Never done sales before? Meka Asonye shares GTM playbooks from Stripe, Mixpanel, and backing founders at First Round

Brett Berson: So you made it a year. You're still here.

Meka Asonye: It is, You've had to deal with me for, uh, 11 months and we're still here. 

 miracles do happen. One of the, one of the unique, um, aspects I think about, uh, when you transition from company building to investing is you often go from depth, uh, to breath and you get to meet so many founders who are all different. Uh, the companies are different, the cultures are different and, uh, you get to work with many of them.

Brett Berson: Um, and so I thought an interesting place to start my B some of the patterns that you've seen now that you've been, uh, working closely with a number of different companies, um, particularly around go to market and bringing first products to market. Um, what are the types of things that you've, you've kind of seen.

As recurring themes or patterns kind of in this first year of investing and partnering with founders. 

 I think, uh, first I'd say a lot of people face the same problems and whether it's a consumer company, whether it's a vertical SAS, whether it's B2B to C a lot of the founding problems are the same.

Meka Asonye: Um, I think many founders are facing hiring challenges. How do I hire the right people? What do they look like? Where do I find them? How do I get more people using my product top of funnel demand? Um, how should I be measuring success? What is really most important right now. how do I know when I've hit product market fit?

Um, and for people who are starting to think ahead, they say, what story do I need to tell if I want to raise the next round of funding? What are these key milestones that I'm looking for? And, as I reflect across all the investments that I've made and I've seen the other partners around the table make, I think all of these companies are facing very, very similar challenges.

Brett Berson: And so maybe we could take a couple of those in turn, um, and potentially start with some of the early go to market stuff that call it as kind of a proxy metric, getting your first a hundred K and then a million dollars in recurring revenue. Um, what sort of the playbook that you've developed or the ideas that you tend to share in these working sessions with founders?

Meka Asonye: I think for a lot of people, this is the first time they're really in the driver's seat of putting revenue on the table. Um, you see people coming from technical backgrounds who all of a sudden are forced into founder led sales. So I always try to simplify what they're doing in terms of key steps in the process.

So can we really take the sales funnel and split it apart and say, you know, there's four key areas here, awareness, discovery, I kind of group evaluation and tenant purchase together and then loyalty. And for some founders, there'll be a couple of things where, okay, we've got this, we have no problems here for others.

They'll say, okay, I have an awareness issue. Where do I start? And so I like to try to diagnose things by splitting it up into the chunks of the buyer journey or the chunks of the seller journey, and then start to sort of problem solve and troubleshoot 

Brett Berson: How do you, what does that diagnostic look like?

Is that just based on your own pattern recognition or, you know, for a founder who you haven't partnered with, that's listening and says, you know, I don't think my go to market in the early days is firing on all cylinders. How do I know across those handful of, of parts of the funnel where the problem is?

Meka Asonye: Yeah, it really depends on which work they've done. So I'll often just say, Hey, do you have a series of dashboards or do you have a Excel sheet with the key metrics that you're looking at? And I'll usually try to start there, look at the 30,000 foot. And for some people they'll have a clear funnel. They'll know what their stage gates are.

They'll know what their conversion rates are for other people they'll say, oh, I don't even have one. Or I have this word document where I've put a couple of customers down, but I haven't really thought in that way. And so you need to understand, like, are we starting from square one or are we it starting from second base and really start to, to troubleshoot from, um, from really where the founders are beginning.

at, 

Brett Berson: And so for a founder that, that sort of, uh, just has sort of a Google doc with a few different steps in it. And they want to put together an NVP of like, they're getting to a million in recurring revenue dashboard. W what should be in there? What should they be tracking? 

Meka Asonye: Yeah. I mean, I think at the highest level you can track, if you essentially know what your average contract value is and, you know, sort of, um, how many customers you hope to.

have, And then you think about roughly how many conversations do I need to have, like, do I think I have a product that has a 5% success rate of first hearing about the product to actually purchasing, or is it closer to 15 or 20%? And so just doing some rough back of the envelope, math around, what does that look like?

If I have a couple of large users or if I'm a self-service and B product, and then we're going to expect to have hundreds of really small users paying me a lot more. 

Brett Berson: One of the things you mentioned is, is a lot of the founders, you tend to partner with their product or technology oriented versus sales oriented, and I'd be interested.

Do you think that most people from any background can get exceptionally good at sales or is it, there are certain people that are wired for it and certain people that aren't. 

Meka Asonye: Yeah. I mean, so I, I almost think about this as a intercept versus slope. I think there are some people who start on a higher intercept. They've done this before. Um, But I think anyone and especially founders, I think any founder can be a good early salesperson for their product. And I say this because as a founder, you've got a couple of superpowers. One, you probably care more deeply about this problem than many people that a customer I've ever met with before to you have some pattern recognition, you probably can go to a person and say, I've talked to five or six of your peers, and I can educate you on how they've tried to solve the problems, what things they've tripped over.

And so that value add of being able to share with someone, what everyone else in their same shoes is doing, I think can be incredibly valuable. And for me, for many of these startup founders, they're trying to solve the problem in a new way. And I think for most curious, people who have hair on fire problems, they would love to talk to somebody who's really deep on the problem and can start to educate them about different ways they might solve it.

Brett Berson: If you were to create. 

Mecca as academy for technical founders that have not sold before. what are sort of the parts of that experience? What are the important concepts that maybe as a director of engineering at company X transitioning into a founder that has to bring a product to market, what are kind of the pillars that you would sort of coach them on?

Meka Asonye: Yeah. So I think One is process, And I think this should be an easy one, be very, very process-oriented and measure. So create your funnel, make sure you understand how many shots on goal you're having. Make sure you're categorizing why folks are excited, why they're not excited. So make sure you walk out of every meeting and you have a concrete takeaway of this was good because of X or this was bad because of Y Um, I think for many people to like sales is part art and part science. And I truly believe that you can get 1% better each time. So in addition to understanding what you're hearing from your customers, you should be taking. a, A real in-depth look at yourself and saying, what did I do well on that call? Um, I think there's this other piece where many founders, their company is their baby.

They wake up it's all that they think about. And I think oftentimes you can be in front of a prospect, you can be in front of a customer and you just really want to talk about your baby and what you've built and how beautiful your baby is. And what I think is really important as you step back, take off your founder hat and make sure that you're coming, coming to this conversation from a customer centric landscape, and really you're understanding you're listening to their problems.

No one cares what you do. They just want to know, can you solve their problem? And sometimes you need to step away from your business and really put yourself in their shoes and start to speak. their language. 

