B2B SaaS Metrics that Matter to Growth Stage VCs - with Doug Landis, Emergence Capital

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show. welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Doug Landis, Growth Partner at Emergence Capital. We will be covering three main areas of today's discussion. The story behind the journey from Chief Storyteller to a VC Growth Partner. The metrics that matter to growth stage funds when evaluating investments. And three, the metrics that are most predictive of growth success. Doug, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Doug Landis** (1:09)
Thanks, Ray. You know what they say, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. And I think for me, how I ended up here is, listen, I spent my entire life basically, just innately and deeply ingrained in the world of go-to-market and sales. Similar to my friend scott Lease, who has a mutual connection of ours, big fan of his and given the fact that you guys are digging deep into these core metrics, I'm a big fan of yours. In fact, I've already learned a ton from you in the previous conversations that we had. I'm a salesperson at heart. I've been selling since I was a little kid, ever since I was selling newspapers in my newspaper route trying to add more houses to my route. All the way to selling software. I was fortunate enough to go work at Oracle in the early days, which I highly recommend to anybody that's getting into sales because they teach you an incredible amount of discipline. It's hard making 100 calls a day, but it's even harder when you're worried about getting fired. Fortunately enough, growing up in the Bay Area, I was privy to a ton of technology startups, if you will, and companies. Google started, Oracle, HP, Sun Microsystems, you name it. I had access to all the right people. But one of the things that's really mattered to me is building connections and sharing those connections. I think that's really important and it's part of the reason why we got connected. In fact, I don't actually know the dots and how they all lined up for us to get here, but yeah, I was super fortunate. I was at Salesforce for a long time from the early days to about 16,000, 17,000 people. Then I left to go to Box to go help builder, go to Market Function, run sales productivity. Globally, went through an IPO there. One of the things that happened that I noticed at Box was, and this is super common in the world of startups, and as the startups continue to get bigger. But think about it this way. You build a pitch deck to go raise money from your VCs, especially at the Series A, and in that pitch deck, you talk about the problem you're trying to solve, the market size, and the value add, etc. Then you go raise some capital, so you go hire some salespeople. You take the pitch deck that you used to go raise money, and you give that to your reps, you're like, here, go use this to go sell. It's just insanely self-serving, and all about you, you, you, and what you do, and how great you are. And what's interesting is I realized we kind of had that same kind of DNA at Box. And it happened actually because we brought in a new CRO, and we were doing the rounds trying to get his sense of how we talk about Box and what we did. And after about 20 different conversations, he looked at me and he's like, hey, guess what? We have no consistency about who we are, talking about who we are and what we do. And that's a real problem. And so I really started digging into that, and that's where I kind of left the world of sales productivity, and I created this role of chief storyteller. Working directly with Aaron, trying to figure out like, hey, how do we talk about who we are by getting ourselves out of the way and using more of the voice of our customers? And it's one thing if you're Aaron Levy or Mark Benioff or John, or whoever it is, your CEO and founder, they have incredible credibility to talk about who they are from their point of view, because they also know the industry and their customers probably better than anybody else. But when you're a rep and you try and replicate that, you lose a ton of credibility because you will have this thing called sales in your voice and it's also not even your own voice.