I help early-stage founders find PMF and build a successful go-to-market motion.
Salt Lake City, UT
Joined November 2009
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Doug Regner retweeted
whoever is troubleshooting and working on the Microsoft outage for outlook and teamsâŚ. take your time
"How can we break through the noise?"
Heard this today from a startup revenue leaderâand over and over again from early-stage founders.
A few plays worth running:
But one thing is certain: you can't break through the noise if you're sitting there silent.
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"There are only three ways a smart person can go broke: liquor, ladies, and leverage." â Charlie Munger
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As @DavidRudnitsky said âget your face in the placeâ
best sales tool is a plane ticket and in office visit or evening out (dinner or sports game) with a group of high tier prospects/customers.
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Good on you @bchesky
New: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is committing $100 million to SF parks in what Mayor Lurie's administration says will be the largest contribution the city has ever received from 1 donor. sfchronicle.com/sf/article/aâŚ
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Like socialism, a sales-free company just hasn't been implemented correctly, right?? The Atlassian founder-fantasy persists.
A company I invested in fired its entire sales team.
"From $5 million to $1 million today because they fired the sales team. The founders didn't like sales. They thought it was icky."
From my conversation with Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast.
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A founder I'm working with executed a brilliant sales call today.
-Led with "How did you hear about us" and "what motivated you to take the time?"
-Let the prospect do most of the talking
-Casually qualified throughout the convo
-Articulated the problem being solved perfectly from the origin story at BigCo (that led them to start company) with credible examples of current customers
-Demonstrated WOW in both ROI and specific demo features
-Controlled next steps
That's how you do it.
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Technical founders sit on expertise theyâre not using to drive leads, and most of them donât know they have it.
While at @Unusual_VC I once heard a founder ask @jyotibansalsf how many customer interviews he did before he started building. The founder wanted a number. Jyoti didnât give one: âWe stopped when we stopped hearing anything new.â
Notice what that implies. If youâre focused on a narrow ICP, the point where you stop hearing anything new comes fast; qualitative researchers whoâve measured this put it at around a dozen interviews for a tight group. Keep going into the 20s and something shifts. You stop collecting problems and start seeing distribution. Which workaround most of them built. Where it broke. What the two teams who actually solved it did differently. You can finish a prospectâs sentence before they do, and youâre right most of the time.
No prospect has that view. They have their own company, a few war stories picked up from conferences, and whatever a vendor told them. Youâve seen twenty-five versions of their problem; theyâve lived one. That makes you the most informed person theyâll talk to this quarter on the one topic theyâre losing sleep over, and you got there in a couple of months of calls.
Most founders keep that to themselves and don't think it's valuable content to share.
Meanwhile the prospects they want to reach are scrolling LinkedIn looking for exactly one thing: how are other teams like mine handling this? They donât want your product yet. They want to be educated.
So write it down. âHereâs what I keep seeing across teams doing X.â Anonymize it, teach it, donât pitch.
The right readers will stop because youâve described their pain, and some of them will comment or message you. Those engagements are leads; they arrive warm and they already trust you.
You donât need 100 calls to earn the right to teach. If youâve stopped hearing anything new, you already have it.
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Itâs been a banner week for drones!
Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation.
When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldnât try.
We started the company on a cow farm. We worked out of run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didnât have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team.
We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote DâIvoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive.
Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. Weâre now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands.
Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud âswarm of beesâ delivering to their backyard or their neighborâs. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery!
Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. Weâre starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, weâve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.
Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didnât think the company was âinvestableâ. Most people didnât even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined.
There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where weâre going. đđ
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Doug Regner retweeted
Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation.
When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldnât try.
We started the company on a cow farm. We worked out of run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didnât have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team.
We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote DâIvoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive.
Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. Weâre now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands.
Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud âswarm of beesâ delivering to their backyard or their neighborâs. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery!
Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. Weâre starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, weâve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.
Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didnât think the company was âinvestableâ. Most people didnât even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined.
There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where weâre going. đđ
What did the pirate CFO say when the first mate asked for more AI spend?
âI donât see the Arrrrrrrr O Iâ
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A tough sales lesson I see many technical founders learn the hard way...
The User loved the demo. The Champion said âthis is exactly what we need.â Best product in the evaluation, clear fit, warm handshake. Then the deal went quiet.
Winning the hearts and minds of Users and the Champion is half the battle. Most technical founders assume itâs the whole thing, because itâs the half they can see.
The other half happens in rooms youâre never in. Your champion walks into a budget meeting and your purchase is one of four asks on the Buyerâs desk, next to a headcount request and a renewal from a vendor already through security. The Buyer isnât judging your product; theyâre deciding where this halfâs remaining dollars go, and ânot nowâ is the answer nobody gets fired for.
Hereâs the part that surprises founders most: your champion often canât tell you how buying works at their own company. Theyâve never pushed a purchase through before. Or they know exactly how it works and quietly decide the six weeks of memos, procurement forms and hallway lobbying arenât worth it for a tool that makes their Tuesdays easier.
Harder to tease out: Theyâve done the math on their own political capital and know they donât have enough to spend on you. None of them will say any of this on a call.
You canât attend that budget meeting. You can find out early whether your champion knows the path, wants to walk it, and has the standing to get there, and you can arm them for it: the cost-of-doing-nothing math, the budget line it displaces, the reference whoâll take a call, the security packet sent before anyone asks. These are all questions unrelated to your product and a muscle you'll to build
Of course, the best way is to engage the Buyer early and find out their mandate and translate your solution helps them.
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