The Pull to Build: Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit and Starting Roadrunner

26:02And I was like, no way. Like, come on. Like, I feel like I've earned my keep here. And I said, all right, I'll cut you a deal. Make me an enterprise rep. Like the, you know, I thought of that as like the creme de la creme, like go do big deals. I want to do big deals and don't change my comp plan. Keep my, keep my comp the same. Put me in whatever territory you want. But if I succeed, then I want to be rewarded for that. And they were like, all right, fine. And I said, if I don't, you can fire me. Like no, no, no problem. And then I became the top enterprise rep within six months. Then the Palo Alto, like the Palo Alto Networks thing happened, closed the deal with them.

26:40Then they acquired us. And then I go to Palo Alto Networks. That was like the last acquisition of Mark McLaughlin, who's, I love that guy, Like unbelievable. What a treat and honor to be able to now like get to know him through the podcast and become friends with somebody that I used to look up to so much. What a treat. That was the last acquisition that he did. And it was the first acquisition for Palo Alto Networks in the public cloud. They were a firewall company until then. And same conversation, by the way, I get there and they were like, you know, you're, you can't lead like you're whatever.

27:12At that point, I was 25. You can't lead all these people. You know, we, we do things a certain way here. It's like all the things that really like, yeah, ground my gears. Too young. Yeah. Ground my gears. Yeah. How did that, like, how do you turn that feedback, maybe even some resentment into like energy into fuel? Yeah. Well, I think, um, in, in that case, like I just wanted to find an op, I just wanted a chance to prove them wrong. And so it was the same conversation as I had it at Evident going into the enterprise job. I'm like, hey, listen, give me whatever territory and let me build it out.

27:48And if it doesn't work, like fire me. And so they were like, all right, well, we have the central U.S. business, which, by the way, like at the time it was securing public cloud workloads. Nobody was doing anything in public cloud in the central U.S. It was all like on the coasts. Right. I'm like, great. Where is the central U.S.? And they're like anything from Chicago to Texas and in between, you can move there. and I'm like, all right, perfect. I'll go to Chicago. I'd never been to Chicago. I didn't know a single person in Chicago. I moved there in November, which was like, you know, a gnarly time to move to the Midwest.

28:25And yeah, like you said, at the time, the business had 100K of renewals. I built out the central US and within four quarters, we were doing 56 million of ARR. We became the top district in the company. I felt like I had stamped all of the things in sales. Like I had been the IC across all of these different things. And then I got to lead those teams. And then we met. Then we met. And then we met. But you also fell in love with Chicago. I did fall in love with Chicago. And I fell in love with a gal in Chicago. That's right. In Chicago or? In Chicago. Okay. Well, you had this amazing tradition that you told me about in Chicago, where you'd go to the same place every once a week for dinner.

29:05The restaurant's called Bavettes. But that's if you're listening, I've never had a single free meal or anything before. So maybe this is my my golden ticket. No, but the restaurant's called Bavette's and it was a block away from my apartment at the time. And same thing, like when I got there, I just wanted some form of consistency, community, like something that made me feel like this is I'm a part of something. And I like stumble on this steakhouse called Bavette's. It like it's a scene straight out of the Goodfellas, dimly lit jazz music, no white tablecloth, like all the things that I'm like, oh, this is right in my strike zone.

29:46And they have like this long waiting list. And I'm like, put my name down. They call me four hours later, have like a 10 o 'clock dinner. And I sit down and my server, his name is Julio. And I don't know what happened, but I just fell in love with this place. And again, it was like the seed that I just couldn't shake. Like I was like, okay, I'm like now obsessed with this place. I guess that's the deal. After dinner, I told Julio, I'm like, hey, this is going to sound crazy, but I want to come here every week, every Wednesday at 630. I want to have a standing reservation with you in your section at Vivette's.

30:22And he was like, that is crazy. I've never been asked that before. It's like a fancy steakhouse. And he was like, you know, let me go check. He goes and checks. Front desk is like, you know, the next few weeks are crazy. like, cause they book out like a month in advance. Let me see what we can do for the next few weeks. But like, if you're being serious after that, we can have a standing weekly for you. It's like your early version of the podcast. You would have dinner with someone different, I imagine every week and have a conversation. So this podcast thing was happening way before you got to Kleiner Perkins.

30:53It was, it was. Was it different people you'd have? Different people. Oh, by the way, it was the biggest hack for work because everybody found out that I had a Bivets reservation. And so senior leadership that I had no business like hanging out with, always wanted to host meetings, bring clients. And I would always say, sure, but like, you know, it's my reservation, I have to be there. Yeah. You know, and so, so yeah, it was great. Well, let's jump to KP. I think when we interviewed you, you were still living in Chicago, right? Yeah. Yeah. Can I interrupt you for a second? Did the interview go bad?

