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 10 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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 …”
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”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”