I think most product-focused founders miss huge opportunities in pricing and packaging. I write about tech companies, careers, and in-demand skills. Tell us about what happened, and how did you guys overcome that challenge? Alejandro: So originally born and raised in Seattle. Reinhardt: We had a full three years there, so I think all I had left was like my senior capstone project. Peter Reinhardt: The most important thing to realize is that the world doesnt care how you think it should work. Like, sure, sales is one channel of the 20 I just mentioned, but its just one of 20. Its hard for them to understand the broader space. Calvin French-Owen: I'm Calvin, I'm another one of the cofounders at Segment. Your father was a carpenter, and also, your mom was an art teacher. : Thats very powerful, Peter. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. You have this multiplication of all these channels that youre talking with customers on, and its all digital and many times automated as opposed to a person. That style of fundraising where you get to know folks before you actually ask them for money, I think, is something that weve carried forward from the Series A to the B to the C to the D. : Got it. Alejandro: Very nice. We reflect on the annual plan once a year. You are the master or the owner of your own future. That people they previously managed may be in even bigger roles, and those people say, The time under that exec was formative for me. The third is drive, which is delivering results, probably the most straightforward one. : You can reach me on Twitter at @reinpk. They started saying, This is great. Yeah. . We shouldnt have had to we actually stood in the back of classrooms and counted screens to figure out what people were doing. Then, how did you develop this love for aerospace? Thats hard work. Each week in their MIT "Founder's Journey" class, the founder of a successful start-up would speak and answer students' questions. Bradford: Which would have been in 2008. Can you load data not just from my website, but from my mobile apps, and so on? We were never challenged to go and figure out deeply, who is the customer? Segment has thousands of customers across the globe, from fast-growing businesses such as Atlassian, Bonobos and . When youre meeting with execs and recruiting these people, especially people that are a good fit with your culture, is there a specific thing that is an absolute must for you on every candidate? )" . How do we get in touch with them? Now, youve been at it for quite a while with the business, and everything started back in 2011. They were actually opening their laptops and going straight to Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, and Gmail, and so on. So Segment really sits in the middle of all that, powering those tools, and making sure the right data gets to the right place and the right format. : Yeah, getting the right introduction is critical. Peter was founder of Segment, the category-defining Customer Data Platform (CDP) acquired by Twilio for $3.2B. : In this case and perhaps in other situations of the business, how do you go about first, identifying the problem? We did that. : Going back to the discussion on growth, you guys have experienced quite a significant amount of growth, as well, on the employee side of things. Alejandro: Thats very powerful, Peter. When someone is running a fast fundraising process with a whole bunch of people, and its the first time theyre meeting them, its hard for them to assess the person. Bradford: Is that when you guys started Segment, then? I think the tough learning or humbling learning there was like the world doesnt care what you think. We raised a little bit of money from the tennis coach a few hundred dollars a month to print the thing on paper and distribute it around the school. Login Get Started. "I'm excited to bring my passion for tackling climate . 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And it wasn't until they took an embarrassing risk that the dream seemed like it could be a reality. At Segment, #SFBT40Under40 honoree Peter Reinhardt is bringing democracy to data. "It's like, 'Wow, a founder is a normal person too. Alejandro: You were talking about company growth. The fourth is maybe a little more unusual, which is, create clarity. But "that was also a disaster," Reinhardt says. I lean on my co-founders. It's fascinating how every startup has their own really individual, really unique journey. Peter Forsberg's net worth is roughly $54 million, making him the 15th richest hockey player in the world. Reinhardt: It's really not something we pay attention to. We still had no paying customers. Studium Politikwissenschaft, Germanistik und Katholische Theologie in Tbingen und Mnchen. And it wasn't the last time the team considered feedback. Alejandro: Wow. Reinhardt: It was literally like 30 days after we had raised our 500K seed round that we realized, "Oh, we have to call back all these investors and tell them it's a bad idea.". "Finance can be an amazing enabler for your business" says Peter Reinhardt CEO of Segment, you should "use finance as a weapon to grow". I think if thats a piece of advice that I could go back and give myself, it would be to run straight at the problem. They do normal things. Eventually, we open sourced it, and we started using it as a growth hack. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. Go figure out something else and work on that.. What a Series A and from top tier guys. I think MIT is a really good place to learn theoretical computer science, but I find that many of the hardest skills to be a successful software engineer you learn in the industry right afterwards: learning how to be on a team, set a team's mission and vision, and keep people motivated. What do you want us to do with the money? Almost all of them a couple took their money back, but the rest said, We really invested for the team. I've tried Salesforce and. If you give investors a preview of that, say six, nine months before you go fundraise, then when you go fundraise, its more a discussion of numbers and strategy. Can you also send data to my data warehouse? Filmography. Thats when we raised the 15 million from Excel for our series A. There are dozen and dozens and hundreds of analytics companies. Also, remember, if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at [emailprotected]. Twilio will host a conference call today, October 12, 2020, to discuss the Segment acquisition, at 5:30 a.m. (PT) / 8:30 a.m. (ET). Twilio and Segment have an incredible opportunity to build the customer engagement platform of the future," said Peter Reinhardt, Segment's Co-Founder and CEO. . His father introduced him to the recordings of Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. We shouldnt have had to we actually stood in the back of classrooms and counted screens to figure out what people were doing. Net Worth. We built this little 50-line piece of code that could send data from our classroom lecture tool out to all three of those tools and would let us figure out which tool was better later on, just like a data piping JavaScript Library. Segment is a SaaS company helping thousands of companies collect and leverage their customer data. : The most important thing to realize is that the world doesnt care how you think it should work. By. How can they position scheduling that meeting and keeping the fundraising conversation in the background so that they can target the discussion more towards seeking advice and then later on getting the money price, but making sure that its not going into that direction yet? Theyve raised quite a bit of money too. For us, Y Combinator was that key foot in the door, into the network of Silicon Valley and the investor scene as you meet some of the investors all at once, YC obviously has connections. 2016, for us, was rescued by pricing and packaging. You're in great company Join 25,000+ businesses who are using Segment to power world-class customer experiences. My guest today is Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment, the market-leading data customer data platform that was acquired by Twilio last year. Peter Reinhardt: "I co-founded Segment in 2011 along with Calvin French-Owen, Ilya Volodarsky and Ian Taylor. Forsberg is known for being one of the best players of all time. By Geoffrey Keating. Youd talk to a sales rep, and they would help you, and they would have memory in their own head or in their CRM of what your preferences were for clothing or what you last bought, etc. Alejandro: Very nice. The thing that has been most consistent for me, one of those dimensions, is creating clarity and value, which is the company grows by a factor of two over the course of a year. We realized that we had one more shot at product/market fit for something. It was an incredibly distracting thing that we had mistakenly deployed into all these classrooms. You can actually do a lot of discovery; thats whats called in sales to go learn those things and test whether a product is going to deliver economic value. I do find that vacation is critically important for actually going and reflecting on things. Segment's new CFO Sandra Smith and CEO Peter Reinhardt. I'm walking around, checking out the dorms, and I walked into one of the doors and Peter and Calvin just happened to be there. CEO Peter Reinhardt. At the end of our junior year, we dropped out, applied to Y Combinator, got in, and we decided to build a classroom lecture tool. So very quickly we realized that, basically, it's not a good idea to disrupt classes where people are actually paying attention and taking notes on paper by asking them to take out their computer. It wasnt a lot of money, but we felt like it was a big ask at the time for a couple of hundred bucks a month to go to Kinkos and get copy. : I love it! To Reinhardt's surprise, thousands of people were interested in the product and many reached out "demanding" access to it, he says. I think we had a big success there, but I think we have also massively under-invested in pricing packaging, aligning pricing, and packaging to help customers want to buy is critically important. Once again, another product. : I guess I was always excited about aircraft, and I was always studying different rocket designs and reading about the missions to the moon and what was going on on Mars and just always super excited about that. Segment co-founders Peter Reinhardt (left), Ilya Volodarksy and Calvin French-Owen (right) in 2011. And Around the Series C, its all about numbers at that point. The numbers are important, but I still found that it was heavily still all about the vision. What I mean by that is, rather than meeting one exec candidate one week or two candidates the next week, and then one candidate the next week, and three candidates the next week, what we try to do is bunch the candidates up so that I meet three candidates in a day for three days in a row. Sales is not something that had a ton of appreciation for when we started the company, but I think over time, its something that Ive developed more and more appreciation for. Came in the next day and was like, All right, guys. Dropbox Paper, a great shared writing environment. Enjoy a 7-Day Free Trial Thru Feb 24, 2023! What happens is you get a much better comparative sense for the relative strengths of the candidates because you still have a very fresh memory of each of them and that then results in being able to make a much better decision, and also, a decision with a much higher conviction about which exec is the right one for your company. We also have Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Twilio segment, joining us for Q&A. . Lets say, youd walk into a Nordstroms, and youd talk to someone. Hello everyone, and welcome to the. But less than a decade ago, Segment founders Peter Reinhardt, Calvin French-Owen and Ilya Volodarsky were college kids at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), living in the same dorm and brainstorming products they could build to launch their own start-up. On an organic basis, sales were up 2.1% as higher pricing more than offset the negative impact of foreign exchange. How was life there? "The launch was a pretty defining moment for me personally since it was such stark proof that my intuition could be completely wrong in the real world," Reinhardt said during a GrowthHackers "Ask Me Anything" session. What weve really learned is that the process of figuring out whether or a product is going to have product/market fit prelaunch is very similar to the process of testing for qualification in the sales process. It was an incredibly distracting thing that we had mistakenly deployed into all these classrooms. We had people reaching out to us on LinkedIn demanding access to the beta version of this product, the hosted beta version of this product, which didnt exist at the time we launched it. Peter is EY EMEIA People Advisory Services Leader, overseeing a diverse team of over 5,000 professionals who work passionately to provide a holistic approach to EY clients' people-related challenges. Cloud 100 . Lets say, youd walk into a Nordstroms, and youd talk to someone. What a Series A and from top tier guys. You probably see the problem. Managing your psyche through years of failure and ever-increasing pressure is the perfect test of willpower. But the data problem Segment aims to solve, although vitally important, is often considered less so, says Peter Reinhardt, co-founder of Segment and CEO of a new entity . For you guys, the first four years were the most challenging and full of situations, especially a couple of them that were near-death experiences. Oct 25, 2018, 6:00 AM. We had $100,000 left in the bank. Our purpose is to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life by sharing their stories via interviews. : So originally born and raised in Seattle. Aug 4, 2018 . Peter Reinhardt: I think from the founders perspective, the only way to scale the team is to hire strong senior executives who then have their own capability and their own network to go hire and recruit aggressively. Made with great respect for entrepreneurs in Missoula, Montana. Peter Reinhardt: About six months after we launched the open source library, we had a good bit of free traction some customers using the product for free. Peter Reinhardt: Thats right. 3 min read. I lean on my co-founders. We had 100k left in the bank. One of them, in particular, was when you experienced the growth rate that slowed a little bit, and that happened in 2015. That was a transformational pricing change. Peter Reinhardt's income source is mostly from being a successful Actor. We'll hopefully be alive to see the world achieve net zero by 2050, our children definitely will be. I think talking about culture is also going to be very interesting with our guest. Add 4 ounces of seed culture mixture (discard the rest, or use to make a second starter) and mix until fully incorporated. I think I was a little bit slow to make this transition from the search from product/market fit to go-to-market strategy. Twilio will host a conference call today, October 12, 2020, to discuss the Segment acquisition, at 5:30 a.m. (PT) / 8:30 a.m. (ET). In our conversation, we cover the fascinating journey of Segment from an education feedback tool to the business it is today, Peter's sales philosop We were like, We should put analytics on our classroom lecture tool. Peter, the people that are listening are probably wondering How do I get the attention from an investor because obviously investors are in the game of investing. Its hard, so you have to delay the early ones and pull forward the late ones. The idea was to give students this button to push to say, Im confused. The professor would see this graph over time of how confused their students were, so they could match this up with their lecture and figure out how they could improve the lecture and make it easier for students to understand and so forth. Can you also send data to my data warehouse? Alejandro: In this case and perhaps in other situations of the business, how do you go about first, identifying the problem? Step 2. We actually built a lot of stuff that ended up not being useful. Still, not everything went as planned. : Amazing. : You had a very good problem and, obviously, explosive product/market fit, but also, its tricky because now youre getting all these different people, different feedback, and requests. We started doing research on that. In terms of growth, recruiting, and bringing people into the company, that, for me, has been a big on-mark. Where? Before and After Product-Market Fit with Peter and Calvin from Segment published October 11, 2017. iTunes Google Podcasts Spotify RSS. : The growth trajectory over the first few years was basically zero to 2.5 million, and then 2.5 to 10, and then 10 to 20. The Snapdragon Auto 5G Modem-RF Gen 2 platform brings more processing, networking, and connectivity performance in a smaller and more power-efficient form factor, which are all key requirements for the automotive segment. Net Worth: $54 Million. Thats what Id tell myself. I do find that vacation is critically important for actually going and reflecting on things. Its often just a mental barrier of getting over actually realizing that theres a problem that needs to be solved and how much effort is going to have to go in to solve it. Segment revenue is $144 million Segment is worth $3.2 billion valuation Segment team size is 584 employees. How are you able to filter through that to be able to focus and prioritize what matters on the roadmap in front of you? Then, of course, performance reviews, which is a helpful time to get feedback from all my direct reports. 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