When it comes to businesses and markets, especially in B2B SaaS and B2B software where I've spent majority of my career, it's certainly easier to build a more scalable business. And then as you start to expand beyond that initial ICP, the good news is in a lot of cases, these markets are sort of like layers of an onion. So if your product centric, which a lot of these organizations are, it becomes easier to build something that will work for a large number of people. It gives you even an initial use case that you can solve and sell into in that second ideal customer profile.
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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