The path of building enduring public companies

💡JC's Newsletter #80

Dear friends, 

Welcome to the 21 people who have joined us since last Tuesday! If you're reading this and haven't subscribed yet, please join the 3 720 people who have already joined the move. It's right here!  

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, including a must-read. 

Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Enjoy!

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💡Must-read

👉 Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli on the path of building enduring public companies:

• In the case of Snowflake, before we went public, we had to get comfortable with our ability to forecast our business on a quarterly and annual basis from a revenue standpoint. It took a few quarters to get there. We literally have to forecast revenue on a customer-by-customer basis by looking at historical usage patterns and, with new customers, how we expect them to grow based on similar customers who have been with us. It’s not an easy thing to do.

• The most important thing for IPO-readiness is having the ability to forecast your business. The street is not very forgiving if you miss on your numbers. You must have confidence in your business to guide your business. You can be an older company and not provide guidance but being a new company going public, investors are going to expect guidance not just on a quarterly basis but also long-term. 

• For example, we had to rebuild our entire billing engine on Snowflake and can now run analytics to understand customer trends. It’s the use of Snowflake internally that gave us the confidence to forecast going forward.

On the importance of forecasting well revenue and margin, and building a bottom up model customer per customer.

• At a certain point, I was interviewing every candidate who was applying for a role in my organization. Especially when you’re in a start-up phase, people in the C suite must take the time to get involved in the interviewing process. 

It is super important to remain very involved in the hiring process, it is the key of a company's success. 

• A lot of SaaS companies—most software companies in face—will try to migrate toward a consumption model. The beauty of Snowflake is that it started out as a consumption model.

• If you have a company and want to go to a consumption model, you must build that metering and visibility into the product to give to your customers so that they can control their own consumption within the product.

• That may go against the idea that you want customers to consume more because it increases revenue, but at the end of the day what you want are happy customers. You don’t want them feeling like they’re paying more than what they should be paying.

How would you do that for health insurance? 🙂 send me an email with ideas!

👉 How CEO-For-Hire Frank Slootman Turned Snowlake Into Software’s Biggest- Ever IPO (Forbes)

• A captain with extreme confidence who will throw overboard anyone who shows the mildest mutinous inclination. 

• “When I was a younger man, I was more tolerant; I always thought I could coach people to a place where they would be great,” Slootman says. “And 99 times out of 100, you’re wrong on that, which is the reason I [now] pull triggers much faster. I still don’t think I’ve ever taken anybody out of a job too soon. It’s [always] been too late.”

• His second: parting ways with anyone who seemed fond of palace intrigue or who didn’t deliver precisely on their word.

On how to part ways sooner than later. It is very hard, and needs to be done with a lot of elegance and protecting the employee. Still, many leaders are too scared to do it, leading to toxic situations. 

🏯 Building a company

In addition to selected articles, I share one of Alan's leadership principles every week - the same one that I share internally every Wednesday.

👉Alaners take time to explain why and the (hard) truth

• We try to tell the truth even if it hurts. When talking to a team member, a partner, an investor, we strive to tell the truth. We are open and honest. We do not withhold information or tell half-truths. Even if the truth will be difficult to hear or to say.

• How to encourage bad news. When we hear about a problem, we try to be ecstatic. “Isn’t it great that we found out about this before it killed us?”

👉 Working asynchronously (Justin Spahr-Summers)

• In a distributed team, like in concurrent programming, synchronization points should be avoided as much as possible.

• Generally speaking, if a meeting can be replaced with something less synchronous, get rid of it.

• Meetings are sometimes still useful for high-bandwidth conversations that are unlikely to get resolved well otherwise — for example, very abstract brainstorming or design discussions. 

• Make sure the meetings are as optional as possible. Take notes and share them out, and minimize the number of people who are actually required to attend. 

 👉 12 Life Lessons From Mathematician and Philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota (fs.blog)

• Every lecture should make only one point. It’s often best to stick to making one point at a time.

• Make it easy for people to take notes: “What we write on the blackboard should correspond to what we want an attentive listener to take down in his notebook”. 

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🗞In the news

📱Technology

👉Richard Branson Interview

• Virgin Group founder Richard Branson on being bold in business and philanthropy “You don't learn to walk by following rules,” says Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group which includes more than 40 companies operating in 35 countries. “You learn by doing, and by falling over."

• Virgin Group companies always try to promote from within. If you give people opportunities above the level they expect to be at, they often excel—sometimes even more so than someone who expects to be at that level.

👉 Pinterest says recommendations powered by neural networks are now driving “nearly 100 percent” of its growth. The company had 480 million users in its first quarter, up 30 percent from last year. 

👉 EA gets hacked through a Slack cookie and lame social engineering ;) (Vice)

• Someone hacked EA and stole a lot of source code for different games engines. Slightly puzzling, since it's not as though anyone else can sell games made with stolen source code. More interesting is how they got in: a cookie bought on the black market for $10 to get them logged into EA's Slack, and then a text chat with IT asking them to turn off two factor authentication.

🏥 Healthcare

👉 Uber Health expands prescription delivery to 37 states with ScriptDrop deal (HealthCareDrive)

• Uber Health is partnering with e-prescription startup ScriptDrop in a deal expanding the ride-hailing giant's prescription delivery footprint from a few cities to dozens of U.S. states.

• Uber's hundreds of thousands of drivers will be accessible to pharmacies using ScriptDrop in 37 states across the U.S. ScriptDrop, a third-party tech platform connecting patients and pharmacies with couriers nationwide, will pay Uber for the cost of each delivery.

• Uber's main thrust in the healthcare sector is non-emergency medical transportation, and it has netted some 1,500 partners, including major health systems and payers, since launching in the space three years ago.

• ScriptDrop integrates with a pharmacy's software system to provide same-day shipping medication delivery options, and also has a consumer-facing portal for drop-offs.

• Uber is integrated with ScriptDrop via an application programming interface

👉UK’s MHRA says it has ‘concerns’ about Babylon Health — and flags legal gap around triage chatbots (TechCrunch)

• During this time the company has been steaming ahead inking wide-ranging “digitization” deals with healthcare providers around the world — including a 10-year deal agreed with the U.K. city of Wolverhamptonlast year to provide an integrated app that’s intended to have a reach of 300,000 people.

• It also has a 10-year agreement with the government of Rwanda to support digitization of its health system, including via digitally enabled triage. Other markets it’s rolled into include the U.S., Canada and Saudi Arabia.

💚 Alan

👉🇫🇷La ménopause : où en est-on dans l’entreprise ? 💬(Étude)

• 🔎 Durant plusieurs mois, nous avons enquêté, avec l’institut Harris Interactive, sur les attentes des talents féminins, les enjeux psychosociaux et les solutions activables pour favoriser l’inclusion de toutes.

• Pour la première fois, notre étude est accessible : elle rassemble une centaine de chiffres clés, nos constats et conseils pour accompagner les talents dans cette transition. 🌟

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🔨 A Useful tool

👉 Need to make shared lists and tables? To follow a project, requests? Try Trello!

• We use Trello to organise the work of different teams, to centralise development requests for engineers, to create a sort of shared to-do list.

• It is possible to create "cards" and move them from board to board. Once you've got the hang of it, everything goes faster! There are templates provided by Trello to get you started.