Transcription
Foreigners welcome to another episode of the CRO Confidential podcast. I'm your host, Sam Blonde. We have another amazing guest this week that we'll get to in just a moment.
One quick reminder: an incredible conference is coming up in just the next few weeks—SaaStr Europa in London, June 6th and 7th. I'll be there, and I'm ecstatic to be there. I'll be speaking about some of the hacks that Brex put in place while scaling from zero to 400 million in revenue. I also have a session with Parker Conrad, the CEO of Rippling. All the major CEOs, all the major VCs will be there, and I hope you will be too.
Moving on, today we have this incredible guest. We are back to CROs and revenue leaders. Moving on from the founder-led sales programming, and we're coming back with a bang. We have the CRO of the fastest-growing SaaS company ever—that's Colin Jones, who is a whiz. Colin is a Philly native. I won't give him too much trouble being a Kansas City native on NFL, but Colin started his professional career as a BDR 14 years ago. Similar story to me, interestingly. He worked his way up to his current role as CRO at Wiz, which, as I referenced, is the fastest-growing SaaS company ever—zero to a hundred million in ARR in two years. Just incredible performance, and we're going to learn a lot more about that. It's one of the highest-valued private tech companies in the world, valued at 10 billion dollars and around announced in late February of this year, so 2023. There are not many decacorns, certainly not many decacorn rounds happening in 2023, so Wiz is an outlier there. Colin joined in 2021, which is just a couple of years ago—February of 2021, just a couple of years ago—but as I referenced, that was when the company was near zero. So, incredible journey, and happy to have you here and learn more about it.
Thanks for joining, Colin.
Sam: Thanks for having me, and uh, as always, a huge fan and advocate of this Austro community, and so thanks for having us and congrats up to you and the team on all your success at Brex and also at South Student Founders Fund—amazing.
Well, before we jump in, and we're going to go on this unprecedented journey that you've been on, scaling from one to 100 million, or zero to 100 million in just a couple of years, um, we're going to focus on recruiting and customer acquisition. We'll see where the conversation takes us beyond those two things, but before we get into the specifics, let's start with some context for the audience. Just tell us a little bit about Wiz.
Yeah, so as you mentioned, we're a two and a half, three and a half-year-old startup, right? Like, regardless of what status it is, we've only been in business for a few years now, and uh, we primarily focus on cloud security. So we help enterprises around the globe gain visibility and then give them contextual and actionable insights to secure their cloud infrastructure. Very exciting.
We talked about—I mentioned that we'd spend some time on recruiting. Let's start right there. Many folks in the audience are going to be at a similar stage to what Wiz was when you joined, um, which is looking to hire a revenue leader and really pour gasoline on what is sort of like some initial product-market fit success. So let's start there. You came in with this incredible pedigree prior to joining Wiz, which maybe you can tell us a little bit about, um, but how were you first introduced to Wiz and why did you ultimately decide to join and what really attracted you to the business? It's—it's action—understanding what actually drove video is is much different than what I initially thought did, right? Um, I think that we have this um industry-wide approach to evaluating the opportunities in front of us, and we do our diligence, and rightfully so, like what—how big is the addressable market, right? Like, what does the competitive landscape look like? How good is the tech? What do we need to succeed here? And at some point in my year-long kind of assessment of different companies, I realized that I wasn't actually looking for that. It was important; it's part of the criteria for a reason, but what I was looking for was people. And so, you know, and I look back now and say the reason I'm at Wiz is because of our CEO and our co-founders. Like, we—we saw the world similarly; we had very different skill sets; there was a—a very easy um dialogue that just continued to unfold, and throughout it, not only did we agree, but we learned how to disagree, and we did it in such a respectful and productive way that I thought, I want to be a part of that team. I love it. So there are some—some similarities to what I experienced in joining Zenefits and Brex, and there's one thing that stands out that is dissimilar. So uh, your background, which maybe um just tell us a little bit about uh your experience prior to Wiz, um, but—but one thing that stands out is I think it was—it was in the same space, so you were—you—you spend a bunch of time in this sort of cybersecurity space. Tell us a little bit about that, and then how you thought about continuing in that similar domain versus um—uh—or like was that part of the criteria? Were you specifically looking for companies in a similar space that you had experience in?
