The Ledger
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Kramer: GitLab positions AI across the entire software delivery lifecycle, not just code completion
“Instead, we stepped back and said, the value of AI on our platform is along every step in the software delivery life cycle. So that will be one piece of it. And customers absolutely need to know we have it and prospects, but we should be telling an end to end …”
GitLab defaults to keeping all meeting agendas open to the entire company
“We never have a meeting without a meeting agenda and it's by default. We always make it open to the company if possible.”
GitLab bans slide presentations during meetings in favor of asynchronous pre-reads
“We don't really like to present, and so we really try to pre-send materials to make the most effective meetings, not sit there and present slide after slide in a meeting. We assume everybody is pre-read, then we can just jump into rich conversation.”
Zima: Omni supports third-party software in Slack to build trust
“If someone wants me to help them write SQL, or like, I don't know, debug something in Excel, like I'll go do something I do support for other people's products in Slack, because I just think it shows like a positive association with how much we care about thei…”
Foster: Zapier remains focused on SMBs, not enterprise customers
“We're still not an enterprise company. We still like SMB is our bread and butter. That's who we solve for.”
Behrens Wu sends an unfiltered company-wide email every Sunday
“And I've been doing it every Sunday since. It's like almost, I think, year and a half, two years now, and it's something that the team really is looking forward to. Like I, and I'm kind of embraced the same style, like the same direction as he was describing, …”
Siroker: Most Regrettable Founder Mistakes Were Deferring to Board or Experienced Hires
“My gut says we should do A, somebody else thinks we should do B, and it turns out poorly. There are plenty of times we said I should do A, and it turns out poorly. I don't remember any of them. The ones I remember are like these deep existential, my intuition …”
Rewind Evaluates Performance Exclusively Against Defined Cultural Values in Quarterly 360s
“When we do quarterly three sixties, which most startups don't do when we do them, the criteria we evaluate each other and I get evaluated on by my team is our cultural values. There's nothing else. There's no other thing that your performance it is. Do you liv…”
Siroker: Rewind lacks a specific target persona beyond Apple hardware
“This is something I'm probably most embarrassed about in terms of our decisiveness. It's just, we don't have a super specific who you know, we have almost by constraints of the technology M one and M two users and app, you know, Apple or iPhone users.”
Three-worker Mechanical Turk consensus often failed expert data accuracy checks
“We originally hired Amazon Mechanical Turks, and we said, hey, we'll save money. We'll have three of them review every response. But we'd often see that even if all three of them gave the same output, we would go to an expert researcher or a customer or look a…”
Pitching a product as an automated researcher alienated early customers
“I remember at first the very early days of Sprig, there was some wording around your automated user researcher, you know, or it does all the text analysis for you. And that was actually very off putting for both user researchers and product teams.”
Kracov: Lattice CEO Jack Altman questioned his ability to scale to VP
“So like, I think the, probably the toughest moment for me at Lattice was, I think it was like series B ish. Like right before I really started hiring some of these more strategic leaders, Jack sort of went to me and was like, Hey, are you the guy? Like, are yo…”
Kracov: Dock skips expensive conferences to focus on owned media
“Events and conferences, like there's so many conferences you can go to and they work and you can stand at the booth and you can talk to people, but it's like kind of expensive and it's kind of time consuming and it can work. And those were things that I did in…”
Kracov: Hiring creative writers for B2B SEO content failed at Lattice
“One hire, you know, I sort of made a mistake on was somebody who was maybe a little bit more of like a creative writer. And I thought, oh, they could apply this like really creative writing. And they had done a lot of other, you know, like really interesting f…”
Weiss: Slack scales founder product intuition via principles and 3-year strategy
“So the first is really just about making sure that we have everyone really aligned and energized around our mission, our vision, and our kind of what we call our three-year strategy internally. So that's kind of what people are aligned at a high level. But the…”
Weiss estimates Slack's product portfolio allocation is roughly 60-35-5
“Across the board, I would say we probably look, my hunch that I haven't actually, like, actually done the math on it, is we probably look a little bit more, like, 60, 35, five, if you will. Not quite as many fully speculative things, but maybe focus a little b…”
Noronha: Pre-AI Gamma had an 'appallingly low' 5% to 10% activation rate
“The conversion rate of someone signing up for our product from a landing page And actually getting to a point of seeing value was like appallingly low. It was like, we're talking five or 10% or something.”
Sager: Plaid kept Visa acquisition deal team intentionally small
“In the case of Visa, the team that was actively day-to-day working on the transaction was actually quite small and everyone else was a hundred percent focused on continuing to grow the business.”
Sager: Plaid pairs 80%-knowledge vertical sales quarterbacks with horizontal product specialists
“The way we've structured that is like, if you're on the vertical, like you own it, you're kind of the quarterback. And there's an expectation that you understand every use case, you know, call it the 80%, but where you need to, You have a team of experts that …”
Sager: Plaid COO still personally sells to select enterprise customers
“So there's still like certain customers that I go sell with myself, right? Because I love doing it. I probably don't need to, right? That keeps me sharp, right? Like it's fun.”
Sager: Plaid COO allocates his calendar 50% business, 25% team, 25% ecosystem
“See, I probably spend like 20.25% of the time on like ecosystem health, probably 50% of the time on like business health, like again, working with customers and so forth, and then 25% on team.”
Copplestone: Supabase ingests all communications and meetings into searchable AI warehouses
“Our attrition is extremely low, but the leaning into the async culture has helped because everything's written, everything's recorded, everything's captured in Slack or Notion, or one of our sales meetings is ingested into our warehouses, and this kind of solv…”
Moreno: Windsurf prioritized partners, enablement, and data early in scaling
“Because when I got into Windsurf, outside of hiring sellers and deployed engineers, the three things that I told our CEO that I wanted to go do was hire a world-class partner person, a world-class enablement person, and a data person.”
