Doug Leone
speaker
164 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Doug Leone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I don't mean it that way. I mean coach as not being in the field on a day-to-day basis. It's not a hierarchy of knowledge, okay? Whether you want to be on the sidelines, maybe it's a better way to say it. You want to be on the field or be in the sidelines. And that's a personal choice. There are people that are inherent builders. Elon Musk, he's a builder.
And there's people that just love to help companies go to market. Look, my knowledge has been the go-to-market side. I love helping founders figure out how to sell something from the customer standpoint and then scale that sales force. Maximum speed. That's my passion. So I'd be a lousy type of builder. So it's not an easy one or the other. What you shouldn't do and say, there's money in venture.
I want a cushy life. I want to go into venture. That would be the wrong choice, both in 1999 and in 2023.
So I've actually, I've given a name for this cycle called the merchandising cycle. And I explain this to founders. It starts with product management. What exactly are we building? If truth be known, it starts with vision. But if the vision's wrong, we're all going home. Assuming we're someplace in a ballpark. It starts with product management. What are we building?
To product marketing, how do we position it? How do we tell the story? How do we have the three words for describing what we do? How do we have the 30 seconds, two minutes? And everybody can do the 10 minutes. Very few people can do the three words. And then how do we do the demand, Jen? How do we do the sales? And wherever that cycle is broken, it looks like a bad salesperson.
This guy can't sell. Actually, the truth of the matter is, if you've got product market feed, even shitty salespeople can sell. When we first invested in ServiceNow, we had the B team prior to Frank Slootman coming in, in sales, and they were selling like crazy. So that was my lesson. And so for me as a board member, I have to debug the merchandising cycle. Product can't sell. Why?
There's not enough leads. Oh, well, I know to fix that. Why don't we get some more BDRs? Then you can talk to the BDR guys. Here, you can have five BDRs. Well, then they start fessing up. Well, you know, it's not really a BDR headcount. It's that the message isn't playing right. Aha, well, I knew that, but it's nice to admit it. Let's go back to product marketing. What's the message?
Is that the right message? Is that the wrong message? And that's based on the product we're building. This is product management. And so I worked very hard at debugging
upstream this merchandising cycle so we can figure out where the real problems are and as i think about it take these rocks out of the river so that damn water can flow as fast as possible and once you do that and once you know that two or three sales reps can sell something and you have your first four or five sales that don't include the seal those are telltale sign that you can start ramping and so that's what we do that's what i do as a board member
The thing I can't do is the black magic. If you don't have the right vision, if you are not close to product market fit, I will tell you, Doug Leone or any other people in venture are not going to help you. Black magic is reserved for founders. Everything else is mere mortal stuff. That's what we can do. And we're probably the very best in the world at Sequoia in doing that.
Simplicity, crystal clearness, something a mere mortal can understand. If you can't describe it and you can't understand it, you're out to lunch. Singularity of purpose. When I go to the store, I buy a pencil because I want to write. I don't buy a pencil because I want to write. I scratch my back with a tip. It doesn't work like that.
Singularity of vertical market early on because you want to be narrow. You have no resources. You've got to be narrow. Oh, we're chasing these four vertical markets. It sounds good. But in order to do that, you have to have marketing that talks four different languages for four markets. And maybe you have to have engineering that develops different features for every market.
A little company can't do that. So be at the bullseye as sharp as you can and then start to expand in concentric circles when you get your legs under you in that vertical market. That's what I look for in positioning.
So keep in mind that we as board members, our job is to make these founders very capable and successful. You lose the founder, you lose the soul of a company. There's no question about that. And telling the founders cuts a little bit of the pinky. And you want a founder with 10 fingers and 10 toes.
But there are certain times where the thing is off the rails, that it's worth a small piece of the pinky to get back in the right direction. First, what I try to do, instead of telling, I like showing. So let me give you an example. Your VP of marketing stinks. If I say that, it means nothing to a founder. But if I say, I'd like you to meet these three VP of marketing from other companies.
Let me tell you what happens nine times out of 10. They come back and they say, holy shit, the guy we have or the gal we have is nothing like this guy. Duh. So try to show, not tell. Build trust, which doesn't get built day one. It really gets built with the first time the CEO founders in a pinch and he understands you're there to help him out.
So once you have trust, which is really the foundational layer, it's the grease that makes all business runs. And once the founder understands maybe you have a little experience, a compliment is incredible talent. And once you show the founder without telling the founder, and once in a while you have to tell because maybe you don't have the time to show, but you better do that once a year.
It's very rare. That's what you do. Those are the actions that you take. And you want to come out of that in a win-win. You want to come out of that with an enlightened founder who's extremely happy and better in his role rather than having achieved your goal of a new VP of marketing where the founder feels like his knees were cut off.
Well, the first thing to understand, is it a broad product? Is it a widget? If you have a widget, it's simplicity. If you have a widget, you do less account-based management. because you've got 10,000 accounts that you can call. So that becomes a volume play. You build something a little more complex with a little more of a solution cell versus a widget cell. A pencil is a widget.
A solution is you've got to tell a story. Fewer accounts, you better have your story right per account. So you have to understand what that is. You have to make a guesstimate of what percentage of your leads comes from BDR versus salespeople. I will tell you that early on, it's a Rolodex of the salesperson. First, you got to make those decisions.
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