Building a Brand and Efficient Growth Simultaneously, with Randy Wootton, CEO Maxio

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you, to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Randy Wootton, the CEO at Maxio. We'll be covering four main topics with Randy today, including number one, the opportunities and challenges in leading a combined B2B SaaS company. Second, insights into managing efficient growth during uncertain times. Third, balancing growth and profitability, the reality for sub 50 million ARR companies. And fourth, the metrics that B2B SaaS investors and operators can agree upon not only in 2023, but going forward. So with that, Randy, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Randy Wootton** (1:23)
Gosh. Well, thanks Ray. It's a great pleasure to be here and I really appreciated your partnership over the year and a half that I've been CEO of Maxio.
I've had just the high level summary. I break my career in three phases. First phase, I was in the military, came out of Naval Academy, had the chance to fly in jets, A6 intruders, and do some really cool things. Made the transition via business school into the corporate sector right at the cusp of the commercialization of the Internet, so 99, and then spent the next 10, 12 years all in what we would call web-based ASPs, eventually became SaaS providers, but in the go-to-market space, so selling to sales and marketers and customer success folks. Last eight, nine years have been C-suite roles, so I've been CEO of three companies. One was a public company, one was a private company backed by top tier, VCs, Sequoia, GDB, Lightspeed, first-round capital, and then the other company is Maxio, which is majority owned by Battery. So in addition to that, I did a stint when I sold Percolate to Seismic, I stayed on as Chief Strategy Officer, which was fun to not be CEO for a bit and get a chance to watch another great CEO, Doug Winter, lead a company that really is transforming an industry. So, and then other than that, I've had the chance to be on a couple of boards. And so that's been helpful to have that perspective, both as an investor, independent observer, as well as the operator on the board dynamic.

**Ray Rike** (2:52)
Wow. What a career journey. And as a huge fan of movies and naval aviators, this 30-minute conversation, I'm going to say I feel the need for speed, Randy.

**Randy Wootton** (3:06)
I haven't heard that before, Ray.

**Ray Rike** (3:08)
I bet you never have. To those people who aren't a 1980s movie buff, you can look that up and see the recast one from 2023 But with that, the background of Maxio is such a great backdrop to our conversation today. So can you share a little bit about the history of how Maxio came to be and the involvement of world-class venture capital in that journey?

**Randy Wootton** (3:34)
Yeah. So Maxio is the mashup of two companies, SaaS Optics and Chargify, both of whom had been around for about 12 years prior to the integration, which is two and a half years ago, 2021 They both had about the same amount of customers, so 1,200-ish customers. They had about the same revenue. They had the same number of employees. So what was interesting for me, we'll get into this in a little bit, was they positioned it as an MOE, a merger of equals. Up until this point, I've never really heard an MOE. I've always thought of you have an acquisition where one company is coming into the other company and you have a set of processes, policies, technology that the acquired company adopts. So one of the interesting journeys has been, what do you do when you got two people, like it's the Bloods versus the Crypts or whatever the right metaphor is. So Battery brought the two companies together, created a deal, almost simultaneous close, which again is kind of unheard of. It was sponsored by a woman named Chelsea Stoner, who has had incredible success investing in the office of the CFO, behind Avalara and some of the other big ones, intact, early intact as well. So she has extraordinary experience, depth of experience in the space and saw this opportunity to combine billing and financial operations. So how do you combine a solution that allows you to manage complex billing for sales led motions, as well as product led or usage consumption, and then the revenue recognition across both.