Welcome to Episode 214! Erica Schultz is Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. Prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214m in funding from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and Blackrock, to name a few. As for Erica, under her CRO role, she leads all go-to-market functions including Marketing, Sales, Operations, Customer Success, Services, and Support. Prior to New Relic, Erica served as Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Customer Success at LivePerson and before that, Erica had a 16-year tenure with Oracle Corporation, where she founded and led numerous teams within the sales organization, including pioneering the company’s cloud business, and leading teams for North American and Latin American markets.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

  • How Erica made her way into the world of SaaS and came to be Chief Revenue Officer @ New Relic. What were some of her biggest takeaways from her incredible 16 year journey with Oracle?
  • Why does Erica believe that enterprise is a “company sport?” Why does each department need to re-platform when making the move to enterprise? How can founders know when is the right time to make the move from SMB to enterprise? Where does Erica often see founders make mistakes with this scaling?
  • How does the move to enterprise fundamentally impact the sales team? How does the structure of the sales team change with the move? How does the role of marketing change with the move to enterprise? How does this move impact the relationship between sales and marketing? How should compensation plans be altered with the move?
  • With the scaling of departments and teams, what has Erica seen work really well when it comes to making cross-functional teams communicate really well? What are the inflection points where Erica often see communication or process begin to breakdown? How does Erica ensure the team are still in the trenches with the clients despite the scaling?
  • From Erica’s experience, how do the very best sales reps build relationships with their prospects? Where do many go wrong? How much time does Erica believe reps should be given when it comes to translating relationships to dollars? What is the right way to think about payback period today?   

Erica’s 60 Second SaaStr:

  • What does Erica know now that she wishes he had known at the beginning?
  • The optimal relationship between CRO and CEO?
  • The hardest element of being CRO @ New Relic?

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Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr

New Relic

Transcript

Harry Stebbings: We are back for another week in the world of SaaStr with me, Harry Stebbings @Hstabbings1996 with two Bs on Instagram. And my word, am I excited for our episode today as we welcome one of the most defining SaaS companies of the last decade. And so with that I’m thrilled to welcome Erica Schultz, Chief Revenue Officer at New Relic, the company that gives you the real time insights your software driven business needs to innovate faster. And prior to their IPO, New Relic raised over $214 million in funding from some of the best in the business, including Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners, and BlackRock, just to name a few. As for Erica, under her CRO role, she leads all go to market functions including marketing, sales, operations, customer success, services, and support. And prior to New Relic, Erica served as Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Customer Success, at LivePerson.

Harry Stebbings: And before that, Erica had an incredible 16 year tenure with Oracle Corporation where she founded and led numerous teams within the sales organization, including pioneering the company’s cloud business and leading teams for North American and Latin American markets. I do also want to say a huge thank you, both to Mallun Yen and Jason Lemkin for the intro to Erica today. I really do so appreciate that and it means a lot to me. Y

Harry Stebbings: Erica, it is absolutely fantastic to have you on the show today having heard so many great things. Huge thanks for the intro from Jason, but thank you so much for joining me today, Erica.

Erica Schultz: Harry, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Harry Stebbings: Not at all. I’m very excited for this, but I want to kick off today with a little bit about you. So tell me, Erica, how did you make your way into the world of SaaS that I’ve come to love so much and come to be one of the leading execs as CRO at New Relic as you are today?

Erica Schultz: Well I actually started in the world of SaaS back in 2005 so about 14 years ago when I was still at Oracle Corporation and it was right after we’d acquired Siebel Systems and I took on a leadership role for what at the time was known as the CRM on demand team. It was this nascent software as a service offering and they competed with Salesforce in the market and we had an instinct that it was going to be a big part of the future. And so I saw an opportunity to get into SaaS early and have been loving it ever since.

Harry Stebbings: I mean what foresight there. But I do have to ask, because you spent an incredible 16 years with Oracle Corporation, so how do you think that experience really affected your operating mindsets today and were there some big takeaways?

Erica Schultz: I did. I spent more than 16 years at Oracle and I learned so much throughout my tenure there. It was really an incredible experience. The experience I had was I was afforded so many different opportunities along the way and opportunities to build new routes to market, new methods of selling, take new products to market, like the software as a service offering. So I really got experience as a builder, which sometimes people find surprising because it’s easy to paint people who come from big tech companies with one broad brush and assume that you’re always part of a mature business. But that was not my experience. Just a couple of examples. When I was a couple of years into my tenure at Oracle, I moved down to Latin America to Argentina, sight unseen actually, and built out a telesales group in Argentina and then later in Miami, hiring about 100 people from 11 different countries and that early building experience really whet my appetite. I came back to North America.

