20VC: Sequoia Partner, Pat Grady on Why Data Is The New Oil, Why We Will See The Return of The Apprenticeship Model in VC & The Defining Characteristics of The Next Generation of Great Software

Pat Grady is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading funds with prior investments in the likes of Apple, Google, Whatsapp, Paypal, Stripe and many more. At Sequoia, Pat has made investments in many past guests of this show and the SaaStr podcast including Zoom, Namely and Qualtrics, just to name a few. Prior to Sequoia, Pat spent 3 years with the team at Summit Partners. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Pat made his way into the world of VC and one of the most famous funds in the world, Sequoia? 2.) How does Pat view the apprenticeship model in VC? How can VCs attempt to develop and convey the founder empathy when they have not been a founder? Do 'career VCs' get the same respect from founders? 3.) What does Pat believe to be the defining characteristics of the next generation of great software? What are the commonalities? 4.) Pat has said before that 'data is the new oil', what makes Pat think this? How does this affect his investment thesis going forward? Are there elements of being 'data long' that make Pat nervous? 5.) How does Pat think the data incumbency advantage can be mitigated? What can startups do to build a moat? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Pat’s Fave Book: The Boys In The Boat Pat's Fave Blog: CB Insights Pat’s Most Recent Investment: Namely As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Pat on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. X.ai is AI-poweredered personal assistant for scheduling meetings bringing you Amy or Andrew. The assistant you interact with like you would to any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, there is no sign in, no password, no download, all you do is cc [email protected] beautiful! And you can check it out now on x.ai it really is a must! Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organized candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to the 20 minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings with two Bs on Snapchat and writing some hopefully more intellectual thoughts on mojito VC.com. Now, this week is a week I've wanted to do since starting the podcast over two years ago. This week, we're featuring undoubtedly one of the world's greatest funds. They've made investments in the likes of Google, Apple, WhatsApp, Stripe, PayPal, the list really is endless. Have you guessed it? Yes, this week we are being joined by Sequoia Capital and joining us in the hot seat from Sequoia, we have Pat Grady. Now, Pat is a partner at Sequoia, where he's made investments in many past guests of this show and the SaaStr podcast, including the likes of Zoom, namely, and Qualtrics, just to name a few. Prior to Sequoia, Pat spent three years with the team at Summit Partners.

• 0:40Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd also like to say a huge thanks to Sarah Guo for making the intro to Pat today, without which the episode would not have been possible. But before we dive into the show today, there are some products that you simply cannot remember what life was like before them. For me, that's X dot AI. They bring you Amy and Andrew, their AI-powered personal assistants for scheduling meetings. And the beauty of Amy or Andrew is you interact with them like you would any other person. And it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule one meeting. Even better, though, there's no sign in, no password, no download. All you do is CC amy at X dot AI. Absolutely fantastic. And you can check it out now at X dot AI. It really is a must. And on the topic of streamlining traditionally long and cumbersome workflows, you must check out Workable, the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies.

• 1:25Harry Stebbings?

  From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organised candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile, and you can find out more on workable.com, where you can try it for free. However, enough from me, so I'm thrilled to welcome Pat Grady, partner at Sequoia Capital.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 1:58Harry Stebbings?

  Pat, so fantastic to have you on the show today. Huge thanks to Sarah Graylock for the intro, but thank you so much for joining me today, Pat.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Pleasure to be here.

• 2:07Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to start today by hearing about you and how you made your way into what I call the wonderful world of venture.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Excellent. So I suppose it began when I was in college. I went to Boston College and I've always loved math and through the course of school, I was looking for places to apply math and I was kind of drawn towards physics on one side and business on the other. And within the world of business, it seems like there are a lot of areas that are somewhat zero sum and entrepreneurship and founding companies is kind of at the opposite end of that spectrum where it is the least zero sum thing imaginable, meaning you have a very tangible sense of contributing something. If you produce a product that solves a problem and employs a bunch of people and hopefully generates a big durable company over time. And so just the notion of venture capital really resonated with me. Right out of school,

• 2:57Speaker 02

  I went to a place in Boston called Summit Partners, which does a little bit of private equity and a little bit of venture capital. Had a couple of years there where I learned a lot of the tools of the trade, but then really wanted to be at a place where 90% of the effort was on the company building and really trying to scale companies of consequence, which is what drew me towards Sequoia. So I've now been at Sequoia for about 10 years.

