Optimizely

“If you haven't implemented Optimizely, we would actually proxy your website and inject Optimizely into it, so that you get that sort of visceral magical feeling of making a change to your website without requiring a developer.”

“I interviewed the first hundred people at Optimizely, and that means I also interviewed probably the other, you know 209 hundred, whatever people that we didn't hire.”

“Adobe you know, has a product that, you know, has been evolved through acquisitions, which turns what they're offering into what our customers tend to describe as a Franken-sweet. It's a bunch of products that don't really integrate well with one another.”

“If I had to give myself advice to a past version of myself, I think a lot about that, and I think about optimization. I think that it would have actually served us better to be more narrowly focused on a set of customers and deeply empathize with their biggest…”

“We try to seek missionaries, not mercenaries. So people who are really focused on title as part of that process, ah, to me is a red flag. It means that they're about trying to make their LinkedIn profile look good, not how to make our customers wildly successf…”

“I think early on, ah, and still, even to this day, ah, we're very underpriced. People look at our product and, you know, when they're thinking about renewing, they're looking at the millions of dollars of Lyft they're getting, ah, and maybe the hundreds of tho…”

“We didn't have features that people assumed were, ah, must haves, things like multivariate testing. We didn't have that for a year and a half.”

“Why did we start so early codifying our culture? It started really with this pragmatic need to be consistent. We would interview a bunch of people, ah, on a day, and at the end of the day, the interviewers would get together and do a sync meeting. And soon I'd…”

“I think when we invested at the A, your payback period was three or four months.”

“Looking back, what I would, wish I had done differently is, is have a small team of folks working on getting six reference customers who are using the product, paying for the product, and are willing to be public spokespeople for the product as a way, ah, to r…”

“Now, the values are different from the behaviors. The values of transparency, for example, I think are pretty, ah, universal. Behaviors within the organization, such as an early one that we had, which was that every time we'd have a meeting of two more people …”

“So in 2012, ah, we became the number one most adopted website optimization platform in the world. We actually had Obama And Romney using us extensively, which is great.”

“They've seen 70% of the decision gets made before sales person is involved. So they use Optimizely. They've got a team of hundreds of people doing A-B testing, optimization every single day that don't require developers to be involved in the process.”

“I'd rather somebody With a chip on their shoulder, who wants to have an opportunity in our company to prove that they can do great things, ah, than somebody who has the pedigree or resume that says they've done it before.”

“Dan raised a series A when I think you were already ten million dollar run rate. He went from a million to ten million on almost no capital.”

“Whenever we started trying to compete head to head with Optimizely, it just totally flopped. They had a nice WYSIWYG interface, and they sold to marketers. We sold to developers. But if we got in a sales cycle against them, it just completely disintegrated.”