20VC: Sequoia's Mike Vernal on His Biggest Lessons From 8 Years of Hyper-Growth at Facebook, Why The Strength of Data Moats Is Over-Rated Today and The Challenge of "Overthinking Investments" In Venture

Mike Vernal is a General Partner @ Sequoia, one of the world’s leading and most renowned venture firms with a portfolio including WhatsApp, Zoom, Stripe, Airbnb, Github and many more incredible companies. As for Mike he has led and sits on the board of Citizen, rideOS, Rockset, Threads and Houseparty (acquired by Epic). Prior to venture, Mike spent 8 years at Facebook as VP of Product & Engineering leading multiple different teams including Search, Commerce, Profile, and Developer product groups. Prior to Facebook Mike spent 4 years at Microsoft as a PM lead in Microsoft's Developer Division. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Mike made the move from VP of Product & Engineering at Facebook to General Partner at the world-famous, Sequoia Capital? What were Mike's biggest takeaways from his 8 years at FB seeing the hyper-growth first hand? 2.) Mike has previously said that he has struggled in the past when it comes to "overthinking investments". What does he mean by this? How does it play out in reality? How does Mike balance between trusting his gut and relying on the data? How does Mike think venture partnerships should participate in this balancing act? 3.) Why does Mike believe decision-making in venture to be fundamentally different to decision-making in operations? How do they compare? How does the decision-making process and approach change as a result of this contrast? How does Mike think about his own time allocation now in venture? What is the most challenging element? 4.) How does Mike evaluate the proliferated SaaS landscape today? Why does Mike believe that the notion of SaaS as a construct will fade over the coming years? What does Mike believe is the reasoning for SaaS apps becoming more and more niche? What problem does that pose for VC? Will we enter a period of consolidation in SaaS? What size do the incumbents have to be to really engage in the M&A process moving forward? 5.) Why does Mike struggle to see the strength of data moats? What are the major downfalls associated with the argument of their strength? At what point is the asymptotic point of the utility value of the data for models today and how does that change over the coming years? What does Mike instead see as durable and sustainable moats? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Mike’s Fave Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude Mike’s Most Recent Investment: Verkada As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mike on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome to the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. I'm always looking to improve the show and to make it the best experience for you that I can. And so I would love to hear your feedback. You can hit me up on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs. It would be great to see you there. But to the show today, and I'm so excited to feature someone that I've heard so many great things about from prior guests on the show. And so with that, I'm delighted to welcome Mike Vernal, partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading and most renowned venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of WhatsApp, Zoom, Stripe, Airbnb, GitHub and many more incredible companies. As for Mike, he's led and sits on the board of Citizen, Rido S, Rockset, Threads and House Party, which was recently acquired by Epic. Prior to venture, Mike spent eight years at Facebook as VP of Product and Engineering,

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  leading multiple different teams, including search, commerce, profile and developer product groups. Prior to Facebook, Mike spent four years at Microsoft as a PM lead in Microsoft's developer division. I do also want to say a huge thank you to the wonderful Pat Grady for the intro to Mike today. I really do so appreciate that, Pat. But before we dive into the show today, we need to talk about Airbase, the ideal cloud based spend management platform for growing startups. It's a game changer for finance teams that need to keep up with company growth. And for me, it's so awesome for three key reasons. One, you can use Airbase to issue virtual and physical cards for card payments, as well as checks and ACH transfers for invoice payments. Second, they have an incredible pre-approval system for expense requests, meaning you see expenses as employees request them, instead of only learning about them when the statement comes in at the end of the month.

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  And finally, because all of the transactions flow through the Airbase system, they can help automate a lot of the accounting work, like coding expenses, collecting invoices and receipts and much, much more. And that's why the likes of Gusto, Front and Segment all love Airbase and head over to airbase.com to book a demo and find out how to get up to 1.5% cash back on your monthly spend. So now we've nailed spend management with Airbase, we should also talk about Culture Amp, the platform that turns your company culture into your competitive advantage. Are you looking for your first investor or are you working your way through the alphabet from Series A to B and beyond? Whatever your goals are, you'll need your team to be at peak performance to help you get there. So how do you develop your employees to their fullest potential? Performance reviews are the cornerstone. Stone of high performance work cultures, but ninety five percent of leaders agree traditional

