Foundations Course – Lecture 8 – Enablers, Innovation and Startup Creation

Yonatan Stern: So I’m very happy that we are on lecture number eight. It’s hard to believe. The lecture is about enablers, innovation, and how you use all of that in order to do startups. I’m going to start by looking at the foundations of when you want to do a startup — how do you do that? Mainly from the idea perspective. So as usual, this is the team, you’ve seen them. Ruthie is also here, but she refuses to give me a picture, so you’ll have to look at her live. So I’ll go back again to what are we trying to do here? I will repeat it every single lecture, so that people will remember why we’re here. We’re here not to invest in companies or anything, but to teach people the profession of building successful companies.

It is a profession, it has a methodology, there is a science to it, and it can be taught. Doesn’t mean that I can take anybody and turn them into a successful entrepreneur, but it means that people who have the potential — we can give them the foundations, we can give them the methodology, how to do it. So what is the definition of a successful company? We put three elements to that. Number one is profitability. You have to be profitable. A company that is not profitable is like a kid — the parents pay for everything, in this case the investors. And very much like when somebody pays your bills, there comes a point in time where they stop paying your bills. So profitability means independence, means the ability to do whatever you think. Fast growing — obviously you can be profitable and not go anywhere.

But we are showing people how to build a company that is fast growing while being profitable. And the last element is that you don’t need a lot of money to do that. You don’t need $30 million or $50 million or $100 million. A few million dollars are more than enough in order to build a successful company. We’re building workshops that will basically take each one of our lectures and turn them into a full course with exercises, homework, thinking, and working on your own company. And that will come hopefully soon. And at the end of the day, it takes a long time to build a company. The residency program, which is the most prestigious one that we do with companies, takes a long time. Companies go through many stages, and each stage presents different problems that need to be solved.

So this time I decided to be a little bit more educational. I’ll tell you what I’m going to tell you, then I’ll tell it to you, and then I’ll tell you what I told you — right? That’s what every teacher is told to do in a course. So I’ll start with that. What we’re going to do is first explain to you what enablers are and what you do with them. Enablers are a lot of things — can be the Internet, a phone, drones, ChatGPT, all of these technologies. Machine translation, DNA sequencing, CRISPR. Anybody here know what CRISPR is? Yeah. Only you. SpaceX — they have reusable rockets. Face recognition. I’ll talk about it later. So I’m just showing you a long list. The dot dot dot means the list is really long.

A lot of basic ideas and technologies that were developed already — they are available, you can use them — and innovation is easy and inexpensive when using such enablers. And basically, you don’t need to develop a disruptive technology. I don’t have to tell you how many entrepreneurs I see every week who have something “disruptive.” I think they believe that the word disruptive will make me immediately reach into my pocket and give them money. So it’s overused, it’s irrelevant. Disruptive is difficult, expensive, and nobody understands it, so nobody buys it. So why even worry? Here are new companies and products that effectively used enablers. What I mean by that is that everything was already there. They didn’t need to invent anything except a new business model. No technology, no disruptive, nothing.

Just take what is in front of your eyes, put it in a slightly different combination, and you have integration. Now you have to have some ideas, but you can just pick and choose like Lego. You don’t have to develop anything — you just take the pieces of the Lego, put them together, and you get a castle. You get something new out of it. So you take the iPhone. The iPhone has two very important things: Internet and GPS. And boom — you have Uber, Volt, Waze, Pango, you name it. Different applications, different solutions. But the disruptive technology is in the iPhone, not in what you do with it. Reusable rockets. Elon Musk said, “I don’t get it. You fly New York to San Francisco and you throw the airplane into the water. What is this stupid idea?” You send up a rocket, it comes down, you use it again. We’re not building one-time rockets. And everybody said he’s nuts, he’s crazy. Well, he’s not. He built reusable rockets. And what does that mean? He brings the price of launching satellites down. And so he built a whole new system called Starlink. We’ll talk about it later. DNA sequencing started in the ’80s with the human genome — cost about $10 billion to do. Nowadays it costs $1,000. It’s here, it’s available. Build something around it — think about where and how you use it. So I will talk somewhat interchangeably about two things we discussed in the last two presentations. One is growth engines and the other is jobs to be done.

These two ideas that we discussed at length previously are going to show up again here many times because they all play together. When you have a job to be done, how do you do it? When you want to grow, how do you do it? All of these enablers should be on the roadmap for you to look at and think about as you build your future. Growth engine — you want to do branding, marketing, product development, sales, operations, and many more. Just think about all the enablers that can help you do that. And obviously you’re here because you want to build a startup, or you already built a startup, so you can use all of these enablers in order to do that. So, bottom line — and that’s only the introduction until now.

You don’t need disruptive technology to build a successful company. So what do you need? Deep understanding of the jobs to be done. If you don’t understand what you’re trying to solve, then chances are you are not going to build a good product or a good company. So you have to deeply understand what you’re trying to solve. Doesn’t have to be a huge thing, but something that you solve that people really have an issue with. You need to focus on branding and marketing — I keep saying that all the time. If nobody has heard about you, don’t be surprised that nobody buys from you. It’s not because your product isn’t good — they just never heard about you. It’s that simple. And people are overburdened with messages and information, so you have to be really smart about how you make people know about you. That’s not trivial. That’s harder than building the product. So before you go and start spending money, think about that all the time.

I intentionally use the word “customer delight” and not “customer satisfaction.” I think I mentioned that in one of the previous lectures. When you think about customer satisfaction, you start ranking yourself between 1 and 10. 1 means they hate me. 5 means they don’t care about me. 10 means they like what I do. And that’s very different from delight. Delight means they are excited about what you do for them. The example I like to bring is when Apple introduces a new iPhone — people stand in line to be the first to get the new model. They spend hours standing in line, which makes zero rational sense. It’s emotional. It’s not customer satisfaction, it’s emotional. That’s what you really want to get to. You want people to love you, to feel something about you — not just say “yeah, it was okay.”

Smart use of enablers to deliver a solution or service to fulfill the jobs to be done. You understand what needs to be done — now you think about how do I deliver it, using all the building blocks around me in a smart way. And it’s the same for building the company’s growth engines. Many of them use enablers to scale the operation. Remember what we talked about? Growth engines is where you scale processes. You want to be able to scale a process without growing the expense at the same rate. You want to get double the output with only a slight increase in the input.

Now we come to some interesting understanding about enablers. There are actually four different classes of enablers. And chances are many of you will look at me like, “what are you talking about?” So I’ll show you what they mean and open things up for you to start thinking very differently about the world — to look at everything going on around you and ask, how can I take advantage of work that other people already did? Technological is pretty straightforward — we talked about that. Infrastructure is another big enabler. Social norms. And big company actions — many times when big companies do something, they create opportunities for everyone else. Now I put them into four categories or four classes, but that doesn’t mean the same enabler doesn’t fit more than one of them.

Usually they start with a technological or big company action, but then they start moving — they change social norms. A great example is social media. It’s a technology, but it completely changes how we feel about things — should I put my pictures online? Privacy. All kinds of issues show up because the technology makes it available, and so forth. So just because I remember that when I talked about jobs to be done I also gave four different classes — I couldn’t resist saying: in the army, everything is divided into three. I guess I do everything in fours. It just excited me. Okay, let’s start with technological. ChatGPT — or any of those technologies — in my mind is a hugely disruptive technology that is now available. I think we are at a very early stage of understanding what it can do for us. But anybody who is not going to use it in some very smart way — and I’ll show that, I said we’d discuss it later — I think is missing an opportunity.

mRNA — messenger RNA — real deep research that suddenly came to the fore with the COVID-19 vaccine, which was developed in about six months. So here’s an example of a technology that people saw as just a technology, and then because of the opportunity that suddenly arose, it came to the front. Machine translation — I guess nobody here is not using machine translation, but I’m not aware of a product that is really using it in a new way, beyond just “when I need to translate something.” Just to explain what I’m saying: iPhone, GPS, Internet — and suddenly you’re dealing with parking, with taxis. Machine translation is kind of like that — I use it for translation, but I haven’t yet seen where someone uses it differently. DNA sequencing — again, great technology, just taking its first steps into the market. SpaceX — so I talked about Starlink. What is Starlink? Starlink is essentially covering the whole world with an Internet connection, and obviously that gives you phone and any other connections. By the way, I don’t know how many of you are aware of it —
Translation. I haven’t yet seen where they use it differently. DNA sequencing. Again, great technology, just doing its first steps into the market. SpaceX. So I talked about Starlink. What is Starlink? Starlink is essentially covering the whole world with Internet connection. And obviously that gives you phone and any other connections. By the way, I don’t know how many of you are aware of it.

When the war between Ukraine and Russia started, the first thing that the Russians did was to destroy a lot of the communication centers of Ukraine. Then the czar of the world, Elon Musk, decided to open Starlink to Ukraine, provided that they don’t cross the border. For those of you who know history, the East India Company — you familiar with that? That’s what started the British Empire. So here’s another example of a person, a company, starting to interfere with world politics. Do you know another example of where Elon Musk intervened? Gaza. Okay. So he allowed Israel to use Starlink in order to communicate in Gaza, provided we don’t kill Arabs. So this is an interesting example about enablers and the power of enablers when you get to big companies.

Image recognition — again, a very interesting example. So what is image recognition? Image recognition is what, a decade ago, every year, a few dozen people got a PhD because they were able to identify a dog in a picture. You’re not laughing. Why are you laughing? It was a PhD project. It was difficult. Just to tell a story — I remember when my kids were very little. We had a book, and the book was, “Where is the teddy bear?” It was a picture book. And the teddy bear was — I remember — brown. And you see his hand sticking from somewhere, or his nose sticking from somewhere. And my brilliant genius kids were able to show you where the teddy bear is. They were, I don’t know, a year old, two years old. And me, as a computer scientist, I understood the complexity of solving it on a computer. And I looked at it and I said to myself, how on earth can a one-year-old kid do that, when people get PhDs for trying to do it and it doesn’t work?

So image recognition has come a huge way forward. Anybody with Google Photos can do it. I use Google Photos all the time. I run a query and I get the answer. Like — I don’t remember my car’s license plate. So I always search “my car” and it shows me my car. Everything goes well. But the interesting thing is where you can use it. So there’s one area that is almost obvious, and that is medical imaging. If you think about it, what is medical imaging? You have an X-ray, or even something in pathology — you have a sample, and essentially somebody is looking at it and, based on their experience, they say, “Oh, this is malignant,” or “Look at this little dot in here, I don’t like it,” or whatever. It is trivial to train because there are millions of these pictures or images with explanations — millions of them. So it’s very tempting to develop such applications.

And there are many applications like that. An Israeli company called Zebra Medical Vision was created in 2014, raised about $50 million, built such an application — I think for pathology — and couldn’t make money. They were later acquired by another Israeli company called Nanox in 2021 for a song. And Nanox is worth a fraction of that now, so the whole thing has crashed. But why? Remember, we talk about enablers all the time — things that enable you to do things. Like everything else in life, there’s the yin and the yang. The opposite of enablers are disablers. So the disablers are the people who are going to lose their job. Radiologists, pathologists, all the people who look at the image and say something — they’re going to lose their job, and they will lose their job. The reason they will lose their job is because machines are getting much better than them, much better than them. And also, once you have one machine that knows something, you just replicate it — copy-paste — and the next machine knows it, and copy-paste, and all the machines know it. Whereas if one pathologist or one radiologist knows something, he’s just the only person in the world who knows it. And all the fresh grads who want to be pathologists are going to miss a lot of problems, and people will die.

So clearly the world is going to move to machines doing all of these analyses. But right now, the radiologists and pathologists are the ones who have to say yes or no. So they say no. How and when it’s going to change, I don’t know. But I can assure you that 10, 20 years from now it will. There is an interesting Israeli company called Sight that has a device called OLO — with one drop of blood you can check for malaria or other things. And they do it by imaging, by image recognition. This is going to change the world. But I’m just showing you that the fact that you have a disruptive technology that really works is not enough in order to build a company that makes money. That’s all I’m saying.

