Insight
Derek Steer: $500M mega-rounds are defensive plays to declare category winners
“Once you get into rounds that are this, as big as like this five train round, you know, five hundred million bucks. Part of that investment is defensive where you were essentially declaring yourselves the winner of the space and like excluding other folks from…”
Insight
Buying developer communities fails because technical audiences reject corporate takeovers
“I mean, so for our audience, authenticity is critically important. I think that's true for technical audiences in general. People just smell sales and that kind of thing. And nothing feels worse to me than buying a community, right? Like it just, well, I don't…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Steer in 2020: dbt will be the next major data product
“DBT is kind of the product, right? That's going to be the next thing. And if we were going to build it, we would do it the way that they did it.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mode surpassed a rival Yammer spinout that raised at a $20M valuation
“A different Yammer group had split off and raised immediately, like day one at like a twenty million dollar valuation on a business that, you know, mode has surpassed.”
What-if
Steer: Mode would have found product-market fit faster if super lean
“I wish we had gone super, super lean in the early days because I think we would have found the market faster.”
Insight
Steer: Companies where two-thirds of staff joined recently are always operational disasters
“Because in the companies I've been in, where I look around and two thirds of the people arrived at the company in the last year, It's an operational horror show. It always is.”
Insight
Steer: Corporate blogs have lost value for analytical content
“People don't go there for, you know, analytical content anymore. They go there for the product announcements and that kind of thing, and so in order to do this right, I'm gonna start a new brand. I'm gonna do this on Substack instead”
Disclosure
Mode refuses to unbundle SQL and Python features to preserve seamlessness
“I don't ever want to separate SQL from, you know, Python in mode because the point of the product is that you can move seamlessly between the two. If we break those into separate a la carte items, you know, I don't want our customers to have to choose.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Steer: Mature Mode deployments average 15 to 20 viewers per editor
“You're looking at, for most companies, right, even just a potential set of people, you're looking at between 15 to 20 viewers per editor at, like, a mature mode organization, and it's just based on team size and what's happening, right?”
Disclosure
Mode operated without an experienced customer success leader for six years
“Like we introduced customer success as a department very late in mode's lifetime. And in fact, the old, the first true customer success leader who actually had customer success experience has been at the company for two years.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mode maintained >100% NDR in 2020 despite churning 20% of logos
“So even churning, you know, more than 20% of logos last year, we still had net dollar retention above a hundred because that's incredible. So the way that the product works, right? Like we've never had net retention under a hundred percent.”
Insight
Steer: Workflow virality, not Mode's product alone, drives strong NDR
“A big part of what drives our strong net dollar retention is just the natural virality of the workflow, right? It's not even our product. It's the workflow that we are attached to.”
Insight
Steer: Startups should bring in strategy facilitators at 30 to 40 employees
“I think it's probably never too early for this to really like think deeply about the strategy and then kind of codify that into quarterly cadence and goal setting. I would start maybe as early as like 30 or 40 employees doing this kind of thing with a facilita…”
Opinion
Steer: Legacy BI treats technical data workers merely as metric specifiers
“BI generally, as a category, decides that the technical person's job is to specify the system, right? They build out a menu of metrics, and then The actual analysis or dashboard building or whatever is going to happen by people who aren't professional analysts…”
Insight
SQL books fail analysts by focusing on setup over SELECT queries
“The big problem with SQL as it was taught, like if you were to go buy a SQL book at that time, and maybe even still today it's focused on software development, which means that the first chapters are going to be about setting up your database, getting data int…”
Disclosure
Steer: Mode's SQL Tutorial Drives Hundreds of Thousands of Monthly Uniques
“The other problem was, it turned out that even though these things were driving traffic, it was kind of a drop in the bucket, because we had this sequel tutorial that, you know, now does hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month. These blog posts are li…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Steer: Looker and Tableau are Mode's most frequent competitors
“Yeah, those are the two that we see most frequently.”
Disclosure
Mode monetizes enterprise tiers by upselling security features like Okta SCIM
“From a feature perspective, the way that we upsell is on standard enterprise stuff like Okta skim.”
Disclosure
Mode bought mode.com before announcing Series D to avoid price gouging
“Well, we did it after the round before announcing the round. Which is the right time because like, you don't want someone to be able to go look up the financing amount and be like, these people can pay more.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Steer: Mode has over 10,000 editor users across its customers
“It's above 10,000. It's not in the huge millions.”
Disclosure
Steer: Mode charges a flat list rate of $25 per user monthly
“Well, the thing is that by charging for viewers, we're able to lower the editor price too. So we charge one price across everyone, which is 300, a 10th of what I described to you. Right. So, so 25 dollars per user per month is the list rate.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Derek Steer predicts Mode will end 2021 with NDR exceeding 110%
“Yeah, I guess I'll just say we'll end the year way, way, way north of one 10, like in a true best in class net dollar retention.”
Disclosure
Mode grew as a 95% inbound business and remains primarily inbound
“At the time we were a 95 plus percent inbound business. We've added some outbound into that since, but not a ton, right? It's primarily an inbound business still.”
Disclosure
Mode raised its initial seed round at a $5M valuation
“So I guess it was about 10%, right? The valuation was like in the range of five million, which we, you know, we were just triangulating around like kind of standard YC evaluations at the time.”
