January 7, 2025 • 39 mins
Dan Balcauski hosts Avi Freedman, Co-founder and CEO of Kentik, on SaaS Scaling Secrets. They discuss Kentik's evolution under Avi's leadership as a network intelligence platform, his extensive background in recurring revenue, and lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey. Avi recounts his career from founding the first internet service provider in Philadelphia to serving at Akamai, shares his 'superhero transformation moment,' and delves into the challenges of leading Kentik. The conversation explores the nuances of product-market fit, the impact of early-stage funding, the importance of self-service customer onboarding, and the perpetual complexities of pricing and packaging in SaaS businesses.
00:58 Avi Freedman's Journey in SaaS
05:59 Challenges and Insights in Leading Kentik
08:01 Product Market Fit and Customer Engagement
13:19 Funding and Bootstrapping Experiences
21:12 Scaling Challenges in Sales
22:17 Customer Engagement Strategies
23:16 Product Investments and Improvements
26:16 Pricing and Packaging Insights
29:46 Balancing Technical Expertise and Leadership
34:19 Reflections on Leadership and Growth
Guest Links
avi@kentik.com
avi@avi.net
Avi on X/Twitter
Avi on LinkedIn
avi.net
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Dan Balcauski (00:20):
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories from the leaders of the
best scale up.
B2B SaaS Companies.
I'm your host, Dan Balcauski,founder of Product Tranquility.
Today I'm excited to speak withAvi Freedman.
Avi is the co-founder and CEO ofKentik, a leading network
intelligence platform.
Under his leadership, Kentik hasevolved from serving technical
champions to becoming a criticalenterprise platform for network
visibility and performance.
Before founding Kentik in 2014,Avi served as VP of network
(00:43):
infrastructure for Akamai duringtheir rapid growth.
Let's dive in.
Welcome Avi to SaaS scalingSecrets.
Avi Freedman (00:49):
Thanks, Dan for having me.
Dan Balcauski (00:51):
I'm excited for our conversation today.
We were wrapping right beforethe episode about some of our
shared love of the networkinfrastructure space.
I gave folks a little bit oftaste of your background, but
can you tell us about yourjourney in the SaaS world?
Avi Freedman (01:02):
Sure.
So I've been doing recurringrevenue.
Which is not necessarily SaaSsince I started my first non-con
consulting company.
I did database consulting in,in, in the eighties, but I
started the first internetprovider in Philadelphia in
1992, so that was recurringrevenue.
It looked like a multi-linebulletin board system, but you
know, happened to have theinternet inside.
(01:24):
And then I was at an ISP wherewe build people, recurring
called above net.
And then I was at Akamai, whichdid still infrastructure but
recurring.
And then I actually took a briefdiversion, if you've ever seen
the show, Silicon Valley towardsboxes.
We built sensors that watchedpackets and everyone said, what
do we do with all this data?
And then I said, aha.
(01:45):
Would you pay me, to have thisin my lab?
And they're like, we'd ratherhave you run it as a service.
I'm like, awesome.
And SaaS was just becoming athing.
So decided to move to the BayArea and raise venture capital
and start out the SaaS journeythat way.
Dan Balcauski (02:01):
Well, we'll dive into some of those experiences
during this conversation.
'cause you have a rich historyin recurring revenue that I'm
sure you've seen.
Many things evolve and changeand probably a bunch stay the
same, that for whatever reasonthe marketers wanna call new and
different.
But.
Before we go there, on yourjourney, like everyone has what
I think of as a superherotransformation moment.
(02:21):
So you're Peter Parker, normalhigh school student.
One day, get bit by aradioactive spider.
You wake up the next day, you'reSpider-Man.
What has that been for you inyour journey?
Avi Freedman (02:31):
I was very fortunate that when I was eight,
so this is 1978, so think wayback machine.
So computers were not litteredall over the place.
Then my uncle gave me a book onbasic at a family Seder, a
family dinner, and my father waslike, oh, we have computers that
run basic at the hospital.
(02:53):
And he had a wizard working forhim, Steve Robinson, who had
fallen into the Unix camp in theway back.
And he became, available as amentor to me and taught me that
anything that some human createdyou can understand given
sufficient time and patience.
And so I think that insight madereal and of, plus growing up in
(03:14):
a day when you actually couldunderstand everything about a
computer has been the superpowerrisk.
Thing for me, and I see a lot ofpeople that don't really believe
that they can understandanything, and I think it holds
them back.
So,
Dan Balcauski (03:27):
That's what such a great confluence of factors
there.
It reminds me, I think you'retalking to me from Seattle and I
think there was a story aboutBill Gates was one of the few,
folks kind of early on withaccess to a computer that he
could work on.
And that definitely is highlytransformative in his, for his
life and hopefully yours.
I remember I in I think fifthgrade, we had some computers in
(03:49):
our classroom and we programmedin basic, and I got the computer
to do the Star Wars themebecause it and I think I had
some little crappy asie artanimations of stars, like, like
Supernova,
Avi Freedman (04:01):
On the other hand, it is worth noting most of the
people that I know that are, Iwill just.
I know this is not, there's alot that goes into what we call
intelligence.
The people that I would say thatare at the next level that I
want to be around that push my,strain, my understanding or
whatever, a lot of them can takethe fun out of it sometimes,
(04:21):
because I remember I got an a DDcard, a music card, sorry, I
called it a music card for mycomputer that I had bought with
some of my Bar mitzvah money.
And I went to this wizard,Steve, and he is like.
Oh yeah, that's just an a DDcard, a d to a card.
You're like, would you like meto explain to you how that
works?
And I was like, but he playsmusic.
And he is like, no, no, no.
This is just math and signals.
Let me explain it to you.
It is like, but he plays music.
(04:42):
So, sometimes familiarity, youhave to retain wonder in the
world.
Even as you under you understandit grows.
Dan Balcauski (04:47):
Well, yes some, somebody at some level has to
understand the brutal details,but let the kids have their
magic As long as they can last.
Well, so that's, so, that'sfascinating.
And obviously your passion fortechnology has not waned as it's
been evidenced throughout yourcareer.
You find yourself, co-foundingKentik 2014 and now leading the
company as CEO.
For folks who aren't aware, canyou just give us a 32nd overview
(05:10):
of what Kentik is?
Avi Freedman (05:11):
Sure.
If I talk to an Uber driver, Iwould say we make the internet
go.
If I, Talk to a level down wemake all the infrastructure fast
and secure for enterprisesworldwide.
So we take network telemetrymetrics, traffic, data
performance routing, all thestuff about how things connect
to each other and howapplications run through
networks and our big dataplatform.
(05:33):
Use ai, generate insights, pokepeople on the shoulders, say,
Hey, you have a problem here.
Here's what you should probablydo to fix it.
Mostly around security, costoptimization, performance.
So we're a SaaS company, 200people and growing, focusing,
but on enterprise and also havea large service provider
business.
Dan Balcauski (05:50):
You had mentioned in the intro that, obviously you
had found an ISP.
You've been in recurringrevenue.
You obviously rode the wave ofAkamai during their incredible
growth.
What surprised you about leadingKentik that maybe you wouldn't
have guessed from yourexperiences prior to starting
that this company?
Avi Freedman (06:09):
Oh, I mean, how much I suck at being CEO.
I mean, I was like, well, I gotthis.
I was, I ran engineering.
I worked for, well, the CTOCo-founder at above net, about a
month, maybe a month and a halfafter I started at Akamai.
I merged a group run by a friendof mine who was one of the a, my
co-founders with the technologygroup.
He had run the business sidegroup of the network group and
(06:30):
ran that, reporting to the CEOwas, I've been, I've started a
couple smaller companies andsold them and I was like, okay,
well I know how to do this.
And, it turns out thatespecially the go to market
side, a lot has changed sincesince I worked closely and,
working besides.
A lot of the go to market versushaving ultimate responsibility
for it.
(06:51):
Very different.
But again, think back to before,I started Kentik in 2014.
So think back to the last I hadbeen in enterprise sales, was.
Really more actively involved.
99 to 2004.
So obviously a big jump fromthere to there.
And, SaaS coming into a thingand all the similarities between
legal, SaaS, marketing, SaaStechnical SaaS that everyone was
(07:13):
figuring out at the same time.
So, all the things I need tolearn and ways to do better at
building a company, building theproduct, going to market, all
that stuff.
Dan Balcauski (07:21):
Well, I absolutely love the
vulnerability and transparencyand I think you are in good
company among the impressiveleaders I've talked to on this
show where something about agrowth mindset and constantly
running up against your owndeficiencies and.
Figure out how to overcome them.
Is the reason that you know, alot of folks such as yourself
are successful?
Because we don't take no for ananswer and we we realize we
(07:43):
constantly need to overcome newchallenges like every CEO faces
challenges along the way.
As you think about your journeygrowing and Scaling Kentik to
the point it's got today, isthere a specific challenge that
just stands out to you, acrucible moment that's kind of,
really shaped your view of howto grow a SaaS company?
Avi Freedman (08:01):
I think it's worth as you grow as a company, going
back to what we saw early on atKentik and what I advise
founders, which is, we talked toour first a hundred customers,
and I think half of them bothasked.
How much does it cost, which isa really good buying signal, and
(08:24):
when can I have it?
And so if you're a growingcompany and you're thinking
about things that customers areasking for, it's like, oh, well
I, my customer, I buy this fromthem and I want this and I want
that.
If you then show it to people.
And they're not asking thosequestions.
And instead they say, oh, thatlooks interesting.
I might try that.
Maybe that isn't worth goingdeep on until you get the right
(08:44):
kind of customer engagement.
