Takeaways from Evolving Enterprise 2017
Last night, GGV Capital hosted its inaugural Evolving Enterprise event at The Pearl in San Francisco. More than 50 founders and executives of top private enterprise technology companies gathered to share ideas and insights on growth, culture and product. While the private event was off-the-record, we wanted to capture some key takeaways from the evening’s speakers to share.
April Underwood on the importance of listening to the customer. As VP of Product at Slack, April is looking forward 6–12 months as well as driving product innovation today. One founder asked how she deals with input from Sales and customers regarding new features. “I love it. We have to have a direct line into what our customers want.” She highlighted ways the product team incorporates this feedback, and said “we can’t always incorporate the ideas right away, but we definitely listen.” April highlighted the company’s recent launch of Slack Enterprise Grid as an example of this direct feedback loop. Slack is the leading enterprise messaging platform.
Sarah Friar on building a strong company culture that can survive good times and stormy seas. Sarah shared many insights from the early days at Square through IPO to successful multi-billion dollar company. “Your employees have to feel like they are part of a movement. If it’s just about a P&L and capitalism, they’ll leave when things get tough. They have to believe in the broader mission.” Sarah also talked about the importance of transparency around hard topics like financing, organizational changes and expansion. “We always try to keep everyone oriented around the core mission of empowering merchants.” Square handles more than $50 billion annual payment volume, completed its IPO in 2015 and today is valued at over $6 billion.
Susan St. Ledger on scaling a sales organization. “One of the biggest challenges I see is companies that are afraid to make the hard decisions on people.” Building for scale is tough, and Susan highlighted the challenges she’s run into in scaling sales teams at Salesforce, Buddy Media and now Splunk. “When you hire, you need to specifically look for people who can embrace change. A good barometer for this is how the individual values certainty. In most high growth companies, there isn’t a lot of certainty — you’ve got to be comfortable with ambiguity and go for it.” Splunk is a leading operational intelligence platform, completed its IPO in 2012 and today is valued at over $8 billion.
Jyoti Bansal on the importance of being a founder close to the customer. “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to be highly involved in Sales.” Jyoti highlighted the importance of his own background as a product-oriented founder learning to spend a great deal of time on Sales and interaction with customers, and how important it was to the success of AppDynamics. “I spend time in the field, I spend time on cold calls, I do demos. I see and hear what our customers are thinking.” AppDynamics is a leading player in the application performance management space (APM) and recently announced its acquisition by Cisco for $3.7 billion.
Josh James on why he launched customer conferences early on at Omniture and DOMO. “No question it’s expensive, and a bit of a risk. I distinctly remember our first customer conference at Omniture. We had 6 people. But we closed them all!” Josh went on to talk about how valuable these events are for DOMO, with Domopalooza drawing more than 1,000 people to its first conference three years ago. “We have fun with it. We’re serious about engaging with our customers, and they know they’ll learn a ton, but they also know they’ll have fun. We take some risks!” DOMO is the provider of The Business Cloud, the world’s first SaaS platform for business optimization. Omniture was one of the original software platforms for marketing and was acquired by Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion.