Brett Berson: so, I mean, you're sort of hinting at this. What does a great first conversation look like in the context of an early product?

early in the company's life. 

Meka Asonye: Yeah. I mean, ideally I think if you're on a 30 minute phone call, you're talking for less than 25% of that call, um, you should be doing deep discovery. So for me, I'm setting an agenda at the very beginning, I'm doing some bit of small talk to build a relationship.

I'm doing a little bit of informing this person where I'm coming from, why I'm passionate about this, why I think I might be able to help them. And then I'm spending the next 25 minutes asking open-ended questions to do deep discovery, to really understand how problematic is this, what have they tried before?

What solutions have worked, um, to really help inform sort of what angle I'm going to pitch my product or how I'm going to build my product. And then usually at the last couple of minutes, you try to make sure that you're saving times for next steps. And next, next steps, you basically want to say, Hey, it sounds like, you know, I took these things away from the conversation, summarize it and make sure you're on the same page. you always want to make sure that in every conversation you're walking closer to a, yes, this product may make sense for this customer or no, this does not make sense. And I'm going to save that person time and I'm going to save myself time. The yeses are great. The no's are great. The maybes will absolutely kill you over 

 why is it so important that you do lots of discovery in the sales process versus just explaining to someone why this widget is so ingrained?

Meka Asonye: I don't think you can properly explain why a widget is so incredible. If you don't know someone, imagine you're a realtor and you have a health. you think it is the best house on the market. You probably need to know whether or not that person works from home. How many kids they have, or if they have their in-laws live with them.

 to have the audacity, to have never met someone before, not know much about what they're looking for. And to just say, I have the best thing for you. You've lost all credibility because you don't know me at all. And so trying to jump directly into my company is the best because of XYZ.

Meka Asonye: It just shows a lack of awareness that the hardest problems are very much nuanced. And you need to understand. The situation that that person is coming from the context with which they have in order to truly have a solution that solves a problem for them 

Brett Berson: on that note. How do you think about if you in the early days have, have a product problem or you've just picked the wrong customer customer segmentation?

Meka Asonye: That's hard because it's funny. You can have a beautiful product, but if you're selling it to the wrong audience, like it's going to look like you have a horrible product. And so, you know, there's a little bit that goes in it upfront of, you know, I'm always telling my founders to do less or do more for fewer. people. And so getting really, really targeted on sort of that red hot core of what you believe your customer is, and you can always work your way out from there. But the common failure mode I see is someone just wants to get to five customers or someone just wants to sneak by a hundred thousand dollars and error.

So they're having a conversation with everyone under the moon. And while I think that as companies grow and as they're more successful, they can take on more. I think at the beginning, you want to be very, very focused on a laser-focused ICP. You want to understand, you want to be able to say, my customer looks like X, they hang out, in Y places they have this problem, their company's probably this big, like, you need to be able to draw four or five criteria and, and. Tell someone articulate, this is what my customer looks like, and this is how I'm gonna sell to them. 

Brett Berson: You mentioned a minute ago, sort of this, the compounding benefit of obsessive, trying to get better at sales every day. How of you're the only person on the call? Do you sort of diagnose what went well and what didn't and what you're going to change in the future?

Meka Asonye: Yeah, I mean, first you can make sure you're not the only one on the call. There's a number of tools that will, transcribe some of these conversations. Uh, there are a number of products that sales organizations use that will actually kind of tell you about the responses that, uh, folks on the other side of the conversation are having to things that you say.

Um, but even if you don't leverage any of these things, like the second, you see someone multitasking, probably a sign that you're not talking about, something really, really important. And so, you know, I think it takes some EEQ to just see where do people's ears pick up. I think the other thing too is like, where are people asking you a ton of questions if they're just nodding their head?

Yes, yes. And you're not getting much engagement. Probably not a good sign. If they're asking the next layer of detailed question, it's probably a sign that whatever you're talking about is perking up their ears for some reason. 

Brett Berson: What do you think about the role of charisma and selling? Is it over-hyped under hyped?

Meka Asonye: I mean, I'd rather have charisma than not have charisma, but I've some of the most successful sales rep. I've seen like you see them into archetypes. There is definitely the person where everyone loves Cindy. And, you know, she could have a conversation with a brick wall and the warmth and energy just exudes.

I've also seen the person who is like the genius who, you know, cut straight to the chase. But when they start talking, they know so much about that. Customer's unique problem. They don't know so much about the product. that. the success comes from their expertise. And well, there's some level of product knowledge that you have done, you have to have, and there's some level of charisma You cue bedside manner that you have to have people still buy from individuals.

And so while the age of relationship selling, I think is gone away and people aren't selling over steak dinners and golf rounds, I do still think people do tend to buy from people that they enjoy their conversation with. And that enjoyment usually comes from learning something. And also just like having a decent person on the other 

Brett Berson: So if you're in that second bucket, do you think they should work on to becoming more charismatic or they should just lean into their strengths of being, you know, a subject matter 

Meka Asonye: I mean, I say you always lean into your strengths, but if you have a huge deficiency, it probably helps to try to work on it a little bit.

Like you don't want to work on it so much that you, you lean away from the things that you're really good at. but, I got some of this feedback from a customer who was talking to one of my founders who said, wow, they're really, really bright, but man, they just jumped right in. And it felt like a transactional relationship.

And with early stage selling, many times you are asking these people to put their faith in you, the businesses, essentially, you, maybe a few other people. And getting someone over that line to trust a two person company, I think it really does take some courage from. and some people's skills.

And so I, I I would focus on building some relationships, um, upfront. 

Brett Berson: Switching gears slightly in you in all the different reps and AEs that you've worked. What do you think tends to separate the good people from the truly exceptional ones?

Meka Asonye: This is easy, and it's going to sound so cliche, but it's about hustle. in sales, you can always prepare a little bit more for your conversation. You can always send one more outbound email. You can always obsess over a detail. You can always try your pitch on a colleague or someone else before you get in.

And actually, have the game time situation. And So it's so hard. There are certain things that everyone like, there's a baseline level of intelligence. There's a baseline level of product understanding that matters. But I think so many of those bars are, are actually pretty low. And what I've seen really differentiate people is it's just hustle.

 I think the hustle actually oftentimes comes out in the preparation for the. meeting. You see somebody who spends five minutes getting ready. who just does a quick LinkedIn search. And you see somebody else who like listens to the podcast that their buyer was on and uses that. Or they think about sort of like what technology stack that company is on and figure out like, how is my product gonna plug in there?

