Founder’s Corner: An Open View into Mattermark with Danielle Morrill

Danielle Morrill

August 13, 2014

Danielle Morrill, co-founder and CEO of Mattermark, shares the story behind her company’s vision and her tips for making it through the transition from early-stage startup to achieving rapid growth.

This week we’re kicking off a new series in which we’ll be interviewing SaaS founders and CEOs to share their stories and insights behind what it takes to build and grow a great SaaS company.
We were excited to confirm Danielle Morrill as one of our first guests, since — like many people in the tech world and investment community — we’re regular readers of the Mattermark Daily newsletter. Danielle was kind enough to let us interview her for the podcast below. Tune in to learn more about her strategy behind Mattermark’s content, her thoughts on women and salespeople in tech, and her advice for entrepreneurs and VCs.

This Week in the Founder’s Corner

“People complain about lots of things. That’s usually a really good sign, because it shows investment on the part of those people to tell you these things and trust that you’ll do something good with them.”

— Danielle Morrill, CEO at Mattermark

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Key Takeaways

On utilizing content to build brand awareness and drive growth

Write about the things others are afraid to talk about. It’s the unspoken things that people actually want to dig into.
It’s not about the brand you’ve already created, it’s about what you actually have to say. It’s important to take stances and work hard to provide truly valuable content.
No one is reading that post you wrote two years ago. Too many VCs assume they can cover a topic once and every entrepreneur will see it.

On metrics

What to focus on: It all comes down to revenue. But you can’t just look at revenue, because it’s a lagging indicator of how you’re doing.
Obsessing over one metric can be dangerous. You may be looking at it out of context and miss out on a bunch of other things.
Look at your funnel. Then figure out the best lever you can use. Focus on that.

On delegating and managing a team

Balancing the bigger picture and day-to-day: Make sure individual goals have a clear connection to high-level company goals, but also make them something a team member can act on immediately and see results.

On how VCs can help entrepreneurs

Be more transparent and share basic knowledge. There are a lot of opportunities to help founders feel like they’re on a level playing field in terms of information.

On the old startup mentality of “making something” vs. “selling something”

Learning to embrace sales and marketing: Ultimately, you do have to sell something and it’s just a question of how early are you going to get good at that?
Growth hacking: The truth is that sales and marketing actually are metrics-driven and they never weren’t.
Founders are more experienced and business-minded. I think there’s just better quality founders now. And that trickles down to everything else.

