The impact of being a Product Manager and VC on before becoming a B2B SaaS Founder - with Alok Goel, Founder and CEO DriveTrain

**Ray Reich** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We're joined by Alok Goel, the founder and CEO of drivetrain.ai. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Alok. First, the value of having a product management background as a B2B SaaS founder. Second, how being a venture capital investor impacts the perspective of being a founder and CEO. And third, the challenges with financial forecasting in today's uncertain economy. Alok, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Alok Goel** (1:15)
Thank you so much Ray for inviting me and super thrilled to be here. First of all, it's really amazing to hear all the podcasts that you're doing, and every single podcast teaches something or the other that is very actionable in the life and hence I'm quite thrilled to be here.
Coming on to my background, we started DriveTrain two and a half years back. I'm an operator turned VC turned operator, and before starting this company, I was a partner at a VC fund called Elevation Capital, which has got more than $2 billion of assets under management. Fund was actually largely a B2C-focused fund when I joined, and I got fascinated with this reckoning revenue nature of SaaS businesses way back in 2015, and it was something which was very attractive. You put in some effort today and that is going to give you a reckoning business in future, so it compounds, it builds up, and that fascination led me to set up the SaaS Investor Practice in the fund. I led that practice, I led about a dozen odd investments across SaaS and on SaaS companies. Three of them are actually multi-billion dollar companies now, which is pretty good. As an investor, you would meet 15, 20 new companies every week, and over a period of time, there'll be about 3, 4,000 companies, which is a massive, massive number. When you meet these many companies, you sort of start drawing patterns, and it's a pretty large dataset to start drawing patterns on top of that. So one key question I got very fascinated was, what brings in predictability in the execution of the company? Because when I would meet these companies which I would evaluate, or I would be serving on the board of, some companies would often meet their targets in a very predictable manner. Every quarter, they'll come beat the target. They will say, this is what exactly we do, or they will do that or they'll beat those targets. Some of the companies will not. And the question that I got fascinated was, what brings in this predictability? And it was pursuit of this question that led to insights which are getting converted into DriveTrain as a product, and at some point of time it felt like it was important enough problem to solve, so I started DriveTrain. And before being an investor at the VC Fund, I was an operator. I was part of two start-up stories which went very well. And before that, I was a product manager at Google. We got to work on search and ads and a bunch of interesting stuff there.

**Ray Reich** (3:21)
Well, Alok, that's a very broad base of experience. And one of the questions we ask every entrepreneur that joins us here in the Metrics Measure Up podcast is what advice you would give to a early career professional who wants to be an entrepreneur. And often people say you should be a product manager. And what's interesting is about eight years into your career journey, you became a product manager for the Google search and GeoLocal. So I wanted to get your feedback on how did that experience of the product manager shape your career path?

**Alok Goel** (3:55)
Actually, Google as a company itself, it was, by the way, very, very small, much smaller than what it is today at that time. And as a product manager, they taught some cultural things. It used to teach some cultural tenets to all the product managers. One of the things that I learned over there was this notion of no-constraint thinking. The question that would often come up would be, if imagine you had no constraints, no constraints in terms of resources or being able to make things happen, how would you like to do something? What would be the ideal solution? And that suddenly puts in perspective of user, where you start thinking about what is the best solution that a user would like to get for the problem that they are facing. And then the second question comes, how can we actually make that happen with the constraints in place? And that basically puts you in a perspective where you're actually optimizing for the ideal solution. You're not starting from the constraints in mind, which will often put you in a box in terms of, okay, this is the only thing that is possible. And that is actually one important thing. And I also tell my customers in DriveTrain when I talk to them, that hey, adopt the same mindset when you're actually talking about metrics and data in your company. Quite often I see this mindset where companies will say, hey, this is the data that I have. Can you tell me the insights? What can I measure? What metrics I can measure on top of that? What are the insights that I can get out of this? But the real question is, what kind of decisions would you like to make? What kind of insights would you like to get? What kind of information and knowledge you would like to get out of your business? And then why don't you actually think about instrumenting your business according to that? And then coming up with data that is required for getting those kinds of insights. So that is one thing that I would call out. Second thing I would call out of that Google experience of product management is there a better way to do things? And this whole pursuit of doing things better by way of deploying technology is actually something which is very, very crucial. Even at DriveTrain, we have a cultural internet that everything is up for change. If you can think of a better way to do something, we will change that method in DriveTrain.