New Relic

“Lucerne, a new relic is a great example. You know, a multi-billion dollar public software company today But if you ask Lou, he took money from people that he knew and trusted in Peter Fenton and Dan Skolnick, and he did evaluations that worked for him, but als…”

“The reasons it wouldn't work, tiny market of Mickey Mouse developers that would never have the money to support a viable economic model.”

“Now New Relic is approaching a billion.”

“If you look at the Series A, there were four people. Now, of course, we committed to Lou, and it was just Lou.”

“We put 3.25 million in to buy 27% of the company with a 20% management pool. That's a series of investment. There was no seed. There was no precede.”

“The unsung hero of New Relic's financial success is Mark Sackleb and the CFO. Lou brought in early, and Mark would write a crisp, succinct narrative with the team that laid out the core business metrics with the story behind them.”

“In the case of New Relic, I was on that board for 12 years. That's a pretty standard commitment for us.”

“What they didn't realize is by adding all of those features to hit the checklist, they added a lot of bloat in the product. That bloat made the experience be a lot worse. When the experience became a lot worse, developers stopped to use it.”

“I believe the best opportunities find you at the end of the day. It's not that you don't find them. Okay. But they also find you by the same token. And if you're gonna pass on an amazing binary set of founders, an amazing CEO, CTO, just because they're in a co…”

“50% of the customers that we work with, this is boring stuff, is private equity on. Like, New Relic is, yeah, 50% people who come inbound are Portfolio wide rollouts.”

“If you look at the data, organic content, and then performance marketing worked really well for New Relic. New Relic was the original current brand that did land and expand. Everything else, events, DevRel, other pieces, you do it because people want you to do…”

“They never change segmentation. They never change comp models. They just ran a dialed-in machine for six to seven years, and they compounded value while everybody else kind of kept thrashing.”

“But for us at New Relic, we had figured out there was 10 to 20 keywords where we were really good and we could put customers on a stitched path. They could see an ad, get to a landing page, use the product, get to an aha. And these could be very boring things.…”

“So we basically shut everything down, reallocated investments to really go after them and earn the right for them to use the product again. And that's what the whole machine was built on. Divest everything else, invest where we are default.”

“Coupa, New Relic, Anaplan, even Zendesk, Avalara, Smartsheet they all look like they may not be able to fully repay their debt”