Transcription
Being a Founder is very, very stressful. Should I keep going? Do you have a job? Do you have a career that's going to, going to work out? My suggestion is frankly, if you feel like you should stop going, you should probably stop going. And if you can't not continue, then you should continue. Hey, you know this is what you need to be doing; you need to keep trying, and all you need is one thing to work out, and then that'll, you know, blow away all the failures in the past.
I have considered giving up many times, but there was just something nagging inside of me that wouldn't let me. Interviews like this is that, hey, I'm someone who's already gone through it; maybe you can learn from some of my mistakes instead of going through the same two years of pain that I did as well. I think you should stop being lazy and learn how to build yourself.
My name is Marie, the co-founder and CEO of Pylon. We're building the first customer support platform built for B2B companies. We're going to consolidate all the products that you would get from a customer support platform, customer success platform, product marketing, I'm tooling for Solutions and Professional Services teams, and combine them all into one. Our initial insight was that a lot of people are talking to their customers not over email anymore, but they're starting to open up shared Slack channels, Microsoft Teams channels, WhatsApp. We got to 120k in AR within 3 months of having the idea; got our first customer in 14 days. We've raised $20 million from investors like Insight Partners and Horwitz, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. Frankly, the vision is shaping up so fast, um, because of what's evolving with AI.
Might sound stupid, but I was definitely inspired by movies like *The Social Network* or *Pirates of Silicon Valley*, kind of learning about how those companies got started. I guess I could relate a little bit to the characters in the movies where, like, oh, I'm kind of nerdy too; I like computers, I like programming, and maybe this could be a path I could go on too. YouTube videos were an early teacher for me, and then I started making games in high school, building websites. Then it was only kind of sophomore year of high school where I joined our robotics team, where I got really excited about.
After leaving high school, I went to Purdue to study computer science. I immediately fell in love with hacker culture. There was this club, Prod Hackers, where every weekend they would spend time just writing code and just trying to build games or applications. While I was in college, I started to do internships, of course, so I worked at places like Qualcomm in San Diego; I worked at Yelp as an intern, and then Airbnb. At Airbnb, I joined the payments team there, and so I was working on back-end infrastructure, helping basically money move around the world. To be honest, I don't feel like it prepared me that much for startups. I actually think it probably was not helpful; it was anti-helpful. I learned all the things not to do because big companies operate so differently and so slow compared to startups.
While I was at Airbnb, I really was not enjoying the work I was doing. I was like looking at all these other Founders who were starting companies on the side, even the ones who were failing; I was more excited about what they were doing and the path they were on than what I was doing at Airbnb. When I left Airbnb, I started working on one idea, which was a health tech idea. We were trying to build an app for people with Parkinson's disease to better understand their condition. It was a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, and we spent a whole year on it. In the end, I decided to pivot, not only away from the idea and the industry of Health Tech in general, but also the co-founder I was working with.
Even when I started working with my now co-founders, Aditi and Robert, we spent months pivoting together until we finally came up with Pylon. What we were interested in doing was building a really big, fast-growing company. I have considered giving up many times. I think in the back of your head you're always questioning, okay, should I keep going? But there was just something nagging inside of me that wouldn't let me. Hey, you know this is what you need to be doing; you need to keep trying, and all you need is one thing to work out, and then that'll, you know, blow away all the failures in the past.
Pivoting is really, really hard. You are going to pivot a lot, and you're going to pivot so much that my co-founders and I, we call it pivot hell now. Once you actually get into pivot hell and you start working with people and every week you might be switching ideas, it becomes really, really hard to keep going. Your parents are going to ask you what you're doing with your life; your girlfriend or boyfriend are going to question, hey, like, should you maybe start looking for a real job? And you're also going to have this like creeping doubt that, hey, maybe I'm not actually good at this, and uh, should I keep going? My suggestion is frankly, if you feel like you should stop going, you should probably stop going. And if you can't not continue, then you should continue. And that was the case for me; I basically didn't feel like I had a choice; I had to keep going because that's just how my brain is wired.
One of the learnings for us was you just have to start in a really, really big market. What type of idea you want to be working on to make something really big that can grow really fast? What we did was we kind of like observed the biggest software companies in the world, and it turns out there aren't that many public SaaS companies. If you look at them, like, they're probably 76 uh, billion-dollar-plus public software companies that are B2B, and of them, almost all of them are horizontal SaaS products, meaning, hey, they're selling uh, products that can be sold into almost any industry. So think like payroll, sales, marketing, customer support, etc. We decided, okay, let's to make sure we don't get stuck in a market, let's go after something really big, so we chose kind of post-sales customer support as a category to go explore.
