Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Exactly. This is also a perfect example of a friend to the show, Alfred Lin at Sequoia, he had a great thing that he said to us at Wave a while back, which is what he really looks for in companies is do they understand, he called it input metrics as supposed to output metrics? The output metrics are, what is your retention? The input metrics are, what is going to get you, what do you understand about your product and your business that is going to get people to retain? This is a perfect example of that. Great point. Another thing that they did was, they were their own first customer. A lot of times I think start-ups presume to know their customers and because it’s frankly difficult to go out in the real world and have these sorts of conversations, you often project the needs of the customer into a map that you already have in your head and just start building. Slack was something where they already with Linefeed had a good amount of development under their bell of what makes it easy to onboard new team members. What are the bells and whistles that we would add on to IRC? They knew better than anyone of what this thing could be and what would make it useful. You don’t often have the luxury of being your own first customer because you’re not building a gaming company that has zero enterprise value, shutting that down, and then pivoting, but to the extent that you can get, a 100% fidelity on what are the needs of your customer? That’s pretty cool. Totally.…

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