What a Unicorn Knows - with Pablo Dominguez, Insight Partners

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared, 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. We are joined today by Pablo Dominguez, operating partner at Insight Partners and author of What a Unicorn Knows. Today, we'll be covering four main topic areas with Pablo. First, the scale framework from the What a Unicorn Knows books, the need for strategic speed and constant experimentation. Third, the lean process for scale up success. And fourth, some of the top lessons that Pablo has learned as a private equity and VC operating partner. Pablo, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Pablo Dominguez** (1:14)
Ray, thank you so much for having me. I'm extremely excited and really happy to talk to your following here. I've had a very illustrious career and very thankful for all my opportunities. I've spent my entire professional life in go-to-market, consulting public companies, startup, and now almost five years here at Insight Partners, working with B2B software growth companies. So excited to share some of what we have learned and some of our best practices.

**Ray Rike** (1:44)
Well, thank you. I know how hard it is to allocate time out to podcast, but it means the world to me. I will tell you, even though I knew you from your work as an operating partner at Insight, when I picked up What a Unicorn Knows, it brought me back to my early career. Out of undergrad, I went to work at a division of GE, and we were helping automotive companies implement just-in-time and Kanban systems, and we learned a lot of things from Toyota. So when I read the book, Lean Thinking by James Womack, and it really took me back 30 years, Pablo. So with that, can you share how Lean scale up principles apply to each stage of a SaaS company's evolution, including early stage, mid-stage, late stage, and even public companies? Yeah, absolutely.

**Pablo Dominguez** (2:31)
And I think for the listener, in case you aren't familiar with Lean or you've got a, have heard of Lean Six Sigma or something, Lean really finds its roots back in World War II days when the US industry had to pivot basically during World War II to start building tanks, weapons, things for the war. That then was taken by MacArthur as we had to rebuild Japan. And then from there, Toyota took those principles and basically built what is number one, number two leading brand in the automotive industry. And for years, Lean has really been applied to manufacturing and predominantly to product development. You hear a lot of it from the concepts of agile were born in Lean. And Matt May, who's the co-author that I've been working with for the last 11 years, he and I have been applying Lean principles to go to market at a public company at the startup I was at before I joined Insight and now at Insight. And so the premise of the book, Ray, really is sharing those best practices of Lean with other practitioners in go-to-market that can be applied really at any stage of growth. And so the book might be misleading and you think like, well, I'm a public company, I'm unicorns for startups. It's the innovation of using Lean and bringing that startup mentality back into the public companies as well. That can also be leveraged.

**Ray Rike** (3:54)
You know, I love frameworks. And since I talk about metrics and benchmarks, I have my own framework for SaaS metrics. But when I was reading your book, what jumped out at me right away was you introduced the scale framework for scale ups. So can you talk a little bit about what the scale framework is and then we're going to double-click into the S as our first in-depth topic.

**Pablo Dominguez** (4:16)
Yeah, absolutely. We wanted to keep it simple. And one of the beautiful things about what we've tried to capture in the book is neither Matt or I are lean PhD professionals, right? This is not an academic book per se in terms of like, hey, I learned a lot about lean, but what do I do with it? This is a book written by two operators that have been working their entire careers in companies. And the framework that we put together scale is intended to give the reader an ability to take those frameworks and apply them in their job, right? We've got templates within the book, very clear examples. And so scale stands for, the S is for strategic speed. I know we're going to talk about that a little bit, right? But it's really the notion of moving quickly to win. One of my former bosses used to say, it's not the small that beat the big, but it's the fast that beat the slow, right? And so a lot of emphasis is put there in terms of like leveraging strategy and moving fast. And then constant experimentation, right? Are you testing hypotheses?