. Let me ask a related question on economics. So and Aaron and I before Bob, we were talking a little bit about services revenue. Right. And I wish I charged more services revenue. We were talking about that. So professional services revenue or. Yeah, and enterprise deals, just getting the 20% of the deal and services and not charging for it or not optimizing that is sort of leaving money and a relationship potentially on the table. Right. So MobileIron to me maybe is interesting in that you've got a mix at least historically of recurring and non recurring revenue, right?
Yes.
So a couple questions. First of all, does it matter? You guys have both done road shows in the last 14 months talking about these, but revenue is revenue at some level, right?
How do you think about this? Yeah, it doesn't matter. That's sort of a weird question to answer. So let me sort of maybe share. How do you think about how we think about it?
How do you think about recurring versus non recurring?
So the most important thing when you're building a company is to look at what it is you're selling and how customers are going to buy it. Yeah, arguing with customers about how they're gonna buy what you sell is not a great way to start your sales process. So we very early on in the days of MobileIron had a very practical sales philosophy. It was sell to customers how they wanna buy and you know for it depends what industry you're in. If you're in an app world it's a lot easier to start and say look, go 100% recurring out of the gate. But what we do is fundamental infrastructure. Like we are providing, you know, enterprise security and management infrastructure for apps, content, devices in the enterprise. And when you're in the infrastructure business, particularly setting the large enterprise, the practical world was a lot of the large global 2000s were still living in a perpetual license world and a lot of the mid sized enterprise were happy going recurring in SaaS and subscription.
Yep.
And so we had a choice. Do we force our customers to go one way or the other or do we sell to them how they want to buy? And in the early stage market, we're winning the customers and the value of that customer over time is so big.
Yes.
Arguing about how they want to buy doesn't make sense. So we have been operating in a mixed model and I think things come in and out of fashion over time. My prediction is over time, sort of mixed models will become a little more in fashion just because it sort of reflects reality of how customers buy. Yeah, it is a little more complicated. No doubt. It does have an interesting side effect though, which is that when you have a mixed model, it creates great discipline in your sales and forecasting organization because you have to get really good at forecasting. And if you look at one of the things about building a great business, it's not just about knowing where your business is right now, but being able to get a sense for where your business is going to be 6 months, 9 months, 12 months from now. Yep. And forecasting, building that discipline into your company, no matter what business it is, matters a lot. So I've actually found one of my sort of key pieces of advice for companies out there that do have a mixed model because of how customers buy what they do. Just need to make sure you're good at forecasting.
Yeah, yeah. I just, you know, in my time at Adobe and after Adobe went from basically downloaded software to a recurring revenue model, and I think the stock price has essentially tripled while the revenues have been essentially consistent. So to me, that's an extreme example that says, at least in some cases, Right. Wall street is in love with the recurring revenue. Right?
They are.
And yet it's interesting, some levels are the same thing. Right.
They love recurring revenue, but it's interesting what they really care about is billings, which is actually what are you selling? Revenue is sort of an after effect of the accounting process. The important thing to zero in on is actually what are customers buying, what are they committing to, what are they billing? The revenue sort of flows out over time and I think that's where the industry is getting smarter in terms of understanding valuations of business and companies is actually to understand the true value of what's being sold, not necessarily about how it gets recognized.
Yeah. Let me ask you, especially since I've got Aaron here, so I could have this wrong, but I think as MobileIron evolved, its rocks and rocks and rocks and moved more into applications box was a pretty Important one, wasn't it? I think there was a lot of customer demand.
Yeah. We do a lot of joint deals with. Absolutely.
So what are from both your perspectives, but what are the learnings from that in terms of partnering and other. Any learnings from the team since we've got both of you? It's interesting, right?
Well, the business we're in is fundamentally a platform business, providing that security and management platform for the enterprise, for the their devices, their apps and their content. Some of the applications are going to be apps that customers build themselves and that's sort of the classic model of being able to enable those with security and management. But increasingly in the new mobile and cloud world, customers are buying apps from third parties and cloud services and Box is a great example of that. So we started working with Box in the very early days and became ecosystem partners where we did technology integration between our two organizations. So my advice in terms of building an ecosystem is, number one, it has to have real technical value that the customers actually get sort of some joint value out of whatever you're doing together. In our case, the value proposition is that we help check the Box for IT security really quickly for our application partners so they can increase their deal size faster and quicker. Inside enterprise companies, the value proposition to us, it actually makes our platform more valuable. And that's sort of the definition of any type of ecosystem relationship is it's got to be symbiotic. Both partners have to see an increase in deals, leads or stickiness by working together.
