One of the worst times at Gainsight ended up creating one of the best times: In 2017, we had gone from "hot" to "not" (H/T to my friend @jhong!) Our early days were on the path for fast growth at the time: 2013: $1M ARR 2014: $5M (5X) 2015: $16M (~3X) 2016: $30M (~2X) In AI times, that ramp happens in a month, but that was solid traction for that era. The problem was we were TAM constrained (primarily selling to tech companies). So our new logo bookings flattened out and in 2017, we ended at $48M. Deceleration was upon us. Morale dropped. Our head of sales (who was a great person) resigned. A lot of his hired in people did too. I did the usual CEO thing and said "MORE LEADS!" to my CMO @akennada, but if you are out of TAM, you are out of leads. And we were burning money like we were still in hypergrowth land. So we needed cash. We went out to raise our next round. Our pitch was basically "yes we decelerated... but give us more money and ... profit!" OK it was more artful than that, but not much. We had some ideas of new things we could do, but no evidence to support the ideas. We called all of the VCs who for years had been "huge fans" and said "we'd love to be in business with Gainsight." My guess is we pitched 50 firms. And we got 50 NOs. Worse still, these weren't the early stage nos where people sometimes pass because they don't know who you are. These investors passed knowing exactly who we were! It was a brutal time as a leader. I had to get in front of the company and bring us together, while I had almost no confidence internally. Then something lucky happened. Because we couldn't raise equity capital, we instead raised a small amount of debt. And since we had debt, we needed to get to breakeven pronto. Our retention was good, so all we needed to do was keep growing modestly and not hire anyone. I became a nightmare to every leader and manager at Gainsight. No new hires. No backfills. End of story. Not a good way to run a company long-term (lots of problems come from this approach). But in a year and a half, we were within spitting distance of breakeven. And because we had that profile, we were in the zone for Private Equity firms at the time (near-breakeven, good but not hypergrowth, good retention). That eventually led to Vista Equity Partners buying the company at the end of 2020 for $1.1B. Our last venture round was ~$500M and most were way below that, so everyone was happy. Strangely, in the multiverse, Many Worlds, Sliding Doors alternate reality, we raised that last round (ironically it would have been our Series "F"!) at a $1B+ valuation, we didn't get disciplined, we later had to do massive cuts, and we were probably a zombie company with no exit. Now would it have been better still to have had hypergrowth, gone public and be worth $100B or whatever? Sure. But for me, the story shows that sometimes failures beget successes.

Centerview: Analyst work that would’ve taken 3 weeks now takes a couple hours.

Give me specific things that an analyst spent 3 weeks that’s been done in hours? Be specific.