Claire Vo: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. I love that advice. It's something I try really hard to do with this podcast. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. You get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny. I know you have a fun story about when you were very pregnant selling your startup to Optimizely. Can you share that story? I haven't actually heard the story. Yeah, this was a fun one. Again, this is the universe is bendable to your will and lean into your power, which is, I had been running Experiment Engine, which was a platform for enterprises to run high scale experimentation programs. Not necessarily the underlying A/B testing technology, but all the stuff around hypothesis gathering, insights, aggregation, operations, keeping things on track. Because I really know, as you do, that high scale experimentation programs can be very impactful to businesses. That being said, it was like a niche inside in industry, as opposed to a large TAM problem. And so I think we just fundamentally hit a TAM ceiling here. We had a great product for a great market that was very narrow. And three years, four years into running the company, I knew that to be true and I knew that we would be better served by being part of a larger organization, and one of those organizations could be a large testing company. And so I remember that was noodling on my mind, but we were also really trying to sell to enterprises. And I heard that Microsoft, who was one of our biggest customers, was doing a experimentation day with Optimizely, and I knew Optimizely was a natural acquirer. And I knew I had to get into that room, so I called Microsoft and I said, "Hey, friend of Microsoft, I'm going to be up in Seattle seeing our other customer, very large Seattle company, this week, week of experimentation day. Could we stop by?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, sure." Well, then I went to other big Seattle companies and said, "Hey, other big Seattle company, I'm going to be up Microsoft at their experimentation day. Would you be..." I got these two meetings to manifest against each other, and then I walked into that experimentation day and I eyeballed the CFO of Optimizely and I sat in front of him and started pulling up the product and coding at the same time. I was just like, "I'm going to sit in front of him in the row and I'm going to do this and we're going to have my screens." And then I went up and did a demo. And I'm not saying that's the thing that made it happen, but I will say very quickly after that, we became very close partners and ultimately they acquired me. And I give this advice to founders because one of the things that, and founders and PMs, one of the things that I really hire for is scrappiness. I think you have to be able to do a lot with a little, and I think you have to know where you're getting and, come hell or high water, figure out a way to get there. And this was a very fun example of working my way into the right room, setting myself up for the success that I wanted, and having the backing, the good job, the great product, the outcomes to earn it. But you also have to get yourself in the room. And how many months pregnant were you?…

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