Contentful

“Contentful is a CMS mostly focused for enterprises and we want to build something like Contentful for small startups.”

“He sent me that email in March, 20 12. It was an cold email with a subject SaaS seed funding storage room.”

“Sasha didn't have a sales background, right? It's not like he has learned how to do that. He's engineer by training.”

“It took us, I think, two months to do our work and come to a decision, and then probably another one or two months to actually do”

“I had a look at the original deck in preparation for this meeting with you, Harry, and it's unbelievable if you look at this from the perspective of today, that Sasha is the original market at twelve million dollar As the addressable market, he did mention tha…”

“It was not an overnight success, though. It's not like this company has taken off right away. Like, it took a couple of years of relatively slow growth and ups and downs, and re-architecturing the product takes a year longer than expected.”

“Contentful's First round, we call the seed round, was 500 K. And we didn't even do it alone because we thought this was way too much for our tiny little fund. So we did less than half of it and helped Sasha fill up the round with others or help him get Balders…”

“I think we didn't dream beyond an outcome of a couple of hundred millions in exit valuation. Our ambition started to get bigger over time, but, like, we had a tiny fund, like, we, I guess the term unicorn wasn't even coined yet, like, we were not really expect…”

“We brought it down to just four. I don't think there should be many more than that. Everybody should be able to articulate them, you know, on the spot all the time.”

“So the values screen is the first screen. The skills screen is the second screen.”

“We've seen lots of companies get swamped, particularly at that sort of 25 to fifty million dollars in revenue zone, where they start to split their efforts, and it really, really slowed the company down, and once that decelerates, it can be very hard to re-acc…”

“From a category standpoint, I think there are maybe two topics that are really helpful if you're thinking about the category you're in. One is one is the topic is friends, and one is foils.”

“Try and purge from everybody at your company's vocabulary the phrase exit, or the word exit. It's not an exit. It's the starting point. There might be some people who aren't in your company, some investors who need a liquidity event, or they need to leave. The…”

“Get advice from people who know a lot about the stage either you're in the middle of or you're trying to bridge to. Because the advice rat is radically different. The investors are different. The questions are different stage by stage. And so I think sometimes…”

“So instead of doing what Webflow and Wix and Squarespace did, where they give you both a front end to backend and then pit themselves against WordPress and Drupal and Shopify, We reached out to the Shopify's, the Drupal's, the WordPress's, the Contentful's of …”

“It's a Berlin-based company at the time, but there wasn't a single employee in the US, and yet they had built this incredible enterprise customer base of US companies, and that's just something that doesn't happen very often at all. You don't see companies clo…”