So, just remember your searchfor product market fit and and
and bring that to your futureexplorations as you try to grow
the platform.
Dan Balcauski (08:54):
I love that.
So, how much does it cost andwhen can I have it now?
At the beginning of that, so wasthat were those signals that you
were having sort of, when youhad, before you had built the
product, or I guess what stageof the company were you at where
you kind of noticed thatpattern?
Avi Freedman (09:08):
I mean, the product at the time was the
front.
So, I, it turns out I'm reallygood at building distributed
systems and databases.
Dom and CSS make me.
Like angry, like I actually wantto go, use the kicking bag.
So, our front end for thisproduct that we were demoing,
(09:29):
basically the insight was asopposed to companies where you
have worked large amount of datacoming in, observability really
hard to store it all.
So we built distributed system,let people ask any questions, so
they don't need to know inadvance what they want to ask.
They can solve these problemswith complex hybrid
infrastructure.
So to demonstrate it.
W the front end was a con jobbemitting.
(09:54):
HTML with JavaScript for highcharts that had data embedded in
it.
And then every five seconds itwould go do a database query and
then it would auto refresh.
That was the ui because like,web, website, I don't even know
web office was a thing backthen, but whatever.
I mean, you don't want to get meinvolved in the front end stuff.
It'll be like, go to the websitethere, I fixed it.
It'll look like that.
But code.
(10:14):
So it was a, here's what itcould be and then I would
quickly use.
Usually for giggles I would usecathode on OSX, which looks like
an old CRT terminal and I wouldshow them that they could use
the CLI to ask any question inSQL or whatever.
And some of the first nerds werelike, Ooh, that's cool.
'cause at Akamai we did that.
We wanted to use sql, but itturns out no one wants to use
SQL for this.
(10:34):
But and so, but people would seeit and go, aha, that's the kind
of question I want to answer.
So it was enough of a thing thatwe could, they could see we were
taking the telemetry, we werestoring it, we were letting them
ask any question.
And they're like, okay, you needto finish this.
No one actually was ready to payfor what we had at the time.
But we were looking for thatsignal and we did get some of
the biggest networks in theworld to send us their telemetry
(10:56):
without an NDA without.
I mean, we were a company, butwe had no money in the bank, all
that, just because I helped totrain them in the nineties about
how routing works.
And they knew I was a good guy.
So, that helped the system andit helped us demo with some
stuff.
And I had a company doingUsenet, which is this old.
I, well, got it.
Pains me to say it's likeReddit, but Reddit is like, he's
not, not using it as likeReddit, but lots of computers,
(11:19):
distributed systems.
So we had a demo environment andwe could show people, based on
that.
So, yeah, it was
Dan Balcauski (11:24):
Well, for those listening I take with extreme
irony, your hatred of Dom andCSS when sitting behind you on
your bookshelf is Pearl Cookbookand Pearl for Dummies.
Which if anyone has ever dealtwith Pearl it's enough to get
your blood pressure
Avi Freedman (11:37):
No.
I completely disagree.
PHP is uppity web pages, right?
People say PHPs, like I say, I,you can write a pearl if you are
so inclined.
But you can also write C likePearl and I have written some
fairly large systems.
It is possible to write goodpro.
Most people don't,
Dan Balcauski (11:54):
It's possible.
It's, yes, it is possible.
I will let you win thatargument.
But you mentioned somethingabout, okay, so, so first of
all, I love this, so likehaving, getting signal on what
you wanna buy, or that customersare asking, buying questions,
when can I have it?
Urgency and how much will itcost?
They're already thinking about,swiping that
Avi Freedman (12:13):
Budget.
Budget.
Yes,
Dan Balcauski (12:14):
budget, right.
So, so those are reallyimportant because, I spend all
my time in pricing and packagingand, it's unfortunate how often
Avi Freedman (12:22):
for doing the Lord's work.
Dan Balcauski (12:24):
Well, we try, but it's very sad when I get a call
from a company that says, Hey,we built this thing, we're gonna
ship it in 30 days and we needto think about pricing and
packaging.
And I said, nobody has asked themarket what if they're willing
to pay for this thing yet.
This seems like a terriblemistake of resources.
Like we did not have thisconversation earlier than this,
but, you talked about having nomoney in the bank and on a,
(12:46):
remind me on a previous podcastyou were on, I heard you discuss
some of the pros and cons ofgetting funding outside of your
customers early on and what thatcan do.
And and I was curious if youcould elaborate on your
perspective and what you see askind of the.
Maybe the undiscussed sideeffects of taking funding as a
(13:10):
growing company and what thatcan, like, maybe what that helps
you like focus on or not focuson to your peril downstream.
Avi Freedman (13:19):
I had worked with venture capitalists.
At Above net and Akamai talkingto their board.
There were folks on the boardthat were venture capitals, but
I'd never started a company withventure backed money from the
beginning.
And so, I, was reading aboutthis and thinking about scale.
Companies thought it was a bigmarket.
There was billions of dollars ofrevenue to be had.
(13:40):
And I looked at it and said,okay, is the market big enough?
Yes.
Do I think I know firstcustomers that can buy and that
I can.
I don't think triple, triple,double forever or triple,
triple, triple, double forever,whatever that rule of thumb is,
go 1, 3, 9 and then doubleforever was a, was a thing.
Then it was like, okay, bigenough market we could do that.
And so venture both growth canaccelerate that.
(14:04):
And I'm not unhappy with thepath that we took, but if I
could do it over again, I wouldhave, as you're suggesting.
Bootstrapped for another year orso because the first six months
of 2014, really before weraised, I was using computers
that I had running in thisUsenet company that I had that
was making some money.
(14:25):
So I was sucking money frommyself from other stuff to do
that.
It was basically self-funding,so I would've self-funded or
maybe gotten some angel stuff,but more self-funded and
bootstrapped for the year ortwo.
And the reason for that is notminimizing dilution.
The reason is that it would haveput what people now call product
(14:50):
led a little more of that DNAinto the beginning of the
company in terms of onboardingand systems and processes for
that.
Not only the UI and design of itwhich once you start designing
the company to have everycustomer have.
A sales team and a customersuccess team, which is needed
absolutely for a lot of theselarger enterprise customers and
(15:13):
people are running the mostcomplex infrastructure in the
world using Kentik.
And, we solved at the beginningto do the super set of that.
It might have been better andleft us with the base of a
simpler thing that we could domore product led with to compete
again, like more with theSolarWinds.
Like you just need somethingbasic.
If we had done that kind ofbootstrapping and then we would
(15:35):
still have, all the moreadvanced technology because we
built the system underneath tobe able to support it.
And so there's some technicalexamples and product examples,
but, I think that it's, we'vespent a lot of time.
Four, five, three and four yearsago, moving to taking the trial,
which we've always had, andmaking it even easier for people
(15:58):
to self-serve and get in andonboard and all that, that if we
had done that at the beginning,probably would've been easier
than taking the company at scaleand building some of that DNA
in.
Dan Balcauski (16:08):
Well, I live this we were talking before we hit
record where I was atSolarWinds, and a lot of people
didn't really get this from theoutside, but you know, when we
would acquire.
Companies and stick them intoour go to market model.
I was on the product team thereand a lot of our focus was not
on adding a bunch of bells andwhistles from a, feature
(16:28):
perspective that demo reallywell.
And of course, sales andcustomers would ask us for those
things.
But because of the go to marketdiscipline that was there, a
significant portion of ourroadmap resources were just
dedicated to making sure that.
Customers could self-service ontheir own.
So, so for folks who haven'tlived there, so, so is that
mostly the stuff that you'rereferring to where you're able
(16:49):
to kind of paper that over withpeople instead of solving that
through technology?
Avi Freedman (16:54):
and it's we rarely, the only times we've
done NRC non-recurring, revenueis small customers that want
training that we would give bigcustomers for free.
People that are like, I'd liketo pay for this POV.
Okay, sure, you can pay for thePOV if you'd like.
It's not like we build things asone-offs, but.
I think it's solving for thebest on, subset.
(17:17):
Now there's whole schools ofthought about, are you trying to
get people to activate with onething?
Are you trying to show them lessof everything?
What are you trying to do inthat onboarding?
Or if you have a freemium or acheap as I call it, something,
what are you trying to do there?
That's a whole thing, but just,I'll just say onboarding.
So for example, in Kentik, a lotof our customers.
(17:39):
Really need to be able tounderstand what all the parts of
the network are.
And we have systems to let themdo that that were built for
initially for some of the mostsophisticated customers in the
world who their routers movepackets.
They have things calledinterfaces or what the packets
go in and out of.
And.
Interfaces can have names, andthe names can be like backbone
(18:01):
data center peering if they'reconnecting to another network,
whatever.
So we built this system forcompanies that have those
interfaces programmaticallydeployed that lets us, lets them
tell us what all the parts ofthe network are from that, and
we built that for that firstwave of customers.
And then you discovered that alot of networks in the
(18:22):
enterprise that had been aroundfor.
Since this thing calledSneakernet, if there's an
interface description, it'swrong.
So we actually built it for setsof people that were like the
biggest web companies andservice providers in the world
who were like, aha, Tik, I needthis.
And then going to theenterprise.
It turns out maybe it would'vebeen a better way of doing that
if we had built it for theminimum common denominator and
(18:45):
built the product so that itdidn't want to know all that
advanced classification.
Again, it would've been a littlebit easier for us to.
Take some novice people becausea lot of people, you come in and
you want to see somethingwithout doing a lot of setups.
So we would've removed somesetup steps, which we have since
it's actively done in cloud.
