Divvy

“Brex, where I was most recently CRO, and Divi, where Sterling is currently CRO, were bitter competitors from the time that I joined at least, which was mid 2018, at least through sort of like early 20 20, we were the primary two players in the corporate card, …”

“It's hard not to race to the bottom if your value is built on on either one of those like underlying economic factors.”

“And for our business, we immediately, you know, revenue drops 30% overnight, and so we get, we got thrust into that efficiency mindset for just a second during COVID, and then it obviously went crazy again, but during those moments, we had an initiative that r…”

“We had a lot of sort of low margin deals where we were hyper competitive because we negotiated on price so deeply something that I'm a bit conflicted about, but those, there were a lot of deals where the margins weren't great.”

“Divi had a sophisticated budgeting tool. There was a feature that Rex did not have. And we actually positioned that as a negative. We said, you're a, you know, 50 person company. You don't want to have a lot of sophistication around rules around where cards ca…”

“Last year, two and a half billion dollar acquisition by Bill.com.”

“And I remember that day, like it was a very pivotal moment for me. Cause we got like 900 demo requests.”

“We paid some cars, wrapped them in like, you know, the Divi branding and said, you know, corporate card for everybody. And we had them sit outside your office.”

“When Brex and Ramp and Expensify and Divi, all of them are worth billions, it changed. Not only did it change the size of outcomes, but it changed the way we invested. We didn't have to decide who was number one.”

“Marketing, we didn't talk about MQLs or SQLs. We actually talked about closed one new dollars. That's how marketing Was measured. That's how they were promoted and compensated, bonus, all of those kinds of things.”

“When you think you've got the idea for the product or the service, you first go out and you sell it. Put together some duct tape and bailing wire version of it. Most of the time it looks like a manual process or service, and you go out and you sell it. And you…”

“This framework was incredibly powerful for us because we got to beat and raise at a very high frequency. Most of the time, we would Push ourselves and come in between that quota and that goal number, and then we got to raise our expectations.”

“Brand would have a number and their number was the organic number. Okay. So like I'm saying, okay, you want credit for basically everything. That's fine. The organic number, right? So everything we didn't use performance marketing dollars for that starts to th…”

“A phrase that we circulated all the time was if it doesn't have a name next to it, and it doesn't have a number, it's not going to happen. Just book it. Like, it will not happen. It is a pipe dream.”

“We went from our first institutional round of funding to getting acquired in, in about four years, right? In a two and a half billion dollar exit.”

“If I could go back to that moment in, in 2018, with everything that, that we've learned along the way, we could have added more, we could have added a couple billion more dollars, I believe, to that eventual exit.”

“When we would focus on a four week interval, we had years where we got to raise our annual target 12 times. And that allowed us to grow much faster than if we had operated in any other way.”

“We had everybody who joined the revenue team read the book and write a book report because we believed That extreme ownership at the end of the day was what was going to separate us in many regards.”

“Now, there's a trick to T-three, B-three. You not only do it for your direct reports, you have your direct reports do it for you. So it's bilateral, ok?”

“The budget number is what we would essentially present on to the board. This is the board number. This is the number that come hell or high water, we are not going to miss. And there is some conservatism baked into this number, ok? This is the number that give…”

“If your business today runs on quarters, figure out how to run it in months. You give yourself 12 chances To beat and raise, you give yourself 12 chances to correct mistakes, you give yourself 12 chances to have a higher growth rate at the end of the year.”

“In my experience great marketers love that, and bad marketers run away from that very, very fast. Like, I talk about it a ton in the interview, like, hey, this is how we structure it, and you know, you're gonna be a demand gen person here, and like, this is ho…”

“If something is getting really hard, If you're behind, you need to shorten the cycle even more. So if you're forecasting and you're saying, Hey, I don't think we're going to get there in, in whatever time period you've chosen. We're not going to get there this…”

“Sales. It wasn't just on new logos. It was based on what they did during their first 90 days of implementation.”

“And that's on the, on all three kind of original platforms, if you will, that's Bill, that's Divi, that's Invoice To Go. On the core builds probably around 250,000.”