They hit $100M ARR—in a "crowded market". Here's how they got to $1M ARR in just 18 months. | Don Mal, Co-Founder of Vena Solutions

Don co-founded Vena & was CEO for 8 years. Last month, Vena became a Centaur crossing $100M in ARR.

Don & his team launched Vena in a crowded market, where everyone else was trying to replace excel. So they built a budgeting and planning (FP&A) solution that instead leveraged excel. As Don says, they "disrupted the disruptors".

Don knew the problem, he knew the space, he knew the customers— that’s why he grew from 0 to $1M in ARR in 18 months.

Here's exactly how he did it.

Why you should listen

•  How to close the first few customers
• How to close 6-figure deals without any proof points
• Having knowledge and a network in the industry you're entering makes it easier to find success as a founder.
• In crowded markets, a differentiated approach and the ability to solve pain points for customers are key to standing out.
• Why there's no feeling like the satisfaction of taking an idea and product to market, working with great people, and seeing others succeed.

Keywords
startup, scaling, Vena Solutions, network, crowded markets, budgeting and planning, differentiation, pain points, revenue intelligence, SaaS, founders, startups, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, venture capital

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:36) The Beginning of Vena Solutions
(00:06:06) Step 1 of Vena
(00:09:35) First Conversations
(00:11:09)The Market in Planning
(00:17:50) The Market in Workflow
(00:20:02) Wealth Fargo
(00:22:23) Getting to a Million
(00:26:05) The Biggest ROI
(00:29:03) Una
(00:34:33) Not Retiring
(00:35:55) Finding Product Market Fit
(00:38:29)One Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 2:36 How it all started
• 9:35 First Customer Conversations
• 11:09 Entering a crowded market
• 20:02 Landing a $300K deal
• 22:23 Getting to a Million ARR
• 29:03 Starting more startups
• 35:55 Finding Product Market Fit
• 38:29 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00.27)

I'm on my third startup. My third one since Vana now. But if you think about if you go back to Vana, like those first five years, you're just building that first, like getting to five to 10 million of AR. That's really what you're doing, I think, in most cases. But then if you think about where Vana is today, like eight years later, it goes from 10 to 100. Right. Right. So once you have that foundation of recurring revenue,

and you have capital where you can scale and invest, that's really where it starts to rock. And I remember the guy asking us, he was our first customer, he said, how many customers do you have, Don? And I had to think quickly on my feet and I think I said something like, you're gonna be one of our first 20 customers. And he said, okay, that's good enough for me. So my first advice to founders, early entrepreneurs is look, what do you know about the product in the space that you're entering? Because if you have,

some knowledge and or a network, it's going to be much easier paths to success, right? To be able to get customers, partners, employees that you already have a network. to the product market fit show brought to you by Mistral, a SeatStage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (01:25.71)

Well done. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Pablo. So listen, man, I mean, I reached out because you crossed a huge milestone recently at Venna. Like, you know, we celebrate a lot of milestones, like a lot of it is really around fundraising, raising 10 million, raising 100 million, you've raised hundreds of millions, we talked a lot about, you know, hitting unicorn status. But I really do think the kind of most meaningful milestones are always revenue milestones, and you hit $100 million in ARR in July. So congrats on that. And I think my question is just like,

How does that feel because it's a small club of companies and founders that make it all the way there? Yeah, no, think, you know, and just to be clear, I mean, I left Venna five years ago when we were halfway there, but the company was well on its way. And so great to see that they eclipsed the hundred million AR Mark Abloh. Feels amazing. You know, I think we always knew when we started the company that we had a very differentiated approach to the market that was going to absolutely

Take us to the beginning. mean, this was a, it's been a long journey. I think you started in like 2011 or so, but yeah, we'd love to know just how it all happened. Like who, who were the co -founders? How did you guys come together? Where did the idea come from? Yeah, there were three of us that founded Vana. So Rishi Grover, George Papiannis and myself, we got together at a Starbucks one day and said, Hey, you know, there's something that we can absolutely do together.

