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 35 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
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Steer: Looker and Tableau are Mode's most frequent competitors
“Yeah, those are the two that we see most frequently.”
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.”
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.”
Steer: Mode has over 10,000 editor users across its customers
“It's above 10,000. It's not in the huge millions.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
David Sacks agreed to invest on slide two of Mode's pitch deck
“We brought him a deck. And on the second slide, he was like, okay, yeah, I'm in. Let's do it. Like the, it's funny. The second slide was it was GitHub for data”
Derek Steer: Mode's list price is $25 per seat monthly plus platform fee
“So the way that we do it now is we have a platform fee, and then a per seat fee. The list price on the seat fee is 25 dollars per Per person per month.”
Derek Steer: Mode serves around 600 customer logos
“Yeah it's around 600. This is the most recent thing that we published.”
Mode cut per-seat pricing from $250 to $25 per month
“When we think about the way that we expand, you know, that was a part of it was shifting from that pricing model to one that again is now like 25 per seat per month as opposed to 250 per seat per month.”
Steer: Mode's SQL School receives hundreds of thousands of monthly uniques
“And that's been tremendously, I mean, this thing gets hundreds of thousands of uniques a month.”
Mode hired its first sales rep at under $50K ARR
“No, we were at like we were somewhere north of zero and south of 50 K.”
Mode's first sales leader scaled the company from $500K to $10M ARR
“She took the company from like, you know, ballpark, You know, 500 K to ten million.”
Steer: Unvested Yammer equity left behind is worth seven figures annually today
“Well, it's, I'd have to go do some stock math because the, my Microsoft shares at that time were worth a fraction of what they would be better now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at the price now is it was a seven figure annual type type of amount.”