Traversing the Traction Gap Framework - with Bruce Cleveland

**Ray Rike** (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 informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Bruce Cleveland, multiple-time Silicon Valley Startup Chief Marketing Officer, founding partner of Wildcat Venture Partners with Jeffrey Moore, and author of Traversing the Traction Gap, one of my favorite B2B technology books of all time. And today, we're going to be covering three main topics with Bruce. Number one, what is the Traction Gap Framework? Second, what are the four pillars of the Traction Gap Framework? And third, what are Bruce's lessons learned from applying the framework and practice, both through his own very successful Silicon Valley career, but also to the participants in his research? Bruce, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Bruce Cleveland** (1:24)
Great. Thanks, Ray. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity, and I always enjoy talking about this subject. obviously, it's a passion of mine. The reason I developed this framework was really out of frustration, frustration with a lot of really smart people who I interacted with over the course of my career as an operating executive or an investor, and watching their companies fail. I think the evidence is pretty clear. You can read a lot of different tales of woe, but roughly 80-85 percent of all startups fail. Roughly 40-60 percent, depending on the research that you've read, 46 percent of all products fail, products inside incumbent companies, that is. I began to have some pretty legitimate success with the products, either I delivered as an operating executive or as an investor, and I wanted to demystify that process. My background, I think, serves me well in that.
I don't know if I was an employee 100, but it was certainly around 100 or so at Oracle. When it was a small private company on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and did that for a number of years, held the position of around the Unix product division. At that point, Oracle was divided and operated and organized by operating system, things like VMS and MBS and other things that really aren't prevalent today. I worked on the Unix system, learned a lot from some really smart people. From there, I went on to Apple to run a large engineering division, all of their object technology development work, and a bunch of products that Apple delivered, primarily for enterprises, not really consumer, which defines the journey that I've taken. I'm not really in the consumer side of the business. I'm in the B2B side of the business. That's where I've invested and where I've operated. I joined Tom Siebel in 1996, April of 96, a few months before we went public at Siebel Systems, and I held a variety of roles over 10 years there. I joined as the VP of Marketing, working for, we didn't call it a CMO at the time, but that's what she was, the co-founder of the company, Pat house, doing mostly corporate marketing things, things that I had never really done before, but I learned a ton from Pat. She's the Cheryl Sandberg before Cheryl, if you know what I mean. She is a powerhouse and a great person, a great mentor of mine. Did that for a number of years. Then Tom asked me to take over and build a BizDev function and alliances function. We did that and learned quite a bit in the process, built it from a few partnerships to nearly a thousand. Actually, an HGVS case was written on the program that we developed. Then I became the head of product, the guy that was running it, David Schmeier, pretty well-known person in the Valley. David retired, at least for time being, and I took over all the product development and running products there. I did that for about 10 years. Then we sold the company to Oracle, chose not to go back to Oracle and joined a small little venture firm. Here's a little fun trivia fact for those of you in Silicon Valley. I joined InterWest Partners, and they happened to be located on Sand Hill Road in the very same small little set of offices where Oracle was housed back in 1996 It was one of those back to the future things. Did that for about 15 years, well, actually 10 years with them, and then started another venture firm with two other fellows called Wildcat Venture Partners, and we invested a bunch of companies. I invested in an idea that became a company called Marketo, which was fairly successful. Very fortunate to be involved with Phil, Jon and Dave in that process. Invested through an acquisition I invested in Workday. Velocity, which is a company David Schmeier created and sold to Salesforce recently, and a variety of others. Not the least of which was a company called C3 AI, which Tom Siebel started in 2009, and I was an investor and an advisor for many years. And then I finished my career operating and investing with Tom, working with him for a little over two or three years as his CMO, to go from a private company to a public company. We took C3 AI public in 2020, December of 2020 under the New York Stock Exchange symbol of AI quite appropriately. And then did that for another year or so and then told Tom, it was time for me to turn the keys over to the younger generation and let them manage the process. And so here I am today doing a bunch of different things and enjoying myself.