Hey, everybody. It's our former co founder partner, Village Global, a network driven Vetra firm. And this is metre stories, a podcast covering topics relating to tech business with world leading experts. Everybody welcome to another episode of venture stories by Village Global here today, rejoined by my very special co host, Yasmin Razavi, general partner at Spark Capital and joined by Arthur Johnson At your story. Arthur Yasmin, Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Your also. So, Arthur,

why don't we start by way of background? What are what are the experiences that led you Teoh where you are and and the work that you do today? They're sure So I've been working in tech for the past 20 plus years now a too big a part of my career. I would advise tech companies on M and A There's acquisitions raising funds for I pose in banking. I did that for about five years. Then I decided to join one of our clients feeling Packard and really worked on strategy and Cork Dev for their HP sample business unit did that for about four years really could help me get closer to the technology, but still from a strategic perspective and in doing it today after that, I joined into it to also when they're cooked up, Team helped him get more into the, uh it's in the tumor space. Many Joanne Cisco It really brought in my crew to become more of a chief operating officer for the exhibition at Cisco. And then after that, I took a right turn in my career. I joined the VC firm. Increasing her was to become an operating partner to help put from the company's with development and then a. And then I decided you want a pre i p O Sure Petroleo Teoh fill out their strategy team and now Mitt. Pure Storage with Extract Planning Corp Tive and strategy

Fascinating Career spanning Corp Dev on Strategy would left to maybe start, um, with your work at Twitter and and the topic we want toe really cover today and get to the weeds off. Is building and scaling. Go to motion, Go to market motions focused on selling to developers s o what? Why don't we sort of hear your thoughts on who To Leo's early adopter base? Where and how do they think about reaching them in the early days

sure happen to talk about that. So Trulia's was a very, very unique company, right? And so is there for about three years and really at the heart, it was accompanied, built by developers for developers. So Jeff Evan John with the founders of the company and they're essentially developers. They wanted to build a company to help solve communications for developers and said the philosophy from the very beginning waas for their customers. It's all about trust and authenticity, right? Because many people didn't really respect the developer back in that time. In 9 4010 timeframe at meeting opens, recalled programmers, and they were kept in the back room and they were required to program code all the time. But Jeff knew the power and influence of what was going to grow as the world started become more and more are into around software, and the doctor does gonna power that,

that emergence of software as it ate the world. And so the philosophy one is trusting authenticity don't treat the developer like a number, and the killer app could be the developer experience for their platform. And so the way they tried to get early access to developers was really having more credibility, right, because as a developer, they don't want to be sold to European markets. You just wanna have great documentation. You wanna have a resilient A P I and you want to make sure if you need help, pick up the phone and answer my questions, because that's what they did. So they hired a very small marketing team that had an email campaign. They had a block post to announce products, and they also went to a lot of these different hackathons to hack. A. Websites likes that overflowing hacker news and the thing that tried to try to attract themselves to more influential developers to get their hands on the coast quickly as possible.

So it was very much there's not a blueprint for how to do that, because at the time there were many, if at all, many developer focus copan it. So they said, you know, if I'm a developer, how do when I use the total product that kind of follow that blueprint to get the early word out so very much, uh, fly by the seat of your pants approach? Teoh getting the early developer adoption,

so that's really fascinating. But what is it? What does it really mean? Thio Thio Be focusing our efforts and selling to developers like Who was this team? Why did they have a credibility to be able to sort of go face to face and and try to find developers and talk to them?

So this team that was that was built was called the Developer Evangelist Team, and that team was really kind of tasked with kind of being on the ground. A really kind of being at the eventual developers were, and the philosophy was, let's talk about the product. Let's get the numbers hands on the product on the code as quickly as possible and a spokesman very technical because they were developers and they knew exactly how to think like a developer. The problems don't were faced. The biggest thing that they that was facing was efficiency. There were becoming so many things thrown at these developers at that time to build this go that tweet this and tweak that they wanted to find a way to make their giant jobs in life easier. And so I think that once they have the empathy and understood the problems of Oprah's faced. They got credibility and the developers trusted them and felt okay. This could really help me in the promise of Basin. So that really helped to make sure that we're on their same level, very empathetic and really authentic and who we are a za

super interesting. I remembering one of the early chats we had. You mentioned that Tullio had these developer evangelist that basically sort of in a very grassroot way, would go to all these computer labs of engineering schools and all these student events and just sort of put a ton of face to face time trying to build, um, build sort of Julio's brand name and expose people to the functionality.