Remember, I’m talking about enablers and building a company at the same time. Face recognition — same thing. It’s getting really good. So a young Korean guy — don’t ask me to pronounce his name — in New York, decided to use enablers. He used two enablers: facial recognition and social media. So he’s just scanning LinkedIn, scanning Facebook, scanning everything that has public-domain pictures of people with their names. So that when I walk into a store, he says, “Hi, Yonatan, you’re from ZoomInfo, right?” He claims he sells it only to police forces. There’s a whole big thing around it. But here’s an example that cost him very little money — he raised, I think, two or three million dollars and built the company, because he just used enablers. There are a gazillion pictures with names on them, there’s a technology available, you put one plus one and you have a new company.

3D printers — phenomenal technology. I’m not aware of any company or industry that has been transformed because of it, but things just happen, so I don’t know when it’s going to happen. The same goes for drones — except for military purposes, I’m not aware of any major shift. All I’m saying is, here’s the stuff, and because we only have two hours, I didn’t want to spend the whole two hours on that. The list goes on and on.

Infrastructure. What do I mean by infrastructure? Infrastructure is when a technology becomes pervasive — you kind of use it the same way you use electricity, which in the early 1900s, late 1800s, was a big disruptive technology. Now we take it for granted. It’s like air. The Internet came out of ARPANET in 1969. DARPA — sorry — is the research arm of the military. And what they wanted to solve was — remember, this is the height of the Cold War — they had a communication system with hubs, and they were afraid that the Russians would do exactly what they did in Ukraine: send some missiles and destroy the hubs, and all communication would stop. So they wanted to build a resilient communication system that, regardless of how many hubs you destroy, would still continue to work. Anybody who knows about packet switching understands what I’m talking about. Anybody who doesn’t, I’ll give a separate lecture on that.

3G — the year 2007. What happened then is that the speed of communication was high enough to allow Internet connection over cellular networks. And I put the word “iPhone” there because that’s what made the iPhone so popular — you finally had Internet on your phone.

IBM PC — that’s both an infrastructure milestone and a major company decision that changed the world. As you can see, I’m very young. When I was really young, there were big computers, and the big one was IBM, with several series of computers, and each series had its own operating system. So if you wanted to develop software — let’s say an accounting system — you’d develop it for the IBM 360. If you wanted to have it on the IBM 370, you had to develop it again, because it was a different operating system and a different set of languages. So developing software was an extremely expensive process because you were married to the computer. Today that sounds to you like — what? What are you talking about?

Well, the revolution started in 1981 when IBM, for some bizarre reason, decided to open the specs for its PC and encourage other companies to develop IBM PC-compatible computers. With one exception — there was one person who said, “Why should I open it?” Anybody can guess who that was? Bill Gates, of course. So Bill Gates — he bought the OS? Yeah. But for whatever reason, he decided that he doesn’t want to give it away for free. And the rest is history. So you can see the difference: with one decision by IBM — which was not a very smart decision — and one decision by Bill Gates, the world changed.

Right now we have only two operating systems to speak of: one closed, which is macOS, and the other is Windows. And the same happened with the new generation — iPhone with iOS, and everything else with Android. The same happens with the browser. You don’t even think about it, but you can open any browser you want — it can be Edge, it can be Chrome, it can be whatever — and they all read the same web pages. Why? Because there is a standard, and everybody agreed to adhere to it. What does that do? It frees up energy. You don’t have to worry about five different flavors of each piece of software. And there are many tools where you develop the software once and it goes to both Android and iPhone — you just compile it for both.

So that’s why I call these enabler standards. Why do I list Microsoft Office, Salesforce, and QuickBooks as standards? Because the usage of these is so pervasive, so widespread, that there’s a huge market around them. If you develop one application for Salesforce, you’re guaranteed to have a very large market. If it’s a PDF — you produce a document in PDF, everybody can read it. You work with a word processor and you say, “It’s Word-compatible” — boom, you’re done. So even though these are not open systems, they still generate such a huge market that they become a standard. Which wasn’t the case 20 or 30 years ago.

So these are enablers. But not all applications are the same. There is a new layer — Zapier, Make, Boomi, MuleSoft — that allows you to basically integrate these systems. They have a mechanism that talks to the API of one system and transfers the information in the middle. So you can do all of those workflows now using Zapier, Make, Boomi, or whatever you want. Again, it’s an enabler.

International payment systems. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to receive money from the Bahamas, or from Iraq, or Jordan, or wherever, it was difficult. Nowadays there are companies that will transfer money from anywhere to anywhere very easily.

Cloud computing — again, I remember when I started at ZoomInfo, we had a computer room, a server room. Why? Because that was the only way of doing it. Now you put in your credit card and you’re in business. And essentially if you’re a startup, you get — I don’t know — ten thousand or a hundred thousand dollars, whatever they give you for free.
Essentially, would transfer money from anywhere to anywhere very easily. Cloud computing — again, I remember when I started, we had the computer room, the server room. Why? Because that was the only way of doing it. Now you put in your credit card and you’re in business. And essentially if you’re a startup, you get — I don’t know — 10,000 or 100,000, whatever they give you for free, right?

Just start working. Open source software — again, you can use a lot of software for free, available. And last but not least is huge amounts of information on the Internet. Huge amounts that you can use to enhance whatever you do. There’s the Freedom of Information Act. It’s an American law that basically says any information that was produced using taxpayer money belongs to the taxpayers. So they publish all the information they collect when they do any activity that is paid by taxes, which is basically everything. They do try to keep the information in unreadable formats, but if you persist and you want to understand it, you can extract a lot of information from federal data. Social norms — Zoom meetings came with Corona, with COVID-19, and everybody was using Zoom. And it became a standard, a normal thing.

Okay, what does that do? Basically, people don’t want to meet in person anymore. So let’s say 15 years ago you had salespeople with territories. Why territories? Because if they lived in Chicago, they got in the car and visited customers — because they drove to the customer. I don’t know when was the last time a salesman came here, because I don’t want any salesman showing up here or anywhere else. Because when they show up, I need to be polite and I need to spend an hour — two things I don’t want to do. So when they talk to me on the phone and it’s interesting, I say, okay, let’s do a Zoom meeting. And what does he do in the Zoom meeting? Exactly what he would have done if we were sitting face to face.

He would open his computer and show me his screen. So why do I need to see him in my office and give him a cup of tea? I don’t. And it works the other way around too. Now think about it — people open offices in America, and I ask them, why on earth are you opening an office in America? Because I want to sell in America. And I say, so what are you going to do in the office in America? And the answer is, I’ll call people. Okay, you think you have to do it from America because in Israel it doesn’t work. But then I organize the Zoom meeting from Israel. So stay in Israel. What about the time difference? Well, start working at three. That’s all. There’s no reason anymore. You can take the money from there. There’s a tax calculator.

Nowadays — many of you maybe don’t know — in America there are taxes at many levels: city, state, and federal. And everybody wants their cut. So you have to know what you’re doing, but you don’t have to know everything — there’s software. So you use that software in your accounting system, and you say you have a customer in Chicago — which happened to me — you have to pay city tax on software. So they charge you the city tax, you of course transfer it to the customer, and he pays the bill. He knows what he’s doing. So you don’t really need to be present physically anywhere anymore. That’s why I call it social norms. That’s the way it works now. They don’t need to see you, they don’t want to see you. They want you to speak good English. The gig economy, okay?

We all know Uber, Bolt, Fiverr, Upwork, TaskRabbit — which we used to carry a lot of suitcases down the stairs — these have literally changed the world. So that means if you want to do something, you have all of this help available to you and you can hire people. We do a lot of that. So I guess that’s what I call social norms. It’s not a technology, but it’s something that is now available to us. I still remember when Uber started, people said, no, I’m not going to just step into a car with a stranger. Am I going to stay in somebody else’s house? Are you nuts? Who is going to open their house? Okay, so the world is changing all the time. And I call these enablers. Work from home didn’t exist before COVID.

Now it’s like — what, you want me to come to the office more than one day a week? I live about 20 minutes away. Change of norms. So Slack became very important because people don’t sit around you, so you need to communicate somehow. And Slack was there — boom. Social platforms and social media — people publish, people do things. It’s crazy what’s going on. Influencers, all these things that didn’t exist 20 years ago are now the norm. That’s why I call it social norms. And people publish pictures and videos in huge quantities. I talked about Clearview. There are infinite datasets to do all kinds of things, all of it available at your fingertips. Big company actions.

So when big companies do something, they many times change the world in a way that you can look at and replicate. iTunes. So developing the — what was it called? The iPod. Thank you. It’s an MP3 player. There were a gazillion of them before — it was nicer, but still not very important. The problem was that an MP3 player needed music, otherwise it’s just a piece of hardware. And most of that music came from pirated software — pirated music, Napster. I’ll talk about Napster later. So along came Apple and Steve Jobs negotiated with the music producers, and they agreed on 99 cents regardless of how popular your song is. It’s simple, it’s easy. Remember, you want to keep things easy and change the world.

And that was just the beginning, because then someone said, wait a minute, why do I have to pay per piece of music? Why can’t I just pay a fixed monthly price and get as much as I want? Similar to the Internet — think about the world today. If you had to pay per hour or per gigabyte, you feel it when you travel, right? You have your cell phone and you buy 5 gigabytes, 10 gigabytes, and you’re counting all the time, right? So you see the difference when something is a fixed price. All you can eat — it changes the economy, it changes how you use it. Amazon Marketplace — they opened their platform to anyone who wants to sell. That allows small players to start becoming international sellers, whether it’s their own piece of art or something they buy and resell.

Total enabler. Google Ads — same idea. One platform that everybody sits on and you can advertise anything you can think of. So with one platform, you reach everybody in the world with any idea. It’s an enabler. PC-compatible — we talked about it. Net neutrality. What is net neutrality? I said before, when you pay a fixed price, somebody has to pay the bill. The communication companies — somebody has to pay the bills for half the world watching Netflix all the time. So they want Netflix to pay much more, because Netflix is consuming a tremendous amount of bandwidth. But when the Internet was created, they committed to net neutrality, which means all users pay the same price regardless of use. So there’s a long battle going on in Congress in the US about net neutrality — whether to start charging companies like Spotify, Netflix, and others more for their bandwidth. I’m just showing big company actions here as examples of enablers. Okay? Remember the scope here — just look at the world and say, this is how the world behaves. People put up pictures — it costs money, it doesn’t cost money — I have this image recognition capability, what can I do with it? That’s all I’m trying to say. Don’t try to develop something disruptive on your own. Just don’t waste your time and money. That’s all I’m saying. Okay?

And here’s the last interesting idea — Ayanna, this one’s for you. Two-factor authentication. I remember it suddenly dawned on me that we are actually creating a digital identity — a unique ID number that is international. Every single individual in the world has an ID. If you want to know mine, it’s right here. And because I’m married, my wife’s ends with 86. That’s our international unique ID number. The day I lose my phone until I get it back, I cannot get into my bank account, I cannot do anything with Google — I’m lost. Two-factor authentication is going to force everybody in the world to have a unique ID. That’s it. And it’s your phone number — the full phone number with the area code and country code. Just think about it that way and you will come up with great ideas about what to do with it.

I don’t know what to do with it myself, but it dawned on me that this is a big company action. Everybody now wants two-factor authentication, and it’s spreading. Just to show you a little bit about what I mean by enablers and what they do — let’s talk about electric cars. So when cars were invented, electric cars were actually very popular. Why? Because they were easier to drive. You didn’t need to do this — anybody who’s seen the old movies, right? You had to crank it up. Electric was quieter, no pollution, and it was perfect for short drives. It had a range of about 80 kilometers and cost about $1,700. They were tremendously popular. So what happened to them? The Ford Model T — that’s what happened. Introduced in 1908, cost $600, a third of the price. Gas-powered. Longer range, and a better road system, because now there were more cars.

So you started building roads. You go farther away. You go farther away, you need a bigger range. Bigger range doesn’t go with the battery. So you start seeing how enablers become disablers. I really want you to think about all of these as something very dynamic. It changes — it opens opportunities, it closes opportunities. But there are always many opportunities. The electric starter was invented, so nobody cranks their car anymore, right? Crude oil was discovered in Texas and it was inexpensive. And 15 million Model T cars were sold in 19 years. So electric cars faded away around 1935 and disappeared for a long period of time. Now what happened? Look at that — from 2010 until today, you see this huge growth of electric cars.