• 2:14Harry Stebbings?

  performance reviews aren't working. Culture Amp's new guide to performance reviews shows you how to create a process that actually makes an impact. So your employees can improve constantly and help your business achieve its goals. Get your free guide now at culture amp.com forward slash two zero VC. Finally, if Culture Amp and Airbase let you manage your team, what about getting the team in the first place? Well, did you know that there are five job openings for every one developer in the United States? No wonder hiring great engineers is impossible. And that's where my friends at Terminal come in. Terminal is your dedicated partner in quickly building skilled remote engineering teams. Well, how do they deliver both speed and quality? Well, Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, set up, and support these teams. From little things like managing office logistics to big things like benefits, legal,

• 2:58Harry Stebbings?

  and community. And they've developed this proprietary and comprehensive remote team solution based on decades of experience building remote teams across multiple continents. So they know what works. But don't take my word for this. Take the word of Eventbrite, former 20 VC guest Hims, and DialPad, all customers and lovers of Terminal. And you can find out more today at terminal.io. But it's now time to dive in. I couldn't be more excited to welcome Mike Vernal, partner at Sequoia Capital.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:31Harry Stebbings?

  Mike, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I've heard so many great things, both from Carl and from Pat on your team. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:40Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all. But I do want to kick off with some context. So tell me, how did you make your way from the world of operations to partner the globally renowned Sequoia?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  I never expected to be in venture. It was not a career goal. It was never a thing that I aspired to. So it's a little bit of an indirect story. So my freshman year roommate in college was one of my closest friends, started a company in 2009 after leaving Apple. Sequoia led the A and Brian Schreier here joined the board. Separately, at about the same time, a good friend of mine, who was my PM at Microsoft before I joined Facebook, also left Microsoft to start a company in 2009. And Sequoia led the A there and Brian also joined the board there. And so I ended up with Multiple connections to Brian and both of them said Brian's an amazing guy. You should get to know him. And so I got to know Brian a little bit, then I got to know the rest of the firm. They invited me to join the scouts program at some point. So that was kind of the backdrop.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  And then in early 2016, my wife and I had our first child and I took six or eight weeks off for paternity leave. And it happened to coincide. My son was born maybe a week before my eight year anniversary at Facebook. And so it felt like a good time to just reflect and figure out I'd been at Facebook for eight years. It's an amazing company, but to think about what I wanted to do next. And I really loved the early days of Facebook. It's probably the most stressful, but also the most fun part of my career. It was incredibly chaotic. It was incredibly idealistic. People were sleeping in the office, working through the night. There was just a tremendous amount of energy and this optimism about just being able to create something from nothing. As I thought about the different things that I could do next, the thing that got me most excited

• 5:19Speaker 02

  was this idea of working with very early stage founders, pre-seed, seed folks in a garage that had that kind of idealism and sort of irrational energy. And so towards the end of my paternity leave, I decided to switch and I've been here for a little over three years and time flies.

• 5:35Harry Stebbings?

  And what a three years it has been, but I titled this segment, Three Years The Review. So I'd love to kick off today with kind of a little bit of a deep dive into the kind of eight years at Facebook there. And kind of seeing that hypergrowth, I do just have to ask, what were the biggest takeaways from seeing the hypergrowth of Facebook? And do you think that impacted your investing mindset today?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be written and probably a lot that still remains to be written about Facebook. But I think the most core thing that I learned there is, and it sounds a little bit trite, but execution matters. Execution matters, tempo matters, focus matters. I think what I've seen a lot of companies, both big and small, is kind of general amorphous forward progress. People doing good things, but I rarely see people that are really dialed in, really understand what are we trying to accomplish? What is the goal? How are we measuring our progress towards the goal? I could do A or B, which one is actually going to be more impactful? I think that. At Ethos, started with the growth team at Facebook. There are a lot of very high quality and executionally excellent people at Facebook.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  But I think the growth team really sort of helped to define this notion of focus and extreme clarity around what are you actually trying to accomplish? Should you do A or B? Will A or B be more impactful towards that goal? You know, as I meet companies today, like the ones that I think are just really head and shoulders above the rest are typically the ones that are just amazing at focus, have incredible clarity of thought about what are we trying to accomplish? What are the steps we need to take there? Have tremendous focus on only doing the stuff that is actually important and critical. And then just relentless execution against what that is. And that to me, I think, pattern matching on people that I think were really impactful at Facebook and seeing it in entrepreneurs, it comes down to clarity of thought.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  It comes down to grit and just sort of relentless focused execution.

