How to know when your company needs to pivot and the signals/principles that will help guide you through pivoting w/ Pete Nichols, Lizzie Matusov, and Tony Dong

Speaker A: I think as like a founder, like, pivoting, like, one of the hard things to recognize is, like, a lot of times the idea itself wasn't bad or even like, timing wasn't bad. It was just like some version of timing or you're not the right person to do it. Right. Like, from every pivot and like, from my previous experience, all the pivots done previously, there are companies successful in that kind of, like, field either at that point in time or later on. Right? It's just like, maybe you were just not the right person. You have to, like, be okay with that.

Speaker B: Welcome to Engineering Founders, the show for engineering leaders making the daring leap to start their own company. This is all about the story of engineering leaders, uh, transitioning to start their own company. And the folks up here have all made that leap in different ways. And I'll introduce and share some context about their stories in a second. But I want to kind of give you, like, uh, a why are we here and why are we doing why? We spend a lot of time doing community around engineering leaders and talking about how to be more effective engineering leader, how to build effective organization, how workflows are changing, all of this stuff. A couple years back, we surveyed the community of engineering leaders, and the results were pretty crazy. It was like something like 60% of engineering leaders in our community were like, I am interested in starting my own company. I am actively working on a project, or I've already started and I'm trying to either get funding or I built a product. We have traction. I'm trying to figure out what's next, which, if you think about our community, that was a pretty crazy number to get confronted by, which is, you know, we have 16,000 people in our community and 60% of them are like, I want to be a founder. And it's like, whoa. So we knew we needed to do some things to tell some stories, because if you think about being a founder, it requires a different mindset to, uh, build strengths around. And as an engineering leader, you kind of optimize for a little bit of a different skill set. There are some things that also make you super effective at founding or co founding too, of which a lot of folks will share. So that's why I wanted to host this event. The other side of this is in this podcast, we asked folks, what's the number one most helpful resource as a founder? 99% of the people, we've done 60 episodes so far. I think only one other person has responded differently is other founders. That's the resource that People share is other founders are the most important resource. So when we thought about bringing people together in person, it was also so you could meet other people. And I think one, build a network of support of ah, people that are on that same journey as you. Even if you're just in the phase of like, I think I want to do something, I don't have an idea. Great, you're going to be around other people that want to do that or if you're like, I've launched something, I'm in early traction, I'm trying to figure out, go to market my first customers. Great. You are also in the space where there are going to be people doing just that. So we knew that that was the most effective source of support for people. We wanted to create that. The other is we wanted to share some specific insights and skills and frameworks that uh, these three have worked really hard to learn, um, and are so generous, uh, to be able to share that with us. So that's kind of the intention tonight is do those two things. The other thing I wanted to share is this is co hosted by our friends at Lightfield. I'll introduce more about Pete in a moment. Um, Pete's been a longtime supporter of elc. I'll share some more about that in a second. So here we are back in his home turf. But uh, so Pete, do you want to give a quick intro to Lightfield? What do you do? And just do a quick share.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we're Lightfield and we have built a CRM. It's been uh, out in the market for about four months now. The very short version of this is Lightfield is a CRM that keeps itself up to date. It's the CRM that you can interact with using natural language, uh, which both have just a dialogue with to accomplish something. But you can also guide it and teach it and program it to be the CRM that you really need to grow your business. We've initially focused on earlier stage companies, many of whom are adopting a CRM for the first time. But we also have a lot of customers now that are moving over like fairly substantially sized sales teams from other existing CRMs that you've probably heard of or maybe you've worked on them. So, um, I can tell you a lot more, show you a lot more about what Light Field actually is. It's a lot of fun to talk about.

Speaker B: They also spent a lot of time in the go to market space and thinking about that too. So Pete's um, got a lot of really great insights to Share. So I'm so excited to introduce these three. So, uh, I've known all three of them for quite a long period of time. They've been on the Engineering Founders podcast and share some of their stories. There's a couple key details that I want to highlight. So number one, Pete, back in the earliest days of elc, hosted an ELC meetup at Pinterest when he was an engineering leader there. He has helped contribute to some of the earliest days of ELC and why we are here today. Uh, so thank you, Pete. Tony's been involved with ELC also for an extensive amount of time. He has spoken at our conference a couple of different times. He's facilitated roundtable discussions, and he also is building within the dev tool space, impacting a lot of how we build today. So we've done a lot of cool intersections with Tony. I'm not going to spoil what he does because we're going to ask him about that in a second. Um, and Lizzy and I have known each other for a long time. A good friend of mine has spoken at our conference, has facilitated roundtables, has facilitated different fireside chats, and she has done a ton of deep research in the field of engineering, management, engineering, leadership. Ask her about some of the research and insights. Like she'll have a report to point you to and like evidence back things to look at. So they're friends of mine, they come from wildly different industries, uh, or not come from, but like they are working on very different problems in product spaces. Uh, they have all pivoted pretty dramatically in different ways. And so the goal here is they're gonna be able to expose you to a lot of different paths of being a founder. So that's gonna be the fun part is like this compare and contrast from all these different things. So, um, they're important people to me and I want to share them with you. You know, Tony, you're right next to me first. So the goal here is everybody here has pivoted from their first idea. The prompt for your opening question is what was the first idea? And then what do you pivot to? What did you pivot to now?

Speaker A: So it's kind of interesting because this is actually my second startup, so gone through pivot hell for both startups and both ideas. Uh, for this particular company, we actually started life as a go to market tool. So more adjacent to CRM, uh, was a kind of category called Partner Relationship Management. Prm. Uh, we've kind of iterated through a bunch of spaces and now where we Are today as of now a year is we are propel code. We uh, leverage kind of like what we think of it as, uh, tech lead level intelligence and capability to provide code review and feedback for engineering teams.

Speaker B: So go to market. Pivot to code review. Pivot. Pretty crazy, right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, here, the other side. Yeah.

Speaker B: Lizzy, what about you?

Speaker D: Okay. Um, hi, I'm Lizzie. Thank you for the wonderful intro. Um, okay, so where we started, I'm um, like how many tumbles back? Um, the first idea that we went out to market with was a hiring tool that um, more accurately identifies engineering candidates based on skills and capabilities and not credentials. Uh, so that's how we started. Uh, and then what we do now is we are an engineering operations tool that focus on the insights, actions and impact that engineering, uh, leaders want to see as their systems kind of transition with AI. So the story I always give is like your engineers are probably writing more code with AI. Does that mean that they're delivering more value to their customers right now? If there is a gap or a delta quotient kind of exists to discover those bottlenecks, Sometimes it's code review, um, surface those and then help you track the impact of those changes as you go.

Speaker B: I love like it's just wild like comparing these stories right next to each other, like as you kind of share it. Like it's, it's really fun. Pete, what about you?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we were um, originally a company built around an AI slides presentation tool. We were under a different name at the time. You might know us as Tome. Um, um, it was a pretty big breakout hit at the time. Uh, we ultimately pivoted from that and it's a. I'll try to do the short version of this from that into uh, an AI sales assistant, which came out of uh, a bunch of things that we learned helping salespeople create presentations with. With tome. That AI sales assistant was not a CRM. It was meant to sit atop CRMs and was really enterprise focused. And it was from that that we pivoted into, let's just, let's just build a CRM. This is the best way that we could possibly help people who work in sales. And part of that pivot was us deciding to focus on earlier stage companies with the intent that we would grow with them, but also with like also I would say informed by our, some of the experiences and challenges we had of trying to be a startup selling directly to enterprise. Uh, and we were, we got to be our own customer. We were an early stage startup who needed a CRM. And that kind of factored in, uh, to where we decided to focus as well.

