The 20-Year Bet to Make Fusion Energy Work | Jeff Lawson

Jeff Lawson (0:00)

People are not tapping into software budgets, they're tapping into headcount budgets. You know, in the past, you'd look at SaaS, and you'd say, oh, well, you know, maybe if I buy CRM for my salespeople, everyone got 10% more productive. But I'm still probably gonna hire the same number of salespeople. But if you look at customer service, and you're like, wow, I can actually deflect now 80, 90% of my customer service requests with AI successfully, you just tapped into a huge budget opportunity. That's what enables that scaling. One of the most brilliant values in corporate history.

Joubin (0:27)

We move fast and break things.

Jeff Lawson (0:29)

The assumption is if I break things, I'm in trouble. That's a career limiting move. The heavy lifting that that value does is it gives people permission to behave in a different way at this company than you probably will at any other company. If it's in the interest of progress and moving fast, you have my permission to break things. As long as we're learning, as long as we're moving fast. It's pretty powerful.

Joubin (0:59)

Welcome to Grit, I'm Joubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history making companies. Today on the show, I'm talking with Jeff Lawson, formerly the co-founder and CEO of Twilio, and now co-founder and CEO of Inertia. Jeff spent 16 years building Twilio from a startup founded during the financial crisis into a $4 billion plus revenue public company. After stepping down, he bought the Onion and then started over in an entirely new field, Fusion Energy. We talk about the hardest years at Twilio, walking away from the company he built, becoming a beginner again, and why he's betting his next chapter on Fusion. Enjoy. Can I ask you the question I was going to ask you? Yeah, go for it. Well, what we're just talking about is like people from the previous generation who join series, actually, it could be this generation, actually, it might even be more so in this generation, who join post PMF series B.

And you just have to scale your function, taking for granted how rare it is to have product market fit.

Maybe, can you expand on that before I get to the next question?

Jeff Lawson (2:12)

Well, you know, it's interesting because when you're growing a company, you really end up with kind of two sets of folks. Let's just talk about go to market.

There's a set of folks that come in before you have product market fit and you're exploring and you're trying to find it.

So for example, the first salespeople that you might hire in that universe, they actually look a lot more like business development. Because I think of business development as essentially creative sales. Sales where there's no playbook, you have to go figure something out with each customer. And the goal of that era of your early go to market folks is to A, close some sales, get some revenue coming in. But really, it is to two, figure out what the playbook is. So if you do five deals and all five deals look completely different, you don't really know much. But if you start finding that pattern and your folks are trained, my job is to close deals but more importantly, find the pattern so we can write the playbook, so we can train up and scale because in order to scale, you have to give people a playbook. And before you have it, you can't scale. And so you end up with the pre-product market fit, trying to find the playbook but really be creative in your sales to then write the playbooks, then post-product market fit, you now have the playbook in your hand and start hiring sales after sales after sales, and just scaling out that function. And so I just think that's really interesting. And so there's a big difference between people who've joined pre and post product market fit, because the people who've spent their whole career in post product market fit always assume that there is a playbook. Right? I show up, there's a playbook, and yeah, we're going to iterate it, we're going to scale it, we're going to learn. But ultimately, we know how to sell this product, which is a completely different world from the, we have no idea how to sell this product. And therefore, we have to explore a whole universe of different buyers, different messages, different problem statements, and maybe even evolve the product to solve a problem we didn't even anticipate on day one.

Joubin (4:03)

And you made the comment like, I don't think people appreciate how uncommon it is to actually find product market fit when you tend to just join the companies that have them.