The magic of the Bay Area, seeing the founders of Splunk and Bill live on a casual afternoon. We live amongst titans.
My notes from the event:
- “Relationships matter so much and when you meet a good human, you trust them” - Bill.com’s founder on stepping down from being CEO and raising after from one of the same board members with whom he goes on a walk every other week, talking about work and family.
- Bill.com’s founder chose not to have a co-founder the second time around - “We were not talking about the hard stuff and the hard stuff you need to talk about, I was only talking about the good stuff with my cofounder”
- The investor needs to be aligned with you the founder, no preferences,“ just be aligned that if you wanna sell the company I’m ok with you Rene. We’re in it together”
- the first round of Splunk was a $5m series A, split between 2 firms. Then it took only $40m to realize the value.
- Splunk was revolutionary in its sales model. Completely new sales model. After 2 years of ups and down and firing the sales team multiple times they changed the strategy - “ We targeted sys admin directly vs the boss of their boss - we did that by doing ads with words that only these nerdy people would understand, target people who are actual end users and we’d give it for free and put a meter on it, you can use it only for a few days. Then they’d ask their boss to buy it, Splunk was the first enterprise freemimum out there”. What also contributed to the success of the company was that every single release was about performance and putting more data in it. Take something super complicated and make it that people understand it in 5 minutes and go wow. The splunk tshirt was the best. Taking the sh out of IT
Thanks Bhaskar Ghosh for facilitating these amazing insights and giving us a chance to see such titans live ??