Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I've spent my whole career in sales. I started out in sales when I was in college. I worked on the Obama campaign. We didn't call it sales, right? We called it turning out the votes or street teamwork or field ops or phone banking, but it was sales. We were just selling the dream, literally the American dream as it were. So I've been in some sort of a role where my primary responsibility was to cold call, send emails, have conversations, objection handle, and try to get someone to sign a contract for my entire career. I started selling in September of 2008 was my first month with a quota. So I started selling in the middle of the last financial crisis. In 2009, the company that I used to do sales for, which is called Meltwater, this company, it's a pretty crazy story. It's one of the few companies that has made it to $100 million in recurring revenue without a drop of venture funding. It's a Norwegian company actually. If I remember correctly, don't quote me on the exact numbers here, but the company had basically gone 10 million to 30 million to 50 million to 70 million, and then in 2009, they went from 70 million to 69 million. It was the first year that they hadn't not only increased revenue, but revenue had gone down. In that year, in 2009, I broke the company record for the most sales by any individual person in one year in the history of the company. I say that not out of hubris or out of pride, I say that because I've literally sold in a downturn. In the middle of a recession, I have been an account executive selling, carrying a quota and have been successful in doing it. Then went on to be a sales leader at a bunch of different places, probably most notably at Glassdoor, where I joined as one of the first 20, 25 employees. Was responsible for enterprise sales there. Personally closed Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Ford, Visa, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Walmart. At its peak, at one point I think Glassdoor had about 100 of the Fortune 500 customers and I'd sold about 60 of them myself. I've done a lot of selling in my career, also a decent amount of sales management and sales leadership. But really my forte is selling. I love to sell. I love to talk to customers. I love to train salespeople. I've been a VP of sales and CRO in a couple different places. Then for the last five years I've been building a community for salespeople that's called Bravado. Bravado is a network of about 300,000 B2B tech sales. That's about 50,000 VPs of sales and CROs, about 150,000 account executives, another like 40 to 50,000 SDRs. Then the rest of it are kind of customer success, sales engineers, sales ops, sales enablement, et cetera. So it's a network that purely focuses on sales, and much akin to your business, I suppose, marries community learning, upskilling, recruiting as this one place that a salesperson can go in order to beat the odds, be successful in their career, find a great job, or hit and crush quota in their role. Awesome. I think that gives a clear picture of why you have such unique insights. I don't know if there's anyone that has such a broad access to so many salespeople and what they're doing, what they're thinking about. The core part of the Bravado product, just to make it even clear, is a community or people ask questions, help each other through sales issues, things like that, right? Yeah. So if you're familiar with Stack Overflow and what that network and community means to engineering, Bravado has a product that's affectionately known as the War Room, which does the same thing. So you have 50,000 companies, sales teams that are on Bravado. We get a realtime pulse of which companies are hitting quota, which ones are missing quota, which sales reps are closing deals with which organizations, which industries are doing better or worse. So we do get a really interesting perspective within the world of B2B tech sales, to be clear, a really interesting perspective on what's happening in terms of companies and revenue and forecast and quota, which gives us hopefully an opportunity to serve those members and the general tech community at large in terms of how they can beat the odds, especially as we're back to that 2008 crunch that we saw then as well.…

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