Scaled MongoDB From $35M to $2B — Why He HATES the Word Playbook

Was it as simple as picking up that playbook, confecicution at MongoDB and just dropping it into. I actually hate the term playbook. It implies that it's a process that goes with you from company to company. It's exactly the same. And you just follow it and you're going to be successful. And the reality is that's not what it is. Today we welcome Dan Barrett, SVP of International at Figma. In this episode, we talk about how the playbook is being applied in both PLG and consumption models. My journey at MongoDB is a little bit like a stock ticker. If you zoom out far enough, it looks like up into the right. On a daily basis, it was like this. You have good days, you have bad days. It was really hard and obviously lots of learnings. They wasn't being authentic as a leader. The epiphany moment for me was things started clicking for me when I realised that I could only be the best version of me I could be. One of my reps said to me, "The reason that we work hard is not because we're scared of you, is because we don't want to let you down." And it was like this kind of moment, you don't have to intimidate people or to drive accountability. In this episode, we talk about Dan's remarkable journey from the origin story from Mongo and how he's evolved into becoming one of the most revered leaders in software sales. In this episode, we explore how the playbook is being applied in both PLG and consumption models. We talk about his epiphany moment where it all changed for him and we explore how his breakthrough in authenticity was a turning point for him in his career. This is his playbook. Today's episode is sponsored by Aura Sale, intelligently automate every aspect of your sales cycle with the first AI native, Fullstack GTM platform. Welcome to Hunter's and Unicorns. I'm Simon Kutis and I'm joined by my co-host, Oli Kune. Welcome back to the show, everyone. And it's with great pleasure that we welcome Dan Barrett. Dan, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Actually, it was a miraculous transformation from just sitting out of a conversation and you came into character. That was really exciting. That was actually wonderful to see. It was something to behold. You should be on a game show, you should be. By whatever introduction you are SVP International at Figma. That is correct. Very, very exciting project. And we're looking forward to hearing much more about that. But Dan, the reason we're so excited to have you here is because you've been through such an incredible journey. Your career is illustrious. You are revered in our industry. But there were some real highs and lows as part of that journey. And you reflect back on kind of a real piphony moment. And I just want to start right at that point. So take us to that moment where it all changed for you. Well, firstly, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here. Long overdue, may I say, but it's great to talk to you. 100%. And there is a backstory to this as well. We'll get to that, which we will get on to. It's not quite as exciting as it sounds, but there is a backstory. We owe a lot to you, though. That's the thing. And we're telling you more about that. I mean, I might get a hat this time. Definitely got hats there. So I joined MongoDB in August 2015 as an RD to run the UK. Previous to that, I worked at Service Now for four years. Firstly, as a rep, I got promoted to be a leader in my last year. So I had the grand total of nine months of leadership experience when I joined Mongo. And honestly, I thought at that time, I was like God's gift to sales leadership. I'd like God figured out nine months under my belt. I was ready to go. And then I started talking to-- it was actually Joe Morrissey that recruited me. I don't know if you-- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was so to him last week, actually. And so it was Joe and Carlos. So my interview process was a couple of times with Joe. It was Carlos. And then Dave, my final thing was with the financial was Dave. Wow. And when I first started talking to-- I mean, to cut a long story short, I joined Mongo to learn my craft as a sales leader. I realized during the interview process that actually I knew very little about sales leadership. And Service Now was a great company, but it didn't have a great structure at that time around sales leadership and in building the skills I needed. So I joined to really learn my craft as a sales leader. And so I came in. So I worked for Joe, who then-- so I'd Carlos. And at that time, my peers were like Jesse Green, who's now CRO at Rubric. There was a smaller mighty team of RDs. Every QBR I did was with Dave, who was the CEO. He's left now. John McMahon, I did 16 straight QBRs with John McMahon. So it was like a baptism of fire, right? You come in. And so you come into this room. You've got all of these big personalities. There's a lot of people that came from BMC, knew the playbook down. There was also a lot of similar leadership styles, quite big personalities. And it's quite intimidating when you first go into leadership. And when you first join a new company, you're like, yeah, I'm sure you've had plenty of guest talk about this before you have this imposter syndrome. But for me, it wasn't really imposter syndrome. It was a similar suffer from a lack of confidence. But I think the biggest thing was trying to figure out who you are as a leader. And it's very easy when you're early in sales leadership to try and imitate somebody else. And so you see it all the time. Two things. One, they try and be someone they're not. And two, they forget all the things that made them successful in the first place. But the first thing was like the piphany for me. And the early days of Mongo were really hard. We used to joke we were selling insurance for free software. Because it was like, at that point, it was open source. We didn't have like a SaaS product. We were selling basically support and warranty and a little bit of tooling for an open source product that no one really thought was like mission critical workloads. So it was really hard at that point. And you surround about all these big personalities and to you. I often say it's a little bit like-- my journey at Mongo is a little bit like a stock ticker. It reflects the Mongo stock ticker. If you zoom out far enough, it looks up into the right. You have good days. You have bad days. It was really hard and lots of lots of learnings. And the piphany moment for me just to cut to the punchline was things started clicking for me when I realized that I could only be the best version of me I could