6 Tactics We Used to Go From Bootstrapped to Unicorn

founders what's going on you guys know i love in-person events and they are back the recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together share intimate details templates kpis okrs about their business and it was something special something special we'd love to meet you in person if you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule the link will be down below in the description if you're listening on itunes check this out on youtube you'll see the links in the description or you can just google

founder path or latka next event we'd love to see you in person in the meantime though enjoy this recording it's a good one uh hi i'm mikita um and uh i struggle with the titles for presentations this one i changed over and over i don't know four or five or six times nathan t nathan's team probably hates me i promise i won't give you um a winning

formula i don't have a winning formula what i want to do today is uh share my very own very personal journey um set of epiphanies and learnings and hopefully some of those are going to be helpful useful or otherwise the bigger the company gets the more fun i seem to have i i start lobbing i started loving my job

i think right after we hit about 10 million dollars in arr and it only gets better so for those of you folks who recently started business for those of you in early stages if you want to get a hug i'm you know i'm available because it was really hard for me back in the day um it was really hard and i would you know like

try to be dramatic spice it up so that um nathan can get more clicks and uh i call this a journey from hell to heaven we're far from heaven like a lot can be better but but a sure thing where we are today is a lot more fun compared to 10 years ago um when i landed myself in san francisco

came from eastern europe i didn't work at a good sas company prior to panda i didn't work at a good company period prior to pentadock um i didn't go to a good school i i dropped out out of a bad school in a third world country so i didn't know much before i had a lot to learn and yeah so like we had a negative net dollar retention

um we constantly missed board plans um i don't know how investors funded us i wouldn't we had really bad employee retention if you guys google our early glass door reviews uh those are glaring and pretty accurate as well and no one wanted to fund us um in order to raise a series a i had to

um i had to meet more than like hundreds of people i'm not kidding and i've heard all that wonderful feedback uh some it was helpful but uh but worst of all we didn't really have a life like we worked 16 hour days and i wouldn't say was very rewarding so now how the heaven looks like again we're fraught from heaven a lot could be done

better uh but i'm much happier today than i was back in the day i have a life i can spend time with kids um over the course of last four years our growth has been accelerating which is atypical the bigger you get the harder it is to grow we were fortunate with [Music] growing faster a little faster a couple of percentage points year over year we got something that live people seem to care

about uh we got a horny valuation call it and um and yeah and you know uh things seem to be good unless some dictators start wars where we operate that's a separate topic so things seem to be improving seeing the things seem to be uh getting better and um i try to reflect on the last uh 10 years and i try to

i'm an engineer i try to kind of like put it together in a in a matrix and some kind of system uh and reflecting back i singled out three epiphanies from people context and written and nine different tactics or action items or investment areas call them whatever you want and that's the stuff i'm going to be

talking today again i was reflecting back to 10 years ago when um i came from belarus i knew very little i had a lot to learn some of those things maybe all of those things are going to be obvious and if so treat them as a reminder

otherwise i hope you like them so the first one the first one is people matter the most uh when i landed in san francisco and when i was going to those big tech conferences and watched um successful ceos founders of big companies who all they did is talked about people and culture in the back of my mind i was like but

what's that feature that you built that actually got you there what is like what is that i don't know maybe it was a celebrity investor that you got maybe it was the customer maybe it was the market like what's that hack that got you there and you know it turns out there's i think there's no hack i think people matter the most and i don't really remember how i got

this epiphany maybe it was after yet another [ __ ] up but um once i started thinking this way uh i started investing and uh making people my my my my co-founders main [ __ ] focus as a result of this the first thing that we

um get very serious about was recruiting recruiting became my number one job it still is here you got you can see some numbers um hiring a cro is a pretty common uh challenge that a lot of ceos go through and discuss and so on so forth so i had to go through

more than 900 candidates before we actually hired a cro it's not because more than 900 people were not a good fit dozens of people that i had conversations with or interviewed believe that pentadock is not a good fit rightfully so but every conversation got me a little further because every conversation with a smart capable individual who

knows more is a learning opportunity so yeah so here some of the real numbers uh from from 2001 that i think we made possible because we focused on recruiting big times over the course of the last last 10 years recruiting is important

you get great people but that's not enough the very least they got to be onboarded and that revelation came to me a little later and um that's one of the action items one of the investment areas that um that i've focused a lot of my time on um all of you have onboarding materials and i'm sure everyone takes it seriously i'll just highlight

um but i think um we we implemented that's that's fun that's cool one of those initiatives is called um who am i where every newcomer is asked to create a small presentation about themselves as human beings not you know i'm an engineer a code on python and i've worked at this in that company and i know this in that framework but rather