31:27Like now that I'm thinking about it? Yeah. Like it was not obvious that we should hire you. Were you a no? I was not a no, but I was a question mark. I got thrown off a little bit. By the dudes and the fans. Yeah. Because, you know, like try to show up like. Proper. Proper. But then at the same time, you really vibe with founder energy. Like in, you know, here we work with founders and it is how do you relate to founders? How do you befriend? How do you make them feel like they trust you? Maybe I was thinking a little different. My calculus, I'm very curious to hear what you think, was I just thought like, all right, I've been talking to these folks from Kleiner Perkins for a little while.

32:17It originally started because they were like, maybe you could be the CRO of some of these portfolio companies. Turns out like I wasn't getting the CRO looks of rippling and Figma, you know? And so I was like, all right. Then the conversation changed tone into like, you know, actually like, why don't we figure out a way where you can help our founders with some of this stuff and you can do some of these things. It was very, very nebulous. Like there was no job description. And I remember thinking, all right, the bear case here, which is the most likely, is that I'll probably spend like 18 to 24 months and hopefully do some good work and then find my favorite portfolio company.

33:00Hopefully have built enough goodwill with Mamoon and the rest of the partnership where they would advocate for me. Hopefully built enough goodwill with a founder where they say, yeah, come in. And then go like join them. Yeah, to be honest, we thought the same thing. Okay, cool. So you had the same evaluation. Yeah, like, yeah, this is, who knows where this goes? You know, we're going to bring you on. You have great knowledge of building out sales teams, which is what we need help with for our portfolio. companies. We also have this amazing CIO group that we've had for the last 30 years and making sure we connect the right companies at the right time with these CIOs.

33:35And you are going to help us manage those relationships and make sure the right connections are happening at the right time. And so, yeah, it was a bit of an experiment, but thought that you could do a couple of those things, which is help on the sales front and help on the BD front. And I think actually very quickly you realize like you can't just give the advice. You kind of have to go in a bit more than just give the advice. Can I actually tell you what I found most refreshing when I joined? It was very obvious when I started to work with these founders that the quality was like really high.

34:09And, you know, I've worked with founders before and I had some feel and it was very obvious to me that some of these folks were different, like Arvin. Like some of these folks that like Glean, Arvin Glean. started in this office right here. Right here. Like different. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, so much of that is because for those who are just listening, Arvin is a founder of Glean. Of Glean. Yes. And so much of that is that, you know, like we have this incredible legacy that you and I are kind of standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before us. And that gives us access to work with amazing founders.

34:48And so that was like part one was like, okay, the people here are amazing. And part of that is because we have this rich tradition at Kleiner Perkins, part one. Part two, which I was very refreshed by, was we did not have any of what I felt like were the sacred cows. And that was like, as I underwrote my bowl case, it was like, all right, Mamoun, Ilya, like this new guard has come in. And they're taking the reins of this historic firm. And I was optimistic, but doubtful that maybe there wasn't going to be that many rules. Maybe they were going to let things kind of run for a while. And then we were going to define our own culture, our own sets of traditions, our own sacred cows.

35:40And that was the thing that was like quite amazing because it's very rare to have that combination of tradition, history, amazing entrepreneurs that we get to work with. I never heard, hey, we do this because this is how we've been doing it for the last 50 years. Like I never felt that and I never heard that. And that worked well for me. Yeah, I think there are a few very sacred cows in our business and that have extended, you know, 53 years of us being around. Those sacred cows are the trust you have with founders, the trust you have with your LPs, and then the trust you have with each other as colleagues.

36:24And part of that trust as colleagues is one of our values, as you know, is assume positive intent. Anyone that comes to work over here, we assume that they are doing their best job and the job they've been hired to go do. And you assume that they have positive intentionality in terms of what they're going to do next that is in the purview of their job, which is one of the things that you did, which was start this podcast. I remember you coming to me and say, hey, I'm going to start a podcast. And this is at the peak podcast era of VC in 2020. We meant right before the pandemic, because I think it's when we had our first podcast episode.

36:59I guess now might be peak VC podcast, folks will say. But even at the time - It felt like saturated. It felt saturated. Even at that time, we talked about like, wow, there's so many podcasts. Why have yet another podcast? It wasn't a sacred cow. It was just a, let's try this. Walk us through sort of the ideation of the podcast and why you wanted to have that as another quiver. The podcast was like, I mean, first of all, the story is hilarious. Like when I brought it to you, I mean, skepticism would put it lightly. Like it was like, you know, all the things, right? Like, hey, every firm has a podcast.