And do you guys. Did you end up bringing each other into deals? I mean, both companies are at scale, right? So it's not like MobileIron customers haven't heard of MobileIron or they haven't heard of Vox. Right. So do the customers already know they want Vox and MobileIron or do you?
It depends. Sometimes we find deals and they're like, hey, we're looking for mobile content collaboration.
Have you ever heard of this Box product?
Hey, Box, one of our ecosystem partners slots right in. And vice versa. One of the things that happens when customers start deploying Box is mobile and mobile data. Mobile security becomes more important. So, hey, do you guys know MobileIron? And yeah, our sales teams know each other really well. That's sort of the last thing that I would leave in terms of ecosystem partners is a lot of times those things get done at sort of what I call the Barney deal stage, which, like everybody.
Say that again. The Barney.
A Barney deal.
Oh, yeah.
Like, we love you, you love us, let's all hug Yep, I may be dating myself there. The real meat on the bone in any type of ecosystem partnership is what actually happens in the field between the sales teams. That's really the measure of a successful partnership.
Yeah, yeah.
I would actually say that the mobile especially did this, but I think cloud has plenty more opportunity where, if you think about this whole industry from a customer standpoint, there's just so much going on, there's just so many things, so many applications, so many new devices, and the more that you can begin to create solutions for customers virtually, in the case of multiple companies coming together to deliver something, often the easier it is for that customer to consume any one of the parts. And so it truly is synergistic in the sense of you wouldn't be getting deals if the customer wasn't able to actually have that holistic problem being solved. And so that's going to be some mix of Apple MobileIron and Box Kind of coming in and delivering a mobility set of capabilities for the enterprise. So. So everybody has their version of that because there's always an adjacency that is next to your application that you can partner with that you're not going to get into their space and vice versa. And you can actually, you have just kind of a fairly straightforward working relationship to go sell to customers.
Yeah, this is a meta trend that I think is sort of a great definitional difference between the old world of enterprise technology and the new world of enterprise technology. The old world of enterprise technology is customers would. A large enterprise would basically buy a closed stack from a single vendor. I'm going to buy everything from them. If you look at the new mobile and cloud world, it's about choice. Choice of Operating System, iOS, Android, Windows, Choice of application from large vendor, small vendor, choice of content, storage in the cloud or on prem. It's really about choices.
We'd prefer that didn't have a choice.
Yeah, I'm working on it, you're working on that. But there still is a choice. Yes, but in this new world of choice, the whole model for security management, collaboration, application integration is gonna be different and it's actually in some ways unleashes a tremendous amount of innovation for IT organizations to be able to adopt. But it's also confusing and requires a lot of other pieces to come together. That's why sort of the old world of the closed stack is dying, sort of the traditional PC economy is dying and sort of this new mobile and cloud stack is evolving. We're actually all part of a transition where fundamentally there's an entirely new enterprise IT stack being built right now. And the emerging leaders of this next generation enterprise IT industry, you know, hopefully some of you are in the room right now and I think that's a great opportunity for us all.
Yeah. Let me take the partner thing just down to a tactical level because I know people think about this stuff all the time. One real low level question, then I'll go up a level. Do spiffs work?
Spiffs?
Well, Box and Mobileiron have joined customers. Does comping the Box Reps or the MobileIron reps and selling. Because everyone wants to do a spiff. Right. What if I could just spiff Box and they'd send me all their deals? Right. Or Spiff Mobile Iron sales team. Right.
So do you want to answer it?
Yeah, I think it helps a little bit. In the beginning, like if you look at the beginning, if you're a salesperson inside an organization, whatever you're selling, you're focused on doing that and you've got limited bandwidth. So the question is sort of how do you get their attention? You get their attention by one of two ways. You bring them business by sharing leads, which is actually by far the best way sometimes in order to sort of drive incremental attention. Spiffs in the beginning can be good catalysts, but they tend to be very short lived.
Yeah, I would say. Exactly.
Because.
If your partnership is actually working, then both sides make money when you're working together and you don't need any additional artificial sort of stimulus. Our sales rep knows that if they bring Mobileiron into the conversation, that's going to actually improve our chances of winning that deal and potentially vice versa. And so the sales rep will actually just hit their quota because of that as opposed to needing any additional comp. So I think usually if you're finding yourself having to do Spiffs, it's some kind of artificial need to create. But in the beginning it might help because it gets their attention before you have the organic successes emerge.
