SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Digits Wants to Replace Quickbooks, $30m Raised, 4 years of Building Distribution, Launch is Next
10 Feb 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This was a stressful process. So yeah, we actually had 72 angels in digits. And these are the CEOs of Box, it's Aaron, of GitHub, it's Nat, of Twitter, it's Dick Costolo, et cetera, et cetera.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Jeff Seibert.
He's a serial entrepreneur and one of Insider's top 100 seed VCs. He's created products that were acquired by Google, Twitter, and Box, and angel invested in more than 60 startups and started the Netflix phenomenon, The Social Dilemma. His newest company, Digits, is revolutionizing business finance. Jeff, you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. Looking forward to it, Nathan. All right.
What's more fun, exiting to Google or starring in a Netflix show?
Oh man, both for very different reasons. And I'd say neither were expected. I sat down for a nice two-hour interview back in 2018 and had no idea I would be front and center in the trailer, in the movie, et cetera. So what a surprise.
That's amazing. Okay. You're working on digital today, but we need to capture some of your backstory. So let me put this in a point in time just so everyone can relate. How old are you today? I am 36. Okay. When did you launch your first company?
I launched my first company back in 2008. So I guess when I was 23 or so. And that was a tiny startup called Increo. We ended up raising money from DFJ. We ended up getting acquired by Box in 2009 as the first acquisition Aaron Levy ever made. And so that was a quick run, but learned so much in that journey.
And be honest with me there, financial windfall for you or not really more of a good learning experience?
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Chapter 2: How did Jeff Seibert's early ventures shape his career?
And so, sorry, how old were you when that happened? Then I was 23. 23. Okay. So was it right out of college or skip college or what?
Yeah, right out of college. Basically, senior year, my co-founder and I just failed to apply to jobs. And so we started working on our own stuff. Got very lucky to raise a small seed round, half million dollar seed round, terrible terms, honestly, looking at it from today's point of view. But it was enough to get started. And we hired a couple engineers and built a product.
That's amazing. Okay. So and Creo then exits to Box. Do you stick around Box, learn a little bit or no, you get bored and leave?
Yeah, no, I stayed two years. They made me an engineering manager and sent me to Boston to launch their R&D office on the East Coast. And that was a fascinating experience. Sort of first time in a management role at a bigger company, had great time building out a team out in Boston. And that's where actually the idea for Crashlytics came from.
And so I ended up giving notice at Box and starting my next thing.
So Crashlytics was launched in 2011. I think you would have been, what, 26 at this point, 27 now? Yep. 26, I think. Yep. 26. Okay. And what was the original idea behind Crashlytics?
Yeah. So it turns out mobile apps crashed. So if you think in 2011, we're two years after the sort of launch of iOS apps, right? Those came in 2009. Everyone's building apps. The app store is flooded with reviews. 10% of them mentioned the word crash. It was a very unstable, very early platform.
And I became obsessed with crash reporting through my work at Box because we were facing our own internal issues with our mobile work and our macOS work and ended up building a prototype on the side. And I asked Box, hey, can I work on this nights and weekends? Would that be cool? And to their complete credit, they were like, yep, great. Go for it. It's totally unrelated to Box.
And if it's good, maybe we'll use it. And so started building.
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