Erica Schultz: We built out the inside sales team in North America over the next five years, building hubs in multiple countries, including in Bangalore, India, and assembling a global community of practice. And then as I mentioned in 2005, I took on the software as a service opportunity, which was a very nascent sales team and business for Oracle at the time. But I really found throughout my Oracle experience, this love for building. And of course I had the opportunity to work with really experienced operating execs who taught me a lot about operating rigor, execution, and working as a team. So it was a fabulous experience.

Harry Stebbings: I’m super pleased you said particularly about the team building element, there. I do partially think that a travel book should be in the offing with those incredible travels. But I do want to ask, you said before to me that enterprise is a company sport, each department needs to replatform. If we take those in turn, first, what did you mean by enterprise is a company sport, Erica?

Erica Schultz: What I mean by it is that every function in the company will be affected by a move into the enterprise market. And oftentimes companies think that the most important move or the only move is to put your sales reps, for example, in the field close to customers, that it’s really a sales driven transformation and of course transforming your sales organization and motion is foundational, but every function in the company needs to evolve as a function to serve the enterprise market. And I’m happy to dive into a little bit of detail of what that means for different functions.

Harry Stebbings: I would love to dive into detail into the different functions. Let’s start with the one that’s most changed in these kind of structure and process with the move.

Erica Schultz: Well the most changed is probably going to be your sales organization and for a number of reasons you may evolve from an inside sales led model to a field based sales model that comes with hiring a different profile of account executive and it probably comes with hiring a different, what I’ll call ecosystem surrounding that account executive, so your pre-sales talent, your customer success talent. Each of those things were part of our move to the enterprise at New Relic.

Harry Stebbings: So, many different kinds of functions built out within that sales team. In terms of the marketing, how does that change? Because one message isn’t necessarily always transferable when considering kind of SMB to enterprise.

Erica Schultz: That’s right. Marketing changes quite a bit. In the early days at New Relic when we were serving the SMB market predominantly, my observation was that the product was the pitch and as we moved into the enterprise we had to evolve our positioning to be more than the product feature function.

Erica Schultz: We needed to assign business value and business outcomes to the features and functions that our product was delivering. So that was one big evolution. The other thing that changes quite a bit as you move into the enterprise for our marketing team is that the marketing team needs to partner with the sales organization in a new way. So not only is the marketing team looking to create brand awareness and drive digital demand for your product, facing off to the market. Marketing team needs to face off to the sales organization and deliver enablement and equip that team to pursue new enterprise customers in the market. So the most critical thing is that the marketing leader and the sales leaders be partners and really go to market together.

Harry Stebbings: The final element that I would love to ask about how they change, and it’s one that really we’ve seen the Kashmir creation of is customer success, does that change as you scale up to enterprise?

Erica Schultz: No question. We found that our customer success investment really followed our growth in the enterprise and that’s because as you move into the enterprise, customers are looking for partners to help them deploy more broadly across the enterprise and you’re likely serving a broader set of stakeholders within an account. You’re helping a customer assemble a center of excellence in the account and that takes expertise as well as all the capabilities of your product.

Harry Stebbings: You mentioned about kind of moving with the nascent products that you had from your time at Oracle. I’m super intrigued because I get a lot of SaaS founders who start at SMB asked me, “Harry, we’ve got something and we need to increase our ACVs and move to enterprise. We’re going to move now.” How do you know when’s the right time to think about moving from an SMB and mid-market to enterprise?

Erica Schultz: Well, the beautiful thing with software as a service is the market will tell you when there’s demand for you in the enterprise. So certainly at New Relic we started to see enterprise customers come to us and usually it was individual developers or small teams within large corporations. In the very beginning they came to us and brought us in to the enterprise market. So first you’ll see those early adopters in the enterprise, those disruptors, again, whether the companies themselves are disruptors or whether the teams within those companies are more modern and more disruptive. And that’s who brought us in first. And then you follow their lead into the enterprise. And as we followed those early adopters’ lead into the enterprise, they expressed a need from us for more capabilities around things like security, scalability, enterprise management. And that’s when we leaned in to really serve the enterprise.

