A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:27:15 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:27:15] S1: Between zero and two. I would say it was mostly inbound for sure. [00:27:19] S0: Got it. Then what about the series – so I believe when you raised $15 million, I think it was mid-2021, is that correct? That was a series A or B? [00:27:28] S1: A. [00:27:28] S0: A, okay. Where were you at that point? Maybe just walk us through how that fundraise even happened. Was that also inbound or did you run a process? How did you do that? [00:27:40] S1: Right, so we extended our seed round, like I said, from two to a six. That extension happened with some pretty amazing investors, mostly from SF, A Capital, and SV Angel, and a couple of others. A couple of months later we did raise our series A was pretty preemptive. It was by a VC based out of London called Eight Roads. Then a few months later we had our series B done. Like you said, everything happened pretty fast within our funding for some of the competition, it was the same. It was going from zero to series B in 12 or 18 months. I think there was a lot of excitement around the problem everyone was trying to solve. I think every VC made their bet on initial traction that teams had. Also, the technology approach is a bit different from team to team. There was also looking at the market and thinking which technology and which product approach can scale the fastest.
00:27:40 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:27:40] S1: Right, so we extended our seed round, like I said, from two to a six. That extension happened with some pretty amazing investors, mostly from SF, A Capital, and SV Angel, and a couple of others. A couple of months later we did raise our series A was pretty preemptive. It was by a VC based out of London called Eight Roads. Then a few months later we had our series B done. Like you said, everything happened pretty fast within our funding for some of the competition, it was the same. It was going from zero to series B in 12 or 18 months. I think there was a lot of excitement around the problem everyone was trying to solve. I think every VC made their bet on initial traction that teams had. Also, the technology approach is a bit different from team to team. There was also looking at the market and thinking which technology and which product approach can scale the fastest. [00:28:48] S0: Can you describe maybe just what it felt like for things to move that fast, both in terms of just getting all this money into your company within 12 to 18 months, and then the hiring and the servicing that you need to do to react quickly? What was that experience like?
00:28:48 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:28:48] S0: Can you describe maybe just what it felt like for things to move that fast, both in terms of just getting all this money into your company within 12 to 18 months, and then the hiring and the servicing that you need to do to react quickly? What was that experience like? [00:29:08] S1: It's a pretty intense experience, I think. You need a strong initial leadership and management team as your first team, otherwise, it's not going to work. You don't have to grow to a hundred people for things not to work. You can grow to 40 people or 30 people and get it wrong. The first thing I made sure that the leadership was super strong. We tried to put our culture in mind, even though it's distributed across so many time zones. There was some, of course, growing pains with going from zero to whatever that was super fast. You spend a lot of time taking care of situations where people were not mid management, but then they are mid management and then they want to manage two people, but maybe, and then things are going back to normal and there's a lot of lesson learned here, but I would say it all falls on how strong your initial leadership team that surrounds you.
00:29:08 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:29:08] S1: It's a pretty intense experience, I think. You need a strong initial leadership and management team as your first team, otherwise, it's not going to work. You don't have to grow to a hundred people for things not to work. You can grow to 40 people or 30 people and get it wrong. The first thing I made sure that the leadership was super strong. We tried to put our culture in mind, even though it's distributed across so many time zones. There was some, of course, growing pains with going from zero to whatever that was super fast. You spend a lot of time taking care of situations where people were not mid management, but then they are mid management and then they want to manage two people, but maybe, and then things are going back to normal and there's a lot of lesson learned here, but I would say it all falls on how strong your initial leadership team that surrounds you. [00:30:09] S0: One of the problems I see, and especially when, actually, this is when things are working and you're getting market pull, is CEOs getting caught up putting out fires, right? Because especially as you start growing, just things go wrong and sometimes you do need to react as a CEO, but then you can also get to the point where you're just constantly putting out fires. Any thoughts around that? Especially having been through it a few times, I would think you manage to get your head above it all. How do you do that? How do you manage being reactive and putting out fires versus staying on top of it and being able to really just move your company forward?
00:30:48 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:30:48] S1: I don't think – if I think of friends of mine that have 1,000 people on their team or 5,000 or 10,000, I think everybody has fires all the time, and also, when it's just two co-founders to start with, right? There's always a fire. Then also it goes to your first team helping you out to your board, to your investors, people, advisors, whatever that is, you shouldn't expect your employees to help you fix the daily fires and for good reason because what they have in mind is their path, their progression within the company, and if it's good for their career and if it's good for the company, and you as a CEO, you have to be providing, the most successful paths to all of your employees while you are putting out files that could be anything, something in production, a huge customer is on a conference now showing a demo and something and they don't have Wi-Fi and whatever, right? Someone is to fly over – it never stops. You just need to have the world's best people on your management team to make sure that you're able to succeed. [00:32:03] S0: Perfect. Well, listen, we'll stop it there and maybe just end on the two questions we always end on. The first one, when did you feel you had true product market fit?
00:32:03 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:32:03] S0: Perfect. Well, listen, we'll stop it there and maybe just end on the two questions we always end on. The first one, when did you feel you had true product market fit? [00:32:14] S1: That's a good question because when I was in SF a few months ago, I went to Dreamforce and it was just – I was meeting one of our investors and it was going for the last two hours of the entire week. I walked in and then I noticed that a big – I wouldn't say half of the companies, but a huge portion of companies were actually using Walnut to show their demos inside the Dreamforce Hall. Some of them also recognized me from that video that we did. It was a pretty – when you build a B2B SaaS product, you don't really see it in the hands of real-life people in the real world, right? It's not a B2C app or something, but that was a moment where I saw people just using it and showing me how they use it, show me if they're using it on a huge screen or a tablet or just a laptop. That was an amazing moment. I left that conference hall and I felt that we did something that actually gets to people on their day to day. [00:33:23] S0: That's a great story. Yeah, I admit, I think as a founder, seeing the value truly delivered and appreciated by our customers is really what it's all about. Then the last question. Taking everything you've learned over the last, I guess, three and a half or so years running Walnut, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when you were just starting this company, what would that be?