i'm a dad of two children um my hobbies are this i like this i dislike that and those presentations are given within the teams that people join to so that there is a human connection this little human connection that happens then another thing that my co-founder and i started back in the days we launched meet the founders

recurring coal where every newcomer we get groups of newcomers that we just shoot [ __ ] with they ask us questions we ask them questions really have an agenda but we try to again appear as humans not like uh you know two guys in a castle but someone they can reach out to slack whatever um then

once you have great people um what i found is that they have the same similar set of desires they all want to learn and grow and when that revelation came i thought of all the different things and techniques that i can do in order to enable them learn and grow while i paint a duck

we launched things like education budgets that every employee can use at their discretion on things like conferences books courses and so on so forth that's pretty typical we allocated certain amount of equity so that people can find advisors mentors for themselves we um enabled our like enabled all of our managers to have board access they got to reach out to

our investors they can and two things that may not be that typical actually one thing that may not be that typical we have a mental health budget that people can spend on therapy because that's one of those things that makes us better makes us calmer and in many cases people that work issues is what gets brought in to therapy and what gets cured through it

one little thing is like even in early days i didn't get it i didn't get the titles are important not even titles are important progression through titles is important but i wish i've uh implemented that earlier so that especially young folks that start as support wraps as drs every six nine 12 months there is an opportunity for them to get a promotion

to get a little bump why is that important well you want to feel like you're growing but it's also important that people around you know that um and then finally um we realized that we have to great people on board it um with an opportunity to learn it's all good stuff but

what gets the work done is teamwork and teamwork requires human connection and making human connection happen after you got 20 you know 30 40 employees is an actual effort so again i'm sure many of you uh know this and you guys are investing in it i'll just highlight one thing that i find cool about our employees during pandemic i came up with this initiative

called ripped pandas she set up a slack channel where the team members broke into the like little teams and where we were competing on who's going to exercise more every time after you exercise you have to take a photo send in that channel and that then that that counts so what that created is like yeah you know there's competition it's fun but

then you look at people that in that you normally know through a business setting or like sweating and you know they're again they're humans and you realize that like we're all people and you get to know them again a little better you get connected um to one another a little more so people matter the most that was that was my first epiphany

very obvious for some it was not obvious for me but it was not enough having great people by your side is not enough what's also important and what i realized later is that it's important to enable them with the right context it's important to enable them with the same context that i have i've been at it for 12 years now

we had a different product oh by the way i should have said what pentatonic does right any of you are customers all right some nice for the rest of you who's paying for your signature subscription everybody uh this stuff is free with panda duck i like the look in your eyes um the stuff is read panda doc and then on top of that we do contract management proposal automation um go to cash and uh that stuff is not free ready signing

it's free all right so um context is important it was important to build context for the great people because as long as like great people have the right context they're going to come up with those ideas you don't have to come up with all the ideas you don't have to over communicate they're going to do it for you and uh especially with the ideas you know there are no ideas that are better than your own they're like children in a

way so context and building that context was the next epiphany that uh that i personally had and doing that building context my co-founder and i decided to start like in a at a very high level inspired by start uh start with why we uh first when things were really bad we like asked ourselves

why the hell are we suffering through through this like why we feel like it was not funny it was not easy in the very very early days so we try to think about what are the things that want to that we want to get out of this outside the financial rewards because financial rewards you know you get you get a few bumps in happiness like you get happier when you're financially independent you get

a little happier when you're feeling like you're rich you get maybe a tiny bit happier when you're like very rich but then that said it doesn't matter afterwards right so it's we started to think about what's there for us beyond those numbers and uh it took us a while vipassanas what not but um the things that we found that are

important to to both of us are learning learning and teaching making a positive impact on people that surround us and communities that we belong to it was important for us to have fun and it was important for us to be empathetic to people that we work with that surround us to our customers once we formed that into like concrete statements we shared it

and we try to do pretty much everything we've been doing within the business we try to align with those values benefits um the stances the actions we try to align it with this four values then the values translated into the culture code we decided to write down who we aspire to be

how we aspire the work to be done and how we aspire what we aspire the culture within the company to be and when i say aspire we're human beings we sleep all the time so at the very least this document uh became a way for my co-founder and i to call each other on [ __ ] as well as like our employees because we shared it with a team right to call us on hey mikita

you say being data driven is a part of our culture but for the last 30 minutes you're pulling stuff out of your so what's up and then you go oh yeah yeah sorry next couple of um artifacts that were incredibly important um were our mission and vision i'm sure you all have it but you know values culture code mission

and vision every company has it i think the key is figuring out a way to make sure that not only you but also everyone on your team has this cons context the way we were able to do that is we first started putting it in our in every presentation that we gave like every presentation all hands meeting updates uh doesn't matter board meetings my investors are fed up with