• 3:22Harry Stebbings?

  And I have to ask then, and sorry, this isn't in the schedule, but it's just a personal one for me. Everyone tells me kind of, you know, to be an established and great investor, Harry, you need to learn the foundational skills of the trade of a VC. What were those skills then you think kind of were foundational to you at Summit that you learned?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  In a funny way, the skills that I learned there hurt me here, which might sound counterintuitive, but the skills that I learned there were things like building financial models and being able to build a financial model is a very good way to break down a business and really understand the unit economics and the drivers. But it turns out that those unit economics and drivers are a function of the product, the team and the market. Understanding the product, the team and the market is not really a tool that you can acquire. It really just takes many, many years of trying to break down businesses, talk with customers, talk with founders, talk with your partners, all of that accumulated knowledge that allows you to do that. So it's not quite as simple as picking up a handful of tools.

• 4:19Harry Stebbings?

  And you mentioned your start there in VC with Summit and you went obviously straight from university to Summit. But then I have to ask, in terms of a much debated topic in terms of the apprenticeship model of VC, what are your views on this, particularly going forward as well?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. I think particularly in the last five years or so, it seems like it's become very popular to put operators and founders on a pedestal as VCs. And I think there are a lot of benefits to having been an operator, having been a founder before becoming a VC. But I think where we differ from a lot of other partnerships is we place a tremendous amount of value on tribal knowledge and the accumulated wisdom of forty plus years of experience working with founders like Steve Jobs and Larry Page and Brian Chesky and Yon Koo and Elon Musk and so many others. And the benefits of all of that wisdom cannot possibly be overstated in terms of trying to make the right decisions and have the right impact on the next generation of great founders.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  And so we do hire operators, you know, Bill Corn ran engineering at Google before he joined us. Carl Eschebach ran the go to market at VMware, Alfred Lin ran Zappos, Mike Vernal was pretty high up in the organization at Facebook. So we do hire plenty of operators and we get a lot of benefit from them. But we also hire people who are much, much, much earlier in their career, who are essentially just raw DNA. And the benefit we get from the raw DNA is fresh perspective and a chance to mold people in the image of Sequoia with all of that tribal knowledge. And just to use one example, if you look at my partner Doug Leoni, who I think is one of the best venture capital investors of all time, he's not a great VC because of the seven years he spent in enterprise sales. He's a great VC because of the thirty years he spent at Sequoia.

• 6:02Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely, no, that makes perfect sense. In terms of kind of the rest of the ecosystem, do you think we'll continue to see this leaning towards operational favorings in VC? Or do you think we will see a rise of the kind of apprenticeship model as you stated with Sequoia?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  My personal view, I think the pendulum in the last five years has shifted towards wanting founders and operators as VCs. I think in the next five or 10 years, it's going to swing back the other way towards hiring younger people with fresh perspective and more of an apprenticeship model. And the reason I think that is because there's this overarching theme of accelerating change. The world around us is moving faster than it ever has before, and there are a lot of data points you can look at to back this up. For example, how long companies stay in the S and P 500. The length of that stay has been shortening monotonically over the last 40 or 50 years. And so if you believe in accelerating change, which we very much do,

• 6:55Speaker 02

  what that implies is the rate of decay on the value of your experience as an operator has never been higher. And as a former operator, most people are emotionally anchored to that deeply personal experience that they had, which they should be, and that gives them a degree of empathy that somebody like me can never replicate. But I think the benefit of fresh perspective in a world that is always changing is growing over time.

• 7:18Harry Stebbings?

  Do you ever find it difficult in terms of kind of founder respect? Often, you mentioned the empathy there. Often founders state they have more respect in VCs, often like operational experience because it gone as founder respect in a more tangible and easy way on first meetings. Is that ever an issue or a thought for you?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  You know, the wonderful thing about being part of Sequoia is we truly and deeply believe that this is a team sport. And so if I run into a founder who really wants somebody with deep expertise in engineering or in scaling a go-to-market organization, the next meeting is going to be with my partner Bill for engineering or with my partner Carl for go-to-market. And so it actually isn't, it isn't an issue for us because we've intentionally built as functionally diverse a partnership as possible so that we can match founders with a person who's going to be perfect for their business.

