Speaker 1Welcome to Top Line, the podcast for the best founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman, and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market.
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Speaker 3Hey, everyone. Welcome to Top Line Spotlight. You know Top Line Spotlight. It's where we talk to founders, CEOs, executives of their companies about challenges and problems that they're facing. And we learn a little bit. I am your host, AJ Bruno. I am joined by Eric Anderson. Eric is the CEO of Walnut. Eric, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4Thank you, AJ. Good to be here.
Speaker 3Yeah. So before we begin, we were talking, we're 15 minutes into this because I was just so fascinated by your background. And I was like, we should actually be recording this. But before we begin, if you want to give everyone just a kind of a quick blurb about you and some interesting things. And then what I'm really interested in is in December of last year, you took over as CEO of a company. And I have experience with this, not from the CEO side, but from the. Being a founder side and all of the fun that comes with that. So really excited to dive into that. But before we begin, just would love to hear, in your own words, your background.
Speaker 4Yeah. 20. I'll do this without trying to age myself, but 28 years of helping to lead and scale tech companies. Very focused in the go-to-market disciplines. So I've been running go-to-market teams as either president or CRO for several years. Several decades now. And I got a call. I'd been looking for a CEO post for quite some time. And I got a call from a good friend of mine who's an executive recruiter. He said that he had the perfect first-time CEO gig for me. If ever anything existed, that was a perfect first-time CEO gig.
Speaker 3Which, by the way, I. The perfect. You know now, Eric, right? That doesn't exist. That doesn't exist. That's not a thing.
Speaker 4That's exactly right. It was the hook that got me to talk to him and attack the company. I'm extremely happy. So glad I made the move. But if you only knew then what you know now, it's a company that has a really, really solid product. And that's, I think, the strength of Walnut is the product engineering side and what's still in Tel Aviv. And what's being run at Israel is really, really solid. And that's important for me because that's the least side of my background, right? I'm really kind of a go-to-market executive. And that's where I think the fun has begun. Looking at the cultural differences, not only between Israel and the U.S., the geographic separation where you have part of the team over there, the growing part of the new executive leadership team here in the States.
Speaker 3Well, because you're in San Jose. So I'm really bad with figuring out time differences between. I'm guessing it's eight hours, if I had to guess. Ten hours. Ten hours? Ten hours. What time do you start your day? 5 a.m. Oh, my goodness. But living in California, there's some level, and being an operator for over 20 years, there's some level of you, you're used to that? Is that fair to say?
Speaker 4Always up early to catch Europe's Day and then up late to catch Asia's Day as well. So. So you get pulled from both sides. But yeah, this, and I think as you and I were talking before, taking over from a founder is just very unique. It's not replacing just another CEO. You're stepping into something that he created. It's his baby. And all the culture and the vision and the mission and the sweat and blood and equity that he poured into it, you're now stepping into for both good and challenges that need to be fixed.
Speaker 3Yeah. Well, Eric, really fun, real quick. First off, I mentioned earlier that the founder, co-founder Matt Allison at TrendKite and the CEO that took over there, his name was Eric as well. Eric Huddleston. And I remember, to your point, I remember Matt and I sitting down as we were raising our Series B, and Matt was the CEO at the time. We knew we wanted to go find an experienced operator. It was a fundability opportunity for us. And we sat down with Eric and we're like, Eric, why do you want to be the CEO of TrendKite? And he looked straight at us, dead serious, and he said, because you guys have already put in the sweat, blood, and equity into this business. So that hard part's done. And I was like, what? That's not, I should have given me an indication of what's to come. What I actually know, Eric, well, still today, we're still friendly, but there was definitely like a cooling off period, as you can imagine. It was a great outcome for the business at the end of the day. But I look back at that now, knowing Eric's personality, I know what he meant, which is what you're talking to. I was like, this thing exists. It's now up to me as a steward of it to figure out how do we make sure we highlight and embrace the parts that are working, but we change the parts that are clearly broken. There's a reason I am here in this seat today.
Speaker 4That's right. That's right. And it's a very delicate balance because some people are very tied to believing that what got them there is going to get them to the next stage, whether it's the 20 million or 30 million in ARR and beyond. And coming to the founders
Speaker 3delusional about where they are in there. No, that's not a thing, Eric. We all are with fresh
Speaker 4eyes and being able to point out areas of the business that just aren't optimized and aren't enhanced the way that they need to be is a delicate dance because you've got to do that in a cultural environment that you want to be sensitive to pulling teams together and driving alignment and not separating, right? And not outcasting. Not outcasting organizations, but truly uniting them. So it's been a great experience and a very big learning experience over the last year.