be. But I think I wasn't being authentic as a leader. And they're like the sort of-- on a pin drop moment or that kind of moment was actually one of my reps said to me once. I kind of remember what the context was. But they said to me, paraphrasing a little bit. But the reason that we work hard is not because we're scared of you is because we don't want to let you down. And it was like this kind of moment. I was like, you don't have to intimidate people or to drive accountability. People don't have to be scared of you. They just need to be bought in to you, to the mission, to the standards of excellence, to what you're trying to drive. And I think at the moment I stopped trying to be somebody else and started being myself, that was the point of which-- I don't know, I think subconsciously you take the pressure off yourself. You stop second-guessing your own gut instinct. And I'm very instinctive about a lot of things. Like in an interview, I pretty much make my mind up in the first 10 or 15 minutes. And then I use the rest of the time to validate my gut. And over time, I'd learn to trust my gut more and more. And I think that was where that-- as a young leader, where that friction came in, where you're sort of overriding your gut and what you think is the right thing to do because you're second-guessing yourself or what would Carlos do or what would Joe do or what would Dondu or whatever. And so I think that was one of the big epiphanies for me. And now, I would tell you that I think authenticity as a leader and vulnerability are like superpowers for leadership. So before you had that epiphany moment, what were you dealing with? What was-- what were you feeling in that moment before that? I think it's just like pressure, isn't it? These environments at these stages can be very high pressure. There's very high expectations to recruit well, to drive PG, to hit the numbers, to be accurate on your forecast. And at that stage, we're going to come onto this word playbook company. But I think at that stage, we actually didn't have a playbook. We didn't have really a repeatable path of success. We were still figuring a lot of stuff out at that stage. And so there was a lot of pressure. There's a lot of people that-- there's very few people actually that made it from those early days through to four or five years later. It's like-- You're nine years. Maybe 10 years, aren't you? Nine years, 35 million to 2 billion, I did. Wow. which was. - I'd like to take it back to, you mentioned this, you know, your experiences with running QBRs with John McMahon. Take us back to that point and, you know, you're in your first QBR and how, what was going through your head and how well it worked and what was the outcome to that? - The first ones was the first ones, you would get a pass on the first ones. - Right, so let's go second then. (laughing) - First one is all right. My honest reflection on looking back at those times was just now with perspective, was just like the learning from it. I learned so much from some incredible leaders. You know, Joe, Carlos, John, Don, Cedric were like, I mean, I worked, basically I worked for Joe for under a year, then I worked for Don for four years, then I worked for Cedric for five years. I know you've had Cedric on the show. I don't know if you've had Don on. We've, we haven't had Don, we've had Dave on, we've had Cedric. - Okay, yeah. So I worked for some incredible leaders and so my biggest thing was just like the learnings, you know, learnt so much and the stories, the stories that, you know, from the hard times, you know, like you just, you look back at those, you know, some of John's stories like Gray Boy, the cat, the piece of carrots, like, you know, there's all these little stories. And if you like, if you know, you know, like it's one of those kind of things. - Yeah. - And it was a scary, you know, it was a pretty scary place to be. It was like unforgiving, but also amazing, you know, like an amazing learning experience. So that's what, that's what, when I look back, it was just like the learnings really was the biggest, the biggest takeaway. - The intensity of that environment was quite well documented and you can see how you wanting to change your way, could have been quite difficult if you weren't allowed the space. So what did you have to fight through to allow yourself the space? Because I imagine, you know, you're having to take a different approach. So just talk to us about that transition. - Yeah, I think, I'm not sure how conscious it was, but I think it comes from like a confidence point of view. I think the point of which you stopped trying to be somebody else and you start trusting your gut and start making decisions with like a with conviction suddenly, you know, I started to become more successful and you get more feedback. And so there becomes this like virtuous, you know, virtuous kind of circle where you start making better decisions. I think the whole like, one thing I will say is like, you know, I think these type of companies have a reputation. It's somewhat based on truth and somewhat based on like folklore. - Right. - And so, you know, I think yes, it was an intense place, but some of the stories you hear, it's just like it wasn't true. So yeah, so I think it was intense, but it was intense because we're all on a mission to get better and like to do hard things is hard, right? Like if you want to do something amazing, nothing in life that's worth truly having is easy. And Sedric used to say this thing of like, you know, far success breezy go and slow success builds character. And so, you know, I think, you know, look over nine years, it was like a lot of character building moments. And so yeah. - So reflecting on that environment and bringing it to kind of the modern world, the industries change so much. And you currently find yourself at Figma, which, lighting in a bottle, the PLG motion was kind of exceptional, really intrigued to understand the, whether there was a clash of cultures or how you've been able to embrace where you are today and actually the background and have the, and the marriage of the two, really intrigued to just go after that and talk a little bit about that. So tell us a little bit about your journey to Figma and how you grappled with some of that. - Yeah, so I mean, first of all, I would say is, you know, Mongo actually ended up being a blender both. Like when I started, it was like purely top down, then we launched Atlas, which was more of a product-led motion. And so we had the marriage of both. And we can talk about that later in terms of, you know, the different things that we did. But yeah, as you