Meka Asonye: There's no shortage of preparation that you can do, before a meeting and then after a meeting too, and how quickly you follow up, how detailed those follow-up actions are. Like I say that that sales is a science, because so much of this is it's easy to do. It just takes time and effort and some attention to detail.

Brett Berson: You talked to just a second ago, a little bit about this, but I assuming you have somebody that has an unbelievable amount of drive, but they don't know where those inputs are. Efforts should be focused around the sales process. Can you walk through some of the, some of the areas when you look at the top 1% of sellers.

And maybe an interesting way to kind of go about it is kind of the story of the life of a customer. What is that person doing or what coaching would you give that 1% person around the life cycle of an opportunity?

Meka Asonye: So I think that 1% person is good at every step in the process. I've seen some salespeople who are really good at the contract negotiation, which is a really important part. I've seen other salespeople who are exceptional at discovery. I've seen other people who are really good at like the evaluation and an intent, or they're great at crafting the solution and showing how this product will fit into what's happening at the company right now.

And I think those 1% people, they are really great at every step. They are great at awareness. They a great evaluation. They're great at the negotiation. They're great at setting the 

customer up for success and loyalty down the line. And You know, what I've seen is that the people who are best, they try to learn from others.

There's no one pathway to success. And I think a lot of people become hybrids. of some of the best people that they've seen in, you know, each little format and their sponges, they're just absolutely trying to figure out, oh, I saw you use this line with this product and it worked really well. I'm going to jot this down.

I'm going to start using that when I get that objection. And that's how I handle it. Or I saw the way you talked about our competitor and how you just tweak the framing. enough that, you know, made a customer's eyes light up. And some of that you can get by just doing it over and over again and again, getting 1% better every day.

But I love people who get 5% of bread here every day by learning from people. Who've been doing this for a while. 

Brett Berson: And so kind of maybe to pick one of those apart, what is top 1% prep look like before a first call?

Meka Asonye: So I think obviously you not only prepare for the people who are going to be on the call, but you also prepare for the people who you believe will be stakeholders to that purchase. Um, So imagine you're selling a enterprise security product. There's probably going to be someone on legal as well as someone in procurement.

And so even if someone on it just shows up, you've also thought about those other people who they're going to have to Convinced that this is the right solution. And whether it's the followup materials from call one, but you're sharing things that not only help you convince the persona you talk to, but the two other people you know, they're going to have to talk to, even if they don't come up in the conversation.

And so it's almost like looking around a corner and saying, not only am I really good at this step in the process today, this discovery call answering these specific questions, but I can almost do a little bit of inception and say, I'm going to leave you with all the stuff that we talked about, our action items.

And I'm also going to leave you with these other two things that I think are really interesting. And I know that you're going to use that internally to help, to help move this conversation down the line. 

Brett Berson: I'm curious as we're talking about this, how your set of experiences around sales and go to market have translated to your first year as a VC.

And so do you think about that top 1% rep behavior, as it relates to trying to sort of behave as a top 1%? Like w what are the, the sort of rituals or habits that you've brought over that you feel are serving you? Well, thus far, 

Meka Asonye: Yeah, I mean, I I think at, at, um, an early stage venture, because of the fact that we invest in.

So few of the opportunities that we see, it looks a lot like in enterprise sales pipeline, where you need to have a lot of people who are in the awareness bucket who are in the discovery. In order to get one to two sign contracts or founders who want to partner with us. And anytime you're in something that has such a low success rate, again, I think you've got to be incredibly focused on the process and not just the outcome.

So what are the frameworks that I'm using on a day in day out basis? Um, I think you need to take as much pride in a first meeting that goes nowhere as our first meeting, that, you know, as a second time founder, who's going to have their choice of five different venture firms to choose from. You need to bring your, a game to every single meeting.

And I think about this we used to always talk about these, um, customers who'd come in, you'd be taking a demo call and you would think that at best, this probably isn't going to go anywhere. And if it does, it's a really small ACV contract. And sometimes out of nowhere, this person says, oh, I signed up with this email address, but I actually represent Microsoft, Right. I actually represent Uber and.

uh, What you saw here was, you know, just my personal side project. And so because of the fact that you never know when these diamonds in the rough are gonna come out of nowhere, I think it behooves you to prepare for every single interaction. Like it's your Superbowl. Like this is a, there's a million dollar contract hanging in the balance.

And, you can never slack off. You've got to bring 120% to every single interaction. Um, you know, another thing I think about as an investor that I thought about on sales is the selling process and investor starts on email one. you just emailed me with a deck. I've never met you before, but ideally I'm responding as quickly as possible in an amazing tone.

And we're getting a meeting set, you know, right away on the first call, rather than just sitting back and having you pitch I'm, I'm giving you more information about why I think myself and first round are an amazing partner to the most ambitious founders. And so you can't start selling Halfway down the line, every single interaction, every single process is this truth seeking exercise where both people are getting to know each other better, and figuring out.

Is there something unique here in special here? 

Brett Berson: So have you found that the mapping from the last chapter of your career is surprisingly similar? 

Meka Asonye: Yeah, I mean, honestly, and, uh, you know, maybe it's just the unique way that we practice venture at first round, we have a ton of metrics. Like we've been doing this for a really long time and we measure everything and we try to get better every single day.

And I think if you talk to any SMB or mid-market sales leader, they're thinking the same way they know what their best reps sort of like first call to close ratio, is they know sort of what the talk time should be. on an, on an average meeting, they know exactly how much pipeline they need to create in Q1 in order to make sure that they're sort of meeting their Q4 goals.

Like They're thinking about everything as a machine there's inputs and outputs. Anytime something is off, or there's an anomaly, they're trying to understand, okay, why is this good anomaly happening? Why is this bad anomaly happening? And so, you know, I spend a lot of time looking at. 

my funnel of opportunities and what things I invest in.

 you know, in the sales world, every quarter, you're, you're looking at all of your losses and you're seeing who did I lose to? and Why, what product feature, what can we do differently? And so, you know, I feel lucky that all of the founders that I've wanted to partner with today, have chosen to work with, you know, first round and myself, but I guarantee you, after that first loss, I'm going to obsess over what could I, and should I have done differently in order to make sure that that ended up in the win column? 

Brett Berson: So looping back to one of the first things we were talking about when you were mentioning a bunch of the areas or patterns that you've noticed across all the companies that you've been working with is hiring. And I know one of the areas you spent a lot of time on is that, uh, first go to market or first sales hire.