And that's what I think that that took a lot of times. Well, it took a lot of the grassroots efforts and to go off of it for the trio brand to spread. But amongst the developers, we had actually had a very, very good bread and incredible brand name. And then it care if they were on TechCrunch earlier in The Wall Street Journal, all they cared about was being on these different hackathons Uh ranks high in the second websites, like stack of insulin, hacker news and really kind of having the following in these developed reforms. That's what they care about. Yes, I got that credibility from the very beginning.

How far does it go to market motion like this? Take you having sort of, Ah, team of Dev evangelists, You know, going to conferences and two schools and that sort of doing that kind of groundwork. How scalable is that? What kind of skill the twilio reached just by doing

that secured him for the 1st 7 years of the company. And I think that people thought that truly held onto that self service dinar for lead, go to market too long. But I think it is served him very well because really kind of built up steam. They both have a lot of momentum in the company and took him to close to north of 100 men. Dozens a are are on that kind of self service the locker land go to market motion And so I think that really

getting real And they are our with with the team of Deva Vangelis must must be the most efficient Go to market motion in the history

exactly and not the head, because I think that that motion was very efficient and allowed them to invest more money in R and D, as opposed to building an expensive enterprise to Lucas gonna mark emotions. So I think that and also help them to learn, understand the market better. And so they were able to work out the kinks on the product and the features by getting really good feedback from the developers. When they started to build up the enterprise, go to market motion, they knew better how to put the Gun America motion at the right use cases in the right customers, and so learning the product market fit on a much more efficient go to market is a great way to think about how you kind invest your money. And after sales service and more time, it's more money by doing it that way. So they held on to that good market motion for several years.

Yeah, super interesting, I think. Now we're at the stage of sort of the developer tooling industry, where selling and to developers, you know, seems like a path that's reasonable and and well played out by a bunch of examples, but I can imagine back then it must have seen pretty risky. Like, where did the inspiration come from that we could even do this in 2010?

It was. It was hard. I think that there are a lot of veces that turned Jeff down when you went to raise money because they felt again the developer was not a a big market. They felt the developers that in for much of when it came to budget Teoh get resource at these companies and this wasn't a other companies doing it this way. But Jeff had strong conviction because he started other couples before it was hard for him at those other companies to get a dal. It'll be kind of UFO system set up to get things, get things going. It says This has gotta be a solution for this problem. And Alba developer, I can program away into better solution. That's what it was. Inspiration was, and also he was one of the early product managers at AWS, which was which was very much of the time writing a developer focus company. It's a lion, things that you learned there in that environment helped inspiring that there is a market for developers. There's a way to build a platform and solution for them That would be very influential. So it s so I think that it started with a strong conviction because again, that many people liked his idea now many people thought was a smart idea. But it turned out to be a very clever way to build a company.

Totally. Um, so they managed to get to something like 100 million or above above that in a Are are just through this small teams of Dev evangelists. How do anything about the next phase of their growth, Um, sort of taking it toe half a 1,000,000,000 of air are what kind of efforts were experimented with to to sort of help with that trajectory.

So it was a bit of a ship, because when you think about a self service, you know, Delta let go market motion. You have the marketing to that way you have the website team. That way you have the collateral tune that way of these two to the going market motion, but building at Mormon Enterprise gonna mark motions very different as you have to kind of change William Market the way you kind of generate demand. The when you build your collateral who you hire for this thing. And so I think that we went through a couple of fits and starts to figure out the right motion. We had a couple of folks heading up says at the time, But I think when brought in Roy and then George and CEO, that really helped the company to really kind of find the right way to go toe to have a Good America motion ready. And so they did. They did a couple things that really helped to solidify that temporize got recognition. Number one is really trying to separate the field into ah Hunter, former model. So the hunter,