But the question obviously is why — what happened in the world? New batteries. And I’m looking at the dates on purpose. 2008: 55 kilowatt-hours, up to 450 in 2020 — tenfold. But why? Because of this. You have laptop computers — you need batteries. You have smartphones like this — it’s a computer, you need batteries. So suddenly you had billions of batteries being produced and the technology improved. It started with laptops, but the smartphone gave it a huge boost. So the technology around batteries, because there was huge demand, advanced rapidly. As a side effect — and I’m short on time here — as a side effect, you got viable electric cars, because the batteries became good enough. They’re not yet as good as they could be, but the whole world is working on it, so they will get there. What I’m saying is there are always enablers and disablers, and you can use them to your benefit — if you open your eyes and start thinking about what you can do with what the world has to offer.

Remember, we were talking about jobs to be done and growth engines. Those are the two elements through which I want you to look at all of these and ask, what can I do with it? So now I wanted to use — remember, jobs to be done — I wanted to choose something I know very intimately and personally: the story, or the tale, of six companies.
Hat can I do with what the world has to offer? Remember, we’re talking about jobs to be done and growth engines. These are the two elements on which I want you to start looking at all of these and say, what can I do with it? So now I wanted to use — remember, jobs to be done. So I wanted to choose something that I really know very intimately and personally, and it’s the story — or the tale — of six companies.

I took the headline obviously from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. And what I want you to do is, as I tell you this story, think about what are the lessons that you can gain from it. So the story is about ZoomInfo and its competitors. There’s a list of six competitors here, and the story spans about 23 years, or 20-odd years. So ZoomInfo started in the year 2000, because I had a company called CardScan. It was profitable, it was growing — all the good things. And the whole world was asking me, what are you going to do about the Internet? Because it was the Internet boom.

And since I am a really brilliant scientist who wants to do disruptive things, I said, wow, what can I do with the Internet that will change the world? And my idea was — if you look at the Internet at the time, it’s very different today. Back then, the whole game was how you crawl the entire Internet. The search engines would crawl the whole Internet page by page. When you type in a few words, they look at all the pages that have those words or something similar, rank them, and show you only the pages that have the answer to what the search engine thought you were asking. That was the task. All search engines — and there were dozens of them in the late 90s — were doing the same thing, Google included.

And I said, wow, if there is an answer to your question, a search engine will give it to you. But what if the information is out there, but there isn’t a page that aggregates that information? And the information I was thinking about is information about companies. So if I wanted to get a list of all biotechnology companies in the Boston area, if nobody had done the work, then there isn’t an answer — but the answer is there. I could go website by website, figure out if it’s a biotechnology company and if it’s in Boston, and put this information in a database. And now I can answer those questions. So the data is out there, but you need a very different engine in order to make sense of it. And that’s the engine I went to build at ZoomInfo.

ZoomInfo was a disruptive technology company — with all the glory and the pain. And I’m going to share with you the pain. So, disruptive technology — remember that we developed a new technology of basically language understanding. We wanted to read. We’re talking about the year 2000. We wanted to read a website and figure out what it is. Not all websites are companies, so we needed to figure out if it’s a company, what the company is doing, their names — I won’t go into all the details. We did it. And the one very good decision that we made was: we need to make money. Because at that time I understood companies need to be profitable. So what kind of information did we want? We picked business information — companies and people. That was it.

We developed it and tried to sell it. Turns out the data was fairly crummy — meaning it wasn’t accurate — and we couldn’t find customers. But then we found customers. The customers were headhunters. Headhunters are people whose job is to find executive candidates for companies. Remember, we’re talking about the year 2000 — there was no LinkedIn. LinkedIn started in 2004, 2005. Where were you going to find candidates? You couldn’t. So what did headhunters sell to their customers? “We are very into this industry. We know everybody in this industry. That’s why you work with us and pay us $150,000 to find your VP of Sales — because we know everybody.” In reality, they knew nobody. So they needed to fill that promise. And they came to us.

We gave them those lists, and they paid us $1,000 a month for a single seat. And it was a booming business. We were growing very rapidly. Then 2004 arrived. I packed my family and we moved to Israel. Before we moved, I said, I cannot manage things from Israel — there was no Zoom at the time. I need somebody here in charge. So I hired a person. His name is Gary Hallowell, and he’s going to be the hero of the next slide. So remember, I’m now selling to headhunters, and I bring Gary Hallowell on board in 2004. The guy is a very interesting guy. He used to work at Thomson Reuters, then he went and was the CEO of a company called Investex — I won’t go into the details of that. And before that, he was a geologist at De Beers, prospecting for diamonds in South Africa. Really smart, very interesting guy. And he got really connected to the business. He had experience at Thomson Reuters and Investex.

We decided, when he arrived, that we wanted to go after the big market, not the small market of headhunters. We wanted to go after salespeople. Who needs lists? Salespeople. So we started selling to salespeople. And we discovered — it was a rude awakening — that the jobs to be done were very different, even though on the surface it seemed like all they wanted was a list of people and companies. That’s why I keep saying on the surface it looks the same. So what’s the big difference?

The headhunters wanted a needle in a haystack. Their job was to come to their client and say, “Here’s a list of 15 people — great people, wonderful. I have their résumés, I know exactly where they’ve been, because we collected all of this data from the Internet.” So each person had a dossier about them, and they were just perfect for what you needed. Then they’d interview them, and so on. Salespeople, on the other hand, wanted the haystack — because they had to call 50 people a day. They needed lists. And honestly, they couldn’t care less about who these people are, where they studied, what their experience is. All they cared about was the person’s title, whether they’re at the right company, and — most importantly — their phone number and email address. Phone number and email address. Remember where I came from technologically: no phone numbers, no email addresses, because they were not on the Internet. They’re still not on the Internet. So we had very few phone numbers and email addresses, and the jobs to be done required emails and phone numbers. That’s where the problem was.

So Gary Hallowell, who is a smart guy, decided to leave ZoomInfo and started another company called Net Prospects. And he didn’t have the disruptive bug — he had the make-money bug. So he came up with a great idea. He said, what if I go to people who have very large lists of people, companies, phone numbers, and email addresses, and buy from them? So he went mainly to publishers — magazines and so forth — and also big companies, and he bought lists from them. But how did he buy them? He gave them a list from someone else. A swap. “You give me yours and I’ll give you mine” — which wasn’t his. He’s a smart cookie, really smart guy. I like him a lot, even though he was a strong competitor. But remember — I do disruptive, he does business.

And he had a wrinkle on it, which is: wait a minute, I get a list — how do I know it’s a good list and not one from 20 years ago, where the people are no longer there and the phone numbers are incorrect? So he would take 500 records, sample them randomly, send them to a group in India, they would call the numbers and verify, and tell him, “Yeah, it’s 90% accurate.” He would take it, not throw it out. So he had really good data, and the company grew like crazy. He raised $27.5 million — these funny numbers I have to remember — and sold to Dun & Bradstreet in 2015 for $125 million. I was still sweating. He made a lot of money. No disruption, no anything. Jobs to be done.

So I left you in the middle of this drama — let’s continue with the next company, Plaxo. I’m afraid of touching it — okay, so remember, I left you with the understanding that the data we had was not suitable for the market we wanted to go after, which was salespeople. So we needed to do something about it. Gary Hallowell did something really smart. And I’m talking now about around 2003, when we were starting to see the problem.

One day, one of my salespeople comes in very excited and says, “Jonathan, you have to see this.” I said, “What?” He goes, “There is an application — let me show you. I’ll type in Jonathan Stern. See? Here’s your phone number.” And how did they do it? He said, “I don’t know, but it’s free. You can use it. It has phone numbers for a lot of people. I ran a few queries, it’s really working well.” I said, “But how do they do it?” He said, “I don’t really know. I had to download an application and I think it’s sitting on my Outlook and reading everything I do.” And I said — “And you did that?” He said, “Why?” I said, “They’re spying on you. They can see anything you do.” He goes, “So what do I care? I need to sell, and they have a great database.”

So the company is called Plaxo. The person who built Plaxo is a guy called Sean Parker. Ring a bell? Yeah. Sean Parker is the one who created Napster — peer-to-peer music sharing. Those of you who don’t know what peer-to-peer is, I’ll explain later. He launched it in 1999 and was sued right away by all the music companies for violating their copyrights. Napster closed in 2002. Then he went to Facebook, which — as you saw in the movie — he became President of Facebook. He likes sharing information, I guess. And then he went to Spotify, and today he’s basically a billionaire. Plaxo was sold to Comcast — I can’t understand why — in 2008, and was shut down in 2017. I told you that Net Prospects was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet and was shut down in 2015. So you can see that these were successful companies, bought by big companies, and then shut down. You can start seeing how the plot thickens, more players enter, and the mystery gets even bigger.

So I said, all right, I think Plaxo is right. What we’re going to do is copy it. We’re going to develop the same application. And salespeople seem to have no morals — they don’t mind sharing everything. Great, we’ll go after salespeople. And remember, at the time the popular application for email management was Outlook, and Outlook ran on a PC. So we needed to develop something that runs on a PC, that you download, install, and it sits right on your Outlook. My co-executives basically said, “You are out of your mind. It’s not going to work. Nobody’s going to use it, nobody’s going to download it. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. Why do you want to do that?” So I hired a guy — I was already in Israel, as you recall — a very smart guy. And we decided that we were going to build the application in a way that would be visible and would give you value.
Aid, you are out of your mind. You are not. It’s not going to work. Nobody’s going to use it, nobody’s going to download it. It is a disaster in the making. Why do you want to do that? So I hired a guy — I was already in Israel, as you recall. I hired a guy, a very smart guy. And we decided that we are going to build the application in a way that is going to be visible and will give you value.

What it’s going to do is basically what you’d have today in Google — it shows you all the people that you communicate with, collects all the information about them, and builds an address book. So that’s what we did. We built an address book that sat inside your Outlook, read all the emails, extracted the signatures from the emails, and did a really nice job. There’s another company that did that called Xobni. If you read it in Hebrew, which is right to left, it says “inbox.” So I thought it was a really nice name. They built the company Xobni and that’s what they were doing — basically the same thing with a few other features, raised money, tried to sell, blah blah, shut down.

Okay, so there are a lot of corpses along the way here. So we built that product. It was a really nice product that, as I was telling you, was visible. And then I had a new VP of Marketing and he said, “Over my dead body — you’re not going to do it. Everybody will see it, they will sue you. Privacy. We have to hide it.” So we scrapped that piece of software and we built a new one that was hidden. You download it, you never saw it again. It just collected your data. That’s all it did — collected your data. We called it the Swapper because supposedly for doing that you get free access to ZoomInfo. Not really free — you get, I don’t know, 20 records a month or something like that. But that’s what it is. And it never worked all that easily.

So we forced them to download it — I won’t go into the details. The amazing thing is that it is still the same way today, okay? This very imperfect application is still the same way today, and it’s generating most of the data that ZoomInfo has. It works. What? There is a web Swapper — I’ll get to it in a moment. Okay. Along the way there was another company called Jigsaw. As you can see, when there is a job to be done, there are a lot of people willing to do that job. So Jigsaw was created in 2004 and they had the same idea as Net Prospects, except for one thing. So instead of going to companies or publishers that have a big list, they went to you and said, “If you give me a record, I’ll give you a record.”

So they had this real accounting system — you give records and you get records. And they were pretty good at pushing it. They built a very nice company that was growing relatively fast. And lo and behold, they were acquired by Salesforce in 2010. Salesforce looked at it and said, “Wait a minute — salespeople use Salesforce. That’s just, you know, one plus one equals ten. If I also sell them data, I can become really stinking rich.” And they put together a business plan to get to a billion dollars in revenues using that. So they interviewed us — they wanted to buy us and Jigsaw. We were competing against each other. And we were sure we were going to win because we had this disruptive technology. Jigsaw had no technology whatsoever, so why would they win? Because they were moving faster than us — and they won.