The idea was born out of Rishi and I worked for a company that was sold to IBM in 2010. And when that company was sold, we thought, you know, what can we bring to market? Let's call it fill the void of what was acquired by IBM. And that's essentially what we did. IBM acquired the company that we worked for. That company had two products. But really, IBM wanted to really, you know,

run with one of the products and not the other. So the product that they essentially put on the shelf is what we then came to market with a year later in 2011, as you said, but with a different approach. And our approach was we were selling a solution for budgeting and planning. All of the vendors were replacing Microsoft Excel as the tool that most companies use for budgeting and planning. We actually embraced Microsoft Excel as the grid technology in our software.

Pablo Srugo (03:50.51)

So we kept people in a very familiar environment and we used to joke that we were disrupting the disruptors because everyone was replacing Excel. We went back and embraced Excel and brought a solution to market that everyone was familiar with already working in Excel. We had another line where we would say only Facebook has as many users as Excel. Were vendors getting tracked? Because it sounds crazy, at least today, maybe in high -tites 2020, right? But like this idea of like replacing Excel.

anything around finance just sounds insane. Was that strategy working for vendors at that time? It was working and it continues to work today. Some of the largest vendors in the planning space have a non -Excel approach. For us, we targeted the mid -market. The vendors that have done well, extremely well in the market where they replace Excel have gone more to the enterprise segment of the market, larger companies.

We were targeting the mid -market where Excel, you know, again was quite pervasive, but also it was is the ease of use, you know, kind of story. You know, if you remember back in the day, there was the Staples easy button. I used to carry that in my bag and people would say, well, why should I buy from Vanna? And I'd say, because it's easy. So anyway, for us, it worked really well. Like I said, it was, know, our main competitors were replacing Excel. We were very quickly able to.

you know, have a nice differentiated value proposition that that had tremendous traction. the way, was there any like legal implications of kind of the way that the company started because the product was shelved or whatever? Like how do you navigate that? No, in fact, that was the beautiful thing because when IBM acquired the company where we worked, they discontinued the product that we then reentered the market with our own approach. So we fill that void in a sense, their product

company that was sold to IBM had an Excel look and feel capability within their budgeting and planning tool, but we embraced native Excel desktop and eventually online Excel. so what happens that you guys, did you, I guess you knew, you knew one of them from, from that other company, the other person joins, you guys are at Starbucks and, you have this idea, like what's step one, where go from there? Step one was hiring a lead gen person, you know.

Pablo Srugo (06:12.012)

So I had complete confidence in Rishi and George to build a product. And actually, my background at the company that was sold was I ran sales. So I was quite confident that I could sell what we were bringing to market. But we needed leads. We needed leads. And so not only did we hire our first person to generate leads, but I've done that in my last two startups since as well. So it is the number one hire, in my opinion. If you don't have leads,

you don't have sales. If you don't have sales, you don't have a company. And this is what somebody like a BDR just starting to like dial or is this somebody more like inbound leads? Like what are you trying to drive? Yeah, I know definitely more BDR style, which you know, as we all know, it doesn't work as effectively as it once did possibly, but depending on which market you're going after. at the time, it was highly effective. We hired Josh our

BDR, who actually worked at the company previously as well that was acquired by IBM. So he had a track record of successful lead gen and started dialing for dollars. So within a few weeks of launching the company in August 2011, we had conversations with potential buyers. Even before that, Rishi went on the road with the product idea and validated, actually it was something that the market would want. If they could have a solution that leveraged

Microsoft Excel as the grid technology within an application framework, which is what Meta was and is, then the market would want that. So we had leads. We quickly got into sales cycles and were able to close our first deal. I remember our first customer was called First Wind. What a great company to be your first customer. It was an energy company based in Massachusetts. And I remember the guy asking us, he was our first customer. He's like,

He said, how many customers do you have Don? And I had to think quickly on my feed. think I said something like, you're going to be one of our first 20 customers. And he said, okay, that's good enough for me. That's right. Now you say something that's true and broad. Yeah. And did you sign that before like having a product ready? Like how far did you take the lead gen and the sales side of things before the product could actually be delivered? Well, the product was, you know, it was ready as an MVP, right? As a minimum viable product. So we

Pablo Srugo (08:32.302)

Definitely weren't selling vaporware, but the product was definitely a young, early stage product. But our first five or six, 10 customers, we were really able to cut our teeth on. The product really did mature, in a sense, quickly. Early days, we were an on -premise solution, actually. But within about a year, George really determined we needed to be a cloud -first type of application. When I say cloud -first, we

cloud second, I guess, but it was really quickly after we started that George converted the code to be multi -tenant cloud software. And we were able to sell them also on a subscription basis versus our first, let's call it 20 customers, where more on -premise perpetual licensing. those first conversations, like the first 10, 20, 30 conversations you have, how much of that was you learning and validating and how much of it was just...

selling and learning whether people would buy or not buy it, whether they would buy or not versus what they told you. Yeah. I mean, this is what I, you know, I coach young entrepreneurs. I'm going to ask this question in a roundabout way, but, you know, I always tell young entrepreneurs, Hey look, stick close to your nettings, you know, come to market with something you already know how to sell. And that's what we did. So we basically came to market with a solution that was highly differentiated, but it was something similar to what we sold, you know, previously at the company where we worked. And Rishi also

was a solutions engineer at that company. And so he's a great demo guy, let's say that. And so with our lead gen capability, my ability to sell in closed deals, Rishi to demo the product, we had a lot of confidence in what we were selling was something the market wanted and the market responded very quickly. They did want that. And then George did a great job building the technology so they could actually implement solutions and have success.

validation road, I guess it was like pre validated, like you'd already been selling something so similar, you were pretty confident that people would buy. We were confident. What we didn't know is, there room in the market for another player? You know, I mean, there's already literally a dozen players in the market when we entered. And so to be able to do what Bennett did, and now hit that hundred million, like you said, with, you know, a crowd in a crowded space is remarkable. But I think it all speaks to the highly differentiated solution that we had in the market. And it continues to be that.

Pablo Srugo (10:56.534)

In most cases, were you going in and replacing one of those competitors, or was it more of a bake -off at that stage, and people were just using whatever status quo was? What did the market look like then? We were essentially replacing Excel on its own. So when customers using Excel on their own were frustrated because Excel has limitations on its own when you're using it in an enterprise setting where there's multiple users, and you need version control, and you need...

single source of the truth that has a database goes, then that's where we were really replacing Excel on its own with an application that still leveraged Excel, but it had a lot more control and efficiency that Excel on its own didn't offer for that application use case, which is budgeting and planning and reporting for finance. So that's really what we, we replaced some other vendors as well that were replacing Excel, but really it's that,

Greenfield market that was available to us. So it was crowded but it's not like the vendors already had a lot of Share is just more that they were also pitching their products the same time as you were yeah yeah, and it was competitive like every pretty much every deal that we were involved in had two to three competitors But all of them replaced Excel so it was just so easy for us to say that they're all the same They replace Excel we don't and so, you know, it was just I don't want to say was shooting fish in a barrel but I mean we were

crushing it. We would win, our win rates against competitors was 75 % or higher. Wow. Okay. That's really high. What do you think broadly? mean, you mentioned you coach a lot of entrepreneurs. I'm curious, especially since you went after a crowded market. That's one of the easy things to kind of diligence upfront. So I think it gets a lot of focus is like, is it a crowd market or you loan, whatever. How do you think about competition and crowded markets kind of more generally? It's interesting because my new startup, Oona, that we just launched this year.

is a nascent space, so it's not as crowded. So it's interesting, you know, it has different challenges. I think going back to Vanna, when a crowded space, the good news is, is you know that the market's buying these tools, right? They're mining solutions. And so really the game there was how do you come to market in a highly differentiated way, which is what we do. So it's really kind of, you know, if you think about business kind of startup 101, right? How do you come to market with something that's...