• 8:07Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And in terms of kind of great investors, as we said, and what makes them there. If we switch to the company side and the software side now, I'm really intrigued to hear what your thoughts are on what you believe to be the defining characteristics then of the next generation of great software.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  It's a great question because if you look at the last decade or so of software, the transition has been from on premise to SaaS or on premise to cloud. And that's been a wonderfully impactful transition, but at a very fundamental level, it's been a transition in the business model, not a transition in the user experience. So if you look at Workday versus PeopleSoft, or if you look at Salesforce versus Sebel, Workday and Salesforce are clearly better products than their predecessors. But they didn't change the lives of the people who are using those products. It's still kind of the same thing. It just happens to be a different business model. Now, I think the next generation of great software will actually embrace what the cloud enables you to do. And it won't be a business model transition, it'll be a user experience transition.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  And specifically, I think for that next generation, the companies that come to define it will have figured out how to create a virtuous cycle between design and data. And the nature of that virtuous cycle is the better design the product is, the more people are going to use it. The more people use it, the more data you have about what they're trying to accomplish. The more of that data you have, the better you can make the design. And so design produces usage, which produces data, which informs better design. And if you can get that flywheel spinning, you can really, really, really impact the way people use a product. And I think the examples of this largely come from the consumer world. If you look at what Facebook or Google have is just part of their core DNA. And the companies that are starting to define the enterprise kind of look and feel more like consumer companies than enterprise companies. And I think Slack or Dropbox would both be great examples.

• 9:49Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of kind of a transition of business models there and not fundamentally changing the way we live. Do you ever kind of agree with founder's fund statement of, you know, we were promised a flying car and we got 140 characters? Do you think that's a fair assessment?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Yes and no. I think it's a fair assessment in that there are a lot of companies that are doing kind of second or third derivative innovation. Meaning they're not zero to one companies, they're one to end companies, or they're even a mishmash of other one to end companies. But I do think that we're seeing more and more fundamental innovation over time. If you look at technology crashing into healthcare or consumer products or energy or industrials or any other sector. I do think that there's been a lot of fundamental innovation. It's just a small portion of the overall set of companies being founded.

• 10:40Harry Stebbings?

  What's your take on the kind of emerging economy investment into foundational structures like energy, like infrastructure that we've seen in recent years?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Emerging economy, meaning India, China, emerging markets?

• 10:54Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Our partners in India and China, so we have about twenty investment partners in India, spread across three offices. We have about forty investment partners in China, spread across three offices. They tend to do a lot of what we do, meaning investing companies where technology is the weapon and technology is the agent of change. And occasionally, those companies exist in fundamental industries like transportation or healthcare or what have you. But there's also a lot of just core technology being built overseas. And so I think we are more likely to invest in some of those fundamental industries overseas than we are here. But there's also quite a bit of real technology being built there.

• 11:31Harry Stebbings?

  And you spoke about the virtuous loop and the kind of viral cycle of design bringing data and bringing more data. So I'd love to hear your thoughts then, and you mentioned the next generation of software, obviously. And to a large extent, that's made possible by data. So before you said data is the new oil, so what makes you think this and where's the power in data?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so data is the new oil. First, I would beg forgiveness on the analogy because oil is a fungible commodity and data is kind of exactly the opposite. The nature of the analogy is this, just like oil fuels cars and planes and other things that have had a multiplier effect on physical commerce, data is fueling really great applications and experiences that are having a multiplier effect on digital commerce. And some examples would be Uber predicting where you're headed, or Facebook tagging people in photos, or Google correcting a search query that you fat fingered. In each of those cases, they're using data about who you are and what you're probably trying to achieve to do the work on your behalf. What's interesting about this, it's not a coincidence that each of these experiences has come from a big company with access to a lot of data.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Just having the data isn't enough, data at rest is no better than oil in the ground. It has to be refined into actionable intelligence. But if you look at Google, they have a hundred teams of machine learning experts whose collective efforts suck up more compute cycles than any other group at the company. And the reason this is important, the reason this is actually somewhat profound for the startup community is because if you believe that great digital experiences will be fueled by data, then it follows that it is the big companies, the Googles and Apples and Amazons and Facebooks, who have the vast reserves of data and the talent and resources to refine it into intelligence that are best positioned to build the next generation of great digital experiences. And that's important because it's counter to the traditional narrative of Silicon Valley,

