The Ledger, every show

“Like in coding, it's not, right? Like all the studies in, in real engineering departments is not that AI makes them 10 times better. The only people who claim that are the people selling AI products, the users of it. You know, there might be individuals claimi…”

“There's over a hundred SAS public companies and something like two of them have NRR less than a hundred percent. Like that's how it goes. And those companies have horrible financials and their values valuations are bad.”

“So there was a study, ah, ah, by Columbia Business School of 22 entrepreneurs who all exited their businesses and made ten million or more personally from it. So in other words, success. 21 out of the 22 were depressed after having that success.”

“Products that have net negative reviews that are specific about what is negative about the product have higher sales and fewer returns than other products with the same rating, like, you know, 4.1 stars or whatever.”

“My assumption is that every market of any reasonable size will be flooded with AI products. Maybe it already is, but my assumption is if it isn't already, it's going to be.”

“In fact, the median for a IPO SAS company, like at IPO, the median NRR is a 119%.”

“Like if people have a follower to following ratio, that's really out of whack and you interact with them, it actually lowers your reputation and reach.”

“It was sold in 2020 for two billion and it doesn't have a thousand employees. It's super profitable. Like it was publicly said then what the profits were. It's 50% bottom line of profit.”

“I founded WP Engine in 2010, and like I said, we now, ah, we're, we've passed a hundred million annual revenue, we just got a two hundred and fifty million dollar investment from Silver Lake, and, ah, we're worth more than SmartBear, right?”

“The pricing was already pretty good, but we had some revelations talking to customers, and Hearing some stories or some revelations where we reset the prices, not dramatically, just like certain things in 2012. And that's when we really took off. That's like w…”

“And I stole this from a company called groove, who has this great case study online about this very thing. They had an email that they sent out, which is a very good, great email. And they started by asking, why did you cancel? They got 10% usable responses. T…”

“HubSpot famously this Tested selling through agencies instead of direct. They ended up being 50% of the revenue after four or five years.”

“We got to a hundred million in something like a little less than seven years.”

“We host millions of websites and have tens of billions of events per day flying around, so we have infrastructure scale problems, too, or challenges, I should say, but it's usually people.”

“So at this point at WP engine, also we've had a few secondary rounds, which by the way, all employees got to participate in as well.”

“This is my previous company, SmartBear, and, ah, it was sold just last year to Frisco Partners for four hundred and fifty million dollars, that's awesome, except that I sold it to Insight Partners in 2007, so.”

“Our executive team is majority female, for example. We have diversity in many areas in the business. Half of our engineering management are women, for example.”

“And now I have zero direct reports, just like Dharmesh at HubSpot.”

“So we got to one million ARR in our first 18 months, which is pretty good.”

“But then in 2012, our growth rate shot up again. We went from one million to five million in one year, and as you can see, it never ended.”