Yeah, interesting. Um, I love security. I—I—I think our customers and our partners, I think they're superheroes. Like, every day they wake up and they—they fight in a movable force, and so getting to play a small and hopefully valuable role and contribute to their success and therefore, you know, secure their enterprise or protect our government or whatever the—the happenstance is, like, I—I'm motivated every day because I know that the work we do helps other people, and that's why I take so much pride in not the way we sell but the way we service and support. Okay? Like, do we just wake up every day and earn it? Do we earn our customer trust? And so, um, for me, security has always been at the forefront, and I was lucky enough to kind of parlay that into answering your initial question. Um, I started as a BDR at BigFix, like, and I loved it, every second of it, because I was learning every day and acquiring new skills every day and in parallel falling in love with security and being exposed to it and coached through it. And so I kind of worked my way up—BDR, individual contributor, leader—to where I am now throughout the years, and at every turn, security is always at the forefront because I'm passionate about it.
Super cool. So, so trying to uh package this up for maybe some takeaways—folks looking to hire uh the next Colin—a couple of things that are consistent with my experience, which is the number one reason that I joined uh both Zenefits and Brex, um, is also the people. Colin, you mentioned the same thing, and for me specifically, the people was the founders, and I think you—you mentioned that as well. Um, it was at Zenefits—Parker—and at Brex—Pedro, Enrique—and man, I just like believe that these people were going to build a really big business. Um, a lot of philosophical alignment as well—wanted to work with them—but—but it did come down to the people. One thing that is um nuanced but different—you were also extremely passionate about this category of security, which maybe I'll frame that for the audience as like an added bonus, then. If you can get someone who you believe can have an incredible impact on the business and has this track record that is Colin—like, where—starts it as a BDR, just crushes it, realizes a bunch of promotions over a number of years, and uh that person is also extremely passionate about the specific domain that you are building in, um, that is uh the stars aligning a bit, um, but maybe don't require that passion, um, using my personal experiences is a bit of a guide there, where, you know, I started an electronic signature, I moved to uh HR all-in-one uh payroll type category, and then lastly was it Brex, which is a fintech—so corporate cards, banking, finance.
Let's—let's continue along this journey. So uh, you find a match made in heaven with Wiz, uh you join the company. Tell us a little bit about the environment that existed in February of 2021 when you joined.
This is a very traditional startup; the—you know, the unique circumstances are actually out of our control, right? Like, geolocation and distribution due to the pandemic uh forced our hand a bit, right? So I'm here in Denver, Colorado; the majority of our team is in Tel Aviv. Um, we all have different focus areas and functions that we're responsible for at the time, mine being on the go-to-market side; there's being mostly product and engineering. And so we—you can picture um like the traditional startup office environment circa 2015, except we were worlds apart, right? We knew that we had uh this evolving dynamic product that we needed to bring to market because the demand was almost immediate, but we had to figure out not just how we were going to do that but how we were going to do that successfully in such a short period of time, knowing that we were operating in a distributed environment, worlds apart. And so there's some unique challenges to our story that um led to many late nights or early mornings, right? Trying to align time zones. I think—how difficult can that be? It's nearly impossible when you look at the calendars and you realize 3 A.M. is the only time where we can all be together. And so you start to—you start to create this new pattern of working as you do in any startup, but for us it was just a bit different due to some forces we didn't control. Um, and then when I look at the go-to-market and sell side specifically, it didn't take very long to realize that we needed to start meeting demand or else people were going to question whether or not we were serious. And so we had to—we had to build, grow, and scale simultaneously in certain regards in order to kind of go from zero to a hundred—pun intended, I guess.
Pun intended.