Yeah. And then there's another version of that that a lot of entrepreneurs think they're like, well, I've got the world's best app for Mobile on the MobileIron ecosystem or box. I'm going to go to them and give them a 40% revenue share and that's going to incent them to invest engineering or other resources in me because they're going to make a lot of money. Right. Obviously 99 times out of 99.9 times out of 100, it can't be Material to your top line. Right, but. So any advice to. But it's a natural thing that founders think. Right. I'm going to go in and I'm going to make this offer.
Right.
How do I. Is there any magic way to make. To do something on the economic side or does it just not matter for a small ISV, small SaaS company?
I haven't really seen it matter. Part of it is that you're focused on selling whatever you do and sort of trying to stick some other revenue from somebody else in there gets kind of confusing. And in particular, if it's relatively small, it's sort of not worth the effort. And the reality is, at the end of the day, it goes back to the two things Aaron and I mentioned, which is driving sales traction and driving leads. So we haven't seen it really be revenue shares, be sort of an effective foundational element of an ecosystem partner model.
Well, let me, let me flip it around and you know, Aaron, you.
Yeah, I would actually.
Can I get anyone's attention to Box by promising them half the revenue of my really cool app that runs on the Box platform? Right. That I've already built on the Box platform.
Right.
Yeah. I mean, that would have to be some kind of side dealing, I guess.
But does it work? Does it get people's attention?
No, the thing that gets people's attention is the ability to accelerate a deal or deliver something more transformational, which is why we realize we can't actually just generically look at our ecosystem as the ecosystem. We have to say, here are our healthcare partners, here are our financial services partners, here are the partners that help with sales teams and with marketing teams, and then that actually then becomes an offshoot of our own product. So if we can have things that become an offshoot of our product, then that actually just helps us sell a better solution to the customer, which makes our company more successful and then by extension, hopefully makes a startup more successful as well.
Yeah. Let me ask another tactical variant of it. Let's say there's obviously with any ecosystem, there's a handful of partners that are the most important at any given time to driving deals.
Right.
It's just natural. It's a power law.
Right.
If I've got the next greatest version of that partner and I've built it, and it's amazing, should I be worried about that incumbent relationship with MobileIron in a box? Should I ignore it? How do I can I displace them? How do I think about that seemingly tight relationship they already have with partner? Because this is another thing founders worry about.
Right.
I can never break in. Right.
At least in my experience. The ecosystems tend to be fairly dynamic over time. So I'm not sure sort of that level of paranoia about having that conversation is justified. I would just have the conversation and see how it goes.
Yeah. Or put differently, as a founder, don't worry about it.
Right, yeah. Have the conversation. Yeah. The ecosystems are, by definition, more than one thing. So the reality is the market eventually decides. So if your product and your service and your sales traction's there, we'd be excited to work with you.
Yeah, yeah. So a little bit more on the revenue and, you know, I mean, obviously MobileIron is even bigger success in Airspace. You talked about Airspace's revenue ramp. So what are. Bob, maybe help us. Tell us about maybe, you know, one or two key hires or accelerants that you did on the sales and revenue side that made MobileIron what was a key moment or key hire.
Wow. There's some really interesting key hires in the early days of MobileIron. Some were obvious, some were not obvious, and they're sort of in the early days of MobileIron. One of them, and this is general for all companies, is make sure you spend the first little bit of getting your product to market. Spend a lot of time with customers before you gas up and build a big sales organization, because you are going to learn a ton from that first three or four months of interacting with customers on sales calls. And one of the things that we actually did by accident, but in retrospect actually turned to work out really well, is that we didn't actually hire a VP of sales out of the chute. And I think that's one of the mistakes most companies make is, okay, we got sales, let's go hire a VP of sales.
Yep.
The reality is a really good VP of sales won't work for you until you've got a couple salespeople that are actually showing they can sell stuff.
Yep. That's a big theme of ours. Yep.
So we sort of backed into this by accident. We hired sort of an early director of sales and a sales engineer and inside salesperson just to start, go learn, go figure this out. And one of the key lessons out of that was hire those first two sort of creative sales types to go figure it out, because they're part sales, part company learning. And out of that, we developed what was called our sales playbook. And that is absolutely critical. It ended up being a little whiteboard in our inside sales bullpen where as we're trying to pitch what we do. It's like, here's what worked, here's what didn't work. Here's what worked, here's what didn't work. And this accumulated over the course of a couple months into essentially what became our sales playbook. That then as we added people this like, hey, look, here's how you learn how what to go do next. Hey, product team, here's what's working, here's what's not working. Marketing team, here's what. Messaging, sticking, not sticking. And then that became the vehicle to. Then once you get enough momentum there, then you can hire a good VP of sales.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hiring the VP of sales too early is about 8 out of 10 of us make that mistake. Right. Did you make reality?
