EchoSign

“Even if EchoSign had just done okay, and we'd gotten up to a hundred million, just the folks that DocuSign turned down would have come and bought us for a billion bucks. Like, I wouldn't have had to do anything just being number two.”

“I sold the business at a million a month growing up to a hundred percent with a 110% in our, that was cashflow positive. You would never sell a business like that today, right? And I saw it even while its market share decline still grow to two hundred fifty mi…”

“And then I hired my first VP of sales from Salesforce. He hired 10 people, all of them, except Sam Blonde, who had done a lot with them, became Brex. All of them, all the other nine closed nothing. And with 10 people, that VP of sales closed less than me and J…”

“When we sold, this is why it was stupid to sell, we had 28% market share by revenue, and maybe 40% by transactions, because we were cheaper than DocuSign. It was 11 within two years of me leaving.”

“Our revenue team went on to be the CROs of Brex, Rippling, Gong, So many leaders, like others, like 10 of them, and like that we had this monster team and I missed, I didn't, what I didn't know was how good I had it in some areas.”

“I sold in 2011 accidentally. We were at a million a month growing a hundred percent, a 120% in our, I thought I was failing.”

“We only had 20 something sellers and 10 of them went on to be top CROs, right? CROs at Brex, CRO at Ripley now, Gong, also CRO at Gong. Seismic, a long list of others, half of them went on to be leading”

“The fifth CEO got fired in part because they lost Facebook to us. And Facebook was even back then was pretty big and they thought they'd already commit. They already did a commit to the board that they were committing this huge deal to Facebook and we won it.”

“The reality is the importance of picking the right company it just really defines one's career. I attribute so much of my success to joining the right businesses. Now, like, I was able to perform within those businesses, and, you know, for context, we're talki…”

“I would say the Echosign model. Is a great model for times like this, right? Which was pay of really high percentage after they paid for the, after they paid for themselves, essentially, right?”

“In the early days of Adobe sign, Echo sign, where we had a truly viral product... I measured in the early days how long it would take someone that first got a contract to sign to convert to paid... It was eight months.”

“And when we, almost a week after I left after acquisition, that got ripped out of the product, the whole free thing, the whole free conversion. And because it didn't help anyone there, But then over the next three years, there may be a variety of reasons, mark…”

“I closed Aetna when we were at Echosign and we did a press release with Aetna or convinced them to do a press release with us. Around how much paper they were saving by going green and doing electronic signature. And it was, you know, millions of pieces of pap…”

“And echo sign, we were like, ah, gosh, a hundred to a 150 employees or thereabouts when Adobe acquired us. And we didn't have anyone in sales ops.”

“Back in the day when I was running Adobe Sign, Echo Sign, and we were competing with DocuSign, we fully, and it was a pain, right? It was fully, we fully localized a two-byte app all across the, every piece of it, in every language under the world and we did i…”

“I was in emergence too. That's like a 12 X fund.”

“I mean, I got him to profile Adobe sign echo sign the day we launched, and that's still probably got us. 20% of our customers our first year.”

“We, I lost a lot of customers after I sold my company, but I never lost a customer I met.”

“I sold in 2011, I sold in 2011 to Adobe, and a VC offered me ten million dollars in secondary, ok, to not sell.”

“The team we had at EchoSign was so much better, by the way, there are some great people on our team at LinkedIn, by the way, phenomenal people that have had great success, but overall the team we had at EchoSign was way better. It was a way better team general…”

“I think realizing what your, not just what your strengths are, but what your weaknesses are, and then weaponizing that before your competitor exposes it as a liability, right? Taking, why do, why should we lose? Okay, we, if we know why we should lose and why …”

“We sold EchoSign, AdobeSign to Adobe in 11, 20 11. It was ten million at the time we signed the deal. It was twelve million AR when it closed.”

“I hired my second VP of sales, who was one of my customers. He was the first head of sales from LinkedIn. Within 60 days, he had doubled the revenue per lead.”

“And when Brendan came in, we never discussed pipeline again, at least not for a long time, not till we were at ten million, right?”

“When we, when you were starting EchoSign, I was doing Trigo, there wasn't a single public cloud company. In fact, in 2000, it took a couple of years before the first emerged and the first private unicorn was LinkedIn and like, Oh wait, so all new land.”

“Even as the world shut down in Q one of 2009, look at that top what happened with our leads. They didn't even decline in the worst quarter, did it? They just flattened out.”

“In my first startup before Echo sign, there was so much drama the first time I raised money. But at the end of the day, I got the world's worst term sheet with the world's worst terms. It was nine, a nine million round on a two pre with a five X liquidation pr…”