What we did was we went on LinkedIn, and we messaged uh, 40 people a day; that's what LinkedIn would let you do. Let's say 7% of those people respond, you know, would create a cycle of us just cold interviewing people in Customer Support roles that we wanted to learn from. I think you need to be very clear with yourself what type of company you want to build. We wanted to build something explicitly very big, and for us that meant a $10 billion market cap public company that was making, let's say, a billion dollars in revenues, and also fast-growing meant that usually there's some sort of emerging trend that's happening in the world where you can capture that and grow with it. So where we saw this emerging trend of B2B communication moving away from email to kind of new channels.
If I were going through and trying to find ideas now, the strategy we used I think can be effective for other people. We basically decided, okay, we're going to explore the customer support and success space, um, you know, kind of horizontal category, and then within it we said we're going to go and cold interview people. Also, at the same time, AI was popping up, and it turns out all the data is flowing through Pylon is conversational, so now for the first time ever, there's an opportunity to structure it. Who have newer types of roles, so like new job titles that didn't exist, let's say 10 years ago; a lot of customer success managers, support engineers, solutions engineers, those people didn't exist 5 years ago; now they did. So we thought, hey, new roles might mean new workflows, which means new software, and maybe there's opportunity there.
The best time to raise a Series A is when you're going to get the terms; if investors are pounding on your door, even if you haven't hit a certain revenue milestone, it might be the right time to just go and take that. We raised our $3.2 million seed round from General Catalyst in 6 days; that's a catchy headline, and and it did really feel like we were living in an episode of *Silicon Valley*. The story is we were 2 months into our YC batch, 3 months old as a company overall; we were probably around like 60,000 in annual revenue at the time; 2 months into YC, that's when people start to think about fundraising, bringing on investors before the end of the batch. Well, we did was we scheduled as many calls with VCs in the course of one week, tried to create some sort of like time pressure between the investors themselves, spreading it out, basically going in with the mentality and kind of signaling to every investor, hey, yeah, we're fundraising really hard this week, and there might not be time for conversations next week, so we kind of need to knock everything out uh, right now, all at once.
Every time we got in touch with an investor, it was important how they heard about us. So instead of just like cold emailing investors directly, saying, hey, we're Pylon, like you should invest in us, we instead got Founders that they respected and knew, um, some that were even our customers already, go message them and say, hey, VC, I know this founder, the founder of Pylon, they're going to YC right now; are you talking to them yet? You should, because they're a hot company; I think what they're working on is really good. We got a bunch of really great introductions through that, and that just meant that the investors were coming directly to us, like basically ready uh, to have serious conversations, and we'd skip straight to partner meetings. The social proof was just already there, and at seed round, social proof is everything; your business is still so nascent; it's so hard to kind of understand, you know, where you're going to go, so having Founders vouch for you who the investor trusts is is really, really important.
To give you a sense of the timeline here, so we start our initial conversations with investors on, I guess it was a Monday; Wednesday is when we had our first discussion with General Catalyst, who eventually led our seed round; Friday we had an in-person partner meeting with General Catalyst uh, investors; and then Saturday went to the apartment of one of the investors, uh, went to the roof, had like kind of a social conversation, and by nighttime that same day they gave us uh, a verbal offer that they wanted to invest. The general advice that we got was, hey, find people who are good partners for the long term, who have a reputable brand; um, that brand then helps you bring on employees because you have that social proof, and then we'll also help you, you know, close customers; they can help you get investors for the next round. So General Catalyst was basically the top of our list, and so we were going after funds like them to, for, for the seed round. The whole process took around 14 days. At the end of 14 days, we ended up closing with Andreessen Horowitz, um, who led a $17 million Series A round.
The process of like talking to all those investors was not easy; they actually tried to fill your calendar as much as possible to make sure that you don't talk to other people once they express interest because there's only downside for them to wait; if they express interest, then they know that other investors will suddenly get interested just because of that like social dynamic. Low dilution was the thing that was really important for us; we just didn't want to sell 25% of the company. The only way to get low dilution is to have a competitive round; we want Andreessen Horowitz into better terms; then you have to go to someone else they respect, so you have to go to like a Benchmark or Sequoia, and Andreessen Horowitz has to feel like they're going to lose you if they do not lower the dilution amount. It's kind of this like social game where they need to make the terms better for you and the company.
