The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Blond: Brex framed Divvy's advanced budgeting features as unnecessary complexity
“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…”
Divvy compensated marketing on closed-won revenue, not MQLs or SQLs
“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.”
Divvy measured brand marketing performance by total organic revenue
“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…”
Snow: Great marketers embrace revenue quotas while bad marketers flee them
“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…”
Snow: Teams should sell a manual version of a product before building it
“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…”
Snow: Initiatives without an assigned name and number will never happen
“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.”
Divvy could have added billions to its $2.5B exit with earlier lessons
“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.”
Divvy raised annual revenue targets 12 times in a single year
“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.”
Divvy required all revenue hires to write reports on Extreme Ownership
“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.”
T3B3 feedback frameworks must be bilateral between managers and direct reports
“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?”
Divvy set board budget numbers with an 80% certainty threshold
“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…”
Operating on a monthly cadence gives startups 12 chances to beat targets
“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.”
Startups missing targets must immediately shorten operational reporting to daily cadences
“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…”
Divvy tied sales compensation to customer implementation success, not just logos
“Sales. It wasn't just on new logos. It was based on what they did during their first 90 days of implementation.”
Lemkin: Multi-billion valuations for Brex, Ramp, Expensify, Divvy changed VC investing behavior
“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.”
Blond: Brex and Divvy were fierce corporate card competitors from 2018–2020
“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, …”
Snow: Competing on economic incentives inevitably triggers a race to the bottom
“It's hard not to race to the bottom if your value is built on on either one of those like underlying economic factors.”
Snow: Divvy reduced CAC by 75% after COVID caused a 30% drop
“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…”
Blond: Brex took bad margins to aggressively undercut Divvy on price
“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.”
Snow: A single newsletter ad generated 900 Divvy demo requests
“And I remember that day, like it was a very pivotal moment for me. Cause we got like 900 demo requests.”
BILL has 250,000 core platform customers out of 475,000 total
“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.”
Divvy consistently beat financial expectations by landing between quota and stretch targets
“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.”
Divvy went from first institutional round to $2.5B exit in four years
“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.”