I feel like on a weekly basis, there's a founder that's been, uh, doing founders led sales, and they're trying to figure out, uh, who they should hire, or maybe they hired somebody. And they're asking you to give feedback on the person. What, what are your frameworks or lenses for that founder that has gotten their first hundred K 500 K a million dollars, whatever, uh, in revenue.

And they want to make their first hire. 

Meka Asonye: So there's a couple of things here. Um, I think the first one is make sure you hire someone who is stage appropriate. And so I can imagine as a founder, it might be tempting to say, I have this VP of sales. Who's been at Salesforce for 10 years and I'm selling I'm in a B2B SAS world.

This person is going to be great to be my first salesperson or be my first sales leader. And I think more often than not, that would be a huge mistake. And that's because that VP probably has been a manager of manager of managers and hasn't closed a deal themselves in a really long time. And for most of these early sales hires, what they need to be is somebody who's going to go out and actually be closing business for 80% of their time.

And 20% of their time, they're starting to think about the system, the organism, what we can do to make this thing repeatable. And so you really want somebody who's actually either been an exceptional. life. And who has spent a bunch of time coaching and mentoring and spinning up new people, or you want somebody who maybe they've had their first manager gig, or maybe they're still in the player coach world, where They're responsible for a team quota, but they also have an individual quota. You just want somebody who's going to be excited about and really good about the things that are mission critical today. And oftentimes also found her like, okay, obviously you could hire lots of different people. What's the one thing you need this person to do.

Sometimes they'll say it's like set up Salesforce, think about our yearly planning, but most of the time it's like close business. And so when you think about that, you probably would want to have somebody who recently or still is on the frontlines closing business. 

Brett Berson: So let's say you, you sort of nailed that spec how do you help, uh, a technical founder, product oriented founder? Know what good looks like? And the difference between, let's say a sales rep that has seven years of experience, um, at a similar type of company to yours. So the shape of the deal that you do is somewhat. 

You plot all those people out and their stars in there are weak performers.

And if you've never hired for it before, it's hard to know what great looks like. 

Meka Asonye: Yeah. I mean, first I would, I would just ask the question of how are you pacing towards your number? What was your percent target over the last four or five quarters or years, depending on sort of what their, their comp cycle was based off of make sure that when you do reference checks, those numbers check out with the manager.

And so, you know, there's obviously a lot of questions and things that you can look stylistically that are forward looking to see, will this person be successful selling my product to my customers. But I also think there's something backwards looking at. how many times has this person missed their number, if they've ever missed it at all.

Um, and you want, I think, especially for some of the sales reps that you want to hire, I think you want somebody who's achievement oriented and who has been successful. in the past. There are other things that I would be doing too, like past success doesn't necessarily they'll be successful, um, selling your product.

So you need to figure out whether or not their last experience is 0%, 50% or a hundred percent overlap with what you're selling. And I would say sort of one persona, like, is that somewhat similar are they wildly different? I think too, I would be thinking about the complexity selling ads is very different than selling a developer API or enterprise secure. Three, I'd be looking at who they're selling it to, um, and the sales cycle on which that is like, are they going from a transactional, to call three call close, that's a 15 day sales cycle, or is there someone who comes from a, you know, these sales cycles are six months, a year, 18 months, stakeholder mapping, you know, get the bill through Congress type of sale.

And so, um, the prior experience, the more degrees of overlap there are. with, Um, what your currently doing and what they did before? I think you can feel more comfortable that that success will translate into yours, but if you're taking someone from somewhere completely different, um, I don't know how much faith you can put into that prior success translating to where you are today.

Um, I also think that I'm always interviewing two for, 

intellectual horsepower, curiosity, ability to think on the fly, solve, you know, type two problems, problems that are evolving quickly because that's the name of the game or their startup. You're going to hire someone. You're going to think that the audience is X and you're going to sell it.

in Y but that person's going to need. to Evolve and adapt. And I think that there are some people who are used to, they want the playbook they say, give me the playbook and I'll execute on this script that you're giving me and reaching out to these, these other people. I think those are others who look at it and say, Hey, this playbook is all messed up, what if we tried this instead of that and they slowly iterate on a process and I'm oftentimes like leaning towards that person, who's going to be willing to take what's given and make it better and tear it apart.

Brett Berson: How does this set of ideas translate to what you think a good recruiting end to end process should look like for this specific role? 

Meka Asonye: For me, this, this process, again, is one of mutual discovery where you are learning a lot about them, their past successes and failures and how they operate. And they're learning about you as a leader, as a company, as a sales cycle, And I often think it's really interesting for founders to share some of the problems that they're facing.

So if I'm a founder I'm trying to hire my first sales rep, I'd probably say I'm going to pitch XYZ company on Friday. Help me understand how I should prep. Okay, cool. Walk me through that. How should I think about this 45 minute meeting? What should I do in the What should I do after the meeting?

Like how do I push to a sale? And you asked this question five times, you'll get five, very, very different answers. You'll see, you'll be able to see the depth and the sort of ingenuity and the creativity of different folks. Who's sort of thinking outside of the box, giving you new ideas that you haven't thought of.

And who's just saying the standard rinse and repeat, here's a message that I send to every Here's the standard template that I tell them to send to everyone first. You'll see the difference between a high quality response and an average one very quickly. 

Brett Berson: Are there other questions you've found or exercises that you like to do with this type of a role that you found or is particularly useful?

Meka Asonye: Yeah. I mean, I love describing what I'm currently doing and asking someone else to tell me what, how can I improve? What's the worst thing that I'm doing here. And if you're a founder and you're doing founders, led sales and you have no sales expertise and you're talking to somebody who's been selling for the last seven years, hopefully there's something that they can pick up on that can make you better in your job.

And I think if the person can't really, probably not the right hire, 

Brett Berson: do you like to do specifically on reference calls for this specific role? 

Meka Asonye: Um, a couple of things. I think one, I want to make sure what they told me was true on sort of their achievement to target. I think too. I want to make sure. The references are painting the same picture that whether you talk to appear.

Uh, boss or someone that they've managed, you're still getting the same rough idea of like a human.

Uh, what I hate to see is when the manager has a very, very different perspective than someone who was their direct report, or their peer has a very different, different perspective. There, I'm oftentimes looking to figure out why people make the decisions they make at the time that they make. And I think if these folks have worked really closely with these people, hopefully they can give you a sense of, of those transitions.

