The Ledger, every show

“AI can generate content that has gone from laughably bad to, like, better than the bottom 25% of marketing employees to, like, maybe better than the bottom 80% of marketing employees and on a trajectory to continue progressing there.”

“The number one requested feature throughout all of Crossbeam was for us to integrate with Reveal and to support the companies that were on the Reveal network.”

“There's a whole cohort of humans that have already largely replaced a very, very large proportion of their traditional search behavior on search engines from looking through these search engine results pages to just trusting the answers that that come out of C…”

“RJ Metrics was Fivetran, Snowflake, DBT, and Looker. All together in one product. We built all four of those products in order to build RJ Metrics.”

“The three co-founders of DBT all worked at RJ Metrics. The founders of Stitch, myself and Jake, which became the early competitor to Fivetran and played in that space. Omni, which is a hot new ticket in the BI space, their founding CTO, Chris Merrick, was our …”

“So Stitch never raised any additional outside capital. We basically like landed the plane of creating a really good home for RJ, bankrolling Stitch, creating a little bit of outcome for folks that had been involved in the RJ journey along the way. And then we …”

“Seven out of every 10 of those companies that signed up for the platform signed up because they were invited in by somebody else who was already on that.”

“Where we had raised, you know, a hundred million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and others during the Zerp era, they raised fifty million dollars from Insight Partners and others during the Zerp era.”

“And in 20 months, we got to as many paying customers as it took us eight years to get at RJ Metrics. With almost no salespeople. It was a PLG, ecosystem-led motion.”

“I think we've got over 80% of the Bessemer Cloud Index that now uses it.”

“The average first time author whose books hit the shelves sell less than 300 copies of their books.”

“We're up to 18,000 companies that use Crossbeam now we're getting close to a 100,000 users on the platform”

“At Stitch back in the day, we didn't actually have hard integrations into Looker at all. It was the data warehouse that sat in between where we deposited data and where Looker pulled the data out. There was no physical integration between us and Looker, but Lo…”

“If we hit our targets, it'll be six ish, nine ish months total will get us from zero to a million. And I think we're based on this quarter, we're pacing toward that.”

“This literally happened to me when we were selling RJ to Magento because we had other potential buyers and all the buyers wanted to see our full customer list before they gave us a term sheet.”

“The entire venture capital market disappeared in September oh eight.”

“The business had gone from a hundred percent to 10% growth and it had a churn problem.”

“Looker, who used to be our biggest competitor over at RJ, started becoming our biggest refer of business at Stitch because the Looker sales reps knew if they were going to close a deal, Their client wanted to see all the dashboards they cared about in the demo…”

“I manually got five on, and then that five led to 15. What was amazing was of those 15, 10 of them invited another three on, and then we got 30, right? And then like this incredible viral loop started before we had even started optimizing on the way to drive v…”

“You've got at least three companies here that raised at least a hundred million dollars to do precisely what we were doing.”

“Oh, and by the way, my 2.6 billion dollar mistake, which was the headline here, very shortly thereafter, Looker gets acquired by Google for 2.6 billion dollars.”

“Yeah, we didn't put any new net new capital into the business. When it got acquired, I think the team was in the thirties. And from a like magnitude standpoint, it was almost the same size that RJ metrics was when we sold it. So in 28 months, we drew stitch up…”

“Fab was a really large e-commerce company that built built up here in New York grew to hundreds of millions of dollars of capital raised, and then went to zero very rapidly.”

“In 20 months, we had as many customers as RJ Metrics had reached in that eight year time period.”

“So, well, basically I bought the thing and changed my entire life.”

“What else came in was we had a group of markets here called Fred Meyer One Stop Shopping Center, and their buyer came in, he was a vice president, and he said, Mr. Meyer would like to open, ah, health food stores in all 44 of his stores, and he'd like to put y…”

“They just whacked a big square hole in it, and he planted one of the firemen there on the ground with a fire hose aimed through the hole, and for the entire time of the fire, ah, he kept, ah, direction inside the mill room, which actually saved all three mills…”

“It's well, well over a hundred million dollars.”

“These days, it's a fifty million dollar check, hundred million dollar check, you know, multi hundred million dollar leverage by us. This is not a venture capital firm that invests in startups. Or companies that have not made it to a very mature growth equity f…”

“We've got just under 400 customers and it's a software as a service sale. So our prices you know, they tend to be you know, on an annual basis, kind of in the tens of thousands of dollars range. And, you know, we've been growing pretty pretty consistently at t…”

“It would basically be between one and two is our ARR over CAC ratio, which is that kind of SAS magic number. So, you know, if our bounds of what we get out of a customer is 10 to a hundred grand a year, you know, the all in sales process broken out within thos…”

“So we typically see customers stick around for multiple years. If you extrapolate out our churn rate, the predicted lifespan of a customer is somewhere in the three to four year range. And that is The biggest source of churn for us, honestly, is because we sel…”

“Over the course of about four years, we went from zero dollars to one million dollars in revenue. It was a slow, long grind to get there, but we were operating with a million bucks in revenue with only eight employees or so and kicking off cash profitably.”

“Let's attempt to bootstrap this thing, and that's precisely what we did for the first several years of the business. We were kind of the tortoise in the tortoise of the hare story, right? Like, we had some market pool, but we kind of were early to the market, …”

“That was 2008 the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, we launched that company.”

“At one of our hackathons in 2015, we had a group of team members actually break off all of the code, the microservices that represented that ETL, ah, component, and actually turn that into something that we could directly sell, and point at our customers' data…”

“Oh, it was about 6000 dollars, and I can tell you that the excitement of having my own business, it, it's still with me.”

“There was already a shell station up there that had been there for years and years and years, and everybody loved them and went there for their gas and for everything else, and frankly, a guy by the, almost one year to the day, we just ran out of money”

“Dewey was such a help. He found me a mill that was to be torn down in Fayetteville, North Carolina. So I ended up, for not a whole lot of money, With my garage stacked full of old, very ancient stone mills dated, 1870, 1860, 1880.”

“Oh, actually, we, I created the 10 grain cereal that we're using now.”

“I kept my job at Penny's for two years, and Charlie, of course she worked the store and talked with people, and she was a great believer in whole grains, and it was all very nice.”

“I had an intense desire to learn to read the Bible in the original languages, Hebrew and Koine Greek, and, ah, we did a little scouting about and found here that Portland, where I am right now, was one of the greatest spots for seminaries, and, ah, we, ah, enr…”

“Here I am at almost 90. I get up at six every morning. I go down to my own store my own restaurant, and have cereal. I don't like anything besides hot cereal, cooked cereal, and then I, well, I get into bed a little bit early, but I work till five or six every…”

“Yeah, it was almost a hundred grand. It was a pretty steady flow of, you know, I'd go to bed at night and I wake up in the morning and there'd be another half dozen or so of these things that had sold online.”

“It's about a fifty-fifty split between inbound and outbound.”

“So my co-founder and I quit insight on a Monday and on Tuesday, Lehman brothers collapsed.”

“We basically were working out of my attic for the first four, almost five years of running this business.”