Harry Stebbings: You already kind of touched on the rise of bottoms up sales and kind of that evolution that we’ve seen. I’m super interested because I’m always quite perplexed when one has those early adopters within the enterprise, but then one’s selling to maybe the CIO. How do you think about that problem of agency and is that one that’s still very much persists today despite the rise of bottoms up?

Erica Schultz: Oh, they’re both so important. We talk a lot about the bottoms up and the top down. Both are incredibly important. From a bottoms up perspective, in particular with what we sell or that we serve, a number of different roles within modern technology organizations from developers to site reliability engineers, Dev ops, IT operations, we serve all of those stakeholders and we need those hands on practitioners to love our product and see value from our product. We have to help them solve their most urgent problems that they encounter every day in their roles. If you zoom up to the CTO or CIO who’s leading that organization, we need to demonstrate that not only will our products see natural adoption across his or her organization, but also that it delivers business value and that he or she can manage a broad deployment across a broad set of stakeholders and that we can really be a strategic partner. So you’re serving different needs of these different stakeholders within an organization, but it all needs to hang together.

Harry Stebbings: I’m so pleased you said that about adoption within the organization because there’s a VC state often with the SaaS businesses, it’s quite common that we see integration and then the services component being looked down upon almost by VCs obviously often due to the kind of low margins. How do you think about that today and almost kind of also in ensuring kind of customer advocacy and adoption internally? How do you think that services and integration component?

Erica Schultz: Yeah, great question. We find that on the one hand we want our product to be so simple and easy to use and deliver a really quick time to value. On the other hand, the reality of enterprise customers that there is that they have really complex, diverse environments. And so it’s important that we get in as a partner with the right level of services and not a heavy multiyear drawn out system integrator engagement of years past. But that we get in there as a partner and we help them build connectivity between the modern and the legacy environments and that’s how they get the most value out of a solution like New Relic. So it’s really about meeting your customers where they are and partnering deeply with them. And we do that with our own services. We have an expert services team as well as we work with system integrators who are really critical parts of our ecosystem.

Harry Stebbings: I’m so pleased you said the word multiyear there, because I’m absolutely fascinated by multiyear contracts, which is probably one of the many reasons I’m still single. But it is fascinating to me because I speak to Jason Lemkin, and he’s said to me before that multiyear contracts, unless they’re paid up front, is really just shifting the burden of renewals from customer success to finance. How do you think about that and really a multiyear contracts and their prominence today if not or if paid up front?

Erica Schultz: We do a number of contracts that are multiyear, particularly in the enterprise market in large part because customers want predictability and stability and so once when we’re a strategic partner to them, they’re not looking to reassess. 12 month cycle comes and goes pretty quickly, so we find a lot of value in working with our customers to build a multiyear plan for success and then behind that is a multiyear contract.

Harry Stebbings: Absolutely. I totally understand that in terms of these strategic partnerships, I know I’m jumping around here, which is so unfair of me. Going back to the role changes and the roles maybe more generally from a macro perspective, the fundamental layer is communication throughout all of them and seamless communication. How do you think about kind of ensuring really strong cross functional communication and maybe what have you seen work really well?

Erica Schultz: Harry, I’m so glad you bring that up. That is so important. Alignment across all these functions and across your executive team is just so critical in any transformation and certainly as you’re scaling into the enterprise. One of the things that we have found so helpful in driving that alignment is grounding everything in the customer voice, so the more that you can bring the customer voice in, whether you do it anecdotally, for example, all of our executives spend time out with customers and then bring the observations back, or whether you do it through a more formal structure like a customer advisory board, which I would highly recommend. And I highly recommend both, but when you anchor everything in the voice of the customer, that’s a very grounding experience and it makes it a lot easier to get aligned.

Harry Stebbings: I love that grounding in the customer voice. In terms of the people within those roles. You said to me before that kind of great people are often builders who can scale up and down. Can you unpack what scale up and down means with regards to these builders and how you think about adding them to the team?

Erica Schultz: Yes, and I’m so passionate on this topic. What I mean by that is you need to hire people who love to build. So people who wake up every day and choose to be in environments where there is room for them to build something that doesn’t exist to create and that’s where they get satisfaction. At the same time, if you’re growing fast, you would need those same people to also have seen scale so that they can see around corners and help lead the company to where you need to go. So it is a unique profile, but it’s so critical and when you get it right, it’s absolutely magic.

