Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Mode operated without an experienced customer success leader for six years

Derek Steer · Can Mode Beat Looker? 140% Net Dollar Retention and 600+ Customers Say Yes! · Oct 18, 2021 · at 17:18

Derek Steer explains how natural organic product virality allowed Mode to delay building a customer success team until six years into the company's eight-year history.

0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Derek Steer

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…”
Derek Steer Oct 18, 2021 ▶ 32:19 Can Mode Beat Looker? 140% Net Dollar Retention and 600+ Customers Say Yes!
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…”
Derek Steer Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 14:56 Mode Grows 95% to $19m ARR, Turning Analysis Into Superhero's
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.”
Derek Steer Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 11:21 Mode Grows 95% to $19m ARR, Turning Analysis Into Superhero's
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.”
Derek Steer Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 19:24 Mode Grows 95% to $19m ARR, Turning Analysis Into Superhero's
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.”
Derek Steer Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 20:55 Mode Grows 95% to $19m ARR, Turning Analysis Into Superhero's
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.”
Derek Steer Jul 14, 2023 ▶ 6:20 The 25 problems you don't need to solve
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 2,600 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.