20VC: The Best Determinant Of Product Market Fit & Why Prior Experience Is Not Required For Founder Success with Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner @ Battery Ventures

Neeraj Agrawal is a general partner at Battery Ventures investing in SaaS and Internet companies across all stages. He was a founding investor in BladeLogic in 2001 and has invested in several other companies that have gone on to stage IPOs, including Bazaarvoice, Guidewire Software, Marketo, Omniture, RealPage and Wayfair. His current, private investments include AppDynamics, Catchpoint, Chef, Cohesity, Coupa, Glassdoor.com, Nutanix, Optimizely, Pendo, SmarterHQ, Sprinklr, StellaService, Tealium and Yesware. For the last six years, Neeraj has been recognized on the Forbes Midas List, which ranks the top 100 venture capitalists in the world. Click To Play In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Neeraj made his way into the world of VC? 2.)Question From Logan Bartlett: 'What is your thought process on what makes a good vs a bad deal? Also, how have you developed your ability to process deals and poke holes in logic?' 3.) How can early stage Saas founders determine the extent to their product market fit?? 4.) What is it like to back rocketships like GlassDoor or Marketo and helping scale operations when you’re in hyper growth mode? Does Neeraj agree with Sheryl Sandberg’s statement, it doesn’t matter where you sit, as long as you have a seat on the rocketship? 5.) Neeraj previously stated in a Nasdaq article that it is all about the team and the market. So I am intrigued what are Neeraj's thoughts on VC founder alignment? Neeraj also places emphasis on the market, so how does Neeraj view the juxtaposition between current and future market? 6.) One hurdle preventing some companies from growth is the ability to attain later rounds of funding so as a largely Series B investor, why is raising a Series B so tough? Is it the embodiment of the funding barbell? Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Neeraj's Fave Blog: Brad Feld, Jason Lemkin Neeraj's Most Recent Investment: Pendo.io As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Neeraj on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to another sterling week on the 20 minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings, who you can find on Snapchat at H Stebbings, that's Stebbings with two Bs. Now, as you may have heard recently, the godfather of SaaS and Sasta, Jason Lemkin and I, have teamed up to create the official Sasta podcast. Therefore, to highlight this, we'll be doing a deep dive on all things SaaS this week on the 20 minute VC. And joining us for this deep dive, I'm so thrilled to welcome the experts from Battery Ventures. And more specifically, joining me today, we have Niraj Agarwal, general partner at Battery Ventures, where he focuses on SaaS and internet companies across all stages. He was a founding investor in Blade Logic in 2001,

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  and has invested in several other companies that have gone on to stage IPOs, including Bizarre Voice, Guidewire Software, Marketo, Omnisture, RealPage and Wayfair. And his current investments are similarly as impressive with the likes of Cooper, Glassdoor.com, Newtonix, Optimizely, Pendo, Sprinkler and many, many more incredible companies. However, we're not the only ones who seem to think that Niraj is incredible. For the last six years, he's been recognised on the Forbes Midas List. But before we dive into the show with Niraj today, the 20 minute VC is brought to you by Leesa. Leesa are like the Toms and Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Why? Well, having created an awesome online end-to-end mattress buying experience,

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  replacing the worst ever experience of buying and testing a mattress in a terrible mattress showroom. That still is not enough for them, as they like to give back, which is why if every 10 mattresses Leesa sells, they donate one to a shelter. These mattresses are also not just any mattresses. They're engineered to perfection with three unique layers, including two inches of memory foam and two inches of latex-like foam, designed to keep you cool. Not only are they engineered to perfection, but all Leesa mattresses are made in the UK and the US and can be shipped for free to the US, UK and Canada. They also have a 100-night trial, so what is the risk? Head over to leesa.com/VC, that's L-E-E-S-A,

• 2:08Harry Stebbings?

  and enter the promo code VC75 at checkout to get a cool $75 off. We'd also like to thank Matamark for providing all the data and analysis for the show today. And if you haven't already signed up for the Matamark Daily by the legend at Thinker on Twitter, then please do so. But enough from me, so now it's time to dive into the show today and welcome the main man, Niraj Agrawal, General Partner at Battery Ventures.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:41Harry Stebbings?

  Niraj, a huge pleasure to have you on the show. I've been a massive fan of yours for a while now, having seen you at SASTA, so thank you so much for joining us today.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Happy to do it.