say, Figma has been wildly successful, was wildly successful, effectively from like a single product, which is Figma design, which is what most people know as best for. You know, pretty much built a billion dollar business with an incredibly strong product-led motion. Amazing practitioner, like customer love. We genuinely have multiple customers that have Figma tattoos. I'm pretty sure we never had any Mongo customers with Mongo tattoos. - I bet there's some of that. - I'm not sure, I'm not sure. - I'm not sure. - I'm not sure. - And so, but the thing is, two things changed. One is, as we started to release more products and became more of a platform, not all of those products were as viral. And some of them required more of a top-down sale. Also, in order to sell a platform, sometimes those things become more of a top-down decision. And so, our world changed. We became more of a platform that required us to get wider and higher in our accounts. And then, obviously the world has changed quite a lot in the last 12 to 18 months with AI, changing the way that people build software. So, the external market has changed a lot. And so, really what I spend a lot of time thinking about is how do you marry the, 'cause it's not like one's bad and one's good, it's actually the magic is how you can bring both together. So, how do you have a top-down that's bottoms up? How do you have a great bottoms up motion but combine that with the best of sales led? And what's gone before isn't bad. It was actually amazing as what's got us here. It's like, how do we build on that as a foundation and marry together the best of both worlds? Because I think if you can do that, that's how you really can unlock the most amount of value. Where has you seen this being done wrong? Because I think there's a, yeah, that's the question. How should you not do this? There's a few things. One is, you know, lose sight of like customer centricity. So, you know, at the end of the day, the customer is a center of everything we do. And if we have happy customers that get value from what we do, that's why the product was viral. Because customers got value from and they loved it. And so, you know, where I have seen things go wrong in the past, where you're optimizing for like the comp plan and not for the customer. And so, but I think in general, if you put the customer at the beginning at the heart of everything you do, it's me coming back to my, you know, my brief foray in running customer success as well. It's like, it's good for me, you know, it's good, good for every sales leader to see the other side. So, I think that's one thing. I think trying it, it'd be one or the other. Like, oh, we're just gonna throw out product led and now we're gonna be sales led or vice versa. It doesn't work like you have to bring both. To the same thing of just like, oh, we'll just, you know, you see this, you saw this whole thing. I mean, slack, I think slack with the first one. We don't need sales people. Eventually, they need details people. Because product led sales is great until it isn't. Yeah, like, you know, as things are growing, then it's amazing. But at some point, you reach a, you can reach a ceiling where you need to do things that the product won't do on its own. The danger of that is that you realize too late you need to build a sales engine. And that takes time. You know, if you think about like, okay, you know, you've built like an amazing product, led hunters and unicorns product. And now you like shit, now we need to hire a sales team. Well guess what? It's going to take you, even you guys, it's going to take you like three months to hire great people. Then it's going to take you three months to get them productive. Then you're going to get them PG-ing and you might have a three to six months sales cycle. Before you know it, it's 12 months, your 12 months down the line. And so I think that's where I also see it go wrong where people realize too late that they need to build, you know, an outbound sales capacity and capability. And by the time they realize it, they're in trouble. Yeah. I want to take this opportunity to ask you all very kindly to go and hit the subscribe button. Whether you're on YouTube, iTunes or Spotify, it will mean the world to us if you could hit that subscribe button. It means we can continue to bring you great content and we'll ensure that you don't miss out on any of our great content. So obviously you were no doubt hired because of your experience in MongoDB and taking a very top down, you know, to now, you know, both and getting the best of both. Where was it as simple as picking up that playbook and for execution at MongoDB and just dropping it into. You know that's triggering for me when you're in trouble. You did that, but. So it's just very, very triggering for me. So like I. The term playbook company has become very popular. Yeah. You know, it's a place. Thanks to Hunter. Thank you, thank you. It's a very, very, very, very, very. But I actually hate the term playbook. Right. And the reason being is because I think it implies that like on day one, when you, like, you get the golden tickets to a playbook company, they give you this like. Man, you're. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do get the value framework, but that's the different thing. Yeah, yeah. But you know, you get this like book and it teaches you everything you need to be successful in, you know, in the company. And it's like the reality is, that's not what it is. It's not a playbook. Because I think it implies that it's like. It's a process that goes with you from company to company. And obviously there are some elements of that that are reusable. But if I think back to my time at Mongo, we had at least three transformations, probably four, I've joined halfway through one. Where the playbook that worked for a couple of years then stopped working and we need to evolve it. So we named all of us as animals. I don't know why. Cedric came out with the first one. The first one was hedgehog. Our first sales transformation was called hedgehog. Maybe from the book, good to great. Maybe it was inspired by that. I think it was a fable about the fox and the hedgehog theory. Was it the fox that you did? It is. He was very-- He was-- Be good at one thing and focus on your strength rather than-- Yeah. Very learned. He is. You're in his life. Yeah. He's like-- He's your-- I'm not going to break you to your name on your books. The second one was puffing. No idea. Because we did-- that was nothing to do with that was much, much less cerebral-- we were in Iceland. Cedric thought it'd be a good idea. So it was just after