ClickUp president and COO Gaurav Agarwal says the company plans as if resources are unlimited but executes as if there are none after a $400m round.
ClickUp is building a single tool to consolidate the modern work stack, combining docs, tasks, projects, clips and whiteboards.
Agarwal fixed rising customer acquisition cost within three months and made people changes in his second week.
ClickUp's COO on executing like the company has no money
ClickUp bets that teams will consolidate their work into one tool instead of a dozen, and that one platform can serve both the operations nerds who build their own workflows and ordinary teams that need packaged solutions. Gaurav Agarwal runs it on the discipline of a startup with no money even after a $400m round, releasing resources only when a team stretches and shows a green shoot.
Takeaways
ClickUp bets one tool beats a dozen. ClickUp puts docs, tasks, projects, clips and whiteboards in one place so teams stop switching context. It once bought billboards across the United States with the pitch all your work in one place, and the long-term vision is a single tool for the modern work stack.
Plan as if rich, execute as if broke. Resources are released reactively only when a team stretches about 10% and shows a green shoot. He spent two years tilting ClickUp's DNA to operate as if it had no money, after a $400m round and with roughly 1,000 employees.
Two kinds of users need different things. Power users, whom Agarwal calls operations nerds, get ClickUp University and build their own setups. Everyone else needs packaged solutions, and consultants build workflow software on the platform. ClickUp is also the top small-business CRM on G2.
OKRs gave way to a Kanban of priorities. ClickUp moved from quarterly or six-monthly OKRs to a Kanban-style system of stable priorities with iterative paths, so the priorities hold while the route to them keeps changing, and he says businesses are never at a global optimum.
Commission design wrecked the services push. ClickUp paid sellers the same dollar commission on services as on seats, so they oversold services to large customers. The fix capped services at 20% of a salesperson's quota, a systems change rather than a plea about behaviour.
Hiring for drive beats hiring for pedigree. A support rep became one of ClickUp's best mid-market sellers within three or four years, and another a top technical program manager. Agarwal cites the Taj Hotel Group, which hires people from small towns who have not lost its values.
Agarwal's first 90 days at ClickUp
Keep your head down and learn the business.
Deliver a data-heavy presentation to leadership within 30 days.
Make people changes early, as he did in his second week.
Fix the most visible problem fast, bringing rising customer acquisition cost down within three months.
From a Singapore trading floor to ClickUp
Studied industrial and management science engineering.
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On this episode 2
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First job at Barclays Capital in Singapore, trading structured products and bonds across Asia and London.
Joined Lensbricks, an MIT Media Lab spin-out doing deep learning on cameras and video. It ran out of money.
Grew Molekule's air purification business to nine figures in revenue.
Joined ClickUp as chief growth officer, then took over all of operations.