Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 11
Three of the highest signal-to-noise ratio snippets from the startup/tech podcasts for founders/operators.
Here are my favorite three snippets from the podcasts I read this week.
Harry Stebbings of 20VC spoke to David Schneider, General Partner at Coatue. David was an elite operator before becoming a VC. Before Coatue, he scaled ServiceNow from $100M to $5B in revenue and Data Domain from $0 to $1B in revenue. He shares his earned secret on how they roadmapped new products by following the customers and then how they set up those products for success by building the right incentive structures.
"…at ServiceNow that we took advantage of was our customers started using our product in places it wasn't originally positioned for. Turns out that by 2015 we had hundreds of customers using us in new ways. And so what we started to do is just listen. And then we productized what they did and built full on customer service product, full on security incident vulnerability products, full on HR employee experience products. And because we just followed the customer, we had better success.
That was not easy because we ended up creating business units. I had to come up with a different selling model to sell new technology because the buying Persona was outside of the core.
I think a lot of it has to do with how we managed our teams and what we did from an extreme ownership perspective. There was one metric that mattered to everybody at ServiceNow. In fact, up until recently, they had a bonus profile that was every quarter we would fund a bonus pool based on the company's achievement of net new ACV, which was new business minus any churn. So everybody was worried about churn revenue and top line revenue, right..
Arindam Paul, CBO of consumer durables startup Atomberg, unpacks a counterintuitive way to look at customer service for consumer brands. He believes customer service is the secret weapon to building a business or brand, but most companies get it wrong. He was on the Growth Tales show by ETML.
And then today most people buy because of a combination of these three things. One is looks, one is remote and one is energy efficiency. And for giving very strong after sales service. Very good service. So in fact, right from day one, like every brand in consumer durable, think of service as a cost center. We have always thought of service as a brand building exercise. That's a very good thought and that is a structural change. So even today service reports to marketing. So survey doesn't report to operations. In any organization after sales service you would report to operations. So. And that was structurally enabled, saying you don't need to think of it as a cost center. Do whatever it takes to satisfy the consumer because that's the moment of truth for any brand. Unfortunately, being in electronics, you have one to 2% failure. But how you treat those one to 2% consumers dictates a lot about what those consumers then go and tell hundred other people about your brand
- , ace public relations and communications expert, was on the Invest Like the Best podcast with . I loved this insight about why founders should tell their company’s stories directly.
The founder has to be accountable for the story. The founder holds this secret knowledge and this vision that other people don't. If that's not true, you have no business starting a company. Get out of here and go work at IBM. Get a job. Unless you have that secret knowledge and that secret vision and something to bring to the world that's new, you have no business being a founder.
So everybody that has business being a founder knows something everybody else doesn't know. I'm belaboring that point because it's really important to me. But the core thing to internalize is if you have that knowledge, you cannot then transmit it through seven other layers until it becomes something that is fully familiar to people and fits fully into some comfortable narrative that already exists.
You have to figure out a way to speak to people directly with your voice, your passion, your vision and not have it trickle down too far because you lose the thing that's special. There can be too many middlemen such that by the time your message reaches people, it's been watered down beyond recognition, and it's not special anymore.
…Ramp, which is a fantastic company, I'm really proud to work with them. And one of the reasons I'm proud is that they've always been very clear about what they are and what they're not. They have a bunch of competitors and copycats and wannabes over the years who have tried to Rampify themselves, and it's never quite worked because Ramp knows that they're there to save customers time and money. They say it 10 times a day. I've heard them say it probably 10 times in a single meeting, and everything is geared towards that, including the comms. Whereas if somebody is just splashing around in the pool, that's not sustainable. You can't splash around forever, you'll also never arrive anywhere.
That’s all for this edition. If you were forwarded this newsletter, consider subscribing below. It’s free.
Rohit