Amanda Kleha

When it comes to building a profitable business, Amanda Kleha has learned by doing.  Amanda’s seven-year tenure in multiple senior marketing and sales positions at Zendesk saw the company make an IPO, grow from 12 employees to 2,000, and go from $1 million to $300 million in revenue. Now, as Chief Customer Officer at Figma — a company recently valued at $10 billion that is creating collaborative design user interface platforms — Amanda is cementing her status as a top-tier business leader. On this episode of Go to Market Grit, Joubin and Amanda talk about Amanda’s very successful run at Zendesk, her current work as CCO at Figma, and the importance of keeping the voice of the customer in focus during decision-making. In this episode, we cover: Structured, yet open: Amanda’s strategy for interviewing job candidates. (6:14) Zendesk's massive growth and how it correlated with Amanda's feeling that she was having less fun working at the company. (11:22) Building experience, gaining traction, showing impact: The benefits of sticking with a company for the long term. (14:51) 'This is the next Adobe': Figma's collaborative design user interface platform. (21:05) How Amanda started working for Figma — and how she simplified the company's go-to-market through a combination of self-service and sales-assisted motions. (24:50) Keeping the voice of the customer front-and-center during decision-making. (29:43) Reflecting on negative and positive career milestones. (37:50) How Amanda felt when others were hired to more senior positions before her at Zendesk — and how that experience helped her become more empathetic. (41:34) Ways that sales reps at Figma stand out since quota attainment is so high. (45:33) Leaders, fillers, and killers: Amanda's framework for product bundles. (52:11) What the word grit means to Amanda. (1:03:07) Links: Connect with AmandaLinkedIn Connect with JoubinTwitter LinkedIn Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

Amanda Kleha

Chief Customer Officer

Figma

Amanda Kleha is the Chief Customer Officer @ Figma, the startup that allows you to turn ideas into products faster through design, prototyping and feedback gathering, all in one place. To date, Figma have raised over $42m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners and former guests on 20VC, Daniel Gross and Adam Nash. As for Amanda, prior to Figma, she held numerous roles at Zendesk including SVP of Marketing and Sales Strategy. Amanda joined Zendesk as the first marketing hire and over the next 7 years Zendesk grew to over 2,000 employees. Before Zendesk, Amanda worked on the marketing team for Google's Enterprise SaaS businesses. If that was not enough Amanda is also an advisor at Airtable and Smartling. In Today's Episode We Discuss: How Amanda made her way into the world of SaaS and came to join Zendesk as their first marketing hire seeing the company scale to over 2,000 over the next 7 years? What were some of Amanda's biggest learnings from seeing Zendesk scale from 12 to 2,000? How does one determine those that can vs cannot grow with the business? What is the sign a stretch VP is a stretch too far? How does Amanda balance between a culture of risk taking but also not accepting failure to easily? How does Amanda like to run the interview process? Why does Amanda like to not show emotion when interviewing a candidate? What are the benefits of this for the brand of your company? What single question does Amanda find most revealing in showing the abilities and character of a candidate in an interview? What does Amanda mean when she says "pricing is made up of 3 components"? Where does Amanda believe most people go wrong with pricing? Is there such thing as no man's land in SaaS pricing? How does Amanda think the go-to-market has to change with every stage of development? What are the challenges with this? How does the structure of decision-making change with scale? What are the inflection points? When does both decision-making and communication tend to break down? What can be done to ensure seamless cross-functional communication across the org? Where do most people fail here? Amanda's 60 Second SaaStr: What does Amanda know now that she wishes she had known when she started in SaaS? Is there such thing as no man's land in SaaS pricing? How to ensure customer support is strategic and not just reactionary? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Amanda Kleha

Amanda Kleha

Chief Customer Officer

Figma