Michael Litt
Co-founder & CEO, Vidyard. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@michaellitt ↗LinkedIn ↗vidyard.com ↗
Litt co-founded Vidyard, a Y Combinator-backed video messaging and buyer engagement platform that has raised over $100 million in venture funding. He also co-founded Garage Capital, an early-stage seed fund that has backed more than 200 tech companies, including Groq and Substack.
1shows
2appearances
25statements
2resolved
1supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
9said about them ↓ Everything Michael Litt said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Michael Litt claims Box artificially lowers CAC by filing hosting under COGS
“Historically, actually, and this may be an interesting backtrack is, is Box, right? When they host someone's files for free, right? In my opinion, that's a customer acquisition cost because you're paying for that content, but you know, they file that away as a…”
Focusing on high lifetime value causes SaaS teams to neglect customer onboarding
“So we don't actually use it as a heuristic in our business, and our board doesn't actually Want us to, because, you know, if you do focus on that, you can start to feel really comfortable about your customer base. And then you can start to like neglect custome…”
Michael Litt warns founders against summer fundraising because investors withhold checks
“And, you know, it's either fall or spring. In the summertime, don't even bother. Investors just are not writing checks.”
Litt: Scaling CFOs must act as a 'house of no' against executives
“Your CFO has to become what we call the house of no. And so you get to a phase where as you bring in experienced executives and individuals who've been a part of bigger businesses, they want to spend a lot of money.”
Litt: Vidyard's net revenue retention is above 120%
“Our internal target's 95 of which I'm compensated against. And then best in class net retention tends to be about the 120% range. And of course, based on that gross retention number and our 30% target, which we hit, we're above that as well.”
Litt: Video SaaS must offer more than hosting to compete with YouTube
“If you're just hosting video for a company you're competing against status quo, which is YouTube or Vimeo, which is free and monetized based on ads. And so there needs to be a whole bunch more in the package that justifies value beyond just video hosting anywa…”
Litt: Vidyard saw an 8x click-through increase from embedded sales videos
“We started to see an eight X increase in, in click through of emails that actually had a video embedded in them.”
Litt: The shelf life of a CMO is typically 18 to 24 months
“The shelf life of a CMO is generally 18 to 24 months.”
Litt: Vidyard's fully loaded CAC payback period is around 18 months
“So our payback period now is, is in the 18 month range. But that is fully loaded.”
Vidyard includes all go-to-market expenses in its CAC calculation
“Anything that is, is in the go-to-market realm gets included in, in the in the CAC breakdown.”
Litt: Vidyard's ViewedIt tool reached 100,000 signups
“And we actually just announced that we had a 100,000 or a 100,000 users sign up a couple of weeks ago. And that was just since October.”
Litt: Vidyard delayed spending Series C for 18 months using FX buffer
“One of the unique opportunities of being a Canadian company is that we sell in, in primarily USD and spend in Canadian so there's a bit of a hedge on Forex, which allows our money to go a lot further than it would if we were elsewhere in the world, so we actua…”
Litt: Vidyard streams over 50 million videos daily
“We're streaming in excess of fifty million videos a day and we subscribe to the Netflix model of throttling our CDN and serving, or service providers based on the latency of loading an asset.”
Litt: Vidyard built ViewedIt to streamline reps' whiteboard video prospecting
“The reality is we built viewed it based on this use case. To make it easier for our reps to do prospecting.”
Vidyard's average contract value sits between $20,000 and $30,000
“Yearly is kind of in the 20 to 30 range.”
Vidyard grew its headcount from under 70 to 132 in one year
“We are a 132 today. And just for reference, I was actually looking at this yesterday, just for some growth metrics, this end of the board. And a year ago, I told months ago, we were just shy of 70.”
Vidyard achieves 130% to 135% annual net retention including customer upsells
“Our net retention numbers, including upsell are in the 130 to 135% per year. So what that means is if we were to shut down all of our new business acquisition programs and just focus on Working with our customers, delivering new technologies and upselling them…”
Vidyard targets an 18-month customer acquisition cost payback period
“So our target payback, and again, we're kind of in a growth phase is a year and a half.”
Vidyard spends $45,000 on blended CAC for $30,000 ACV customers
“On a blended perspective, if our average customer is, you know, 30,000 dollars per year and we have a year and a half payback target, that means that we're spending 45,000 dollars to acquire them.”
Vidyard surpassed $1 million in ARR during first year of sales
“Our first actual year of sales, you know, we broke through that million dollar ARR mark.”
Litt: Vidyard is approaching 250 employees
“Yeah, so we're about double in size. We're approaching 250 employees now.”
Vidyard targets 95% annual gross revenue retention discounting all upsells
“Our growth retention target per year is 95%. So that is if like discounting all upsells and just looking at the base of customers we enter a year with from a revenue basis, we want to retain 95% of that revenue in the year. And that's an organization wide metr…”
The other half of the tape: Michael Litt's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 9
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 9
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- EP 413: SaaS, $242k MRR, $13 Million Raised to Re-Invent Business Email with Mathilde Collin of FrontApp
- Ep 415: Phone Accessory Company Hits $2.5M Revenue 2015 with Noah Rasheta of iStabilizer
- EP 416: 4000 New SaaS Customers From Youtube On $100K Spend with Neil Patel of CrazyEgg
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Michael's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Vidyard | 2 | 25 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Top Founders → |