So we were left without a buyer, with a pretty bad system, and Jigsaw was acquired. But the problem was that they didn’t have any technology and they didn’t really understand how you clean data. And cleaning data, it seems, is a very complex thing. So Salesforce tried, ran into all kinds of issues, called the product — or the company — Data.com, and they shut it down in 2020. Gone. So a lot of these companies have come, done something, and gone.

Then in 2007, DiscoverOrg. DiscoverOrg had a very ingenious idea for how to collect data. They had a room full of people in Washington State who would call companies on the phone and interview people. And they did a pretty good job, actually. They accumulated information on about 2 to 3 million people manually, by phone, and they started selling.

Henry Schuck, who is the CEO, is a really good salesman. He’s also a lawyer, and he had a brilliant marketing idea. His brilliant marketing idea was: “You know, if you buy from ZoomInfo — our main competitor, who is still alive and kicking — they give you 20 million records, but you don’t need 19 and a half million of them. They just clutter you, they just bother you. We work really hard to choose only the records that you really need. That’s why we only have 3 million records, and they cost about four times more than ZoomInfo data.” I’m just talking about marketing here — truth and marketing have no correlation, they don’t even sit in the same room. Anyway, he built a really good company — DiscoverOrg — very profitable.

And he grew a lot by acquiring competitors. He bought and bought competitors and kept growing until there was only one big competitor left: ZoomInfo. And at that time I had already been in it for a long time, traveling back and forth like an idiot. So I decided enough is enough. And we sold ZoomInfo to DiscoverOrg for $800 million in 2019. I was already not in the company — it was a few months after I left.

So here’s an example of solving the same problem — jobs to be done. I’ve shown you four different ways of doing it: having an Outlook plugin, exchanging lists, exchanging single records, or buying ZoomInfo data. Four solutions. And then there’s a fifth and sixth — the company Apollo. They started in 2015. At that time the enablers had changed.

Remember, we were working with Outlook. Outlook meant I needed you to download a piece of software, install it on your PC. It didn’t work on Mac and it was hidden in the background. Apollo came with a very different idea, which I thought was brilliant. They developed a sales automation tool. Sales automation is a tool that allows you to send bulk emails, see who opened them, create sequences — like, if they open this email, you send that email, and so forth. A really nice piece of software, and it sits right on your Gmail. So all you have to do is allow Gmail to cooperate with that piece of software. That’s it. Really, really simple.

You click a button and it works, and it gives you value immediately because you can really manage your entire sales process through it. And it seems almost natural that you share the data because you’re using the data all the time, right? So Apollo became very successful. When I encountered Apollo, I was no longer at ZoomInfo. I went to ZoomInfo and said, “Guys, I think this is a really nice solution — better than our Swapper. You should develop something similar.” I don’t know what happened or didn’t happen, but I’m just showing you how the same jobs to be done got very different implementations and solutions, and how when the world changed, some companies took advantage of it. So when people didn’t care about privacy, along came Plaxo, Sean Parker, Jigsaw, and so forth.

That said, Apollo, I think, came with the best solution — giving you real value that makes sense to you and is easy to install. So, what are the lessons?

Disruptive technology is hugely overrated. I loved the technology at ZoomInfo — it really did a nice job — but it’s overrated. There is a big gap between technology and generating money at scale. Technology is a very nice toy, it makes you feel great, but between that and making money there is virtually no correlation. Many entrepreneurs start by thinking up some disruptive technology. I’m trying to tell you that this is not the best way to become rich. It’s a nice way, it’s really cool, but it’s not.

They should focus on understanding the jobs to be done and then look around for enablers to get those jobs done easily. And I think I’ve convinced you by now that enablers are not necessarily just technologies. Oh, by the way — don’t forget to start with branding first, okay? If nobody has heard of you, tough luck in the end.

And this is very important: success comes from happy and loyal customers, not from the technology, long term. Which is why ZoomInfo was sold for such a high price, and why shortly after the acquisition, DiscoverOrg changed their name to ZoomInfo — because nobody knew about DiscoverOrg, but everybody knew about ZoomInfo. So that’s why the company is called ZoomInfo today — because we did good marketing.

The combined companies went public in 2020 — it was the first IPO of the COVID season — at a valuation of about $24 billion. $24 billion. The valuation has declined; I think it’s worth about $10 billion today. Not bad for a company built on disruptive technology and a clunky Swapper. And it’s a good company. It’s a really good company. Why? Because it was focused on customers. Both Henry and I — that’s what we focused on: sales and customers. Sales and customers. Technology is very easy to duplicate — I’ve shown you examples of that right here. Customer satisfaction is very hard to maintain. Really hard. So that should be what you think about.

Obsessive focus on customers, operations, efficiency, and synergies will take you much further. So I wanted to take you through this whole story so you can see the really big picture.

Six companies competing on the same jobs to be done — only two succeeded. Really significant. By the way, Apollo is worth about a billion dollars today and growing fast. Good companies that focus on results.

Okay, similar or different story. Capital IQ was founded in 1998 by three investment bankers. Investment bankers — what do they do? It’s a nice term — like realtors, but instead of selling real estate, they sell companies. They are the middlemen: they find buyers for a company or sellers for a company. That’s what they do. And what they wanted to do was open a boutique to deal with the low end of the market. Usually investment bankers take a percentage of the transaction — if the transaction is a billion dollars, 1% is a reasonable amount of money. If the transaction is $10 million, 1% doesn’t justify the work. And it is a lot of work — selling a company is a lot of work. So they wanted to create a growth engine, something that would allow them to do it faster and better.

They identified that the jobs to be done — the first stage of it — is to figure out who might be interested in buying that company. So they wanted to build a database about companies: who they are, what they do, who the people in them are. Just build a database. Remember, this is before ZoomInfo — 1998. And remember, this data didn’t exist at the time when I started either. So they developed a database of information about companies, which was a novelty, as I noted. And it was populated manually by low-cost researchers — they had people in India doing the research.

And here’s the interesting thing, which is why I bring it up. They built a fairly simple mechanism for finding the information, and the mechanism was based on Google Alerts. They fed Google with the names of, I don’t know, 100,000 companies they were interested in. And any time Google found any piece of news about that company, it sent an alert. So what they did is they had a split screen — on one side they would bring up the page that Google alerted them about: an acquisition, a new product, whatever it is. And on the left side they had a form.
Sed on Google Alerts. So they fed Google with the names of, I don’t know, 100,000 companies they were interested in. And anytime Google found any piece of news about that company, it sent an alert. So what they did is they had a split screen. On one side they would bring up the page that Google alerted about — acquisition, new product, whatever it is. And on the left side they had a form.

They tried to figure out what the piece of news was and put the right form, but not necessarily, because then a person would sit there, read the piece of information, and fill out the form. So they solved the problem of how to identify new information, and they made it easy to copy, paste, type, or whatever. Pretty much scribes — people that sit there and get piece of news after piece of news. It went so well that they bought an Indian company with hundreds of people. That was later on. I already knew them, I was talking to them. So they bought a company with, I don’t know, 300, 400 people in India. That’s what they did. They gave them the software and they filled out the information there. When I put something in red, that’s a question I would like to discuss.

So can you do it today more efficiently? How? ChatGPT, right? So you can compete today with Capital IQ with — I don’t want to embarrass you — but even Aviat can do it now, right? Aviat is a genius with ChatGPT. He shows me how he solves all the problems in the world with ChatGPT. And it works. So Aviat can build a new company called Capital IQ. So what happened with Capital IQ? Well, they tried to build this boutique, remember? But it turns out nobody was interested in the boutique — everyone who they showed the database to said, “I want access to that database.” And so they deeply understood the jobs to be done, because they were selling the database to people who looked exactly like them and they understood the need for it.

So it was sold in 2004 to McGraw-Hill. As you can see today, Standard & Poor’s — it’s still going, and it’s going very well. And here’s one of those April insights about ChatGPT. Remember I told you at the beginning I want to talk about ChatGPT? Now you see what I want to talk about. Here’s an example where they basically built a human GPT. They surfaced the information and people copy-pasted. You can do it today more efficiently. Now, what happened with the people? So Neil Goldman founded a company called Relationship Science. He wanted to build these maps of who knows whom. He called me and tried to interest me in working on it with him, and I declined — I was too busy. And Randy Wayne, who was another founder, invested in DiscoverOrg in March of 2018.

And I talked to him several times before they bought ZoomInfo, and after he bought ZoomInfo. So the world is small and people go around. Okay, so I’ll give you a blueprint for a startup — for all of you who don’t want disruptive, you just want to make money. Here’s a blueprint for how you build a startup. You can extract specific information from free text like web pages, contracts, receipts, emails, whatever it is. All you have to do is use ChatGPT and train it a little about extracting this information and what the jobs to be done are. So the jobs to be done in a lot of companies is what I call the back office. The back office is where all the paperwork, in one way or another, ends up and you need to do something about it.

That’s what I call the back office. And virtually every company has a back office — some more sophisticated, some less. And you have to think about scale. Simple jobs become more and more complex and valuable as the scale grows. CRM, for example. If you’re a salesman and you call three people a day, you scribble it on a piece of paper — you don’t need anything beyond that. When you call 100 people a day, you already need something that will help you remember who you called and what you talked about. When a hundred salespeople call 100 people a day, you need something to handle that because you can’t manage it manually. So as the scale of every activity goes up, the need for something to scale it goes up. Remember that.

So there’s a book, like anything else, called *Scale and the Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies* — blah, blah — and growth engines. Remember, they’re about achieving scale at low cost. It’s an interesting book. It’s a little bit too long, could have been abbreviated, but it has some really interesting facts that I never thought about. So — heartbeat. It turns out that heartbeat has an inverse correlation to body size. If you touch a cat’s heart, and then a baby’s — as the baby grows bigger, it slows down. So elephants have about 30 beats per minute. That’s the heartbeat of an elephant. A cat, I think, is 100-something. And a mouse is even faster.

He even has a conjecture that says the heart is designed to beat a billion times. When it reaches a billion times, you die. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I stopped counting my heartbeat because it’s too scary. The other thing he mentions in the book is how fast people walk depending on the size of the city. It turns out the size of a city matters. People in New York City walk much faster than people in Ruana, and people in Ruana walk much faster than in a kibbutz. The bigger the city, the more people there are, the faster people walk. Why? I have no idea. But it’s a very interesting book and it opens your mind to think that anything that moves up in scale has some fundamental changes happening to it.

And to me, all of these are opportunities. Remember, I’m teaching you how to build a company with five different simple steps. So the purpose of many business software applications, like a CRM, is to aid the efficiency of scaling up. So what’s the problem? Why is there a problem? Why do I say the back office is always a problem? Here’s the problem. As I put in here, there’s an interface — the interface between the people who generate the information, let’s call it that, and where you want to put it, which in most cases is a database. So there is a need to take that information from what’s called a human structure to something that is a machine structure. Always. Sometimes the information itself is generated by a machine, but even then, many times it’s not standard. So you get a receipt — every single business has a slightly different receipt. So you need to read it a certain way, even though the receipt was generated by a machine. So there’s always this problem.

Now, what most companies do, if you think about it, is they have forms. You want something from a bank, you need to fill out a form. Why? Because they don’t handle speech. So they want you to fill out a form. That’s the old-fashioned way of dealing with this gap. But forms aren’t always available, and people don’t like filling them out. So there’s always an opportunity in the back office to take whatever the input is and allow it to be organized. Okay.

So when you talk to people about ChatGPT, they always think about ChatGPT in its generative form. That’s called generative AI — you ask it questions and it starts giving you a whole discussion, or it summarizes something, or it does all kinds of generative things. But really, it is far more interesting on its other side, which is understanding what you say. We call them prompts, but in reality you tell it what you want and in most cases it understands you pretty well. And that, to me, as an enabler, is a huge disruptor. Because problems very much like the ones I described before about image recognition — finding the dog in the picture — these were problems that were totally unsolved until this happened. And with that, you can do amazing things, but you have to understand the job to be done specifically. I’ll give a few examples momentarily.

