The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“The best time to send a board deck is Saturday morning, the week before your board meeting”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Frankly, at Rome, we think that's all the wrong question because a hundred percent of scaled companies Are distributed.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“I've got, yes, now I think 12, and that's about the maximum number that I think a leader can really have”

“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 …”

“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.”

“So, Jensen, now, today, famously, has no one-on-one meetings. He barely has any meetings at all.”

“Rome is an all-in-one cloud headquarters. It makes companies more productive with fewer and quicker and faster meetings. It makes them more connected by bringing the company together, the entire distributed company together under one roof, and it helps save th…”

“We haven't done any marketing and we haven't done any outbound. It's all just kind of been folks using the product.”

“We went with monthly active users, which by the way is how Slack got started, But after the Salesforce acquisition, they nixed it. And so now you have to pay up front for the year and the kind of Salesforce more traditional sales model.”

“What you find is that the original idea you have is almost never, unless you're extraordinarily lucky, the idea that you end up winning with.”

“Now you obviously can't do this, you know, when the company gets to a 100,000 people, but for running a 1000 to 3000 person company to get an idea of what's going on, there is no better technique than the Teddy Roosevelt five minute meeting.”

“When you memorize a line, you craft it as you write it. If it's a line you say out loud, it will be better than a line that you've written down. If it's a line that you say out loud, if you want to remember it, each time you try to memorize it, you're going to…”

“In fact, the gamemanship of entrepreneurship, I would argue, that is raising a C round, raising an A round. A lot of entrepreneurs buck up and think that raising a round is the end of itself, and it's the human desire for that conclusion, for that feeling of, …”

“And a lot of the reason that voice has become big in the last couple of years is because of the fact that we've gotten really good at transcription. We're now at, you know, 96, 97% accuracy, which is about as good as the human ear at transcribing things.”

“At Rome, my new company, we have 93 amazing founders in our cap table, and I'm a Phone call away, if you will, from any founder we want, because that's our target audience.”

“One time Intuit thought about buying Yext. So this was 1012 years ago, way before we were public.”

“As of yesterday, when I last checked, we had 182 paying customers and about 4000 paid active members.”

“And for the past, I guess, 56 weeks that we've been out there, we've had 56 different releases and, you know, continued to pack in improvements and features.”

“So I'm chatting with probably on the order of maybe 50 to 100 customers per on an average day.”

“The average customer in Rome is in our product for 5.9 hours per day.”

“In fact, when I started Yext, the very first thing I did, we were selling to gyms, and I called the founder and president of Ursa, which is the trade organization for gyms, and this was in And this is really old school. And he is now, you know, 78, 80, but I m…”

“One of the biggest failures of my career was a thing called a zone at Yext. It was a product that Used a beacon. I don't know if you remember the beacons, the iBeacon protocol that Apple launched, that basically was this Bluetooth thing that could wake up your…”

“Well, in February, Roam went viral on TikTok, and it caused like a thousand people, some huge number, not a thousand, but something like hundreds of companies to sign up for Roam on the wait list”