Speaker B: Building something that accelerates you is kind of a cool position to be in, or like, your tool is actively powering your success.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, if, um, if you can build a tool that you, like, not only love to use, but, like, desperately need to use in order for your business to be successful, that is, like, it, uh, really sharpens the focus around what you actually need. And when the people who are trying to do GTM and sales at your company are like, I can't work unless you guys add a particular feature, that's pretty clear.

Speaker B: So some initial reactions from you three, like, hearing everybody's kind of pivot. One, do you feel like you're among kindred spirits? Like, reaction to sort of hearing people and kind of some of the dramatic shifts in terms of product, space, industry, things like that? Um, I don't know, like, how do you react or respond to pivots?

Speaker D: I think for me, uh, I hear this and I'm like, ugh. Like, this is the hard work of really, like, running a company is when you have to really set aside your ego and, like, look at the situation in front of you and decide, like, is this the best path forward for the company, or should we take another direction? It is so much easier said than done. It is one of the hardest things. This probably gets easier. Doing it more times. I think I've done it twice now. Um, but it is a very human feeling. You have to manage your own ego and then think about what is the end goal that I'm trying to achieve.

Speaker A: I think it's a founder pivoting. One of the hard things to recognize is a lot of times the idea itself wasn't bad or even timing wasn't bad. It was just some version of timing or you're not the right person to do it. From every pivot and from my previous experience of all the pivots done previously, there are companies successful in that kind of, like, field either at that point in time or later on. Right. It's just like, maybe you were just not the right person. You have to, like, be okay with that.

Speaker C: Um, when I was, uh, working at Pinterest, uh, I was there a bunch of years after the company was initially founded, but before it was public. Um, and the sort of, um, simplified story always felt like, to me, like, ah, oh, these, like, two people met each other and they had, like, a good idea and then they built it, and it became, like, this enormously popular, uh, like, product and isn't that amazing? And then the more that you sort of learn about the history of. I think any company I learned, like, oh, like Pinterest wasn't their first idea. There's like another app before that, at least one that I knew, that I know of, and that wasn't a secret. Um, but it's sort of something. I think that when people, uh, are writing news articles about a company or something like that, they want, like, this clean, simple story. And that's sort of how I always sort of perceived it. And then the more that I learned about this, the more I realized I don't know what the statistics are, but I would bet that more it's probably more common to have pivoted than of not to have pivoted. At least that's what I come to experience it. So, uh, that, uh, was surprising. It doesn't match the fairy tale exactly.

Speaker B: I think that was my intention with wanting to open up with the pivot. Because if you're sitting here and you're like, um, I'm playing around with some ideas, I, uh, think my intention was there's a pretty high percentage likelihood that that may not be the thing you land on and it may open up the next idea. And so I wanted to kind of start with this sort of intention, first of build that idea. And now we're going to get kind of tactical to talk about the assessing the validation and determining if that's working. So I want to kind of zoom in on all of your specific stories to, I guess, the sign or the signal that made you think or helped you and your teams realize, oh, we should probably do something different. Was there a sign or a signal? Maybe you didn't recognize it live, but in retrospect, that helped you kind of work through that decision. Um, so maybe that specific trigger or the specific signal that indicated we need to pivot.

Speaker A: So the way we kind of approach, at least the initial product is very regimented. You do the customer research, you do the customer calls, you reach out to people in your network. You have a perspective on, uh, where the landscape is shifting. In our case, it was like, hey, everyone's going to leverage more partners like Accenture, bcg, et cetera, to deploy AI products. This is how people have historically done it for every single iteration of a transformer technology. So I think there are a lot of things that went into it felt like, hey, this was the right thing, the right idea. We did all the customer validation, willingness to pay. I think some of the things that really started to crystallize as we started to actually build the product, actually sell it to customers, actually move the product is one is, I think we got too trapped into more or less the echo chamber of the people in Jason who were early adopters. And then we started to look beyond our buyer profile to beyond just the companies, the people in our network or in my network. And then started to see a lot more friction in terms of what the actual buying process looks like for these enterprise companies. And then the other thing was the market that was candidly just wrong. We saw the shift or were thinking about the shift. It just wasn't progressing in the same way of bring on partners to be able to do this. And then I think a lot of it is also a lot of companies are in housing this aspect of it, right. So they're kind of like hiring for deploy engineers. They're hiring these like the consultant equivalents within the company. So that kind of idea of like, hey, this being more of like company to company relationship management being meaningful just like didn't uh, really materialize. Right.

Speaker B: That's great. Comparing and contrasting. Pete Lizzie, when you think about like your own journey, like, how did that kind of match up to like the signs and signals that impacted what you were looking at?

Speaker D: Well, actually, I have a question for you. Um, after that, how did you get to code reviews? Did you just restart the discovery process with a new hypothesis or did you like learn something along the way that took you there?

Speaker A: Yeah, so that's a great setup for me to follow up for the code review part. It was really around iterating, kind of like being in the arena. You're like, hey, the problems us, we're facing actually on day to day on the engineering side was around code review. Right. Because we were at this point in time, cursor had started to become a thing. Um, this was March last year. So Claude literally just started to launch. The amount of code that gets generated was like exponential. But we weren't really seeing the output of, hey, why are we generating all this code and we can't make it to production? We started to try out a bunch of different tools in the space, all the different competitors, grabtile code rabbit, you can name it. We tried it and they were all just candidly not that good not to like talk down.

Speaker B: I don't think anybody here representing any of those companies.

Speaker A: So I mean, just like, you know, at least at that point in time, it just didn't work. So we're like, you know, we're trying to figure out like, oh, maybe something that we try to build in house and try to figure out if we can build something better. We prototype something that was working at least as effectively in like a two weeks sprint. And then we started to like go through that rediscovery process. We went through a bunch of buyers. This time we went a little bit bigger as well as smaller. We tried to go through the entire process of willingness to pay. How big of a problem is this? What does your deployment look like? Uh, would that look like to bring us in? And that was the reset, that process before we decided, hey, this is the right, uh, kind of area to go forward.

Speaker B: There are a couple of key elements there that I want to put a pin in because you're talking about went after higher customers, bigger customers, and then um, bigger buyers, and then a more thorough process around willingness to pay. So I want to put a pin in that because I think those are some sort of like some process and tactics want to dig into there. Yeah, physique don't have any expanding.

Speaker D: Um, okay, my first, I would say my first pivot is not as interesting as the second pivot, but I'll still give the. So yeah, we were like a hiring tool. And then um, we basically followed the insight that like one of the challenges that. And this was like 2022, 2021, 2022 essentially where we basically discovered this insight that like okay, hiring, like if there's an explosion happening in hiring, but really like the challenges that people are having was they were bringing in this new talent and struggling to make them effective within the time window they wanted. And we have only ever worked at an engineering domain. And so we sort of were like, okay, well what if we could basically find a way to sort of standardize through best practices and research, um, this way to basically ensure that we can onboard new engineers within whatever a certain time frame, four to six weeks, super effectively have the data to prove it. What would that do for a company? Because a lot, in a lot of organizations, especially bigger ones, it could take up to six months for an engineer to actually be effective. Again. This is pre AI. This was 2021. You have to like remember what the world looked like back then. It has changed so much. Like thank goodness we pivoted away. So what we, um, you know, we did a very similar exercise to you started with a bunch of discovery within our network. Um, there's a great book called the Mom Test that I highly recommend. If you haven't seen, you can get a free PDF online that helps you understand how to ask questions of Your so they're not like patting you on the back and saying, I love your idea, but rather giving you honest feedback on if this is a need to have. Um, and we got it into the market in our first few companies and then when we started figuring out how do we charge people in a way that makes this like a scalable business, frankly, a venture backed business, like, the math just did not line up and we realized like the willingness to pay was not as high as what we would need in order for this to be a scalable company. And I think that's a separate topic that I'd love to talk about any time, is that founders and the way that they, their relationship to money really impacts their company, um, both in how you spend and also in how you go out and sell, especially if you're going to be the like, seller of the founders. So we can talk about that later. But, um, as we were going out and building this, a lot of people came to us and said, we guys have a really unique way of thinking about effective engineering teams. Do I have to have a new engineer onboarding in order to use this to like figure that out? And we were like, why do you ask? And so we started kind of pulling on that thread with other customers and we're in a market that's not, you know, it's not a new market. You know, we've got like companies like Sleuth and Linear Beam Codeclimate that started in like 2014 and then, you know, more recently a couple companies like DX and Span. Um, but what we kept hearing from people is like, there's a lot of solutions out there, but I still have this problem I can't seem to solve and I'm willing to pay a lot of money for it. And so that's kind of how we started following the insight. Um, we had a unique take on the market and how we wanted to solve that problem and ultimately like, that was what gave us the legs to our current company.