Pablo Srugo (13:16.738)

different than everybody else. So that was really the key. So I think the fact that there were a lot of competitors was a good thing. It's amazing that this industry still keeps on giving because since Venna, there have been another, let's call it half dozen vendors that have entered the space that are all doing well. What explains that by the way, like especially something like budgeting and planning you'd feel would be like a solved space and that incumbents to the extent that there was new things to build, which is build them. Like what do you think?

gives room for new startups. I think the fact that everybody has to plan, right? Every company has to plan is a good thing. So in terms of market opportunity and as the market continues to grow, more and more companies are created. And so there's room for more solutions. Also, there's consolidation space. So a lot of vendors get acquired. And so it feels like it's a bit of a recycling where a lot of the vendors, it's probably still like

15 vendors in the space, right? But the first five that were competitive with us, when we came to market, have now been acquired. But five new vendors have come into the space. So it almost kind of stays like 15 -ish in terms of the number of vendors out there. Having competition, I think, is a good thing. It just validates that there's a market and a space that you can plan, but you've got to have a way to do it that's unique.

And by the way, we didn't talk about this, we of just took it for granted, but like what goes into budgeting and planning and especially back then in 2011, 2012, like, you know, people were using Excel, that was status quo. What was not good enough about Excel? What are some of the sort of things that those customers need to do that then I was helping them with? Yeah, if you think about some of the shortfalls or limitations of Excel, you know, it is a spreadsheet that's never, was never intended to be a multi -user. It is more now with online Excel, obviously.

in the same way Google Sheets have come to market that it can be in a collaborative way utilized. But back in the day, it was very much a single user application. It was really a productivity tool on your desktop, and you could send spreadsheets to people. That was the first problem. So you didn't have version control. So you didn't know which version of the plan or budget was the latest version. People make changes to numbers. You didn't know who made changes when changes were made.

Pablo Srugo (15:40.414)

So those are some of the challenges. Also the big challenges with Excel, especially back then, was as a sort of a desktop productivity tool, is you got, it's not a database, right? It's actually just data that's in the spreadsheet. The idea of centralizing the data so that multiple users can use that grid -like template or interface, but have everyone on the same page was a challenge.

Also then consolidating different departments. So if you think about what budgeting and planning is, is you're sending out a template back then, sending out multiple spreadsheets to different departments to enter in their budget numbers that they thought they were going to have for spend and revenue and so forth. And so the idea that it was a very kind of decentralized distribution of spreadsheets and templates was also a pain for people to consolidate all the numbers, to create a master plan or a budget.

All of those things are solved by budgeting and planning solutions. And so the greatest differentiation is whether you use Excel or you have your proprietary. So the other vendors had proprietary grid technology with their own proprietary formula conventions. So for us, there were no legal issues. mean, Microsoft loves it when their software is being used because they're selling more spreadsheets and more Microsoft technology as well.

And it was actual Excel. not like you replicated Excel. was literally Excel and you built off of that. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, Excel has the ability to have, let's call it an add -in or a ribbon where you can, you know, tie it to other applications. So that's kind of how the technology worked. What was like the first MVP? Like what was the core features? Cause there's a lot on that then goes on top of that when it comes to, especially, you know, large with market and whatever, but what was the MVP? What did you constrain it to?

I mean, so the fact that we were able to have spreadsheets in a controlled environment was the number one thing. So how do you bring Excel into an application framework? So if you think of a security, it's an important thing, So having security. So only people that have access to certain data would be able to do that through highly secure user authentication. So that's part of the MVP. The other thing is workflow. So the other big part of this whole equation is

Pablo Srugo (17:59.138)

budget owners or controllers or let's call them FP &A, financial planning and analysis managers and VPs of finance, they want to know where we are in the budget process. So when they send templates out to be completed where either department heads or different subsidiaries or business units would need to contribute to a budget, they would want to know where they are in that process. So workflow essentially drives that. So when you have the ability to send these budget templates out, you

can also have the visibility on who's completing what. So we had very nice status kind of dashboards on who had completed and who hadn't completed. So people aren't chasing the numbers. So on an MVP, you need to have the grid, database, workflow, and security. Once you have that, you're off and running. that's what Meta did earlier on. And what was the ACV? What's the pricing for this when you start off?

