Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Tenfold allowed laid-off employees to keep their equity
“One of the things that we did is we made sure everyone kept their equity so that they felt like they still had a piece of something, that they still had to share for the work that they had done to get us to where we were, and actually many of those people Actu…”
Insight
Cotton: Leaders executing layoffs must cut as deeply as possible immediately
“When you do these, you've got to go as deep as you possibly can.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Tenfold cut headcount from 200 to 29 at $5M ARR
“So the company was about 200 people before I joined. I took it to 29, and that was at five million in revenue. We went down to 29 people, and it was probably 80% of the 29 that were left were developers”
Insight
Cotton: Startups must exit underperforming sales reps within six months
“We would not let sales reps go past six months if they couldn't build pipeline and perform. And this one's really hard because it's always hard to exit people, but this is kind of general sales culture. And I think in a startup, you really have to be all over …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Tenfold recapitalized to expand the employee equity pool to 50%
“We also were successful at getting 50% of the company back in the hands of the employees. You can imagine raising three rounds of capital now with the types of valuations that we had taken a lot of dilution on, and we were probably down around 15% was what emp…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Tenfold Burned $2M Monthly With Only $2.2M Cash Remaining
“We were averaging about two million dollars a month in burn. We had raised about fourteen million a year the prior two years. And by the time I joined, we had 2.2 million in the bank with two million dollar average burn. And I had about two million dollars in …”
Insight
Cotton: Startups should not raise VC without repeatable demand generation
“I think before you really take on venture capital, you really have to know your business model. Your business model has to be repeatable, and when I say business model, I'm primarily talking about Demand generation. Can you reliably, repeatably generate demand…”
Insight
Cotton: Startups need a path beyond $5M ARR before product expansion
“Once again, getting to five million in revenue and ARR is great but you have to have a sustainable path well beyond five before I think you start to expand a product.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Tenfold had 26 reps generating only $500k ARR bookings quarterly
“But had a sales team of about 26 quarter-bearing reps, and we're only generating about 500,000 dollars in ARR sales bookings a quarter. That's gonna get you killed very quickly and was a big part of what was burning cash without generating a lot of revenue and…”
Insight
Cotton: Companies need $100M revenue at Rule of 40 for viable IPO
“You've got to get to a hundred million with rule of 40 at a hundred million for you to really be on, you know, a potential IPO path.”
Insight
Cotton: Grant OEM partners notification rights instead of ROFRs to spark bidding
“You obviously never want to give a right of first refusal. And we had everyone demand it and ask for it. And in every case we, except for one, actually, we did not successfully get one OEM agreement done because of not granting a rofer. But we did grant notifi…”
Disclosure
Cotton: Tenfold pivoted GTM 100% to channel partners
“And so we pivoted the go to market a hundred percent towards a channel partner based model, which in our business made a lot of sense because we had a lot of natural partnerships because we were an integration platform built into our ecosystem.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Tenfold spent millions annually on unnecessary software tools
“My vendor stack was ungodly. I mean, we were spending millions and millions a year on stuff that we didn't need when a spreadsheet would frankly do the job.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Tenfold delivered 2x to 5x returns on $35M raised
“We had taken on about thirty-five million, just shy of that in total capital. We returned more than two X what we raised, and we, because we'd done a number of rounds, including a down round our investors got anywhere between two and five X, depending on how m…”