• 2:50Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to kick off today by hearing a bit about you, and we've got, you know, Marketo, Wayfair, Brightree. Investing in rocket ships seems to be a daily occurrence for you, but where did it all start? What's kind of the Neeraj story?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Sure, you know, I've been at Battery now 16 years, you know, seems an amazingly long time. I actually got into venture somewhat accidentally. Graduated undergrad with a computer science degree and thought that I would work in product management for a software company. And after my, my business school degree, folks at Battery reached out and said, do you want to do a project on the streaming media space? I had just worked as a summer intern at a company called Real Network. They, they were the inventor of the Real Media Player, so kind of the original streaming media player. And I was very excited by that space. I'd worked in satellite TV at Sky TV and thought I would do video on the internet post-business school. But when the Battery folks came calling, I decided to give it a shot. I thought I would spend a couple of years doing it until I found that magical, perfect startup.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  But 16 years later, I'm still investing in software and internet companies.

• 3:54Harry Stebbings?

  And what is it then, do you think, that's, that's made you stay in the world of VC and not join startups? Is it that you haven't found that magical startup to join yet, or is it just an innate love for VC and helping a plethora of different companies at the same time?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are a few things that I that I think are pretty exciting about the VC career path. One is there's kind of a lot of variety built into it. You know, I might one week go to a board meeting at Wayfair and talk about the the home goods market and the next week I'll go to Marketo and we'll talk about marketing technology. Another day, go to Glassdoor and we'll talk about the recruiting space and how that's evolving. You get to learn about all these different segments that are out there that form broadly speaking, you know, the economy and and really kind of think about the trends in each of those segments. I I would say it's incredibly exciting intellectually speaking. You're trying to understand these markets, try to predict what might happen, ultimately make a few

• 4:52Speaker 02

  bets and and hopefully your your predictions will will play out. So that type of excitement and variety, it doesn't really exist in in most other career paths. I I think that's been one super exciting thing for me. The second part has really been the entrepreneurs that I work with. I've been fortunate to work with some just amazing founders and, you know, they're they're intoxicating. You you work with somebody like, you know, Raji at Sprinkler and, you know, you you you can't help but leave the board meetings super excited and, you know, ready to take on the world because he just has this vision for what he wants to do that's so massive. And, you know, I have the the luxury of working with a dozen plus such entrepreneurs kind of on a regular basis.

• 5:33Harry Stebbings?

  And you mentioned some of the amazing companies you've backed there. And for interviews like this, I love to crowdsource some questions from from friends of of yours and fellow investors. And and so this is one from your colleague, Logan Bartlett, and he asks, what's your thought process on what makes a good versus a bad deal?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  At a high level, I I tend to use a a pretty similar framework across my my last 15 or 16 years. Really been looking at four key things. Look at market, the team, technology, and and of course, the deal itself. I've learned over the years that the most important thing really are the first two, the market and the team. There's some debate in the venture industry between which of those two is is more important. Some will argue that if you back good founders, then they'll figure everything out. Some will argue that if you don't start with a good market, it's very hard to course correct and and have the opportunity to figure something out.

• 6:24Harry Stebbings?

  How do you view markets then? Because markets are often uh very difficult to analyze and assess in terms of they they grow and expand rapidly, you know, ephemeral messaging wasn't a market really before Snapchat and now it's potentially one of the most exciting social platforms we have. So how do you view the open-endedness of markets?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  It's a great question. So on on markets, a lot of people will come to come to us and have this presentation about how this market is a ten or twenty billion dollar market. And I I always find that to be kind of the least exciting part of the presentation. Like in the ideal world, what you're looking for is actually a market that might be close to zero today, and that's going to be like five hundred million three years from now. And and it's really the the new opportunity, however you want to define it, and this rapid rapid growth where you get to enjoy an inflection point in the coming six, twelve, eighteen months. That's kind of how I that's what I think is the ideal market curve. If you get to a space and you're too early for it, many times you'll run out of money before that inflection point comes. And if you're too late, someone's already captured the

• 7:28Speaker 02

  leadership or the second uh spot in that market. It's kind of hard to sometimes catch up, although not not always the case. And so timing is really important. Thinking about the trends that allow for a new market are are really important. On the consumer side, as you said, there's some differences. On the enterprise side, which is where I spend my time, you know, there's there's mostly kind of uh new greenfield markets is typically where we where we invest in. And so markets that just really didn't exist before. Uh once in a while, we'll do some replacement markets, and those have been very good for us. A company like Guidewire Software that sells uh modern property casualty systems, billing and policy systems, uh you know, replacing really legacy uh products. So that's kind of a replacement market. But mostly what we've done has really been on the greenfield side.