Yeah, you we sold it for different use cases. You know, the primary one was budgeting and planning to mid -market, which, you know, might have been in that kind of $30 ,000 per customer per year range. But we also sold it for high, you know, sort of mission critical regulatory processes to banks. One of our first 20 customers was Wells Fargo, as an example. And we sold to all, you a lot of the big banks in the US after that. But we were getting half a million dollars a year.

from the banks to use Venna for mission critical regulatory processes. It was a liquidity reporting process called CCAR in the US that was very critical. You had to report your liquidity position on a current and forecasted basis. So Venna was ideal because they were doing it in Excel and it was highly uncontrolled and risky. And so we were able to convince them that we had the greatest solution for that. But really, you

The bread and butter business for VATA was planning and it continues to be that today. How did you get in front of like, what's the story there? Like, how'd you get in front of Wells Fargo so early on and he's such a big logo? We had a lot of confidence and also credibility. know, again, going back to that stick close to your knitting kind of advice that I give young entrepreneurs, when you're, you know, we sold big banks in our previous companies. So we were able to convince them, hey, you should take a look at us because we're doing what we did before, but in a better

Pablo Srugo (20:21.07)

And we caught the meeting. I remember the three of us flew down to Wells Fargo. We hadn't even had our first 20 customers. They would have been probably around our 20th customer. We were there in our room with about 20 highly critical of us kind of folks that were vetting our software. And we were just confident. And we whiteboarded what we were doing and how we did it. And they're willing to take a chance. And what does that look like? Like it did half a million dollar kind of

right away or is it like they do a pilot and then they test it out and then it grows? Like how do they do it? I think that first one got like 300 grand, US. That was great. Were you bootstrapped at that point? We, know, kind of friends and family funding, you know, that's how we started it. Yeah, we didn't have a lot of capital. Yeah, like when did you raise the first, I think it like a $3 million round, right? The first kind of Actually, it was just over a million friends and family.

But then we did about a $3 million round with some angels after that. And then we got some kind of boutiquey investments from about three different institutional investors. Before we actually did a series, proper series A, we actually called our series A and series B because we raised, I think, close to $30 million from our first real serious investor that came in. When was that? About five years after we started. So we really did all kinds of

interesting financing to get us there, but there's a mishmash of things, whatever was reasonable at the time around availability of capital. Probably did about four or five kind of these little rounds before we got to our first PE round, was, as I said, around 30 million raised on pretty decent valuation. And then the next round we raised was 115 million shortly after I left. I'm sure it's in the archives there, but

I Venner raised almost $300 million. So yeah, it's been a lot of capital raise over the years. Going back to those early years, like how fast things take off like from an ARR perspective, like how quickly, mentioned 20 customers, one was $300K, so I'm sure it's getting close to that million dollar mark. like, what was that ramp like? It's a, you know, it's a hockey stick, right? It always is with these companies. I've got, you know, I'm on my third startup, my third one since Venner now. So, but if you think about it, if you go back to Venner,

Pablo Srugo (22:44.558)

Those first five years, you're just building that first, like getting to five to 10 million of ARR. That's really what you're doing, I think, in most cases. But then if you think about where Vana is today, like eight years later, it goes from 10 to 100. Right? So once you have that foundation of recurring revenue and you have capital where you can scale and invest, that's really where it starts to

Do remember how long it took to get to like a million in AR? A million would have been literally, I'd say maybe a year and a half. Okay. So it was fast, right? Because like zero to a million in a year is kind of like top decile, right Mark? Because we were perpetual for those first, you know, six months or whatever, then it took us a year and a half to get to a million AR. What were the challenges? Because it sounds like a lot of the things were, I don't like smooth. Do know what I mean? Just from the perspective of you had a product that you'd already kind of sold, you had relationships.

that you could leverage and you understood the market much better than I think most founders going into it. And then it seemed to like kind of just work, but then again, know, service was never easy. So I'm just curious, like what were the harder parts you in those days? know, ultimately it's always about customer success, right? Making sure that technology could keep up with sales is really where we needed to, which is a good problem, right?

