Kevin Egan

Chief Revenue Officer, ClickHouse · 1 appearance on the record.

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executiveoperatorinvestorLinkedIn ↗clickhouse.com ↗

Kevin Egan is an enterprise sales executive who scaled go-to-market teams at Salesforce, Dropbox, Slack, and Atlassian. He serves as Chief Revenue Officer at ClickHouse and is a Venture Partner at IVP.

27statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 3.85/5average certainty → 2.04/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 7said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 1 opinion · 20 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Kevin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Egan: Slack Reached Tens of Thousands of Organic Users Per Company

“They had, in some cases, tens of thousands of users within single companies that said, Hey, look, we need to come to the table and operate.”

Kevin Egan Jul 12, 2023 ▶ 8:12 Kevin Egan: Biggest Lesson on Managing Sales Teams at Slack and Atlassian | E1034 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted

Egan: Atlassian Does Not Discount Software Prices for Any Customers

“In my current role at Atlassian, we don't discount. We try to work on terms that work for our customer, but everything's programmatic. So if our customers were to speak with any other customer, they know that they're in the same boat and that we're transparent…”

Kevin Egan Jul 12, 2023 ▶ 31:00 Kevin Egan: Biggest Lesson on Managing Sales Teams at Slack and Atlassian | E1034 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.5 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.1 · compression 4

answered every one of 40 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

258 words/min while actually speaking · 19.7 um and uh per 1k words · 9.7 false starts per 1k · 31.3% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,334 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10

setup questions received 45%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 16:04“Can I ask, I, I, I respectfully, and this is going to sound incredibly arrogant, I don't, I struggle with that one, and again, you're the hailed business leader, so I'm like, you k…” ▶ 18:56“Capitalize, do you think it's a fair description that sales reps are coin-operated?” ▶ 34:40“How do you respond when you hear the classic, oh, it slipped to next quarter?”

when Kevin pushed back ▶ 4:45“Well, that's an interesting question, Harry. I don't typically use the word playbook.”

What they said27 What others said7 Episodes1

Everything Kevin Egan said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Egan says withholding product documentation in enterprise sales is dead

“The sales tactics that have died a death are really around withholding information. When I started at Oracle to get a white paper, you had to email the sales rep and to get any technical documentation, documentation, so forth. Over time that has changed dramat…”

Kevin Egan Jul 12, 2023 ▶ 35:59 Kevin Egan: Biggest Lesson on Managing Sales Teams at Slack and Atlassian | E1034 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Sales leaders must avoid pattern-matching previous playbooks when starting new roles

“I'd call myself and say every environment's different. Watch out for pattern matching from the previous company. Really get to know your peer group and the other side of the equation of that being probably the engineering leadership to understand how they view…”

Kevin Egan Jul 12, 2023 ▶ 36:38 Kevin Egan: Biggest Lesson on Managing Sales Teams at Slack and Atlassian | E1034 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Salesforce and Slack used different sales candidate mock scenarios

“At Salesforce, we gave them a fictitious company and a business set of business problems that they would solve using the Salesforce set of solutions. At Slack, we were comfortable with them positioning their own service, and so I think both have their advantag…”

Kevin Egan Jul 12, 2023 ▶ 15:37 Kevin Egan: Biggest Lesson on Managing Sales Teams at Slack and Atlassian | E1034 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

The other half of the tape: Kevin Egan's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4 Mark Roberge 2 Reggie Marable 1