Jason Lemkin: belief

Transcript context

…Mm-hmm. No. The thing is, here's the thing that you have to think about. What's crazy, Lenny, now, and I talk to a lot of these folks is, there's so many SaaS companies that are a billion or more in revenue. I just wrote up, there's just Pimcore, which is SaaS for [inaudible 01:25:49]. I just wrote up, it just crossed a billion in revenue. So many folks are at a billion. CloudFlare just crossed a billion. And the only way you can do that is if your revenue compounds. And in fact, just myself, I just interviewed Matt Mullen from WordPress, 20 years he's been doing this, and he said the number one thing he didn't understand at WordPress, at Automatic, was the power of compounding. When you do these things that are customer hostile, and a lot of us were under stress this last 12 days, to hit the numbers, right? This is your job as founders, is you got to load balance the fact that the cash has to last and my investors are mad with me, but nothing matters in B2B that it compounds. And some of this dark stuff you're talking about on PLG, it anti-compounds, right? And I would say, let me flip it around. The magical thing at the high level that it compounds, if you have a self-service model, a PLG model, I actually think the number one most important metric is churn. It's going to this churn, churn, churn, churn. And when I meet any startup for investing or anything, if the churn is not top decile for a low end product, I'm always out. It's almost unsolvable. It's almost unsolvable. This 3% to 4% a month churn rate that a lot of SMB stuff, it's almost unsolvable. I think that's where the energy should go, is relentlessly bringing down churn so that, 20 years from now, we all have billion dollar AR companies. That's what we want. I have a rapid fire set of questions before, actually, the lightning round. We'll see if we have time for all these things. I just have a bunch of random questions that I'm going to fire at you and and see what comes up. Sounds good? Okay, cool. I got a thumbs up. Let's do it. Okay. What is just one thing a founder or product leader can do to become better at sales?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.