Speaker B: It's really cool. Interesting to see the specific, because both of you referenced very specific conversations either that you have with customers or your team and how that unlocked an insight around what this pivot would look like. It's interesting, Pete.

Speaker C: Yeah, definitely some things that overlap there for sure. I think one of them is like experiencing people saying like, I really like this product, but there's some kind of limitation in terms of the size of the market or what people are willing to pay. Where you go like, hey, there's like a chance for some success in revenue here. But not a company that we can ultimately build and scale the way that we want. Um, so we, we felt some of those things and they were combined with us really similar like discovering and chasing pain and going like, hey, we want to, we want to help people make great presentations. Um, one of the groups we want to focus on is salespeople. Uh, like they have to make presentations. Let's learn from them. And um, they said this sort of reminds me of your story. They said, I can't convince my company to switch slide formats, but other things that you're doing to help me prepare for my next sales meeting are really useful. Just have that. Um, and then as we started focusing on ah, a very sales specific product, um, we learned more things there that included like, you didn't really find people that loved their CRM. Um, uh, in fact we found a lot of people that really did not love their CRM. And that was sort of another sort of follow the pain and follow what people are actually saying. Even if it's different from the like the product that you're building. You're like, this is really cool. We built this thing. And they're like, yes, but I also have this other pain. I think that it was worth being curious and following some of that stuff because it led us to the product that we ultimately wound up building today.

Speaker B: Can we dive in a little bit? Because I think also the environment that you're in, there was a lot of signals of success of tome. There was 25, 30 million people using the tool. So there's also these things that it's like, oh, but this is working. And you have to kind of wrestle with it. But we're getting this adjacent pain that we see as more valuable. I don't know if you can speak to some of the things at play. There's.

Speaker C: Yeah, and that was a, um, that, that was not like a day or a week where we're like, oh, we have some new information. Let us now make a decision. It was like a protracted months long, like we should build both at the same time. And um, you know, a lot of people that were working at the company are working because they wanted to build like a consumer product at scale. And so I was going like, oh no, we're going to build an enterprise like AI sales assistant. They were like, I don't like, I get why that's interesting to build, but that is totally not the company that I joined. And what does that mean if a lot of people don't want to work here anymore? If this is what we're building. And yes, um, we're like, it's not. There may be some limitations and challenges in that building in that business, but we also have this. And, um, how do you walk away from something that's really working? It took a lot. We built in parallel, or at least supported the old project in parallel for a really, really long time because of that. Um, I think ultimately some of it's data and some of it's just like, what's your gut about what you can build? Um, and there's a lot of signals. Um, and like, do you chase something you ultimately think is a bigger idea but is unproven? And, um, that's what we decided.

Speaker B: I think that last statement really sets the stakes for this next topic I want to get into is, like, now the validation process and some of the tactics or frameworks or mental models that you use. TONY M. I'm going to bring it to you first. I know we've been kind of, like, leaning on you, but one of the things that, like, from our conversations that really stood out to me was like, you did this whole mo. You did this whole process around analyzing your competitive advantage and anchoring your pivot around that. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that framework and how it applied to your pivot. So specifically, we want to get into validation how you validated this is the right customer segment, how you validated the right product, how you validated this is the right market. Um, and so I want to dive in. Competitive advantage, I thought, was a really powerful framework.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, I think one of the common kind of like, underlying threads across all these conversations is around the customer itself. Right. So I think specifically, if we were to, like, unwind one step back, like originally selling to kind of like the partnership people that kind of like, selling the prm. One of the things that I just didn't fully comprehend at that moment in time, it's like, kind of sounds dumb in retrospect, is that basically partnership folks are, you know, with all love, they're like, more like people pleasers. They're like, very much like, going to, like, tell you what you want to hear. So there's always like, you know, would you pay for this product? It's like, of course. This is so valuable. But then, like, when. Kind of like we actually went to market, when people are actually like, like, okay, well, can you, like, go, like, talk to your procurement person? Like, there's always that, like, kind of, oh, uh, like, yeah, next week or they're on vacation. You know, all these like excuses that don't end up converting to a thing. Right. I think one recognition there was like, it was just like didn't understand the customer maybe as well as I originally thought. And as we kind of like started to build in this more engineering focused space, the nice thing is like, you know, we're building for a product that I would use, but also a buyer profile that I understood a lot more. Right. I knew how engineering leaders were going to think. I knew how like evaluation processes work. I knew how like to unlock that budget. What like thing to like say to say like, hey, this is going to invoke that like you're going to buy it, then this doesn't have to be like, hey, everyone should go build a devtools product or should go build in space. But I think it's more around like, you should understand your customer a lot better. And I think in that first go around, uh, with this company at least, like I understood the customer way less than I actually, uh, thought I did.

Speaker B: What do you both think about that? The understanding the customer principle?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean it's huge. Uh, yeah. And I also echo your perspective. Like, uh, in some ways selling to engineering leaders, which you all are, is a blessing because it's very direct and honest. And then if you choose, especially if you're out in consumer, um, or if you're selling to other departments, you oftentimes really have to think about like, well, how do we. Yeah, how, how do I make sure that what I'm hearing from them is like, this is a need to have. I think that's the other thing too. I think before starting a company, like, I understood this concept of like a need to have in some ways, but I didn't really know like what that actually means in practice. Like when somebody needs a tool, like, you know, think about uh, where you guys are today and what you guys are working on. Like, probably pretty busy day to day. There's probably a lot going on. And so if some company shows up and is like, hey, I have this like unproven early company. Do you want to give it a try? Like, you're gonna have to have a pretty serious problem to be like, you know what, it's worth it, I'll give it a try. Or like, I have 12 things on my plate, but I'm going to add the 13th because I think this is going to solve some of the things on my plate. Like, I don't think I really internalized that when I first started the company that like, for Somebody who's paying for this, it has to be really worth their precious time to go run out and figure out procurement and, like, go and talk to their boss and bring in, like, these three other leaders who are probably also really busy. And again, this is speaking more from the enterprise perspective. I think consumer, um, is very different. But I think, yeah, like, really honing in on, like, what is actually going to make their lives easier. And then how do I speak their language in a way that I can basically say, like, if you trust me, and we go on this journey together, like, your life will be easier. And here's the data. I will show you to prove it.

Speaker A: That's great.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Validation methods. Pete, when you thought about, like, post pivot, like, was there a process, a framework, a specific activity that helped validate that, you know, this was in the right direction?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, we spent a lot of time talking with, like, um, potential customers. A lot of it came from, uh. I guess I'll say a couple things about it. I think a lot of it we learned kind of while learning about sales and interacting with sales for the, like, the previous product kind of built, like, on itself as well. And then, um, you know, I also think to some degree, we were fortunate that, like, if you're doing sales, you need a CRM. So it wasn't sort of a question of, like, hey, do people need this thing? It was more a question of, uh, can we build one that is notably more effective in some way? Uh, uh, which is a different set of questions that you're sort of coming after. And it also was like, yeah, we think we can, but we kind of need to build some of this first to show it to people and demonstrate why it could be different and better. Because I think, like, a lot of products, if you talk about it on the very surface and go like, yeah, let's say different CRM. And they're like, uh, okay, so, like, hold my data and I'll be able to update it. Um, they're like, no, no, no. It's going to be, like, different. And you have to be able to, like, at least describe some. But we had to kind of build it and figure out how it was going to be different and better ourselves as well.

