SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
They make $30m per year selling software to the EOS community, Ninety CEO
19 Nov 2024
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode with Ninety's CEO?
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Well, I don't want to bury the lead, but I rarely see someone take advantage of a movement and build it into a $30 million revenue software company as quick as you did. So guys, buckle up. Mark, take it away.
Awesome, thank you. All right, so good afternoon. I'm curious, how many of you are founders and or CEOs? All right. I'm curious... During your journey as a founder and or a CEO, how many of you have actually kind of hated the journey for at least a little bit? If you raise your hands. All right. You're my audience. Thank you. All right.
So over the next 20 minutes or so, I'm going to talk about our growth because You know, Nathan always likes to hear people talk about their numbers. And then I'm gonna talk about our business and how we help people do something, which I'll talk about in a second. And then how we've also gone about getting our customers, which he also talked about a little bit. So our growth.
But then I'm gonna go a little bit different than most of the other speakers. I'm gonna talk about where the world is and where it's going. Because if you're a CEO or a founder, You need to be aware of all this, and you need to play into it. We want to ride the wave, not fight the wave. So I'm going to talk a little bit about where the world of work is going.
And then finally, I'm going to talk about how we're leveraging AI to help our clients ride the wave. So that's the next 20 minutes. So a little bit of background on me. I started my career back in the 80s. All right, so I'm an old dude. And I started with a big bank, and they sent me down to Oklahoma City to work out bad oil and gas loans.
So real early in my career, I found out what happens when a company goes under and how it hurts lots of people. Not just the investors, but the employees, the community, and even their vendors and their customers.
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Chapter 2: How did Ninety achieve $30 million in revenue?
So it's not a good thing. So I did really well at that, and I got to go anywhere I wanted to go in the bank, and I helped start a leveraged buyout finance business. Started sitting on a bunch of boards, and I became fascinated with the art and science of building companies. Helped build a company and a platform that was pretty successful. Helped take the company public.
To this day, the company is over $50 billion, pretty well known in space. And part of my journey was I loved data and collecting data and understanding why things are the way they are. This takes us to the next thing because I like understanding things and why the way they are.
I ended up being on a bunch of boards and I actually got frustrated as a board member because I thought building a company is not this hard. It's not that complicated, I should say. It's hard, but it's not complicated. And so I got frustrated. I thought I should be able to help people with this thing.
And that's really the big idea behind 90, which is that we're going to give people everything they need to build a company that ultimately you'll love forever. Because for a lot of us, there are a lot of times when we don't love our companies. So what's 90?
We're an innovative cloud-based platform that simplifies the hard work of building an extraordinarily productive, humane, and resilient organization where people are focused, aligned, and thriving. Now, you'll see up there we've got Great Place to Work certification. We came in at 98% this year. I was afraid of our certification because we do it every single year.
And honestly, I was afraid of it because we just did one of those transitions that you will do as you navigate the stages of development of a company. We went from having about 10 different departments reporting to me to me hiring a C-suite over all those department leaders. And that's not an easy thing for people to experience, right?
And so I thought for sure my numbers were going to go down, our numbers were going to go down this year, and they actually went up. And we made it on a number of Fortune's best places to work list this year. And so we've been able to sort of walk the talk, if you will. So I'm proud of the team, proud of our organization. All right, so what do we do?
We basically just help people master the fundamentals, as I mentioned earlier. And we do this... by helping them master what we call the nine core competencies. I won't get into all this, but right, you need to have the vision stuff, you need to have the customers, obviously you need to have the goals. There's about nine things that you need to be great at.
And when you're really, really strong at these things, scaling, starting, building, scaling, and running your organization just becomes so much easier. All right, how do we do this? We have a bunch of tools. These are the tools that everybody in the company should be using. Everybody should be in meetings. Everybody should be having quarterly conversations. Everybody should have KPIs.
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