David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It's exactly right. I would commonly say we had all the burden and cost and pressure being a public company with none of the benefits. Zero. Because you’re exactly right, this was pre JOBS Act and we had to report every quarter just as if we were a public company. So the silver lining is we had a great training ground of how to set quarterly expectations, how to work with the street, how to work with analysts. We had to do quarterly earnings calls with the analyst that would be covering our stock. But it was very, very difficult and a testament to the strength of our team and our company culture that we kept everybody focused, we kept everybody very positive. And ’08 was just a difficult year for running the business in general given the economic crisis. Our numbers went up because a lot of our small business customers were going out of business, renewals got tougher, up-sells got tougher. In new business there was a lot of price pressure. So we had a good year in ’08 but it was very different year from the prior years of our business. But it was a great learning and growth opportunity. In early ’09, it became evident we were not going to get out. We didn’t need the capital. We didn’t want to go public unless we’re very confident it was going to be a successful IPO and then to my earlier comment, the business really started shifting more to the enterprise. I also learned a valuable lesson. We were profitable at that time and the public markets really want to see margin expansion and it became really evident that if we were to go public, we were going to have to show margin expansion, both gross margin and operating income. And it was going to make it very difficult for us to make those strategic investments in the business that we wanted. We were very passionate about moving beyond email and to a pure digital marketing platform. We were ready for international expansion. We were ready to start a couple of our acquisitions. All of that became a lot easier as a private company. So we pulled our IPO in early ’09 in conjunction with a large round of capital led by Battery and Scale and then later TCV came onboard as well. Our internal tagline was better than IPO. We really outlined from employees. Between that and then a later round you did in 2011, I think you raised more money than in the private markets than you ultimately did in your IPO. Yes, we raised 145 million in 2009. There was a large secondary component but it gave us a war chest to really get aggressive in expanding in the business. We created a vision we called Accelerate 2013 where we became very specific around the company, what we wanted to look like in 2013. We started with the end in mind and then worked our way back. And very counterintuitive. This was the time where Sequoia sent out their favorite, kind of famous deck around.…

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