Speaker 3I think the learning experience. So the things that I tend to think about for a first-time CEO is if I said, AJ, what would you tell a first-time CEO? And I mean, expect the unexpected for startups is the obvious. I think the thing that you mentioned, having a great product and making sure you go to an organization that has a great product to do that. I would. I would. I would recommend to talk to customers. I'm guessing you talked to a few customers before you took the gig, right?
Speaker 4Prior to coming here, I was the president of go-to-market for MindTickle in the sales enablement and training space. We were a customer of Walnuts, so we used the interactive demo platform for all of our trade shows and our events. And so I had firsthand knowledge of, you know, having deployed this in my SE teams and my product marketing organization, I knew what it did for us at MindTickle. So that was a great starting point. They've got big enterprise customers, and I've known several of them for years and sold to them. So I blindly called into these companies and said, hey, what do you think? And, you know, how's the tech and how's the support and how's the experience been? And as I suspected, it's solid, rock solid from that standpoint. And so a lot of the opportunity or the challenges. To become opportunities really existed in the strength of the go-to-market teams, the marketing engine, the sales organization, the success teams, and how we present ourselves to the market. So lots of opportunity there.
Speaker 3The I think so product would be one thing in the customer value and delivering customer value. So you had that. I think the thing that I don't think a lot of first time CEOs deal with, because most companies I know, the CEO themselves deal with this is is board. And board dynamics. And that's something you you get to learn. I've I know personally, I've had 70 plus board meetings over the years. I try to keep them quarterly and sometimes when things aren't going as well, they become monthly. I've never had them go weekly, but there's there's definitely CEOs that I know that have. And I would, Eric, I just be curious to like your experience from a. Board level of managing that. And when I talk about this, it's first off, boards can be phenomenal and and a lot of times they want to help. They want you to win. Right. So they're there to support, but they can get sometimes a little over eager, not fully understand context of things. And that's just that's just the nature of the beast of the board. But going into it, had you had experience board management and venture funded startup in terms of just like having those conversations with investors?
Speaker 4Yeah. A lot of experience. I've raised institutional funding before years ago. for several different companies um and even as my role as ceo or president i've been heavily involved in board discussions and uh and uh board meetings um it's a very different thing when you're now responsible for it and you're not just a participant in the process um not only the weekly check-ins like to your point of you know how often are you checking in how often are you keeping them up to speed how often you giving them updates as to you're progressing but all the decisions that we're taking and we're taking some bold decisions uh yeah and driving some big change within the company um there's there's a uh certain level of oversight that they like uh certain level of oversight that and visibility that you want to provide them but yet not completely open and transparent or you feel like you have to educate them as if they were another founder and so there's a balance between that that you've got to strike uh and uh you know they say the ceo they uh roll is the loneliest job in the world you start to realize why it's because there's no other person you turn to that's going to help you with yeah how do we position this board meeting and how do we build the messaging and how do we create the narrative that's all on you now there's no one else well especially
Speaker 3as you're coming in as a new the new ceo you don't know your team you have to build that first team mentality of trust and relationship with them so you're not really sure who you can rely on or not rely on and that's just the nature of the beast the third the third thing that i was going to say for ceos literally you just said which is don't be afraid to make bold decisions and make unpopular decisions it's it's especially when you have founders still involved i think that that was something that i saw really firsthand where there was some level of indecisiveness when we had a ceo switch just like not rocking the boat and i understand that there's a ramping period you have to get rampers for but like we had um some indecisiveness about brand choices that we were making in terms of positioning it seems like you all have had some level of those choices when you first came in and i'd be curious as to one culturally how did the business handle decisions was that something you have to you had to change and are there areas where you look at look at like okay i need to come in and make some bolder decisions here
Speaker 4yeah i spent 30 days after joining just doing a listening tour and just getting to know every single person in the company and doing one-on-ones and trying to get everyone's perspective on where they thought the bones were buried and some of the challenges were um then in january i took everyone to tel aviv the executive leadership team to tel aviv when you had an executive off-site and part of that was for me to kind of let them get to know me and understand my tone and my pace at which i wanted to run but also to pull people together and unify them because this had been very siloed from a leadership team standpoint so we set an operating plan we set okr's four big objectives for the year um and really use that as to align the entire executive leadership team so that was like challenge big challenge number one handled but your point about decision making is really important because i think that's where this company struggled the most various points of views i like to say strong opinions loosely held uh and uh they would vacillate and and either get sucked into data you know paralysis for too long yeah yeah or have really strong opinions in some areas and couldn't make progress um pricing had needed to be updated for several years and they couldn't get past it um you know markets that they knew were unprofitable that they were continuing to chase after they would just continue to keep doing it because in the cut the decision to not do something that they knew was going to be unprofitable um you know markets that they knew were unprofitable that they were continuing to chase after they would just continue to keep doing it because the decision to not do something that they knew was going to be unprofitable um you know markets that they knew were unprofitable that they were continuing to chase after they would continue to keep doing it because the decision to not do something that they knew was going to be unprofitable do that was scary and it was hard and that kind of change i think oftentimes people uh people tend to focus get really focused on the negative side of it and the impact it's going to create as opposed to the positive outcomes and the and the positive impact it's going to have on a