the only mission in that person's life was the hunt for admit new Locusts. And that's the only mission they have. And it's a certain DNA and kind of person. You gonna drive that and be successful doing that, that you have the farmers. Their mission in life was to cross the line up, sell products into our installed base, and you can take a difficult person to be successful in that role. I think when you have those rules blended, you kind of sub optimize of either part of those rules. So having the separation of the Hunter former model was a great, great step to building at the price go to market motion Number two is that they really kind of focus on use cases. So before they first started, they really trying to say, Do you want to buy Twilley right? Because the clapper was so flexible,

some valuable, it could do a lot of things. It's hard for a person to go in there and we'll identify. What do you want to buy? What your problem is, you pay Point is, when we started food is to go to market motion on use cases like SMS marketing call center and book collateral treating around those use cases that healthy the enterprise field to identify the pain point and to address the paper went with the customers will be able to do more use. Case Selling was another big step to build up their go to market motion, and the last step was on the channel inside. And this is a big, big helpful to Leo's gonna mark emotion. So a direct customer truly is, like uber, that uses that in their platform directly into the act and indirect customer chairman customers like a zendesk that in beds Toya voice into the platform and the resells that to their customer building up a series of channel partners like Zendesk really helped to drive the growth of the business because they got more leverage in the inner part enterprise gonna market motion that really helped them to to drive a more efficient and go to market. So those steps we help them to tradition for more of A and he's still service develop the lead motion to move enterprise motion. But again today,

one still complements the other. It's not been trying to just be 100% enterprise. Go to my commotion they wouldn't do. They wouldn't continue to go through. It is a great kind of cycle that kind of have both motions at the company.

Yeah, totally. And it's probably one of the companies that is most gifted with being able to have this farmer model just because of the widespread bottoms of adoption of it

is a

fascinating what were some of the learnings as you guys were iterating across thes sort of different go to market motions to to go beyond passed beyond that sort of 102 $100 million there are. Are there any things that you think founders and similar positions should be aware of will be thinking about.

I think a couple things voiced it out as key lessons learned. Number one is You have to complement your account executive E with a great technical seller in SC on DSo being because it was very it was a somewhat technical sale to a technical audience, and most of counties can kind of get to that. That first call meeting with the second Call me when it gets down to those third and fourth call meetings to kind of get to the clothes, you kind of bring in the experts really kind of sell the solution. Stroshine. Any problems really communicate the technical value of the solutions and complimenting your eighties with a group of very, very strong ST's was a very important step to help us to sell into those different use cases, I think number two customers success was very important. We put a hi hi, uh, party on having world class customer success. That's probably why the Trulia has a very high NPS score. Net promoter score as we wanted to make sure as a development customer or enterprise customer. If you had any problems with the platform. Well, the product We're gonna answer your call, solve your problem right away. So we put a great big emphasis on having a world class customer success organization.

What is that tactically mean? Like, how did how did you guys is approached? Customer success differ, you know, from any other B two B software company that presumably also has that function.

So Troy has a reputation for running towards the fire. So there's a lot of times when you call a customer success organization of customer support and because the infrastructure is header genius is a lot of other parts to it. If you if the company discovers that hits that my part, that's wrong, That's it, that's it. Goodbye. But trillions said, you know what? I'm gonna help you leave. It isn't even though it's not. Part of my platform would help me figure this out. And so being able to run towards the fire may want to solve problems that may not be true is probably is a customer problem going the extra mile. That was a reputation truly. That's how you kind of trained because we're success to do that. And that's what the A P A score so high. So we were able to run towards the fire, help help the customer solve their problem and do it in record time. So those those actually has helped us to become a really great world class custom success organization. A lot of couples don't go the extra mile because it's expensive and it is very time consuming.

So we tried Teoh. Their efforts starts and ends with their product, which where their products starts an end. And when the product ends there, sort of like, you know, this is no one in my territory

because most customers success teams gold based on the amount of time it takes you to close the case and the short amount of time it takes, the better you do. That was not the key metric that it was not the key metric actually really focused on solving the custom problem, no matter what it takes.