Yeah, zero to 100—literally. The customers were there, and they needed our help. And so how do you build the foundation in the right way to make sure that what you built is not just good for a hundred but it's good—you know, one of the things I'm proud of is 200 million plus in 27 months. That means what we built initially, the structure, the foundational elements, is solid. And so to do that in this environment, at this pace, at this scale, um, is a part of our journey that I look back on with tremendous pride.
Very cool. Um, I'm going to backtrack just a little bit, which I don't love doing, but one thing that I—I um glossed over—how were you first introduced to the business?
Fantastic. Um, I—I was—I'm the luckiest duck in the pond, right? I was so fortunate to—to have great leaders of my past who challenged, developed, and then ultimately recognized that I was ready for an opportunity like this one. Um, and they facilitated some introductions to the VC community. One thing led to another; I just started meeting everyone I could. It didn't matter if there's a potential opportunity; I just wanted to—to meet with folks who I could learn from and—and share ideas with. And um, I probably owe some of them some money for counseling sessions at different points, but uh, ultimately, charged Index—Doug Leone at Sequoia—connected me to our CEO, and the conversation started as just two people, worlds apart, meeting for the first time and just never ended—just continued. And to your point, it's like I always think about finding teams—you—you're a part of and identifying people you want to work with—it's—it's like music—like you might like reggae, I might like country music; if we both like reggae, then great, here we go. But everybody likes music. It's—how do you find that—that common connection between different genres in order to build something successful?
Awesome. So reinforcing a theme that has been consistently represented on this podcast, which is leveraging your network in these types of situations. And I think it goes both ways. Um, you, as this incredible candidate at the time, leveraged your personal network, uh where you have this track record of performance, and you wanted your reputation to precede you, and so you uh reached out to your personal network that included VCs who introduced you to companies like Wiz that were leveraging their personal network and their investors, and it was this like network connection—it—it's the exact same thing for me, um, and it's the exact same thing for so many others that have been on this podcast, which was, you know, I'll reference my personal experience—Jason Limkin introduced me to Parker at Zenefits when I was ready for my first VP of sales opportunity, and YC introduced me to Pedro at Brex when I was uh, you know, evaluating new opportunities post-Zenefits. Um, and so, you know, so many of these data points—just leveraging your network in um more ways than one.
Let's go back. Um, you talked about the environment that existed at the time that you did join, um, and you talked a little bit about go-to-market specifically. So—so let's go back to that time, where sort of like day one through day 60, something like that. What were the first things that you were focused on? Like, how did you allocate your time?
So for me, I think—like I say, playbooks are prisons, right? Like, so many times we see leaders or executives join organizations and bring playbooks that they've implemented elsewhere, um, assuming that it's going to be effective in a new environment. And so the—it was a listening tour. Um, a lot like I observed everything; I listened to everyone, internally and externally, and—and one of the things that—that struck me was trying to find time on calendars, I think, right? You remember there's dozens of us at this point, and the majority of our teams are focused on product and engineering, but everybody's calendar was full of—of customer calls. Like, everybody—all day, every day, we were talking to customers. And so I remember trying to organize a meeting between the five of us, six of us, and saying like, this is damn near impossible because there's customers on the other end. And I—I know what that means. I mean, that means we need to get on the phone and listen a great deal. We need to understand what customers see in us versus what we see in ourselves and then utilize that to—I don't say standardize, but very quickly put together a value proposition with a complementary tone that customers were reacting to. And so I—I gave myself 60 days to do that. I think we had to do it in roughly four, right? Like, we had a week to get that right in order to make sure we didn't—we didn't miss the opportunity. And then very quickly, I had to transition into—to finding some trusted resources to go meet that demand in the marketplace. We had to start hiring, and we had to start building almost instantaneously.
So much insight in that answer. Um, you were in this privileged position where your problem—and it was a bit of a problem—was that you were um swimming in demand. You had so much demand that there were calendars that were full of demos, and it was difficult for you to find time outside of these customer interactions to meet as a team. And the takeaway for me in that answer is, regardless of whether you're swimming in demand or not, the way that I've typically approached um whether it's day one, day 60, or day uh one thousand, there's—there's going to be some bottleneck in the uh customer acquisition or revenue growth uh spectrum, and you need to find that bottleneck and start applying as much pressure and attention until you alleviate that bottleneck and it moves somewhere else. And so for you guys, your specific bottleneck was—we have a lot of demand, and we actually don't have the resources in the form of salespeople to um uh adequately serve this demand, so we need to go out and hire. Uh, and tell us a little bit about that process.