he took over the CRO role. And he thought it'd be a good idea. He looked on the map and thought it'd be a good-- it's like neutral territory, be a good idea to bring the US leaders and the Amir leaders together in neutral territory. So he picked Iceland in February. Wow. Those are trumps. Trump's not involved in that way. That's being-- That's really weird idea. It was pretty Trump. So it was like minus 10. And we were in this office in Iceland. He had only like light for five hours a day. And one night at a bar, they served as puffing. Oh, wow. OK. And so that's why we called it puffing. And if you're wondering, it tastes like fishy chicken. Oh, there we go. Fishy chicken. Fishy chicken. I won't recommend it. And then I'll ask someone who's called Tiger. So anyway, back to the point. I think what-- if you look at the really great-- let's call it playbook companies-- if you look at the really great playbook companies-- actually, it wasn't about a playbook, per se. It was about having leaders that could apply-- like first principles of what they knew about the different disciplines, like recruiting, like PG, like a sales process, qualification, et cetera. And they were able to figure out what, at that period of time, for that company, would make people successful. And then how do you measure it? How do you-- most importantly, how do you train and develop people on it? And so I think if you look at the really great leaders in this space, the most number one common trait is that they're amazing developers of people. They're able to figure out, taking something super complicated, make it really simple, and be able to train people on how to get gray at each of those things. And so when you see it, it's actually much more around that than it is around, I've got this like repeatable system for excellence, which just works for every-- just doesn't. Yeah. Well, I think if you look at a lot of people in the simplest term, think that actually a playbook organization is a company that runs medic as a qualification methodology, or even a sales framework, right? Which clearly isn't. But I think there's so many tenants to that, right? Which is, as you say, it's the people, it's the enablement, it's how we sell, it's the value framework, and all of those create a framework. But every single one of those needs to be evangelized in some way, whether or analyzed, if it's the type of people, such as people have experienced in taking a PLG motion and turning it into a sales more sales-led motion and having that experience. So you really need to qualify or do you-- is that how you then take it? So let's say that we've got this play, but how did you go about saying, OK, well, I've got this framework, I'm now taking on this new job at FIGMA. Where do I start? So did you actually use some of those guiding principles and some of those frameworks to really understand what you needed to do to go and execute on the mission? Yeah, I think the first thing you do when you come into any new company is you're observing, you're observing, you're asking questions, you're learning, you're trying to figure out, you know, spending time with customers, spending time with the reps, you know, figuring out who's been successful, and then trying to understand why. So I'm not sure I'm going to-- I'm not actually going to name this particular rep, because I don't want anybody like trying to approach them, because this is my best friend. And when I came in, one of the top reps of one of my segments, they were like absolutely crushing it. I'm being very coy about who this is right now. I'm trying to get some guesses on it. There's a lot of sharks in the room. [LAUGHTER] I'm not stupid if I look. And so I asked the leader. I said, you know, why they've been successful. And Hene said to me, oh, they're better at qualifying outdills than everybody else. And I was like, yeah, I'm not sure about that mate. So I was like, OK, let's look at the data. So we basically-- he pulled this massive spreadsheet of every single, like, how many discovery calls, how many meetings, analyze the pipeline. And he came back and he's like, guess what? I was like, well, he's like, yeah, he wasn't at a tour. He's like, oh, really? He wasn't there. Well, it wasn't. He's like, there's three things. He consistently hit his leading indicators. But he focused more on outbound rather than inbound. So he spent more of his time focusing on the best accounts in his patch, rather than just focusing on mqls or leads or whatever. And then if you look at the people he's spending time with, he spends a disproportionately larger amount of time with founders, CTO, CEO, head of engineering, like C level and C level minus 1. And so I was like, that's really interesting. And then this RD who's amazing basically then turned that into his playbook of how we then upleveled all of his other reps. So now we're kind of built on a playbook, right? Like we figured out what it was, what was the secret source to make this particular segment and team successful. And now we know he's like, okay, now I can make everybody else successful. So the next quarter, everybody in his team, sorry, everybody in his team hit plan. We're excited about this. I'm very passionate about this and stuff. Everyone in his team make plan. Then he figured out, how do I turn that in a way to hire great people and on board them quickly? So now he can drive people to productivity in three months. So it's just a really good example of where like when you come in somewhere new, there is great stuff happening. It's not like I came in because everything Figma was bad before, far from it. Yeah. I mean, they built an incredible company. We, they, they, I don't, I don't, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, because they've already built it by the time I came in. I mean, a north of a billion dollars growing north of 40%. And actually insane, the metrics are insane. And so there was so much great things happening over the years to get it to this point. It wasn't like everything was bad. It's just like, okay, the world has changed. What's got us to hear isn't going to get us to there. And we need to build a little bit more like repeatability into it. So rather than it being artistic and people having to figure stuff out for themselves, how do you turn it into more of a system? So that's to cut along so short, that's what you do. You come in, you analyze, I'm very data driven, you know, look at the data in lots of different ways. And then you use your experience of what you, like what you know intuitively is going to work. As an example, you know, it doesn't take you, it's not much different