Bill Magnuson
Co-Founder & CEO, Braze. On 3 shows, 3 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@billmag ↗LinkedIn ↗braze.com ↗
Bill Magnuson co-founded Braze in 2011 and has led it as CEO through its 2021 IPO into a publicly traded customer engagement platform. An MIT computer science graduate, he previously worked as a software engineer at Google and as an analyst at Bridgewater Associates.
3shows
3appearances
47statements
11resolved
9supported
2contradicted
82%fully supported
Everything Bill Magnuson said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Magnuson: Venture capital should fund pre-market development, not unprofitable growth
“When I look at the purpose of venture capital, it's not to, you know, burn a dollar five in order to grow a dollar of revenue. It's to give you that opportunity to already be building for the market while it is still developing.”
Magnuson: Early app makers rejected Braze because engagement raised server costs
“And even when we went and talked to some of our potential early customers, I remember someone telling me that they didn't want our service because the sooner people stopped using their app, the sooner they could stop paying the server bill for those people. An…”
Magnuson: Early GTM must target customers willing to overlook missing table-stakes features
“We needed to make sure that our go to market was targeted at the people that appreciated our differentiators enough that they were willing to ignore the things that we were missing that were table stakes.”
Magnuson: Batch email marketing via Salesforce Marketing Cloud would stop working
“Which meant that, you know, if you were still just kind of blasting out emails to everyone, as people had been doing with the likes of a, you know, what is now called Salesforce Marketing Cloud, that, that would eventually just stop working.”
Steady methodical compounding is the only real survival path for startups
“Letter A actually ends up being the only one that exists in reality, right? So this isn't a question about risk tolerance. It's actually a question about how do we navigate market dynamics over time Taking into account things like the fundraising environment, …”
Early Braze competitors launched five simultaneous products to hit VC targets
“You know, these are, these were companies that had 50, a hundred, a 150 employees. And all of a sudden they were trying to sell five products because in order for them to actually kind of hit the growth targets that they had signed up for, they needed to acces…”
SaaS startups lose scaling customers by neglecting enterprise compliance features
“So we got trapped in this interesting situation where I had to pay more for worse software because of these enterprise needs that I had, which means that the businesses that we turned off of Are by definition losing some of their best customers right at a stag…”
Magnuson: Early App Store pricing models held back mobile software businesses
“Paradoxically, even the purchasing of mobile apps in the app store, I think in the early days was holding back people thinking about building those businesses because you didn't have any recurring revenue or ongoing revenue streams from your mobile app users. …”
Magnuson: WeWork ran out of money building its Meatpacking location
“It was down in the meatpacking district. It was the early days of WeWork and they actually ran out of money while they were building it.”
Magnuson: Mobile apps freeze risk force-quits if latency exceeds 50 milliseconds
“And if it freezes for more than 50 milliseconds, you think that it's died and you're going to force quit it, right? Like you had to be interactive in terms of the personalization of the delivery.”
Magnuson: Braze never received multiple term sheets until its Series D
“It wasn't until our series D six years into the business that we ever had a fundraising round where we got more than one term sheet.”
Magnuson: 85% to 90% of mobile SaaS in 2012-2015 targeted gaming
“If you go back to 2012 to 2015, probably 85, 90% of the SaaS businesses that were in mobile were very focused on helping the gaming industry because it was the kind of quickest route to make money in the early days.”
Magnuson: Competitors burned out raising $50M Series As in an immature market
“We actually had a number of competitors in the early days who went out You know, at the same time we went and raised 10 to fifteen million dollar Series A, they went and raised a fifty million dollar Series A, and they actually burned themselves out. Despite h…”
Magnuson: Raising venture capital forces founders into relentless hyper-scaling
“There's a lot of businesses that people may start that are not appropriate to be venture backed. And when they go and they try to kind of back them with other investors, they very quickly lose control of exactly what trajectory it needs to be on and, you know,…”
Magnuson: Braze had more 2012 beta signups than total 2023 customers
“Back in 2012 when we launched our beta, we had more developers sign up for the, we were called Appboy at the time, for the Appboy beta than we even have customers today. 12 years later, having gone public and now worth, you know, billions of dollars.”
Magnuson: Smartphones are more widely deployed than clean water and electricity
“When we look at smartphones, interestingly enough, it's the most widely deployed technology ever, even more so than clean water and electricity before it.”
Magnuson: E-Commerce Has Returned to Pre-Pandemic Growth Path
“Ecom pulled forward tremendously, and now it's revisited its prior growth path almost exactly.”
Magnuson: Braze got one term sheet per early round and floated loans
“Through that time period we raised our, you know, our seed round, our series A, our series B. In each one of those rounds, we only got one term sheet. And we actually ran out of money twice and had to float, you know, a small loan in order to make payroll.”
Magnuson: Enduring enterprise software aligns with users' career paths
“The teams and the budgets and the org charts and the skill sets that people invest in and the way that they Develop their career paths, and they build their careers around your technology, are one of the most enduring aspects of, you know, really building any …”
B2C-scale CRM did not exist in 2011 or 2015
“When you look at, you know, the concept of CRM, it wasn't happening at B to C scale in 2011, much less 2015.”
Braze revenue only accelerated after smartphone sales growth leveled off
“Global smartphone sales graph, and it was rapidly accelerating from that 2011 to 2015 period. Interestingly enough, it wasn't until that actually started to level off a little bit that we started to see our revenue opportunity take off.”
Braze received only one term sheet per round through Series C
“If we go all the way to 20 16 into our series C, every single fundraising round that we raised, we only had one term sheet.”
Forcing early growth in immature markets hits inelastic demand barriers
“If you raise too much money, you know, you try to grow too fast in the early days before the market is really there. You find yourself trying to claw up this curve, but it's pretty inelastic. You know, if you are trying to sell to job titles that don't exist, …”
Braze vertically integrated data ingestion to guarantee real-time access
“One of the most important things we did was that we vertically integrated the data flow, and we went right into our customers' products when the data was being generated, and we made sure that it would get to our stack as fast as possible. That was one of the …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Bill's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Braze | 1 | 14 | 100% 2/2 | full record on In Depth → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Braze | 1 +1 | 24 | 83% 5/6 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Braze | 1 | 9 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Top Founders → |