At what point did the business shifts. Obviously, we started this conversation talking about the sort of tremendous effort that went into building this bottoms up motion and the organic growth from within that at what point did the balance of new leads shift from being mostly inbound, driven in tow? Outbound,

I think. Like when George who came on board and we made further investments in the go to market motion that really helped to really kind of, uh, really kind of should just even more towards the enterprise focused effort for twilio and really drive the growth because that also help us to get to bigger deals, larger customers, and we have those large. He has a lot of customers that describe to feed on itself, and you get the cross sell, get the up sell. And so George, who came on board several years ago, really tried to to mature that enterprise going market motion that really helped us to become I wouldn't say where. I would not say that the company's 100% enterprise and go to market, but I say that a good shot of the of the company now it is more than enterprise versus the help

right interesting. An interesting evolution for having reached 100 million of a are are entirely through sort of inbound. Um, in the early days of Tulio and I remember sort of I was in and around the VC industry as well. There was a bunch of skepticism around. You know, is this gonna be a commodity? Is you're gonna be gross marking compression in the long term. You know, reliance on a few big customers. Are they gonna think they're sort of bring this in house? Eventually. Obviously, 20 is a monster company today. $26 billion market cap. So and and a lot of these experts have obviously been proven wrong. Um uh,

and I'm just curious. In those days when you heard feedback like this, how did you internalize it? And strategically, sort of think about mitigating some of these risks.

I think that there were definite last skeptics because the number one the developer focused company and beginning was a knowledge number two. I think that, uh, communications was views as a nice to have not It must have. I think what Jeff and team got right was they really hit the near the curve at the exact right motion, right? So software was eating, the world developed was powering that, and communications is becoming an essential thing now for many businesses, right? And so the heart problems comes to trying to solve is customer engagement is still very hard for businesses large and small to successfully engage with their customers and do it probably do it scalable and being able to infuse communication into the work flows views it into their absent The websites with easy NPR platform is exactly what they need to help enable better customer engagement and truly was came around right exact time to help drive this into the market. There are allowed to take loans out there now because people have really kind of gotten a sense of the market how big could be. But Trio is the company that really is trying to stay ahead of the competition by having a suite of communication. P eyes there any companies that have one communication work with my voice or, worse, an SMS, but they have email video trills. One of the only companies that has four or five of the key to making workloads at scale on one platform is a big move

and as your of sort of moving up market and selling to enterprise is there is probably a huge preference or dealing with one vendor and having, to the extent possible of one stop shop, as opposed to a bunch of point solutions. So that must tremendously helped

to. That's exactly right. So being able to have one vendor, one AP I won Senate docks is something that things comes would happen. Because again, the trick ation problem is not, is multifaceted is not just one communication worker is going to be voice here for this use case. Maybe estimates for this use case email for that use cases. So you need to have a vendor that I saw all those problems free with with one flag.

Yeah, one of the one of the most fascinating things about to Leo's journey is, um, how they've managed to sort of branch out from their early use cases and products to repeatedly new new categories, whether it's email, whether it's chat, whether it's video, how how did the company think about their sort of second and third act? Um, and to what extent sort of you having had a Corp. Dev. RL thought about it. Ah, from from a perspective of emanate versus building in house.

Yeah, so that when you think about the market is thinking about like a three layer cake, right? So layer one is the raw connected it. Yet the telecom operators you have the aggregators at that level will tell about connectivity and that that level there one area is is pre must commoditized. It's low gross margin, but it's got the wrong level. Connectivity, which was the foundation for for the see Past market and later to you have the AP program ability. This is what Tweet was born is where they innovated in this great space to be in leverages the connected from later one to infuse that into Maybe I and abstracted tune a piano player to New Probursa program against it, so to lose. At that level, you have the competition like mixed smoke. LeBeau. Mrs Bird, there's got cleared. They have layer three,

and layer three is where it's more like a communication. Enable applications and solutions. Cloud based contact centers is a good example of of that, and so you can sell on the layer cheek and still that to developers, but it's Vienna P I. But the developer market is is a big market, but it's also a lot smaller than in the Layer three market. So there were three markets. You can sell that to wine business. The CEO is right up the show. Usually at a way, you don't need to have that problem ability. So I think that the more that trillion of the companies can invent continue investing in layer to like they've got syndrome for email but also make investments in their three like they do with twilio. Flex is a way for them to kind of continues to have the competition that kind of get into

sentences, given overview of what truly of flexes.

I'm sorry. Satoya Flex is a cloud based contact center. Tardio Large enterprise soul into Cisco Via Does Cisco of I and Jim says, do so. The cloud based context

on gets the application layer.