The really good ones won't be the first one in the door.
A hundred other mistakes, but you avoided that one.
That was the one where we got the two out of 10.
The two out of 10. Yeah. Good. So, you know.
Oh, actually, I have one other key early on, by the way.
Tell us about the key. So the sales one's a good story.
This is one of the other things that often doesn't get talked about in the very beginning. Kicking off a company is your culture that there's two ways company cultures can evolve. One is you can sort of be organic and sort of let it evolve, and that's totally fine. Or you can actually sit down ahead of time and think and say, what is the type of culture we want to build as a company? What do we want to be about? What type of people do we want to work with? And we followed that model, which is the very first meeting we had as a company was sit down, write down what type of culture do we want to be and how do we want to work together and what's important to us. And so in the spirit of early stage key hires, particularly associated with culture, is one you would not expect. It's actually your office manager, which is, if you think about the early days, you might have two or three engineers, like a product person, CEO, maybe salesperson. You're all trying to figure out what to do. The person who ends up, interestingly helping really dictate the early culture dictates the wrong word, sort of influence the culture in the early days. Not just the CEO and the early founders, but your office manager, because they become sort of the company mom or company dad that helps take care of everybody and sort of is the glue. And so the personality and demeanor of your office manager has a huge impact on what your company starts to feel like in the early days. So that's the one you wouldn't think.
Of, you know of any good like sales oriented office managers they just like walk around the sales floor like why aren't you selling more And I'll go fix the fridge.
Yeah. Or I mean really every team should have an assistant too. Is early as. I mean the last thing you want is your engineer staying home to fix the cable when they could be writing code or your sales guy.
Oh yeah.
So just two things I wanted to dig on when I had Bob in mobile specifically but a while back I think when box was about 100 million or getting there maybe 80, Aaron and I met and we talked about seeing 10x a little bit. He won't remember but seen a billion. I think you can just in most recurring revenue businesses if you squint you can just about see 10x on the horizon. Right. You're in such an agile space with so many boulders. How far can you see in mobile? Because it's just this world changes so much. Right. So can you see 10x?
Absolutely.
Can you?
And just to give you a sense, I mean I often joke that it's really second inning of a nine inning ball game in mobile and I really do believe that and just sort of put that in perspective.
Yeah.
You know if you look at smartphones and tablets in the workplace, there's somewhere between 4 and 500 million of them right now. And that over the next three years is growing to 900 million to a billion new smartphones and tablets. Even at a relatively small attach rate at a reasonable pricing assumption you can very quickly get to a $500 million a year billion dollar a year million many billion dollar a year company because it's really. We're still early stages.
You just need a 1 or 2% attach rate to the.
Yeah, we are in it. It's really second inning of a nine inning game. And just even put that like BlackBerry at the peak of their game was it like 22 million devices? That was it in the enterprise. Right. And our space is 400 million going to 900 million. Like this is an absolutely monster market.
Yeah. All right. Well I won't ask you to tell us what MobileIron looks like at a billion plus in revenue. But the answer is you can see it. Right. That's what I'm always curious about. Right.
Amen.
So one question I wanted on the revenue side too. When Aaron and I chatted earlier, you might not have heard it but he talked about it. Was really only maybe in the last 18 to 24 months that they had real CIO level discussions at box right going up from department on up at MobileIron, I assume it's almost from the very beginning, right in the first two.
Years, not so much. But I would say since 2012, 2012, mobile's become a CIO level conversation. And how it's correlated is if you look at mobile as a journey in the early days, it's like, oh look, I want device choice and email. But then it becomes about applications, content, identity, mobile becoming a full productivity platform that is a CIO level care about and actually arguably a CEO level care about. So since 2012, as of the enterprise IT industry and just all of us as people with jobs inside companies have realized that mobile's now strategic, mobile's absolutely a CIO level conversation. Now what's interesting is there are sort of two classes of CEOs out there. There are the ones that sort of come from the classic infrastructure, sort of lock things down, close stack view of the world. And there's the other ones that are much more. How do I enable my users with productivity, how do I deliver great services while at the same time making sure my enterprise data is secure? They're really much more of a technology strategic business partner to the business. For those types of CIOs, mobile is absolutely on their top three list.
So if I'm two years in or less and I want to sell to a CIO, it's not like MobileIron's gone public and has hit some and it's how do I convince the CIO to take a risk on me.