• 8:13Harry Stebbings?

  And then talking about your experience there investing in enterprise and and reverting back to one of the four characteristics that you you very much look for in an investment in the team. Enterprise is very much pervaded by maybe more seasoned or experienced uh entrepreneurs and CEOs. Is that something that you've seen to be true? Or have you seen kind of a new wave of enterprise founders and CEOs, you know, your Aaron Levis of the world who are coming in with no prior experience in enterprise?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Definitely. I'd say when I first started at Battery. The typical founder, so I started Battery when I was twenty seven years old. And I would say the typical founder that came in the door would be somebody like David Acharya at Blade Logic. Maybe thirty four years old at the time, had some enterprise experience. And what I have found is, as I have gotten older, the founders that I'm working with are getting younger. Now I'm forty three years old and many times I'm pitching to a founder who might be twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight years old. And I've often wondered, like, that's kind of interesting. Why is that happening? And I find that these founders are equally passionate, very thoughtful, similar intellect.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  What's allowed them to start earlier in their careers is really just the vast amount of knowledge that's now on the internet through great podcasts like yours and various websites and, you know, whether it's Brad Feld's website, who I think is amazing.

• 9:34Harry Stebbings?

  Brad is a legend. But and then so you do think that actually coming in afresh with no experience in enterprise can be a benefit because the naivety means you don't see problems that you could scale if you don't have it.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  I kind of think of it a little bit different. I think being a founder is somewhat of a glorified path, but it is a really hard path. I mean, the ups and downs of a startup, I think, don't get talked about as much. And so requiring, you need incredible perseverance. You know, ideally the right point in your life cycle where you can go all in on something. And so there's something nice about starting at that point in your career where you can really be all in for five, ten years. Maybe before you have a family, sometimes you have a family at that point. But founders have this great ability to learn. Prior experience is not required for success.

• 10:22Harry Stebbings?

  And you said the ups and downs aren't talked about enough there. What do you mean by that? We, you know, we hear a lot about failure in startups and success, so I'm just intrigued to hear what you mean by that.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  You know, I think of it as the highs are incredibly high and the lows are very low. Sometimes they happen in the same day and sometimes in the same hour of the same day for founders. You might lose a big deal, you might have somebody quit on you, you might land a great BPS sales. You know, all those things are happening throughout the day for a founder. They have to somehow be able to detach from those lows and kind of keep going and making sure that there's opportunity for them. That's kind of what I think about. People think of it as it's a linear graph from zero revenue to a hundred million in ARR and everything's hunky dory and the world is awesome. But the the roller coaster that's happening throughout that journey is is it's it's not for

• 11:18Speaker 02

  the faint of heart. You need to have the right fortitude to be able to to to to handle that.

• 11:22Harry Stebbings?

  Would you say that's one of the fundamental benefits of having a co-founder to share in the very high highs and to console you in the lows of losing your VP of Sales at last minute?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  It's a great point. I I I've studied this question around starting companies and with a co-founder, starting it solo, the number of co-founders. In the ideal world, you would have one co-founder so that you have a person to go to. Being a founder CEO is a lonely job. The co-founder is the the kind of the confidant until maybe you're up to real scale and you've got a real executive team around you. There's some things you really don't want to share with your board and and you kind of want someone else to talk to you and that's the the role a co-founder can play. Having said that, I've worked with companies that have had no co-founders, like Raj at Sprinkler, and I've worked with companies that have had six co-founders like I'd wear, and they've been equally successful. So I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all.

• 12:15Harry Stebbings?

