Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Can you tell us that one? How do they use you? What's the name of the company?
A Yeah, absolutely. So this is a manual like John Hancock. So manual life is the overall name and John Hancock is their, uh, DBA in the U S and And at a high level, we started out working with the innovation lab there. It's called Loft, the lab of forward thinking, uh, which is sort of this small group of 20 or 30 people within Manulife whose job it is to go out and find emerging technologies and figure out if there's a way to kind of apply them to, uh, real business use cases. And what we did with them is we actually, and they're a really wonderful team. It was actually very, very happy to work with them. And we, we put together a really, really strong bond sort of over the, about a year that we've Working together. Uh, so their main goal is they wanted to give their investment analysts a better way to read through sort of these large quarterly and annual reports, right? You know, you get In case they come out and these can be anywhere from dozens to hundreds of pages, depending on the company and sort of how rigorous their reporting is. And just reading through that for an investment analyst is extremely time consuming, extremely tiring, especially when, you know, searching through the whole thing, they're usually only looking for a few key pieces of information.
AI assessment note: “So manual life is the overall name and John Hancock is their, uh, DBA”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Which I think last time we came on the show in 2017, you were flirting with this 50 grand a month in revenue. Did you break a million in ARR the year after that in 2720 18?
A Uh, so no, we did not that year. Right. So actually it stayed about flat at, at, at that level. Right. So, and that was a lot of the reason that we had to do the shift, right. Is that, you know, we had, we had some customers that really, really loved us, but it was just not a big enough market. So we were, you know, pretty much flat, you know, some, some wins, some misses, some ups and downs, right. Pretty much flat, um, until we got this next product out. Right. And then, and that's why I really say, you know, you know, we certainly had progress through 2019, you know, as we were doing the product launch. That's really why I say 2020 was the year that like redefined everything.
AI assessment note: “so no, we did not that year. Right. So actually it stayed about flat”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 3 4.45
Q Which I think last time we came on the show in 2017, you were flirting with this 50 grand a month in revenue. Did you break a million in ARR the year after that in 2720 18?
A Uh, so no, we did not that year. Right. So actually it stayed about flat at, at, at that level. Right. So, and that was a lot of the reason that we had to do the shift, right. Is that, you know, we had, we had some customers that really, really loved us, but it was just not a big enough market. So we were, you know, pretty much flat, you know, some, some wins, some misses, some ups and downs, right. Pretty much flat, um, until we got this next product out. Right. And then, and that's why I really say, you know, you know, we certainly had progress through 2019, you know, as we were doing the product launch. That's really why I say 2020 was the year that like redefined everything.
AI assessment note: “Uh, so no, we did not that year. Right. So actually it stayed about flat”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q you have fewer than 50 employees, You're eligible today. Go to NathanLacca.com forward slash Zendesk to get their best customer support tools totally free for six months. Again, that's today, NathanLacca.com forward slash Zendesk. Talk to a little bit about the capital history here, because it's sort of funky, right? mean, raised three million in, in,,, in in,,,,, in in,, in,, in in in in,, in,, in in, in, in,
A And then sort of over the course of the next couple of years, we sort of realized, okay, we can't quite get this business model figured out, right? And, you know, so that's, that's sort of where that, that one point due to that bridge came in. We're like, all right, you know, maybe we can, you know, just finagle this a little bit, and we're just not executing well enough. Then we sort of came to the realization, no, actually, we're executing fine. That's not the problem. The problem is that this business model fundamentally, you know, we need to shift that to the enterprise. And then when Tom came in, that was when we did the next raise, right, which was another four, Right? Um, and then, uh, actually, then we had probably the easiest raise in the world after that, which literally we were, we were kind of looking like, ah, you know, do we want to go out and raise a full, uh, because at that point it would have been like a full A, and we just had so much stuff to do, and, you know, this was twenty-twenty, so, you know, like the, the pandemic stuff was kind of scrolling around, so we just took a smaller inside round, so we did, uh, um, you know, approximately another, uh, another four then, and then And then again, we sort of hit these metrics and they're like, wow, you know, this is really a rocket ship. And then we went out for the series B. So we, we sort of skipped a step in …
AI assessment note: “that's sort of where that, that one point due to that bridge came in.”
Answered produced feed
D 4 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.00
Q this about a lot of CEOs, their egos, uh, worry them when they think about doing a bridge round for a lower amount than their seed. Cause they, they worry the market perception is that they're not doing well. But actually bridge rounds can be very effective for minimizing dilution, right? And growing valuation in the meantime, how did you, how did you manage your own emotions going through that?
A So it's a pretty good question. I like to think that that's something that I'm relatively good at. I mean, one thing for me is that I don't really come at the CEO position from a business perspective, but I'm very much coming more from the engineering design sort of product side. And, you know, even though I'm sure there are a lot of product managers out there that really let their egos get the best of them. Um, and it wasn't a huge problem for me. You know, I think even, even as much as six months to a year before that bridge round happened, we basically were looking around the space and realizing Hey, look, a lot of the companies out there, really, really good companies are still having trouble hitting this product market fit. And we really think that sort of bridge around to get us sort of this extra year of space is going to be the time that we need. Uh, and, and at the same time, you know, we kind of got to, got to clean house, sort of use that as a really good event to get all the investors, all the employees sort of totally aligned in this new direction.
AI assessment note: “it wasn't a huge problem for me. You know, I think even, even as much”