Metadata

“The metadata has been super optimized for human click through, right? So think about like clickbait, think about things that are like, you know, like Creating urgency, especially true in e-commerce, right around sales and things like that. But they're not very…”

“When you don't need the money, when you go to an investor and you tell them, this is happening anyway, you are invited to join us for this journey, the conversation is very, very different. You talk to different people, much kinder people, and you get term she…”

“We got all the way to, I think, 25 grand in the bank. It's like, not a lot of money in the bank. Almost going under, and then slowly going up. From that moment, I was able to get, ah, 200 K in accounts receivable debt. From that, I was able to get 300 K in con…”

“When I say works, again, I don't talk about vanity metrics. I don't care about leads, I don't care about impressions, click-through rates, all of those cool, you know, KPIs that, that, you know, growth hackers talk about, I really don't understand much about. …”

“This tactic, we've been using it maybe for four years now. It hasn't been exhausted. All of my customers use it. It hasn't been exhausted.”

“We want a huge deal, Just by going to the same person who liked us, but it can't, she couldn't bring us into that company, she later joined ThoughtSpot. Big ass logo that we still have, and we were able to win that just because we woke her up.”

“This comes from the same ICP. I find the same person that I sell to, and I find the same person in my company who is equal. And I send that email from them because there is much more credibility. There is camaraderie between a marketer and a marketer versus a …”

“Second is being able to inject metadata actually is quite important to actually improve retrieval performance of like the downstream application, because like, you know, let's say you're splitting up like a sec, 10 K filing into a bunch of chunks within a sing…”

“I had about half a million dollar left burning about 200,000 every month. So we had about two months of life.”

“So right in there, we cut about a third of our employee. We also stopped paying every essential vendor.”

“Also, the entire management team took a 20% cut, and all of the salespeople converted their commissions to equity.”

“When you have a situation like that, a survival situation, you don't only want to take defensive moves. You also want to take offensive moves, because when everyone is panicking and hunkering down, it's kind of an opportunity for you to make bold moves.”

“I maxed out all of my credit cards. American Express would call me daily. I would pick up my phone and tell them I'm not paying you anything. When I have money, I'm paying you all of it. Right now, you can keep calling me. Not paying you any of that. And third…”

“We were supposed to grow from two to five, then we said, hey, we're doing well, let's do it to seven and a half, then 10.4, then 12 and a half, and we ended up at 12.2.”

“Q one was amazing. We grew exactly as we planned. Q two, we flattened.”

“Our money was in Silicon Valley Bank.”

“If I waited two months, like I was advised to, by pretty much everyone, then I would have had to lay off eight more people, seven to eight more people, because that's how the burn works, right?”

“So we're supposed to grow to about 200 people, and we're at about a 110. And so we really had to make hiring freeze completely, so about 30 people that we're about to hire, we're not hiring. And then we had to let go of a lot of people, some contractors, some …”

“Product-led growth. This was expected to bring us about five to six trials. We're already at about a hundred after a month and a half.”

“I planned to raise two million, ended up raising five million over a period of one month with convertible notes.”

“So it starts in, in the beginning of 2020. We just hit product market fit. It looks good. It looks good. You know, it's two million dollars in ARR. For me, that was a dream. We only launched in the McGill in the middle of 2019. So in about a year, we got to tw…”

“Another thing is that all of us took a 20% cut. Everyone, of course, including myself, every VP, every employee in the company took a 20% cut. We paid all of those people back that, that six months cut Compounded plus equity, additional bonus equity, after we …”

“All the AEs who are very cash, you know, kind of cash operated, They converted 50 to a hundred percent of their commissions into options, into common options. That got, got them a lot more invested in the business, and got us about a million dollar cash back i…”

“American Express. Not essential. Got a phone call every day. Sir, are you gonna pay your debt? No. I'm not gonna pay a dollar of my debt. My credit score went down to 500.”

“I got a term sheet, a four million dollar term sheet from a green entrepreneur, a shark, who saw that we're struggling. That term sheet, if I took it, My company wouldn't be around anymore. That, that would convert all of the preferred to common. It wouldn't m…”

“Never make decisions out of fear. When you're scared shitless, take a breather. If you're still scared, go for a walk, go for a run, do some pushups, do some psychedelics, smoke a joint. I don't care what you do, but definitely do not make a decision from that…”

“Last month, 600 demos from this campaign.”

“So we brought five AEs who knew each other. They already knew how to work with one another. They ramped each other up. They were super knowledgeable and all of them crushed the numbers. They, their ramp up time was insane. I think in about month and a half, we…”

“And after that, we went back to our Series A investors to tell them about the cuts, and they said, fuck, that's amazing. Here is three million dollar more because you guys are so efficient. So we raised another three million dollar in, in, by the way, twice ev…”

“We ended that year at almost twelve million, trying to be accurate, almost twelve million in ARR. So two and a half, roughly two and a half X growth.”

“This is pre-series B. We had almost nine million in the bank. We were only burning 200 K. So you can see we have years and years of runway.”

“But this was the state in which we were able to raise a forty million dollar Series B in a very healthy way. I was able to turn down many term sheets because I had a confidence that my company is doing well”

“We don't move any data. So we have kind of connectors. We tie into all of your kind of data systems on-prem and the cloud. We capture all of that metadata. Table, schema, columns, files, and so forth. That's kind of how we built that metadata graph, but we're …”

“The best time to collect metadata is when the job is running and we can inspect it to figure out what the inputs were, what the outputs were, how long it took you know, what was the version of the code and things like that.”

“I think the curse of collecting all that metadata that becomes really hard to figure out, to find the right information in the mass of data, and therefore that's what we strive to solve, right?”