Harry Stebbings: So I’m always absolutely perplexed by kind of the interview process and I totally agree with you in finding those for a special unique people, but it’s very hard in a such a compressed time that kind of interview processes are–What do you do and what do you think one can do to determine whether that candidate in front of them it’s kind of a builder that can scale up and down pre hire?

Erica Schultz: Yes, interviewing well is hard. It’s a craft. I agree with you and I think that getting at the experiences and an individual’s background and really probing on what did you build, what did you create? Asking them what drives them, what were the most satisfying experiences? So if they were operating a bigger scale, I think you can get a little bit at the DNA, but I never rely on interviews alone. I’m a big believer in talking to people who’ve worked with candidates before, reference checks, informal references, just to get a sense for what really drives them. And will that match with what we’re looking for here.

Harry Stebbings: I often speak to Jason Lemkin about hiring these kind of special people. And he says, “Harry, in startups, you can either hire the burnt-out exec or the up and comer who’s not ready.” How do you think about that today, maybe? And do you think that’s a fair assessment given the required profile in this case of kind of the builder that can move up and down?

Erica Schultz: Yeah. Well I’d like to believe that it’s not quite so binary, but I do believe that fast growing companies are a great place for the up and comers who are looking to really make their mark. And ideally you find someone who really hasn’t had their breakout opportunity yet but has assembled a lot of the raw material and their experience, and as part of that has seen scale. Maybe, for example, they haven’t been at the top of the marketing function in their prior role, but they’ve been in a number two spot leading one of the disciplines within marketing and they’ve seen scale and then you give them a shot to lead marketing and its entirety and that’s their breakout role. And they’re really going to lean into that role and look to make their mark. So I do think that finding those up and comers who are on the cusp is a really great opportunity, but you’d be surprised. Even folks who’ve seen scale several different times or who built several times over when that’s their passion, they might be willing to do it again and I’m convinced not all of them are burnt-out execs.

Harry Stebbings: It is quite a binary opinion. I do have to agree with you on that one. In terms of this scale up so to speak, that often one endures at that hyper growth startup. There’s also kind of elements of tension that begin to show. I’d love to hear having kind of seen multiple different business lines that grow and develop. What are the inflection points within company growth where maybe existing systems and processes breakdown and the twangs of pain really come to bear.

Erica Schultz: Yes. Building for scale is definitely one of the bigger challenges of my role, certainly at New Relic, but for companies going through multiple inflection points as you say, and I think frankly one of them for us has been our growth in the enterprise market and needing to serve enterprise customers and it’s really tested us a lot of our systems and processes and talent internally to say, do we have the right people, systems, processes in place to serve our enterprise customers as they need to be served? And so that’s been a great catalyst for growth and maturation, certainly within New Relic.

Harry Stebbings: You said there about kind of getting your customers to be served as they need to be, that always requires empathy from your side, how do you get your teams to be empathetic to your clients’ biggest problems? Maybe regardless of scale? What really works in ensuring that empathy?

Erica Schultz: Yes, I am passionate about building a culture of customer empathy. Certainly as you move into the enterprise, but not limited to that, as you say. I think it’s a great foundation for any business and a couple of things that have worked for us. The first off we really have tried to dive deep into the different, I’ll use the word personas or stakeholders that we serve. There are different roles within an organization that a solution like New Relic serves and so understanding the specific jobs to be done or problems to be solved, that each of those individual roles is focused on every day is really important. So empathy for the specific role in a specific job to be done is critical and that’s something that could be led by a product management, product marketing function. The other thing is again, grounding and the customer voice, getting out to market, just meeting your customers where they are and then having a system to bring those observations and those conversations back.

Erica Schultz: And again, this could be as simple as taking the first few minutes of your CXO meeting to download input from customer meetings over the past week. Or you could do the same thing with your sales or marketing leadership team, but looking for ways to just even bring the anecdotal back in a loosely systematized way, super helpful. And then finally the most formal is the customer advisory board where you develop deep relationships with these customers. You can kind of bring them over the wall and give them visibility to your company strategy and product roadmap and get their honest feedback. And that’s a really nice way to have empathy for what they view as top priority.

Harry Stebbings: I often have founders come to me and say, I often hear that I should really present the vision to potential enterprise customers of what we can and will do. But I also don’t want them to think that we’re not there yet and it’s kind of all in the future. What would you maybe advise and respond to a founder kind of asking whether or not they should be open with that vision and roadmap given that it may be not in the product today?