Speaker A: I mean, I think that's the interesting thing about any of these products. Or some of it is like, net new customers. Some of it's like rip and replace. Right? The rip and replace. How much political capital you need to, like, go actually make a thing for that. How much, like, change management you need to Manage for all this thing. It's like crazy. Like you have to like have something that differentiates, something that like people are willing to do all these things for.

Speaker C: In our um, one of our particular strategies was to start early with folks who are adopting a CRM for the first time. Um, because like a lot of that was driven by what it was like to try to get into enterprise sales deals and be like, oh, this is going to take like six months to get to, um, and it might be worth nothing at the very end of that and it's going to be this incredible journey or it might be worth like a lot and it'll go really well. But um, uh, we realized, hey, if we're going to learn, we need people to come into the product and use the product. Um, and it's not that like starting with enterprise isn't a viable way to build a company. I don't think that. But for us it was a big benefit to be able to start early and just go like, we need folks that'll come in and so if they're like, hey, I'm like looking for something uh, that is simpler, um, more affordable. Um, I've got some data in a spreadsheet. Sure, I'll give you guys a try. This seems more appealing than other things. That was uh, a very effective strategy for us to just get as much feedback as fast as possible as we could.

Speaker B: So we've talked about pivots will happen. We've dove into some of the tactics around pivoting and some of the different methods of validation. Um, I think one more follow up question, Lizzie. When you think about post quotient's pivot, was there a specific process or system that you introduced to help validate the path? Was there any kind of a rigorous structure or activities that you found, got a lot of good signal around new versions of quotient?

Speaker D: Yeah. Um, so there was like, yeah, this, this question or this sort of pull that we were starting to feel. And so we, we try to run everything as like a series of experiments where we like have a hypothesis, we have some success metrics and then we go out and run the test. And I think that framing also helps because again it's as uh, analytical people, it's much easier to look at data from an experiment and then use that to sort of drive your next steps than to be like, I think we should do X. And then suddenly you have to feel like maybe you were wrong because you didn't understand. Like I just structure everything as experiments. So when we first Heard this insight of like, we should move downstream. I think we ran, um, we basically ran like three cohorts of experiments where we had like five companies. And again, like, we could talk about how we pulled those companies in. We essentially had like three rounds of five companies where we tested a slightly different version of the value proposition. We thought, thought we were hearing people wanted. Um, and then basically just looked at those numbers and we saw like, okay, what is the speed of which they're moving from initial discovery to demo and demo to procurement, and then how many of them are actually signing up and running a real pilot? Because in enterprise, like, pilots oftentimes take a lot of energy just to get to.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: You have to prove there's a budget and get the right people involved and do success criteria. And so we just looked at that and said, if none of these work, then the foundation of this is wrong. And if some of these work, then we can start refining into, like, what are they looking for? And for us, it was very much like the research angle was drawing people in because they were feeling like they were lacking that expertise on how to manage all of this data. Um, and then the second thing was also like, you know, if we can save them time on analyzing metrics and instead focus on what are the insights and actions I should be taking from these, you know, 50 plus data points and really focus on that, that driving next steps and then proving it had measurable outcomes, um, that would land much more too. So, like, all the experiments that lean towards that did much better than the ones that were just like, you know, fight for more metrics, basically. Um, and that's how we started to like, formulate, you know, more of that, um, I guess, like differentiated perspective or our take on the market.

Speaker B: Were you surprised by the inbound from the newsletter? Like, for. So for context, you know, um, a person emailed me like two weeks ago and was like, do you know Lizzie? Like, I follow her Ardell newsletter and it like, helps me shape about how I think about engineering leadership. And I was like, yeah, I do know Lizzy. Like, check it out. So, like, I personally know how it's been like an inbound channel for you for like discovery. Like, were you surprised by that?

Speaker D: Um, yes. Like, initially we first. So we had an internal. It's funny, RDL is like a very organic thing, if anyone hasn't heard of it. It's called Research Driven Engineering Leadership. Every week we basically summarize the latest research on developer, like, productivity, AI, its impact on productivity, how to measure it, like all of Those things, um, we just take the latest paper and then quick context, this is what the study showed and then here's how you can apply it as an engineering leader, um, try to be a little bit contrarian at times, especially like counterculture with what you see on the headlines. We started it because we were internally analyzing a lot of papers. We became this research lab for a couple months where we were like, if we're going to do this, we need to prove we understand why we're different. And a lot of that is if we can show data from research, that is one of the best ways to communicate to engineering leaders. That's what I love to see. It's what other people love to see. And so we wrote up all these papers and then I would be in calls with like, you know, engineering leaders and I'd be like, oh, there's this like, this is interesting study. Exactly. Validating this like thing you're experiencing. Let me send you the paper. And I'd send them this like, you know, whatever link to archive. And it was like a 50 page paper and I was like, they're never going to read it. Like that, that was, that was a dead end. And so we started thinking like if we could summarize it and make it easy to share, would that help influence some of the perspectives that we're older ultimately trying to drive? Which has been really helpful. I would say it's actually much more helpful for brand awareness and for like throughout the sales conversations. And that's because we've distinctly tried to keep quotient the company a bit more separate from Ardell the newsletter. Because we want that to continue to give value to engineering leaders and not make them feel like they're being sold to like that's like the research benefited our company, we want it to benefit all leaders. And then if you wanted a tool that basically takes that research and best practices into a single product, then you can come reach out to us, I think.

Speaker B: Thank you for sharing that. So we've now shifted into the go to market side of this conversation. The other side of this in tandem is like, Tony, I want to talk a little bit about some of the building in public that you've been doing and how that's also sort of impacted this inbound channel. And so can you share a little bit about what that journey has been like, what surprised you and what have you learned just from a lot of what you're doing is building in public and showing a lot of the value?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, we definitely do some of it. I Wouldn't classify myself as we're building in public, as publicly visibly as some of the other companies. But I think it does help to just generally show that, kind of show what we're doing, have continuous updates with people like, hey, here's the progress we're making, here's the interesting thought pieces around what we're actually doing. Here's for example, some of the recent changes around how we're shifting away from being in the GitHub or GitLab or BitBucket process to more of like, hey, here's how we get into your agent flow and here's how we actually integrate with your existing coding agents to be able to provide the same value, the feedback, the kind uh, of outcomes, but in a slightly different way and kind of helps people shift a little bit into their mindset. It's kind of in this collaborative mode of people wanting to understand basically how do I, like a lot of the conversations are like, how do I actually deploy coding agents? How do I build like a background coding agent for my company? How do I do all these things? You're like kind of like part time consultant, part time, like kind of uh, selling your product. It's a little bit in between. But I think it helps to just publicly talk about it because like some of it is just a lot like shared learnings. Right.