Okay, so what you see here is: here’s a problem, here’s a way to deal with it, it’s business-to-business, and you have a template to think about how to build a company. So let’s start with a case study. I’m going to bring you two case studies that I became aware of. Think about a company — even ZoomInfo has, I don’t know, 10 offices around the world, maybe more. But many companies have several offices around the world — more than several. And many companies have a lot of locations. Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s — they have a lot of locations around the world, and I say specifically around the world. Each location is usually rented, not bought. And it’s rented from a different landlord, with a different contract, different local laws, different size, different dates — you name it.

There are a lot of pieces of information you want to extract from those agreements and put in a database, but it’s kind of hard. So most companies have a very rudimentary spreadsheet, basically, where they keep, I don’t know, four or five, six pieces of information out of the 30 or 40 that you’d want. Okay? So there’s a company that said, “This is an interesting opportunity. Why don’t we go and talk to these companies, take their agreements — usually they keep them in a folder, or even if it’s on the computer it’s just a PDF copy — read those contracts, and start to extract information out of them?” And here comes the other angle of it. You can do that. That gives you about 30% of the value.

The other 70% of the value is when you start enriching the data. And when you start enriching the data, you open up a lot of interesting insights into the original data. So in this case, for example — just a few examples — average rent per square foot charted over time for that area. I pay $20 a square foot, and it seems like everybody else, the rent has gone down and everybody else is paying $14. I signed the deal five years ago at $20. I’m an idiot — I should renegotiate, right? But unless it shows up to you and you have a trigger set, you don’t know that. Updated list of other available offices in the area — you always want to look around and see what else is out there. Maybe you can swap and get a better place, or maybe you need to grow. And number of people in each location — you have 20,000 square feet and three employees. Big space, nobody here. That’s because I’m cheap. So you want to compare the number of people with the space and figure out whether you have too little space and need to rent more, or maybe too much space and need to trim down. Okay, so these are just a few examples to show that when you start enriching data with information from another source, it becomes more valuable.

Let’s go back to the tale of six companies. So one of the assets — ZoomInfo is successful, not by mistake. We did a lot of interesting things. As I was thinking about salespeople — remember, I moved from recruiters to salespeople — it gradually became clear that the information that’s really interesting is not about the people, it’s about the companies. Why? Because when a business wants to sell to another business, they set criteria that make another company a prospect. For example, we at ZoomInfo can’t sell to any company that doesn’t have salespeople. Let’s say they sell B2C — they have stores, they don’t need ZoomInfo. It’s useless for them. So why would I want to talk to them? It’s wasted effort. If they have two salespeople, it’s still a waste — I’m not going to waste a salesman’s time calling them. But if they have 500 salespeople? Now you’re talking. Now it’s interesting. So we use that.
ny company that doesn’t have salespeople. Let’s say they sell B2C. They have stores. They don’t need ZoomInfo. It’s useless for them. So why would I want to talk to them? It’s wasted. If they have two salespeople, it’s still a waste. I’m not going to waste the time of a salesman to call them. But if they have 500 salespeople — now you’re talking. Now it’s interesting. So we use that.

Remember, we have the list of people in the company with their titles. So it was very easy for us to count how many salespeople each company has and divide the market into no opportunities, small opportunities, medium, big opportunities, and start routing the leads or the companies to the right people. Usually very valuable. And that’s because ZoomInfo has that. If you try to sell to companies that have many offices, you want to know how many locations they have. So you start seeing that every company’s definition of who is their ideal customer profile is very different. Very, very different. So we started collecting a lot of data about companies — the titles of the people, for example, how many engineers do they have, what’s the ratio between the number of engineers and the number of salespeople, how many lawyers they have.

You’ll be surprised — that’s a very interesting element about a company. Some companies have a lot of lawyers, so you want to know what they do with them. And other companies have very few lawyers. Most big companies have a lot of lawyers, and if you look at it, they are mostly tax lawyers. So like all the gas companies in America have more tax lawyers per company than the IRS — the Internal Revenue Service, which is the Mas’ev Hakhnasot. Why? Because they don’t like paying taxes. They’d rather pay lawyers to avoid paying. So what you see is that the information about companies was much more interesting, and we started enriching our database with hundreds, if not thousands, of what we called attributes — some of which we calculated, some of which were taken from other places.

That became a huge asset because it allowed our customers to really be smart about how they identify their ICP. So that’s what I’m saying — when you start adding more information, you will start having a real business. The value of the data grows significantly when it is enriched with other data. So I gave you a template: go to the back office, figure out what they need, bridge the gap between the human input and the database you want to build, enrich it, and you have a product.

Okay, let’s take another example — small business accounting. This is really interesting too. Most small businesses have accounting, but why do they have accounting? Because this country and many other countries want them to pay taxes. In order to pay taxes, they need to hand in financial reports that say how much money they earned or lost each year. So they have an accountant, either in-house or as a service, and they take every receipt and every invoice and all of that and type it in and create financial reports. Now, what happens with these financial reports? How many of you know how to read financial reports? Literally read them and understand them? Most small business owners have no clue what a financial report means and they don’t use them for day-to-day decisions. How do they run their business? Because they’ve been running it for ten years. They have good intuition, their father gave them the business or whatever — they run without any financial reports. That’s the reality.

When I’m talking about small businesses, I’m talking about a small grocery store or a coffee shop — they sell, I don’t know, a million shekels a year, ten million shekels a year. But it’s a small business. The owner is the manager, is everything. So we had an enabler — the guy came with an enabler — and that is: they use Hashavshevet. Hashavshevet in Israel is the dominant accounting software and it has an API, so you can connect to it through the Internet. If the owner gives you permission and says, “Okay, I want to do it,” you can read the entire report. There’s also a new law called the Open Banking Law, or “Bankatucha.” It essentially says that each bank has to allow each customer to access their account through an API. So I can connect my own bank account to my accounting system or to my CRM or whatever it is. That’s coming, I think, by the end of this year.

So what this company did was they connected through the APIs to Hashavshevet and to the banks. They sat with the customer and said, “Can you please put in your credentials so we can connect to your accounting system and connect to your bank?” And they built a report, but this time they tried to make it more operational. They just thought about what they wanted to show customers and built a very simple report. For example, sales per employee — taking the data that was there, which was meant for tax purposes, but there’s data in it. Each record, each line is unique — different from one company to the other, depending on how they decided to do it. But there’s something in it.

So they did that. They had a very different business model in mind — doesn’t matter. But I told them, “Why don’t you — I don’t know what it means — go and show it to the customers. Let’s see what they think about it.” So they went and started showing it to customers.

And to everybody’s surprise, there was one element that immediately caught the attention, and that was the accounts receivable — how much money was still out there that they were not getting paid. We all know net 30, net 60, and so forth. They had all of this information in the accounting system, but they also had all the information about people who hadn’t paid — and they were out 120 days, 300 days, whatever it was. And the business owners were shocked. They were just totally shocked by the amount of money that belonged to them and was sitting out there and not in their bank account. And that made them say, “Wait a minute, I need to see that.”

So we created a simple collections application that actually dealt not so much with collecting bad debt, but just with making sure you get paid on time. At ZoomInfo, we collected 99.3% — I told you that in the last meeting. 99.3% of all invoices were collected, which is almost a world record. And how did we do that? We did it because the person — the famous Donna — just made sure that people who owed us money were aware of it way before it was due. So if it was net 30, after two weeks she sent an email and said, “Here’s the invoice again. I want to make sure you already have it in your accounting and you’re not going to miss the payment on July 17th.” A week later she said, “You didn’t respond to me — is it in your system?”

You just nudged, and we got paid. Why? Because if you ask and you deserve to get the money, and you ask about it three times, they will pay you. Nobody can be angry at you — it’s your money sitting in their bank. You want it, that’s all. It’s really simple. You don’t have to be nasty, you don’t have to be anything. You just have to show that you are efficient and you really want to get paid on the day you want to get paid. So that’s basically what they’re doing.

Okay. And it’s a small startup, just starting. But I’m showing you again this concept of enablers — connecting to Hashavshevet so you can build those reports in ten minutes: “Just give me your credentials and we’re in.” Connecting to your bank account so you can see when money came and went, and compare it. These are enablers. He didn’t know what to do with them, but his customers knew what to do with them. So you take these enablers, you build something really simple, you go and ask people what’s the job they want to get done — and these people didn’t know until they looked at the numbers. When they looked at the numbers, they knew exactly what they wanted: “I want that invoice paid now.” That’s what they wanted.

So you start seeing what I mean by enablers. Hashavshevet is just one example. There’s another big one — QuickBooks. I’ll leave that to you.

Okay, so I keep saying, “Be creative, think about it,” and so forth. There’s a guy called Jacob Goldenberg — he actually resides not far from here, he teaches at IDC — and he wrote a book with another person called *Inside the Box*. Everywhere they teach you to think outside the box. It turns out that outside the box takes you into bizarre adventures. But most creativity happens inside the box, which means using only the things you have available. You should read the book. It’s really interesting and it has a real system for how to be creative. You put all the things that you have inside the box and you start adding and subtracting and doing all kinds of things.

I won’t go into the details, but what I’m trying to say here is: use these enablers as the “inside the box.” Here’s what I’m trying to do, and here’s the world — how can I take this plus this, mix it somehow, and get interesting results? Especially in growth engines where you know the job to be done, where you have a good definition of the jobs to be done. If you look at it with this approach of inside the box, you can reveal a lot of innovation that really is in plain sight. Literally. Sometimes you just don’t think about it. Like I said about the collections — there’s nothing smart about it. It’s obvious. And nobody’s doing it. Why? Because they didn’t think about it, that’s all. There’s email. You know their email. You know exactly when the invoice is due. You know everything — and you just don’t do it. Then you have to go to collections, you start chasing them, and you waste a lot of money. And it’s not a growth engine. If you do it in advance, the number of times you have to chase them is very low. That’s what I’m trying to say throughout: think about the job to be done, think about all the systems that are available to you, and use them.

I go back to the other thing I said about what is the opposite of a growth engine — it’s called people. Anywhere in your organization where you feel like you need to add more people because you are growing, that’s where you should stop. Scratch your beard — that doesn’t exist — and say, “Do I really need to add another person? Really, really — do I need to add another person? Or can it be done with the same person, with better tools, better ideas, better process?” And when you start thinking like that, every time you are tempted to hire another person — stop. Hiring people is really hard. Every time you need to hire a person, it’s a lot of work. Your chances of hiring the right person for the right job are not very high.
Better ideas, better process? And when you start thinking like that, every time you are tempted to hire another person — stop. Stop. First of all, hiring people is really hard. So every time you need to hire a person, it’s a lot of work. Your chances of hiring the right person for the right job are not very high.

At the end of the day, even if you get the right person in the right job, life is hard — they want to move somewhere else, they got married and they go to Japan. Whatever it is, people are difficult to deal with. So anytime you feel a need to hire another person, stop. Think inside the box, dissect the job to be done, and figure out whether you can do it with a process. As the scale of the operation grows, it is a must. It’s not just something you should think about. As I told you before, the only place where I at least had no choice or found no other way was salespeople. But salespeople — if you pay them 15% or 20% of the sale, they still add 80% profit. So it’s kind of interesting.

But even then, the way we built it at ZoomInfo was very mechanical. We built the whole process so that B-minus salespeople would succeed and be productive. We built a whole system around them to be successful, even if they are not geniuses and not outperformers — because we were thinking about a growth engine, about how we can multiply them without being dependent on their individual skills. You can read about it. So “think inside the box” is also an interesting concept, and it’s already in the book. You can read how, if you take a product and look at all of its features and start subtracting them, many times what you discover is that when you subtract features, you actually get a very interesting product that didn’t exist before.

So I’ll talk about that now. Is anybody familiar with a company called Gong? A few people. And Chorus — is anyone familiar with Chorus? Yeah, Chorus. So Gong came up with a wonderful, disruptive idea: we’re going to record every sales interaction with customers, convert it to text, analyze the text, find issues either with the sales process or with the salesperson, do a lot of analysis — and it’s a very expensive system. This is an Israeli company, Gong. At least the founders are Israeli. And the competitor in Israel called Chorus — for those of you who don’t know why it’s relevant — Chorus was acquired by ZoomInfo for $550 million. They didn’t ask me, but interesting concept.