And so I'm really just trying to understand who am I marrying for the next, however many years, who am I putting the faith of my company into? Um, and I think the other thing about this too, is, is integrity. Values are really important. you sometimes see salespeople Doing whatever it takes to get a sale across the finish line.

And for any organization, I've been a part of, I've always said, Hey, we are customer first. If there is a customer priority and our priority, they come before we do. And you just want to make sure that people aren't going to be willing to make those trade-offs and those shortcuts and the name of IRA sales bonus, 

Brett Berson: if we transitioned it, let's assume you find somebody that you're excited about.

Um, a couple of things sort of come up. One is, um, how do you think about calm structure in those very early days when you don't necessarily have a scalable repeatable process? Um, and two, how do you think about leading indicators that this person is going to be wildly successful or leading indicators that I made a hiring error?

Meka Asonye: Yeah. So I think one and that first piece on sales comp, I think people are often tempted to immediately jump to what a mature sales competition process look like.

Looks like. So you might say, you know, of a person's on target earnings at a mature company, half of it will be base salary and half of it will be incentive-based. I think that's a huge mistake for early sales. Um, I would never set a target where 50% of someone's comp is at risk, unless I have reasonable certainty that they are able to achieve.

that target. So you need to think about where you are as a company. Do you have that level of insight? Um, I think especially with early stage sales too, and anyone who's going to be joining be the fifth or 10th employee and the first sales person, I think you want them incentivized by the equity value in the company.

Sometimes they may need to make a trade off on the revenue standpoint. 

Worst for them in the short term, but better for our company in the long run. So I think you sometimes really want to punt that can down the road until you have clarity that you can do it. One of the things that I've done in the past is before rolling out any plan, I shadow that plan for the first quarter or for the second quarter, I make sure I give them a target.

and say, Hey, we would have hypothetically set this target. Here are the dashboards to measure. it. And then we check in middle of the quarter, end of quarter, like, did that target make sense? And was it in the realm of reasonableness? You don't want people to be 10% to target. You also don't want people to be 500% to target.

That probably means you, you really set the wrong, the wrong target. Um, The other piece that I would say is like, you get what you come for. So just really make sure that the plan you're building is aligned with the most important thing for the company, um, at that time. 

Brett Berson: And so does that mean you just kind of have for maybe the first six months or a year, you just have a base comp plus equity and you, you kind of leave it alone.

Meka Asonye: Sometimes I'll do a spiff where I say, you know, your expected comp is going to be paid out in base salary. But if you achieve this hurdle rate that, you know, I think of as an a or an a plus here's a small cash bonus, or here's an extra equity grant for going above and beyond. I think the other thing that you can do, and which I think is really important is to make sure that you have interim checkpoints at quarter one quarter two, quarter three, you should be giving them.

Qualitative and quantitative goals. It could just be, I would expect you to have closed this number of deals, by this time it might be, I expect you to have sort of our value proposition down and objection handling with our five key competitors down after the first 30 days. Um, so there's a bunch of different qualitative things that you can do to say if you're on track to being a good and productive person here, you will meet some of these stage gates.

And I think combining some qualitative things, especially in the early days with quantitative, as folks get further up the ramp curve is sort of the right way to set both parties up for success. 

Brett Berson: And do you think about those early goals and targets based on what the founder led sales motion looked like?

Or is it more quote, industry, best practice or some simplistic framework to get your arms around? What is reasonable for that first go to market? 

Meka Asonye: I think you use the founder led sales metrics to inform what it should be. But in some cases you can imagine a founder being able to get into rooms that a first founding sales rep will not be able to get into.

Um, on another side you might say, Hey, I was doing founder led sales, but I'm really bad at it. And I would expect the, the sort of conversion rate to go up when you hire someone. So you really got to think about the uniqueness of your situation, um, where you are as a business and, and who you're bringing in.

But I would inform it somewhat with what I've learned by being on the front lines with our customers over time. 

Brett Berson: What else should a founder be thinking about when he or she is looking for leading indicators that this was the right or wrong hire? 

Meka Asonye: I think a lot of it is actually going to be cross-functional.

So the right early stage sales person, like this. isn't Hey sales person, I'm hiring you. You need to go get me a million in revenue and you go sit in the corner and like deliver us cash. The, I think the best early salespeople are fundamental to all parts of the company. Ideally, they're helping inform the product roadmap.

Ideally they're saying I'm talking to customers every day and this is what I'm hearing. This is what I'm seeing their eyes light up. This is what I'm hearing. They wish we had. And so they should be really in an integral part in providing feedback to product and engineering, to customer support, to other parts of, of the house.

And I think if they're doing that, that is a really good first step. Like you just want them to be an integral part of the company. Um, I think you'll start to see, or hopefully start to see that they're having meetings with companies that you think of that fit your persona. You'll start to see them closing you know, opportunities here, here and there.

Um, and so I'd be measuring it qualitatively and quantitative. 

Brett Berson: Do you think that most founders just gut instinct about whether the person is working or not 10 tends to be accurate or they're? So uncalibrated, it's a bit scattershot 

Meka Asonye: I've seen it all over the map. I think there are some founders who've worked in somewhat early stage companies before, and have seen what early stage reps look like.

And I think there are other people who have not. And so you need to look inside yourself and say, do I know what good or great looks like? Or am I going to be this person who is so used to the way that I did things. And if someone comes in and does them in a different way, um, you know, the alarm bells are going to be going, 

 so what about in the inverse? how should a rep or sales leader think about whether being that first go to market hire is for him or her?

Meka Asonye: I think it's a lot about thinking about what brings you joy and passion and energy and what your ultimate career goals are. I think being an early stage salesperson can be such a unique opportunity and you can learn so much about different things, but it is a very different job than joining a 500 person company where you're going to be the eighth or ninth sales rep.

And you know what the ramp curve looks like, you know what the playbook looks like. You have all the objection handling, you have all the legal contracts the machine is built for you being an early stage sales person I always think it's like trying to build a plane While you're flying it, which feels almost impossible.

I think that's what early stage sales feels like. It feels really, really hard. It feels like you're being asked to do two impossible things at once.

Brett Berson: What do you think that person's process should look like to decide whether the opportunity is right for him or her? 

Meka Asonye: That's easy for me, it's, two-fold one spending a ton of time with the founding team and figuring out whether or not you would work well together in early stage startups. So much of the value is driven from the founding team.

