Silicon Valley

“When I first came out, I was like, holy shit, most of these VCs have no, you know, no idea in regards to tech”

“This is not a one and done. You can't be like, oh, I went to the Bold Force meeting, I went to the Martin Luther King march, I did one pay audit. We're equal. Like, this is something that you decide to commit yourself to, and commit your company to”

“And so outside of Silicon Valley, I think that all of us here are at far more risk of quitting because people just won't believe in what we're doing.”

“In the past five years, my co-founder Dennis and I have built a SaaS company outside of Silicon Valley from zero to sixty million dollars of ARR in four years.”

“Once you have a vision, and once you have the product market fit, you need to, you will only get what out of your business what you expect of it. So if you expect only to ever talk to analysts at these firms, guess what? That's all you'll talk to. But if you d…”

“I think when you know, your first 10 sales hires are guys. It's going to be tough to diversify from there because there tends to be sort of a network effect of how you hire, and I think moving outside your comfort zone early on, and obviously you want to hire …”

“We didn't want to do the typical fundraise announcement where, you know, everyone gets high fives because they raised X dollars at a Y valuation you know, which always seems like an odd thing to celebrate. It's a very Silicon Valley thing to do. It's sort of a…”

“The ability to raise money is what separates the winners From the runners up and the losers.”

“I think the IPO is a really important milestone, and sometimes in Silicon Valley, We treat it more like an exit, but it's only an exit for your private investors. It's a really important milestone for the company”

“There's like, build a viable business which you care about things like profit margin, things like this, or you just sell to a bigger sucker. Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley is based upon the latter of those, and like, the reality is at no point relevant in actu…”

“It works for a couple quarters because you're the only player in the category, but you are a ripe target for a bunch of hotshot engineers here in Silicon Valley to rebuild your product and charge half the price. So be careful about raising your prices unless y…”

“When we think about international expansion in the Valley, we often say, oh yeah, UK or Australia or Canada. And it's you know, or sometimes we'll get really aggressive and we'll say, let's go after Europe. Like we rarely think I spent 10 years of my life in A…”

“I think that if we're going to have more EU Based unicorns and references, we have to be bold, we have to think big, and by the way, I think we are much more resourceful in general. I feel like we're much more resourceful, again, because we have less access to…”

“I think especially in Silicon Valley, the term land grab can be used as a way to rationalize kind of throwing out every business practice and just doing whatever it takes to win. That doesn't actually lead in my opinion to really long-term durable businesses.”

“It's not enough to take the advice of typically Silicon Valley-based, ah, ah, VC companies and say, well, build a productivity model around hiring salespeople, assign productivity to salespeople, and scale your organization in that way, because it turns out th…”

“This conventional wisdom is wrong or at least extremely limiting, and there exists a set of companies that could be built that are often not built that break this rule.”

“So, if you find yourself in this situation, it's probably a sign that you're in a really good category, but you either need to play to win, and go out raise the other guy, or you need to find pivot into some sub-segment where you're not directly competing with…”

“Boston, the IPO is the finish line. It's so come Valley. It's the starting line.”

“When you look broadly, one, the market's super fragmented. There is no, you know, not one person, one, you know, team or one product is dominating everywhere. And two, The sort of, the adoption curve, like, most people are still stuck at just getting the basic…”