I became aware of Gong many years earlier when one of my salespeople had a free trial for a month or two. He used it and wanted to show me the impact of that software on his sales operation. He said, “I had two salespeople — one was tremendously productive and the other was less than productive, let’s call it that. And I wanted to explain to him why he wasn’t meeting the criteria.” So all he did was use Gong to measure the time the salesperson talks versus the time the customer talks. That’s all. And create a ratio. And he said, lo and behold, he could show this salesman that he was talking 80% of the time and the customer only 20% of the time.

And the other, more successful salesman talked 20% of the time, and the customer talked 80% of the time. That person made 80% more sales than you. So you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that if you keep talking and the customer just doesn’t listen and goes away, you’re not selling. But if you ask questions, wait for answers, and engage in a real discussion, there’s a much bigger chance of closing the sale. And I said, “Is that all you do with Gong?” He said, “Yeah, why should I do anything else? It’s working.” And I was thinking to myself — how much money do I need to invest in building a product that just measures this ratio? And if I sell it to companies for, let’s say, $50 a month per user or $10 a month per user, wouldn’t that be a phenomenal way of getting customers, instead of trying to sell a full system for $10,000?

So that’s kind of the “think inside the box” idea. Sometimes people add more and more features to a product — why? Because this company wanted that feature, and that company wanted this feature, so now we have two features, let’s put them together. And this company also wanted another feature. Before you know it, you have 100 features that nobody uses, and the product is very complex because now you need navigation just to get to each of the features. Right?

You know, if you go to a venture capital group and try to raise money — have you ever seen the size of the agreements? They’re about this thick. And when you ask them why it’s so big, they say every single page has a reason, because at some point somebody sued them or something happened, so now they’ve closed that loophole. So you basically have a lot of loopholes being plugged. But that’s not a way to build a successful product or a successful company. What I’m trying to say again is: think about what’s the job to be done and what’s the minimum you can do to accomplish that. Creative thinking about mixing things together and taking things out can help you a lot. But enablers are not just technology — they can be something completely different.

We had a company called Opster, and Opster was an international company with people literally around the world. There were about 18 people in the company — half of them were one per country: one in Brazil, one in Ukraine, one in Armenia. So how do you hire these people? Not all of them wanted to be consultants. They wanted to be hired as employees, pay taxes, and get all the benefits. And how do you do that from a company based in Israel? As always, where some people see a problem, others see an opportunity. There’s a company called Deel — an Israeli company actually, like many — that provides global compliance services for big-name companies, including payroll, reports, and analytics. Basically, you went to Deel, you paid $500 a month, and they hired that employee for you. That was it. You never had to deal with the employment agreement. You told them how much you’re willing to pay, you paid $500, and you never had to think about that employee’s administration again — only their work. You didn’t have to set up a company in Ukraine or Armenia or anywhere. So when I talk about not needing to set up a company in the US — if you find that you need somebody in the US, use Deel.

Now, it’s 2024, there’s a crisis, companies can’t raise money, and it turns out that thousands of startups in the US are shutting down. So somebody saw an opportunity where others see a disaster. It’s called Simple Closure — a startup that helps you close your business. It turns out it’s complicated to shut down a company on your own. They call themselves undertakers — company undertakers.

Okay, so let’s summarize everything I wanted to cover today. I told you I was going to talk about three things: jobs to be done, growth engines, and enablers. Three things. So what do you do first — start thinking about a great idea, or focus first on talking to customers and finding out what the job to be done is? I believe that knowing your jobs to be done is far more important than knowing how to solve them. But how do you figure out the job to be done? The biggest asset is, of course, if you come from that industry — like I told you about Capital IQ, they were the customers, they knew exactly what they wanted. People who have been doing something for 10 years and say, “There must be a better way to do what I’m doing” — those are the best people for understanding jobs to be done at a visceral level.

So as I said, if you don’t come from the customer side, you should hire — and I say “hire” because we’ve been talking about hiring — you should hire that knowledge before investing in developing the product. How do you hire that knowledge? I’m trying to give you back-of-the-envelope ideas for how to build a new startup — not that I’m necessarily encouraging you to do it, but I want to show the process so you can start thinking about it. It doesn’t have to be complicated. So you talk to potential customers. And most of the time when you ask them about their problems, there’s a good chance they’ll do one of two things: either they’ll talk to you about the problem they had yesterday, because it’s fresh in their mind even though it’s actually a small problem, or they don’t really know what you want from them — they’re working, they’re happy, everything is great. They have 10 people filling out forms, it’s wonderful. They got a promotion, now they have 20 people. What could be better than that, right?

So most processes — if you talk about a process, I’m yet to find one that cannot be improved. Every process, from cooking to cleaning the house to selling — every process can be improved. So ask them to explain the process. Don’t ask them about the problem. Ask: what do you put into the CRM? Where is the data coming from? How does it get to them? Is it accurate? Oh, somebody has to type it? Okay, and who is that somebody? The more questions you ask, the more you’re going to discover the disaster. The more you’re going to pull your hair out and say, “I can’t believe that’s what they do.” Yes, that’s what they do. And they have 20 people doing it, and the manager will fight forever to grow to 25, because that’s his promotion. Remember that.

You can start by asking friends and family. You can talk to retired executives — retired people are always my best targets, because they’re bored, they know what they’re doing, and they’re looking for someone to talk to about their business. Or even past workers who aren’t retired but have left the company — you can start talking to them. You can use LinkedIn introductions. There’s a product called Expandi — costs a few dollars a month — and it allows you to send connection invitations at scale. You can send about 400 to 500 invitations a month before LinkedIn shuts you down, and Expandi knows that limit, so it keeps you within it. You give it a list and it starts sending invitations. In our experience and others’, about 30% of the people you reach out to will accept. So if you send 500 a month, you’re going to get 100 to 150 people who say, “Sure, let’s connect.” That’s enough people to start asking questions. Most of them won’t spend a lot of time with you, but some will, and you can start understanding the business.

Then, once you’ve talked to a few of them and you start identifying a common problem, you can say, “Okay, I want to organize a roundtable with executives in this industry to talk about these specific problems and how each of you is solving them.” People like to talk about their issues with peers, so you’re giving them that opportunity. At a later stage, you might consider forming an advisory board. And here’s my content again: don’t boil the ocean. Start with a simple product. Don’t try to solve too many problems at once.

Okay, Gong and Chorus — why? And then we’ll wrap up. There’s a huge difference between talking to people and having people who pay you money. When people pay you money, they consider you a partner. That’s the reality.
Later stage, you might consider an advisory board. And here’s my company, my content again — don’t boil the ocean. Start with a simple product. Don’t try to solve a lot of problems. Okay, Gong — and here’s why. And then we will end.

There’s a huge difference between talking to people and having people that pay you money. When people pay you money, they consider you to be a partner. That’s the reality.

They start talking to you. When you call them, they answer. So remember — branding first. That’s the strongest branding possible. Even if you sell them a product competing with Gong for $10 a month, all it does is measure call times, okay? And it’s really cheap. Now you have the VP of Sales and the Sales Directors talking to you. They know you think about their problems. They’re talking to you now. Now it’s easier to grow with them than to come in with a product that costs $10,000 and has this very complex process that they don’t really understand.

יע לפניך ויש לך trigger מוגדר, אתה לא יודע. רשימה מעודכנת של משרדים אחרים זמינים באזור — תמיד רוצים להסתכל סביב ולראות מה עוד יש. אולי אפשר להחליף ולקבל מקום טוב יותר, או אולי צריך לגדול. ומספר האנשים בכל מיקום — יש לכם 20,000 רגל מרובע ושלושה עובדים. מקום גדול, אף אחד כאן. זה כי אני קמצן. אז רוצים להשוות את מספר האנשים עם השטח ולברור האם יש לכם מעט מדי מקום ואתם צריכים לשכור עוד, או אולי יותר מדי מקום ואתם צריכים לצמצם. בסדר, אלה רק כמה דוגמאות להראות שכשמתחילים להעשיר נתונים במידע ממקור אחר, הם הופכים ליקרי ערך יותר.

בואו נחזור לסיפור שש החברות. אחד הנכסים — ZoomInfo מצליחה, לא במקרה. עשינו הרבה דברים מעניינים. כשחשבתי על אנשי מכירות — זוכרים, עברתי ממגייסים לאנשי מכירות — בהדרגה הפך ברור שהמידע שמעניין באמת הוא לא על האנשים, אלא על החברות. למה? כי כשעסק רוצה למכור לעסק אחר, הם קובעים קריטריונים שהופכים חברה אחרת לפרוספקט. למשל, אנחנו ב-ZoomInfo לא יכולים למכור לשום חברה שאין לה אנשי מכירות. נניח שהם מוכרים B2C — יש להם חנויות, הם לא צריכים ZoomInfo. זה חסר תועלת עבורם. אז למה אני רוצה לדבר איתם? זה מבוזבז. אם יש להם שני אנשי מכירות, עדיין בזבוז — אני לא הולך לבזבז את הזמן של איש מכירות על להתקשר אליהם. אבל אם יש להם 500 אנשי מכירות? עכשיו אתם מדברים. עכשיו זה מעניין. אז אנחנו משתמשים בזה.

זוכרים, יש לנו את רשימת האנשים בחברה עם התארים שלהם. אז היה קל מאוד לספור כמה אנשי מכירות יש לכל חברה ולחלק את השוק להזדמנויות ללא, הזדמנויות קטנות, בינוניות, הזדמנויות גדולות, ולהתחיל להפנות את ה-leads או החברות לאנשים הנכונים. בדרך כלל יקר ערך מאוד. וזה כי ל-ZoomInfo יש את זה. אם אתם מנסים למכור לחברות שיש להן משרדים רבים, אתם רוצים לדעת כמה מיקומים יש להן. אז אתם מתחילים לראות שהגדרת הפרופיל של הלקוח האידיאלי של כל חברה שונה מאוד. מאוד, מאוד שונה. אז התחלנו לאסוף הרבה נתונים על חברות — התארים של האנשים, למשל, כמה מהנדסים יש להם, מה היחס בין מספר המהנדסים למספר אנשי המכירות, כמה עורכי דין יש להם.

תתפלאו — זה אלמנט מאוד מעניין על חברה. לחלק מהחברות יש הרבה עורכי דין, אז רוצים לדעת מה הם עושים איתם. ולחברות אחרות יש מעט מאוד עורכי דין. לרוב החברות הגדולות יש הרבה עורכי דין, ואם מסתכלים על זה, רובם הם עורכי מס. אז כמו כל חברות הגז באמריקה — יש להן יותר עורכי מס לחברה מאשר ל-IRS — מס הכנסה. למה? כי הן לא אוהבות לשלם מסים. הן מעדיפות לשלם לעורכי דין כדי להימנע מתשלום. אז מה שרואים הוא שהמידע על חברות היה הרבה יותר מעניין, והתחלנו להעשיר את מסד הנתונים שלנו במאות, אם לא אלפי, מה שקראנו לו attributes — חלקם חישבנו, חלקם נלקחו ממקומות אחרים.

זה הפך לנכס עצום כי זה אפשר ללקוחות שלנו להיות ממש חכמים לגבי איך הם מזהים את ה-ICP שלהם. אז זה מה שאני אומר — כשמתחילים להוסיף מידע נוסף, תתחילו להיות עם עסק אמיתי. הערך של הנתונים גדל משמעותית כשהם מועשרים בנתונים אחרים. אז נתתי לכם template: לכו ל-back office, ברו מה הם צריכים, גשרו על הפער בין ה-input האנושי למסד הנתונים שרוצים לבנות, העשירו, ויש לכם מוצר.

