Shawn Wang: belief

Transcript context

…yeah, you're making a bunch of rookie errors in trying to close a contract that any mediocre or better salesperson will be able to do for you or in partnership with you. That was really interesting to learn. But the biggest thing that I learned, which was, I'd say, very humbling, is that at MemSQL, I worked with customers that were very technical. And I always got along with the customers. I always found myself motivated when they complained about something to solve the problems. And then most importantly, when they complained about something, I could relate to it personally. At Empira, I took kind of the popular advice, which is that developers are in a terrible market. So we sold to line of business. And there are a number of benefits to that. We were able to sell six- or seven-figure deals much more easily than we could at SingleStore or now we can at Braintrust. However, I learned firsthand that if you don't have a very deep, intuitive understanding of your customer, everything becomes harder. You need to throw product managers at the problem. Your own ability to see your customers is much weaker. And depending on who you are, it might actually be very difficult. And for me, it was so difficult that I think it made it challenging for us to one, stay focused on a particular segment, and then two, out-compete or do better than people that maybe had inferior technology that we did, but really deeply understood what the customer needed. I would say if you just asked me what was the main humbling lesson that I faced with it, it was that. I have a question on this market because I think after Impera, there's a cohort of new Imperas coming out. Datalab, I don't know if you saw that. I get a phone call about one every week.…

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