So you join, you identify this um opportunity. Who did you hire? How did you recruit? Sourcing candidates—just—just tell us about some of the details there.
Yeah, and—and just a kind of comment on it, like people think about product—my earlier found product-market fit—like I call that unrecognized demand. Like, you should always be seeking demand because if you have demand, you have product-market fit. And for us, it wasn't just what was in front of us; it was the fact that there was so much more demand to be created in a very short period of time that was compelling, right? So like, you can go—I can run through 100 customers all by myself; that's not the point. The point is, what do you learn from the first 10 to—to go to a thousand even faster? And so like I always think about this pivotal juncture where, of course, there's demand, but how do you create more of it, and how do you recognize it? And that's not a sales lead effort—like, just for everybody is listening—that's an organizational effort. That means that adjusting roadmaps and feature function and product direction and marketing approach—like that, for me, is—it should be a company objective number one at all times. When it comes to hiring, it's a very traditional story in the sense that over your career you have opportunities to work with, interface with, um, admire and observe some professionals that you connect with as people and therefore you build these bonds, in this—this level of trust where I had to look some people in—in the face and say like, this is a huge risk. Like, I understand you trust me, but it is a seed company; this is where we're at. And so you have um families to provide for, mortgages to pay, but I really went straight into my network, and I identified a few people um both on the—the sales, direct sales side as well as the uh upside and said, I think we have something, but it's a calculated risk, and I need you to be aware. And so I went and got a couple sales uh folks, the sales leader, and uh some Ops people and some support staff to make sure that we could over-invest in the Ops part of our business while we were driving that demand on the sales side.
It's awesome. It—it continues to reinforce this theme that is consistently represented on this podcast—just around leveraging the network in so many different ways—whether it's recruiting, demand gen, and more. In this specific example, when you hire a senior sales leader, there should be some expectation that that senior sales leader has the ability to source, recruit, and hire people in-network that have a low risk of success and high probability of—or low risk of failure, high probability of success. Um, Colin, you did that with several folks. It was—thinking back to my time at Brex when I joined, um, the first two sales reps that were there, we had hired a CFO as one of our first employees; he had come—his name's Michael Tannenbaum—he had come from SoFi. The first sales reps were Michael Tannenbaum's—so if I uh—uh reps that—so it doesn't have to be the network of the person leading the organization. I entered this world where there were already a couple in-network hires from our CFO, and I brought in a bunch of people from my personal network and then continued this path where uh Brandon Boyle was an early sales rep that I brought in; I knew him from Zenefits, and he brought in an incredible person named Jack from Gusto that was another—brand was at Gusto in between Zenefits and Brex. So you just like continue down this path of leveraging the networks—your personal network and the networks of others that are top performers within the organization, and before you know it, you have this really unbelievable team of all-stars.
Totally. There's—there's two things that jump out at me: one is like it's so simple, but you are the company you keep. Like, if you're surrounded by a—like I'm—this can you—depending on how you interpret this—but like the best way to celebrate overperformance is not to tolerate underperformance, but like A-players want to be with A-players. Like, everybody is on the Yankees, so to speak, uh or the Phillies, depending on where you live, but—so not the Royals, right? But like—so you are the company you keep. One, and two, like all of the success that I—I is attributed to my career or Wiz—like it's not me; it's the fact that I surround myself with these incredibly talented, selfless, hard-working people who just go and execute every single day, all day. And so I've always looked at a—you know, kind of like a coaching tree—like if—if all of my coaches, so to speak, are becoming head coaches for winning Super Bowls or winning MVPs, like then I must be okay at my job. Unfortunately for me, I've had the—the privilege of working with so many wonderful, talented people that um if you—if you're looking to bring in a CRO or a sales leader or go-to-market leader, and they don't have the—like the best reflection of them is in the people they bring, and if they don't have that, then they're probably not the leader you're looking for.