Speaker B: Um, there's one other thing. I think this is an interesting connection between Pete and Tony. So like Tony, one of the conversations you and I had was about the principle of speed to value and creating a wow moment with a product and trying to do that within the first five minutes. And I see a lot of those patterns in light field as well in terms of this focus on as people use this experience, they have this super easy, fast wow experience. And so there's also this design as a differentiator. Because I'm thinking about the stakes that you were talking about in the enterprise. You're working with somebody who has to have a lot of political capital, spent a lot of their political capital to run up like the whole evaluation process. And there's like this element of like speed to value and design and like that experiencing like joy in the product that um, makes that a little bit less hard. I don't know. I don't know, Pete, like, if there's anything that kind of resonates or like things that you've seen within light field, I mean, we'll start with you. And then like Tony, if you want to kind of talk about like speed to value in the wow moment.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean for us, like, I imagine a lot of products these days demonstrating that like, you're bringing tremendous value with AI, not just like, I mean for a while we talked about ourselves as an AI CRM. I don't really say that anymore because I think every product has AI in it. So, uh, but demonstrating that that is like, um, real and deeply integrated and providing some kind of very powerful, unique, unique value are like, I would say, my favorite version of this at the moment. Um, we now run your onboarding, uh, which is often one of the roughest parts of like, and why people don't want to move CRMs, even if they go like Light Field 1's pretty cool. I would really like to be inside, but how will we migrate? Because it's usually this really painful field mapping. We built uh, a feature where an agent runs that for you and you drop CSV files in and the agent goes to work and goes like, all right, I think we want to map fields this way. I'm going to have to create some additional fields. Okay, cool. Now I'm going to write some Python code to handle the migration for you. And what I love about that is like, it's very like, like almost everyone's had to move data from one place to another and it's like, oh, that is rough. Um, and then when you see the agent using all these tools and writing code and solving a very specific, painful thing, you know you're going to have to go through. I think it sets a nice tone for what is this going to actually be like? Um, if I bring this to my team and we ultimately go through this, are they going to be impressed? Are they going to be like, like you all said, there's a person there is going out on a limb whose job it is to make the company more successful and has been entrusted with this decision and they're going to hear a ton of feedback if, um, even if they make the right decision, this change management and a bunch of things like that. So, uh, having a ton of understanding and empathy for that, that they're both going to need to like build confidence right from the get go. But they're also going to want to get in deep with you and understand that uh, in our case, if you store all like the entire story of your company and how it sells inside of it, we're not going to lose it or forget it or do any number of things which would be really damaging.

Speaker B: I really, I really like this idea of like finding the hardest part of using your product and building a really Elegant, intentional process around that. Because that to me seems like this isn't maybe a direct correlation, but I think about the moment when, uh, anthropic was like, hey, we'll help you export your context from OpenAI and it'll be really easy because that's. Oftentimes people are like, oh, I don't want to use a different tool because that was all my context. So I'm trying to think about other use cases of that same principle. Um, and I think that's a really powerful way to build in that type of experience. Your product is like, can you make, like, what's the hardest part about using that friction? Can you make that easier? I think that's really, that's really cool.

Speaker D: I'd also say too, like, in the early days, again, I'm maybe a little bit more biased towards enterprise here. Um, but in the early days, like, people are kind of trusting like you, like, they're buying, like, your expertise. You kind of mentioned the consulting side of things. And like, early time, like in the earlier days, like, people will say, like, I have this problem, can, and I'm trusting you to fix it. Like, uh, they're almost kind of accepting that your product as it is, might not be the perfect solution, but, like, the product plus you and the team and the commitment to sort of like helping them drive those outcome is what they're paying for. And in a lot of cases, they end up getting like, outsized value from that because, like, what a human being does, like the hand holding that we all probably did with our first 10 customers is like, not something you would do for the next hundred. But, um, I think that that like, yeah, like, you're looking for those moments of magic. And sometimes there's this concept of like, wizard of Ozzing, where you basically, like, you make it look like the product maybe did it, but actually, I don't know. They dumped the CSV file, they uploaded it, and it just went to an S3 bucket that you went and grabbed. And we're like, we're gonna write our own scripts and figure this shit out and then send it back. And it looks like magic, but actually it was us doing work to make sure that that was worth people paying for. Um, so I would say, like, in the early days, those moments of wow or magic might just be like you behind the scenes solving it and then being like, great, and are you gonna pay for it now?

Speaker C: Yeah, I agree with the, like, they're buying you. And that's a, I think, a standard, almost cliche about venture Capital as well. Right. Like, they're investing in the people. Um, it's a cliche and it's true. I think, um, as much as the idea. And I think that's the same goes when you're like, um, when you're trying to sell somebody a product, uh, uh, that's going to help their company run better. For sure. We have gotten the feedback that says, like, hey, we're going to go with your CRM. It doesn't actually do everything that this other CRM does today, but the things it does, it does really, really well. And we see how fast you're shipping and we've built trust with you. Um, and so we want to be on, like, we're on the ride with, with you all. And like, that makes sense. Like, I've definitely. We've, like, a lot of us are engineers, probably bought at least one thing. And you're interacting with salespeople that, like, our thing is that like, everyone says their thing is the best. It all demos pretty well and you're like, I don't know, like, which of these. Like, like they all have the same features on the back of the box of which of these am I going to go with? A lot of it can come down to, like, do I think this person is going to help me solve problems, um, and react when I have issues, or am I going to get shunted somewhere to, uh, a customer support channel, uh, when I run into a problem? And that's a lot of what people are buying with their money.

Speaker B: I have one more question about sales, and then we're going to be transitioning into discussion, so. And, uh, I'll be running to get an additional microphone in a second. So this is just like questions around pivoting validation problems you want to work out. Like, this is the space to kind of surface. Like, hey, I'm focused, I'm dealing with this problem. Should I pivot? Should I not? How do I know I'm getting validation? Um, thoughts on go to market, so be ready. Um, so I wanted to kind of the final question is, I mean, Pete and I were joking about this. It's like, how do you get your first customer? How do you do sales? Like, how do you get your first customer? And I don't know if that's a really general conversation. So maybe we focus on the first time you observe repeatable sales and you're like, ah, uh, this new idea is working. So bring us into like, that first moment and some of the things that you're thinking about. That's like, okay, we've pivoted, we're in the right direction, We've gotten validation, and now, like, go to market is working. Is there a moment? I know, Lizzie, you were nodding your head in enthusiasm. So I was like. I was like, okay, I'm like, speaking

Speaker D: of my pain points right now. Um, no, I've. A funny thought crossed my mind, which I'm like, I'm in a room of engineering leaders, so I can share this candidly. Like, you know, I grew up in engineering, and I feel like in many of the companies that I worked in, like, sales was this other over here, and engineering was. And a lot of times they'd be like, oh, uh, sales. Just like, Bob, this request, like, how dare they? Like, we're better than them. And like, now that I have the experience of having, like, done all of our early sales, and I'm now, like, growing the sales function, I'm like, we can use a little empathy for how crazy that world is. Like, it turns out sales is so hard. Um, and in many ways, I wish I could crawl back into some of my engineering tendencies and escape some of this. So, um, you know, the. I would say, like, that transition from, like, the first maybe, like, two, three, four customers to, like, we're starting to repeat it. It takes a lot of trial and error. I think, like, one thing that has humbled me most about the sales experience and I've had to do some reframing, is like, you know, you go out and raise money and we can always talk about that. And it's like, you know, you walk in and you're like, I'm expecting whatever, 20, 30, 50 rejections, but I'm looking for. It's a search problem. I gotta search. And then you go to sales, and you're like, wow. The search problem is only crazier because every, like, you. If you're doing things right, you need to be talking to prospects on a daily basis. Like, getting people in the door, getting a lot of rejections, like, 25% close rate. Great. That means 75% of them shut the door in front of you. And you got to be able to say, like, okay, what did I learn? And how does that get me closer to the right people and the right insight? Um, so I think those first, like, five sales you do are going to feel really messy and, like, a lot of rejection because you're talking to the wrong people. There's this concept of an ideal customer profile, and you have, like, a belief on who those customers are, but you probably got it wrong. Like so you get so many doors shut and then you start to like, okay, like two people who have the same profile said yes, like okay, like there's something there. And so then you start really digging into that. So there's a process. But I'm really more speaking to like maybe some of the emotional aspects of like accepting that you have to create a Persona and know that you might get it wrong. Which means all the doors will shut. And that doesn't mean that your product isn't right. That just might mean this isn't the right person or company to talk to. And now you have to like run a new set of tests and try that experiment out. So again goes back to experimenting. But um, it is a little bit messy in the beginning. Until you start finding those patterns, you can really rely on.