from one company or another, like those people that generate more pipeline are going to be more successful. You know, there's, there's no like the, the, the, the inverse is never true. So it's then just about working out, okay, well, what's working? What is it? What are the right personas? What are the right metrics? And then, you know, how do you inspire and develop people to be successful around that particular discipline or competency? I think this was a, this is actually a don, I'll credit Don Darsie to this one. He always used to say, why, what and how? Like when, you know, when you're trying to develop people, why? Like what's the, you know, like you need to get, you need to give people the why. Yeah. I think Cedric, Cedric's quote, I'm sure he gave you this one about the, you know, if you want to, if you want to teach people to build a boat, you don't, you know, there's something about that you don't, you must know this is like a, this is one of his, yeah, it's about, you know, you don't teach him out of like, you know, chop wood and hammer nails, you teach him to the year and for the open blue scene. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's a, that's a, that's a pesh, that's a pesh, but it's, it's right. Like, you know, so many people, and this is what I think this is like playbook and wrong is they just focus on the what, do more PG, show the scoreboard. It's all about the metrics. And that's where it gets a bad name. Yeah. But actually, that's just a means that the metrics are just a means to the end. It's like, why are we doing this? Because, you know, we want to, we want to build like a legendary sales team that crushes its numbers ever quarter. As I, you know, I say to my team, never forget sales is one of life's highest callings. We, you know, are we, it's like one of sales, I just want to tell my mom as well. It's one of the best one of life's highest callings. But actually, we're from the car sales, we're from the car sales. But, you know, we genuinely sell a product that has huge value that customers love. I mean, what a privilege that you, you get to be able to share that with more and more people. So like, you know, PG is not just self-serving. It's like, we're actually doing a service to our customers. But you have to, you have to anchor on their why. What's in it for them? in it for our customers and then really over rotate on the how. Because I think that's the other thing. It's like if you really want to teach someone how to do it, it's a lot of work. I mean, when I came into Figma, one of the things that we wanted to do is to bring some standardization in terms of how we run our playbooks at Figma. And so we took every single sales leader out of the field for a week in November, then again in March. So we already invested, you know, in our memory, we have like 70 leaders took them out of the field for two entire weeks. And we are by no means done, right? But that's a sort of investment it takes if you really want to build excellence. It's like that you have to invest in training and developing people to get them good. And leaders, right? Because this is something that we've noticed that is happening a lot more, but should have been having a lot more in the past. Leaders having training rather than just focusing on race. 100%. I think I took it for granted at Mongo. It's just like how we operated. Yeah. And then you realize that like it's not normal. You know, how many companies invest in space of six months, two whole weeks flying every single sales leader from like Sydney to San Francisco and investing that much time in training sales leaders. Very few. Very few. I want to kind of join these and see if there is a parallel here in joining the two kind of pillars of this conversation, which is one authenticity. The second is the playbook and it's not necessarily a cookie cutter. Do you think obviously you joined MongoDB and you came from service now where you didn't necessarily have the structure and the process? Do you think what helped you create your own authenticity was really getting to understand the playbook on each of its pillars? So then you're at a point to say, okay, I understand the theory now. So actually when it comes to now building my own playbook and creating my own authenticity around this, do you think that had something to do with it? I'm not sure I would make that link, but I think where I would make the link was the incredible leaders that I work for. Right. I would credit the leaders I work for. You know, I think Don and Cedric had a huge impact on me on both of those things because they invested so heavily in development, teaching me, but also giving me the confidence and the backing to be myself. Yeah. I mean, at points Don did used to call me a care bear, but it's sweet. Was there a big deal? He called me a lot of things. What was your super power? The other thing he used to call me was fancy pants. I do have a certain reputation for the final things in life. But I was tell. But in general, what both of them gave me was, was a huge amount of confidence to be myself and to and then the development to like train and also the opportunities. Like I had some incredible opportunities to build some amazing things at at Mongo. Even though I didn't realise I wanted to do it. So like I just like my story of how I got into into customer success. I was going to say that was an interesting point in your career, right? Yeah. I took a little bit of selling on it. I've got to be honest. Because I was like, dude, I was like, I remember having this conversation with Seder. I was like, dude, I'm not sure about this. I'm not sure. I'm like a CS guy. And this was actually just before we went through like a really major transformation, which was moving to consumption. So we took the entire, sort of moved the entire go to market function from like up front subscriptions to consumption, which was a huge, super interesting. Which CS would have been right the heart of. Exactly. Hence why he wanted to position you in. Yeah. And so like, you know, I think when I took it over, we probably had 35 people. We took that to 300 and agree that to 350 people. He phones vibrating. So nice. That's happened. I told you about popular person. Yeah. So, you know, I had the opportunity and actually was looking back now. It was the best thing I ever did. I could have ever done because it just broadened my skill set. And like I ran an entire global function. Whereas, you know, like I ran northern Europe. It was like 75 people was a big, it was a big business. I was a third line leader running northern Europe. But then when you get to like effectively