Transcript

Announcer: This is Labcast, insights and ideas for the expansion-stage senior manager, hosted by OpenView Labs.
Jonathan: Hi, everyone and welcome to Labcast. This is your host, Jonathan Crowe. This week, we’re kicking off a new series, in which we’ll be interviewing founders, hearing their stories and getting their insights on the challenges and best practices of building great software companies.
Our guest for the first episode is Danielle Morrill, CEO and cofounder of Mattermark, a big data software company building deal intelligence tools to help investors and professionals research, discover and connect with more than 200,000 privately held companies.
You may also be familiar with Mattermark thanks to their daily e-mail newsletter. Which, I can personally confirm, has become required reading here in the OpenView offices and for many others in the investment community as well.
Prior to cofounding Mattermark, Danielle was also the Director of Marketing at Twilio. We’re very happy to have her here as a guest. Danielle, thanks for joining us.
Danielle: Sure.
Jonathan: All right. Let’s dive right in then. So can you talk a little bit more about the origin story of Mattermark? And can you talk a little bit about the early days, how it came to be? And how you, making the decision to blog regularly and then eventually send out this daily newsletter, how that played a part in the process to you?
Danielle: So initially, when we started Mattermark, we thought we were going to build a media company. So we thought “Well, we need to have a unique angle. Probably not going to have all the sources and all of the product releases and funding announcements; they’re not going to just magically come to us, at first. So we need to have some different way of breaking through and having enough content.”
So we immediately turned to data as a way to differentiate ourselves. We thought we would write in-depth analysis and we’d crunch different numbers. And in doing that, we started off just writing blog posts.
So the newsletter played a part right from the beginning because we had a readership who would just read our blog posts when we would publish them and we would tweet and put them on Facebook. But e-mail turned out to be a really valuable distribution channel.
At first, I was just kind of manually sending an e-mail to all my investors and some other people. It was a couple hundred people I would contact, “Hey, here’s a new post that we wrote.” So pretty quickly, that list became large and I felt “Well, I should probably let other people sign up for this list. Even if I don’t know them, maybe they’re interested.” Because it was getting forwarded a lot. And people were writing back to their initial e-mail saying “Hey, how do I get on this list?”
So pretty organically, just it was initially a distribution channel for the blog posts. And then, I started… I read a lot throughout the day, of course and so, I started including other content links that I thought were good, that I thought were high-value pieces. My bar for content is that you have to be able to read all the way to the end of the piece yourself or you shouldn’t share it with other people. So it was actually pretty high bar and a lot of things wouldn’t pass that.
Then what ended up happening is we got too busy building the Mattermark product to do a blog post every single day. So then, I was like “Well, I’m reading really good articles. Maybe I’ll just send those around.”
And at this point, it was still a weekly newsletter. So I just started curating a weekly reading list that I would send out on Saturday morning, like a weekend reading digest.
But pretty quickly, it was really long. So we realized, if we were going to keep doing it, we might as well just send it out daily as the articles were happening. Because it was just too much for someone to consume at the end of the week.
So it was a pretty natural progression of just “What does the readership want? What do we think makes sense?” At first, I thought putting out a daily newsletter would be really hard. And it was kind of a struggle. And then, fortunately, now, we have Wade on the team, who’s acting as our editor. And he’s researching and also collecting articles from other people in the company. So we kind of have a chat room where we contribute stuff and there are some editorial guidelines.
So yeah, I think it ultimately has been really valuable for our brand. Because I think it just keeps us top of mind every day. And that’s really kind of the progression of how that happened.
Jonathan: It certainly keeps you guys top of mind here. Like I mentioned, we’re all big fans. And it’s really become required reading, especially for a lot of people in the VC world.
And it sounds like this happened pretty organically. Can you talk a little bit about how you centered into the topics that you’re going to be covering? Kind of how the e-mail newsletter evolved?
Danielle: I always feel that the things you should be writing about are the things that people feel like you’re not supposed to talk about. So different themes kind of run through not just the value, but the entire ecosystem at different times. And sometimes, it’s the unspoken things that I think are the ones to dig into.
So we wrote about the Series B Crunch six months ago before people were really talking about that. People were talking about it; what they’re doing is talking about it in the bar over a drink. But they’re not talking about yet in the blogs.
So we realized, there’s this just this opportunity to say “No, we’re just going to talk about this stuff now.” And there’s also all these VCs who blog really infrequently and so, they just don’t get discovered.
And if you don’t work on it, you don’t necessarily have people reading your blogs. So since we were kind of searching through the entire Internet to find them, we would pick up people who might not be getting any attention.
One really big issue and you guys are on the East Coast, so I think you’ll understand this. Is there’s a lot of noise in the Bay Area, but there’s a lot of investors all over the world. So we felt like some kind of global perspective was also really valuable and really working to promote the best content wherever it was coming from.
It’s just sort of this idea of looking at the world and choosing for yourself what’s good and not trying to just play into the same trends. I, for example, don’t think that Fred Wilson’s blog is that interesting anymore. I feel bad, he’s probably going to listen to this. But I think it used to be really great and I think now, for whatever reason, he’s focusing on different things.
And I think people will just re-tweet because he’s really well-known. Whereas there’s somebody else like… who’s a blogger? Kanyi from Collaborative Fund has been blogging a lot this year and is, I think, working really hard to create great content and it’s very thoughtful. And he doesn’t have that brand that Fred has, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be getting read.
So, it’s just sort of just flipping it around and saying “It’s not about the brand you’ve already created, it’s about what you actually have to say.” There are all these new VCs and I think there’s so much opportunity for them to kind of craft different stories and talk about different topics.