It's a lot easier.
(19:05):
It's harder and easier indifferent ways.
But there's some of that processwe would've done.
And again, like at SolarWindsyou had this thing called flack.
Not, I really haven't seen inthe SaaS world.
Anyone do.
Like, have you seen any bigsuccessful SaaS companies use
community forum based support
Dan Balcauski (19:24):
No.
I've seen people try, but it'sreally hard.
Avi Freedman (19:26):
so SolarWinds is really the grandmom, granddad of
SaaS in many ways.
'cause you look at the SaaS, youlook and they're not SaaS
metrics, it's renewal andsubscriptions.
They're very SaaS like.
I mean, when you got grossretention.
On the support stuff, in thehigh nineties and net in the,
above a hundred.
And it's like, is this a SaaSbusiness or downloadable
software for a long time, evenpost the breach.
(19:49):
It is very impressive.
But the thwack, the communitysupport model, people try
community support, but it's notexactly, usually it's not run by
product.
Like, what?
And then there on the otherhand, when we were, we have
partnership with New Relic, Iwas like shocked because.
New Relic had just released anew platform.
So I went to town and openedlike 50, like, Hey, this is
confusing, this is wrong, thisis broken.
(20:10):
Every single one, a productmanager got back to me and I was
like, wow, this is like thesummon product button.
It's like with the completeopposite of guides some group
conversations to get thefeedback.
So, it's interesting.
Dan Balcauski (20:24):
Well, I'm curious, so kind of going back
to what we were talking aboutwhere the, this early funding
sort of maybe allows you to, tonot worry as much about solving
with technology and you cansolve with people and kind of
paper it over as you're sort ofaccelerating, growth in that
space, I guess, is there.
Is it the sort of thing wherethe ca the genie's sort of,
(20:44):
outta the bottle at that point?
Is there any way, as a leader,you've been able to sort of
exert pressure back on theorganization to be able to focus
on, assisting your, go to marketwith technology and not just, by
handholding with more people?
Avi Freedman (21:02):
yes.
It's just harder when you'realready running it at Scout, so.
I mean, there's very traditionalsit with the CFO physics of a
company.
Reasons why this is helpful,because, Scaling is expensive.
Reps can't be productive fasterthan a typical sales cycle,
(21:25):
right?
Because they're gonna, have tomake us, start a cycle.
And until they start having somecycles closed, they can't be,
have attainment unless they'rejust walking into what we used
to call house accounts or,someone else's account.
And so if your sales cycle issix months.
Then your reps are not gonna beat 80 per, productive for six
(21:46):
months, which means that there'sa limit to, and in fact, it
might take longer than that inenterprise sales, which means
that you're investing ahead ofthat, which means you're
burning, and then that affectsyour cac, payback your customer
acquisition cost payback.
And so, like, even at our most.
Let's take the top 5% complexcustomers away who run again,
(22:07):
like, I mean, they just runcrazy infrastructure and they
might wanna buy four of ourproducts and do everything.
So that's a whole separatequestion, is should you try to
get them on one product andthen, drive the NDR or not?
But, 95% of our customers, wehave not spent, probably more
than 15 hours with them in thePOV.
Probably less including likework on our backend, but these
(22:31):
people are very busy.
So you get a shot at them andthen the next meeting might be
in two weeks.
And especially post covid, it'snot like you're gonna go swarm
them for two days and just makeit all happen, on pre, on site
because there's no on site forthem to go to, even if they have
an office because it's adistributed team.
So if you have 10.
(22:51):
Interactions in A POV and ittakes one to two weeks between
them to do inter, discovery andsome stuff, even if, the more
that they can do themselves andthe easier it is to do that,
that can take a couple monthsoff a sale cycle, which is a
material effect to a Scalingbusiness.
So there's real economic reasonswhy you might wanna do that, and
(23:14):
we've done a lot of investmentsin.
I mean, in the product we have aself-driving demo with tool tips
so that people can do discoveryand say, oh, I might want the
cloud product so that generatespipeline.
Or they can say, I'm trying toset this up and how does it look
once it's set up, a lot of thatinvestment, it just would've
been more, easier and had moreimpact had we done it earlier.
(23:36):
And we've needed to, even justthings like that we could be
doing better at like.
Customer analytics.
We use Pendo.
We love Pendo.
But are there ways we could beusing it better?
Yes.
Could we have done some of thatdesign into the product a little
better?
Probably so like how do weenable the field?
How would do we enablecustomers?
That's continual improvement.
And the more focus you have onthat earlier, the less, work you
(23:59):
need to do.
Training everybody on what thateven could mean and then
building it, et cetera, whichhas been a journey for us that
we're doing pretty well on.
I mean, I tell people in thecompany'cause most startups
would love to have our problems.
It doesn't mean we don't haveproblems and things we could do
better at.
But you know, the more you focuson some of these things earlier,
the easier it is.
Dan Balcauski (24:19):
I think really key what part of what you just
said there was, looking atthings like that, sales.
Cycle length and how little timeyou really have with the
customer and how much, or theprospect and how much ability
you give them to work withoutyou in the room or on a call
(24:40):
like that has meaningful impacton top line.
Business metrics.
And I think one of the, one ofthe traps that companies can get
into is you say like, oh, well,we'll always have a sales
engineer there if they run intotrouble.
Or we'll have a customer successrep there, right.
To help.
And it becomes, and that was, Ithink one of the pressures, as a
product person at SolarWindsthat we didn't have was.
(25:00):
There was no customer successsales engineers, I think if they
exceeded being on more than 10%of any given any deals that went
through your product, like yourproduct was kind of failing
because the cost model was noteffective there.
So there was, we rarely couldreach in that bag.
So, but I like the idea of beingable to kind of.
Focus in on, hey there'sactually real business value and
(25:21):
allowing your customers to, tomove forward, without you in the
room.
And that has real, real
Avi Freedman (25:25):
Which happens to also maybe make them happier
and, add to virality and haveother side effects of benefit
too.
Dan Balcauski (25:32):
Yeah.
Well, you mean they don't justlove being on calls with
salespeople all the time.
I.
Avi Freedman (25:37):
They love being able to figure things out.
The challenge is some of ourhappiest customers are like,
leave me the hell alone.
I'm happy.
Why are you talking to me?
Why are you asking me whetherI'm happy?
Of course I'm happy you wouldknow about it if I wasn't happy.
So it could be hard with,technologists, especially prima
technologists to figure out whatthe right balance of not bugging
them and being, having thatengagement is so.
Dan Balcauski (26:00):
Well, well, you've mentioned different.
Elements of, monetization inthis our discussion so far of
like, hey, do we land andexpand?
How much do we balance sort ofthe first money in the door
versus their net revenueretention and a dollar retention
increasing over time.
As you have grown Kentik, like,have there been any good lessons
you've learned about how to, howpricing and packaging and has
(26:23):
affected your go-to-marketmodel?
Avi Freedman (26:25):
Oh my God.
Pricing and packaging.
That's a whole thing.
Do you know companies that lovetheir, that, that are like, oh
my God our pricing and packagingis the most awesome thing ever
and only helps to accelerate thebusiness and everyone loves it
and understands it, and itoptimizes every opportunity.
Have you seen companies likethat?
Dan Balcauski (26:41):
The most common is everyone is unhappy with
their pricing.
Like they're unhappy with thecurrent state of their product.
It it's functional, but it couldbe a lot better is usually sort
of the status quo.
Avi Freedman (26:52):
Yes, ours could be better.
It is not slowing the businessdown.
But you know, we also have saidwe're not trying to be primarily
product led.
We wanna be, productdiscoverable, but you can't self
fulfill on your own.
You do need, you can set up andbe ready to pay.
And some people do that withoutand say, leave me the hell
(27:14):
alone.
I'm happy.
But then you do have to talk tosomebody and we won't draw it
out.
If someone's ready to buy, we'rehappy to take their money.
But we're not trying to bepurely product led and let
people self fulfill and then dothat for various reasons we can
talk about.
So I I think that we're.
At Kentik we, you could think ofit as basically having a
(27:35):
platform fee and then chargingin various ways based on usage.
But it's not the 25 cents pergigabyte or whatever.
'cause no one knows.
How many flows per second, ormetrics per second, or whatever
that is.
And they need a way to thinkabout it.
That's the common way they do.
And it could probably be betterand probably help the business
better.
There's more around quoting andhaving to explain it.
(27:55):
Or at renewable time couldprobably be better for us.
But you know, we also debateevery.
Probably not year, but coupleyears, should we simplify it, et
cetera, and have come back tonot doing that.
So
Dan Balcauski (28:08):
So you do discuss every year, which is I do wanna
flag, I applaud you for it.
Okay.
Alright.
Well, well, that's better thanmost I see a lot of people are
like, oh yeah, we did pricingfive years ago.
That's totally fine.
Assuming that you still live in2020 co environment or whatever
it might be.
I am curious, so just aboutthat, like, is that, like, how
have you instituted aconversation even every two
(28:29):
years?
'cause some.
CEOs are just like, oh, yeah.
Like it never comes up, so wenever talk about it.
Or like, is there, like, are youforcing that in in your, yearly
planning
Avi Freedman (28:38):
Oh no, the field's like our pricing needs to be
better and here's some thingsthat don't work.
And so we just queue it up andsay, okay, well we just talked
about this a year ago and like,what's the new data?
And then, so it could be less.
It, it could be more formal, Iguess, but it's not a, it's not
a cadence.
Like when we think about are wefocusing on the right strategy?
(29:00):
Do we, are we tracking the rightcompetitors?
All that stuff is more regularcadence, yearly, or six months
or whatever.
