BlackLine

“We would have sometimes three to five year sales cycles.”

“In fact, about half of my C-suite right now is women.”

“Had I taken that advice, I doubt, and money, I doubt that Blackline would be here today.”

“Optimizing accounting operations was not my big idea. How embarrassing is that? It was created by an accountant at a bank in Nebraska.”

“My first engineer was a guy who had not yet finished his coding class. Alright. My first marketing guy was a guy whose previous job was selling awnings. Yes, awnings for houses. Ok. He was fabulous. He's still with the company. So, oh, and the first engineer's…”

“If there was a playbook that worked for everybody, then everybody would go out and make a gazillion dollars, and we'd all be happy. But, it's not like that. Companies are like people. They have a unique DNA. They have a unique culture. What might work beautifu…”

“If you go with good, but they're not cheap, alright, guess what? You're gonna run out of money. If you go with cheap and not crazy, your product is gonna suffer, ok?”

“Think about Blackline, 15 years from inception to IPO, alright?”

“Blackline started out by building wealth management software. I knew how to do that. I was great at it. After three years, we had one paying customer.”

“We had 14 offers sealed offers, and so it was a real process, and we did not, I did not have that level of conversations with all of them, but there were several.”

“Oh, fourth time? I would say more like 20th time, right? I mean, you know, and in the early days, those, you hit the wall a lot more often.”

“Because we have a very healthy balance sheet, We viewed it as a tremendous opportunity to invest heavily in R and D where many of our smaller competitors sort of pull back, right? Because they were very worried about where the future was going. We said, great,…”

“To this day, I'm still the largest shareholder.”

“And we just decided at the end of 2007 that we were going to be SaaS only going forward, ah, which actually turned out to be a great decision”

“It never pays and most people hide it out of insecurity.”

“Having the right skills and having the values that don't mess up the cultural DNA of the company is critically important when you think about when is it time to hand it over, hand over that mantle to someone else.”

“To a person, I knew that we had outgrown the executive when the answer was do more of the same.”