And if you don't believe in them, if you don't see them scaling, you shouldn't join their company. Um, the second piece I'd be looking at it. 

how good is my product. Um, and I would be trying to understand. Who my customers are, how big their pain is and what other options that they have. I only want to work somewhere that is a category leading product and company.

You don't want to be at the third best solution. 

Brett Berson: It is amazing how in, in almost any role, most candidates don't talk to customers or potential customers. regardless of what you're doing, understanding deeply, what the customer thinks about this product is just unbelievably valuable. 

Meka Asonye: It is. For every job that I've ever even thought about, I've always tried to talk to customers to understand what they think of that company, what they do well and what could they improve on. 

Brett Berson: So switching gears a little bit, something we haven't yet talked about in this sort of early go-to-market market phases, um, is thinking about things like early pilots and design partners and how that kind of intersects with the zero to one product building and I'm interested.

What, what are some do's or don'ts or some of your own lessons learned about getting those first design partners, picking them, making them successful, sort of anything in that area? 

Meka Asonye: Yeah, I think, I think I've said this before, but first I would say do less identify as sort of the most important issue and tackle it, Trying to tackle multiple things at the same time can really be tough.

 if you think about Salesforce, Salesforce has multiple jobs to be done. Uh, one, it's a revenue forecasting tool for managers, you know, to it's the ultimate CRM for sales reps. So they understand who I need to talk to you and what daily behaviors I have.

Meka Asonye: If I were trying to build a new CRM, I would focus on one piece of that. I would either focus on the revenue forecasting piece, or I'd really focus on being a better tool for sales reps to manage who they're talking to. And when, But out of the gates, trying to be both things, trying to say, I'm going to come in here as a scrappy startup and try to spread my little tiny resources across the same surface area that a multi thousand person organization.

is It's bonkers, Like there's no way you're going to be successful there. I think also choose the team that you're working for, like work with a really small core team and make sure, again, you're really checking 

Brett Berson: of the design partner side 

Meka Asonye: on the design partner side, figure out like who is the person that I care most about their feedback and make sure you're checking in with that person frequently versus, you know, I've seen people who spread the love across too many people.

And again, especially with a design partner, you're going to get different feedback again, from that sales manager versus that sales rep. If you asked the sales manager, what's the most important thing, they'll say one thing, if you asked sales up, what's the most important thing. they'll say another thing if you ask.

a rep or an SDR. What's the most important thing they'll have different answers. So it just gets too hard to balance all of those stakeholders opinions. You need to choose who you're going to be best in class for, and then just try to be table-stakes for everybody else. 

Brett Berson: W what else makes it a great design partner?

One is kind of this small team that you can, I guess, kind of quasi embed and co build with. Are there other leading indicators that, that this company and, or a team might be a good fit of your, you know, call it five design partners or, or however many might have? 

Meka Asonye: Yeah, I think when there's something from a firmographics, point of view, ideally, they're representative of this ICP that you're going to go build for where if you go and build for this company, this company is a flag bearer for a bunch of others.

And by saying, Hey, I successfully stood up a product or a pilot for this company. And this is the results that they're having. You would love for a hundred, a thousand other companies to say, Hey, if it's good enough for them, this probably fits. our use case. Um, I would also say that early stage companies are um, there's a lot that's written in pencil and there are some people and companies who are okay with a little bit of a Yolo.

This is half-baked attitude. There are other companies where that will drive them up the wall. I love working with design partners who have worked with other early stage startups and, um, you know, had successful successful pilots. There 

Brett Berson: is that the best proxy is they've done it before, or, or how do you know if somebody is, is open to a half-baked solution 

Meka Asonye: sometimes it's that they've done it before other times it's that whatever they're doing right now is so painful, they would do anything to change it.

And so you're also, this is the third piece is ideally the design partner has a hair on fire problem that they needed to solve. yesterday, And that will be transformational for their business if you solve it. 

Brett Berson: When does he touched on a number of times, is, is the importance of ICP. Uh, we haven't yet talked about how does somebody figure that out or make sure they either have the right ICP.

It's appropriately narrow, it's appropriately defined sort of those types of things. 

Meka Asonye: First, I'd try to write it down. Like I've forced people to write down what their ICP is and give me an example of 20 of it, 50 of it, like who was the persona? What is the company size? What do they do? Another piece I would say is sometimes you can't shortcut this. You start to hone in on your ICP by having. Tens of hundreds of customer calls. And You start to see people want to rip it out of your hands. You start to see the visceral anger and what's happening right now in this space and how much they would want to see something different.

And I always like, I would just think about creating a big Excel sheet with a list of who I'm talking to the companies. And then maybe it's in a green, yellow, red, maybe it's a 1, 2, 3, but just score how those conversations look, and then start to pivot. Start to sort by all of the greens. And ideally you start to say, oh, okay.

 the people who I'm selling to is this persona they're at this size company, they're at this type of company. You'll just start to see the same things repeated over and over and over again. 

Brett Berson: Going back to kind of this dance between early product and customers and getting the right product built correctly for the right customers and trying to figure out if you have a product problem or a customer or ICP definition, problem, do you tend to find that there's a pattern to one of those meaning in most cases it's actually a product problem, or in most cases it's actually a customer problem or is it completely random?

And idiosyncratic?

Meka Asonye: My hunch is that most of the time it is a product problem. And I say this because if I had built an amazing product and I went and told someone who might be a buyer, here's what I have. And they're not interested if I had a really good product, I think they'd be able to. tell me, Hey, I'm not interested, but Jane down the road would love this thing.

Or I remember the police situation I was in four years ago and this product would be great for me then, or in three more years or when I have 20 more sales reps, this is exactly what I'd be looking for. And so I often find if you build a product with value, people will somehow stumble upon you they're here about you or someone will reappoint you in, in another direction.

Brett Berson: What advice do you give to founders, uh, who are getting a lot of nos, um, in the sense that as human beings, we don't like to be told no, and I think a lot of product people and technical folks don't like sales because it, it's not delightful to have people constantly telling, you know, in particular, in the early.

It could be 90% of the people that you're talking to are saying, no. Do you have a way to help somebody build that resilience in the early days of it's not, it's not an experience they've had it. 

Meka Asonye: I mean, I don't think there's a way to build a resilient other than to just tell people to get back in there and get slapped in the face again.

 there's a slight silver lining, which is each slap in the face makes you somewhat more educated where you can take away what is the loss reason? And is this something that I can change or I can work on? Or is this something that I can't, and if it's something that you can work on and you keep hearing the same thing over again, you're going to have this Eureka moment where it's like, oh, okay, I've gotten the 15th.

