Peter Reinhardt - Learning How to Sell – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 34]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:14)
My guest today is Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment, the market-leading customer data platform that was acquired by Twilio last year. In our conversation, we cover the fascinating journey of Segment from an education feedback tool to the business it is today. Peter's sales philosophy on meeting the customer where they are and not where you think they should be and why revenue operations or rev ops is underrated for any business. This was an incredibly honest conversation on company building that any builder can learn from. Please enjoy my conversation with Peter Reinhardt.
So Peter, I think we need to start at the end.
I'm a data person by background, so I don't want to get too off the deep end here before we orient the audience in what Segment does today and then we'll probably rewind all the way to beginning because the journey has been so unique and interesting in your case. Can you begin by describing what Segment does for its customers today in 2021?

**Peter Reinhardt** (3:09)
Yeah, so we help companies collect and manage all of their first-party customer data, so all the interactions that they have with their customers on their mobile applications, their websites, their help desks, their payment systems, all those things, all that data, they float into Segment where we assemble this holistic record of their customer interactions. And then we're like the pipes, we sort of move that data out to all the different marketing sales support tools where they actually then make use of that data to interact better with their customers.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:38)
Can you say what existed or how this function was handled prior to Segment? Presumably you made life easier for people that are generating first-party data, want to do something else with it. They probably were still doing something else with it before. What did it look like before Segment came along?

**Peter Reinhardt** (3:53)
Yeah, before us and frankly still most of the market today goes and builds this in-house. So they've got engineers who get assigned to requests from the marketing team to go integrate the newest ad campaign pixel into the website, like Bespoke, use the API directly alongside the other 20 or 30 marketing pixels that they've got going on, pull data out of this Stripe API or out of the Salesforce API and load it into our data warehouse.