own like the strategy, you know, present into the board once a quarter, like gave me such an amazing opportunity. So yeah, we built. And at the time, our retention was actually. This is not well known, but our retention actually wasn't that great. Our GRR was was was not great. And I think this is a, this is a good, it was a really good opportunity to apply these like first principles of like, okay, well, I know how to run a sales process. I know how to like inspect the right things to focus on the key leading indicators. I just applied that. Not the playbook, but the understanding of the mindset. It's the mindset of it. And to like build out the same capabilities and competencies. And like, you know, we, we improved retention by probably 14 points in two years, saved $197 million in ARR. Wow. I'm built an amazing CS team, super proud like they're incredible. And then I built our product led sales org that James Kirk ran that for me. It was a 200 with you now, who's moved me now. Yeah. There's a fourth company on the track. Yeah. And I was going to say was he your super, was he your super seller or leader that you mentioned? No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. Sorry, James. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't him. He would have, he wouldn't have given me a cop out answer. No, I just don't qualify now. You would know better than that. But you know, when, when we took over that business, it was basically a, you know, $150 million self-service business that we sold a bit of PS. And we turned that team into the most productive sales team at MongoDB. You know, we were driving an incredible productivity. And most importantly, it became like a talent factory. So we were taking like, it was the first rollout of sales development. We're teaching them how to run a sales process, how to PG and built that team into, as I said, like a real talent factory for the rest of the business. Then I built our account management function from the ground up. I built our renewals function from the ground up. And so coming back to that kind of original point, it's like you get to apply the learnings of, you know, all these amazing leaders and all these experiences and the good and the bad and the mistakes of which I've made like thousands. And then be able to try it for yourself. And so like that's where you, you know, you just learn these, the muscle of like, how to come in, how to look at things, how to analyze, see the opportunity, trust your intuition, and marry that up with data and science and build a vision and go through these kind of transformation programs. Just taking the conversation, you know, slightly off-peaced in a way. But you know, when leaving Mongo, was it a tough decision? Because obviously you speak, you know, I can fill the energy in how you talk about it. Your journey from, as you say, coming in as a pretty, you know, average leader, I'm not saying you this. I'm in the high of a church, that's the word I'm looking for. But you know, you grew so much and obviously you built a great team, you knew the business really well. How does understand, you know, the mindset of saying, and why did you know that now was the right time to move on from, or when was the right time to move on from Mongo? So, I mean, firstly, all good things have to come to an end. And so I think nine, one of the remarkable things that I think about the Mongo story was how long that crew stayed together. Yeah. It's pretty unusual for like, for that, the majority of the crew stayed together for at least six or seven years. I was there for nine years. Eight years was like, you know, when Cedric came from Cedric, from when Cedric came into the end was probably eight years. Very unusual. Usually it's like four years, you know, everyone's fully vester than everyone leaves. That's like the usual, the usual period. It was pretty unusual, I think. And that was a really a credit to the fact that we will continue to grow and learn and develop and enjoy working together. We were really tight crew. But I actually had like a moment. So it was post COVID early 2021 and I actually felt like I was getting burnt out. Right. And Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, you know, just take us a baticle. You know, take some time off you'd be fine, you know, just a bit burnt out. And it was just when we were into second lockdown in the UK and I was like, dude, oh my God, I'm going to do a sit-home like I'll go with my wife, I can't even go to the gym. So that's actually the time when I moved into the CS role. And within like weeks, if not months, months, if not weeks, I got my mojo back. I got my energy back and I really, I went through a lot of like self-reflection and did a lot of like self-development. And I realized it just I wasn't getting energy from the role anymore. So I love building, scaling, transforming. That's like what I get my energy from is what I love doing. I think that's what I'm best at. The like execution steady stay, it's just like I can do it for a while, but I rapidly start to sort of lose energy from the job. And so I could see the signs of like, you know what? I, you know, I would. would love to leave on a high and look back rather than get to the point where I'm burnt out or I'm negative and the team deserve better than that. So I was like, I haven't had more than two weeks off since I started working 2001. Wow. So I was like, I'm going to text, I'm going to text in time off. So I took six months off, learnt to scuba dive, went on some bougie holidays, like midweek lunches with my wife. You know, just like it was fancy pancing it. It was really cool. It was a really nice experience. And so yeah, was it a hard decision? It was hard to leave the people. But I still speak to those people now. And so I think you, it's not leaving those. You just sort of some-- Because the environment, MongoDB, and especially the area that you're operating in that organization, doing almost 10 years is a big commitment. Right? And there's lots of people that go through that. How did you sustain for such a long duration from a-- how did you keep with it? Obviously, you mentioned the burnout piece. How were you able to continuously keep up that energy and just that work ethic that comes with all of that? Because lots of sacrifices are made, right? Family wise. Yeah, I think, yes, but the thing that is, I think, is misunderstood is that you do it because like you want to do it because you want to build something amazing, not because like people are putting your under pressure to do it, per se. And Sedraic actually used to run this development session around operating