37:37Oh, you're like the youngest guy here. You know, you just started. in so many words, like, don't you have anything better to do? You studied anthropology in college. What do you know about tech companies and the history of tech companies? And to interview a bunch of CEOs and CROs. I'm not really sure I trust your ability to articulate quite clearly on a podcast, like the questions you want to ask. There was resistance. Like it was like, it was, I would say, it was a test of conviction. It's like how I would think about it. Like how bad did I actually want it? Totally. Because like you and others were like, come on, basically.

38:10And I remember like licking my wounds that night, like almost embarrassed because I was like, man, maybe that was a bad idea. Like I actually, I think maybe they're right. And I was just talking about it. I remember just talking about it. And then the next day I'm like, you know what? I need to show them. I can't just tell them. Like I need to actually like give them something that they can feel. And so I recorded an episode with my old boss at the time, previous to KP and - First episode? First episode. and I sent it to, I think you and Ilya. And I remember saying, hey, like, I don't feel like I did justice to what I thought this could be.

38:52If I like still have a job here and you all like this, like, let me know. And I think like that was important for you to like feel it. And I think it like went from maybe a lot of skepticism to a little skepticism. I don't think we were like, oh my gosh, we have to go do this right now. But I think it was enough to give me some rope and say like, yeah, go like do 10 episodes. Yeah. I think I remember like first five, you had Jim Herbold from Box. I think you had Bob Frady. Bob Frady. From Slack. Yeah. So you had some really awesome - Hannah Wilson. Hannah Wilson. Yeah. Modern Health, now Nooks.

39:27So you had some greats. Yeah. And the whole point of it, just to be clear, was not that I wanted to have a podcast for podcast sake. It's because I realized that like so much of this job is helping our founders build their teams because like startups are just an accumulation of great people doing hard things for a really long time. And the like key variable is great people. Yeah. And folks like Arvin were asking me like, hey, how do I hire a sales leader? Where are they? Right. What are the things that we should be doing. And I remember reaching a limit where we would run routes together. This is how you should close this deal.

40:09I would kind of give him some thoughts, structuring deals. And then eventually it became very clear, we need somebody in the seats leading sales. Yeah. And here you could actually do it. You could walk down the hall and go see Arvin talk about. That's right. That's right. About deals, right? That's right. But how do you do it as a Monday morning quarterback from a VC firm on Sandhill road, you know, across a bunch of portfolio companies, it was impossible. And what I realized, because I was like interviewing other people that did this job at other firms and frankly, like no shade, but many of them are at the tail end of their career and they go to venture as like kind of a retirement job.

40:47And the good thing about that is that they have like 30 to 40 years of experience where they have the sales leader tree of people, right? Like they've hired all these people that have now gone on to become sales. So they just go and pick the people that they've worked with. And I was like, I do not have that. Right. But I'm still being asked to help our founders with that same problem. And so this was my kind of maybe creative solution to be like, how do I get to know these sales leaders? And I just thought, you know, like there is not a very good platform for them to be able to tell their story authentically.

41:20And so that was the genesis. it worked because I did get to know all these sales leaders intimately. And we did start putting them into our portfolio companies. And so, you know, like at some point we just realized, man, like whatever, it was like 80 episodes in, I've interviewed 80 CROs. I'm like, I know every CRO, like I know every great sales leader in the Valley right now. It was insane. Yeah. So that was the like, that was the Genesis. Yeah. I know it's been incredible to build out our network of CROs and help place a few of them, help place people that work for them. Just all in all, it's been an incredible success.

41:58But you obviously didn't stop there and you built that a whole portfolio operations team here at Kleiner Perkins. Maybe do your best version of the marketing of that team. My disclaimer on the marketing of the team, which you can disagree or agree with me about Kleiner Perkins is I actually think we're quite good at doing the work and we don't really do a lot of talking about the work. Yeah, so now's your chance to market it. So I'll say - Now's our chance to market it. I will say, actually the arc of the podcast resembles a lot of the arc of how the team was built. Meaning like the podcast from episodes one through 80 was CROs, then we did some CMOs, then we did COOs.

42:41And then after like episode 90, it was like Ariana Huffington. And then it was like John Doerr and then Al Gore and then CEOs that used to be CROs. And ever since it's basically only been CEOs. And so like it kind of like our TAM expanded over time. As we started to see success, we kept doubling down on it. And I actually think in many ways, like the story of the operating team here at Kleiner Perkins mirrors, like us seeing early versions of success and then doubling down on it. Like it was just me. And I was helping founders with sales stuff and we talked and we were like, this is working. We should double down on it.

43:18And I'm like, yeah, I agree. You should meet this guy. I've been thinking the same thing. You meet Liam. And then we bring on Liam on the sales side. And then it's like Liam, the guitarist, the bass guitarist, you know, this is like the you're Chris Martin now. We're going to go, let's do the Chris Martin thing. That's right. So, so we bring in Liam. And then on the customer side, like I had, you know, managing this group of 50 of the Fortune 100 CIOs. And I was making a bunch of introductions because of the podcast and because of this. And the portfolio was like getting a lot of use out of it.

43:49And we were like, well, that's working. We should double down on that. And so we brought in Lauren. Our drummer. That's right. And then, and by the way, I tried to hire Lauren, like three different companies. So I guess it took Kleiner Perkins to get her to team up. And then we were like, wow, okay. Like there's like a go-to-market thing here where like we have sales, we have customers. Well, I think there's an opportunity to help our portfolio with a lot of things around marketing and demand gen and how do you build a funnel and what does that look like? And so we hired Suzanne to kind of round out the go-to-market side of the team, right?

44:26Then I would say like mirrors the podcast in many respects, where it was like, all right, we were like rode that for a while. That like was working. I don't know how else to say it. Like it was just really working. Working as defined by founders would tell us all the time, this is magic. I have a lot of other VCs on my cap table, and this is magic. And the reason why go-to-market was such a good wedge for us to help founders most impactfully is because so many of the founders that we work with are technical in nature. And so their experience and biases around product and eng, and so if we can help them fill the gaps on the go-to-market stuff with operators at the primes of their career, not the folks that I used to work with when I would work with other VCs that were at the tail end of their career that had the energy, like you were saying earlier, of a founder or of the people that would be working at these companies.

45:18Like you could actually do something special. Now, in order to do that, you needed to have a firm that had the appetite to bring in people at the primes of their career. Right. So like there was a lot of like shape-shifting that we had to do internally to like be able to do that. And like we had to make a real investment in doing that. the way, like each one of these people is truly in the primes of their careers, which is demonstrated by the number of offers they get every year to come join one of our portfolio companies, which is by design. If they weren't active and so good, they wouldn't get these offers from our portfolio companies or CEOs coming to me and saying, Hey, like I would love to hire Suzanne or I'd love to hire Liam.

45:58Yeah. And would you be upset with me? You can try. I dare them. By the way, I tell them all the time, like your success metric is if CEOs try and hire you. Like that's like the highest compliment that they could they could give you, which is that they want you to lead this function within their organization. And that means they can like see you as a part of their team. That's like the essence of what we're going for. Yeah. So like maybe one more thing is that these are all very senior people were actually doers and ICs here. Just square that for folks. I mean, like, let's just take Suzanne, who was like employee 30 at Miro, spent four years there leading enterprise marketing, had like this giant team, and then joined us.

46:47She has no direct reports. And she is like deeply, deeply in the weeds, like in some cases, like fractionally CMO of some of our companies, like literally running their standing Monday meetings and stuff. And that is like a very rare person that is what I call a dolphin. And a dolphin like goes up in the air and then underwater. And what's happening is like, they can operate in the air at like 10 ,000 feet, very, very strategically with founders. They can start breaching the water at like 5 ,000 feet. And that's like, you know, like all the mid-level stuff. and then they can go all the way underneath the water at a thousand feet and very, very tactically get in the weeds.

47:31And the ability to oscillate back and forth between very, very tactical and very strategic, it's like my love language. Like it's magic. It's like the thing that I always interview for in leaders. It's like the core thing. And it especially is useful in this job because there's such big swings of responsibilities where one founder is like, tell me about this comp plan and what it should look like. And another founder is like, help me architect what a sales or marketing org should look like. And that's like quite a range, you know? And so I would say like, that is like probably some of the magic of these people.

48:08And the people defines the strategy. And we have incredible people that can do these things at all of these different altitudes. Does that answer the question? Yeah, totally. And then maybe just play it out for the rest of the team. Play it out. So then we were like, great, this is working. This is obviously working. I think one of the core insights that we had was going back to the Arvin needing a sales leader thing. In order to help Arvin hire a sales leader, I needed to have like a very nuanced, context-rich understanding of his business. So first I had to be an effective extension of his team as an advisor, which then earned me the right to help him with things like hiring sales leaders and talent recruiting.