בסדר, בואו ניקח דוגמה אחרת — הנהלת חשבונות לעסקים קטנים. זה גם מאוד מעניין. לרוב העסקים הקטנים יש הנהלת חשבונות, אבל למה יש להם הנהלת חשבונות? כי המדינה הזו והרבה מדינות אחרות רוצות שישלמו מסים. כדי לשלם מסים, צריך להגיש דוחות כספיים שאומרים כמה כסף הרוויחו או הפסידו כל שנה. אז יש להם רואה חשבון, או פנימי או כשירות, והם לוקחים כל קבלה וכל חשבונית וכל זה ומקלידים ויוצרים דוחות כספיים. עכשיו, מה קורה עם הדוחות הכספיים האלה? כמה מכם יודעים לקרוא דוחות כספיים? ממש לקרוא אותם ולהבין אותם? לרוב הבעלים של עסקים קטנים אין מושג מה הדוח הכספי אומר ואין הם משתמשים בהם להחלטות יומיומיות. איך הם מנהלים את העסק? כי הם מנהלים אותו עשר שנים. יש להם אינטואיציה טובה, אביהם נתן להם את העסק או מה שזה לא יהיה — הם מנהלים ללא שום דוחות כספיים. זאת המציאות.

כשאני מדבר על עסקים קטנים, אני מדבר על מכולת קטנה או בית קפה — הם מוכרים, אני לא יודע, מיליון שקל בשנה, עשרה מיליון שקל בשנה. אבל זה עסק קטן. הבעלים הוא המנהל, הוא הכל. אז הייתה לנו enabler — הבחור בא עם enabler — שהוא: הם משתמשים בחשבשבת. חשבשבת בישראל היא תוכנת הנהלת החשבונות הדומיננטית ויש לה API, אז אפשר להתחבר אליה דרך האינטרנט. אם הבעלים נותן לכם רשות ואומר, “בסדר, אני רוצה לעשות את זה,” אפשר לקרוא את כל הדוח. יש גם חוק חדש שנקרא חוק הבנקאות הפתוחה, או “בנקאתוחה”. הוא בעצם אומר שכל בנק חייב לאפשר לכל לקוח לגשת לחשבון שלו דרך API. אז אני יכול לחבר את חשבון הבנק שלי למערכת הנהלת החשבונות שלי או ל-CRM שלי או כל מה שזה לא יהיה. זה מגיע, אני חושב, עד סוף השנה הזו.

אז מה שהחברה הזו עשתה הוא שהתחברו דרך ה-APIs לחשבשבת ולבנקים. הם ישבו עם הלקוח ואמרו, “האם תוכל לשים את פרטי ההתחברות שלך כדי שנוכל להתחבר למערכת הנהלת החשבונות ולחשבון הבנק שלך?” והם בנו דוח, אבל הפעם ניסו לעשות אותו יותר תפעולי. הם פשוט חשבו על מה שהם רוצים להראות ללקוחות ובנו דוח פשוט מאוד. למשל, מכירות לעובד — לוקחים את הנתונים שהיו שם, שנועדו למטרות מס, אבל יש בהם נתונים. כל רשומה, כל שורה, שונה מחברה לחברה, בהתאם לאיך שהחליטו לעשות את זה. אבל יש בה משהו.

אז הם עשו את זה. הייתה להם מודל עסקי שונה בראש — לא משנה. אבל אמרתי להם, “למה לא — אני לא יודע מה זה אומר — ללכת ולהראות את זה ללקוחות. בואו נראה מה הם חושבים על זה.” אז הם הלכו והתחילו להראות ללקוחות.

ולהפתעת כולם, היה אלמנט אחד שמשך מיד את תשומת הלב, וזה היה חשבונות הפריע — כמה כסף עדיין בחוץ שלא גובים. כולנו מכירים net 30, net 60, וכן הלאה. הייתה להם את כל המידע הזה במערכת הנהלת החשבונות, אבל הייתה להם גם כל המידע על אנשים שלא שילמו — והם היו בחוץ 120 יום, 300 יום, מה שזה לא היה. ובעלי העסקים היו בהלם. הם היו פשוט בהלם מוחלט מכמות הכסף שהיה שייך להם וישב שם ולא היה בחשבון הבנק שלהם. וזה גרם להם לאמר, “רגע, אני צריך לראות את זה.”

אז יצרנו אפליקציית גבייה פשוטה שבעצם לא עסקה כל כך בגביית חוב רע, אלא פשוט בהבטחה שמקבלים תשלום בזמן. ב-ZoomInfo גבינו 99.3% — אמרתי לכם את זה בפגישה האחרונה. 99.3% מכל החשבוניות נגבו, שזה כמעט שיא עולמי. ואיך עשינו את זה? עשינו את זה כי האדם — הדונה המפורסמת — פשוט דאגה שאנשים שחייבים לנו כסף יהיו מודעים לזה הרבה לפני שהגיע המועד. אז אם זה היה net 30, אחרי שבועיים שלחה אימייל ואמרה, “הנה החשבונית שוב. אני רוצה לוודא שכבר יש לכם אותה בהנהלת החשבונות ואתם לא הולכים לפספס את התשלום ב-17 ביולי.” שבוע לאחר מכן אמרה, “לא הגבתם לי — האם היא במערכת שלכם?”

פשוט נדנדתם, וגבינו תשלום. למה? כי אם שואלים ומגיע לכם הכסף, ושואלים על זה שלוש פעמים, הם ישלמו לכם. אף אחד לא יכול לכעוס עליכם — זה הכסף שלכם שיושב בבנק שלהם. אתם רוצים אותו, זהו. זה באמת פשוט. לא צריך להיות נאסטי, לא צריך להיות שום דבר. פשוט צריך להראות שאתם יעילים ואתם באמת רוצים לקבל תשלום ביום שאתם רוצים לקבל אותו. אז זה בעצם מה שהם עושים.

בסדר. וזה startup קטן, רק מתחיל. אבל אני מראה לכם שוב את הרעיון הזה של enablers — התחברות לחשבשבת כדי שתוכלו לבנות את הדוחות האלה בעשר דקות: “תן לי רק את פרטי ההתחברות שלך ואנחנו בפנים.” התחברות לחשבון הבנק שלכם כדי לראות מתי כסף הגיע ויצא, ולהשוות. אלה enablers. הוא לא ידע מה לעשות איתם, אבל הלקוחות שלו ידעו מה לעשות איתם. אז לוקחים את ה-enablers האלה, בונים משהו פשוט מאוד, הולכים ושואלים אנשים מה ה-job שהם רוצים לבצע — והאנשים האלה לא ידעו עד שהסתכלו על המספרים. כשהסתכלו על המספרים, ידעו בדיוק מה הם רוצים: “אני רוצה את החשבונית הזו משולמת עכשיו.” זה מה שהם רצו.

אז אתם מתחילים לראות מה אני מתכוון ב-enablers. חשבשבת היא רק דוגמה אחת. יש עוד אחד גדול — QuickBooks. אשאיר את זה לכם.

בסדר, אני ממשיך לאמר, “היו יצירתיים, תחשבו על זה,” וכן הלאה. יש בחור שנקרא יעקב גולדנברג — הוא בעצם מתגורר לא רחוק מכאן, מלמד ב-IDC — והוא כתב ספר עם אדם אחר שנקרא *Inside the Box*. בכל מקום מלמדים אתכם לחשוב מחוץ לקופסא. מסתבר שמחוץ לקופסא לוקח אתכם להרפתקאות מוזרות. אבל רוב היצירתיות קורה בתוך הקופסא, כלומר שימוש רק בדברים שיש לכם. כדאי לקרוא את הספר. הוא מאוד מעניין ויש בו מערכת אמיתית לאיך להיות יצירתי. אתם שמים את כל הדברים שיש לכם בתוך הקופסא ומתחילים להוסיף ולחסר ולעשות כל מיני דברים.

לא אכנס לפרטים, אבל מה שאני מנסה לאמר כאן הוא: השתמשו ב-enablers האלה כ”תוך הקופסא”. הנה מה שאני מנסה לעשות, והנה העולם — איך אני יכול לקחת זה פלוס זה, לערבב אותם בדרך כלשהי, ולקבל תוצאות מעניינות? במיוחד ב-growth engines שבהם אתם יודעים מה ה-job to be done, שבהם יש לכם הגדרה טובה של ה-jobs to be done. אם תסתכלו על זה עם הגישה הזו של inside the box, תוכלו לגלות הרבה חדשנות שהיא ממש לנגד עיניכם. ממש. לפעמים פשוט לא חושבים על זה. כמו שאמרתי על הגבייה — אין בזה שום דבר חכם. זה ברור. ואף אחד לא עושה את זה. למה? כי הם לא חשבו על זה, זהו. יש אימייל. אתם יודעים את האימייל שלהם. אתם יודעים בדיוק מתי החשבונית אמורה להגיע. אתם יודעים הכל — ופשוט לא עושים את זה. ואז צריך ללכת לגבייה, מתחילים לרדוף אחריהם, ומבזבזים הרבה כסף. וזה לא growth engine. אם עושים את זה מראש, מספר הפעמים שצריך לרדוף אחריהם נמוך מאוד. זה מה שאני מנסה לאמר לאורך כל הדרך: תחשבו על ה-job to be done, תחשבו על כל המערכות הזמינות לכם, ותשתמשו בהן.

אני חוזר לדבר האחר שאמרתי על מה הוא ההיפך של growth engine — זה נקרא אנשים. בכל מקום בארגון שלכם שאתם מרגישים שצריך להוסיף עוד אנשים כי אתם גדלים, זה המקום שבו עליכם לעצור. לגרד את הזקן שלכם — זה לא קיים — ולאמר, “האם אני באמת צריך להוסיף עוד אדם? באמת, באמת — האם אני צריך להוסיף עוד אדם? או שאפשר לעשות את זה עם אותו אדם, עם כלים טובים יותר, רעיונות טובים יותר, תהליך טוב יותר?” וכשמתחילים לחשוב ככה, בכל פעם שאתם מתפתים לשכור עוד אדם — עצרו. גיוס אנשים הוא באמת קשה. אז בכל פעם שצריך לשכור אדם, זה הרבה עבודה. הסיכויים שלכם לגייס את האדם הנכון לעבודה הנכונה לא גבוהים במיוחד.

בסופו של דבר, אפילו אם מוצאים את האדם הנכון לתפקיד הנכון, החיים קשים — הם רוצים לעבור למקום אחר, הם התחתנו והם הולכים ליפן. מה שזה לא יהיה, אנשים קשים לניהול. אז בכל פעם שאתם מרגישים צורך לשכור עוד אדם, עצרו. תחשבו inside the box, תנתחו את ה-job to be done, ותברו האם אפשר לעשות את זה עם תהליך. ככל שהסקייל של הפעילות גדל, זה הכרחי. זה לא רק משהו שכדאי לחשוב עליו. כפי שאמרתי לכם קודם, המקום היחיד שבו לפחות לי לא הייתה ברירה או לא מצאתי דרך אחרת היה אנשי מכירות. אבל אנשי מכירות — אם משלמים להם 15% או 20% מהמכירה, הם עדיין מוסיפים 80% רווח. אז זה קצת מעניין.

אבל אפילו אז, הדרך שבנינו את זה ב-ZoomInfo הייתה מאוד מכנית. בנינו את כל התהליך כך שאנשי מכירות ממוצעים יצליחו ויהיו פרודוקטיביים. בנינו מערכת שלמה סביבם כדי שיצליחו, גם אם הם לא גאונים ולא מצטיינים — כי חשבנו על growth engine, על איך אפשר להכפיל אותם בלי להיות תלויים בכישורים האישיים שלהם. אפשר לקרוא על זה. אז “think inside the box” הוא גם רעיון מעניין, והוא כבר בספר. אפשר לקרוא איך, אם לוקחים מוצר ומסתכלים על כל התכונות שלו ומתחילים לחסר אותן, הרבה פעמים מה שמגלים הוא שכשמחסירים תכונות, בעצם מקבלים מוצר מאוד מעניין שלא היה קיים קודם.