  And and talking of the kind of the core executives there and building that out, at what stages do you think it's right in your space, in the enterprise space, to really start building out a team, getting a VP of Sales? Do you know what I mean? Establishing yourself and team around you?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  The the one thing that I would say founders sometimes do, and especially as I've noticed with younger founders, is for some reason they are less willing to hire executives earlier in the cycle. I think sometimes there is this skeptical perspective around what does an executive actually do? And whereas an individual contributor, you can see the work they do at an individual contributor, whether it's an engineer or a salesperson, and they tend to bias in that direction. And what you find is 12 months later, you really do need to bring in leadership. And so my advice to founders is it's okay to go to invest in leadership early in a in a company's cycle. A people tend to hire other A people. So if you can bring in a great VP of

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Sales, sooner rather than later is is kind of, I think, the way to go.

• 13:18Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think it's tougher for younger enterprise CEOs and founders to to bring in the truly experienced titan, the VP of Sales, that is required sometimes to enter hypergrowth mode?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  I think five or 10 years ago, I would say it was harder for seasoned executives to maybe work for younger founders. I think that with enormous success, folks like Anne Levy has had, or Zuckerberg's had, I don't think that that structure is an issue anymore. I do think the, as opposed to being a younger issue, I think it's a 10-year question. If a company only has a million or 2 million in revenue, there's just hundreds of companies like that. And so if you want to land that amazing executive, you have a greater shot at getting that person at 10 million, you probably have a better shot at getting that person at 20 million. So sometimes the person who's right for you for 0 to 20 is not the person who's going to be the executive that takes you from 20 to 200.

• 14:14Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm intrigued that, going back to the characteristics on investability, and we said there were four there. And that slightly seems to contradict a large sector of enterprise VC mindsets who invest on quantifiable metrics of, can you hit 10 million ARR by year two? And they don't seem to place so much emphasis on the team. So how much emphasis do you place on those clearly defined milestone ARR, MRR, churn, all these stats that are thrown around meaninglessly? Or how much do you pay to the characteristics we mentioned earlier?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  One of the beautiful things about investing is that it really is a mix of all these components that you look for. So when I think about patterns, I look for all of it to make my call. I'd say there's three stages that people tend to get involved. There's this 1 million in recurring revenue stage that a lot of investors invest in. There's this 5 to 10 million dollar stage, and then there's really everything from 20 to IPO stage. Batteries are a bit unique that we do all these stages. I personally have made investments across all these stages. It's not as dogmatic on the financial metrics, but I do tend to spend a lot of time going back to market and understanding why now, what's the pain

• 15:33Speaker 02

  point? I talk to a lot of prospects. I try to understand, is the pain point being discussed? The number one and number two pain point they have? So I'll tell you, the one thing I've learned is that if you're addressing something that's pain point number three, four or five on somebody's list, they just never get around to it. They just don't have enough time to to buy that solution. So.

• 15:53Harry Stebbings?

  How can you tell if it is pain point number one? Is that if they're kind of ringing you up, pounding you for the next feature? Because it's often very difficult to gain that customer feedback as to how much you really do have product market fit.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  I I tell you a few things. I I learned something from Jyoti Bonsol, who's the founder and CEO, uh founder and chairman of App Dynamics. Jyoti has this one question that that he he asks people and he says, if you had to justify this product to your boss, how would you do it? You learn a lot in that question. One is, will the will the champion that you're talking to actually take the time to go to their boss? Right? That's step one. If they don't, you know, it's not a high priority. Can they find some tangible benefit? And are they then willing to ask for budget because it's high enough pain point? That's how you, that's the real way of knowing is if someone's going to spend money at the end of the day against this problem. So.

• 16:44Harry Stebbings?

  God, that's good. That's a really good answer. But but then, again, back also to the to the full stack approach to VC that you kind of described there with your differing stage investments. You know, you you've broached from seed to series B?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I've I've gone anywhere from seed to uh pre-IPO rounds. You know, I I did the pre-IPO round in Marketo and I did the uh series A round at Sprinkler and, you know, everything in between.

• 17:09Harry Stebbings?

  So so what's it like then, seeing rocket ships that you back at seed uh go on to IPO like you like you have done with the Glassdoors and Marketos? And seeing them enter hypergrowth mode? How's that for you as an investor?

• 17:23Speaker 02

  It's incredibly satisfying. You know, you you hope as an investor that you make some investments that that reach real critical mass. Hopefully, the founders enjoy the the fruits of their labor financially, but also most founders I have found are ultimately, they're ultimately more missionary than they are mercenary and and they're they're, they want to change something about the world. And when you can get these companies to that stage, they they really have, you know, to borrow a phrase, dented the universe in a special way. And I I that's the part that's really enjoyable for me.

