The New Rules of Building a $100M Company with Roger Neel

**Brad Weimert** (0:00)
You have built a 100 million AR company, exited it. How would you change your approach to building that company now in the era of AI that we're in versus how you built it then?

**Roger Neel** (0:09)
The world has drastically changed. The amount of leverage you can get out of AI, anybody and everybody should be able to prototype something. If you're sitting on chatgpt.com or clod.ai in your browser, you are doing it wrong.

**Brad Weimert** (0:24)
What advice do you have for somebody trying to raise money today?

**Roger Neel** (0:26)
There are two things you need to think about when going into a capital raise process. One, you have to be able to describe your moat and strategy. These guys see pitches all day long. If there isn't something compelling about the pitch and why you're unique to that story, you're gonna be dead in the water. The number two thing you need to think about.

**Brad Weimert** (0:48)
Congrats on getting Beyond A Million. What got you here won't always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I'm Brad Weimert, and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you'll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi-million eight, nine and ten figure businesses. Life can get exciting Beyond A Million.
Roger Neel, welcome to Beyond A Million.

**Roger Neel** (1:34)
Brad, great to be here. It's been a long time coming.

**Brad Weimert** (1:37)
It has been a long time coming. It's exciting. We've done a lot of snowboarding together while you ski because you're-

**Roger Neel** (1:42)
Yeah, I lay down tracks for you.

**Brad Weimert** (1:44)
That's actually very true. That is very true. You pulled me through the woods. You have also built a 100 million ARR company, exited it, and now you're on to some other crazy continuous glucose monitor, health, live data tracking stuff, and you are CTO by trade on to now, what are you, the fucking CMO of the company?

**Roger Neel** (2:05)
Both CTO and CMO at the moment. Yeah.

**Brad Weimert** (2:07)
Crazy. So I want to talk about all sorts of stuff. Yeah. I want to start with, you had a very traditional software company that you built up as the CTO, 200 million ARR. It's now, what is it, May of 2026
How would you change your approach to building the company now in the era of AI that we're in versus how you built it then?

**Roger Neel** (2:29)
Holy cow. Yeah. Starting with a banger here. The world has drastically changed. I've listened to a few of your recent episodes too, and I know you guys have touched on this a little bit. We're seeing in the market too, between Brian Armstrong's Coinbase announcement just a couple of days ago, to Pick Your Poison, Jack Dorsey, etc.
What Square did, or I guess Block now, doing their restructuring. The amount of leverage you can get out of AI, out of Claude Code, out of different things, if your workforce is really trained to use them, it doesn't necessarily mean, and I know a lot of these big companies are compressing, doesn't necessarily mean you need to kind of compress the size of your talent pool, but it does mean that you can just get a lot more out of each individual person. We're seeing it on the engineering side, we're seeing it on the marketing side.
So I would say there's an old motorcycleism, go slow to go fast, smooth is fast, fast is smooth. We probably would have grown a little bit less precipitously at Mavenlink. At exit, we were about 450, 500 people. We still have a pretty traditional large sales force, but I would say across all other roles and functions in the company, you could probably get by with fewer headcount.

**Brad Weimert** (3:46)
Yeah. The core thing there is probably scaling with less people. Yeah.
We can talk the tactical stuff that's happening with AI and development, but how do you think about software in general right now? I mean, you built this traditional per seat company. Yeah. So traditional SaaS company, is that going to go away?

**Roger Neel** (4:10)
Starting with another banger. So let's rewind the clock first a little bit just for context. So we started Mavenlink in 2008 with two co-founders. So I mean, this is like, I think we're starting to measure ourselves in dinosaur years at this point. So 2008, the world was really different. That was a fun founding story. We can get there later, but we essentially started it right in the teeth of the financial crash.