A Victory Lap with Greg Poirier!

**Christopher Penn** (0:06)
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

**John Wall** (0:14)
Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall. Today, our guest is Greg Poirier. He has been with us for years and years.
Last on the show, though, it's been a long time, 2018 was the last time we had you on and telling us all about CloudKettle and what had been going on there.
But it's always a thrill to have you too, because really, you're definitely our ICP. There are so many listeners that have similar jobs to yours. So I know we could just wake you up in the middle of the night and talk to you and we'd have a great show. But we've actually done more work than that. Greg, thanks for joining us.

**Greg Poirier** (0:46)
Thank you for having me, John. It's good to be back.

**John Wall** (0:48)
Now, you had started, CloudKettle was up and running. In fact, going back to the archives, and there's still a link, we had you on Stack and Flow, which I had been doing with Sean Zinsmeister, just talking about blood and guts, nuts and bolts automation. But to give everybody the basic idea, you guys started out as Salesforce consultancy, laddered up, and when we last talked to you, I think you had maybe like broken a million or something like that. Like you had momentum and you had a 10-year plan, but where did it go from there?

**Greg Poirier** (1:19)
Well, I started the company about 12 years ago. And one of the founding principles, because I'm a psychopath and had like a 10-year plan for a company that was zero employees at the time, but one of the founding principles was the company was going to be acquired.
I always knew that that was the end game, in part because I believed really strongly that I needed a way for the company to persist after I wasn't with it anymore. And by no means am I ready to retire now, but I knew I wanted to retire at some point. And Exit, being a guy who had worked at a number of B2B SaaS companies, seemed like the natural way to go. And then as part of that, because of how I benefited when Radiant Six was acquired by Salesforce, I knew that I wanted an employee stock option program to be part of that path. And for that to work, you can't have an employee stock option program without the theoretical construct of an acquisition occurring because there has to be a way for those employees to realize value. So those two things were kind of intertwined, but there was always from even founding day a plan for that to happen.

**John Wall** (2:25)
Okay, and this is a huge learning thing. You know, veterans understand this and know this, but a lot of people don't when they get into a startup for the first time or into tech, is that, yeah, everybody brags about, we've got this employee stock option plan, like there are sales set aside. But what gets lost in the shuffle is there's all kinds of casino games that can get played as far as how many shares are for the employees. And then the other thing that gets hidden too is like, oh, well, that's a certain level of shares. There's a whole other level of shares above that the owners get and share. And now, you guys, one third of the stock was set aside for employees, is that right?

**Greg Poirier** (3:00)
One third of the stock was set aside for employees. Now, not every one of those shares was realized because, of course, there was a pool held for employees that had not yet been hired. So it was established that a third of the shares were available to employees for the stock option program.
But what happens when you get acquired and there's a lot of math that goes into that, not all of the stock are consumed, so then the money is divvied out in a different way. But essentially, we'd always reserved about a third of the value of what the company would be sold for for the end employees.

**John Wall** (3:32)
Right. And just to spell it out for people, in case you're still not putting all the math together, the idea is that I've been places where this has happened, and it was 1% or less of the stock. The company would get sold for like $350 million, and the average employee would get a check for like 86 bucks.
It was kind of completely astute. And everybody's writing this idea of, you're involved with the company, you're an owner and all that, but you're really absolutely not. So yeah, if you can talk about this, I mean, how did that go over with the employees? Did all of them understand even that this was happening, or was it a big surprise when the acquisition happened? How did that go?