• 13:20Speaker 02

  which says a disruption comes from below, from the startups. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that startups are screwed. It simply means that they need to be clever and deliberate about creating data reserves of their own. For example, narrow the scope of the product to something in which you can truly become an expert, or break new ground where nobody else has any data, or prioritize ubiquity over monetization to build up the data reserve before putting it to use. In general, data will fuel great digital experiences. It is likely to be the primary source of votes, and it should be absolutely top of mind for every founder going into a software business of any kind.

• 13:54Harry Stebbings?

  But the incumbency advantage doesn't concern you going forward in terms of investments in the space?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Interestingly, if you look at the last platform shift, which I think can be defined by a consumer experience on mobile and an enabling technology of cloud, if you look at that last platform shift, the biggest beneficiary was not a startup, the biggest beneficiary was Apple, I mean, as a public company. I think in the next platform shift, that will also be true. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be Google, or Facebook, or Apple, or Amazon. However, the question for us is, what's the Uber? Meaning, yes, Apple reaped the most value out of the transition to mobile, but Uber was also created as a result of that transition. In the next transition, chances are it'll be a public company that reaps the most value, but there will be Ubers created. We have no idea what those will look like, and that's what we're trying to find.

• 14:43Harry Stebbings?

  And in terms of, we mentioned the data there, I'm intrigued, do you think then that data has finally been given its kind of utility value with the rise of AI in recent years? Do you think finally we have a role for it now in kind of mass consumer worlds?

• 14:58Speaker 02

  So yes and no. I actually think the Challenge with data has rarely been the processing power or the frameworks through which it's analyzed. I think the challenge with data has been the last mile problem. And what I mean by that is basically just connecting it to human beings who have actual problems at the time and in the context of those problems that they're trying to solve. And possibly the best example of this, which is a very popular one, is Moneyball. You know, the 2002 Oakland Athletics, which had a payroll of 44 million, which is very low for a major league team, but managed to win 103 games, which was the most in the majors. The Yankees also won 103 games that year, but they did it with a payroll of 125 million.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And so the Oakland A's essentially had 3X the productivity of the Yankees, simply because they understood their own data. And what's really interesting about this, it's not that they had a Hadoop cluster fired up in the dugout, it was a very simple Excel-based analysis that they had done. So it wasn't power of the tool, it was the fact that they had somebody right there whispering in the manager's ears at the time of making the decision that made it work. And I think a business analog would be our company that we're investors in called Medallia, which is based here in Palo Alto. Medallia focuses on customer experience. They don't talk about analytics necessarily, they talk about improving your relationship with your customer, making that your NPS scores go up, and as a result,

• 16:24Speaker 02

  generating more revenue. But the way they do that is they piece together 15 or 20 different discrete components, any one of which is essentially an analytics product that allows them to ingest, understand, and then act upon all sorts of different data about the interaction companies are having with their customers. So I think it's that last mile of just connecting the data to real problems at a human level that's been the bottleneck historically and is still the bottleneck.

• 16:49Harry Stebbings?

  Do you ever adopt Elon Musk's view that, what is his radical view, that we're all going to be replaced by robots and kind of this will be the end of mankind as we know it? Does that sort of fear mongering ever, ever concern you? Or are you on the, are you on the other side that we'll kind of adopt poetry in fishing and all live as one brilliant community?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  You know, it's a good question. You know, the Turing And the notion of artificial general intelligence go back to the nineteen fifties. And over time, as we've actually become exponentially more sophisticated on artificial intelligence. We've also continued to push out that final date of this, you know, the singularity when artificial general intelligence takes over mankind. The date of that happening has gotten pushed out further and further and further and further. And my personal view is it's one of these things that the more we know, the more we realize we don't know. And that there is some magic in being human that we will never be able to replicate. And so I I personally do not have the Elon Musk fears of artificial intelligence taking over humanity.

