Takeaways from Evolving Enterprise 2018
Last week, GGV Capital hosted its second annual Evolving Enterprise summit at the Pearl in San Francisco. We were lucky to be joined by more than 50 founders and executives from top enterprise technology companies, as well as exceptional speakers who shared insights on product, go-to-market, talent and scaling.
Here are a few of the top takeaways:
Sarah Friar (CFO & Head of Operations at Square) emphasized during her fireside chat that it is incredibly important for team members to put themselves in the shoes of the customer and “live the struggle.” Square put a team of their engineers behind the counter at Soulva, a popular San Francisco restaurant, to enable them to actually use the point-of-sale system in a real life, high pressure setting to fully understand customer pain points and strengthen empathy for Square customers. Following its IPO, Square highlights its merchants in every earnings report and encourages them to ask questions on earnings calls. “We want to be challenged, to have an open conversation.” She also stressed that she manages people around output, not input, and doesn’t believe in being prescriptive in how goals are met — she likes to “step back and let people figure it out,” driving a broader range of innovation and more diverse approaches.
The panelists on our “Series A” panel shared advice on identifying product/market fit, staying lean, picking the right early customers and aligning the initial exec team.
Tiffany Chu (Co-Founder and COO of Remix, which builds transit planning software for public agencies) looked through her Linkedin connections and invited every urban planning official in her network to her offices to conduct interviews on their pain points and how her product could help them. This round of initial user interviews helped her team validate that they were onto something. She also warns early stage companies to pick initial customers carefully — Remix signed a big deal early on with a sophisticated customer, couldn’t deliver and the deployment failed. Ultimately, they won that customer back years later with a more mature product and team. Tiffany also talked about measuring the impact her technology is having on her customers’ communities. “I’m very focused on social impact. Every time a city uses Remix to make a decision that affects change, it’s a win.”
Ilir Sela (Founder and CEO of Slice, the largest technology provider to independent pizzerias) encouraged founders to be creative in looking for talent and told the story of how he built a 300-person team in his birthplace of Macedonia, giving his organization global leverage in a lower cost environment. Going lean in the early days enabled Ilir to bootstrap the business to $40M in annual sales. Ilir also talked about the importance of having a true north around product decisions, and balancing team input with a strong personal vision for the product. “You have to listen to the team, but also know when to just make a decision.”
Dave Vasen (Founder and CEO of Brightwheel, the leading vertical software provider for Pre-K education) believes in highly “surgical and targeted” hiring at the early stages, as the first hires can have a huge impact on culture — and are costly to replace. He also advised founders to make time for self reflection, to consider working with an executive coach and to regularly collect feedback from the team, as all of these enable them to think about strategy and direction at a high level separately from the weeds of day-to-day operations. He also talked about open dialogue, “I don’t want folks to just nod their heads, but instead, engage. We need to push each other.”
The panelists on our growth stage / scaling panel shared their insights on building a go-to-market engine, the importance of content marketing and how they manage retention/upsell.
Jenny Roy (VP of Marketing at Gladly, which builds customer support & engagement software) talked about how Gladly brought on a VP of People early on in the company’s life because they see well-run recruiting, interviewing and onboarding processes as opportunities to build a great reputation. She has run marketing teams in many stages of organizations, across both consumer and enterprise products, but has no hard rules on the ideal marketing stack — she encourages people to experiment and quickly shut down campaigns that aren’t working.
Edith Harbaugh (CEO of LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform for software delivery) highlighted the importance of content marketing for creating a new category. The team wrote many blogs on customer case studies with big names such as Netflix and Facebook, and leveraged Edith’s own popular developer-centric podcast, “To Be Continuous,” to educate the market on feature flags and why they matter. She also talked about actively shifting the culture as the team grows, “Some people don’t like it, but the culture at 8 people can’t be the same as at 80 people.”
Dave McJannet (CEO of HashiCorp, a builder of infrastructure automation software) talked about how HashiCorp invested early in an annual customer conference, and the positive impact of doing so. He said that the company’s first humble HashiConf “made us seem bigger than we were” and the annual event has now grown to hundreds of attendees. He agreed with Jenny Roy on the importance of hiring a Head of People early on to focus on hiring the right 50–60 initial people because they will form the core culture for the business as it scales. Dave also talked about marketing as a long game, “We don’t try to measure the direct impact of the conference. We have confidence it works, and we run with it.”
Finally, Stewart Butterfield (Co-Founder and CEO of Slack, the leading enterprise collaboration platform) talked about product craftsmanship and the importance of really understanding the day to day experience of an end user. When he started building Slack, he had never built enterprise software before, but he thought about the realities of the real life of the user, who has normal day-to-day family and financial stresses and how bad software could compound that. As a result of this thought process, he built a product that people would rave about at work and tell other people to use. He also said that he had no regrets about Slack’s bold full-page “Dear Microsoft” ad in The New York Times, despite the criticism he received — “The day after Microsoft Teams launched, there were 109 articles written about it and 107 mentioned Slack in the title.”
Thanks to everyone who joined us for the event. We appreciate your time and look forward to staying connected.
GGV Capital is a $3.8 billion venture capital firm that invests across the US and China in ecommerce/internet services, enterprise/cloud, and frontiertech. EvolvingEnterprise is an annual summit led by Glenn Solomon, Jeff Richards and Crystal Huang, and this year co-sponsored with Silicon Valley Bank.
All photo credits to Noah Berger.