three slides which are vision mission values north star every board update starts with that stuff so it becomes like mantra you know we repeat it over and over and over and over again and then somehow like our managers and directors picked up this trend so now every presentation in pentadock starts with three slides that are the same so all right we got great people

they know what our values are they kind of know where we're going and why but what is that we're actually doing that's rare strategy comes into the play and every company has a strategy so do we um this is something that i started writing in google docs sharing with

my co-founder my executive team half of it was destroyed changed edited and like my you know first few attempts were very humbling i was like holy [ __ ] i spent two weeks writing this thing down no one likes it then i take another step no one likes it and another step and then like slowly

we're coming somewhere we're getting somewhere and so forth and then we're like oh we're actually building it together oh that brings a much better alignment in my team so why don't we expose it further so now the company is big 750 people plus um therefore not everyone can write a strategy however we still distribute that google doc that everyone can leave a comment on or make a

suggestion and i'm the guy who minds it and responds to those comments why again because it helps to build the buy-in we kind of know what we're doing but then how are we doing that's another important piece right um and again like every company got kps we used to have kpis five ten years ago but in order to get the actual data you

had to ask finance or go to the data person and um send an email and so on so forth so like one of the uh one of the big efforts that we made was to make data as accessible kpis as accessible as possible put them in google spreadsheets every team has their own spreadsheet finance team mine maintains those spreadsheets month over month but again

everyone has their kpis in real time same as data we decided at some point that it's easier to be entitled completely transparent so people have context and then finally all of that was still not enough the one last piece that i recall is that at some point um my co-founder and i

decided to drive a culture of getting feedback everywhere at any time in like at any point we needed to make feedback part of our culture so what kind of feedback feedback from employees so that we know what's happening so that i have the context so that my executives have the context my co-founder has contacts every manager has a context market right

g to crowd glassdoor enps employee nps like we gather that data and try to see the why what is not working what do we need to get better at and then finally um i i asked for reviews i asked my team to review myself ask my board to review myself then always do that scott but when they do

that typically helps so great people they have context that makes makes a big difference made my job a lot easier but again that was not enough the last epiphany that i had was that fantastic talented athlete is not going to win the olympics unless that athlete trains regularly

the same amount of time the same amount of time more and more effort so written setting the written for the business um was the last epiphany and um one of the one of the important ones kpis helped us set the written yeah like knowing where we are against where we wanted to go definitely helps but then figuring out how do we get to those kpis

was another really important revelation i don't know how many years ago seven eight years whatever but we sat on like okay ours it's been working for us really well i highly recommend to do that but kpis and okrs are helpful it's it's good you set the written um but what's i think the glue the the oil that helps it all move

is how you communicate around it so the cadence of meetings meetings around those kpis meetings around the ocrs was another important um revelation that uh and implementation that we've done within the company that helps to set that written that set us into motion set us into running and then finally the last thing

um was the reviews i shared a little bit about the titles in our early days we've done promotions and we've done feedback sessions feedback reviews whenever managers felt like it was important but as the company scaled we learned that it's really hard to have a really good cadence it's really hard to have the same format and a lot

of the managers that we have are new managers so we decided to do uh performance reviews twice a year um we decided to have a cadence rituals processes surrounded we templatized the hell out of it and uh now everyone knows um when the promotion are due when the feedback is due and how the reviews need to happen it became a part of the culture became a part of the mantra

so three epiphanies people matter the most context as long as you enable those people with the right context great things are bound to happen and then when the company is set into a written those the results are going to come fast that's my learning over the course of the last 10 years thank you very much let me jump in guys give me keith a round of applause for the content here

incredible content uh mckees i'm right in front of you so let me let me see up some structure um i want to invite scott to the stage there's a mic on stage for him um with makita mckee to the extent that you'd love i'd love for you guys to touch on obviously the very difficult situation related to ukraine right now we'll have a conversation here you guys sort of going back and forth for maybe five five ten minutes mikita maybe kick us off uh how many folks do you have in ukraine and belarus in that area so this is my last slide if you like my presentation

donate if you don't like my presentation still donate it's the right thing to do okay um yeah we started panda dock in belarus uh as a different company different product in 2010 we launched panda dock in 2013-14

the dictator in belarus unfortunately had a crusade on human rights and pentadoc so we had to leave belarus [Music] opened an office in ukraine scaled to about 200 people in ukraine and yeah um [Music] things are hard there um please donate um those of you who are gonna be the most generous

uh going to get a very valuable price makita set make help people sort of feel this a bit more scott you're a board member i mean some of you guys can help sort of quantify what's actually happening the dollars invested the time invested what are you trying to do what's the how are you trying to help what's the plan yeah how many people traveled from outside the u.s to come to this event well about half how many people were born outside the us that's crazy wow