Couldn't agree more. You're preaching to the choir. Just so much of what you said resonates with me personally, and—and I attribute so much of my personal success uh to those that uh I've been able to recruit. We've had several folks on this podcast—Jameson Young from Gong, Matt Plank from Rippling, Trish Mishaw now at Guild Education, who ran RevOps at uh Brex—like the—the reason that the businesses that I was a part of and the reason that I was personally successful, I just like point to those folks, and it sounds like um you feel the same way and have your—your similar sort of group that you're able to point to. And couldn't agree more on um so many folks that are sitting in your seat—it's the same—just like this attribution of success to their ability to recruit and the people that they recruit really performing um at a high level.
But let's—let's switch gears a little bit. Um, you entered this environment where demand was not the initial constraint—calendars full of demos, as you described it. Where was this demand coming from?
It was very organic, and it's a credit to the approach our founders took, right? Like, as—as practitioners prior to—like, they build out Alum, they sell it to Microsoft, they take a set of responsibilities at Microsoft security, and they were practitioners who were experiencing this challenge that we solved for every single day, and they thought they had a solution, but like any good idea, it's not a good idea until somebody else tells you—and more or less—still hundreds or thousands of people tell you—like, that's a great idea. And so they—they took this approach of—let's go show other like-minded practitioners who are dealing with this set of challenges what we're up to and get feedback and iterate. And so they built this enterprise-class, ready-to-go out-of-the-box solution as a result of collecting and applying feedback over a period of, you know, six, nine, 12 months. And so the—the initial direction of the company and the product is very different than what Wiz is today, and I think it's a testament to um, you know, not only our co-founders but a corporate philosophy of—we should always be listening first and—and asking questions more than speaking. And so when I see the—when I saw the initial demand, that some of it was misunderstood, some of it was dated because the conversation had transpired months prior, and they weren't actually aware of what we were doing now or how we had evolved, um, but I think just through network and interaction and asking really thoughtful uh questions, we were able to create a pool of demand through our network—just—just sitting down and calling people that we worked with or we knew or whatever—um, and just saying, hey, let us show you what we're up to; let us try to explain it, and then hopefully you can help us make us better again.
This theme of leveraging network—it sounds like that was done at the founder level um uh when it comes to demand gen, customer acquisition, generating calls to learn about uh problems that potential customers were facing, and then founders would go back and
Design the solution over time based off of what they would learn. The second thing that, um, I hear that isn't totally related to demand gen, but for Founders out there, it is a consistent theme. Um, even if you're, as a Founder, on the more technical or product visionary side, you're not a go-to-market or business-oriented founder. So many of the best Founders at the best companies spend a high percentage of their time customer-facing. Um, and that happens on day one, and it happens on day one thousand.
So Colin, I'm curious, do your—I guess two things—do your Founders still spend a fair amount of time meeting with customers and prospective customers? Um, and then the second part of that question is, as the company has matured, how have the demand gen channels also matured?
Yeah, that's a good question. Um, a couple of things, and just while it's top of mind, like we talk about the network effect quite often in our industry because it is—it's a multiplier; it's a force multiplier at times. Like specifically within the security domain, your network is earned over an extended period of time. Like I will never do anything that I don't believe is the right thing for a customer, right? And so like you have to earn that credibility and that trust and build that network through your actions, not some happy hour at some event at the Moscone Center, right? Like so just to clarify, I think too often we see, uh, what I'll call transactional connections as building our network. It's not true; that's not how you earn trust and you build credibility in relationship with people. It is through your actions over an extended period of times and having a set of core values you will never deviate from. And then, you know, like our Founders, Executives spend time with customers every single day. Like our responsibility to our customers in the market at large is—especially in the cloud—it's the most dynamic part of the market right now, right? It goes up, it comes down, it goes this way, it goes that way; your world changes, their business changes, your cloud changes. It's like if—if our responsibility and our focus isn't on understanding what our customers are going through and how their world is changing and therefore, as a byproduct of that, we need to change, then we missed the point. Like we never set out with these ambitious revenue targets; like that was never the goal; it wasn't talked about very often. Like we set out to build a world-class product to solve the biggest problem in a particular industry, and the only way for us to stay in touch or attached to our customers throughout our life cycle—which we're at the very beginning of—is to be present with them. So all day, every day, customer, customer, right? Like that's—it's a non-starter; it's table stakes.