rhythm. And he would always say that like the first building block of building an operating rhythm is like looking after your own health. So this is the first thing it goes in. Then your family basically put your own knocks in your mask on first before helping other people. And so it was kind of drilled into us pretty early that it was our responsibility. No one else was going to do it for us. It was our responsibility to look after ourselves. Was it hard? Yes. You know, day to day, it was like the stock ticker. Now with perspective and distance, I'm like, yeah, it was hard, but it was amazing. I don't think I could go back to like I couldn't go back to like a nine to five job. It just be just be boring. I don't just like I just kind of rewired, you know, how I work and how I operate. And I love what I do. I mean, I like someone said to me that they must be like really hard. You know, all this travel, I was like, I mean, sure, but I mean, I get to fly around the world. You know, spending time with the team at the front of the room, training people, helping people be successful. Like you see the glint in in reps eyes when they leave the room excited about, you know, an opportunity that we've just brainstormed. Like, I mean, what a privilege. Like what is like an amazing job. Yeah. And so yes, it's hard. Yes, we work hard, but I think I think it's, I can't remember the quote when they said like in a few, if you, if you find a job you love, you never, you never work a day in your life. doesn't mean every day is amazing, but I think in general, if you're passionate about what you do and you'd love the people you work with, that's not that hot. It's the worst thing you could be doing. Well, it's funny, obviously I said at the beginning of this conversation that there was an interesting story, and the interesting story is that Hunters and Unicorns was really born, it came from my first interaction with you and I remember that was probably. Do you remember that? I do remember that. It was a cow-fuck. Cow-fuck, exactly. Was that part of a test, by the way? Why cow-fuck? That's near your house. It was near your house. It's my bedroom. It's a great place. It's like it's my equivalent. Jeremy was a Pennyhill Park, Cow-fuck, my equivalent. Yeah, and I remember it, and we again, you know, I'd been doing recruitment for about five years, but we were doing in a very traditional recruitment way, which was hiring people based upon a roaded-exor contact and domain experience. We were just kind of like. We were selling cybersecurity markets. It was so- Exactly. Exactly. So, Gartner was kind of our navigation, and I think there was a point at somebody's turn, and I was like, "Oh, there's loads of business over at MongoDB." Go and try and break into that business, and I remember Cole calling you, and I remember it, not being my best conversation that I'd ever had. But there was something that came from it, and we then ended up meeting in Cow-fuck, and I remember you sitting me down, and talking to me about why somebody would come and work at MongoDB, which is where then the story came of how many great people you took me back to John McMahon, you took me back to Blade Logic, and you explained all these great leaders. And I remember walking away from that meeting. First of all, you know, sweating like anything, but it was very nerve-wracking meeting. But I came away from it thinking, "Oh, my goodness. What an environment." I came and sat down with you and said, "Simon, I've discovered this, or I've just been explaining this." And a whole conversation then to go back to John McMahon and kind of build that whole ecosystem around it to see what this world was about. And so a big thank you, and to any of our audience that have enjoyed the series that we made, it's all down to Dan. So, yeah, you'll get your share pay out. You'll get a hat by the end of today though. But it's an interesting story. It's an interesting story. If you go back to the origin story, right, and John and Blade Logic and Dave and all those guys, and you look at why they went on to be so successful, it wasn't because they got this book. It's because John invested in building something amazing, developing, hiring incredible people and developing them. And teaching them how to be incredible leaders. So that's really why that. And I think you'll see that again. You're already starting to see it with Monkose. So many of the leaders going on to do big roles in other companies. I think you'll see the same thing. And it will be the true test of, is it a really great playbook company? The true ones will be because they had just this culture of amazing people being developed consistently and continuously staying together for a long time. And you'll see these pockets of talent that come out of that. And that's why. And that's really what we're trying to build at Figma. Yes, there are plenty of great places you can go and sell software. There are undoubtedly lots. But how many places are there where you can really learn your craft and work with a whole load of people that are super invested in building the skills you need, not just to be successful for one year, but to build a career. And so joining Mongo changed not just the trajectory of my career, but it changed my life. I don't say that as like in a cliche way, it genuinely changed my life. And so my motivation, the reason I get out better in the morning is to give people that same opportunity. I want other people to have an opportunity where they'll never want for a highly paid job ever again. And they can learn the skills to go on and almost just extend the legacy. What an amazing thing to be able to do is just like you teach people and inspire people to go on and build the next generation of incredible sellers and sales talent by investing in developing and inspiring and motivating people to be the best versions of themselves. They can be as a kind of full circle back to infinity. Because at the end of the day, that's all you can be is like the best version of yourself. And so our job is to try and bring that out in people. I'm curious to hear your opinion because the privilege of the different environments and the versatility of the different types of roles. You know, it's a changing landscape right now. Do you think that this crew will still be able to survive that or do you think it's under threat? What's your hypothesis around some of the changes we're seeing right now in the industry? I think it's a great question. So I think a few things. The world is changing, but right now the world still needs incredible salespeople, even more so than before. I would say. So is AI