One year at MadKudu, on the cusp of something big.

My first week at MadKudu was anything but typical. But then again, so was my first year.

I stepped off the elevator at the 12th floor of Mountain Bay Plaza and into an open office space. Over the next week, my ambition & enthusiasm would be put to the test as our office was systematically & maniacally dismantled from beneath our feet — the air conditioning stuck on freezing, the carpet pulled up leaving floors so sticky I would walk out of my own shoes at the end of a meeting, and a kitchen that looked like a Black Friday aftermath.

My relationship with MadKudu started during a period of extreme vulnerability for me — for those who’ve worked with me in the past or read my work as a blogger, vulnerability has been a double-edged sword for me. I happily expose my failures but I also feel an extreme internal pressure to have all the answers. Struggling with this duality was what ultimately led me to be asked to leave Algolia two months before joining MadKudu.

With each professional experience I’ve been pushed out of my comfort zone — I am often reminded of a masterclass I hosted [video excerpt] with Algolia’s Gaetan Gachet on the topic — but MadKudu is the first place that has prioritized my personal development as a vehicle for my professional development.

During our first conversations, I told Sam & Francis that my ambition was to excel as a leader. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do in order to fill the gaps, but I knew from experience that there were plenty of them. MadKudu found me an executive coach to identify areas where I struggle so that I can build better processes for myself to avoid falling into those traps. I’ve been asked over the past year what an executive coach does, so here are some areas that I’ve worked on:

• Internal communication: I often speak fast and take up most of the conversation to mask the fact that I am unprepared or feel like I am expected to have all the answers. I identified this habit to catch it in the act (pause, step back, breath), but I also learned that having all the questions was sometimes more valuable than having all the answers. I also began preparing more for meetings, which helped me come to them with clear goals and talking points.
• Operational excellence: I treated weekly 1:1s as informal catchups when I first started, and I quickly realized more was expected of me than I was delivering. I now see the huge value in having a meeting mapped out before it starts. We run through the KPIs & operational checkboxes more quickly and it unearths important conversational topics (or not, when there is no need).
• Consistency & Persistence: Last year, I fell short on some key goals that, honestly, weren’t hard. In fact, they were so not-hard that they were boring to me, so I devised a more intellectually stimulating way to solve the problem without communicating to the rest of the team. My strategy didn’t show results, and not pursuing the agreed upon strategy blew up in my face. When a fire lights up in me I can have a 10x impact, but I need to learn to light that fire. Challenging myself to be consistent & persistent has become an intellectually stimulating challenge in and of itself.

In every instance where I have stumbled, MadKudu has helped me. They have offered a path forward, voiced their concerns clearly, and made me feel comfortable with the journey I was on. I’d like to think that MadKudu saw in me what I saw in them: the potential for success, the cusp of something big.

As a company, MadKudu has been laser-focused on making the right decisions at every turn. For example, we stopped selling in Q3 last year so that we could focus on streamlining the way we onboard customers — we saw an opportunity for 20x improvement in our onboarding process, shifting the burden off of customer success engineers and onto product engineers. Our platform team rebuilt MadKudu’s underbelly from the ground up to be able to deliver value to customers faster, and now our CS team can focus on helping customers deploy the Playbook for Modern Marketing Operations, instead of running SQL queries.

Some other notable MadKudu achievements include:

• Adding new customers every day that a marketer could only dream of: the likes of Plaid (raised $250 Million in December), Freshworks (raised $100 Million last summer) & IBM join our ongoing customers like Segment, Drift, InVision, Shopify & Avalara.
• Building an invite-only community for B2B Marketers where marketing operations, demand generation & growth leaders from Zoom, Stripe, Slack, Okta & Hashicorp come together in-person & online to share best practices for building a frictionless buyer journey.
• Co-organizing events with leading MarTech players Intercom, G2 Crowd, HubSpot, Drift, Segment, Outreach, Chilipiper & Calendly.
• Scaling up the team from 6 to nearly 20, including 6 people in our Paris office (we're hiring to hit 50 by the end of the year).
• Triple-digit growth across all major marketing & sales metrics.

I didn’t get poached and I didn’t jump ship. MadKudu wasn’t hyped. I joined because I felt like MadKudu was on the cusp of something great. I enjoyed the experience of being a MadKudu user at Algolia, but I fell in love with the vision that Sam, Francis & Paul had. More importantly, I fell in love with the vision that MadKudu customers had of MadKudu. It’s very rare

Today we’re on the cusp of something great. Success for me in the next year is feeling the exact same way 12 months from now having grown the same amount.

I shared a few extra photos on Medium if you'd like to see MadKudu's first office and other escapades.