Then pricing and packaging justhappens to have been more
organically.
Every couple years the stuffbubbles up and we look at the
pile and say, okay, well what'sworking?
Not working?
Should we do something?
I will tell you that we did.
(29:20):
One time, maybe twice, trying toget some consultants involved.
I, there might be some timesthat that's worked.
I don't think it's a function ofwhich consultants, it's it's a
hard problem.
It's a hard problem.
There's a lot of optimization tobe done, and sometimes you need
some creativity.
And maybe the next time we'lltry taking some of the newest
people at the company or findingand asking them they've gotten a
(29:42):
little bit into it, but not,they don't know all the sins of
the past, so.
Dan Balcauski (29:46):
I wanna circle back to something we were
talking about earlier in theconversation.
So obviously you've got a verydeep technical background and,
you also said, it's like there'sso many things you've learned
about how not good of a leaderyou are.
I guess, how have you thoughtwhich I, apparently you're doing
a fine job.
So, but how have you learned tokind of balance your sort of
(30:07):
deep technical expertise withwhat I'm sure are very other
non-technical aspects of thebusiness that you have to run?
Like how do you see that thatimpacts how you think about
making business decisions?
And and if so, how?
Avi Freedman (30:22):
I mean, it's true that I always come at it from a,
like, where are the marketsgoing?
What's possible with technology?
What holes are need to befilled?
The customers are saying need tobe filled, right?
Because ultimately creating abusiness for me, tickles the
same things.
Well, it's a means to an end.
(30:42):
Yes, you'd like to make money,but having the best you can
create a product that solves aproblem.
But if you can't bring it tomarket, does it matter?
Right?
Are you actually solvingproblems if it's not, if no
one's using it, so.
To get people using it.
Unless you're taking a moremineral list or open source pro,
approach or whatever.
The traditional way to do thatis to start a company and bring
(31:03):
it to market.
And so then you have thequestion, is there someone that
I'd like to work for?
Or is it gonna be me running thecompany?
So if you decide that there's,'cause that's a big risk, having
someone else lead it.
And I have always, I.
I and a lot of our customerslike having knowing that the,
(31:24):
all the way up to the top,there's an understanding of what
we're doing and why.
There've been some verysuccessful CEOs who come at it
from, I want to build a companythat sells things and is less
and she or he is less particularabout which things those are.
But that's not me.
So, if I am going to make acompany and.
(31:45):
Don't want to work for someoneelse doing it, then I need to
make that company.
But I still come at it from theperspective of how does this
help us build the right thingsand sell them versus a little
bit more of the forming andshaping of the company and
optimizing it and thinking aboutthat.
That's.
Equally important, but maybe alittle bit, still not where my
(32:07):
brain goes.
So I think of it a lot as wheremy brain naturally goes is to
all these interesting technologyand market things, and I have to
make it go to these other thingsalso as like a crown job.
Whereas there's probably otherleaders that, that's, they're
really thinking at all timesabout optimizing the
organization, optimizing thego-to market, and then wanted to
make sure that the producttechnology strategies aligned.
(32:28):
So, I knew I had a lot oflearning to do.
On the other hand I.
I don't know what the hell'shappening with hip bro.
Mark Zuckerberg nowadays.
I'm glad he is happy with andwith Priscilla's stretched
cayenne limo.
But you could look that
Dan Balcauski (32:43):
I've not seen that.
Yeah.
Avi Freedman (32:44):
I.
I think he and I share.
We both have a GT three A, Iguess, but when he started I was
like, looking, reading andlooking.
I'm like, man, I'm a much, Iknow a lot more than that guy.
Practically speaking.
Not, Not, like intellect andlike, and I look at it early.
Zuckerberg and then even withinthree years, and I'm like, wow,
look at how much he's learned.
So it's like, well, if hefigured it out, then I could
(33:06):
probably figure it out.
A lot of his business andScaling stuff.
And I had seen organizations,but, probably didn't put enough
into organization design likesome, founders do, which again
you catch up with once you're,'cause it's hard when you're
like, you go from, can this be acompany to, is this going to be
a company to.
Like, should we be a company to,is this going to be a company?
(33:28):
To, okay, we're a company to,will we survive, to, can we
scale to like, okay, are, are wegoing to exist to, are we un
killable, we're probably at thatlater stage.
I don't wanna be, too proud,but, we're at scale.
People want it.
We just, it's how do we optimizeit?
And in the very early stage ofshould this be a thing, can this
be a thing?
The, it's hard to, for me to puttoo much energy into all the
(33:51):
other stuff about thescaffolding.
'cause you're busy.
I'm, for me, I'm busy.
Like, do people want it?
Will they pay for it?
Can we start doing that?
And but there's other peoplethat have had a lot of success
by being very thoughtful aboutall those things very early on.
And next time I will be morethoughtful about them.
'cause I've seen, in a fastgrowth company, you just don't
have a lot of time to work onthose things.
And they're more painful to,takes a lot more energy to.
(34:13):
Change the DNA and put thesethings into place once you're
already 50 people, even muchless, 200 or 500.
Dan Balcauski (34:19):
well, you obviously have a passion for the
technology and the product andmaking sure that product is
useful to customers.
And obviously that's had goodoutcomes for the company, I
guess, and maybe less so for,less of a passion or interest of
the organizational design andmaybe other things related to
Avi Freedman (34:35):
It is interesting, but it's just not where my brain
DNA goes.
It's not where my priorities go.
It's not what my EDD is chewingon, so.
Dan Balcauski (34:43):
I suffer from the same diagnosis.
And I think it, a wise man oncesaid, know thyself as a first
step to life fulfillment.
So, given that, like, as you'vescaled the company, how do you,
so, you obviously have thispassion and this is where you
naturally gravitate towards, butobviously the business still
needs to grow around you.
How have you set yourself up forsuccess such that you're able to
focus on what is.
(35:04):
Where you're best suited butthen it also makes sure that the
other things that need to happenhappen.
How have you thought about sortof building the organization
Avi Freedman (35:10):
hire, hire, a team of great people that have
different skills and are.
Work together well and arecomfortable telling you, if
there's problems and you're fullof shit.
And identifying the poops on thefloor and saying they need to be
picked up and I mean, you haveto have a team that works well
together that compliments, so.
Dan Balcauski (35:27):
Well, I would love to di dive super far into
that, but we are running outtatime, so I'm actually gonna
start closing us out here with acouple of rapid fire closeout
questions.
Good to that.
So, if all your day-to-dayresponsibilities could be
handled, everything would cruisealong fine without you, you
dedicate a full year to studyany subject you wanted in depth,
all your other responsibilitiestaken care of, what would you
(35:48):
study and why?
Avi Freedman (35:51):
I would get to more fluency on French and
Hebrew and learn Spanish.
Because Spanish would be a lotless, lot more practical, even
though I like French better.
And I feel like not quite acitizen of the, it's like
partially enabled.
I have so enough knowledge to bedangerous, but if I actually
lived in either country for likesix months, it'd be fine.
(36:13):
'cause I used to be able to readnot newspapers, but you know,
books and stuff.
So, I would probably do that.
And find that when I use mybrain differently sometimes the
best insights pop out aboutother things.
So that's probably what I woulddo If I had a year off.
I won't, but I probably won't.
I'll probably just start anothercompany.
But if I were to do that I'dlike to have time to do that.
Dan Balcauski (36:32):
Awesome.
Starting becoming fluent andborder languages.
If.
With, as you think about all theamazing people you've had a
chance to work with, is thereanyone who just pops mind and
had a disproportionate effect onthe way you think about growing
companies?
Avi Freedman (36:46):
Growing companies.
Um, George Conrad's was not wasthe CEO brought in at Akamai
when he had been at IBM.
There's just an amazing set ofkey people at Akamai.
I was there 9.9 years.
My brother recently passed 25years there.
(37:07):
And he was the first reallygreat leader that I got to
observe.
And, I spent some time with KBT,Kevin at SolarWinds and watching
him lead again, he's not.
I say this with all respect, notthe here's, oh, we need to build
that.
That's not where his brain goes,but consistency, communication,
(37:30):
it's a thing with my a DD brain.
I need to get, better at.
And watching him, CEO, it wasreally instructive.
So I haven't lived up to, beingas excellent at some of those
things as I'd like.
But in terms of just thinkingabout how do you build a company
and run it and.
And and lead, just being aroundhim and, I try to spend time
with other people when I BradSmith, who is, I think at
(37:52):
Intuit, I used meet people like,wow, they communicate really
well.
I wanna be more like that.
So that's probably not the mostday to day, but it's more
aspirational.
What I would like to be like atsome point.
So.
Dan Balcauski (38:03):
Perfect.
If I gave you a billboard andyou could put any advice on
there for other CEOs trying toscale their B2B SaaS companies,
what would it say?
Avi Freedman (38:12):
It's your job to suck.
Did you see the movie KeepingThe Faith?
Dan Balcauski (38:16):
I have not.
Avi Freedman (38:17):
That's a old movie at this point, but Ben still is
a rabbi and there's a13-year-old kid, or 12-year-old,
whatever, practicing his towproportion for his Bar mitzvah,
which is a lifecycle event, ifyou're Jewish and he's.
Purposely, I mean, he's suckingin the movie, he's purposely
sucking.
He's like, I can't do this.
I suck.
And then somebody's like, it'syour job to suck.
You're 13 years old.
(38:39):
This is supposed to be hard.
So, just think about it likethat.
It's your job to suck.
Most companies would love tohave your problems.
So just keep things inperspective,
Dan Balcauski (38:47):
That's amazing.
