The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Running PLG and enterprise requires operating two completely separate companies
“Winning the enterprise is really, and winning a more traditional PLG motion, it's almost like two separate companies. I think it's a very different way you think about building product, different way you interact with customers, and certainly a very different …”
Jay: Pitching team productivity fails to resonate with enterprise executives
“As an executive, all I care about is driving enterprise value. And then really the only things that drive enterprise value are driving more revenue, lowering costs, risk mitigating, right, on that level. And so your pitch at that point is like, well, look look…”
Software category leaders eventually capture 70% to 80% of market share
“We look at every single category that's been created, it's very noisy in the beginning, but there's a period of like, there's like a two to three year window, where there's a massive competition, but coming out of that, the category leader is kinged or queened…”
Atlassian had a much shorter route to CIOs than Asana did
“The edge that they had was eventually the route to the CIO, the CTO to then just, all right, let's just Deploy this across the whole organization. That path is very short. Whereas for many PLG companies like us on the distance was really long.”
Asana had 5% company penetration compared to Dropbox and Slack's 30%
“We didn't have the dynamic that Dropbox and Slack had where you have 30% of a company using it, especially when you go outside of the big tech companies. And so, A lot of times it would be like five percent of employee base”
PLG companies cannot rely solely on organic users for enterprise sales
“You want to go after executives, you got to find a different way to create that demand. You can't just rely on your organic user base to organically create you know, create those opportunities.”
Jay: Asana invested in OKRs to open enterprise executive sales conversations
“So at Asana, what we realized was a lot of companies were starting to use Asana as the framework for Goal setting and OKR setting. The reason is because all the work is actually already happening in projects and tasks in the product, and so you might as well s…”
Eighty percent of early tech unicorns were built on Asana
“A lot of the early unicorns, like when unicorns were still a big deal, 80% of them were sort of built on Asana.”
Jay: Asana organized sales teams into seed, land, and expand motions
“So we ended up splitting a team into seed, land, and expand. Seed is very straightforward, that's the self-service and the online sales component. Land and expand, the way I would think about it was accounts that we were trying to go after, the universe of acc…”
Facebook was one of Asana's hardest enterprise deals to close
“Facebook was one of the hardest enterprise accounts for us to crack, because their V-one, like, non-mobile version was still so widely used, right, and caught tasks.”
Jay: Asana started a pilot three-person enterprise sales team from day one
“And so when I started from day one, I launched, even though my focus was building out the online sales side, I always had a pilot enterprise team. It was just three people in the beginning. And I basically took the three more sophisticated members of the team …”