00:01:41 · Rebecca Lynn
[00:01:41] S7: Because it's really easy to create a company in Gen.ai in demo mode. It is a very different thing to take that beautiful demo and put it in the wild and scale it. And we've already seen a handful of companies that, you know, were backed by amazing investors kind of blow up because they weren't able to transition from that really cool slick demo into the wild, essentially, into full production. The biggest question we have for companies is they come to us and, like, it's a beautiful demo. Come to us when you have a customer that's live. My name is Rebecca Lynn. I'm the founder and managing partner of Canvas Ventures. Canvas Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm that focuses on investing in financial services, digital health, and AI. So some of the most recent outcomes of Canvas Ventures are Casetext, Gabby, and FutureAdvisor. And importantly, Casetext was a very early exit with AI and GPT four, and they exited to Thomson Reuters for about 650,000,000. Gabby was acquired by Experian and FutureAdvisor by BlackRock. So I have always been a believer in in second mover. I think first mover advantage is a fallacy. And the reason is is that it takes a lot of money and time and patience to really prove out a brand new market. And once you prove it out, you have a ton of technical debt. I invested in Lending Club, and from then on, Lending Club ended up being the largest US tech IPO in 2014. And so Lending Club wasn't the first mover. There was a company out there called Prosper who had really hit the market first. The best position to be in, in my opinion, of a company is the startup that lets another company kind of seed the market, prove that there's a market there, and then that can take that learning and come up very quickly with a better product and better marketing and no technical debt. I would challenge anyone to to come up with more than just a handful of companies that are public today that truly were the first mover. There are very few. I think the most important characteristic of a CEO is salesmanship. Really, a CEO's job all the time is sales. You're selling to your customer. You're selling to your employees. You're hiring people. You are constantly selling. The company that, in my opinion, really most clearly defines a CEO who listens to their customer and then is a great sales leader, it was Jeff Tangney at Doximity.
00:04:03 · Rebecca Lynn
He, from the very beginning, brought on a customer advisory committee to help inform him of, you know, what was important to his end users in the product and what wasn't and where to take it. Very early on, he would bring in this advisory panel to, like, an on-site sort of strategy session, and they would wireframe, you know, five, six, seven different ideas and show them to this, you know, panel of end users that would really feed into their entire product roadmap. And he did that from the beginning. So when I'm evaluating whether a CEO really possesses sort of the salesmanship, it becomes blazingly obvious as they're pitching us. You want a CEO who can sell you on their vision because of their excitement and how they thought about it and that they've talked to the consumer. And you also want them to be incredibly honest and forthright with you at the same time because that's what endears trust when you're in the sales process. So when we ask a CEO about, you know, their ARR, and is it booked or is it forecasted? Having that CEO be very open and transparent and upfront, I think shows us that they are going to not only earn our trust, but the trust of their customers. And that's really important, especially early on. The mistake most startups make when they're scaling is that they believe too early they have product market fit. And they believe they... They've got it, and then they go out and they hire a very expensive salesperson who then wants to hire a bunch of people, and they just burn a ton of cash too early. And then they have to let that salesperson go and then go back to the drawing board and kind of sort
00:05:42 · S0, S1, S2, S3
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00:06:49 · S3, S4, S6
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00:07:22 · Rebecca Lynn
[00:07:22] S7: Out a little bit more, you know, what those elements of product market fit are, and then rehire. It's hard to watch. I think almost every startup does this, especially in the enterprise space. And and our advice is, you know, just way to beat. Hire maybe that director level salesperson who can help you, maybe a chief of staff that can help you in your in your sales efforts, and then really make sure you scale gradually. When you think you have product market fit, have some more checkpoints, you know, before you go out and pay a lot of money for a head salesperson before you have product market fit. You know what? There's an example. So Casetext, pretty early, thought they had product market fit, and they hired a very good seasoned sales executive to come in. And they spent quite a bit of money on the sales exec and the team, and it wasn't working. They weren't getting the traction that they had hoped for. This is before they launched CoCounsel, the GPT four product. The founder, to his credit, made a pretty quick early decision to let that team go. And it was really hard. You know, the salesperson was great. It wasn't an issue with them. It was an issue with, you know, where we were at that time with the product. You know, it was really about supporting the founder. He kinda saw also that was the right answer, but it was a hard answer. It was a hard thing for him to execute. And so helping him think through how to message it, how to make that happen, and introducing him to other founders who've had to make similar tough choices so that he can get their firsthand experience and advice was really helpful. Oftentimes, the founder does have instinct and data that I don't. So I first seek to understand why they're heading in the direction they're heading. And then if we become pretty convinced that it is the wrong direction, we try to show not tell. And so we try to find the right people to introduce them to that will offer them a more complete picture of the way we're thinking about the world. And oftentimes we get there. It's not that they were completely in the wrong direction and we were right. Oftentimes, there's some kind of meeting in the middle. I think the first thing that we need to do is check our assumptions, understand where the founder's coming from, and then get them the resources.
00:09:20 · Rebecca Lynn, S8
If they do need to make a shift and they decide they need to make a shift, like, help them on that journey. And it does happen. There's, I think every company, it's oftentimes many stages, you know, has to pivot either from strategy or product or channel or, you know, whatever it might be. And when they get there, you know, our job is to help them figure out how to make that shift. Ad[00:09:55] S8: Hi, I'm Peter On. With over fifteen years of sales experience at companies like Google, Dropbox, and Slack, I've obsessed over how to effectively answer questions like this in a way that builds trust. That's why I created Peter on sales school with EO to equip startup founders and sales professionals with the modern skills to excel in enterprise b to b sales. This online course offers real life examples and ready to use b to b sales frameworks that you can incorporate immediately. From crafting the most effective pitch deck to authentic customer discovery and even negotiation, I walk through how you could do it all. And limited to just 10 students, I'm also offering one on one bespoke feedback on assignments. Ready to learn and grow your sales confidence? Check out the link in the description or find me at EO School.