Avi, this has been a blast.
If listeners wanna connect withyou, learn more about Kentik,
how can they do that?
Avi Freedman (38:53):
avi@ick.com.
avi@avi.net.
Avi Friedman on Twitter,LinkedIn.
I don't know some other thingstoo, probably.
Dan Balcauski (39:00):
I will put those links in the show notes for
listeners.
Everyone that wraps up thisepisode of Sask Scaling.
Secrets.
Thank you to Avi for sharing hisjourney, insights, and valuable
tips for our listeners.
If you found this conversationas enlightening anxiety to
remember, subscribe so you don'tmiss out on future episodes.
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories from the leaders of the
best scale up.
B2B SaaS Companies.
I'm your host, Dan Balcauski,founder of Product Tranquility.
Today I'm excited to speak withAvi Freedman.
Avi is the co-founder and CEO ofKentik, a leading network
intelligence platform.
Under his leadership, Kentik hasevolved from serving technical
champions to becoming a criticalenterprise platform for network
visibility and performance.
Before founding Kentik in 2014,Avi served as VP of network
(00:43):
infrastructure for Akamai duringtheir rapid growth.
Let's dive in.
Welcome Avi to SaaS scalingSecrets.
Avi Freedman (00:49):
Thanks, Dan for having me.
Dan Balcauski (00:51):
I'm excited for our conversation today.
We were wrapping right beforethe episode about some of our
shared love of the networkinfrastructure space.
I gave folks a little bit oftaste of your background, but
can you tell us about yourjourney in the SaaS world?
Avi Freedman (01:02):
Sure.
So I've been doing recurringrevenue.
Which is not necessarily SaaSsince I started my first non-con
consulting company.
I did database consulting in,in, in the eighties, but I
started the first internetprovider in Philadelphia in
1992, so that was recurringrevenue.
It looked like a multi-linebulletin board system, but you
know, happened to have theinternet inside.
(01:24):
And then I was at an ISP wherewe build people, recurring
called above net.
And then I was at Akamai, whichdid still infrastructure but
recurring.
And then I actually took a briefdiversion, if you've ever seen
the show, Silicon Valley towardsboxes.
We built sensors that watchedpackets and everyone said, what
do we do with all this data?
And then I said, aha.
(01:45):
Would you pay me, to have thisin my lab?
And they're like, we'd ratherhave you run it as a service.
I'm like, awesome.
And SaaS was just becoming athing.
So decided to move to the BayArea and raise venture capital
and start out the SaaS journeythat way.
Dan Balcauski (02:01):
Well, we'll dive into some of those experiences
during this conversation.
'cause you have a rich historyin recurring revenue that I'm
sure you've seen.
Many things evolve and changeand probably a bunch stay the
same, that for whatever reasonthe marketers wanna call new and
different.
But.
Before we go there, on yourjourney, like everyone has what
I think of as a superherotransformation moment.
(02:21):
So you're Peter Parker, normalhigh school student.
One day, get bit by aradioactive spider.
You wake up the next day, you'reSpider-Man.
What has that been for you inyour journey?
Avi Freedman (02:31):
I was very fortunate that when I was eight,
so this is 1978, so think wayback machine.
So computers were not litteredall over the place.
Then my uncle gave me a book onbasic at a family Seder, a
family dinner, and my father waslike, oh, we have computers that
run basic at the hospital.
(02:53):
And he had a wizard working forhim, Steve Robinson, who had
fallen into the Unix camp in theway back.
And he became, available as amentor to me and taught me that
anything that some human createdyou can understand given
sufficient time and patience.
And so I think that insight madereal and of, plus growing up in
(03:14):
a day when you actually couldunderstand everything about a
computer has been the superpowerrisk.
Thing for me, and I see a lot ofpeople that don't really believe
that they can understandanything, and I think it holds
them back.
So,
Dan Balcauski (03:27):
That's what such a great confluence of factors
there.
It reminds me, I think you'retalking to me from Seattle and I
think there was a story aboutBill Gates was one of the few,
folks kind of early on withaccess to a computer that he
could work on.
And that definitely is highlytransformative in his, for his
life and hopefully yours.
I remember I in I think fifthgrade, we had some computers in
(03:49):
our classroom and we programmedin basic, and I got the computer
to do the Star Wars themebecause it and I think I had
some little crappy asie artanimations of stars, like, like
Supernova,
Avi Freedman (04:01):
On the other hand, it is worth noting most of the
people that I know that are, Iwill just.
I know this is not, there's alot that goes into what we call
intelligence.
The people that I would say thatare at the next level that I
want to be around that push my,strain, my understanding or
whatever, a lot of them can takethe fun out of it sometimes,
(04:21):
because I remember I got an a DDcard, a music card, sorry, I
called it a music card for mycomputer that I had bought with
some of my Bar mitzvah money.
And I went to this wizard,Steve, and he is like.
Oh yeah, that's just an a DDcard, a d to a card.
You're like, would you like meto explain to you how that
works?
And I was like, but he playsmusic.
And he is like, no, no, no.
This is just math and signals.
Let me explain it to you.
It is like, but he plays music.
(04:42):
So, sometimes familiarity, youhave to retain wonder in the
world.
Even as you under you understandit grows.
Dan Balcauski (04:47):
Well, yes some, somebody at some level has to
understand the brutal details,but let the kids have their
magic As long as they can last.
Well, so that's, so, that'sfascinating.
And obviously your passion fortechnology has not waned as it's
been evidenced throughout yourcareer.
You find yourself, co-foundingKentik 2014 and now leading the
company as CEO.
For folks who aren't aware, canyou just give us a 32nd overview
(05:10):
of what Kentik is?
Avi Freedman (05:11):
Sure.
If I talk to an Uber driver, Iwould say we make the internet
go.
If I, Talk to a level down wemake all the infrastructure fast
and secure for enterprisesworldwide.
So we take network telemetrymetrics, traffic, data
performance routing, all thestuff about how things connect
to each other and howapplications run through
networks and our big dataplatform.
(05:33):
Use ai, generate insights, pokepeople on the shoulders, say,
Hey, you have a problem here.
Here's what you should probablydo to fix it.
Mostly around security, costoptimization, performance.
So we're a SaaS company, 200people and growing, focusing,
but on enterprise and also havea large service provider
business.
Dan Balcauski (05:50):
You had mentioned in the intro that, obviously you
had found an ISP.
You've been in recurringrevenue.
You obviously rode the wave ofAkamai during their incredible
growth.
What surprised you about leadingKentik that maybe you wouldn't
have guessed from yourexperiences prior to starting
that this company?
Avi Freedman (06:09):
Oh, I mean, how much I suck at being CEO.
I mean, I was like, well, I gotthis.
I was, I ran engineering.
I worked for, well, the CTOCo-founder at above net, about a
month, maybe a month and a halfafter I started at Akamai.
I merged a group run by a friendof mine who was one of the a, my
co-founders with the technologygroup.
He had run the business sidegroup of the network group and
(06:30):
ran that, reporting to the CEOwas, I've been, I've started a
couple smaller companies andsold them and I was like, okay,
well I know how to do this.
And, it turns out thatespecially the go to market
side, a lot has changed sincesince I worked closely and,
working besides.
A lot of the go to market versushaving ultimate responsibility
for it.
(06:51):
Very different.
But again, think back to before,I started Kentik in 2014.
So think back to the last I hadbeen in enterprise sales, was.
Really more actively involved.
99 to 2004.
So obviously a big jump fromthere to there.
And, SaaS coming into a thingand all the similarities between
legal, SaaS, marketing, SaaStechnical SaaS that everyone was
(07:13):
figuring out at the same time.
So, all the things I need tolearn and ways to do better at
building a company, building theproduct, going to market, all
that stuff.
Dan Balcauski (07:21):
Well, I absolutely love the
vulnerability and transparencyand I think you are in good
company among the impressiveleaders I've talked to on this
show where something about agrowth mindset and constantly
running up against your owndeficiencies and.
Figure out how to overcome them.
Is the reason that you know, alot of folks such as yourself
are successful?
Because we don't take no for ananswer and we we realize we
(07:43):
constantly need to overcome newchallenges like every CEO faces
challenges along the way.
As you think about your journeygrowing and Scaling Kentik to
the point it's got today, isthere a specific challenge that
just stands out to you, acrucible moment that's kind of,
really shaped your view of howto grow a SaaS company?
Avi Freedman (08:01):
I think it's worth as you grow as a company, going
back to what we saw early on atKentik and what I advise
founders, which is, we talked toour first a hundred customers,
and I think half of them bothasked.
How much does it cost, which isa really good buying signal, and
(08:24):
when can I have it?
And so if you're a growingcompany and you're thinking
about things that customers areasking for, it's like, oh, well
I, my customer, I buy this fromthem and I want this and I want
that.
If you then show it to people.
And they're not asking thosequestions.
And instead they say, oh, thatlooks interesting.
I might try that.
Maybe that isn't worth goingdeep on until you get the right
(08:44):
kind of customer engagement.
So, just remember your searchfor product market fit and and
and bring that to your futureexplorations as you try to grow
the platform.
Dan Balcauski (08:54):
I love that.
So, how much does it cost andwhen can I have it now?
At the beginning of that, so wasthat were those signals that you
were having sort of, when youhad, before you had built the
product, or I guess what stageof the company were you at where
you kind of noticed thatpattern?
Avi Freedman (09:08):
I mean, the product at the time was the
front.
So, I, it turns out I'm reallygood at building distributed
systems and databases.
Dom and CSS make me.
Like angry, like I actually wantto go, use the kicking bag.
