Jason M. Lemkin invested in Pipedrive when it was doing $2M in self-serve revenue. He hired a sales rep who outearned the founders by calling large customers like AOL to upsell seats. The company later sold for about $1.5B.
Questions this video answers
Pipedrive
About $1.5 billion
About $2 million
100% self-serve
Reverse-sort customers by seat count and call large-seat accounts to upsell additional seats (example: AOL with 20 seats).
Chapters
Remember, the first investment I ever made was a company called Pipedrive, which sold for a billion and a half, you know, SMB, CRM. And I put in the first sales rep there. He used to work for me. And the founders got mad at him. They got mad at him because in three months he was making more than any of the founders. They're, they were pissed. I'm like, guys, I know we're, we're have different backgrounds and cultures, but this is what you want. But it took him a long time culturally as self serve, because Pipedrive was 100% self serve at the time. They'd never had a sales rep. And I put the guy in and what he did was he, when he looked all these self serve customers, he's like, it was. This was. The company was at about 2 million revenue at the time. And he's like, okay, who's bought more than one seat? He just did a reverse sort. And he called them, I remember he called AOL back in the day and he's like, you guys have 20 seats of pipedrive, would you like to buy more for your sales team? They're like, thank you very much.