yeah i mean software in particular is not a local business it's not it doesn't have any tie to geography really only people do and you know that's changed while i've been an investor when i first started it was a very local business it was all silicon valley and and very local but it's just not the case anymore and it's it's really impressive and when i first invested in panadoc and met makita i just thought hey belarus is an interesting place i'll get to go visit sounds great i had no awareness

whatsoever of what was going to happen and there's been two really big events in the company's lifetime that have been very difficult um the first one it's in the press there's been some crackdowns and um i don't know i'll let you describe what you want to share but in belarus there were issues of a dictator there making life very hard for panadoc the company and pandock the employees in multiple different ways

and we as a board you know had to try to help any way we could we end up hiring uh a lobbyist who's basically like a really high paid lawyer who tries to work through diplomatic channels to try to help you from the u.s way abroad something you know never would have occurred to me we did a a bunch of other donations and things just to try to make the problem um go away and and i don't know if i would say it was successful it eventually resolved itself what would you say

it was successful yeah i mean we i don't know if our results you know we we did everything we could but eventually it was successful and then this incident in ukraine has hit both of us um both in different ways through our work and it's become very personal for both of us so why don't you describe what it's a full-time job for makita and probably four people on his hr and op staff just dealing with relocation and you can share some details

yeah um we had to relocate uh close to 100 people out of belarus at some point um like it's been it was a nightmare right like moving immigrating is hard for the first time in your life especially but then doing it at scale is that's another animal and then when the war in ukraine broke

out um like that was we had to do the same exact thing again uh we're still doing it and uh it's painful to um it's painful to watch um the danger people that the people go through it's painful to watch

uh like just you know we have we have employees in kiev and uh hiding in the basements and it's just it's it's tough you guys are fortunate to live where you live and like no matter what you believe to have the government and the political system that you have yeah and um our second investment at camber is a ukrainian and

belarusian-based company called se ranking and it's an seo tool that you may have run across it's a competitor to semrush or ahrefs and very good business very good founders incredibly strong product execution really good online marketing execution and when this broke out we had a contingency plan but it was so much worse than we had really i mean on the spectrum of what could happen it was way beyond what we were anticipating and prepared for um it costs a lot of money to relocate

people people are who aren't allowed to leave kyiv right now are literally going down to the bomb shelter six times a day every time their rates go off you know a lot of them are staying behind out of choice to volunteer you know not all of them are fighting but they're like delivering food delivering clothes driving from town to town to make logistics work or to bring food in uh it's it's crazy stories and then i woke up on sunday morning and found out that the head of finance for se

ranking had been killed overnight from uh russian shelling um i worked with her you know weekly you know as recently as like a week ago um because she was the head of finance and she and her two children 18 and 9 years old were evacuating and they were in one of these protected you know corridors supposedly no fire zone and a russian shell landed and killed all three of them

and there was the new york times photographer who was close by who ended up capturing it and it was in cover of new york times.com it's gotten a fair amount of publicity which on one hand it's unfortunate but on the other hand it's a good thing that it really humanizes the impact of the civilian losses which you read about and you know that they're happening but when you know someone and you see a picture of someone it just it really hits home and and it's been devastating and heartbreaking for the company too um it's definitely we're not out of the

woods yet i know panadoc has a budget that's going to approach a million dollars to relocate 400 plus employees and do what they can do yeah i mean it's whatever is necessary to support them help them their family their children parents you know providing housing temporary housing permanent housing temporary office space makita chartered a plane to take employees out of belarus because

it was very difficult to get on flights and they could only go to armenia from belarus in terms of the flight pattern i mean it's been it's been insane guys we appreciate you opening up and and sharing more about this and obviously the real time obviously live situation um i think it's appropriate to ask for roundup applause to show support so round of applause to show support um

yeah thank you additionally this is this is the call to act right you know these guys this is a this is the way to do it yeah those are good guys they support a number of humanitarian initiatives i know the founder personally um they're trustworthy and um um yeah i just thank you for this opportunity we people who are you know affected by this uh try to raise awareness in any way we can

because those of you folks coming from europe if this doesn't stop in ukraine you'll be the next yeah so i'd encourage you if you're in the front row you're the good students donate ten dollars everyone can do it now second row twenty dollars per person third row thirty in the the delinquents in the back row you gotta put up forty dollars each and as i watch all of you donating right now i'm confident we're going to get to a thousand dollars donated across and our reward for doing so

is that nathan has agreed to wear this shirt for the rest of the day so everyone get your phones out and donate what is this what is it i will do it i will do that i will do that guys give it up for scott [Applause]