Insight
Yoo: Early-stage startups only need people who code or sell
“Hey, in the early days, like you code or you sell, there's nothing else.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Yoo: 40% to 50% of Confluent's revenue flows through cloud marketplaces
“You know, 40 to 50% of the revenue actually goes to each side of the marketplaces. And a lot of people just don't know that.”
Insight
Yoo: Fast startup execution requires single-threaded human ownership despite AI tools
“If you want to go fast, there's nothing like having a single threaded owner who can really focus on, you know, their specific kind of job to be done.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2030
Yoo: Cloud marketplace GMV will cross $100B in next 5 years
“They are, you know, I mean, their GMV is like expected to cross a hundred billion dollars over the next five years.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Yoo: Snowflake was first to cross $1B in AWS Marketplace revenue
“You know, one of our customers, Snowflake, for example, they were the first to cross a billion dollars in just AWS marketplace revenue alone.”
Insight
Yoo: Business software buyers require pre-built workflows over API-only tools
“Turns out that is not the case at all. They like the unified APIs because it does allow them to customize all these things. But when you're selling to business users, like, you know, sales people or partnership people, they don't have engineering or IT resourc…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Suger reached nearly $2M ARR having burned only $1.2M
“Fast forward to like September of last year, we were at close to two million dollars in ARR and we had burned like 1.2.”
Insight
Yoo: Talk to boards for alignment, not approval
“When you, whenever you talk to the board or your investors, you're not asking for approval, you're asking for alignment.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yoo: Suger pitched a different idea during its YC interview
“When we actually applied for YC, it wasn't even around marketplaces. It was around usage and so lo and behold, like we show up to the interview and it's a 10 minute, like high pressure interview. And the first thing we see in the interview is just, hey, we're …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yoo: Suger entered YC Demo Day at $30K ARR and $100K contracted ARR
“We got out of, you know, we went to demo day with 30 K in real ARR, but we had a, we were, we had a hundred K in contracted ARR.”
Assertion Partly supported
Suger signed Fivetran as an enterprise marketplace customer in late 2023
“The big like win for us, I gotta say was winning Fivetran. That happened in at the end of 20, 23. And that kind of gave us the power of, hey, if we can support a customer that's doing tens of millions of dollars through marketplace that, you know, I think they…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yoo: Suger scaled from 10 to 50 customers at 7–10 per month in 2023
“It took us, you know, four months to get to 10 customers. And then starting in June, July, we started kind of averaging, you know, seven to 10 customers a month. And so by the time we reached like 50, I was like, holy crap, this actually is working.”
Disclosure
Yoo: Suger's co-founder left right after the seed round
“So, so this happened in June of 2023. And, you know, timing wise was also right after we raised our seed round. And so that's another complexity of just things to deal with. You know, the reason why, like ultimately we just had a difference in vision of what w…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yoo: Suger maintained a headcount of just 5 people through 2023
“I mean, we were at four people at that point in May. And then by the end of that year, we were at five people.”
