The Valley blog series is written by husband and wife co-founders, Patrick and Alexandria Gentry, to chronicle their experiences in The Bay Area while on a four-month accelerator program.
If you’re keeping up with our Valley Blog series, you’ll know my wife Alex’s last article was on some of our initial takeaways from being in the center of the San Francisco tech scene.
We’ve been brought here by Silicon Valley’s premier SaaS accelerator, Acceleprise, to refine our HR and payroll startup for emerging markets, Sprout Solutions. We’re here to network, raise capital, and most importantly, learn from the best of the best in Enterprise SaaS.
It’s crazy to be in a one-on-one meeting with someone who has built a billion or multi-billion dollar tech company. I mean, this guy built a unicorn. And not the kind of unicorn that seems to just pop up out of thin air, like some of those consumer apps. A hardcore, business-2-business enterprise application. These apps take painstaking care to develop, super advanced skills to sell, and back-breaking work to support.
Here’s our experience working with our mentors.
Meeting Tien
L-R: Alexandria Gentry, head of product and co-founder of Sprout Solutions Inc.; Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora; and Patrick Gentry, founder and CEO of Sprout Solutions Inc.
Very early in the program, we had the opportunity to have a mentorship session with Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora, the $1b+ valued enterprise billing application responsible for driving the subscription economy we have today. He was also employee #7 in Salesforce, the now-public company responsible for building the entire enterprise SaaS world, essentially.
I was intimidated. My heart was pounding when it came time to talk with him – these guys don’t screw around.
Ok, here goes the elevator pitch…damn he’s really intense…what’s going on there why is he still staring at me like that, did I say something stupid or confusing about our product? Either it went well or Tien is very forgiving, but all that nervousness passed and our meeting was very productive and we got some amazing ideas.
Meeting Nick
We had the opportunity for a one-on-one session with Nick Mehta, founder and CEO of Gainsight, another enterprise SaaS company, valued at $400m as of last year.
His company is responsible for driving the “customer success” movement we’ve seen in the last few years. Another, perhaps more impressive stat — Nick is the highest-rated enterprise software startup CEO according to a Forbes study released last week, with a 100 percent approval rating from his 250+ employees. That’s insane. How does he do that?
Nick’s affable, easy-going nature belies his critical thinking and analytical mind.
After some probing questions, we got right into it. He gave us clear cut steps of how Gainsight overcame the exact same difficulties we are facing. Frankly, it was so refreshing to hear him say “I know exactly what you mean. We went through that in our company.”
The beauty of SaaS is that best practices aren’t archaic methods found in textbooks — they are live solutions evolving thanks to people like Nick!
Needless to say, we are very lucky to have him as an investor and advisor of Sprout.
The power of mentorship
So what do we get out of these sessions? This is something that really surprised me. I was thinking “how much can we really learn in 45 minutes with this guy,” before the session with Tien.
As it turns out, a truckload.
It’s hard to describe, you can see the machinery working and there were times they tripped over their words getting them out, as the content of the message was being re-evaluated and refined real-time. They digested our product, stage of maturation as a company, main pain points in a matter of minutes, then we tackled ideas and feedback for the remainder.
We’ve had office hours with a dozen more folks like Tien and Nick, radically successful entrepreneurs with insane value to share. From every meeting we had, we walked away with real, meaningful, and actionable takeaways that will dramatically impact the business as we implement and scale them.
Value to share
We’ve found additional resources outside the Acceleprise program — from companies like Yelp, Mixpanel, Optimizely and organizations like General Assembly and Galvanize.
The resources for tech entrepreneurs here are staggering. And this got us thinking.
The tech environment in the Philippines and neighboring countries is booming — we want to foster an ecosystem that builds on that energy and momentum. We have a great opportunity to bring back not only the direct lessons learnt here, but the philosophy and processes of mentorship and value-sharing.
We’ll be launching some initiatives when we get back to Manila! Stay tuned.
Next time, Alex talks about how tech has changed the world of product management, and how product people are driving innovation.