48:53And that like embedding yourself into a business to then actually have the context required to do the talent work was like a big shapeshift for us and how we think about these roles. And so the next iteration was great. Let's pair these incredible operators with recruiters that can go in and do all of the things together. Otherwise, you end up looking like every other recruiter and venture firm in the Valley, which is like, go find the fanciest logos because you have no context on their business. And all you want to do is hire the person that's gone from X to Y at these three logos. And, you know, like Glean is a very specific culture.

49:34Figma and Harvey are very specific cultures. And so like what you have done is only one piece of the puzzle, but there's a lot of other things that you have to understand about that business to like effectively put these pieces together. So to make a long story short, that was like the insight that rolled in the talent and recruiting function and embed them within these within these roles. And then we did engineering. Right. So we brought in Tomas. He was like amazing. And so basically, like to to to put a bow on this, like we have created our own like dream early stage executive team that founders can basically omakase into.

50:09And when they need, when they have a pressure point on their business that they need solved, whether it's across hiring, talent, advice, recruiting, somebody to shoulder to cry on, engineering, finance, product, sales, marketing, whatever it is, they can tap into an operator at the prime of their career that feels like an extension of their team across all of these different functions. And so, you know, it took us six years to get to this point, but that's, what we've been building towards. And I think of it as our job as early stage VCs, partner with founders who have incredible vision, passion, and dreams to create really history-making companies is to help them in those early days, really get them on the rails, get that freight train going.

50:58And if we can create as little friction as possible for the the rails that they're on and help them with the hire their first sales rep or be their, their fractional CRO or fractional CMO. There's so much leverage in that for the company and us as investors, because once it's going, then, you know, momentum builds and you become a market leader and then you're anointed to the leader in space and, and things just work so much more smoothly. And candidly, it requires less time and energy from us as companies mature, because at At that point, if a company doesn't run itself and doesn't have key leadership inside the company, you don't want a fractional CMO of a company that's 100 million of ARR.

51:41Totally. You really want to help them when they're at zero, one, two, so that they can push really fast to 100. And I think that's where we really have, I think, done an incredible job. And your team has done that is to really help with those really early innings. And then, you know, you go deep for that first year with companies at that Series A stage. and you get to 10 million and it's like, you know what? Like, I think you got this. You built a team now. They've left the nest. They've left the nest. And so, you know, think about your time with Arvind when the company was zero, one million of ARR and how much time you spent with them at the time versus how much time you spend with them now.

52:17And it's just different, right? And that, because it's working and they've got the internal resources to do everything that we were helping them with early days. Can I connect two random dots? And maybe you disagree with this, but like, I think this take in like conventional wisdom is that venture firms cannot help startups. And I actually generally agree that in most cases, when you surround startups with people that are like at the end of their career, that haven't actually operated in 10, 15 years, that a founder would never hire as the executive in that respective function. Like, yeah, probably not that helpful.

52:58I do think that if you can have people that are an extension of their team that are actually at the primes of their career, I think it's real leverage. I think it's real leverage. And I think hopefully our founders would say the same. I'm really proud of this effort over the last six years under your leadership to really build out the portfolio operations team and provide real results. It's definitely like a important part of what we are able to offer to our companies and is really differentiating. And I know other folks have tried or are trying to replicate what we've done here and they should because it really helps our companies.

53:38And can I tell you why it helps our company? Like, why does it help our business too? Like it helps our companies because I do think we're inflecting outcomes more positively, but also 95 % or more of the entrepreneurs that we partner with come from referrals from other entrepreneurs that we have worked with. And so like, talk about doing the work and not talking about the work. Like they feel that. And I think part of why they say, hopefully I want to work with Kleiner Perkins is because we can help them across a bunch of different areas. Yep. Win. Yep. It's not just the pitch. I think it's, I get to see it in action.

54:15And of course, I'm biased here, but it really has moved the needle for many of our great companies. So you talk about helping entrepreneurs. You have become an entrepreneur and a founder yourself in the last few months. And I reflect back on our one-on-ones and the ants in the pants, the anxiety, anxiousness. There's always a desire to do more. And I probably told you like, yeah, that's cool. Like you want to do more, but the more has to be done in the right place. Like it has to, you know, be applied in your zone of excellence, at least. So you decided to start a company. It's called Roadrunner.

54:53Tell us more about Roadrunner and really more importantly, the why of starting a company. As I was growing up in my sales career, this is the problem that basically haunted me my entire career. The company was legitimately, I don't know if you remember this, almost called Casper because of that. Like it's been the ghost that has been haunting me. And very specifically, what was haunting me was when I was, my team or I were trying to get deals done, whether it was mid-market or enterprise, the underlying software systems would not permit me to do them. And the reason for that is because we have built these custom Frankenstein things on top of Salesforce CPQ and other solutions that just don't work.