• 17:52Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. I do want to touch on finally, though, before we dive into a quick fire. You mentioned Medallia, their portfolio company of yours, and they're located, as you said, in the valley, as are you. And I'd love to hear your thoughts then with kind of Sequoia having global outputs, but you very much being focused in the valley. What's your thought on kind of the monopoly of innovation that Silicon Valley has? Do you think it still is very much the monopoly of innovation? And do you think we'll see a dispersing of this?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Fantastic question. I think if you you can look at it two ways. You can look at it and say innovation in Silicon Valley has gone up every single year for the last forty or fifty years, and that would be true. You could also look at it and say, well, if we draw a pie chart and the pie chart is all of the innovation in the world and where does it come from? Silicon Valley's slice of that pie has been decreasing monotonically for the last forty or fifty years. And the underlying reason for this is what I would call the democratization of the means of production. Which is a way of saying that anybody with an internet connection can go on to Code Academy or Khan Academy or Coursera and teach themselves how to code. And then spin up an AWS cluster, produce something that they can distribute via Facebook or an app store and have a business up and running.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  And so it's cheaper and easier than ever before to launch a company. Which means that people are doing it in every single corner of the planet. Which is actually the reason that Sequoia for eleven or twelve years now has had a local presence in India. has had a local presence in China. Part of our thesis here, even though it's cheaper and easier than ever before to launch companies, it's more expensive and harder than ever before to scale companies. Because instead of competing locally, you're competing globally. Companies in the US are competing with companies in China, which are competing with companies in India, which are competing with companies in Europe, which are competing with companies in South America. So with all of that global competition, you really need more resources and more know-how

• 19:49Speaker 02

  than you did ten or twenty or thirty years ago to scale a company. And by the way, it's no coincidence that the largest IPO of the year, which just happened this week, is a Chinese shipping and logistics company called ZTO Express, which our partner Xinglu in China happens to be on the board of.

• 20:03Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. I do have to ask you, we mentioned Uber earlier and you mentioned China there. I'm intrigued, do you think though that actually there is that competition between Asian startups and then the Western startups? In the way the culture transition is such a difficult one to bridge, as we've seen with Uber's recent return from China?

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think people appreciate the cultural differences. And one example I would use, if you look at a lot of the messaging apps or the e-commerce apps that people use in China to an American consumer or to a Western consumer more generally, they don't look good. They look crowded, they look messy. There's red and gold colors splashed all over the place. It's very, very noisy. And we look at that and say, ooh, we don't like that design aesthetic. But for an Eastern consumer and for Chinese people in particular, there's this concept, and I'm going to completely butcher the pronunciation, but there's this concept of runout, which literally translates into hot yelling. But what it means is when things are crowded and noisy and busy and there's a lot going on, they actually love that.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  And so I think we can try to take what works in the US and impose it upon other countries, but it's much, much, much better to start in those other countries and grow from the ground up, truly appreciating all the cultural nuances that might not be obvious from the surface. And that's why when we got into China, instead of sending Doug or Jim or some of our more senior partners at Sequoia over to Beijing and asking them to build a business, Found somebody local in Neil Shin who could actually build a team of native Chinese people from the ground up.

• 21:37Harry Stebbings?

  No, I very much agree with you and I think that's the kind of key solution to startups moving out there is adopting local workforces. Um, but yes, I'd love to dive into a quick fire round with you now, though. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. How does that sound?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Perfect, let's do it.

• 21:52Harry Stebbings?

  So let's do, start with your favorite book and why?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Boys in the Boat, nineteen thirty six, US Olympic rowing team, men's rowing team. I love it because it is the perfect story of underdog mentality. And we should be so lucky if every company with which we partner had the same spirit inside the building of the people on that team. Every single one of them thought that he was the weak link in the boat and was just fighting desperately to not let down his teammates. And I, I love that story.

• 22:20Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is it diffi- and this is uh, kind of harsh of me to break out the schedule for. But is it difficult for, for you and the Sequoia team with the incredible success that you've achieved for the past, you know, several decades? Is it difficult to retain that kind of humility and underdog mentality that, as you said there in Boys in the Boat, made them so successful?