The biggest thing with CIOs and taking risks is other good customer references for sure. So this is sort of the chicken, the egg problem in an early stage, right, is you got to get your first couple sort of large enterprise wins and you might get those wins at sort of the VP or director level and you earn your street credibility. So then that CIO says something good about you. At that point you have credibility with the next CIO and the next CIO after that. Because very few CIOs will ever bet on an early stage company without talking to someone, somebody who's tried it. So you need to get those early referenceable customers. You know, one of the key milestones in the early stage of a company is, you know, when do you get to five large referenceable enterprise customers? At that point you've got sort of the core crucible to then daisy chain into other customers and really have that conversation on a regular basis.
Yeah.
And.
What would you say to, to startups that want to penetrate the CEO's office? What's the advice? How do you get in there? I mean, Aaron did it more organically actually than I even realized over time. But you've got MobileIron to make it, you've got to penetrate the CIO's office relatively early. So what's your advice if you haven't lived it, You've got a lot of experience selling to the enterprise and working with the enterprise, because there's no magic here. The CIO does buy stuff.
The CIO does buy stuff.
They buy a lot of stuff. Right. So as impenetrable as it can seem, it's actually quite penetrable if you know what you're doing doing. Right.
Yes. And in the early days, honestly, it's just banging the phones and banging on doors and you know, the thing is, try and find the CIOs that tend to be more progressive.
Yeah.
Have a track record of working with early stage companies. You know, like actually I was meeting with CIO of one of our joint customers yesterday for breakfast and there are progressive CIOs that actually want to be known as the people who first find the great piece of the technology stacked together. And they tend to run together actually. So in some cases ask companies like us or Box about who were some of the early CIOs that were willing to take those bets. Those are the companies where, believe it or not, actually a cold call to that CIO actually can be successful or a reference through another company can be successful.
Google, the craziest startup you can think of and then with the word CIO in it and see what names show up and then call all those CIOs.
Yeah. And so I think the corollary of that for those that aren't classically trained in outbound is don't be discouraged. Right. Because you're going to have a low hit rate with that approach.
Absolutely.
If you don't know who the innovators are, you're going to have a low hit rate.
Right?
Yeah.
And they tend. There's like for instance in the Valley, there's a network of CIOs that is a fairly progressive group and they network, they talk to each other, you get one of them, you quickly get an audience with two. But the trick is you gotta make sure that first one's successful. So that's the advice there. And don't be discouraged. I mean, look, we're a public company. Lots of People, lots of customers. I actually spend probably an hour and a half a week doing CIO cold calls.
That's interesting.
And the reality is that it's part of your job as the CEO to reach out to the executives of your customers.
You don't have any SDRs helping you out. It's literally Bob picking up the phone.
I pick up the phone or send emails now they're targeted. Right. It's prospects. It's like who are we working on or who's a customer where we haven't yet talked to the CIO and I want to build a relationship. Just pick up the phone and call, reach out. And that's the way it starts. Don't be discouraged.
And related to that, I asked Aaron the question, but curious how much, now that MobileIron is really at scale, how much of your time are you able to spend both with existing customers and then as you touched on with prospects? And how much time should we spend with both?
Right. Wow.
Sorry.
At our stage or at.
Well, you can pick any stage that you like. But it's how much time as CEOs and founders should we be spending with prospects? And because it's a long term relationship with existing customers. Right. How much of your time do you spend on those?
Boy, that's a tricky balance. I'd say it ebbs and flows over time. I don't have a particular rule on that. In the early stage, when you're going after your first 20 customers, you're all about the prospects. You win your first 20 customers and you're working your damnedest to make sure they're successful. So it sort of ebbs and flows depending on what time you're in. I would say if I look at my time, it's probably 50, 50 between prospects and existing customers.
Jason has some really hard rules about this. Apparently he says don't spend time with new customers, new prospects.
I think we just, as founders, we're naturally biased to want to close deals and sometimes we don't get on a plane enough and go out to wherever it is, Round Rock or Pensacola, and hang out with the customer that we already closed, right?
Oh, absolutely. If you go over rotate 100% on new customers, that's terrible. Particularly I mean, if you look at our business, right, it's a huge land and expand business. When the customer starts, they're this big.
Sales, just a little tiny piece of the journey.
Absolutely. The long term value of your customer relationship is absolutely driven by your ability to expand, upscale, sell and retain them over time. And that requires time and focus. And it's not just you as CEO, it's the product team, the support team. Making your customer successful is actually one of the highest ROIs you can have in your business. Cool.
Well, thanks for the time to both you. Anything we didn't catch that you want. Either of you wanted to bring up so much more. So much more.
All right.
Very good. All right, let's thank Bob Tinker and also Aaron for staying, which was terrific. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks, man. It was great. Yeah.