Meka Asonye: No, because I'm missing this product feature. I'm going to go build this product feature. And so. Sales is a really, really tough profession being an early stage founder and doing founder led sales. Like you're going to get a lot of nos. Um, but I think those are slowly giving your breadcrumbs towards the treasury trust that you're looking at. 

 you can't shortcut product market fit. And one of the things that you see when you're in some of these really large companies, when I really reflect on my time at Stripe, we got so many nos as we're going up market, but those nos just made us all better as individuals. They met us better as a company and they're, they're part of the process and you just can't.

Meka Asonye: short circuit it. 

Brett Berson: So an area we haven't yet explored is, is what great looks like after you have your first few customers. Um, and you know, you probably don't yet have a customer success function built out, but maybe every first five or 10 customers may be you're halfway through some pilots. How should a founding team think about that work in the, in the early days?

Meka Asonye: It's funny you asked that because I think it is one of the things that often gets most overlooked. And it's surprising because you have these people that you put your blood, sweat and tears into convincing to be a design partner. And then you sort of just say, okay, now time to focus on net new logos.

And one, I think if you don't continue to satisfy those initial crop of people. You're really dead in the water. I mean, imagine a new customer comes in and you're trying to convince them to work with this early stage startup. And you said, Hey, I have these five design partners. And the valley, small tech is small.

They call those partners and they say, yeah, you know what? The product is really great in the beginning, but it started to fail me and no one's answering my questions. Like it is mission critical. And I always tell people, I don't care. Who's doing it. Whether it's you, whether it's the engineering team, whether it's the sales team, like you really need to focus on making sure a year from now that customer stills, as excited about you as they were when they first decided to agree to be a design partner and so loyalty.

And I think that if you were wined, if you think about okay, I'm a year later from a design partnership and this person is renewing their contract or their contract is expanding. that Yes starts on day one. It starts in how you get this person on board. It starts in the monthly or quarterly check-ins that you have, it continues with the customer support experience that they have anytime they run into issues.

And so you can't start thinking about the renewal a quarter beforehand, if that's, when you start it's too late. 

Brett Berson: Uh, how do you think about the opportunity to sort of, um, tactically provide excellent customer service or support? And it could be speediness of responses. It could be speed to incorporate early feedback and kind of one bucket.

And the other that I think is a little bit in the early days, maybe under leverage, which is just the relationship and almost friendship that you have with that first 10 or 20 customers. 

Meka Asonye: You, you hit on a lot of the important pieces. So I'd say one, I was always measuring SLA. And not only is it time to first response, but it's also time to resolution.

until you want to make sure if someone said. you know, your mission critical to my infrastructure, And I'm having this issue, that someone responds right away, ideally with it, it's solved, but if not what they it's solved, it's a, we're gonna solve it by this point. I think secondarily the relationship piece, 

I always thought about every single account having a champion and the champion is the person who put their name on the line for making this decision. It's the person who, if things go right. They are going to be championed. Maybe they get a promotion. If things go wrong, everyone's going to look at them. And so I'm building and I thought authentic relationship with my champion. I'm checking in to understand sort of like, how are they? And how's the rest of their organization, perceiving their product I'm using these check-ins to hopefully get feedback for what could we be doing better?

If nothing, what could we be doing next that we don't currently solve? Um, and so you want to make sure that the company's happy. You want to make sure that the champions happy and, um, you need to be thinking about this holistically. You, you also ideally have set some sort of mutually agreed upon success criteria of if we pick our head up a year from now, and we're really happy, what are we saying?

And maybe it's usage. Maybe it's like, you know, revenue one back. It really depends on your product, but you want to be able to. Be able to objectively or agree that if we get to this point, this is a good thing. And the partnership should continue. 

Brett Berson: Are there any other rituals or best practices in those early days of customer success that you'd recommend, or you've seen any of the founders that you've partnered with?

Uh, leverage that had been really impactful. 

Meka Asonye: I always love surprising and delighting my customers with things and celebrating the milestones that they meet. Especially if my product enabled them was a small piece in getting to that milestone. again, if we take the CRM example, imagine that one of your customers gets to X million in revenue.

like Send them something celebrate that moment. And maybe it's a quick reminder of, Hey, there are a lot of people who contributed to this and this software vendor that I was using was it was a small piece in it. 

Brett Berson: So switching gears a little bit, what are the things that you've learned in this first year, as an investor that you think would have been useful or served you as a startup employer? Exac how do you known them?

 so I think one would be the power of storytelling. I used to wonder sometimes why companies had these expensive. All hands meetings. And sometimes it felt like you didn't get any new information, um, or sometimes because of the role that you were in, you felt like everything that was being told there was, was something that you already understood.

Meka Asonye: But I think what I've really started to realize is, and especially in a remote world, how important it is for everyone to feel like they are uniquely bought into and contributing to the same mission. And I think what I've seen is the best founders have this ability to captivate audiences, bring them along, make sure people feel this excitement that's going on.

And as a leader, as a manager can be. I know many people who just want to focus on operating and executing and selling and hiring. And sometimes people forget to communicate internally. And I think it's a huge mistake. And so I've been pushing a lot of my founders to say, remember, not everyone in your organization has the same context that you have and make sure that you are continually checking in, refreshing everyone on, you know, where we're going and where we are right now.

What percent towards that mission are we,

Brett Berson: how did that click for you in this, uh, role as an investor,

Meka Asonye: I've seen a lot of people who are working on the same problem, and I've seen the ability of some people to make you feel like this is the world's biggest problem and a solution to this would be like unlocking Nirvana. And I've seen other people who are working on this same problem. And you just walk out of a meeting with far less enthusiasm.

Um, I've seen companies internally who have gone out and raised subsequent rounds of fundraising where I was nervous that it was going to be a hard round to get done. Um, I've seen others where if you look at the fundamentals of the business, they're doing exceptionally well, but if you don't communicate it right, if you don't paint that vision in that story, right.

Other people in that may not be as 

Brett Berson: And so is the takeaway that when you think about your role as, uh, a go to market leader, you would have prioritized this selling narrative setting internal evangelizing more than you did? 

Meka Asonye: Yeah, I think it is. I I think I did an okay job.

at Continually reinforcing, especially if you think about being at a high growth company, you can look up one or two quarters later and say, oh well, 50% of my team is new, and is turned over. And didn't remember that talk that I gave at sales kickoff a year ago. And so the job never finished it.