Uh, talking about, you know, kind of sources of pipeline, it all depends on not just your go-to-market, but your routes to market. Like we announced earlier this year, we're transitioning from a kind of hybrid direct channel model to 100% channel. That's a result of how our customers are telling us they want to buy, right? Like we didn't make that decision; our customers made it for us. But what comes with that is diversity in your pipeline generation sources, whether that be, you know, very traditional BDR or marketing or, you know, your sales-led and generated pipeline to now, for us, a huge investment area, which is our channel-sourced and generated pipeline. And thankfully, we've—we've found ourselves in a position where our partners understand, just like our customers, that we have something of value that can really help them, and—and they're bringing the pipeline to us.
In the earlier—earlier days when you joined Whiz and it didn't have the brand tailwinds of a lot of the things that we're talking about right now—which are the growth of the business, the valuation of the business, so many customers that are probably in-market championing the brand—what were some of the initiatives around brand that were successful for you, and anything maybe on—on the flip side—uh, that was less successful that comes to mind?
Yeah, like I think a few, and you'll—this—I know this little—I'll register with you—like I believe this to be true on day one; I believe it to be true on day a thousand, to use your terminology. Like every employee who works here is the brand; you're the brand first and foremost. How you—how you conduct yourselves, how you engage, how you market us—like what—what tone you set—like you are the brand every single day. And therefore, I have to trust you to represent who we want to be and what we represent every single day, and that—that's just an expectation we have of every employee now until forever. But to your point, I think what we all had was personal brands; we—we knew we had great visionary and great product, a great execution, and great go-to-market. And so the people who we had connected to earlier in our careers really trusted us based upon our word; they took us at our word that we were going to do something, and we were—that thing was going to be exactly what we said we were going to do. Like there was no gray area; if we promised it, we committed it; we delivered upon it. And—and over time you see that change thing, and you know, like thankfully in our case it's due to, you know, some success, but there's a—there's a multiplier effect and an order of magnitude where you do that enough times, you do the right thing every time, you get a reputation for doing the right thing every time. And sometimes that means stepping up and saying we got it wrong. Like I can think of a handful of instances very early on where, you know, like maybe I miscalculated the pricing model; like I just didn't understand the customer environment well enough, and the number was wrong, and I had to call them back and say, actually, it's not that; that was my mistake; we'll honor our commitment to you. Um, but building that brand and what I call the currency of trust, right? Like in every interaction, there's an opportunity to either build or break trust; you better be building it. And then security specifically, with the position our buyers are in, if you're not building trust, you don't have a chance.
Interesting insight around uh, in this domain of security, so much of the brand is trust. And when we were thinking about building a brand, the way that we thought about it, or at least a—a big way that we thought about it, was establishing trust, um, and—and so we did that, uh, through the—the examples that Eaters provided around, um, just being completely honest, delivering results, the types of things that you committed to.
Okay, so you referenced earlier, um, on the call that, uh, you didn't set out with these incredibly aggressive revenue targets. I listened to a different podcast of yours where you talked about your initial revenue target, I think for the fiscal year of 2022 was something like eight million dollars, and your plan called for 22 people in the revenue organization, um, and that didn't last long. So your actuals were something like 40 million in revenue and 100-plus people, uh, so 5x on each the revenue and the headcount side. Can you talk to us a little bit about how that plan evolved throughout the year? Was this one major re-forecast that you did when you realized, like, man, this is taking off a lot faster than we thought? Um, who was pushing to go bigger? Uh, just tell us anything that comes to mind with, uh, uh, this crazy change to the plan?