Erica Schultz: I think the key is drawing the distinction between vision and roadmap. So I think it’s really important to share a vision because we want to expose the customer who is about to bet on you as a partner and what you’re thinking and where see possibilities in the future. And then don’t confuse vision with roadmap. With roadmap, you really want to give customers something they can plan around. And this is where getting that balance right of just enough forward looking view and just enough specifics again for customers to be able to plan but not so much that you don’t leave yourself room to learn as you go and iterate and shift priorities. But I think at the end of the day, transparency, communication, respect for customers’ needs and timelines will always be a winner.

Harry Stebbings: And all of those characteristics like pillars to a successful relationships with your customers in terms of those relationships, obviously an enterprise, it’s ever more important with the long sales cycles and the heavier touch. So having seen these relationship’s been built many times successfully, how do the very best individuals build relationships with their clients and most importantly in my eyes, in a non-transactional human way?

Erica Schultz: Well I think the key there is human, as you mentioned. So at the end of the day, people want to do business with people. We’ve all heard it and said it a million times, but it’s true. And so being human and letting your customers know that you are a human being and someone that they can develop a relationship with and communicate with and trust is really foundational that you have to go beyond just that, the relationship where I’ve seen the best sales teams and the best individuals really thrive is when they know how to anchor on value and it starts with customer empathy, understanding what is the job your customer is trying to get done and then anchoring your solution on delivering value to solve that problem, to help the customer do that job and so it’s both the relationship and being human and being great communicator, but then it’s also respecting your customer and anchoring on delivering value to them.

Harry Stebbings: Merging kind of two of the topics that we’ve discussed in terms of knowing when someone’s the right fit that can kind of build and scale up with the organization and then that relationship that we just touched on there. Often that kind of super tough element with how the enterprise is kind of a long sales cycle that’s inherent in the relationship process being elongated so to speak. How much time does one give reps to turn these relationships into dollars? And how do you think about payback periods today?

Erica Schultz: Yeah that’s a really tricky question. It really depends. It depends on your solution and it depends on your market. And what I can say is always a fail-safe strategy is identify your target market by … And this would be something you have to learn over time and iterate on, but identify your highest potential target market and put your efforts behind those highest potential lifetime value customers. And then keep in mind that if you have a land and expand model, like many SaaS companies do, the time to be initial deal is a period of time. But then time to full potential if that customer may be a much longer time and you just have to adjust your business model accordingly and your expectations accordingly.

Harry Stebbings: No, I do get you in terms of not adjustment. When one really takes this to the extreme and the relationship is so ingrained, it can often lead to partnerships, and often founders come to me and ask kind of, how can I deepen relationships and is partnerships kind of a really great option? How do you approach and think about customer partnerships, Erica?

Erica Schultz: I think the key for me is that any successful partnership, there have to be three winners, the customer and then each partner assuming there’s two partners and their relationship. So you have to think deeply about is the combination say of New Relic solution with another ISV solution, how is that a win for the customer? And then in this arrangement, how does the other partner win and how does New Relic win? And so we always have to be thinking along those lines. Our customers again have been the best guides to what partnerships would be meaningful for them and for us. So again, anchor on the voice of the customer and we’ve had a couple of customers turn into great partners themselves. One example is IBM who has been a longtime customer of new New Relic and then we expanded to include a couple of different dimensions of partnership including IBM does power our data center in Germany as well as resell New Relic to their customers.

Harry Stebbings: Can I ask, when you’re a company like New Relic you have incredible amounts of kind of opportunity for potential partnerships. How do you determine between partnerships to do versus maybe to put on the back burner so to speak?

Erica Schultz: Yes, ruthless prioritization for sure. I mean that’s a big theme overall I think in this business, in a fast growing business and it certainly relates to partnership as well. I think you have to look hard at where can you get the most bang for the buck and then really line up your resources behind small number of choices and ideally achieve success against a small number of partners and I’m willing to bet that some of those models of success you can then replicate to other like partners. But pick a few, enjoy success first. And I always believe in with any new partnership, identify a target set of customers where you think you can go achieve success together. Then you scale from there, you scale to do more with that same partner and maybe scale further to do more with like partners.

Harry Stebbings: I mean I feel it was a, I could chat all day and continuously ask questions that are completely off schedule, which is so unfair of me. But I would love to dive into the quick fire round, Erica. So I say a short statement and give me your immediate thoughts, 60 seconds per one. All you strapped in and ready?