Like we were selling a ton of software and so, you know, George was like, you know, building like crazy because he had to keep up with what we're, you the market demand was. And then we also serviced, we had quite a large service department that could implement our software and support customers. So those scaling the product and the services organization for the success of our customers was kind of the most challenging, but you know, we obviously pulled it off.

And so that I would say would be where the challenges were. you're right, a lot of things worked well. We had a good idea. We were able to raise capital. The other thing is that the three of us founders were all aligned. We all worked really well together. We all sort of had different swimways. I was kind of a sales CEO. Rishi was a product leader as a founder, and George was the technical leader.

Pablo Srugo (25:05.87)

So when you think about it, we all had kind of our own swim lanes and we complimented each other really nicely. So I think that's really important. We weren't kind of bumping heads on the same things and trying to do the same things. We were all kind of focused on our specific areas of the business and we let each other lead their areas. And that was really important too. And we're all mountain climbers, you know, in terms of like, it was all top line kind of focused company. So we weren't trying to cut corners or.

you know, see for a rainy day, we were like, let's go, you know, and we all had that mentality, which is really important, I think for, you know, founders or partnered with other founders is that everyone's on the same page in terms of where they want to take the business. And that's kind of where, where we were. And by the way, what was like the biggest ROI that you sold on, especially in the early days when you were just getting people to move off of Excel or to like enhance Excel, is it time -saving ROI, security ROI, accuracy?

What's the main thing? The biggest thing in that space is really getting the most out of your team. When you think about the manual, sort of archaic way of doing budgeting and planning of sending spreadsheets, chasing the numbers, manually consolidating the results, you've got highly trained and educated people that are doing these really manual, real things. So they're not adding much value.

So the biggest ROI in that space or in this kind of budgeting and planning world is how can you get more value from the intelligent people you have that are in your finance department? So rather than becoming sort of people that spend a lot of time doing these manual tasks, people are now spending time analyzing the numbers, right? And really providing more decision support for executives around where they should invest and so forth.

That's really the biggest, let's call it advantage. You're not really saving headcount necessarily. It's just that you're giving more value for your investments in people. And in your case, especially in mid -market, was the buyer, whoever had budget authority, were they also the user typically? They could be. Usually it's the head of that kind of process of leading a budgeting process that would be involved in a software evaluation.

Pablo Srugo (27:29.394)

So they would need to be convinced that this was something that they could be comfortable being systems administrator of typically. Yes. They were close enough, at least even the CFO being like obviously finance person, I would think close enough to the problem to to kind of get it firsthand, even if they wouldn't if they wouldn't use it. Absolutely. Yeah, because they want you know, they want to know that the numbers are getting are highly reliable numbers and coming from a trusted single source of truth, which is what our technology because I find like a lot of times that ROI of just like get more from the people you have, which

kind of as a time saving ROI can be a little fluffy, especially when the user and the buyer are two different people because like, and when they don't necessarily speak the same language, right? Because whoever kind of pays that 50K a year or whatever it is, it's kind of like, yeah, maybe you'll save time. Like maybe it'll be for a fish. Maybe you won't. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. Right. I think it's also that the trust in the numbers, right?

that drives that, that's a big part of the ROI. I for a CFO to, you know, to prove an investment in this type of technology, it's because they want to trust in the numbers and are not feeling that trust when it's all very manual, you know? So I think that's, that's a big part of the ROI driver in a sense. It's, it's more having confidence in the numbers, being able to sleep at night, worth the investment. Makes sense. So anyways, after, after Ven, I mean, you left, you said five years ago? Yep. Okay.

So Ben has gone on to grow. He grew to about 50 million ARR. It's now at 100. I know you started at least, you mentioned a few other companies. I know at least one, which is Fluence, which I think grew to over 10 million ARR as well. And now you've got a new one called Oona. Tell us a bit about that one. Yeah, super excited. We've just launched Oona this past couple of months ago. We've already got our first MVP and customers. And it's looking, the pipeline is looking pretty good.