Yeah, it's so—who pushed us to go bigger, though? The market did. Like that wasn't a decision that we made, but we—when you start to make go-to-market investments and the return is much higher than anticipated, right? I think there's this notion of like, okay, let's see if it's there. Ultimately, I had to sit down with our CEO and ask him to trust me, and I needed him to trust me with—it's not free; it costs millions of dollars to build a team that big in that period of time to generate the revenue. Now, with that said, I'm a big believer in milestone-based planning. If a + b = c, you better move on to d, and—right? So like objectify the outcomes and the milestones so that it's a no-brainer. The hard part is thinking through what those should be, and in our world, I can tell you very early on, like when I started throwing a number around in the—with a—it started with a four; people thought I lost my mind because we were nowhere near that, right? We didn't have the pipeline for that, but the pattern and the trend in the analysis was there. If we do a and we do it well, b, c will be the outcome, and if c is the outcome, we better get ready for next year, right? Now, and so there wasn't a massive, a one-time exercise where we shifted the goal post and picked a new target; it was iterative and challenging, right? Like at any given time, one particular variable could—could, you know, destruct the entire, um, build of any plan that we had in our hands, and so we had to be adaptive and willing to admit, like, got that assumption wrong; better move on, right? Like no harm, no foul; we miscalculated; world's moving fast; let's sit down and do it again, and let's sit down and do it again, and let's do it again and again and again until we get it right. And frankly, I don't think most organizations are forced into that situation, but I'm so glad we were because how repetitive it became—if we build a skill set and a muscle as an organization so early in our journey that will benefit us for years to come.
Lots of uh, takeaways. One thing that I loved from something that you just said, which is counter-intuitive or certainly not—um, the standard, which is you first—you said like the market is what drove the increase in targets and the increase in headcount, um, but you said that you, as the revenue leader, went to your CEO and said, I want to generate more revenue, hire more people, and trust me. And you know, oftentimes that is the opposite of what happens where, you know, revenue leaders are the—the cliché term, um, sort of like condescending term is, you know, sandbagging, uh, where if there's evidence that we can actually grow faster or you don't want to surface that—that's possible because you want to—you know, over-deliver and crush numbers and uh, it gives you a chance to like lay off the gas a little bit. One thing that I have learned as—as I've gotten sort of more experienced in my career, which it sounds like—um—is—is some like maybe you wouldn't articulate it this way, but it's probably happening; it's just this like paranoia and obsession with how can we grow faster, um, just constantly thinking about what are the opportunities for us as a business to grow faster, regardless of what the target is—is it additional demand? Is it increasing ACVs? Is it uh, working with different personas? It's just like constant paranoia around how can we grow faster, regardless of what the targets are.
And then I'll share one uh, other story because I went through a similar experience, not quite as extreme, um, it benefits—when I was a bit more junior in my career, but—but this mindset helped me progress in my career in different things, different exercises that I would do with folks on my team. Um, when Xenovitz was uh, very young and immature, we had a goal of going from like five hundred thousand dollars in ARR to 10 million in ARR in uh, one year. This was 2014. Um, and about in March of that year, Parker sat down with me and Matt Epstein, who was the uh, marketing leader, and we were beating the Q1 revenue targets, and he said, let's go through this thought exercise of what would it take for us to get to 20 million this year, um, and look—like you know, if we get between 10 and 20, that's still a win; we're still like one of the fastest-growing tech companies of all time, but like let's go through this thought exercise. And we mapped out a lot of what you just described, which is headcount-related; we needed to hire more people if this was going to happen, and we came away from that meeting with, okay, let's do the things that sort of make sense that we circled on this whiteboard; let's not do some of the ones that seem a little bit crazy and see how the year progresses. And I think the takeaway from that meeting for me was—um, I'm constant—and the other thing was like Parker was doing this without every team, but I'm constantly doing that with my team, which is okay, like you know, we want to get here; yes, that's a success, but what would it take for us to get here? Like what would we need to do differently to get to 200% of our number instead of 120%? And I know at least at Zenovitz that was happening across the entire organization; it was like, okay, we're supposed to deliver this product on September 1st; as we sit here, we're at May 30th, and what would it take to deliver this thing, um, late July instead? Uh, and so that type of, um, thought exercise I found really impactful for me personally, but also others that I've worked with.