So, our front end for thisproduct that we were demoing,
(09:29):
basically the insight was asopposed to companies where you
have worked large amount of datacoming in, observability really
hard to store it all.
So we built distributed system,let people ask any questions, so
they don't need to know inadvance what they want to ask.
They can solve these problemswith complex hybrid
infrastructure.
So to demonstrate it.
W the front end was a con jobbemitting.
(09:54):
HTML with JavaScript for highcharts that had data embedded in
it.
And then every five seconds itwould go do a database query and
then it would auto refresh.
That was the ui because like,web, website, I don't even know
web office was a thing backthen, but whatever.
I mean, you don't want to get meinvolved in the front end stuff.
It'll be like, go to the websitethere, I fixed it.
It'll look like that.
But code.
(10:14):
So it was a, here's what itcould be and then I would
quickly use.
Usually for giggles I would usecathode on OSX, which looks like
an old CRT terminal and I wouldshow them that they could use
the CLI to ask any question inSQL or whatever.
And some of the first nerds werelike, Ooh, that's cool.
'cause at Akamai we did that.
We wanted to use sql, but itturns out no one wants to use
SQL for this.
(10:34):
But and so, but people would seeit and go, aha, that's the kind
of question I want to answer.
So it was enough of a thing thatwe could, they could see we were
taking the telemetry, we werestoring it, we were letting them
ask any question.
And they're like, okay, you needto finish this.
No one actually was ready to payfor what we had at the time.
But we were looking for thatsignal and we did get some of
the biggest networks in theworld to send us their telemetry
(10:56):
without an NDA without.
I mean, we were a company, butwe had no money in the bank, all
that, just because I helped totrain them in the nineties about
how routing works.
And they knew I was a good guy.
So, that helped the system andit helped us demo with some
stuff.
And I had a company doingUsenet, which is this old.
I, well, got it.
Pains me to say it's likeReddit, but Reddit is like, he's
not, not using it as likeReddit, but lots of computers,
(11:19):
distributed systems.
So we had a demo environment andwe could show people, based on
that.
So, yeah, it was
Dan Balcauski (11:24):
Well, for those listening I take with extreme
irony, your hatred of Dom andCSS when sitting behind you on
your bookshelf is Pearl Cookbookand Pearl for Dummies.
Which if anyone has ever dealtwith Pearl it's enough to get
your blood pressure
Avi Freedman (11:37):
No.
I completely disagree.
PHP is uppity web pages, right?
People say PHPs, like I say, I,you can write a pearl if you are
so inclined.
But you can also write C likePearl and I have written some
fairly large systems.
It is possible to write goodpro.
Most people don't,
Dan Balcauski (11:54):
It's possible.
It's, yes, it is possible.
I will let you win thatargument.
But you mentioned somethingabout, okay, so, so first of
all, I love this, so likehaving, getting signal on what
you wanna buy, or that customersare asking, buying questions,
when can I have it?
Urgency and how much will itcost?
They're already thinking about,swiping that
Avi Freedman (12:13):
Budget.
Budget.
Yes,
Dan Balcauski (12:14):
budget, right.
So, so those are reallyimportant because, I spend all
my time in pricing and packagingand, it's unfortunate how often
Avi Freedman (12:22):
for doing the Lord's work.
Dan Balcauski (12:24):
Well, we try, but it's very sad when I get a call
from a company that says, Hey,we built this thing, we're gonna
ship it in 30 days and we needto think about pricing and
packaging.
And I said, nobody has asked themarket what if they're willing
to pay for this thing yet.
This seems like a terriblemistake of resources.
Like we did not have thisconversation earlier than this,
but, you talked about having nomoney in the bank and on a,
(12:46):
remind me on a previous podcastyou were on, I heard you discuss
some of the pros and cons ofgetting funding outside of your
customers early on and what thatcan do.
And and I was curious if youcould elaborate on your
perspective and what you see askind of the.
Maybe the undiscussed sideeffects of taking funding as a
(13:10):
growing company and what thatcan, like, maybe what that helps
you like focus on or not focuson to your peril downstream.
Avi Freedman (13:19):
I had worked with venture capitalists.
At Above net and Akamai talkingto their board.
There were folks on the boardthat were venture capitals, but
I'd never started a company withventure backed money from the
beginning.
And so, I, was reading aboutthis and thinking about scale.
Companies thought it was a bigmarket.
There was billions of dollars ofrevenue to be had.
(13:40):
And I looked at it and said,okay, is the market big enough?
Yes.
Do I think I know firstcustomers that can buy and that
I can.
I don't think triple, triple,double forever or triple,
triple, triple, double forever,whatever that rule of thumb is,
go 1, 3, 9 and then doubleforever was a, was a thing.
Then it was like, okay, bigenough market we could do that.
And so venture both growth canaccelerate that.
(14:04):
And I'm not unhappy with thepath that we took, but if I
could do it over again, I wouldhave, as you're suggesting.
Bootstrapped for another year orso because the first six months
of 2014, really before weraised, I was using computers
that I had running in thisUsenet company that I had that
was making some money.
(14:25):
So I was sucking money frommyself from other stuff to do
that.
It was basically self-funding,so I would've self-funded or
maybe gotten some angel stuff,but more self-funded and
bootstrapped for the year ortwo.
And the reason for that is notminimizing dilution.
The reason is that it would haveput what people now call product
(14:50):
led a little more of that DNAinto the beginning of the
company in terms of onboardingand systems and processes for
that.
Not only the UI and design of itwhich once you start designing
the company to have everycustomer have.
A sales team and a customersuccess team, which is needed
absolutely for a lot of theselarger enterprise customers and
(15:13):
people are running the mostcomplex infrastructure in the
world using Kentik.
And, we solved at the beginningto do the super set of that.
It might have been better andleft us with the base of a
simpler thing that we could domore product led with to compete
again, like more with theSolarWinds.
Like you just need somethingbasic.
If we had done that kind ofbootstrapping and then we would
(15:35):
still have, all the moreadvanced technology because we
built the system underneath tobe able to support it.
And so there's some technicalexamples and product examples,
but, I think that it's, we'vespent a lot of time.
Four, five, three and four yearsago, moving to taking the trial,
which we've always had, andmaking it even easier for people
(15:58):
to self-serve and get in andonboard and all that, that if we
had done that at the beginning,probably would've been easier
than taking the company at scaleand building some of that DNA
in.
Dan Balcauski (16:08):
Well, I live this we were talking before we hit
record where I was atSolarWinds, and a lot of people
didn't really get this from theoutside, but you know, when we
would acquire.
Companies and stick them intoour go to market model.
I was on the product team thereand a lot of our focus was not
on adding a bunch of bells andwhistles from a, feature
(16:28):
perspective that demo reallywell.
And of course, sales andcustomers would ask us for those
things.
But because of the go to marketdiscipline that was there, a
significant portion of ourroadmap resources were just
dedicated to making sure that.
Customers could self-service ontheir own.
So, so for folks who haven'tlived there, so, so is that
mostly the stuff that you'rereferring to where you're able
(16:49):
to kind of paper that over withpeople instead of solving that
through technology?
Avi Freedman (16:54):
and it's we rarely, the only times we've
done NRC non-recurring, revenueis small customers that want
training that we would give bigcustomers for free.
People that are like, I'd liketo pay for this POV.
Okay, sure, you can pay for thePOV if you'd like.
It's not like we build things asone-offs, but.
I think it's solving for thebest on, subset.
(17:17):
Now there's whole schools ofthought about, are you trying to
get people to activate with onething?
Are you trying to show them lessof everything?
What are you trying to do inthat onboarding?
Or if you have a freemium or acheap as I call it, something,
what are you trying to do there?
That's a whole thing, but just,I'll just say onboarding.
So for example, in Kentik, a lotof our customers.
(17:39):
Really need to be able tounderstand what all the parts of
the network are.
And we have systems to let themdo that that were built for
initially for some of the mostsophisticated customers in the
world who their routers movepackets.
They have things calledinterfaces or what the packets
go in and out of.
And.
Interfaces can have names, andthe names can be like backbone
(18:01):
data center peering if they'reconnecting to another network,
whatever.
So we built this system forcompanies that have those
interfaces programmaticallydeployed that lets us, lets them
tell us what all the parts ofthe network are from that, and
we built that for that firstwave of customers.
And then you discovered that alot of networks in the
(18:22):
enterprise that had been aroundfor.
Since this thing calledSneakernet, if there's an
interface description, it'swrong.
So we actually built it for setsof people that were like the
biggest web companies andservice providers in the world
who were like, aha, Tik, I needthis.
And then going to theenterprise.
It turns out maybe it would'vebeen a better way of doing that
if we had built it for theminimum common denominator and
(18:45):
built the product so that itdidn't want to know all that
advanced classification.
Again, it would've been a littlebit easier for us to.
Take some novice people becausea lot of people, you come in and
you want to see somethingwithout doing a lot of setups.
So we would've removed somesetup steps, which we have since
it's actively done in cloud.
It's a lot easier.
(19:05):
It's harder and easier indifferent ways.
But there's some of that processwe would've done.
And again, like at SolarWindsyou had this thing called flack.
Not, I really haven't seen inthe SaaS world.
Anyone do.
Like, have you seen any bigsuccessful SaaS companies use
community forum based support
Dan Balcauski (19:24):
No.
I've seen people try, but it'sreally hard.
Avi Freedman (19:26):
so SolarWinds is really the grandmom, granddad of
SaaS in many ways.
'cause you look at the SaaS, youlook and they're not SaaS
metrics, it's renewal andsubscriptions.
They're very SaaS like.
