The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Coupa, Zendesk, and Anaplan may fail to repay their debt
“Coupa, New Relic, Anaplan, even Zendesk, Avalara, Smartsheet they all look like they may not be able to fully repay their debt”
Mukherjee: Datadog won market dominance through six years of GTM consistency
“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.”
Mukherjee: Scale PLG by divesting everything except where you are the default
“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.”
Lemkin: Passing on Great Founders Over Competition Misses Out on Category Winners
“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…”
Gonto: Enterprise Checklist Bloat Destroyed New Relic's Developer Adoption
“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.”
Mukherjee shut down event marketing at New Relic due to poor ROI
“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…”
New Relic's Lou Cirne prioritized trusted partners over maximizing round valuation
“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…”
Mukherjee: New Relic found SEM ROI on only 10 to 20 keywords
“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.…”
Fenton: New Relic's Premortem Risk Was Targeting Low-Budget Developers
“The reasons it wouldn't work, tiny market of Mickey Mouse developers that would never have the money to support a viable economic model.”
Fenton: Benchmark Invested $3.25M for 27% of New Relic's Series A
“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.”
Mukherjee: 50% of Rox's customers are private equity-owned companies
“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.”
Fenton: Benchmark backed New Relic when it was just founder Lou Cirne
“If you look at the Series A, there were four people. Now, of course, we committed to Lou, and it was just Lou.”
Fenton: CFO Mark Sackleben is the unsung hero of New Relic's success
“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.”