Speaker 3company well no one likes to deliver bad news to someone so like if i we had this in our um business a couple years ago where we were we started pretty smb but have moved uh to up market to mid market and we had a segment was like micro smb and we're like we just have to cut this part of the business but we've got to rip the band-aid off and deliver the bad news um and and of course the ceo has to just kind of own that piece of it but it it makes it feel like it's a flight against them that they failed in their decision making and therefore they're not able to like move up so i understand that paralysis and then as you said it's just a lonely road so like they're thinking that but they don't have anyone to be a sounding board sometimes it's to do that it's a hard thing
Speaker 4to say no to revenue right it's it's hard yeah very hard especially when the pressure's on you for growth and for performance walking away from a segment of the market that that may not be a fit for you and and i think it causes other things like when you dig deeper into that problem it's really hard to build a product that suits everybody's needs and if you really want to attack the enterprise you should really question whether you're trying to sell the smb at the same time because those are two different product strategies and two different uh you know ways to go to market entirely different companies um and so trying to do uh everyone that serves uh you know trying to do everything that serves everyone well is just a uh it's just a impossible
Speaker 3errand impossible yeah it's not gonna work we know we know this as operators for uh myself it's been 15 plus years actually to turn 40 so it's 20 years at this point say that uh um but but we know this we learned those lessons we learned those lessons but sometimes it's really difficult when you're in the position and you're relearning the lesson to just make the counterintuitive uh decision as you said revenue um the uh eric today so six months in and you've learned quite a bit around like what are you looking forward to for the the rest of the year
Speaker 4at walnut i think it's exciting um when you start to tackle some of these big initiatives you know i mentioned pricing and overhaul and pricing strategy and market segmentation and who we really want to focus on um you start to rebuild certain aspects of the team we brought in a new head of marketing in january uh heard a new head of success uh recently so uh re-fortifying some of these organizations uh with exec experience executives with fresh eyes um has really helped breed new life into the company i think that the other founding members and the other team members start to see the progress and start to see the the success that we're creating in market and it because it becomes a buzz and that's what you want you want everyone excited and pulling in the same direction and aligned and feeling really good so uh we're really bullish uh about what the what the year provides um we're on a pretty good growth uh streak right now and and uh we're we're excited about uh the expansion of a new product line that's going to come out next month uh awesome second new product line that we get to handle introduce to the market and create create even more buzz um but uh yeah just uh it's just we're gonna have a we're gonna have a good run at it and we're we're pretty excited about uh what the future holds for us
Speaker 3well uh eric i noticed in talking about some of these ideas of trust and getting alignment uh your favorite book is also my favorite book which is the five dysfunctions of a team absolutely love patrick lencioni's book there we actually have a management offsite next week and we all read the advantage so i don't know if you've read the advantage by patrick lencioni any great follow-up yeah yeah um and so we've all we there's like six questions there so we did like a pre-read six questions and i'm excited to see how aligned or misaligned we are headed into next week yeah um uh eric do you have any other like podcasts or content that you're listening to or doesn't have to do it might not have to do with business at all but things that like the you know the audience might
Speaker 4appreciate um there's another book i'd recommend outside of just uh the five dysfunctions of a team and it's good to grade uh super easy read um case studies on several different companies that have kind of made that transition from good companies to great companies uh so uh that's a classic i think
Speaker 3that's the very first business book like i ever read in my entire career
Speaker 4easy read and i keep going back to it and i find that every time i read it i pick out different things yeah same
Speaker 3same thing with five dysfunctions i read it every other year and like that story it's a quick read but it pulled things out and the data in good to great is is just the thing it's like so it was that was quote unquote revolutionary in 99 or 2000 when it was written but um it is it still holds and i agree timeless yeah uh well um eric thanks for uh thanks for joining us today if people want to find you reach out or learn more about walnut what's uh what's their best approach
Speaker 4uh you can always email eric walnut.io um come to our website uh or uh uh track us down we're uh we're happy to happy to talk to you and happy to share with you uh what we think we can do for you from a value standpoint
Speaker 3great perfect well eric thank you so much and this has been another great episode of topline spotlight thanks eric awesome
Speaker 4thanks aj thanks for listening to topline
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