Howard Lerman
Founder & CEO, Roam. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@howard ↗LinkedIn ↗ro.am ↗Wikipedia ↗
Howard Lerman is the co-founder and former CEO of Yext, which he led to a 2017 IPO. He also co-founded Confide and currently serves as the founder and CEO of Roam.
2shows
3appearances
41statements
3resolved
0supported
0contradicted
0%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Howard Lerman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Lerman: Billing and Contract SaaS Companies Should Just Be Salesforce Features
“A lot of the SaaS companies out there should just be features of Salesforce. In fact, it's annoying that they're not features of Salesforce. Things like billing, things like order management, things like contract management, but Yext is a platform in itself.”
Lerman: Going Public Is Essential; VCs Discourage It Out of Self-Interest
“First off, being public is way better than being private. For those people that say that you shouldn't be public, that's just a timing thing. And honestly, sometimes it's a VC that has a self-interest that wants to do a late stage round before you go public. B…”
Howard Lerman: Scheduled one-on-one meetings slow companies down by delaying urgent issues
“People, if they need to talk to you, they queue up the stuff they need to talk to you about until the meeting. So if I have a meeting with Kyle, with Kevin, on Thursday at two o'clock, let's say I need to meet him, and he's got something really urgent to tell …”
Howard Lerman: Startup founders should hold 8 PM Sunday night planning calls
“The frickin' founders who are starting the company and trying to do something impossible and move a rock up a mountain ought to be available at eight p.m. Sunday night for an hour and a half to plan out the week.”
Lerman: Replace outbound SDRs with equity-backed advisors for direct executive introductions
“Instead of investing heavily in BDRs and SDRs and outbound to generate demand, Use your stock options to bring on advisors who can make a fast introduction to the top people immediately and get you in. No BDRs can be able to get a meeting with the CEO of some …”
Lerman: Senior advisors make better enterprise BDRs than junior sales reps
“The best BDR, the most, the best BDRs are the most senior people because they're a phone call away and can easily meet people and the board. And so I really think founders ought to think about how to construct their board and our advisors in a way that they ca…”
Lerman: Group tours almost doubled onboarding conversion rates at Roam
“Well, Sam, it turned out that the percentage of people That chose to go on to the next step in our process went not quite, but almost doubled with the group tours.”
Lerman: Augmented Reality and Voice Will Replace Smartphones as Next UI
“Augmented reality is going to be the other part of that puzzle that completes the evolution away from the smartphone into a next generation user interface.”
Lerman: Every Website Owner Will Soon Need an AI Structured Database
“Well, it's the whole concept of the web to the brain. Every business in the world that today has a website will very soon have a brain, and that brain is a structured database of their public facts. If you're a restaurant, it's your stores, your menus, your ev…”
Howard Lerman: Presenters should let live demos break for audience sympathy points
“I strongly recommend doing Live demos that could break, and frankly, sometimes you should have it break, because people like it when stuff goes wrong. They do. You get sympathy points.”
Howard Lerman: The best time to send board decks is Saturday morning
“The best time to send a board deck is Saturday morning, the week before your board meeting”
Howard Lerman: Startups should vest advisor equity over one year, not four
“Make the stock only best over up to one year. Don't make it four years. When you hire employees, you make it, it's four years, because most advisors lose their, you just use up all their connections in six months.”
Lerman: Board chair is a purely ceremonial title with no power
“The chair of the board has no power. It's purely ceremonial. It's just a title. They call the meeting to order. That's all they do.”
Howard Lerman: Founders must never delegate product-market fit to anyone else
“The second to last thing you should delegate is recruiting, and then never, over your dead body, over your corpse, delegate product market fit. You as a found, and I'm speaking to the founders here, your job as a founder is always to completely own and dominat…”
Lerman: 100% of scaled companies are distributed
“Frankly, at Rome, we think that's all the wrong question because a hundred percent of scaled companies
Are distributed.”
Lerman: Slack is weak at direct messaging compared to Roam
“We've added features for group chat that make it possible for a company to not, if they want, use Slack, because we think we have a better approach for direct messaging in particular, where Slack is pretty weak.”
Lerman: Free B2B software creates sample bias and bad feedback
“There is an enormous, and I've seen in my career, like over and over and over again, a huge sample bias when you give something away for free and freeloaders that have no intention whatsoever of ever buying anything, but they're glad to use your product for fr…”
Lerman: Freemium models force SaaS companies to compete with themselves
“If you do something freemium, kind of your, You're competing with yourself. You create the free monster where you've got this freemium thing, and then you spend a lot of time trying to come up with a differentiated feature that people are going to pay for, and…”
Lerman: Events are the highest-ROI B2B customer acquisition channel
“Events, I think are, The highest ROI way to reach customers in B to B. If you can, it doesn't have to be much. It's not that expensive to put on a dinner.”
Lerman: History's Greatest Companies Are Built Organically Bottom-Up
“I will say that I think if you historically look back at the greatest companies in history, they typically have come from more of a grassroots organic type of feel like Microsoft or Apple or even IBM or going back to the Ford Motor Company, going back eons ago…”
Lerman: 12 Direct Reports Is the Maximum a Leader Can Manage
“I've got, yes, now I think 12, and that's about the maximum number that I think a leader can really have”
Lerman: Memorizing lines forces founders to simplify their pitch
“The point is, the act of memorizing your lines is one of composition, and you will find yourself continuously editing as you do it, and removing, and mainly it's subtraction. Mainly you're gonna be subtracting words you don't need, because I can almost assure …”
Lerman: Yext operated with 30 to 35 direct reports to the CEO
“I used to have, when I was running Yext, probably technically, 30 to 35 direct reports, but realistically, everybody reported to me, if that makes any sense.”
The other half of the tape: Howard Lerman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 5 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jason Lemkin 4Sam Blond 1Jules Maltz 1
Statements about Howard Lerman, by other people (1)
Lemkin: CEOs Read Every Inbound Email and Reply If Top Problems Addressed
“CEOs read like every email. Every email. And it's just, they don't, Howard's nodding his head. Even when he was running Yext, 22 quarters is a public. He didn't respond to any of them. And if the email was great, if it was like, if it was going to solve one of…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Official SaaStr Podcast 5
20VC 1
2024 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Advice Every SaaS Founder Needs to Know to Scale to $100m with Sam Blond and Jason Lemkin
- Top 10 Go To Market Mistakes Founders Make Again … and Again with SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin
- What It’s Like Running a Profitable $400M Public SaaS Company with Vimeo CEO Adam Gross
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Howard's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Roam | 2 | 30 | 0% 0/2 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Roam | 1 | 11 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |