Ben Braverman, Ashley Kelly, and Sam Blond hosted a panel at this year’s SaaStr conference. It’s a dense and tactical conversation about scaling to $20MM in ARR.
Ben, Ashley, and Sam demonstrate how creative you need to be to grow at an unprecedented pace. Chocolate, champagne, Shaq, inbound vs. outbound leads. How do you leverage each? When do you find success? There’s no correct answer, only the pursuit of better outcomes. You can watch the session below.
On Founders Fund recruiting Sam: this demonstrates one reason why FF is so impressive. They constantly discover creative ways to scale a highly-limited and valuable resource. In this case, it’s Sam’s talent.
Sure, FF could have a portco or two chase him, but that opens the firm to risk. Maybe Sam will join. Maybe he won’t. If Sam decides to join the FF portco, that’s great. Now, what about the rest of the portfolio?
This one instance of a great hire has no impact on the rest of the portfolio. So the solution: bring Sam onto the investment team. Provide the entire portfolio with access to an exceptional sales leader. Provide him with the opportunity to impact the portfolio and give him the economic upside for delivering on that impact. Full-stop impressive.