55:33The data models do not work. And so I knew that, like I knew that like I was getting dragged through days of back and forth, trying to get the software to work, going back and forth with people internally. Come to Kleiner Perkins, CIO group that we mentioned. Lauren and I on my team started a second CIO group of 35 technology CIOs. CIOs from companies like Netscope and Box and Uber. And over a series of several dinners, I asked them, what is the number one thing that is broken in your company that you are responsible for? And I swear to you, uniformly, all of them said the same thing, which is that they are getting yelled at by their sales leaders because the underlying software that they're trying to use to get deals done does not work.

56:22And the reason it does not work is because pricing models have gone crazy over the last 20 years, where it used to be in your early days of investing, you sell a seat, that seat equals a license, that license equals a person. Okay. Now over the last 20 years, you have hundreds of products, all of these SKUs, some of which are priced as consumption, some of which are priced as, well, it's like, it's gotten crazy. Right. And now you have like open AI, Databricks, Anthropic that all price, you know, it's like a, it's a new era of pricing models that have completely broken the underlying systems. The architecture is completely broken.

56:56It reminds me of, of when we went from on-prem to the public cloud, like when I was at bracket and everyone was like, yeah, you can just like lift and shift this application from on-prem to the public cloud. And then you realize like, oh no, like S3 buckets can just like blow away. You need to refactor this entire architecture from the ground up. And by the way, I think we see that more broadly across many of our portfolio companies, which is like, there needs to be an AI native version of a lot of these products. They have to like rebuild from the ground up. So that's like the tee up. We as a firm get very excited because we're like, great, like pretty obvious.

57:30Like it's very rare that you hear this much pain from this much buying power. Let's go invest in a company, right? So me and a few folks internally like go and investigate this entire space. And we come back and we're like, Nothing. Like there's nothing compelling. All of a sudden GPT 3.5 comes out and we realized, oh, wow, like this is actually a pretty good problem for LLMs. Not dissimilar from our portfolio company, Harvey. Anytime you have structured and unstructured text in nature that the LLM can point to and then reason with and then produce something thoughtful on the other side, that's a good use case for these LLMs.

58:09It's also a good use case like encoding, right? like where there's structured things in nature. And this is a very similar problem. You have price books and discounts and approvals and all these things. Then I come to find out that the gorilla in the room, Salesforce, that probably has 95 % market share in this space, has end of life and stopped supporting their incumbent CPQ solution. So they have now abandoned 8 ,000 customers. And by the way, like all of those customers are calling me being like, Jubin, what's the deal? Like, what do we do? Like, can KP help us find a company that can like fill this void?

58:41because this is like a key business process for us. Then I started to think about like, well, why hasn't anybody done this? And I think the short answer is like technology wasn't there. And this is like a pretty complex go-to-market and distribution problem because there's a lot of hands in the cookie jar. And it's like an upmarket problem where as you get more complexity and volume and reps and SKUs and products, that's where things start to break. And like, just so happens, like that's what I was brought to do at Kleiner Perkins. And that's what I've done my entire career. And it just so happens that I happen to know every CRO and CIO in the industry, because we have two groups of CIOs that I'm responsible of here at the firm.

59:26And I happen to have started a podcast that interviews 80 CROs. And so, you know, like, if we could make this thing work, like we had a very, very unfair reason to win. That's was I think what pushed us over the edge. And then I don't know if you remember this, but I think you and I were like, kind of like, okay, this is like kind of starting to make sense. You know, like this is making sense. And then I went to a wedding in Monterey and I basically didn't leave the house except for the wedding itself. And I spent the weekend vibe coding the initial product. Basically like the product that I as an AE would have wanted.

1:00:07This is like what, four months ago? This is like, yeah, four or five months ago. Yeah. Like, I think June. June, okay. July. And built it. And then I think like maybe the tone internally shifted to like, oh yeah, yeah. Like this, this makes a lot of sense. Is that fair? Like, no, I mean, I think you had a blank check. Okay. Yeah. You actually did tell me that and that meant a lot to me. Yeah. I appreciate that. And I meant that. I appreciate it. So along the way now, you brought on amazing co-founders and you built what I think is an incredible team already in just a few months of from vibe coding to saying, we're going to start this and incubate this here, pairing yourself up with folks who can help make this into reality.

1:00:54Tell us more about your co-founders. So we incorporated the company 13 weeks ago, not that anybody's counting. And we immediately brought on several paid design partners, customers that we're co-developing the solution with. And during that time, I was like, kind of like dating all sorts of technical talent across all oscillations because the core risk is obviously like, I'm not hands-on keyboard. Like I am not an engineer. And AJ and Eugene, former KP fellows, were introduced to me. They had, they're amazing. AJ went to Caltech at 15 years old, met Eugene, his first day of school there. They have been literally roommates ever since, to this day.

