The first customer that we deployed to, it was here in the Bay Area called LiveOps and it was a 300 person company at the time. We had a very good sense that the requirements that they had in their particular use case to roll out were ones that were representative of a larger set of customers. Even if you might sequence some feature and you might do it sooner than you maybe had planned to in your roadmap, as long as you're confident that it's going to serve the larger market then I think that makes a lot of sense.
Today’s episode is with Eric Berg, CEO of Fauna, which is an adaptive operational database platform. In joining Fauna as its CEO in the summer of 2020, he brought a wealth of experience as a product leader. Most recently, he was the Chief Product Officer at Okta, scaling the company from 10 employees and zero customers to its eventual IPO in 2017. He started his career in product at Intel, working under the legendary Andy Grove, as well as a five-year stint as a product leader at Microsoft.
In today’s conversation, he opens up his executive playbook as he weaves together each of those experiences — and covers a lot of ground along the way. He starts by talking about early go-to-market lessons and the keys to honing in on an ICP to get Okta off the ground. He also dives into the often-maligned “messy middle,” particularly when it comes to moving upmarket and developing a pricing and packaging model that, when done well, takes a company to new heights.
We then switch gears and discuss more broadly about team building and company building — particularly the cultural lessons that stick with him from his tenure at each stop in his career. His biggest learnings include hiring folks up and down the org chart with the right ego to talent ratio and the tactical steps he takes to implement a “disagree and commit’ value so it’s not just a long-forgotten team motto. Finally, we touch on the biggest surprises as he approaches one year of sitting in the CEO seat.
Today’s conversation is a must-listen particularly for product folks, as well as others who want to more deeply understand the trade-offs that nearly every great company faces on the path to scale.
You can follow Eric on Twitter at @ericberg.
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