Speaker B: Run the same uh, experimentation playbook for product as you do for sales.

Speaker D: Yes, absolutely.

Speaker A: Great. I mean for us, every idea, I would say you probably have five to 10 friends you can sell it to out of the box. That's your friend test, right? Complimentary to the mom test. But I think and maybe converse that if you literally can't convince five to 10 friends to like buy your product, either like are working in a product that doesn't make sense or you're working in an area where you're not the right, like founder fit. Right. Because if you don't know 10 people who might buy, it's probably not the right thing to work on for you personally. Could be better for someone else. Right? But I think when outside that uh, initial set, I think it's good to have those friends. Now you have basically some rough understanding of what the uh, pain points, what the specific thing, what you should be angling towards in the process and then it really feels repeatable is when you get that first adjacent out of network or that first referral from a customer that like, hey, I heard from blah that they're using you guys wanted to try out. That's when it feels repeatable. It's like when you can now take that original rinse and repeat playbook from your friends and expand it one layer out.

Speaker B: Heck yeah.

Speaker C: Pete. Yeah, I'll share a couple versions of this. Um, one was really similar. As soon as you're sort of in self serve out of network mode and people that you definitely don't know are showing up and swiping a credit card and you're like, oh, okay, wow. Like they've like, like they just discovered we existed through advertising or social and they're actually showing up and doing this is a pretty cool moment. I'll show something that's even like, like really sticks in my mind is a moment where I'm like, okay, like this might, this might really be working. We were uh, it was a couple months after we, we went ga, um, and like I said before, really focused on like early stage startups. A lot of like companies are signing up or getting like one or two seats maybe and it's like founder led sales. Um, and uh, we were and are just sort of like maniacally obsessed with the experience of everyone and going like, oh, like one person's like email sync isn't working in the middle of the night. Like riddle, like fix it. Like this is. Uh, because that might be the middle of their workday in Europe and we've got like, we can't leave them working that way. And it was about two months after we had launched. There was someone, uh, who just had a single seat that asked for a meeting with our head of gtm. And he was like, oh cool, like they might want to add some more seats. And he got on a call with him, um, and there were six people on the call. It was like his entire C suite. And it was a company with I think like a couple hundred people. Um, so not enormous, but by our standards, big. You're based in Europe. Um, and he was like, yes, I want to transform the way my company does sales. I want like 30 seats, um, because I'm going to move my entire company into doing this AI driven sales method. And we were like, uh, oh, okay. This is a very different call than the one I was expecting. And I think for us that was a moment of like, wow, there are people who are definitely deeper into their journey that are looking at what we've built, even the very early days that think it's the answer to a transformation they're trying to make to really build their business. And I think it underscored the like, uh, this, this person who was basically undercover sort of poking at our uh, like that wasn't any different than any other one, like one seat buyer along the way. But we managed to give them a great experience. And it turned out to be this like, you know, pretty important milestone in our company that kind of reinforced this is why we gotta sweat. Every single customer, even if they're just buying one seat right now because you don't like one, they matter for sure, but you don't know who they're going to tell and who they're going to tell or how big their company is going to get. So, uh, that was like a neat moment where, hey, this thing might be working a little bit.

Speaker B: Pivots validation go to market. Um, thank you three for sharing your journey and sharing some of the things that worked. Um, let's get after it. What do we want to talk about? What do you all. You look okay, Vertica. And the microphone is just so that everybody can hear. Make sure that. Um, but, like, feel free to jump in, share some perspectives.

Speaker E: Hey, thank you. This session is amazing. So thank you for sharing your journeys. Um, to be a founder, you probably had, like hundred ideas to choose from. You chose the one you liked. You have to be a little crazy to be a founder because you believe in this idea more than everybody else and you go around convincing people. And through that journey, I'm sure a lot of people said, oh, you know, pivot or try something new or maybe, you know, just do that adjacent thing. And you said, no, that's not what I want to do. So at what point do. Because every pivot is expensive, every experiment is expensive. So at what point do you say, no, this is not the pivot I want to do? And do you have like, examples of when you said, no, this is not what I would do Because I'm trying to understand at what point is a pivot warranted? Because you said you had 25 million people using it. I'm sure your earlier ideas as well. Uh, so at what point is it valid to pivot? Uh, because there are always so many cool ideas out there. Uh, and always people willing to buy.

Speaker B: So example is saying, no, no, or

Speaker E: did you have to the no.

Speaker B: You got to know, you all have a no example.

Speaker A: I mean, I do have a lot of no examples of what we were not going to do post. Even from this time pivoting post the prm, there was a lot of different interesting perspective ideas and I think anywhere from insurance automation for brokerage operations, very much like meaties hype spaces. I think at the end of the day, it just didn't feel like it was the right fit and right opportunity. And there are a lot of things that you have to kind of take from your previous existing learnings and use a combination of learnings, but also intuition built from just trying and doing things. There is no perfect answer of, oh, here's the framework for how you should decide you should do X or Y. There's some guidances, the same way that you like, you know, would manage people. It's like, there's frameworks, there's guidances, but it's like a lot of intuition, right? Like at the end of the day, like, you just have to have strong convictions weekly held. Right? That's how it works. I will say there's one general thing that I've like because I also like, invest like, uh, advise a bunch of companies. I candidly have not heard of someone who's like, oh, I wish, like I stayed a little bit longer. Like in terms of like before pivoting, like most of the kind of like thoughts are like, oh, wish we pivoted earlier, not later. Right?

Speaker C: Thank you guys. Great conversation. Name's Vlad. Um, I wanted to ask you, think back. You have Your first version 0.1 and

Speaker A: I would like to hear your like

Speaker C: real life anecdotes about how you kicked off your sales process. Lizzy, you already mentioned this, but I want to hear really anecdotes. What worked, what didn't work, what didn't work. That's most interesting. And what worked, what strategy you explored to get from your first design pattern to maybe first 50 customers. I can talk about a couple things that uh, we did here that I think are pretty interesting m None of which I personally take credit for. Um, one is that uh, we happen to have this space, we have this office that we got a sort of silly cheap deal on, um, uh, but was way too big for us. Um, and we actually didn't post pivot. As we became smaller, we didn't really like being here very much because it was too big and kind of bummed us out. Um, but uh, uh, KE2s are CEO had this idea, um, which, which I thought was pretty brilliant. One day he was just like, I think I'm going to tweet out, um, that we have a bunch of extra office space and see if there are any startups that are looking for some office space and would be willing to use a CRM that's only a month old. In his enclosed beta, um, and he got a lot of responses, um, spent a bunch of time talking to people and said like, yeah, like brought tender and that's how we got the first 10 people that used the product. But we were people we didn't know before. Um, and they came and they sat next to us and they were like our first 10 closed beta customers and we got real time feedback from and they're like real companies are obviously like trying to do serious business and trying to make their dream countries. We took that really, like really seriously. But I thought that was like a pretty creative use of a resource that we happen to Have We've um, used this space to host events as well where we invite a speaker who's an expert on sales and, and say like, hey, if you're trying to learn about sales because you're kicking a company off, come and listen to the speaker that we brought in and like, we'll get to learn some things from you and you'll know life exists, um, as a result as well. So there, uh, that was another channel that I thought was like pretty creative. Um, we also got a hold of uh, a lot of VCs we had connections with and said, hey, we'd be willing to give Lightfield away for, for free to companies in your portfolio, uh, as part of a kit you give them. And um, that was another channel as well. So a lot of this is sort of how creative can we get in addition to just trying to get the word out, um, over social and things like that. But I thought all three of those were interesting things. Again, like I was busy building. These were sort of what felt like really creative GTM ideas that some of the other crew were doing.