Yeah, I have so many thoughts because you're spot on in—in so many different ways, right? Like I get—I can go back to—to college, and outside of our locker room, there's a quote on the wall; it says to find the—the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Okay? And so we condition ourselves to—to think we know what reality is or what outcome we can achieve; that's not our story; that's us interpreting and applying somebody else's story to ourselves. And so I feel like as a team, as a leader, as a human being, I believe in one percent better; I believe in pushing the envelope; I believe in setting higher expectations for ourselves than anybody else because the—the only way to figure out how great you can be is to fall short of it. Like excellence is unachievable because you're always in pursuit of it, right? And so like every once in a while, sitting your team down and saying like, throw everything out the window and tell me how we can do this; what is this? How do you know that—that's it, right? And—and we've continuously pushed ourselves and our teams to do that exercise regularly because it's healthy; it allows us to gut check what—what worked in the past won't work in the future. So that's one thing that I couldn't agree more with. The other one is like we have revenue milestones, targets, whatever you want to call them—like those are inflection points; like some of that you control, some of that you don't control. Like making sure you're obsessed with it because you need to understand it and adjust accordingly; like that's the whole point. I feel like so many, um, go-to-market leaders are focused on revenue targets, or it's like, no, no, our job is to create shareholder value. We pulled different levers at different times throughout our journey in order to maximize value for those that uh, invested in us or who are invested in us. And so like it gets lost in translation so often, and I'll never understand why shareholder value is always number one; the way you go about creating that should be very different from time to time. And like after that push to the limit as far as you can every single day.
Love that. Um, we're getting a little uh, philosophical, which I think is uh, great, um, and hopefully insightful for the audience. Let's continue down that path and um, end on what hopefully is a bit of a high note, and again, it's sort of like philosophical; I don't know if you've ever received uh, piece of advice that uh, was sort of like most impactful for you personally throughout your career; it would be helpful to share with the audience, um, that could help those that are listening.
Yeah, it's so generic, but I say it to myself every morning; it is an affirmation, right? Like the hardest part every single day is putting your boots on and going to work. So like, get your ass out of bed and go do the best job you possibly can right now. And like it's the first thought I have every morning when I wake up, and you know, the—it's interesting as a parent now, like I have a different one with my kids, which is what's today? Like today is a good day for a great day. Like the only one who controls whether or not I have a great day and I worked as hard as I possibly can today is me; nobody else gets to influence or impact that. And so like I know it sounds so simple, but for me, like I go back to kindergarten principles regularly—like treat people the right way, work as hard as you can, try to help other people—like that's my advice. Like you do that, you're—you're working on a life of significance and impact versus success, and—and that's what it should all be about.
Uh, I'm—I'm sitting here smiling, and—and that uh, piece of advice or—or the way that you sort of like live your career is resonating with me. One—one thing that comes to mind that I constantly remind myself, um, and it's—it's in the same vein; my takeaway from what you just said is it's around like motivation, um, like the hardest part of the day, put your boots on, give all of your effort, positive attitude, and one thing that has resonated with me is it just never to be satisfied, um, which is—it's a different version, but the output is probably similar because like the second that you're satisfied with some achievement or performance or you're—you're—you're—you're going to perform less well, um, and so if you're just constantly striving for more, better improvement, uh, the outcome will be significantly greater. Um, so anyway, uh, maybe—maybe we in there, Colin; this has been a blast. Thank you for joining, um, such an insightful conversation; you all are just crushing it, uh, so congratulations on all the success and best of luck continuing uh, building this rocket ship.
Thank you all so much for having me, and uh, I can't wait to listen to—to others and learn from others as well. So thank you so much, Sam. Amazing. Take care.
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