• 7:27Harry Stebbings?

  Can I also, I absolutely love that in terms of that kind of pattern matching on those core skills and execution abilities. How can you stress test that when you're meeting a founder for the first time? And you really have quite a limited time to get to know them?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  So it's often, I think, people who really understand their domain and really understand their strategy can often articulate it in just a handful of words. I think that singular focus on, okay, there is one thing that matters. This is the thing that we're going to really focus on drove tremendous performance. I find a similar dynamic when I meet entrepreneurs. They can come in and explain the entirety of their business in three to five minutes. And then the rest of the time is deep diving, poking on the margin to just understand sort of the fringes of the basic plan, then that's an exceptional pitch. And I don't know if it sounds easy or not. It might sound easy. It might sound like, well, if I'm an entrepreneur, I pulled together 60 minutes of content. It would be way easier if I could just pull together five slides.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  But as it turns out, it's way easier to talk for 60 minutes than it is for five, as you're about to discover. But people who can distill it down to five minutes and just leave you with the impression that this person understands the business on incredibly deep level and can explain it crisply. That's just incredible. Incredibly powerful.

• 8:40Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree in that. I do think it is a challenge, but I do want to talk about kind of challenges on the other side of the table, being on the venture side of the table now. When we chatted before, you said that potentially one challenge is overthinking investments and is potentially kind of a challenge and a mistake that maybe you've made and maybe others in the industry make. I'd love to hear, what did you mean by this? And how does that actually play out in reality?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the good and bad things about venture is the feedback cycle. So the bad part about it is it's a very long feedback cycle. It takes eight to 10 years to really understand if a company is going to be great and enduring or not. But on the good side, the decision-making process, since it's the most important thing, tends to be fairly objective and well documented. Write maybe a short memo, maybe you'll write a longer memo if you want to pose an investment and you can always go back and sort of read through them. And so in my case, I've only been here for a few years, so it's early to have categorical data about which things are misses or not. But I have my own internal scorecard of things that might end up being misses.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And the interesting thing about most of them is I have yet to meet a company once, think it wasn't interesting and then have it actually be very interesting. For the handful of companies where I think I probably made a mistake, I thought it was pretty interesting. I usually invited more people to meet it and then I started thinking and writing and trying to play out the future, understand how the market was going to play out, understand the terminal market structure, et cetera, et cetera. And in each case, I started by being instinctually really interested in the company. And then as I rationalized it, I rationalized a way why this might work, but it probably wasn't going to be a great company. In each of those cases, I just didn't trust my instincts or gut enough.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And it's tough because you definitely, some people do this, but we do not want to be an instinctual or gut-driven firm. I think we try to be very rigorous and rational about our investment decisions. But there's some balance, I think you have to strike between your sort of initial gut instinct and then all of the sort of analysis and thinking that you can do about a company.

• 10:42Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, I guess the subsequent kind of obvious question is, how do you find that balance? And is it a case of bringing external partners in early to really kind of fact check your? How do you think about that solution to the balance?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things we talk about here is the importance of the conviction of what we call the sponsor, the person who is proposing the investment. I think you can get feedback and hard questions and the like from your partners and from the rest of the partnership. And I think that's really important. But I think the thing that I am discovering is even more important is really your internal conviction about an opportunity. And I don't have a great way of quantifying that. But I think two things that I have found are, one, whether or not you've really fallen in love with the company and whether you've fallen in love with the founding team. And this is something that you want to work on kind of regardless of outcome.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  I think if it is a great investment and you're not excited about working on the problem space or with a team or something like that, then that's a very strong signal you should probably take. And then I think another litmus test is just would you want to quit and go work at the company? And I think both of those tend to get to some intangible instinct as opposed to something that is maybe more quantified or rational. But at least for me, I keep trying to, as I make investments, think if I were not at Sequoia, would I go and join this company?

• 12:03Harry Stebbings?

  It's a great fact checker for sure. When we chatted before, also kind of in terms of that decision-making process, you said that one challenge is the terminal decisions in venture. What did you mean by this statement? And how does that maybe compare to day-to-day activity more on the operations side?

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think of decisions as terminal and non-terminal. Some people sometimes talk about these as type one versus type two decisions. But you know, terminal decisions are effectively, once you make that decision, you can't reverse it. You can't go back. Whereas non-terminal are, you make a decision, you do it for a while. If it was wrong, you just go back and change the decision. And in my experience, there are incredibly few decisions in an operational role that are terminal decisions. Like you can just do something and build it for a while. And if it was wrong, you can go back and do it again. Even with hiring decisions, if you want to hire someone and then you decide not to hire them and you realize it was a mistake, you can go back to them and try to hire them again, et cetera, et cetera. And so in operating, I really think what is most important is Is just tempo and feedback loop.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Like, sometimes I'll talk to founders that I work with, and they will be racking their brain around whether they should build A or they should build B. And on the one hand, I care deeply about product. I might have an opinion about A versus B. But on the other hand, I'm like, it doesn't matter. Just pick one and build it. Don't roll it out to everyone. Roll it out to some people, measure it, figure out if it's working or not. And if it's not working, then just go back and build B. Just optimize for doing things somewhat quickly, learning, and then sort of iterating based off of that. In venture, on the other side, the most important thing that we do is make decisions. And that's, I think, why there's a lot of formalism around decision making. Most firms have a day where they make decisions. It's typically Monday. Most firms write in a memo before they make a decision. Most firms vote when they're making a decision, et cetera, et cetera.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  And I think the reason for that is those decisions are effectively terminal. If you pass on a round and then someone else does it, that round is done and you can't go get a second bite at that apple. You might be able to leave the next round if you made a mistake, but they are terminal decisions. And so that, to me, the thing that's been really interesting is coming from an operational world where I think people value tempo and learning over thinking. It's interesting to see the amount of infrastructure that is built up around decision making.

• 14:14Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, in terms of the decision making that we do have to engage with, more and more stay that's in the world of SaaS, just in terms of sheer number of opportunities with the massive proliferation of SaaS apps that I think we probably both see. So this is an impossible question to ask. So I'm sorry for such a terrible question. But on a meta level, how do you evaluate this very proliferated SaaS landscape today?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's very interesting. I mean, there's, depending on which stats you read, companies will have 50, 100, 150, 200 more different SaaS apps. I probably have a bunch of thoughts on this topic. I think the first is, there's a famous Barksdale quote where there's two ways to make money, bundling and unbundling. And I think for the past 10 years, there's kind of been an unbundling of on-premise software and V1 SaaS. And there's been this notion of best of breed. And I think you've ended up, that sort of combined with the funding environment, which I think is prolific, you've ended up with, I think, just SaaS. Tools that are just nichier and nichier. And as a result, I meet companies and opportunities that I think are very clearly

• 15:16Speaker 02

  features of something larger and they're maybe charging a dollar per employee per month or two dollars per employee per month or something like that. And so I think there will be a correction, like often in the early days of a market, you'll see this proliferation of different opportunities. And then as the market progresses, you'll see consolidation. So I think first and foremost, there will be a consolidation of many of these different SaaS apps. Two, I think there will be incumbents that see an opportunity to better integrate these things together and sort of have an all in one solution. A good example of this is Notion, which I think markets itself as kind of an all in one workplace and tries to, I think, replace multiple different SaaS tools. And then I think there's also just going to be a bunch of sort of meta SaaS apps, which are either helping to manage all the different SaaS apps you have.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I think there is still an interesting opportunity for a sort of SaaS app store over time. Probably something that evolves from an existing SaaS platform, not just a standalone SaaS app store. And I think there's just going to be, as the market matures, a convergence, a consolidation. And I think there is going to be a rebundling a lot of this of this functionality into a few key players.

• 16:22Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, at what level do you think the incumbents need to be for this kind of consolidation to really take place in the industry?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  It's a good question. There are kind of two levels of it. One is there will probably end up being a handful of anchor products, maybe by vertical. You know, if you think about Adobe, for instance, they have historically really owned the creative community or Salesforce has obviously owned CRM and sales. And so I can imagine a handful of players getting more and more weight in probably a particular functional vertical and then either building the features of other SaaS apps and integrating them into their own offering, or just developing enough market cap and cash flow to be able to acquire other things and integrate them together. But, you know, these things take time to play out. I think Salesforce is probably 15 to 20 years old at this point.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  And maybe only in the past five to eight years, I think, has been really adding more and more things to its portfolio.