coming for our jobs? Thankfully not quite yet. I think this is kind of ironic. You do all this, I don't know if you agree with this, but I feel like there's a lot of clickbait on LinkedIn right now. There's a lot of like this so much. It's got like every day you read it's like, oh my god, I'm just like, I mean, if you believe what you read, there's only going to be two software companies. There are only two companies left on the planet. Anthropocon open AI, none of us are going to have a job. You can be in this like dystopian kind of reality. I'll call it. But the reality is these companies are hiring developers, product managers, designers, salespeople like by the boatload. And so like we're not quite, we're not quite there yet. So I think is the world going to change for sure? But I think the core skills of people buying from people, yes, AI is just a tool like anything else. But I think especially for many of the AI companies now, it's actually not a product-led motion. It's a traditional top-down enterprise sales motion. Because this stuff is kind of. complex, it's not like product level, you just switch it on and it goes viral, you need forward deployed engineers and you need to get sea level buy-in and so I'm not worried, I'm not worried that this world isn't going to survive, but just coming back to the original point, so I've cut you across, just to come back to the original point is this is where the real understanding of what a playbook company really means is so important because in two years time is what's working now at Figma going to work, probably not, we're probably going to have to adapt and change as the, you know, we're moving to more of a consumption model, so historically Figma has been a seat-based license, increasing and becoming a consumption, more of a consumption-based model or a blend of both, so our playbook is going to have to change, but that's what makes it exciting, you know, that's the joy of like the job, so I think for those leaders and those companies that understand what it's really about, which is like figuring out for that moment in time, for that company, what's going to make people successful and to be able to repeat that, you'll be absolutely fine. For those people that are still like dust and off their book, they got in 1999 and try and apply the same thing, maybe not. So obviously Figma's a really exciting company, obviously you're making a lot of noise in the market at the moment, what is the future hold for Figma and whereabouts are you on your mission? It's a great question, so I'm just coming up for a year in, it's been a pretty wild 12 months, we've been through an IPO, the world has changing very quickly in terms of the way that people build software. The reason that Figma has been so successful is because it's like multiplayer, so the unique thing about Figma was we have this infinite canvas that could bring people together to collaborate in this sort of multiplayer environment, and that's why it went so viral and it's why it's so loved. And so in a world of AI where people are in a terminal, it's like the complete opposite of collaboration, and great products are built by people collaborating, by products, design and engineering collaborators together and increasingly now agents. And so in a world where building code has never been easier and less of a differentiator, design, craft and deciding what to build and not just like how to build it will be the thing that differentiates average companies from great companies. And so we have this incredible opportunity to be at the heart of where teams come to collaborate, where it's designed backed by code, whether you start in code, whether you start in design doesn't really matter. And so we have a huge tam that's growing by the day. We're in a really competitive market, like every day someone will come out with something that's kind of somewhat competitive, but I think it's just a validation of like what an amazing market we play in. And so I think for anybody thinking about what their next career move is and why you would join Figma, I think we operate in one of the biggest markets in SaaS in a time of unprecedented change, with a company that has so much customer love that. I'm consistently shocked when I come out of custom meetings of just like how loved Figma is, but in an environment where you can come and learn your craft as a sales person and be invested in by leaders that are not just at the skills, but have the passion and really care about building great sales talent. So I think it's a great place to be. I can't promise you easy, but remember nothing in life that's truly worth having is easy, but I can promise you an opportunity to grow your career and to build something amazing. So Dan, this is the point of reflection, what's been an incredible session, it's been absolutely fantastic, long time coming, given that you were part of our origin story and it's taken us the best part of six, seven years to get you to start getting these great scenes. It's taken that long for us to actually get you on the show, but I'm pretty lucky I don't do many of these things and how many is paid for isn't it? But I think today's session has been so good to get into the data because Dan, you are someone that's had such a multitude of experience and even though you've been based out of the art, that international experience, cross-domain, customer success, PLG, the various renaissance of Mongo through those different stages, you've had so much experience and we know how highly regarded you are within the network and just your perspective and your insight has been so well received and we're so grateful that you've taken the time to spend with us today and just want to say a massive thank you, we wish you the very best of luck, we're rooting for you, wish you all the success and yeah, massive thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me on, it was a pleasure, it was even better than I was expecting it to be, you know, I've been looking forward to this moment for a long time so it was great to be able to do it and you know, I think if there's like one person that watches this and comes away and is able to be like authentically themselves and it helps them unlock like their superpowers, then like it would be a great investment of time for me so. I appreciate that, Dan. So to all our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in, if you like what you heard, please do subscribe to our various channels on iTunes, YouTube and Spotify, all the links to be in the description below and we look forward to working you back for another session very soon. Thank you and goodbye.