Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Gutierrez:
What did your typical day look like at Prior Knowledge?
Jonas:
There was no such thing as a typical day at P(K). As CEO, it meant
that I worked with customers, managed the team, owned the product vision,
and dealt with investors. The responsibilities and day-to-day work in each of
these areas changed very rapidly as we went from idea to execution to being
bought all in the span of eighteen months. Each day I would work on all these
areas and, before I knew it, my entire day would be gone. Sometimes I would
feel like I had done nothing. After all, as an MIT person, I was used to thinking
about my day in terms of how many equations I had written and how many
lines of code I had committed, so it was very tough. Some weekends I'd go to
the office to code because I missed doing the actual technical work so much.
One of my extremely smart friends, Alex Jacobson, who was the entrepreneur
in residence at Founders Fund, who made the original introduction for us, at
one point told me, “You're never going to get to do new technical work again
because now everyone knows that you can manage technical people, and in
many ways that's a far more valuable skill. Most people don't know how to
evaluate technical people or how to convince them to do anything. So the
fact that you can manage a group of 24-year-olds, and get them to do some-
thing real is all that anyone's going to want you to do”. This was somewhat
disheartening to me because I don't want to be pigeonholed away from doing
technical work.
The only way that I survived the CEO experience was that my team was
amazing. My cofounder Beau Cronin handled the product side. My cofounder
Vimal Bhalodia handled all the COO-type work, and planning, and execution.
My cofounder Max Gasner handled all of the transactional work and was the
person out on the road fundraising with me. Cofounder Cap Petschulat, my
best friend from high school in Idaho, was our lead architect. So it was just a
really great group of people that kind of helped me through that. The first two
hires we had—Jonathan Glidden, a Berkeley undergrad, and Fritz Obermeyer,
a PhD from CMU—were also fantastic. It was my first experience actually
managing people who were obviously much smarter than me. It was always
great to come back at the end of the day to find out how much technical
progress they had made.
Gutierrez:
What did your typical day look like at Salesforce?
Jonas:
At Salesforce, a lot of our challenges revolved around overall integra-
tion, integration with the existing systems, and talking to customers. This
made life much less hectic. The challenges inside of any large company are very
different from startups, as the incentive structure is so different. In a startup you
can move very quickly. The Facebook mantra of “move fast and break things”
works at startups because when you break things, no one cares—because
generally you have four customers, whom you likely met through a friend
of a friend, or a friend of a VC. So if you break something, you can call up