I mean, when you got grossretention.
On the support stuff, in thehigh nineties and net in the,
above a hundred.
And it's like, is this a SaaSbusiness or downloadable
software for a long time, evenpost the breach.
(19:49):
It is very impressive.
But the thwack, the communitysupport model, people try
community support, but it's notexactly, usually it's not run by
product.
Like, what?
And then there on the otherhand, when we were, we have
partnership with New Relic, Iwas like shocked because.
New Relic had just released anew platform.
So I went to town and openedlike 50, like, Hey, this is
confusing, this is wrong, thisis broken.
(20:10):
Every single one, a productmanager got back to me and I was
like, wow, this is like thesummon product button.
It's like with the completeopposite of guides some group
conversations to get thefeedback.
So, it's interesting.
Dan Balcauski (20:24):
Well, I'm curious, so kind of going back
to what we were talking aboutwhere the, this early funding
sort of maybe allows you to, tonot worry as much about solving
with technology and you cansolve with people and kind of
paper it over as you're sort ofaccelerating, growth in that
space, I guess, is there.
Is it the sort of thing wherethe ca the genie's sort of,
(20:44):
outta the bottle at that point?
Is there any way, as a leader,you've been able to sort of
exert pressure back on theorganization to be able to focus
on, assisting your, go to marketwith technology and not just, by
handholding with more people?
Avi Freedman (21:02):
yes.
It's just harder when you'realready running it at Scout, so.
I mean, there's very traditionalsit with the CFO physics of a
company.
Reasons why this is helpful,because, Scaling is expensive.
Reps can't be productive fasterthan a typical sales cycle,
(21:25):
right?
Because they're gonna, have tomake us, start a cycle.
And until they start having somecycles closed, they can't be,
have attainment unless they'rejust walking into what we used
to call house accounts or,someone else's account.
And so if your sales cycle issix months.
Then your reps are not gonna beat 80 per, productive for six
(21:46):
months, which means that there'sa limit to, and in fact, it
might take longer than that inenterprise sales, which means
that you're investing ahead ofthat, which means you're
burning, and then that affectsyour cac, payback your customer
acquisition cost payback.
And so, like, even at our most.
Let's take the top 5% complexcustomers away who run again,
(22:07):
like, I mean, they just runcrazy infrastructure and they
might wanna buy four of ourproducts and do everything.
So that's a whole separatequestion, is should you try to
get them on one product andthen, drive the NDR or not?
But, 95% of our customers, wehave not spent, probably more
than 15 hours with them in thePOV.
Probably less including likework on our backend, but these
(22:31):
people are very busy.
So you get a shot at them andthen the next meeting might be
in two weeks.
And especially post covid, it'snot like you're gonna go swarm
them for two days and just makeit all happen, on pre, on site
because there's no on site forthem to go to, even if they have
an office because it's adistributed team.
So if you have 10.
(22:51):
Interactions in A POV and ittakes one to two weeks between
them to do inter, discovery andsome stuff, even if, the more
that they can do themselves andthe easier it is to do that,
that can take a couple monthsoff a sale cycle, which is a
material effect to a Scalingbusiness.
So there's real economic reasonswhy you might wanna do that, and
(23:14):
we've done a lot of investmentsin.
I mean, in the product we have aself-driving demo with tool tips
so that people can do discoveryand say, oh, I might want the
cloud product so that generatespipeline.
Or they can say, I'm trying toset this up and how does it look
once it's set up, a lot of thatinvestment, it just would've
been more, easier and had moreimpact had we done it earlier.
(23:36):
And we've needed to, even justthings like that we could be
doing better at like.
Customer analytics.
We use Pendo.
We love Pendo.
But are there ways we could beusing it better?
Yes.
Could we have done some of thatdesign into the product a little
better?
Probably so like how do weenable the field?
How would do we enablecustomers?
That's continual improvement.
And the more focus you have onthat earlier, the less, work you
(23:59):
need to do.
Training everybody on what thateven could mean and then
building it, et cetera, whichhas been a journey for us that
we're doing pretty well on.
I mean, I tell people in thecompany'cause most startups
would love to have our problems.
It doesn't mean we don't haveproblems and things we could do
better at.
But you know, the more you focuson some of these things earlier,
the easier it is.
Dan Balcauski (24:19):
I think really key what part of what you just
said there was, looking atthings like that, sales.
Cycle length and how little timeyou really have with the
customer and how much, or theprospect and how much ability
you give them to work withoutyou in the room or on a call
(24:40):
like that has meaningful impacton top line.
Business metrics.
And I think one of the, one ofthe traps that companies can get
into is you say like, oh, well,we'll always have a sales
engineer there if they run intotrouble.
Or we'll have a customer successrep there, right.
To help.
And it becomes, and that was, Ithink one of the pressures, as a
product person at SolarWindsthat we didn't have was.
(25:00):
There was no customer successsales engineers, I think if they
exceeded being on more than 10%of any given any deals that went
through your product, like yourproduct was kind of failing
because the cost model was noteffective there.
So there was, we rarely couldreach in that bag.
So, but I like the idea of beingable to kind of.
Focus in on, hey there'sactually real business value and
(25:21):
allowing your customers to, tomove forward, without you in the
room.
And that has real, real
Avi Freedman (25:25):
Which happens to also maybe make them happier
and, add to virality and haveother side effects of benefit
too.
Dan Balcauski (25:32):
Yeah.
Well, you mean they don't justlove being on calls with
salespeople all the time.
I.
Avi Freedman (25:37):
They love being able to figure things out.
The challenge is some of ourhappiest customers are like,
leave me the hell alone.
I'm happy.
Why are you talking to me?
Why are you asking me whetherI'm happy?
Of course I'm happy you wouldknow about it if I wasn't happy.
So it could be hard with,technologists, especially prima
technologists to figure out whatthe right balance of not bugging
them and being, having thatengagement is so.
Dan Balcauski (26:00):
Well, well, you've mentioned different.
Elements of, monetization inthis our discussion so far of
like, hey, do we land andexpand?
How much do we balance sort ofthe first money in the door
versus their net revenueretention and a dollar retention
increasing over time.
As you have grown Kentik, like,have there been any good lessons
you've learned about how to, howpricing and packaging and has
(26:23):
affected your go-to-marketmodel?
Avi Freedman (26:25):
Oh my God.
Pricing and packaging.
That's a whole thing.
Do you know companies that lovetheir, that, that are like, oh
my God our pricing and packagingis the most awesome thing ever
and only helps to accelerate thebusiness and everyone loves it
and understands it, and itoptimizes every opportunity.
Have you seen companies likethat?
Dan Balcauski (26:41):
The most common is everyone is unhappy with
their pricing.
Like they're unhappy with thecurrent state of their product.
It it's functional, but it couldbe a lot better is usually sort
of the status quo.
Avi Freedman (26:52):
Yes, ours could be better.
It is not slowing the businessdown.
But you know, we also have saidwe're not trying to be primarily
product led.
We wanna be, productdiscoverable, but you can't self
fulfill on your own.
You do need, you can set up andbe ready to pay.
And some people do that withoutand say, leave me the hell
(27:14):
alone.
I'm happy.
But then you do have to talk tosomebody and we won't draw it
out.
If someone's ready to buy, we'rehappy to take their money.
But we're not trying to bepurely product led and let
people self fulfill and then dothat for various reasons we can
talk about.
So I I think that we're.
At Kentik we, you could think ofit as basically having a
(27:35):
platform fee and then chargingin various ways based on usage.
But it's not the 25 cents pergigabyte or whatever.
'cause no one knows.
How many flows per second, ormetrics per second, or whatever
that is.
And they need a way to thinkabout it.
That's the common way they do.
And it could probably be betterand probably help the business
better.
There's more around quoting andhaving to explain it.
(27:55):
Or at renewable time couldprobably be better for us.
But you know, we also debateevery.
Probably not year, but coupleyears, should we simplify it, et
cetera, and have come back tonot doing that.
So
Dan Balcauski (28:08):
So you do discuss every year, which is I do wanna
flag, I applaud you for it.
Okay.
Alright.
Well, well, that's better thanmost I see a lot of people are
like, oh yeah, we did pricingfive years ago.
That's totally fine.
Assuming that you still live in2020 co environment or whatever
it might be.
I am curious, so just aboutthat, like, is that, like, how
have you instituted aconversation even every two
(28:29):
years?
'cause some.
CEOs are just like, oh, yeah.
Like it never comes up, so wenever talk about it.
Or like, is there, like, are youforcing that in in your, yearly
planning
Avi Freedman (28:38):
Oh no, the field's like our pricing needs to be
better and here's some thingsthat don't work.
And so we just queue it up andsay, okay, well we just talked
about this a year ago and like,what's the new data?
And then, so it could be less.
It, it could be more formal, Iguess, but it's not a, it's not
a cadence.
Like when we think about are wefocusing on the right strategy?
(29:00):
Do we, are we tracking the rightcompetitors?
All that stuff is more regularcadence, yearly, or six months
or whatever.
Then pricing and packaging justhappens to have been more
organically.
Every couple years the stuffbubbles up and we look at the
pile and say, okay, well what'sworking?
Not working?
Should we do something?
I will tell you that we did.
(29:20):
One time, maybe twice, trying toget some consultants involved.
I, there might be some timesthat that's worked.
I don't think it's a function ofwhich consultants, it's it's a
hard problem.
It's a hard problem.
There's a lot of optimization tobe done, and sometimes you need
some creativity.
And maybe the next time we'lltry taking some of the newest
people at the company or findingand asking them they've gotten a
(29:42):
little bit into it, but not,they don't know all the sins of
the past, so.