When he was trying to figure out how to have a good fundraise, he basically was like, okay, how do you have a fundraise fast, like the Twitter guys; that was the example he gave. And so he asked investors, he's like, why did the Twitter guys have such a fast fundraise? There are actually no secrets; it's you have to have a really good team building in a really big market with a really good product that people love and, you know, high potential for growth. You have all those things; you've kind of already done all the work; here are the numbers; here's the growth rate; here's, you know, what customers are saying, and they're just going to be convinced based off of that, so really just the fundamentals are what's actually important; basically riding a big wave, and then we have the founder SL company; that's a, a great surfer, and so as a result, you can surf the big wave.
Hi, I'm uh, Tah Nam, a co-founder of Storm Ventures and also co-author of uh, *Survival to Thriving*. I started working in Silicon Valley in 1985 and then uh, started Storm in 2000. We've invested in uh, over 200 B2B software companies since then, of which 12 have become unicorns; probably the best knowns are like Marketo; we also have uh, unicorns like Vado, Techon, Algolia, Pipedrive, and so forth. I want to talk to you about what happens after you unlock growth; in other words, you've spent all this effort to catch the wave, and how do you stay on the wave? I hope that everyone that's in a startup recognizes that it's a an emotional roller coaster where you can go from the highest of highs, the lowest of lows in 5 minutes. And so in those moments, I hope you realize life is never so bad or never so good, and at the end uh, enjoy the [Music] journey.
When you're competing against incumbents, you're not actually competing with all the employees there; most of them are not working on R&D; most of them actually do not care because, you know, they're just getting a paycheck. We were, at the time, especially living in the office, working 14-hour days; the number of people grinding at Zendesk trying to accomplish the same thing is very few. I think at this stage, what has worked for us in terms of what the founder should be doing and what leader should look like is just doing the work yourself. So leadership at Pylon is very much just doing the work yourself, and other people kind of following by example. So like 6 months ago, we were actually living at the office; it was like Robert had a bed in the living room, and that, you know, everyone just had desks surrounding, or our salesperson, his desk that he would take sales calls out of was literally like 5 feet away from that bed; I was like sleeping in a meeting room. For us, leadership just meant doing the work, and then people kind of seeing that, kind of being motivated and excited by, by that.
Being a Founder is very, very stressful. At the end of every month, that's when we do our reporting on how much revenue and how quickly we've grown; we keep doing it, and part of me feels like, oh my God, this is magical; it just keeps happening, but it's very stressful. I think the only way through the stress is by just addressing the problems and grinding really, really hard, so you can more consistently maintain growth and, you know, hiring pipeline and building a great product. Both myself and, and I think my co-founders feel very similarly, where we just want to win; we want to build a company, and so we just didn't let ourselves give up. I think the really important thing is to be able to build and solve problems yourself. Say, hey, I'm just going to go find, let's say, a technical co-founder who will build the product for me. I think you should stop being lazy and learn how to build yourself. There are lots of resources on how to do it; you could go watch YouTube like I did, go to a boot camp, or any free courses that exist around the world at this point; just learn how to build for yourself. Especially with AI, it's becoming so easy; then the world is your oyster; you can have an idea, make it, and then just try it and see what happens.
So first off, if you're not like purely set on starting a company immediately, I do actually recommend just trying to get a job at a startup. You can create a network and kind of like be immersed in the startup community. So, for example, you work at Pylon; we have events here all the time for Founders and um, other startups that are coming through, so you just have an opportunity to mingle with a bunch of people. If you are just set on starting a company immediately, I would probably go live in a hacker house of some sort; I would probably just attend a lot of meetups; YC has meetups now and events; I would just go to as many of those as you could, find the best people, and then try to get into their networks. I would probably tell myself, learn from others more. I think I'm one of those people that often likes to just go figure things out on my own, which I think is really helpful, but I think there's also a lot of advice; for example, I could have gone to successful entrepreneurs and been like, hey, what do you think of my idea? Like, is this good? What do you think are the risks? Whatever, and I gotten to the same point 2 years later in months had I just like listened to their advice, taken that instead of just trying to like discover everything on my own. Interviews like this is that, hey, I'm someone who's already gone through it; maybe you can learn from some of my mistakes instead of going through the same two years of pain that I did as well. So that would be one piece of advice: just go learn from other people who have done it before and are a couple years ahead of you.