So what Una is, is software for SaaS companies. And it's software that I wish I had when I was growing Vana. What Una does is we take data from CRM systems, HubSpot, Salesforce. We take data from those systems and we light up friction points of where in the go -to -market, let's call it customer journey.

Pablo Srugo (29:45.246)

of where you're acquiring customers, you're retaining and expanding customers, we're able to light up friction points on all aspects of the revenue. And so now you don't have a siloed view of how just lead gens working or conversions are working or how is onboarding or retention or expansion. You've got in the siloed world of looking all of that data, it's hard to make really good decisions.

So Una is a single place that brings the data together that shows you a holistic view of your revenue and go to market motions that are working and not working. And so that's the first part of it. And then we also provide frameworks and resources on how to improve. And is it all just CRM data or do you tap into other data sources to provide that like holistic picture? The other, yeah, the other data sources might be customer success data or product management data as well. and finance, finance is a big part of it still. So our heritage being in that planning space,

and the team that I have largely come from that kind of budget and planning space as well, is we are closely also integrated into finance because really at the end of day, it's not just about revenue intelligence, it's about how you then take that intelligence and make proper investments to continue to grow in a more efficient way. So we provide that critical information to the CFO as well. So we're super excited. It's software, like I said, I wish I had.

Why is that? what you say you wish you had it, like what sort of things do you think this would have shown you that you otherwise either didn't see or was very hard to see? Great question. I'll give you a great example. Early days at Venna, going back to Venna now, had invested over a million dollars launching a go -to -market motion for enterprise. Okay. Hired very expensive sales reps. You know, really the way we were going at that market was very similar to the way we were going at the mid -market. But you know, those are very different segments, right? Mid -market.

It's kind of a two -stage kind of sales process, enterprise, longer sales cycles, lots of other different complexities around selling into that space. And intuitively, obviously, we know what those were, but having a solution that could show us, for example, conversion metrics across every stage of a sales cycle. For enterprise, this is what UNA can do, but we didn't have that data available to us early days.

Pablo Srugo (32:07.404)

know, millions of dollars where it just took us a long time to figure out that market, that segment of the market, where if we had what can provide today, which is really, really great data around, you know, what friction points there were in that segment, but also we provide benchmarks as well on UNA on what those conversion rates should be along that, you know, all this stuff. it would just would have been much more efficient for us to get to.

Are those different conversion rates than what you might get within like HubSpot or Salesforce? Yeah, mean, so, yeah, I mean, the data comes from there, but we calculate the conversion rates, right? And then if you look at every aspect of the customer journey from acquisition to even retention and expansion, you know, it's all about conversions along those stages. So, yeah, Una, super excited in that we're now helping software companies

deal with challenges that we face ourselves in growing and scaling businesses. And so I think having that technology and capability would be having this meeting two years ago and having hit 100 million, think. It really would have accelerated our journey, our revenue. And are you like CEO of this business? Or how do you structure these days? Yeah, since I left Vanna, I haven't actually been full -time CEO of either my previous company, Fluence, which was just acquired by Ennaplan a few months ago.

I take a role more of an executive chairman where I hire leadership, I help to raise capital and I help in strategic sort of initiatives, whether it's mergers and acquisitions or really, or especially go to market type of strategic initiatives, given my background in sales leadership. So yeah, so I've hired a CEO who's awesome. Actually, he ran sales at Venna and the team that I have were

some former Venet folks, but also some former Affluence folks and people that I've worked with even at the company prior to that I've mentioned that was acquired by IBM. you know, building a, having a team that you can trust, you know, that they know what they're doing and is great. So yeah, super excited about where I think you and I can go and really help the SaaS industry in general to better understand where the revenue is coming from and how to optimize that. By the way, I have to ask like,

Pablo Srugo (34:30.574)

What keeps you going as a founder? lot of people would have, you know, either retired to the beach or like worked on pure like passion projects. You seem to just like, you just want to keep building more companies. I tried that whole retirement thing. It didn't last long. I think it was a couple of months after about, you know, the thing is, is, you know, it's, it's muscle. It's a little bit of muscle memory, right? So the, I've been in this industry for 30 years now, in software and I've done a bunch of different things. I've actually built a golf course.