1:01:42They went to NASA, built a bunch of the software testing for the Mars rover. AJ went to Robinhood. Eugene went to Meta. They started a company that was an LLM for college students to send their applications and essays, and it would grade them. The business is actually cash flowing. Anyway, they started asking their founder friends, like, what's the thing that's most broken in your company? and lo and behold, CPQ, CPQ, they were like, they, but they didn't put a word on it. They were just like, I don't know, like our sales teams are just yelling at us because like they can't get deals done because like the software just like doesn't work.

1:02:16And they were like, what is that? So they spent a week. Then they got independently excited, met me. And I had like this, like lovable, like this deck, like this, like we had this like thing built out. Right. And it became very obvious to them like, all right, if we're going to do this, like we should probably like do this with Jubin. And it became very obvious to me that if that if I'm going to take this really seriously, these are absolutely the co-founders of Dreams, really. The team is seven about to be nine. You saw a demo last Friday. Pretty good, right? Yeah. Pretty insane how fast that happened.

1:02:51Yeah. Also still inside of KP. We're still, you haven't kicked this out yet. Yeah. Yeah. Taking over the second floor of South Park. Taking over the second floor. Yeah. It's happening. Yeah. Can I give you like one other answer about like your blank check comment? Because we had a lot of conversations behind the scenes of like me. I don't know. Would you describe it as thrashing? Like me feeling the itch to go build. Yeah. I really felt the itch to go build. You asked me at lunch one day, like, why? I think my answer was that starting a company and doing an early stage startup is like the ultimate test of what you're made of.

1:03:38Seeing it in the podcast, seeing it in Kleiner Perkins with our founders, like it's one of the hardest things I've ever seen be done. And after a while, I kept talking to people that did it. You know, I kept seeing it happen. And I think I realized a few things. One was like, that is the most impressive thing that I see somebody doing to push themselves to their potential. Like, man, do you see what you're made of? And then two, most people have no idea what they're doing. Meaning like, it doesn't matter how many companies you've started, every company is unique. And it's like this own thing where like you put one step in front of another and you have to like figure out the problems at hand right in front of you.

1:04:23and that like generally was very exciting to me. Like that gave me a lot of energy and then paired with like this thing that's been haunting me for a while, that conversation stuck with me. Yeah, well, I guess my job is to ask questions and the Socratic method of trying to get people to find their own real answers and why they're doing what they're doing. And now that you're in it, you're doing it. This is, you actually have two jobs. one at Kleiner Perkins and one being the CEO of Roadrunner. Maybe just before we go more into the job of being the CEO now and building a company, CPQ is not the sexiest, maybe we'll start with like, what is CPQ?

1:05:09You described like it was like a hair on fire problem for a lot of folks. But for those uninitiated on this topic, help us understand why it is so interesting and critical as a problem that you want to go solve and make it also your life's work. Because everything that we back at Kleiner Perkins, we're like, hey, how can this be a generational company? How can this company make history in the words that we use here internally? How can Roadrunner make history? The entire life cycle of this business process is from quote, an AE generates a quote to cash, like money in a company. And by the way, like that's kind of the like core competency of any business, which is like you deliver a product.

1:05:51In order to deliver that product, you need like a piece of paper that says, what are you delivering? And in return, you get money, okay? So like that's the like how businesses run. There is an underlying operating system that enables all of that to happen. The beachhead of that operating system is CPQ. The like first part of that process is called configure pricing quote, which is how do you as an account executive put these products together, the discounts that you're doing across a bunch of different SKUs? How do you get those discounts approved inside of the system? That all happens in very, very, very old and bad software today, okay?

1:06:31And so that's like what we're solving first. There's a series of other things that we want to go solve within the quote to cash bucket, but we're solving that thing first. And we think it's like pretty important. And then let's bring in AI, okay? because we're not backing too many things that are not using the powers of LLMs and AI today. And you said that this is actually a particularly useful application of LLMs and AI. Tell us more about that. I don't know if you agree with this, but it does feel like a moment in time where AI seems to be the panacea for everything. Like we see a lot of companies that are applying AI to things that I have my own sets of skepticism about because it's a amazing technology shift and like people are just excited.

1:07:13In this case, imagine a world where if you're a customer, every quote that goes through Roadrunner has a series of tags that are associated with that quote. And so an account executive in natural language can say, this is what I want. They can say it, they can type it, whatever it is. And the system will basically say, you know, what you want to do, we have done a deal like that before. You should structure it just like this. And by the way, just like this is perfect for their comp plan. It maximizes their commission. It's perfect for the business. It creates a set of approvals that instantly get done with a bunch of business intelligence around it.