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Very kind of you to, to, to compliment us in that way. I think the reality of our business is we can lose to anybody with any company on any day. If you're a founder, yes, it's nice if somebody with a brand like Sequoia shows up at your door. But you are going to choose somebody who is passionate about what you're doing and who you are and what you're trying to achieve. Somebody who really understands those goals and somebody who's gonna fight like heck to help you get there. And so I think it is easy enough for us to retain that underdog mentality and that spirit. Because the reality of our business is even with all the great advantages that we have, the next investment is the one that matters.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  The founders we're in business with today and the next founder we get into business with is all that matters. Everything that happened yesterday is in the past.

• 23:28Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And then let's do the biggest mentor to you and how it came about.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  So two of them, Doug Leoni and Jim Gatz, both partners of mine here at Sequoia. How it came about with Doug, Doug was the one who's essentially sponsored me when I was hired at Sequoia. So he was kind of stuck with me and Jim was the one who took pity on me when in my first couple of years at Sequoia. I clearly had all the best intentions, but didn't know what the heck I was doing. So Doug Leoni and Jim Gatz.

• 23:54Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And then let's talk about your favorite blog or newsletter. Are there any must reads when they come in that you just absolutely devour?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  So I really like what Anand and his team are doing over at CB Insights. Their ability to produce data-driven insights every single day in interesting ways is really fascinating to me.

• 24:13Harry Stebbings?

  No, I'm very much with you. Loved him. And then the learning process for you with new verticals. You often have to immerse yourself very quickly in a very complex vertical. What's that learning process for you?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  I imagine it's not unlike the first handful of days of starting a company, meaning dive right in, talk to as many people as possible, customers, competitors, anybody who's a thought leader in the vertical, and try to iterate like crazy and try to frame a very specific and deliberate investment thesis and then stress test it from a hundred different directions.

• 24:44Harry Stebbings?

  And then let's finish today on your most recent investment, public investment, that is, and why you said yes.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  It's a company in New York called Namely. Two reasons we said yes, and actually the same two reasons apply to every investment. It's a function of the founder and the market. In this case, the founder is again Matt Strauss, who's had a couple of companies in the past and has just made all of the right decisions and has all of the right kind of cultural aspects in place for the business. Very high trust environment, very open environment, just a really spectacular founder to get in the business with. In terms of the market, Namely is essentially for employees what HubSpot is for customers. Meaning if you're a smaller mid-market company, HubSpot should be able to take care of everything you need to do around customer acquisition.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  And Namely should be able to take care of everything you need to do around your people and around human capital. So that's payroll, benefits, HRIS, and a bunch of other applications that revolve around those centers of gravity.

• 25:43Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. Well, Pat, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Seriously, it's been such a pleasure to have you on and amazing to hear your journey. And I'm glad we agree on the apprenticeship model.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Harry. It's been a pleasure.

• 25:56Harry Stebbings?

  Again, so fantastic to have Pat on the show today and do not forget to tune in on Wednesday to hear Pat's partner Carl on the show. That is another fantastic episode and as always, we so appreciate your support. We'd love it if you followed us on Snapchat at H Stebbings or you can follow us on Twitter at 20minutevc in letters. However, before we leave you today, do not forget that everyone needs Amy and Andrew in their life. Yes, this is X.ai bringing you the AI-powered personal assistance for scheduling meetings. And the beauty of Amy or Andrew is you interact with them like you would any other person and it allows you to avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong in order to schedule a single meeting. Even better though, there's no sign in, no password, no download. All you do is super simple, cc amy at X.ai. Absolutely perfect. And you can

• 26:39Harry Stebbings?

  check it out now at X.ai. It really is a must. And the other pain point for startups is always hiring and that's where Workable come in. Workable is the all-in-one recruiting software for ambitious companies. From posting a job to tracking and managing candidates, Workable provides everything you need to hire better. Transparent communication, organised candidate profiles, structured interviews and a full reporting suite gives hiring teams the information they need to make the best choice. Workable is available for desktop and mobile and you can find out more on workable.com where you can try it for free. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you Wednesday's episode with Carl Eschenbach, partner at Sequoia Capital.