Got a couple of records I've released, I'm a musician as well. So I have these hobbies. I've got a family, obviously, we're busy with kids and all that. Kids are older now. But for me, the excitement of taking an idea and a product to market is just something that really keeps me going. Working with great people, there's the social component, but also the satisfaction of seeing other people succeed.

is really what keeps me going as well. I love being able to coach and mentor, you know, on the team. So yeah, so that's kind of why I keep doing it. And I'm never going to be a professional golfer or a rock star. So this is something that I can, you know, continue to do. Right, but you're pretty good at startups. Yeah, exactly. Well, listen, we'll stop it there. We'll end with the two questions that we always end on going back to Venede's and as well, this was a while ago, like, when did you feel like you had true

product market phase? It was really early on. just having come from an industry that was doing something like what Venna did successfully, but we actually were able to even improve upon that idea. would say, in fact, I left my very, very high paying job to start Venna. I think it was a seven figure income the year I left just to take a rest to start something, but I did it without even seeing the product. After I talked to...

After I talked to Rishi, I said, what do you build? And he said, this is it. This is the idea. Just on the idea, I knew it was going to go. What kind of mental math do you have to make when you're making seven figures for the startup to make sense? You think about it, you're making a million a year, 10 years, that's 10 million bucks. That's if your salary doesn't increase at all. It's basically guaranteed. And if you own 20 % ... It is highly taxed. It's real. You're lucky if you get to keep half of that.

Pablo Srugo (36:51.458)

I think the nice thing about it, I think look, there's definitely some, have to have, there's always an ROI in a sense, right, of what you're doing. You have to convince your other significant others sometimes, which I had to do. We had a young family and a very secure situation, but it's all about also money isn't everything, it's about being happy, right, and what you're doing. And so to me, at that stage of my career, it was like I either did that,

I mean, if I didn't do it, would never do it. You know what I mean? So it was kind of already, you know, 20 plus years into a career. And so it was the time and I'm glad I did. But yeah, yeah. But you have to feel like this is at least a hundred million dollar exit minimum. Otherwise it's just not worth it or not, or not, not really. Yeah. No, I think you think about stuff like that. go, Hey, you know what for, you know, for us to share, you know, some success across the founding team and our employees who are shareholders and our investors.

You have to have a, you know, a number, guess in mind. Yeah. You you could say that, you know, we, definitely thought that we would have to have at least a business that would get to that kind of number. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, that's the difference, right? When you're starting and you're like 25, you know, you're making like very little next to nothing. You're like, you know, obviously you want it to be a hundred million dollar, billion dollar business, but like the reality is you own 20 % even of like a $20 million exit. And that's a life changing event at 28 or 20 or 30. Right. So it's just different math.

okay, cool. And then the last question is just, you know, and especially because you work with so many founders, like, what do you find is some of the most common advice that you find yourself giving to founders these days? You know, I mentioned it a few times, but I think that first one is so critical. Like I remember someone came to me and said, Hey, Don, I got this great idea about how to, you know, bring smoke alarms for forest fires, to the market. And I said, I don't know anything about forest fires or smoke alarms. So.

That's a great idea, I'm sure, but it's not something that I'm going to get involved in. So we know, just as an example, I think it's a great idea because let's face it, lot of forest fires, to have advanced notice of that for firefighters would be a good thing. But I don't know if I would be successful launching something like that. So my first advice to founders, early entrepreneurs, is look, what do you know about the product and the space that you're entering? Because if you have some knowledge and or a network,

Pablo Srugo (39:15.308)

it's gonna be much easier, Palace of Success, right? To be able to get customers, partners, employees that you already have a network, you know, that you can kind of lean on. Whereas if it's something kind of totally brand new that's never been something in your, you know, in your kind of historical career, it's just gonna be more challenging. Not to say that it can't be successful, but it's just much more higher risk and challenging. Well, Don, we'll stop it there. Thanks a lot for spending time with us. Good stuff, Pablo. Nice to speak with you as well.

Take care, buddy.

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