You can't expect other people to translate it to new people. You need to continue to refresh that, to reinvigorate, re excite people about the challenge. And, if you think about someone who has been there, imagine you're at a startup and you've been there for three years and you're starting to feel like, wow, I've been working on this thing, just pounding away for three years.

I think, again, you need to, as a leader, re inspire those people and say, Hey, remember, the three years ago when we were five people in a room, and this was the problems that we're facing. Look at where we are now and look at the challenges we're facing. Like there's so much more exciting. We've made so much more progress and it's so easy when you're in the weeds operating to just get focused on tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, and people really need to be able to step back, take the, take the macro view and, um, share that with employees.

I think that people who are working with them are also probably very much focused on just like, what does my manager needed me to get done for tomorrow? 

Brett Berson: And in similar to what we're talking about sales earlier, can someone get very good at this? Or are there people that are just, you know, the, the classic example would be Steve jobs, right?

It's just, um, one of the talents and genius was this ability to weave a narrative that can get customers and employees really excited about what they're doing. Um, is it a muscle that can be exercised and developed? Uh, Or maybe to some small degree, you can get better, but true greatness is much more innate.

Or how do you think about somebody deciding that they are not doing a great job in this area and becoming world-class at it? 

Meka Asonye: I think you can get better at it I think one, if Even if you just take a static message and you workshop a couple of different ways to get this message across, I guarantee you that the message comes across crisper and better on the fifth iteration of it versus the first iteration of it.

Even if the language sounds somewhat similar, you see this with branding and marketing slogans, like just changing one word or changing the order. can make a really big difference in how people perceive it. Um, and it's something that I thought about a lot you know, on my journey as a sales leader is I would really think about these quarterly kickoffs a quarter before they even happened, right after one would finish.

I'd be thinking about, okay, what is the message that I want. to give to my organization next time, what are the vignettes? And during the quarter, I'd be thinking about, oh, this is a great example that. I'm going to be able to tie in at our next quarterly kickoff, or this is another example what we talked about last person last quarter, and someone actually living up to that ideal.

So for me, it wasn't something that came just natural. It was something that I really had to prepare for. And I would start a notes document four months in advance. 

Brett Berson: I thought maybe we could wrap up with a topic that I assume you get a lot, a lot of questions about, and instead of you answering them one off, you can just send them this recording to make your life a lot easier, which is, um, for folks that are curious about venture or thinking about it for the first time they've been a founder they've been in a.

Um, what sort of advice do you give them about, you know, your fresh eyes to the experience and might it be something they would enjoy? Might it be something they would hate? Might it be something they could be great at? It might be a struggle for them. If you were to kind of open source, the zillions of people that have pinged you from time to time about, Hey, I'm thinking about venture, what, what, what's kind of the, the stump speech that you figured out now, if you will.

Meka Asonye: Yeah, for me, um, you know, a lot of people have been asking me I'm 12 months in and they're asking, how are you feeling about the job? And I can say that I've never been more fulfilled in a role. And for me it combines a lot of things that I love. It combines really ambitious individuals inside our partnership and as founders working on the most interesting problems in the world and being able to be a coach.

To those people. And so I think the only way to figure out whether or not you would enjoy it is just doing the job. And for me, I started angel investing before I made my transition to full-time venture and being an angel investor convinced me that the next step in my career was to be an institutional investor.

And so I wish I had started angel investing earlier. I think for folks who are sort of, you know, at amazing companies or who have what's his school with, or have friends who are starting companies, just ask if you can invest, get involved as to see their fundraising doc as to just provide feedback and you don't always need to do it with money, you can advise on the functional thing that you spend all your time thinking about.

 I just wish I was on the field earlier. 

Brett Berson: On that note, what are the things that have been surprisingly similar between angel investing in venture investing and what has felt just completely new to you?

Meka Asonye: So there's a lot of similarities. I think the thing that has been new is the number of people who all need something from you at all at the same time. And so, as an angel, when you're thinking about how you can add value, oftentimes you're sending a really thoughtful email, responding to the ass in an investor update, um, that a company sends.

And if you invest in you know, 10 companies a year, maybe you're getting you know, an update every couple of weeks as an institutional investor, where you are at least at first round, the closest partner to that founder, you are usually the first call. And sometimes all of these first calls are happening around the same time.

 some of them, you can solve some of them you're looking with inside the partnership for an answer, others. You're looking to friends that you've worked with before. And, and so I think I've been a little bit surprised by just how deep our relationships are with our founders and as an angel, even as a really, really valuable value at angel.

Meka Asonye: I think that that depth of that relationship with the founder pales in comparison to being the lead investor,

Brett Berson: I've found that, you know, one of the really incredible things about investing in the style that we do is that you spend a decent portion of your week trying to help people figure things out and build a really exceptional company. I think the other really incredible thing is the learning that happens in the other.

From the founders that you get to partner with and, um, the things that they teach you over time. And so maybe to wrap up, are there things that the founders you've worked with thus far have taught you in sort of a medicines or is there a specific founder or, or moment that, um, instilled something in you that you're kind of taking with you or is, um, useful to you?

Meka Asonye: I mean, maybe this is a self fulfilling prophecy and it says something about the people that I've backed, but I think founders have helped reinforced some of the beliefs that I are just inherent to me. Um, one of them is this never get beat on hustle. And I have a founder who I wake up to there on the east coast, but I wake up to 

5:00 AM texts from this.

founder. And so it's funny, it's like the first thing they're thinking about is how to make their business better. And oftentimes, like, you know, I'll be sending them a response for you late at night, west coast, and they're still responding. And I start thinking about like, do they ever sleep? Like what is going on?

And I just, I just so respect that level of hustle or, you know, I was thinking about a founder the other day, who was telling me about a prospect that they might lose. And they sent me a text with just all of these explicits and these emojis. And they were like, I hate effing losing. I'm not going to lose this thing.

And I just, again, it was one of these things, like, I love that drive that intensity, that passion. And so when you're at a larger company, I think you see those moments far less frequently, and now being at a place where we serve. really, really small teams where everyone on that team has that level of intensity.

It's just reminded me of, of this mantra that, I really truly believe in, which is like, if you can control one thing, it's to never get beat on hustle and it's, and yeah, these founders that I've partnered with have ever reminded me and live it, you know, day in and day out. 

Brett Berson: Awesome. Great place to end.

Thanks so much for joining, excited to have you on another year, another year from now.

Meka Asonye: Thanks for having me. And, uh, hopefully I'm make it another year and I'll, uh, I'll see you there 

Brett Berson: there you go.