Speaker B: What occurs to me with the customer residency piece, like uh, the top level, what is the principle? It's thinking about your community and what are ways that you can contribute to broader communities that maybe would be involved or potential users. And thinking about it from contribution, not just, oh, they'll get insight, early access to a tool, but contribution of what's their underlying motivation in general for their business. And for these ones, I'm thinking their motivation is we kind of want a place to work. We want a place that's cool. Oh, and by the way, we get also then to kind of copilot this experience of like a, you know, cutting edge CRM. So I think I would think about like maybe the generative question is like, what does our community need and what are some interesting ways that we can maybe experiment with that or engage that. I don't know. That was like, as you were sharing that I encourage.

Speaker D: Yeah, I'll just share maybe some stuff that didn't work to play the opposite side of things because like, it's all experiments. Like things work and things. I think when we first started the company we were like similar. We went to our network, we sell to enterprises that usually are a little bit larger. So like knowing people in the network got us as far as like getting into the demo, but we still had to like prove that the product was worth someone running it up the chain. Um, you know, we got like our first. I don't know, I would Say like small handful of companies just through like they're, they're trusting our vision. And then we started running a bunch of experiments. So for example, like, I got a sales coach because, uh, which I highly recommend. If you're an engineering leader who starts a company and you're going to run sales, just get a coach. Like, don't read blog posts to try and figure out how to do sales. There's good books and people that can teach you, like sharpen your skills and send you off into the world. But the first coach I had was a disaster. And so one of the things she did was she said, I just think you need to be increasing your outbound. Uh, you need to be like getting out and emailing as many people as you can and get to these engineering leaders. How often do you guys answer to cold outbound that you're. And also how many are you getting a day? You're probably getting like 30 that go filter into an inbox that ah, like you're never even opening or looking. And so I remember starting that and being like, oh my God, our product doesn't meet the market. No one's answering. And then like had a heart to heart with another founder who sells to engineering leaders and they were like, put yourself in their shoes. They're getting like pinged all day long. Like they don't care. Uh, they also don't even look at their emails. Like, so go find the place where you can like share something that they actually need. And then, and then if they're interested in like the resource or whatever information you're giving to them, then like they'll listen to you and then you can start talking about your product. And so since then like all of our go to market has really been about how do we earn the right to have the conversation. Um, and for us at least it's you know, around sharing that expertise and providing resources. And this transition with AI is really messy. I'm sure all of you are going through. And so the as much as we can do to help like engineering leaders like shape that strategy and build the confidence that yes, they do know what they're doing. Like that's what we try to provide to people and then we earn the right to talk about what we do. Um, but I will say at the beginning was a lot of like nothing's answering, like nothing's working. I guess our product doesn't work, you know, and it was just not knowing our customer as well as we should have.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, want to add on, um, especially the Enterprise side, because we do do a lot of enterprise sales. Like, tactically, instead of like getting a sales coach, I actually just like, talk to people like I used to work with for great sales leaders who are great, like AES, they kind of like, coach on the side, but they, you know, for friends who are like, yeah, sure, I'll like, review your deck or I'll like, look at like a recording or two to kind of like give some feedback. And that was the, like, it's a process of like, continual, like, improvement. Right? You are watching your game tape. You're like watching your own calls, uh, that you should be cringing at things you're saying and trying to figure out how do we improve it, how do you get better? Right. And you get a second opinion from other founders or from salespeople that, you know, could be good and could give good feedback. Right. And they're actually also doing this a lot. Right. Especially if you talk to someone a little bit more senior. They're like coaching their own team. They're already doing this by watching tape and helping them. Right. So what's one more video?

Speaker B: Other questions, what else do we get?

Speaker D: Yeah, first of all, thank you. Thanks.

Speaker E: This, uh, thanks for sharing your journey.

Speaker D: This was really amazing. Um, my first question is, how did

Speaker E: you find your first, um, partner that you could trust?

Speaker D: And, uh, they share your vision, your values, and, you know, uh, overall worked well and where I'm happy to share. It's a ride. Um, like everything is a ride. Uh, you should get on it. It's so fun. Um, so the first company that I had referenced, I actually built it with a longtime friend who's now, actually just a year ago, launched his own company. So you can tell where that story ended. But, um, uh, we had different backgrounds and experiences, but we were both really interested in this idea of hiring on skills and capabilities, not credentials. Um, and so we played around with that DIA a good bit. And as we were pivoting, I was coming always at it from engineering and wanting to, to support the engineering industry. And so, um, I kind of kept pushing us more and more as our ideas continued to like the space of engineering. And ultimately it was like, I just don't know enough about the space to be able to be the person in it. And I was like, no problem. So we amicably split up and then I was by myself. But I still had really strong conviction in the idea that we were doing. So I kind of basically went out and like, co founder, dated, if you will. Um, which was an interesting contrast now seeing what it was like with a friend starting a company versus was, you know, um, someone who I'd met. So the story is I was in graduate school around the time that I actually launched the company and one of my professors helped me write a co founder job description. She mentors in front of startups, she's a big angel investor and she was like, oh, like help you write this job description that's really honest and you can basically share it with people who you think might be a good fit. And she's like, I happen to know this guy. Like I don't know, I'll let you know. And so I must have talked to like six or seven people and someone gave me this great rubric that was like, or this great way of thinking which is, um, do they inspire you as much as you think you can inspire them? So like is it a two way dynamic or do you just need something from them, in which case that's not a co founder. Like you want to carry the vision with them. Um, I interviewed so many people and went to drinks and coffee and dinner and whatever and there were so many people I was like, I don't know, I don't feel like they inspired me. And then I met my co founder, now Joe, and uh, he was my professor. She had coached him in his last startup. He ran it for nine years, he sold it, um, great outcome and like said he would never do a company again. And six months later was like, I think I'm gonna do a company again, you know, um, and so he, I met him and my immediate reaction was like, well he inspires me but what the heck do I bring to the table? Like I, you know, I'm like a naive first time founder. Um, we spent three and a half months like meeting very regularly and just chewing on the idea and the problem and what is the vision? Because like we all mentioned like the idea is probably going to change. So like why are the two of you uniquely positioned to come together to build this? And so, um, there's a great resource, uh, First Round Capital has this 50 co founder dating questions. If you've never heard of it, I highly recommend it. Don't do all 50. Each of you pick the 10 that matter most to you because that will also tell you what matters and then talk about your answers. And after like three, four months of like trialing it, we decided like it was, it was a good fit and so we signed the paperwork and that was so almost four years ago. Um, and it is like not, you know, it's not always smooth sailing. I'm sure everyone here can talk about the disagreements you have with your co founder. It's healthy, it's good for the business. You want a relationship where you can debate and have discourse. Um, and so you want to make sure to make like find out that that foundation is there. So um, that said, it's a really hard thing to do. I'm sure all of us can name dozens of companies that we know of where the co founder relationship ultimately like led to some challenges. So it's worth thinking through in the beginning.

Speaker B: Lizzie, I don't think I told you this but I think I applied that on your recommendation and actually ruled out co ah founders because of it. So thank you, thank you. I was like actually no, this is not the right fit. So just to validate it was really cool.

Speaker F: Thank you.

