EP 555: Sudo.ai Raises $2.3M at $10.3M Post Money Valuation to Fix CRM Space with CEo Francisco Larrain

Francisco Larrain who has been an entrepreneur for most of his life. He was born and raised in Chile and is the co-founder and CEO of Sudo. He founded a company called Zappedy – a payment technology company that was backed by Eric Schmidt and acquired by Groupon. More recently, he led a project engineering team of a hundred plus people for Groupon's local business. Now, he's working on enabling high quality work for corporations and their teams. The co-founder and head of product, Amit, is also joining Francisco in this podcast.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – High Output Management (Francisco)
• What CEO do you follow? – N/A (Amit)
• Favorite online tool? — Splunk and Github (Francisco)
• Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No (Francisco)
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Francisco would tell himself that all these people that you look up to are much more human than you think and he'd would love to have more confidence.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:29 – Nathan introduces Francisco to the show
• 02:11 – Amit codes late at night
• 02:27 – Team of 9 people and they all code
• 03:00 – Francisco explains the hedge fund with trigger power
• 04:00 – Francisco likes the entrepreneurial side of the Valley
• 04:37 – Francisco has raised $3M
• 04:45 – Sudo wants to fix the broken CRM of enterprise
• 05:15 – There are system problems and software problems
• 05:25 – A time consuming software will lead to people not using it
• 06:17 – Francisco has experienced problems with CRM in Groupon
• 07:20 – Francisco shares their plan with Sudo, starting with expense management
• • 07:45 – There's a free-form format in the CRM where people can update
  • 08:10 – Francisco wants to flip everything around
• 09:17 – Sudo is on pre-revenue and private beta
• 09:56 – There are 5 pilot companies
• 10:10 – Sudo will possibly start with monthly subscription system and will move to an account based system
• 11:00 – The key features of Sudo allows people to add contacts and notes from their meetings
• 12:30 – Sudo is very sticky with the representatives
• 13:43 – The $3M seed round was an equity round
• 13:59 – Francisco shares who their investors are
• 15:00 – Why the valuation was easy for Francisco
• 16:00 – Francisco shared the acquisition of Groupon on Zappidy
• 17:37 – The valuation that was negotiated for Sudo in the seed round
• 19:50 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

• A time consuming software will lead to people not using it.
• The valuation is much easier if you've had a good exit before.
• We are all humans – even the ones in the highest positions that we look up to and respect.

Resources Mentioned:

• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Drip – Nathan uses Drip's email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel
• Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn't have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal
• Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible.
• Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books.
• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• Jamf – Jamf helped Nathan keep his Macbook Air 11" secure even when he left it in the airplane's back seat pocket
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives