SaaStr 683: How To Live Your Values While Building A Unicorn with Notion, Motive, and Incredible Health
Discover how three breakout SaaS companies scaled from an idea to hundreds of employees and $1B+ valuations, all while living their values along the way.
Notion COO Akshay Kothari, Motive CEO and Founder Shoaib Makani, and CEO and Co-Founder of Incredible Health Iman Abuzeid share the secrets of ensuring their company-centered values and purpose remained an anchor amidst hypergrowth. Moderated by Laura Weidman Powers, Operating Partner at Base10 Partners.
As we dive into these three highly successful companies, we'll talk about their values, the process of creating them, and the right time for founders to create their own values.
#138 CEO Motive, Shoaib Makani w/ Ilya Fushman: Powering the Physical Economy
Guest: Shoaib Makani, CEO of Motive
“When we fail,” says Shoaib Makani, “it is because we have not understood the customer problem deeply and allowed them to guide us.” This wisdom is hard-won: Motive’s first product, an app for fleet management of trucks, idled for four years before becoming a runaway success story. Emboldened by this, the CEO tried to make an orthogonal push into all kinds of freight, “guns blazing,” only to realize six months in that he had way overestimated Motive’s competitive advantage. Retreating from freight was “painful,” Shoaib recalls, but helped the company extend its existing lead in trucking — and may have saved the whole business.
In this episode — joined by special guest Ilya Fushman from Kleiner Perkins — Shoaib and Joubin discuss curiosity for the world, first impressions, reorienting yourself, electronic logging devices, directly connecting with customers, growing up as a CEO, waiting for the market, having a “low discount rate on the future,” the physical economy TAM, AI dash cams, and pricing in risk, and running out of runway.
In this episode, we cover:
Shoaib’s Pakistani parents and doing extra homework (01:17)
Explaining and experiencing startups (04:26)
“High standards are infectious” (08:15)
What Motive does (10:08)
How Shoaib and Ilya met (10:54)
The origins of Motive as “Keep Truckin’” (14:06)
Working with friends (17:27)
First-time founders (21:56)
Deep empathy for users (24:01)
Monetization and second-guessing (25:48)
Sudden success and scale (29:12)
Recruiting top talent (31:04)
Shoaib and Ilya’s personal-professional relationship (32:07)
“I knew the board I wanted” (34:32)
Motive’s failed expansion into freight (36:21)
Realizing and correcting the error (39:26)
How to make smarter future bets (44:09)
Second and third products (47:29)
Back to the core mission (50:36)
Autonomous driving vs. AI assistants (52:17)
Thinking about competition (55:05)
A tough conversation about runway (58:52)
Sticking your neck out for your partner (01:04:09)
Losing Ilya as a board member (01:06:23)
Who Motive is hiring (01:08:32)
What “grit” means to Shoaib (01:09:32)
Links:
Connect with ShoaibTwitter
LinkedIn
Connect with IlyaTwitter
LinkedIn
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
20VC: Why You Never Want To Fight A Fair Fit For Distribution, Why No Great Company Is Built with 1 Product and When To Release Your Second & What Founders Can Do To Extract The Most From Their Cap Table with Shoaib Makani, Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin
Shoaib Makani is the Co-Founder & CEO @ KeepTruckin, the modern fleet management platform building solutions that make drivers and fleets safer, smarter, and more efficient. To date, Shoaib has raised over $229M from some of the world's leading investors including Index, GV, Greenoaks, IVP & Scale Venture Partners. Pre-founding KeepTruckin, Shoaib was an investor @ Khosla Ventures where he led investments in Instacart, Everlane and Indiegogo to name a few. Before venture with Khosla, Shoaib was on the operations side enjoying roles at both Google and Admob.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Shoaib made his way from the very comfortable world of venture to changing the way trucking fleets are managed today with KeepTruckin? How does Shoaib analyse and assess his own attitude to risk today?
2.) How has Shoaib seen himself change and evolve as a leader over the last few years? How did his time investing impact how he approaches the role of CEO? How does Shoaib think about appropriate market sizing today? What advice does he give to founders on this? What is a reasonable market penetration to assume if successful?
3.) What advice would Shoaib give founders when it comes to successful board management? How does Shoaib ensure investors have the right context at the right time to provide advice? What does that information flow to investors look like? How does Shoaib determine between the advice to accept vs what to reject?
4.) Shoaib thought about distribution and customer acquisition long before he launched the product, why? What did this thought process conclude with? Does Shoaib believe you have to own your own lines of distribution to succeed? How does Shoaib feel when it comes to current CAC's on incumbent platforms?
4.) As a founder, what does Shoaib say is his biggest mistake made in the KeepTrickin journey? How does Shoaib think about what it takes to acquire the very best talent? How does Shoaib advise founders work with recruiters? What can they do to really get the most out of them? When can this function be brought in house?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Shoaib's Fave Book: Presidents of War
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