Derek Steer
person on 1 show · 12 statements across 3 episodes · said 6 times in 2 episodes since 2022
On the record as a speaker too: Derek Steer across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
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Top Founders 6
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
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12 statements about Derek Steer, every show
Steer: Mode's SQL Tutorial Drives Hundreds of Thousands of Monthly Uniques
“The other problem was, it turned out that even though these things were driving traffic, it was kind of a drop in the bucket, because we had this sequel tutorial that, you know, now does hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month. These blog posts are li…”
Steer: Companies where two-thirds of staff joined recently are always operational disasters
“Because in the companies I've been in, where I look around and two thirds of the people arrived at the company in the last year, It's an operational horror show. It always is.”
Steer: Startups should bring in strategy facilitators at 30 to 40 employees
“I think it's probably never too early for this to really like think deeply about the strategy and then kind of codify that into quarterly cadence and goal setting. I would start maybe as early as like 30 or 40 employees doing this kind of thing with a facilita…”
Steer: Workflow virality, not Mode's product alone, drives strong NDR
“A big part of what drives our strong net dollar retention is just the natural virality of the workflow, right? It's not even our product. It's the workflow that we are attached to.”
Mode grew as a 95% inbound business and remains primarily inbound
“At the time we were a 95 plus percent inbound business. We've added some outbound into that since, but not a ton, right? It's primarily an inbound business still.”
Mode refuses to unbundle SQL and Python features to preserve seamlessness
“I don't ever want to separate SQL from, you know, Python in mode because the point of the product is that you can move seamlessly between the two. If we break those into separate a la carte items, you know, I don't want our customers to have to choose.”
Steer: Mode would have found product-market fit faster if super lean
“I wish we had gone super, super lean in the early days because I think we would have found the market faster.”
David Sacks agreed to invest on slide two of Mode's pitch deck
“We brought him a deck. And on the second slide, he was like, okay, yeah, I'm in. Let's do it. Like the, it's funny. The second slide was it was GitHub for data”
Mode raised its initial seed round at a $5M valuation
“So I guess it was about 10%, right? The valuation was like in the range of five million, which we, you know, we were just triangulating around like kind of standard YC evaluations at the time.”
Steer: Unvested Yammer equity left behind is worth seven figures annually today
“Well, it's, I'd have to go do some stock math because the, my Microsoft shares at that time were worth a fraction of what they would be better now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at the price now is it was a seven figure annual type type of amount.”