אז אדבר על זה עכשיו. האם מישהו מכיר חברה שנקראת Gong? כמה אנשים. ו-Chorus — מישהו מכיר את Chorus? כן, Chorus. אז Gong הגיע עם רעיון נהדר ו-disruptive: אנחנו הולכים להקליט כל אינטראקציית מכירות עם לקוחות, להמיר אותה לטקסט, לנתח את הטקסט, למצוא בעיות בתהליך המכירות או עם איש המכירות, לעשות הרבה ניתוחים — וזו מערכת יקרה מאוד. זו חברה ישראלית, Gong. לפחות המייסדים ישראלים. והמתחרה בישראל שנקראת Chorus — למי שלא יודע למה זה רלוונטי — Chorus נרכשה על ידי ZoomInfo תמורת 550 מיליון דולר. לא שאלו אותי, אבל רעיון מעניין.

נתקלתי ב-Gong שנים רבות קודם לכן כשלאחד מאנשי המכירות שלי הייתה ניסיון חינמי לחודש-שניים. הוא השתמש בזה ורצה להראות לי את ההשפעה של התוכנה הזו על פעילות המכירות שלו. הוא אמר, “היו לי שני אנשי מכירות — אחד היה פרודוקטיבי מאוד והשני פחות, נקרא לזה ככה. ורציתי להסביר לו למה הוא לא עומד בקריטריונים.” אז כל מה שעשה הוא להשתמש ב-Gong כדי למדוד את הזמן שאיש המכירות מדבר מול הזמן שהלקוח מדבר. זהו. ולצור יחס. והוא אמר, הנה לך, הוא יכול להראות לאיש המכירות הזה שהוא דיבר 80% מהזמן והלקוח רק 20% מהזמן.

ואיש המכירות המצליח האחר דיבר 20% מהזמן, והלקוח דיבר 80% מהזמן. האדם הזה עשה 80% יותר מכירות ממך. אז לא צריך להיות מדען רקטות כדי לדעת שאם ממשיך לדבר והלקוח פשוט לא מקשיב והולך, אתה לא מוכר. אבל אם שואל שאלות, ממתין לתשובות, ומנהל שיחה אמיתית, יש סיכוי גדול הרבה יותר לסגור את העסקה. ואמרתי, “זה כל מה שאתה עושה עם Gong?” הוא אמר, “כן, למה שאעשה משהו אחר? זה עובד.” וחשבתי לעצמי — כמה כסף אני צריך להשקיע בבניית מוצר שפשוט מודד את היחס הזה? ואם אני מוכר אותו לחברות תמורת, נניח, 50 דולר לחודש למשתמש או 10 דולר לחודש למשתמש, האם זה לא יהיה דרך פנומנלית לקבל לקוחות, במקום לנסות למכור מערכת שלמה תמורת 10,000 דולר?

אז זה סוג ה-“think inside the box”. לפעמים אנשים מוסיפים יותר ויותר תכונות למוצר — למה? כי החברה הזו רצתה את התכונה הזו, וזו החברה רצתה את התכונה הזו, אז עכשיו יש לנו שתי תכונות, בואו נשים אותן ביחד. וגם החברה הזו רצתה תכונה נוספת. לפני שיודעים, יש 100 תכונות שאף אחד לא משתמש בהן, והמוצר מאוד מורכב כי עכשיו צריך ניווט רק כדי להגיע לכל אחת מהתכונות. נכון?

אתם יודעים, אם אתם הולכים לקבוצת הון סיכון ומנסים לגייס כסף — האם ראיתם פעם את גודל ההסכמים? הם בערך בעובי הזה. וכשאתם שואלים אותם למה הוא כל כך גדול, הם אומרים כל עמוד יש לו סיבה, כי בשלב מסוים מישהו תבע אותם או משהו קרה, אז עכשיו הם סגרו את הפרצה הזו. אז בעצם יש הרבה פרצות שנסגרות. אבל זו לא דרך לבנות מוצר מצליח או חברה מצליחה. מה שאני מנסה לאמר שוב הוא: תחשבו מה ה-job to be done ומה המינימום שאפשר לעשות כדי להשיג אותו. חשיבה יצירתית על ערבוב דברים ביחד ולקיחת דברים החוצה יכולה לעזור לכם הרבה. אבל enablers אינם רק טכנולוגיה — הם יכולים להיות משהו שונה לחלוטין.

הייתה לנו חברה שנקראת Opster, ו-Opster הייתה חברה בינלאומית עם אנשים ממש ברחבי העולם. היו בחברה כ-18 אנשים — חציים היו אחד למדינה: אחד בברזיל, אחד באוקראינה, אחד בארמניה. אז איך מגייסים את האנשים האלה? לא כולם רצו להיות יועצים. הם רצו להיות מועסקים כעובדים, לשלם מסים, ולקבל את כל הטבות. ואיך עושים את זה מחברה שמבוססת בישראל? כמו תמיד, שם שחלק רואים בעיה, אחרים רואים הזדמנות. יש חברה שנקראת Deel — חברה ישראלית בעצם, כמו רבות — שמספקת שירותי ציות גלובלי לחברות בשמות גדולים, כולל שכר, דוחות וניתוחים. בעצם, הלכת ל-Deel, שילמת 500 דולר לחודש, והם שכרו את העובד בשבילך. זהו. מעולם לא היה צריך לעסוק בהסכם העסקה. אמרת להם כמה אתה מוכן לשלם, שילמת 500 דולר, ומעולם לא היה צריך לחשוב על ניהול אותו עובד שוב — רק על עבודתו. לא היה צריך להקים חברה באוקראינה, ארמניה, או בשום מקום. אז כשאני מדבר על כך שלא צריך להקים חברה בארה”ב — אם מוצאים שצריך מישהו בארה”ב, השתמשו ב-Deel.

עכשיו, זה 2024, יש משבר, חברות לא יכולות לגייס כסף, ומסתבר שאלפי startups בארה”ב נסגרים. אז מישהו ראה הזדמנות שבה אחרים רואים אסון. זה נקרא Simple Closure — סטארטאפ שעוזר לכם לסגור את העסק. מסתבר שמסובך לסגור חברה בעצמך. הם מכנים את עצמם חברות קבלנות — קבלני חברות.

בסדר, אז בואו נסכם את כל מה שרציתי לכסות היום. אמרתי שאני הולך לדבר על שלושה דברים: jobs to be done, growth engines, ו-enablers. שלושה דברים. אז מה עושים קודם — מתחילים לחשוב על רעיון גדול, או מתמקדים קודם בדיבור עם לקוחות ולמציאת ה-job to be done? אני מאמין שידיעת ה-jobs to be done חשובה הרבה יותר מידיעת איך לפתור אותם. אבל איך מגלים את ה-job to be done? הנכס הגדול ביותר הוא, כמובן, אם אתם באים מהתעשייה הזו — כמו שסיפרתי לכם על Capital IQ, הם היו הלקוחות, הם ידעו בדיוק מה הם רוצים. אנשים שעשו משהו 10 שנים ואומרים, “חייב להיות דרך טובה יותר לעשות מה שאני עושה” — אלה האנשים הטובים ביותר להבנת jobs to be done ברמה הקרביים.

אז כפי שאמרתי, אם אינכם באים מצד הלקוח, כדאי לשכור — ואני אומר “לשכור” כי דיברנו על גיוס — כדאי לשכור את הידע הזה לפני השקעה בפיתוח המוצר. איך שוכרים את הידע הזה? אני מנסה לתת לכם רעיונות בגב המעטפה לאיך לבנות סטארטאפ חדש — לא שאני בהכרח מעודד אתכם לעשות את זה, אבל אני רוצה להראות את התהליך כדי שתוכלו להתחיל לחשוב על זה. זה לא חייב להיות מורכב. אז אתם מדברים עם לקוחות פוטנציאליים. ורוב הזמן כשאתם שואלים אותם על הבעיות שלהם, יש סיכוי טוב שהם יעשו אחד משני דברים: או שידברו איתכם על הבעיה שהייתה להם אתמול, כי היא טרייה בראשם למרות שזו בעצם בעיה קטנה, או שהם לא ממש יודעים מה אתם רוצים מהם — הם עובדים, הם מרוצים, הכל מצוין. יש להם 10 אנשים שממלאים טפסים, זה נהדר. קיבלו קידום, עכשיו יש להם 20 אנשים. מה יכול להיות טוב יותר מזה, נכון?

אז רוב התהליכים — אם מדברים על תהליך, עדיין לא מצאתי אחד שלא ניתן לשפר. כל תהליך, מבישול לניקוי הבית למכירה — כל תהליך ניתן לשיפור. אז תבקשו מהם להסביר את התהליך. אל תשאלו אותם על הבעיה. שאלו: מה אתם מכניסים ל-CRM? מאיפה הנתונים מגיעים? איך הם מגיעים אליהם? האם הם מדויקים? אה, מישהו צריך להקליד את זה? בסדר, ומי זה המישהו הזה? ככל שתשאלו יותר שאלות, כך תגלו יותר את האסון. יותר תתחילו לתלוש את השיער ולאמר, “אני לא מאמין שזה מה שהם עושים.” כן, זה מה שהם עושים. ויש להם 20 אנשים שעושים את זה, והמנהל ילחם לנצח כדי לגדול ל-25, כי זה הקידום שלו. זיכרו את זה.

אפשר להתחיל בשיחה עם חברים ומשפחה. אפשר לדבר עם מנהלים בדימוס — אנשים בדימוס הם תמיד היעדים הטובים ביותר שלי, כי הם משועממים, הם יודעים מה הם עושים, והם מחפשים מישהו לדבר איתו על העסק שלהם. או אפילו עובדים לשעבר שלא פרשו אבל עזבו את החברה — אפשר להתחיל לדבר איתם. אפשר להשתמש בהמלצות LinkedIn. יש מוצר שנקרא Expandi — עולה כמה דולרים לחודש — ומאפשר לשלוח הזמנות להתחבר בכמות גדולה. אפשר לשלוח בערך 400 עד 500 הזמנות לחודש לפני שLinkedIn סוגרים אתכם, ו-Expandi יודע את המגבלה הזו, אז הוא שומר אתכם בתוכה. אתם נותנים לו רשימה והוא מתחיל לשלוח הזמנות. מהניסיון שלנו ואחרים, כ-30% מהאנשים שפונים אליהם יסכימו. אז אם שולחים 500 לחודש, מקבלים 100 עד 150 אנשים שאומרים, “בטח, בואו נתחבר.” זה מספיק אנשים להתחיל לשאול שאלות. רובם לא יבלו הרבה זמן איתכם, אבל חלקם כן, ואפשר להתחיל להבין את העסק.

אחר כך, ברגע שדיברתם עם כמה מהם ומתחילים לזהות בעיה משותפת, אפשר לאמר, “בסדר, אני רוצה לארגן שולחן עגול עם מנהלים בתעשייה הזו כדי לדבר על הבעיות הספציפיות האלה ואיך כל אחד מכם פותר אותן.” אנשים אוהבים לדבר על הבעיות שלהם עם עמיתים, אז אתם נותנים להם את ההזדמנות הזו. בשלב מאוחר יותר, אולי תשקלו להקים מועצת ייעוץ. והנה התוכן שלי שוב: אל תרתחו את האוקיינוס. התחילו עם מוצר פשוט. אל תנסו לפתור יותר מדי בעיות בבת אחת.

בסדר, Gong ו-Chorus — למה? ואז נסיים. יש הבדל עצום בין דיבור עם אנשים לבין אנשים שמשלמים לכם כסף. כשאנשים משלמים לכם כסף, הם מתייחסים אליכם כשותפים. זאת המציאות.

הם מתחילים לדבר איתכם. כשאתם מתקשרים אליהם, הם עונים. אז זיכרו — branding קודם. זה ה-branding החזק ביותר האפשרי. אפילו אם אתם מוכרים להם מוצר שמתחרה ב-Gong תמורת 10 דולר לחודש, כל מה שהוא עושה הוא למדוד זמני שיחה, בסדר? וזה ממש זול. עכשיו יש לכם את סמנכ”ל המכירות ומנהלי המכירות מדברים איתכם. הם יודעים שאתם חושבים על הבעיות שלהם. הם מדברים איתכם עכשיו. עכשיו קל יותר לצמוח איתם מלבוא עם מוצר שעולה 10,000 דולר ויש בו תהליך מורכב מאוד שהם לא ממש מבינים.