Erica Schultz: All right, I am ready to go.

Harry Stebbings: The hardest element of your role as CRO at New Relic?

Erica Schultz: The hardest element is probably constant prioritization and making trade off decisions. I mean in a growth company we’re going fast. You probably have a target rich environment and you have limited resources. So you’re constantly assessing priorities and making trade off decisions. Sometimes you’re armed with great data that leads you to the right decision and sometimes you’re not and you have to rely on your instincts and know when to make a call. So I’m a believer in erring on the side of making a decision, even if it’s not always the right decision. I want to make active mistakes, not passive mistakes. And if you make the wrong decision, mistakes are rarely fatal, especially in the SaaS business. So it’s that constant prioritization and need to make fast decisions.

Harry Stebbings: Tell me what’s the optimal relationship between a CRO and a CEO?

Erica Schultz: Well, I feel really fortunate to have the relationship I do with our founder and CEO at New Relic, Lew Cirne. And in our case, I have to believe in all cases that communication and trust are really foundational. So that’s number one. In our case, Lew has a really strong product vision and vision for strategy at the company. And I come from more of an execution background and so we partner and that my goal is to translate his product and company vision into a growth strategy for the company and translate that into execution. And as much as sometimes we find ourselves speaking different languages because Lew is known as the coding CEO. He’s very much steeped in product and I grew up on the execution side. Sometimes we find ourselves speaking different languages, but the common ground that you find is in anchoring on the customer. So we both spend a lot of time with our customers and then we come back and we debrief on the stories and that’s a great way for us to stay aligned.

Harry Stebbings: Tell me what do you believe in SaaS that many around you disbelieve?

Erica Schultz: Good question. I mean, what I believe I think is a common belief is that customers win with the SaaS delivery model and the SaaS business model, what may not be as widely held a belief is that those traditional elements of relationship and anchoring on value and customer empathy, those need to be as strong as ever. So if there’s any belief that SaaS is more transactional, I don’t believe that. I actually feel that you prove your value day in, day out, month in, month out and it’s an opportunity to actually get much closer to your customers and operate with more empathy.

Harry Stebbings: Penultimate one, constructing sales comp plans. What’s the advice?

Erica Schultz: Well it really depends. I mean it’s situational based on the type of segment that you’re covering. The stage that your company’s at, what success looks like for the sales reps in that segment or territory or region at the time and so if that’s true, then what’s also true is that your comp plan design will evolve with your business, so it’s unlikely that the comp plans that serve you in year one are the same comp plans that will serve you in year two or three. So you’re constantly looking to tweak different metrics to evolve with the business. So I would say design by segment and then also evolve over time.

Harry Stebbings: You are right. That was a terrible generic question [crosstalk 00:28:58] Self-criticism is key to improvement I’ve found. Tell me final one. What do you do now, Erica, that you wish you’d known and you can choose here, it could be at the beginning of your time with Oracle or it can be at the beginning of your time with New Relic, but what do you wish you’d known at the beginning that you know now?

Erica Schultz: Great question. I think I’ll start with from the beginning of my time at New Relic, what I wish I had known that I know now is it all comes down to talent and the more that you can hire people who’ve seen bigger scale more than you think you’ll need at the time, you’ll likely be well served as long as they have that builder profile. They can also scale down, roll up their sleeves and do what you need to do in the early stages. What I wish I known in the very beginning when I started my career and this certainly played out for me over time, is that it’s all about how much you can learn. And so really focusing your career decisions on where can you learn the most and having that growth mindset. Failure is a gift, feedback is a gift, but making your decisions based on where you can learn the most, you’ll find yourself later in your career with this rich portfolio of experiences that open up a lot of opportunities.

Harry Stebbings: Erica, I’ve so enjoyed today’s episode. As you can tell for me continuously going off schedule, which was so unfair of me, maybe he did so brilliantly well. So thank you so much for joining me today and this has been so much fun.

Erica Schultz: This has been so much fun. Harry, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Harry Stebbings: I mean my word, just such a pleasure and about 10% of the questions that you actually heard today were on the schedule. So a big hand to Erica for being so fantastic and accommodating with that. If you’d like to see more from us behind the scenes here at SaaStr, you can on Instagram @Hstabbings1996 with two Bs. It really would be great to see you there.

Harry Stebbings: As always I cannot thank you enough for this podcast and I can’t wait to bring you another exceptional episode next week.

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