• 17:16Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, it's super interesting in terms of how that landscape evolves and changes. Because you said to me before also that the notion of SaaS as a construct will fade. What did you mean by that in terms of this ever changing landscape and the perspective?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Well, I think the initial term SaaS was intended to sort of distinguish it from on premise software. And there was a time where it was perhaps novel that you would offer a cloud hosted software with a subscription revenue model. And every so often I will meet a company that is also offering an on premise solution. And every so often, I mean, very, very rarely, but every so often I might meet a company that is only doing on premise software. Usually it's for like the banking industry. But at this point, SaaS is such the norm that I think it is effectively synonymous with software. And so mostly I just meant the SaaS is software and software has been, you know, business software has existed for 40 years. And I think SaaS at this point is just business software.

• 18:10Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agreed with you on that. And when we kind of dive deeper and analyze these opportunities, a lot of them suggest kind of the presence of data modes. I'd love to hear from your perspective, how do you feel when someone says that they maybe have a data mode? And do you really believe in their strengths?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Generally, no. You know, one of the core questions I think any company tries to wrestle with and answer is what is your durable competitive advantage? And people often shorthand that as modes. And I think with the rise in prominence of AI and machine learning, there has been a convenient narrative that has propagated, which is, well, you know, we're an AI application. And our mode is based on the fact that we get some data and then we label that data and then we train our model. And then we give it to a customer and then the customer corrects any errors and we feed those new labels, those corrections back into the data set and we get more data and we create this virtuous cycle that makes our model better and better. And ergo, we have a data mode.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  And I think many people accept that as a thing. I personally am pretty skeptical. The reason is multifold. One is I just think the technology and the researcher is evolving so quickly that I think the number of data points you need to train a model is decreasing at, you know, some fixed efficiency level is dropping. Quite precipitously. I think, you know, there's a bunch of research around few shot or even sort of single shot learning techniques. I just think, sure, if the first mover collects a corpus of 10 million, you know, labeled data points. I don't think that means that the next person who comes along also needs to create 10 million data points to be comparable. They might only need a million or they might only need 100,000.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  And so I think people that think they are relying on data modes just need to really pressure test whether that's a real thing or not. There might be things, you know, some of these things involve human in the loop. And I do think if you can become part of some workflow, that workflow can be quite sticky. And so there might be a mode, but the mode to me is not really based on the data and the labels. It's more based on, well, now we have some specialty function. Let's say it's like radiology or dermatology and you're labeling medical images. And now they have been trained to use our software for this thing. And it will be hard to rip out our software because you'll have a generation of people that are just trained to use this particular piece of software.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  My guess is that that's actually more durable than having 10 million labeled images versus 100,000.

• 20:37Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is the kind of benefits of data modes, so to speak, not actually largely mitigated by models of the rise of kind of synthetic data creation?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  That's a very interesting question. I think one that is hotly debated. I don't want to pretend that I'm an expert here. I think it depends on the context and how accurate you need the model to be. I think in, if you talk to people that are doing autonomous vehicles, for instance, I think they feel that simulation might make some common cases more efficient. But the hard part of driving a car autonomously is the edge cases that live beyond 99.99. And I think those ones are just hard to imagine, let alone generate synthetically.

• 21:18Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to finish though, Mike, on my favorite element of any episode being the quickfire round. So I say a short statement and then you hit me with your immediate thoughts, about 60 seconds or less per one. Are you ready?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  I hope so, yes.

• 21:30Harry Stebbings?

  So I'm flying to the West Coast and I need a book. What is the must read?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  100 Years of Solitude. I think the most magically written book of all time, or at least that I have ever read.

• 21:40Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you think is an underrated rock star in the industry that deserves more credit?

• 21:44Speaker 02

  I'm on a bit of a Colin Greenwood kick at the moment. He's the bassist for Radiohead. I think he's just a very talented and melodic bassist.

• 21:51Harry Stebbings?

  Love it. Price sensitivity. How much attention does one really pay to price today?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I think there could be many contexts. What I will say is I think almost every startup under prices its product.

• 22:01Harry Stebbings?

