Eilon Reshef: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love... Because today, like I said at the very top of this conversation, you're just so ubiquitous, everybody seems to be using Gong. And I love that you started with something, where there was seven, I don't know, different constraints to narrow down who you're going after, and it's such a good example of the power of starting very focused and then expanding from that, which is what you've done. Okay, last question before we get to a very exciting lightning ground, we have a segment on this podcast called Fail Corner, where so many of these podcast conversations, everyone's always sharing all the successes, everything's always going great, nothing ever goes wrong, when in reality it does, things often go wrong. Can you share a story from your career or just the journey of Gong when things didn't go well, when there was maybe a failure, and if you learned something from that time, what you learned? Yeah, I always joke that in my previous company we had done so many mistakes, that if life limited you to a certain number of mistakes, I wouldn't have any left I think. I still do mistakes, but just so many. So, every one of them probably done twice, and then it's like at some stages, third time's a charm. So, the one I just gave you is probably the worst, is crossing the chasm, you start a company, you have this technology, I was thinking let's go horizontal. And that technology was whatever, web integration, something, eventually ended up being an e-commerce content syndication, or [inaudible 00:45:28] management SaaS software, which is the right way to go because you want to specialize in a certain market. But initially, just going on in was just ridiculously not smart, and the other thing we did together was that was, the previous company started year 2000, so that was the bubble, one of those very, very nice bubbles. So, we're like, you know what? We actually got three customers, admittedly in totally three different segments, now let's go and scale. Now, we all knew we need one salesperson, one SE and [inaudible 00:45:59] what's now called product market fit, I don't know that the term even existed there, and we're like, nah, you know what, investors told us you got to hire more people. So, we hired, I don't know, 20 salespeople, all of them failing miserably, because A, we didn't have a true product market fit, but even what's worse, we didn't have a true focused ICP with a very, very repeatable product market fit. So, if you sort of hear me talk about how we started Gong, Amit is the CEO, and he drove a lot of that business strategy, but me being sort of a co-pilot there, it definitely bringing the same, I'm not going to make that mistake again, I might do new and fun ones, but not that same mistake again. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round, are you ready?…

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