Speaker B: Um, Tony, you kind of have a different path.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, I mean like I've previous company, I had a co founder of this company. I'm solo founding so I can talk through the trade offs uh, between both directions like till, you know, for hours and hours. I uh, would say maybe one kind of like just personal piece of advice is just like if you're co founding with someone, be prepared to lose them as a friend, right? Like even if like in the there is like obviously the, you know, some percentage where it works out, everyone's super happy, like etc. But honestly like most m of the time it's not going to be super great. Like a lot of times even if like it's amicable and like you know, the company doesn't work out, you don't want to like face your own failure kind of to extend like you know, you don't really see them that much. Like I know people who work together who are like friends but not like having worked together before. Company didn't worked out fine like everyone had an outcome but like at the end of day you just don't want to like come back to it. So that's my one like piece of advice there. But overall I think it's really helpful to have a co founder because there's so many complementary skill sets that you can have aside from share vision. It's just like are you complementary or not? Are there things that you can go into? Basically can you have a list of maybe even 20 sets of responsibilities that blindly you two can divide or three people can divide very quickly. Hey, they're best at X, you're best at Y and they're best at Z. Right. So from that if that's honestly not clear, then there might be too many overlaps and too many things that just may not be the best fit.

Speaker B: This co founder question is juicy because all three of you, it's such a different pathway. So Pete, the lifestyle journey is also different.

Speaker C: Yeah. So, um, I joined Telme, the previous company, the slides presentation company, like, like well after it was founded and joined to lead the engineering team as it was scaling. And then when we uh, like did our big, big pivot, slash reset and formed the new company, that's when I became a founder of the new company. And so I had a little bit different, um, I did like, uh, a bunch of background, um, among the founding group of us for Lightfield. Um, and so we kind of knew a lot about each other and how we. And how we worked, how we worked through, like how we work together, the kinds of stuff we disagreed on, like, what do we do when we disagree about something and the like, complimentary skill sets there. And I think that was a nice advantage for us because we're like, hey, it takes a while, I think, to really learn how to work with someone in this kind of, uh, in this kind of a partnership. Like, it's not just like, oh, we just clicked and we're really good friends and we saw, we, we both like, saw things the same way and we had a, we had some big hits. Like, no, like you have to work through a bunch of stuff that is like really hard and getting big debates about things and realize, oh, like it is possible to come out the other end of that. And uh, I think it's been like, so aside let like that kind of experience to know. I, um. Before I came to work at Tome, I actually like considered founding a company with someone who's a really good friend of mine was one of the reasons I, like one I got really excited about Tome and coming to work here. And that was one of the reasons that I, that I had joined Tome instead. But I also actually had the same feeling. I was like, this person's a really good friend of mine. I don't know if I can like actually disagree with them in the ways that I know I'm going to need to disagree with them. And I, um, There might be some time where I go, like, look, I just don't want to lose this person as a friend, so I'm not going to do the thing that I know or say the hardest thing that I need to say. Um, and like, I'm um, like I'm still glad I did that because He's a really good friend of mine. I'm like, I just don't know it. So. And someone was asking me earlier, like, hey, hey, like, how do you know if you found like, the right idea to start a company? I think that's important. It should, there should be an idea you have a ton of conviction about. But for me, me, um, I think it was more about like, am I ready to go into like the startup battle with these people? Because the idea is probably like, whatever we think we're definitely going to do today is probably going to change and are like, are you up for like going through it with these people and like getting in arguments with them and getting frustrated by them, but ultimately like, deeply respect them and coming through it and that's kind of like. I think ultimately the thing to choose is like, like, is this. Are these people you're going to go on this crazy journey with? That's like a work style? It's like a. Are they as committed as you? Are you going to get frustrated with each other? Because someone is willing to do whatever it takes and someone else, um, like, is trying to balance it with like, other things going on in their life, which is legit. It just might be incompatible.

Speaker B: Last question, Avi.

Speaker F: I have started a company before and I'm about to start something new and I have no idea what I'm doing next. But that notion of the wizard, uh, of Ozing is something that I had maybe too much experience with last time around and I felt like we were doing too much of it. Ended up with co founder problems in part because of how much wizard of Ozzing can we do and should we be doing? How do you think about that of like, how much time do you need to put into a feature? How much love do you need to get back from your customers before you say, yeah, this is actually a thing that is worth investing in versus let's just keep doing it on the side, let's keep doing it ourselves in the back end until like, yeah, we actually have to invest in, in this thing and stop that other thing that also kind of seems to be working, but this seems to be the one that we should spend time on.

Speaker C: I can take a shot at that. Like, it's, um, uh, I think for. I'm not exactly sure what the math is, but there are definitely things where we have like, hey, we can take care of that hard part of onboarding for you, um, or we can like make this thing happen in the product for you because we, you know, it might only be One or two customers that need, need it. So that makes sense. And at some point there's like a trade off there where we're like, wow, actually a lot of people want this and we are like hurting our ability to build the features that other people want because we have engineers doing magical things in the database behind the scenes. And ideally you just never do that and you'd always build the ultimate capability. But there's some trade off we ultimately decide there of like, all right, it's come up enough times and we're spending enough one off engineering time on it, um, which is maybe only sort of what you're asking. I think also there's like a, like, can you demon, like, can you show enough that you can get the reaction from people? Um, that would tell you like, yeah, this is really valuable. And, um, I think that's a, like a reasonable version of wizard of Ozing. And not that you're trying to fool them into something, but we're like, hey, we want to know like, if this could happen automatically for you instead of us saying, will have it for you in a day. Like, uh, like because they reacted so positively then, then I think that's the signal that you're getting. But it's, um. I don't know. I wish there was a formula I could give you. But we definitely do a little bit of both where we're like, let's just do the one off version. And um, but we try really hard not to because we know it doesn't scale and if one person needs it, there's probably five more behind that need it.

Speaker D: So I think the big thing though is like just, I mean, you know this, but like, you don't want to build something that's like scalable early on because first you just need to prove that it's worth building at all. Um, but there is that weird sort of period of time where you're like, what is that, like, signal or set of signals that I need to hear to say like, okay, this is worth building. Um, we talk a lot about like paper, um, cuts at our company, like, both externally and internally. So like, our product experience we know is not optimal. Where are all the paper cuts our customers are feeling, but then internally, where are all the paper cuts that we are feeling when we, you know, sign up to, um, commit to a certain feature and know that there's a lot of manual process. So we take stock of that, like I would say every maybe like two to four weeks and just like reflect on like, okay, here's all the Paper cuts that we're taking on, are they still worth, like, are we still trying to learn something or do we need to deprecate it or start building off the real version of it? Um, and so I would just say, like, if they're going to build and grow and then shrink and then grow and then shrink. But if you have some practice around just like taking stock of all those paper cuts, like, because to your point, that's dev effort that maybe or, you know, somebody's time that could be used on another higher impact thing. Um, especially if you get into those weird periods where like one customer really liked it, but then the other like, whatever, 10 don't. And you're just like, I'm really only doing this process for this one. Like, I would just kill it and then, you know, move on. It's like the painful things of saying no to a customer, it's tokens.

Speaker A: You can be devoting to something else. Um, but we actually do a lot of, uh, prototyping, especially just given how easy it is to spin up something for a prototype. So we actually do something a little bit different. It's like company secret, open secret. But we actually do a lot of fake doors in our product that I intentionally have in the product, in our demo version or in our company feature flagged. And I just don't talk about it and kind of like just show the product it's there, but I don't talk about it and kind of like wait for someone to proactively ask it. If someone's asking about it, even though it's just like in the corner somewhere, it's actually something valuable to that. And then that's when the discovery starts. Like, oh, we're building this for ourselves internally. It's still in beta. I can show you the thing. Would love to get your thoughts on it, but we're not launching it to any customers yet. And that's how you kind of spark that conversation.

Speaker B: Tony, Lizzy, Pete, thank you. Uh, it's been, been a lot of fun to uh, just be here in conversation, diving your journeys. And I just like the intention here was to compare and contrast very different founder journeys. Uh, and it's been a really, it's been a joy to be able to, to deal with you and thank you. So thank you for the generosity of your experience, sharing the hot lessons. Um, and thank you all for, for being here. Um, cool.

Speaker D: Thank you all.

Speaker C: Sam,