Moreno: Parallel is overwhelmed by intense market demand
“Like an example right now at parallel, we have so much, the market is coming towards us so intensely. That the team is overwhelmed. There's like not enough people to respond to the demand that we have.”
Moreno: Parallel converts 50% of evaluations to scope and 60% to close
“40% of first meetings convert into use case evaluation. For us, qualified pipeline QP is starting at scope. So once you get to scope, We expect the close rate to be 60% or greater. So we know 50% of use case evaluation conversations move into scope. We know th…”
Hirshberg: 50% of Artemis customers are in highly regulated industries
“And we tend to see about 50% of our customer base is highly regulated industries, such as financial services and financial institutions, where they have the need, the impact can be very high, but they don't necessarily have the Let's say desire to build in hou…”
Hirshberg: Demisto founders invested the first check in Artemis
“And they also said, you know, we'll give you the visibility, and we'll give you the first check when you end up starting the company, and they ended up really investing in Artemis.”
Payne: I founded DoorDash's platform business as its first new S-curve
“Like one of the first things I did at DoorDash, cause I had a lot of experience with this is I, even though DoorDash was very young, I founded the first new S curve at DoorDash, which was The platform business.”
Kreps: Confluent struggled for years to expand into data processing
“One of the more recent versions of this was we felt is very important for the company to do the processing of data, not just the flow. And we worked on this largely unsuccessfully for a number of years.”
Grosser: Personally leads customer onboarding sessions for every new Vercel hire
“Now actually every new hire I deliver, one of our company values is KYC, know your customer, and I deliver the KYC onboarding session where I walk through every new hire at the company. Here's how we think about customers, how we break it down, here's what our…”
Vercel standardizes on GAAP revenue for executive-level business reviews
“So that's one of the things in at Vercel we've just decided We're gonna look at things on a gap revenue basis. Just make it simple. Again, I'll have my forecast call, but I'm gonna translate that into gap revenue basis when we talk about it as an executive lev…”
Harness aims to shift its 80/20 enterprise revenue split to 70/30
“We are at 8020 right now. I would actually like it to become 7030.”
Harness uses structured pre-sale assessments to guarantee quantifiable ROI before closing
“In Harness, we run a very structured sales process where we will create a assessment before we sell, which is, this is the value you're going to get.”
Stauch: Serval's demo only clicks when showing the workflow builder
“The demo can be kind of broken up into everything that comes before showing the workflow builder and then everything that comes after, because before you show the workflow builder, people are bored and everything you show them, they think they've seen before. …”
fal struggled to raise Series A because VCs doubted image inference
“And we tried to explain this to people because it was so new, like no one got it. Everyone thought, An inference platform is an inference platform. Doesn't matter what kind of model it is. There are other people who are more qualified or more prepared to do th…”
fal never monetized its viral real-time image-to-image inference demo
“Still, we didn't make any money from that demo. It makes a really impressive, you know, technical demo for people to see how fast we can run inference, but we couldn't find any use case for that, like very fast image to image inference. Still to this day, it i…”
Early indie developer customers on fal spent tens of thousands daily
“Everyone was spending serious money on the platform, tens of thousands of dollars a day, all of a sudden.”
fal maintains a 15-person applied ML team dedicated to model deployment
“We have a Applied ML team. It's around 15 people right now. And, you know, all they do every day is either deploy these models, optimize them, play with them, and they're obsessed with it.”
fal operates generative media inference across 28 different data centers
“That's part of the strategy we are running in, I think, 28 different data centers.”
fal maintains roughly 500 shared Slack channels with customer engineering teams
“We have, I don't know, 500 different Slack channels with all the engineers from companies we work with. And the response rate of those Slack channels, you measure that daily and like we obsess over that.”
fal converts pay-as-you-go AI usage into multi-million dollar annual commitments
“We built a sales team early on, maybe earlier than some of our competitors. And we tried to get as much of this revenue in form of yearly commitments rather than pay as you go. To this day, I think we are doing an incredible job at that. And that protects the …”
Samsara aimed to be the Salesforce of physical operations
“Part of our vision was also that we're not trying to find a single data point for a single industry. We're actually trying to build a platform and, you know, thinking about what did a company like Salesforce do for sales teams and for customer data? In the ear…”
Asthana: Postman made single-player free and charged for team collaboration
“So we put the dividing line as collaborating beyond three users as the time at which a team has actively decided to standardize on Postman. In the free product, you're just using it individually. So the single player product is free, the multiplayer product is…”
Early user testing revealed social media marketers as Canva's initial beachhead market
“Through some of those early user testing sessions, both the in-person ones and then the ones that we did online, we started to see that there was this rich vein of social media marketers who just got really excited about Canva.”
Agrawal: Parallel provides source attribution and confidence scoring on outputs
“The second thing we do really well is really good attribution down to specific sources from which web research was done in a very fine grained granular way. And that allows us to build a differentiator, which is confidence scoring for all of our output element…”
Agrawal: Parallel tracks source attribution to calculate publisher compensation
“Part of the reason we do so much attribution down to sources is to be able to do that math. To be able to understand feasibility. We really want to create open solutions where everyone has incentive to remain open”
Mercury evaluates candidate curiosity via a one-hour non-work presentation exercise
“We have a cultural attribute of wanting people who are curious. And the thing that we do to test that is we give people basically an hour to prepare a presentation on any subject they want. We're just like, hey, pick something non-work related that you find re…”