  And for you as a venture investor, investing?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Uh, this is tough. I think for a truly exceptional company, you should always make an exception. But if you make the exception, the norm, it is the new norm. So I think you have to pay attention in aggregate, but also be flexible when really called for.

• 22:16Harry Stebbings?

  What's the single biggest challenge of your role with Sequoia today?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Time management. There are far more interesting companies created each year than I have time to meet.

• 22:24Harry Stebbings?

  How do you prioritize?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  It is a constant battle, but I think it is a blend of trying to read everything that I get and look at everything quickly. And then just try to meet everything that I think might be interesting.

• 22:36Harry Stebbings?

  And then final one, Mike. Tell me, the most recent publicly announced investment, and why did you say yes and get excited?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  So we just partnered with a company called Verkata, which is a security camera company. And I'm incredibly excited about this company for a whole host of reasons, but I'll give you two. First is, I think there's a lot of magic that can happen when you combine great hardware talent, great software talent, and people that are willing to sort of operate cloud services at scale. I think too often what happens is you have people who build hardware that write really crappy software, or you have people who write software that are scared of building hardware. And so try to build software across a wide range of devices, you end up with kind of the least common denominator. But I think if you're willing to do hardware and software and services together, you can build a really great experience. And I think that's what the Verkata team has done.

• 23:25Harry Stebbings?

  As I said, Mike, I had so many great things, both from Pat and from Carl. I've wanted to see this for such a long time. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. It's been great.

• 23:35Harry Stebbings?

  I have to say, I absolutely loved having Mike on the show there. And if you'd like to see more from Mike, you can find him on Twitter at M Vernal. Likewise, I want to say a huge thank you again to Pat Grady at Score for the intro today. I really do so appreciate that. It'd also be fantastic to welcome you behind the scenes here. You can do so on Instagram at H Stabbings 1996 with two Bs. It'd be great to see you there. But before we leave you today, we need to talk about Airbase, the ideal cloud-based spend management platform for growing startups. It's a game changer for finance teams that need to keep up with company growth. And for me, it's so awesome for three key reasons. One, you can use Airbase to issue virtual and physical cards for card payments, as well as checks and ACH transfers for invoice payments. Second, they have an incredible pre-approval system for expense requests, meaning you

• 24:18Harry Stebbings?

  see expenses as employees request them, instead of only learning about them when the statement comes in at the end of the month. And finally, because all of the transactions flow through the Airbase system, they can help automate a lot of the accounting work, like coding expenses, collecting invoices and receipts, and much, much more. And that's why the likes of Gusto, Front and Segment all love Airbase. And head over to airbase.com to book a demo and find out how to get up to 1.5% cash back on your monthly spend. So now we've nailed spend management with Airbase. We should also talk about Culture Amp, the platform that turns your company culture into your competitive advantage. Are you looking for your first investor? Or are you working your way through the alphabet from Series A to B and beyond? Whatever your goals are, you'll need your team to be at peak performance to help you get there. So how do you develop your employees to their fullest potential?

• 25:02Harry Stebbings?

  Performance reviews are the cornerstone of high-performance work cultures, but 95% of leaders agree, traditional performance reviews aren't working. Culture Amp's new guide to performance reviews shows you how to create a process that actually makes an impact, so your employees can improve constantly and help your business achieve its goals. Get your free guide now at cultureamp.com/20vc. Finally, if Culture Amp and Airbase let you manage your team, what about getting the team in the first place? Well, did you know that there are five job openings for every one developer in the United States? No wonder hiring great engineers is impossible. And that's where my friends at Terminal come in. Terminal is your dedicated partner in quickly building skilled remote engineering teams. Well, how do they deliver both speed and quality? Well, Terminal does this by focusing on

• 25:44Harry Stebbings?

  Everything necessary to successfully source, set up and support these teams. From little things like managing office logistics to big things like benefits, legal and community. And they've developed this proprietary and comprehensive remote team solution based on decades of experience building remote teams across multiple continents. So they know what works, but don't take my word for this. Take the word of Eventbrite, former 20VC, Guest Hymns and DialPad, all customers and lovers of Terminal and you can find out more today at terminal.io. As always, I so appreciate your continued support and I can't wait to bring you a fantastic Founders Friday this coming Friday with Hitten Shah.