1:07:54And today that process is, and has been since I started in sales, I get on the phone, I call deals desk, I call rev ops, I call finance. Hey, here's what we're thinking. We negotiate back and forth or AE calls one of their friends. that just did a deal like this. Hey, how did you put that deal together? All of that should be LLMs that basically become a central nervous system, like an omniscient central nervous system that can just tell you right when you say it exactly how to structure the deal in exactly that way and then be able to on the fly give you all of the benchmarking around the discounts to get these things approved very quickly so that, and this is the tagline of the company, we can put revenue back in motion because right now it is stuck.

1:08:43And so if you fully play out the mission of the company, well, actually, you don't believe in mission statements. Maybe just pause there for a second. Okay. Why? Okay, okay. This is like maybe an annoying hot take, but there are a lot of companies in Silicon Valley that make their mission broader than it needs to be. And it implies like they're doing something. some of our portfolio companies, like let's just say Modern Health or Watershed are like right in the slipstream of trying to solve mental health crises and global warming and climate change. And I'm like, yes, that is a serious mission that you are solving.

1:09:27But like, we're not doing, like we're not solving mental health. You know what I mean? Like we are solving a very important problem for a specific group of people that if we solve those problems well in perpetuity, then we earn the right to go build a big company. And that is a mission that I get very excited about, which is solving enough problems that are meaty enough that we earn the right to build a big company. And why do I think building a big company is amazing? It's because growing up, startups changed my life. Like it was literally the number one thing that changed my life. It gave me more money than I ever thought I would make.

1:10:06It gave me jobs and responsibilities that I never thought I deserved. It gave me an access to a community that I basically craved my entire life. And as they grow, you just keep putting people in these positions to literally change their life. And that is a mission that I get excited about. You know, CPQ is something that is important, but I'm not going to make it, I'm not going to pretend like it's something it's not. I'm particularly excited because I get to work with you on this now. and it's really fun to see your co-founders and your team at KP building. The energy is palpable and it's great to just see stuff getting built at Kleiner Perkins.

1:10:44Are you hiring? We are hiring. If you go to our website right now, roadrunner.ai, you will probably get the feeling that we are solving for one very specific thing, which is not customer demand. We have more of that than we know what to do with, which is not venture capital dollars. It is purely to humanize the people behind the company. because so much of my evaluation criteria when I was deciding where I wanted to go work was the people. And so there's fun interviews where everybody talks about what they're working on and who they are. And so we are hiring. The number one bottleneck of this company is today and I suspect will remain for several, several years, engineering, great, great engineering talent.

1:11:25Our roadmap is being dragged out of us right now, quite literally. And so we are hiring. It is in San Francisco. I think by the time you hear this, Mamoun will have probably kicked me out of the Kleiner Perkins office. And so we will probably be downtown in San Francisco or South Park or something, but we are hiring and we're in San Francisco. You know, I'm a softie man. You know how long Glean was here. They were here for 18 months. Yeah. And like 20 people. 20 people. Cool. And then what does grip mean to you? Yeah. You'd think that after like whatever, 270 times of asking this question, I would have like some beautifully prosaic answer.

1:12:02Angela Duckworth's definition of passion plus perseverance over a sustained period of time. Grit to me is doing something for a very long time, come hell or high water. And like even this podcast, like there's a lot of reasons why I wanted to stop it. And, you know, 99.9 % of podcasts never make it past 10 episodes. And it's because they just cannot stick with it. And so for me, it is putting myself in places, whether it's Roadrunner, whether it's my role at Kleiner Perkins, whether it's this podcast where I genuinely feel like I can do this for a sustained period of time. That's great. So the podcast is not going away.

1:12:44So, okay. So the podcast is not going away. We will likely modulate it down. It used to be biweekly, then it became weekly. It'll probably become biweekly again. The thing that I am most excited about in this journey of working together is that I do believe you're the longest term thinker that I've ever met. I mean that. I have never met somebody as patient as you. In the spirit of yin and yang, I may be the most impatient person alive. And so I thought it was really important to do this inside the firm and with you in a way that hopefully represents us well and is a partner for us, I think can help us go the distance.

1:13:24Well, I look forward to the decade plus journey ahead. That's at least as long as some of these great companies take to get built. So we've got a lot of time ahead of us working together. That's right. It's really a joy and really an honor to partner up with you. Appreciate it, man.

1:14:03We'll see you next time.