From Yext to Roam: Howard Lerman’s Second Act
The hardest company to build is the one you start after you’ve already succeeded.
After scaling Yext into a platform powering millions of businesses, Howard Lerman chose to start over with Roam, the “Office of the Future,” where humans and AI work side by side from anywhere.
On Grit, he joins Joubin Mirzadegan to talk about the solitude of leadership and what happens when you stop building for Wall Street.
Guest: Howard Lerman, co-founder and former CEO of Yext, and founder and CEO of Roam
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SaaStr 757: 10 Cheat Codes I Learned While Scaling to $400M with Yext and Roam Founder Howard Lerman
SaaStr 757: 10 Cheat Codes I Learned While Scaling to $400M with Yext and Roam Founder Howard Lerman
Dive into a unique and tactical journey with Howard Lerman, Founder at Roam, sharing unconventional yet effective strategies drawn from personal experiences and notable figures like John Lennon. Learn the importance of mastering storytelling, the art of live demos, the controversial take on one-on-one meetings, and the benefits of Sunday night executive meetings. Discover how leveraging your cap table for strategic advisors can accelerate your business and understand the significance of maintaining product market fit. Embrace the philosophy of doing things your way and making your company an extension of your vision. This episode is packed with practical advice for startup founders looking to navigate the complexities of building and scaling their companies.
Howard's 10 cheat codes:
Memorize Your Lines: Master storytelling by memorizing your company's story.
The Live Demo: Take the risk with live demos.
1:1 Meetings Are Terrible: Avoid scheduled one-on-one meetings.
Sunday Night Meetings: Start your week with Sunday night exec meetings.
Advisor-Led Growth: Use stock options to bring on influential advisors.
5-Minute Meetings: Hold short, effective meetings.
Meet with Customers: Meeting customers lifts spirits.
Board Chair: Have a powerful chairperson.
Do Not Delegate: Retain control over critical functions like product-market fit.
Have Fun: Make your company your creative canvas.
SaaStr 655: SaaStr CRO Confidential: Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Roam On Roam's Unconventional Approach for Acquiring Their Early Customers
In this episode of CRO Confidential, Roam Founder & CEO Howard Lerman sits down with Sam Blond to talk about Roam's unconventional approach to acquiring its first customers.
Full video: https://youtu.be/dGj6VZoi0Kw
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The morality and efficacy of going public earlier
For this week’s deep dive Natasha and Alex and Chris dug into the world of the IPO. Not just the numbers and the metrics and the calculations of valuations at diluted, and non-diluted share counts. No. We wanted to talk about the morality and efficacy of going public.
So to round out our conversation we enlisted Steve Cakebread, the CFO of Yext and Garth Mitchell, the CFO of Latch. Cakebread is known for being aboard the Salesforce, Pandora, and Yext's IPOs. Mitchell has sat on both sides of the table during the IPO process, and is currently helming the money equations as Latch approaches the public markets via a SPAC.
For more context, Yext, a company that first launched at a Techcrunch event back in 2009, provides data tooling and search software to businesses, while Latch builds software and hardware for rental-focused buildings. Yext is public. Latch will be in a few months.
Back to our topic, we asked Cakebread to talk about his thesis on why going public earlier than later can help a company's maturity process and can help provide greater returns to the general public. The CFO has written a rather good book about the IPO process more generally and what it means for a company's internal processes, but his morality notes especially stood out because its an argument far less noisy than the POP critics. Baked beans comes up, somehow!
We also asked Mitchell to talk about Latch's choice to go public, and what opportunities and challenges the SPAC route brings for the company. Of course, there's a SPAC joke in there (or two), but we get into broader "what's next" debates about if more companies will start to leave the private world, venture capital's role in this whole mess, and the financial lift of going to the public market.
Hope you enjoyed the show, and get excited: Equity is going to have more guests on from time to time, and we welcome any suggestions you want to throw at us.
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext
Howard Lerman is the Founder & CEO @ Yext, the company that allows you to control your brand experience across the digital universe. Due in part to Howard's incredible leadership of the firm, Yext went public in April 2017 with an opening price of $11 a share, today the stock price sits at $26.85 and a market cap of $2.65Bn. Prior to the IPO, Yext raised over $117m in VC funding from Insight Venture Partners, IVP, SV Angel and CrunchFund to name a few. As for Howard, Yext is his 4th company and he is also Co-Founder and Chairman of Confide, a leading off-the-record messaging service.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howard made his way into the world of startups and came to Partner with is co-founders to start the now public company that is Yext?
2.) Why must every founder know about Teddy Roosevelt and his "Five Minute Meetings"? Literally, what is the right way to structure these meetings? What one question is the right question to ask? How can a leader look to retain that startup culture and ethos with scale? Why does Howard believe running a global company is like running a country?
3.) What have Howard's biggest takeaways been from studying "John Lennon's Storytelling Trick"? How can founders use this trick both to inspire their team more effectively internally and then to present a better vision for the company, externally?
4.) Howard has said before "fundraising is not an end in itself". Does Howard believe that company financing should be celebrated? How was the IPO process for Howard? From a literal standpoint, how does the process run? How did Howard choose which banks to work with? How did the 10-day roadshow shape up? How did the pricing decision-making process look the night before IPO?
5.) Why does Howard believe it is fundamentally better being a public company? What does "public" status allow you? How does being public introduce a challenge never before seen to founders? Why must founders always examine the motives of the VC behind whether they are pushing them to remain private or go public?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Howard's Fave Book: Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get From Good to Great
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Howard on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.