Dan Balcauski (29:46):
I wanna circle back to something we were
talking about earlier in theconversation.
So obviously you've got a verydeep technical background and,
you also said, it's like there'sso many things you've learned
about how not good of a leaderyou are.
I guess, how have you thoughtwhich I, apparently you're doing
a fine job.
So, but how have you learned tokind of balance your sort of
(30:07):
deep technical expertise withwhat I'm sure are very other
non-technical aspects of thebusiness that you have to run?
Like how do you see that thatimpacts how you think about
making business decisions?
And and if so, how?
Avi Freedman (30:22):
I mean, it's true that I always come at it from a,
like, where are the marketsgoing?
What's possible with technology?
What holes are need to befilled?
The customers are saying need tobe filled, right?
Because ultimately creating abusiness for me, tickles the
same things.
Well, it's a means to an end.
(30:42):
Yes, you'd like to make money,but having the best you can
create a product that solves aproblem.
But if you can't bring it tomarket, does it matter?
Right?
Are you actually solvingproblems if it's not, if no
one's using it, so.
To get people using it.
Unless you're taking a moremineral list or open source pro,
approach or whatever.
The traditional way to do thatis to start a company and bring
(31:03):
it to market.
And so then you have thequestion, is there someone that
I'd like to work for?
Or is it gonna be me running thecompany?
So if you decide that there's,'cause that's a big risk, having
someone else lead it.
And I have always, I.
I and a lot of our customerslike having knowing that the,
(31:24):
all the way up to the top,there's an understanding of what
we're doing and why.
There've been some verysuccessful CEOs who come at it
from, I want to build a companythat sells things and is less
and she or he is less particularabout which things those are.
But that's not me.
So, if I am going to make acompany and.
(31:45):
Don't want to work for someoneelse doing it, then I need to
make that company.
But I still come at it from theperspective of how does this
help us build the right thingsand sell them versus a little
bit more of the forming andshaping of the company and
optimizing it and thinking aboutthat.
That's.
Equally important, but maybe alittle bit, still not where my
(32:07):
brain goes.
So I think of it a lot as wheremy brain naturally goes is to
all these interesting technologyand market things, and I have to
make it go to these other thingsalso as like a crown job.
Whereas there's probably otherleaders that, that's, they're
really thinking at all timesabout optimizing the
organization, optimizing thego-to market, and then wanted to
make sure that the producttechnology strategies aligned.
(32:28):
So, I knew I had a lot oflearning to do.
On the other hand I.
I don't know what the hell'shappening with hip bro.
Mark Zuckerberg nowadays.
I'm glad he is happy with andwith Priscilla's stretched
cayenne limo.
But you could look that
Dan Balcauski (32:43):
I've not seen that.
Yeah.
Avi Freedman (32:44):
I.
I think he and I share.
We both have a GT three A, Iguess, but when he started I was
like, looking, reading andlooking.
I'm like, man, I'm a much, Iknow a lot more than that guy.
Practically speaking.
Not, Not, like intellect andlike, and I look at it early.
Zuckerberg and then even withinthree years, and I'm like, wow,
look at how much he's learned.
So it's like, well, if hefigured it out, then I could
(33:06):
probably figure it out.
A lot of his business andScaling stuff.
And I had seen organizations,but, probably didn't put enough
into organization design likesome, founders do, which again
you catch up with once you're,'cause it's hard when you're
like, you go from, can this be acompany to, is this going to be
a company to.
Like, should we be a company to,is this going to be a company?
(33:28):
To, okay, we're a company to,will we survive, to, can we
scale to like, okay, are, are wegoing to exist to, are we un
killable, we're probably at thatlater stage.
I don't wanna be, too proud,but, we're at scale.
People want it.
We just, it's how do we optimizeit?
And in the very early stage ofshould this be a thing, can this
be a thing?
The, it's hard to, for me to puttoo much energy into all the
(33:51):
other stuff about thescaffolding.
'cause you're busy.
I'm, for me, I'm busy.
Like, do people want it?
Will they pay for it?
Can we start doing that?
And but there's other peoplethat have had a lot of success
by being very thoughtful aboutall those things very early on.
And next time I will be morethoughtful about them.
'cause I've seen, in a fastgrowth company, you just don't
have a lot of time to work onthose things.
And they're more painful to,takes a lot more energy to.
(34:13):
Change the DNA and put thesethings into place once you're
already 50 people, even muchless, 200 or 500.
Dan Balcauski (34:19):
well, you obviously have a passion for the
technology and the product andmaking sure that product is
useful to customers.
And obviously that's had goodoutcomes for the company, I
guess, and maybe less so for,less of a passion or interest of
the organizational design andmaybe other things related to
Avi Freedman (34:35):
It is interesting, but it's just not where my brain
DNA goes.
It's not where my priorities go.
It's not what my EDD is chewingon, so.
Dan Balcauski (34:43):
I suffer from the same diagnosis.
And I think it, a wise man oncesaid, know thyself as a first
step to life fulfillment.
So, given that, like, as you'vescaled the company, how do you,
so, you obviously have thispassion and this is where you
naturally gravitate towards, butobviously the business still
needs to grow around you.
How have you set yourself up forsuccess such that you're able to
focus on what is.
(35:04):
Where you're best suited butthen it also makes sure that the
other things that need to happenhappen.
How have you thought about sortof building the organization
Avi Freedman (35:10):
hire, hire, a team of great people that have
different skills and are.
Work together well and arecomfortable telling you, if
there's problems and you're fullof shit.
And identifying the poops on thefloor and saying they need to be
picked up and I mean, you haveto have a team that works well
together that compliments, so.
Dan Balcauski (35:27):
Well, I would love to di dive super far into
that, but we are running outtatime, so I'm actually gonna
start closing us out here with acouple of rapid fire closeout
questions.
Good to that.
So, if all your day-to-dayresponsibilities could be
handled, everything would cruisealong fine without you, you
dedicate a full year to studyany subject you wanted in depth,
all your other responsibilitiestaken care of, what would you
(35:48):
study and why?
Avi Freedman (35:51):
I would get to more fluency on French and
Hebrew and learn Spanish.
Because Spanish would be a lotless, lot more practical, even
though I like French better.
And I feel like not quite acitizen of the, it's like
partially enabled.
I have so enough knowledge to bedangerous, but if I actually
lived in either country for likesix months, it'd be fine.
(36:13):
'cause I used to be able to readnot newspapers, but you know,
books and stuff.
So, I would probably do that.
And find that when I use mybrain differently sometimes the
best insights pop out aboutother things.
So that's probably what I woulddo If I had a year off.
I won't, but I probably won't.
I'll probably just start anothercompany.
But if I were to do that I'dlike to have time to do that.
Dan Balcauski (36:32):
Awesome.
Starting becoming fluent andborder languages.
If.
With, as you think about all theamazing people you've had a
chance to work with, is thereanyone who just pops mind and
had a disproportionate effect onthe way you think about growing
companies?
Avi Freedman (36:46):
Growing companies.
Um, George Conrad's was not wasthe CEO brought in at Akamai
when he had been at IBM.
There's just an amazing set ofkey people at Akamai.
I was there 9.9 years.
My brother recently passed 25years there.
(37:07):
And he was the first reallygreat leader that I got to
observe.
And, I spent some time with KBT,Kevin at SolarWinds and watching
him lead again, he's not.
I say this with all respect, notthe here's, oh, we need to build
that.
That's not where his brain goes,but consistency, communication,
(37:30):
it's a thing with my a DD brain.
I need to get, better at.
And watching him, CEO, it wasreally instructive.
So I haven't lived up to, beingas excellent at some of those
things as I'd like.
But in terms of just thinkingabout how do you build a company
and run it and.
And and lead, just being aroundhim and, I try to spend time
with other people when I BradSmith, who is, I think at
(37:52):
Intuit, I used meet people like,wow, they communicate really
well.
I wanna be more like that.
So that's probably not the mostday to day, but it's more
aspirational.
What I would like to be like atsome point.
So.
Dan Balcauski (38:03):
Perfect.
If I gave you a billboard andyou could put any advice on
there for other CEOs trying toscale their B2B SaaS companies,
what would it say?
Avi Freedman (38:12):
It's your job to suck.
Did you see the movie KeepingThe Faith?
Dan Balcauski (38:16):
I have not.
Avi Freedman (38:17):
That's a old movie at this point, but Ben still is
a rabbi and there's a13-year-old kid, or 12-year-old,
whatever, practicing his towproportion for his Bar mitzvah,
which is a lifecycle event, ifyou're Jewish and he's.
Purposely, I mean, he's suckingin the movie, he's purposely
sucking.
He's like, I can't do this.
I suck.
And then somebody's like, it'syour job to suck.
You're 13 years old.
(38:39):
This is supposed to be hard.
So, just think about it likethat.
It's your job to suck.
Most companies would love tohave your problems.
So just keep things inperspective,
Dan Balcauski (38:47):
That's amazing.
Avi, this has been a blast.
If listeners wanna connect withyou, learn more about Kentik,
how can they do that?
Avi Freedman (38:53):
avi@ick.com.
avi@avi.net.
Avi Friedman on Twitter,LinkedIn.
I don't know some other thingstoo, probably.
Dan Balcauski (39:00):
I will put those links in the show notes for
listeners.
Everyone that wraps up thisepisode of Sask Scaling.
Secrets.
Thank you to Avi for sharing hisjourney, insights, and valuable
tips for our listeners.
If you found this conversationas enlightening anxiety to
remember, subscribe so you don'tmiss out on future episodes.
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