• 17:52Harry Stebbings?

  And what's the most common problem that you see them encounter on these kind of uh very, very steep trajectories? Is there one that pervades the rest? Is it uh hiring? Is it scaling uh, you know, servers?

• 18:07Harry Stebbings?

  Whatever it is, what's it for you?

• 18:09Speaker 02

  It really, it really tends to be a recruiting issue. You have on the product side, which you see less of these days, but Battery was an investor in Frenzer way back in the day and I think they were way ahead, but unfortunately grew too fast, they couldn't keep up and Facebook ultimately won that market, which, which is unfortunate for us. But I'll tell you, the, the one that we see is kind of a common issue is really around sales leadership and so we spent a lot of time blogging about this issue, about hiring a great VP of Sales and how to think about sequencing mid-management and sales and then international expansion. Those are the areas where I think people don't necessarily do a great job, finding a great sales leader, sometimes moving on a sales leader, find the next person.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  It's a high-risk game because if you pick the wrong person, you're not going to know that for at least 12 or 18 months. And many times that's the difference between the number one and the number two person in a market is that critical 12 or 18 months.

• 19:04Harry Stebbings?

  So then what's your advice for hiring, you know, a crucial sales figure? Say a founder asks you, what, what should I be looking for? How do I approach this stage of the hiring process? What would you advise, having seen so many do it so successfully?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  I think for founders, it's really good to have a, either a CEO coach or chairman that they can trust to help them assess executive leadership. Many of them do, but, but sometimes even though they don't really have a ton of experience in that area, will try to wing it. So I think having a few folks they trust and, and by the way, the, the VC investor can also play that role for the founder, but, but many times they'll pick a, another person to be chairman or, or a CEO coach that can help out. I think that's a, it's an area that founders under invest in, but they can do a better job in.

• 19:54Harry Stebbings?

  And if it's okay with you, I'd love to dive into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you hit me with your immediate thoughts.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  All right.

• 20:02Harry Stebbings?

  So you recently retweeted, I, I do do my research pre-interviews. Whenever you have a tough decision in your career to make, always go for the harder one. If you were to look at your career and look at the hard decisions you've made, what's the hardest?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  I'll tell you, one that I had a hard decision to make a couple of years ago was one of our companies called Brightree. This is a SaaS software company in the healthcare space. And we had offers to to sell the business for, say, four hundred million dollar range. After a long conversation with the CEO, we collectively decided to turn that down and to keep going. And we were fortunate that two years later, we announced a sale of the company to ResMed for eight hundred million dollars. That's a really tough decision when when you can walk away from what obviously would be a good investment or a good result to being willing to risk it to get to something greater than that.

• 20:53Harry Stebbings?

  And then what's the anti-portfolio? What have you missed that that keeps you up at night?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Oh, God, there's so many companies that I've missed.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  And I I learn a lot from each one. I'll tell you, you you learn a lot from your your your your missed companies or your failed companies, more so than the good ones.

• 21:09Harry Stebbings?

  So what's the one that plays on your mind most and what did you learn from that process?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  I would say there there's a company, Kayak. We spent some time looking at their Series B. We ultimately decided to not move forward because at that point in their journey, their their unit economics weren't such that they were they were acquiring traffic for free. And so we we weren't really sure how it would scale. And what we realized is that that team was so phenomenal, that they built such an amazing product, that all the traffic just started showing up over time for free. They got these power users and they built this amazing business. And so, you know, our friends, Joel Cutler at General Catalyst, did an incredible job building, you know, investing that business. And Paul English and Steve Haffner did a great job building it out. So that's one. You know, I'll tell you, I'll give you another example of one, too.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  I I don't know if we really had a shot at this, but we had conversations with Salesforce. When I first started Battery in two thousand, I think we had the conversation in two thousand one or two. At that time, I was an associate at Battery, not a partner, not leading my own deals. But I remember we had a conversation with the company. Ultimately, we decided not to move forward because we couldn't get the right structure or downside protection that we were looking for. What I've learned through that deal and many others since then. Is you should really be willing to do a deal regardless of the exact terms that you get, the exact structure you get, because that's how you really test your conviction in a, in a, in an investment thesis. You know, if you're really focused on, hey, did I get that special dividend

• 22:40Speaker 02

  structure or participating preferred or, you know, some ratchet or, you know, if I got the deal for five percent less, ultimately, none of those things matter, you know, for your successful investments. So that's why the deal side is, is the least of the four important variables.

