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Blond: Zenefits raised its 2014 ARR target from $10M to $20M

Sam Blond · Rippling CEO Parker Conrad's Theory of the Compound Startup: Disrupting How We Think About Software · Jun 27, 2023 · at 0:00

Sam Blond, former VP of Sales at Zenefits and partner at Founders Fund, recounts working under Parker Conrad at Zenefits in 2014.

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“One of my favorite Parker stories is I joined in late 2013, so my first full year was 2014, and about a quarter in, we were shooting for a revenue target of ten million dollars by the end of the year. We started at something like half a million dollars of ARR. We were going for ten million. And one quarter in, Parker sat down, myself and the head of marketing at the time, so the go-to-market team. He was like, alright, nobody panic. But I just want to do a quick thought exercise of what it would look like if we switched the goal to twenty million in ARR this year. So we're gonna double it but just like throw stuff up against the wall, see what sticks. And so we went through this, what started as a thought exercise, and I think within 24 or 48 hours we changed the revenue target to twenty million in ARR.”

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