A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:31:58 · Pablo Srugo
[00:31:58] S0: Yeah. So I think that's that's the high level, like, in terms of what what you needed to do. Like, imagine I'm a founder. Thinking about raising a seed, raising an a. And what I'm struggling with... The business is a business. It's doing what it's doing. What I'm struggling with is creating a narrative and telling it in a way that VCs wanna come along for the ride. I mean, I've met so many founders, and I can tell you there is a big delta between... Like, you have the founder as the operator, and then you have the founder as the fundraiser or storyteller. And some are great at both, but many many founders are great at operating. They know exactly how to do the business. They know how to close customers. And then when it's like, okay, cool. Go tell a great story. They just fumble. They can't do it. They can't get themselves in the minds of an investor and so on. Obviously, you've been able to raise. You've raised over $90,000,000. And like I said, I think this is a side of type of business where you had to tell... You always had to have a story that was ahead of the business because just... It's a fifteen year journey, as you said. So I'm curious, you know, if you're talking to a founder and you think back to raising your seed or your a, what are some of the kind of the the pieces of advice that you can share? How you went about thinking of how to craft this so that VC's nod along and and wanna invest.
00:33:00 · Hermann Frank, Pablo Srugo
[00:33:00] S1: You need to have a big vision. Like, so a good way to explain is like you need to be able to tell like your three, six, twelve month horizon with like incredible detail, and like you need to understand what needs to happen imminently. And then you need to paint a much larger arc and vision in the back of like what could this be if we do the things right that are just in front of us. That's one thing. Like, you kind of need to have this, like, bifocal type of storytelling. [00:33:30] S0: And what was that? That second one. Like, if you had to tell me in thirty seconds, if everything goes right, here's what we come. What does that what does that look like?
00:33:36 · Hermann Frank
[00:33:36] S1: So you basically... You imagine, like, if we execute this to its full ability, what is the end state gonna be? Like, what is what is reality gonna look like at the end of this journey? For me personally, there were like two events that helped me understand this. One was an interview I saw about Microsoft founders back in the day, and like, there was someone said like that, like, the GUI like, GUI was not... Like, it was not a given thing. It was debated in the industry if that is gonna be the winning interface. But the Microsoft founders just went out and just told everyone it's gonna be, so they kind of willed that outcome into reality. So it's like this kind of Plutonian projection. Right? Like you you just make the world see like how things could be and what they are, and ultimately that becomes reality. And another one was, like, a couple years ago, I was visiting this original SpaceX headquarters, and the their founding VP of engineering showed me this video of the Falcon nine launching and being recaptured. And he said that Elon created this video relatively at the beginning of SpaceX. The video looked exactly how the thing looked like on TV when it finally happened. And because what he was trying to sell was just so hard to imagine and considered so impossible, that he created this, like, ultra realistic version of it to just inspire people that that's what it is. And, like, that is what great storytelling is. You you show the final outcome. Like, you show the result, and you convince people it's it's real.
00:35:23 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:35:23] S0: I like that. What would that look like for for gigs? [00:35:26] S1: So we were lucky in the beginning. We had Stripe. Like Stripe was our projection. It's like we're building Stripe for phone plans. Like that was the tagline, that was the story, and that resonated really well. And quite early on, we had quite a few people from Stripe come on board as team members, right, like they were early at Stripe. So... And they saw the same thing. Right? They're like, hey, this like reminds me a lot of like Stripe in its early days, and like they kind of understood what this this should be, and what this could be. The the the more we progressed, the more this became kind of a real story arc. And it's like only relatively recently where we said, we kind of understand the market more now, and there is more depth that we can that we can go into, where like that started kind of... We can now start telling our own story and our own vision of the world. But for the longest period, we just used another highly successful company that we truly believe is a parallel to what we're building as an example, and that allow people that don't understand much about telecom to understand, okay, yeah, if they can make this work, the mechanics work a similar way, it's a similarly complex industry, then they will be able to build a massive company. So just use an existing example.
00:36:46 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:46] S0: And then jumping to the second kind of tactical piece, which is around selling enterprise. Mean, you're selling some of the largest enterprises in the world. I mean, a lot of these fintechs are multibillion dollar companies. You had this idea of, like, enterprise sales is less about salesmanship and more about statesmanship. There's a lot of politics that come into play. I'm thinking if you could think about a given customer that you close, and you don't have to share who it is so that we can go in a lot of detail, And walk me through, you know, end to end, how did you go from that name in a list somewhere of a customer you wanna add, and you finally closing that customer x amount of months later.
00:37:18 · Hermann Frank
[00:37:18] S1: Yeah. So I put the team together a couple weeks ago, or like a couple months ago, and, like, I walked through like the anatomy of a deal that is that is typical for us. And I said it is more about statesmanship than it is about salesmanship, because if you wanna land an enterprise customer, multi billion or tens of billions of dollars in market cap, what you need to do is you need to convince several layers in that organization that it's a great idea to partner with you, many times including the founders or the c level. You need to get the operating team to like you. You need to get the developers to like you. And ideally, it's not you just like one person doing all that. Ideally, your team tackles different people from different layers of that company, and does their part. Right? Like the product engineering teams talk to product engineering teams, like our VP of sales talks to their VP of sales or their VP of product. I reach out to the founder, and like we we got it covered at different altitudes. And that gives us a pretty much three sixty degree view on the company, and is what has allowed us to win 90% of deals in the market that we're in, and I think we're probably one of the companies in the world now that works for like largest amount of high profile customers, at least where we're launching businesses together. It's not like someone's using our our dev tool and we can put a logo on on the website, but it is a real business partnership. We're launching a new product line. So that has been one of our kind of success recipes.