• 22:55Harry Stebbings?

  And then when you look at your kind of landscape of investors, is there one or two that you most respect and admire and why?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  There's a ton that I respect. I'll tell you, I, I really admire Doug Leone at, at Sequoia. Maybe not because of all the success that he's had per se. I mean, that's obviously impressive. I had the opportunity to work with Doug on a deal maybe five years ago, and I think Doug, by that point, was probably already a billionaire. If not, he was well on his way to be a billionaire. And Doug and I were working on an investment. The entrepreneur decided not to go down our path. Doug got on a plane, took a red eye out, sat in the lobby of the person's office, can, waiting for the person to convince him that, hey, we should really work on this deal together. What I, what I loved about that story is even though he was so successful, he was still so hungry and, and really just a wonderful role model of someone who's, didn't

• 23:45Speaker 02

  get caught up in his success and is still just hustling to do whatever he thinks makes sense for his investors. But I'll tell you, he does the same thing for his entrepreneurs. He, he will do whatever it takes to make them successful.

• 23:56Harry Stebbings?

  And then what's the favorite blog or newsletter for you?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Well, as I mentioned, I'm a big fan of, of Brad Feld's writing. He's done an amazing job writing about both professional and personal topics. I've, I've learned a lot from him. And then, you know, who, who doesn't love Jason Lemkin, right?

• 24:12Harry Stebbings?

  Of course. Yeah, we, we, we all do. Um, yeah, absolutely. Brad and Jason are the winners. And then most recent investment for you and why you said yes?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  My most recent investment's a company in Raleigh, North Carolina, a company called Pendo.io. This is a company that's in-

• 24:28Harry Stebbings?

  I saw them at Sasta.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Oh, you did? Good, good there.

• 24:31Harry Stebbings?

  They had delicious cupcakes. Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Good, good. I'll, I'll let Todd know that you liked his cupcakes.

• 24:36Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, dude. Sorry. Yes. Pendo.io.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  So they're, they're in the product success category. The one liner here is we saw a dramatic transformation in the marketing function where it moved from being very gut-driven to being data-driven. Hence, our investments in companies like Exact Target and Marketo and Omniture. We believe the same thing is now happening in product management where it's historically been a gut-driven field, but now we believe more and more data will infuse the product management process and Pendo is really championing that.

• 25:07Harry Stebbings?

  Well Neeraj, thank you so much coming on the show today. It really has been so fantastic to hear your story and your journey with Battery. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

• 25:20Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic guest Neeraj was and that has to be one of my favourite answers to how do you determine product-market fit? Try and sell this product to your boss. Absolutely brilliant. And to celebrate the success and release of the official Saster podcast brought to you by Jason Lemkin and I, the SaaS fun does not stop here on the 20 Minute VC. And with it being Battery Week, neither does the participation from Battery. And I'm so excited to have Logan Bartlett, investor at Battery, on the show on Wednesday. But before we leave you today, if you're loving the show, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings, that's Stebbings with two Bs, or you can sign up for the newsletter on the20minutavec.com so you never have to miss an episode or an update from us. Also, finishing today, are

• 26:04Harry Stebbings?

  you feeling fresh? I am because I spent the weekend in my new Leesa mattress and so many good things about it. First, it was a fully online shopping experience, which meant I did not have to traipse around a showroom, feeling terribly awkward perching on a bed. Then even better, I didn't even have to go and collect the mattress. It was delivered straight to my office in a matter of days. Of course, this is also possible for all residents of the UK, US and Canada, and all the mattresses are made actually in the UK and the US. Then for the experience itself of the mattress, the mattress is engineered to real perfection with three crafted layers comprising of two inches of memory foam and two inches of latex light foam, designed to keep you cool at night. So if you want to join me for a weekend

• 26:47Harry Stebbings?

  in a Leesa mattress, head over to leesa.com/vc, that's L-E-E-S-A dot com forward slash VC, and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off. And even better, they even have a 100 night trial, so there is no risk and no commitment. As always, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for supporting the show. It really does mean so much. Please always feel free to email me [email protected] or you can follow us on Twitter at 20minutavec or at Harry Stebbings. Thank you so much as always.