It's something Kinsella's. An application is a solution to you so you can use off the shelf that goes into you kind of sell that to the customer success team right away. So it's really, really kind of 11. Does the AP eyes that tortillas. But before we come in a package solution

that's such an interesting deviation from a company that must, you know, for a very long time has been developer focus and a P I focus. What do you think triggered on expansion to the application

layer? Well, I think that the feedback from customers was you know what the the A. P s a great, but if I don't have a developer resource to use it. But I can't use a Toyota product. And so to attract a different part of the market segment, let's try to attract some of the non developers with the same kind of ethos of true Leo. And so the thing that the Flex has is very flexible, very modular. How many packs? But you don't need to know how to program in a Pluto usefully reflex. It's available to sell this to non developers to broaden the market. Was the thinking behind making more vessels that that layer three for twilio?

And how do they think about this particular product aside? Obviously, Sandberg was an acquisition, but a lot of these other products they built in house what was your view or What is your view? Typically in A Corp Dev seat when evaluating buying opportunities, but versus building

Also, it may sound funny coming from a name and a guy, but my bias is always towards building. Did you build it? You can build exactly. It is you want to think about, because the reason wise, because you can build exactly what you want to do. What if you don't have the time or the expert cheats? But you have to have this new portfolio, then you have to kind of buy it. And so we did a very rigorous by a bill partner. Analysis Rosa Troy o do the same thing it pure And when it comes to look at the Bible part analysis, but we determined this is critical i p for portfolio. They don't have the time or expertise to build this thing ourselves that we have to buy it. So that's what we thought about emanate Twilio without immediate pure is that But but But again emanate is something that that almost every company should at least have their two kids. You shouldn't use it all the time, but you should have the expansive view of what everyone that's up into the portfolio you should always think about by building. Partners should not always default to one. You should do pretty rigorous thinking around how did kind of had actually before you

write. So it sounds like it's heavily contextual that you personally have always had a bias for building it. To the extent it's possible,

it's a less risky. Eventually, I'm gonna build display once that that's correct. But I have recognized that people need to have Amadeus person toolkit.

Yeah, I want I want to end it on asking sort of what you're seeing in the field. Um, you know, during covert times Ah, and how how it's impacting sales cycles or go to market motions given people can't travel as much or field sales seems to be on pause for the time being. What kind of adjustments are you seeing companies make and and to what extent, sort of Do you think this model can go on forever?

This is definitely a challenging time, and my heart goes out to everyone who's impacted by this and especially my heart goes out to the first responders. You know, I think for the I T area and and folks like Trillion in particular. I think it's actually admit positive from Chile from a commercial perspective. And here's why. I think that there were a lot of projects that people thought were nice tohave when it came to building out of context in Are Going on an SMS Chandler Context Center doing things digitally. Things that that were nice toe have pre coded have become essential today, right? Because they're companies that had two hour wait times for the call center post Kobe, if they would have built in different channels, make their efficient, made their costs and more efficient, they would have had that problem. We start to impact your customers in that way that's gonna have a lasting impact on your brand. And so I think that's what people understand, that the value of better customer engagement,

the value of digital communications. Since I think that's gonna be a deposit petroleo, I think it also spills over to other I t means as well. I think that for other I T companies, the total transformation was still kind of getting steam. I think the the Koven environment has made it even more important, Secu Nick eight and to interact and function as a company digitally, as opposed to in analog fashion. And so when it comes to selling, for example, you know a lot of people, like a bit of the quarter that was sitting in the lobby of the key customers to get the final sale. They can't do that anymore. They had to learn how to engage busily their customers. And so that's why you see folks Exume taking off in others. And so and I think that people realize that you know what? This stuff isn't half that, and it's actually more efficient, and it's more measurable for me to do it digitally. So I think that they hangover from Kobe is gonna is gonna make something stick that hadn't stuck before because people actually tried it and realized it's actually better than doing it in an analog way.

So you are. You're you're bullish on close the multimillion dollar enterprise deals on Zoom, and virtually

you'd be surprised you'd be surprised. How many does it getting close now that via zoom, that head of sales sores no one closes, beat this deal with that? See the whites of his eyes. You'd be surprised how he was getting close. Now it uses

well, that that's an optimistic note. Thank you so much, Arthur. This was great.

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