Jonathan: Absolutely. We’re actually going to be talking, we’re having an upcoming webinar with Doug Kessler, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. He works at a UK-based B2B marketing consultancy.
But one of the big things there, he emphasizes the need to actually say what you mean, take a stance on anything. There’s a lot of quotes you can attribute to the 37signals guys about you’re not making people upset. You’re not really saying anything and all that kind of thing.
But at this stage of the game, there’s a million blogs out there. Everyone is feeling like they should be active with content one way or the other. But unless you’re really taking some strong stances and letting people know what you find to be really valuable and staying behind that, I think it’s easy to become kind of like these other blogs where you may build up a big following but it’s all just kind of noise now. It’s easy to get lost.
Danielle: It’s interesting, too, because how much can you really write about? It’s not these blogs got big because they were interesting. It’s just at some point, there’s only so much to write about and then you just go back to doing things. I mean no censure toward the bloggers that are famous but now are maybe less active. They’re just busy doing deals. They’re just busy learning new things.
And so, you kind of see blogging happens in these waves where people… it’s kind of like if you’re an artist and you’re making music. Your first album comes easily because it’s things you’ve been thinking about for the first 20-something years of your life. The second album, the sophomore album problem, you’ve been on tour, you’ve been promoting this first album and that’s why you have all these artists who end up writing songs about the creative process because that’s all they’re living.
So it’s just sort of… it depends on where you’re at in the process.
Jonathan: It’s a great point. Going back to one thing you mentioned, you’re developing your sense of what should be being talked about more. What are people talking about that’s not being portrayed out in the blogosphere yet? Or what do you think is a really valuable voice that you want to get wider exposure? So you’ve got your own internal ways of determining “What should we be talking about?”
There’s also feedback that you’re getting from your readers. So obviously, you’re seeing your subscribers go up, you’re seeing people forward. You’re getting good feedback that way. Is there any other thing that you’re getting that was showing that you were on the right track?
Danielle: People complain about lots of things. That’s usually a really good sign. We started having people say “You don’t have enough women being covered here. You don’t have enough minorities. You’re not covering enough stuff outside the Bay Area.”
And we feel like that’s super healthy. As soon as people are complaining, it’s like they’re not just leaving, they’re saying “I like this, I want this to be better. And I think that if I tell you these things, that l trust that you’ll actually do something good with them.”
That was a really good sign, because it shows investment on the part of those people to speak up and say those things.
I mean, I think the best thing was when I would meet with someone for the first time through the sales process and they would say “I’ve been reading your newsletter for months and I finally decided I had to sign up.”
I think that was probably the most important one because that is really what the goal of the newsletter is. I know that there are many people who read it who will never become customers of Mattermark. But for those who are in our target market, we want to show them how we think and show them our integrity over time.
And if it takes a year to prove that, we’re going to be around forever. So I think Mattermark is a way of kind of creating a sense of permanence of us in their minds. So I think if that happens, that pretty much how we know it really justifies the business case for spending the time and effort on it, other than the fact that we just love making it.
Jonathan: What about… shifting gears a little bit, giving you opportunity to speak a little bit about some of your other background, too. And I was going back and reading through some of your older blog posts. And I came across one where you were specifically talking about metrics and brought up the piece of advice from Paul Graham. How you need to find one specific metric that you should obsess over.
Can you talk a little bit about that? What were some of the metrics that kept you at night when you were at Twilio and Referly and now, Mattermark?
Danielle: Fundamentally, you have to think about goals in a hierarchical way. So for both Mattermark and Referly and Twilio, ultimately, it comes down to making money. But the path to making money for each one is different.
So with Twilio, the product is a developer tools product. So one of the challenges there is developers don’t need Twilio until they do.
So we would have a lot of people who would sign up with Twilio as a toy or a funding to do at a hackathon. And at first, that was frustrating because you felt like “Well, when are these people are going to build serious applications? We need them to do enough volume so that we start to make money.”
So the important thing is that every product has a different funnel leading to that goal. Ultimately, the goal for everybody is revenue, but you can’t just look at revenue. Because it’s a lagging indicator of how you’re doing.
I think it is good to have one metric, but I think also, it’s dangerous. Because if you pick the wrong thing and you focus on it for too long, you’re probably missing a bunch of other things.
I think people sometimes take this advice and they say “I only measure one thing” and that’s not what the advice means. I think it is, you measure many things, but you pick one thing above all that you have to move every week. So you still want to look at the rest of the funnel.
For me, I think sign-ups… in our case here at Mattermark and also at Twilio, “Free Trial” was the name of the game. And so, we were just really focused on making that top of the funnel big enough.
I think that it comes down to market size. So in both the case of Twilio and Mattermark, there’s a huge market. So you really just were trying to make the top of the funnel as wide as possible to increase your footprint for just the first touch. Like, how many people even know that you could be a tool that solves their problem?
But that’s one of the luxuries of being venture-backed is that you can have that wide top of funnel and it might not all convert. And it’s okay to do that because you have enough time with the money that you’ve raised to help you kind of go back and keep nurturing those relationships.
If I was listening to this and I’m bootstrapped, I would be much more focused on not just the top of the funnel, but that the conversion is really healthy since it is absolutely funding your growth. So, it very much comes back to what your goals are ultimately. But I think there is always this danger of thinking that small numbers are okay. Sometimes, I’ll talk to people and they’re like “We talked to 100 customers this year.” It’s like “Really? That’s it? I talked to 100 customers this week.”
So I think, sometimes, the danger of obsessing about a number is taking it out of context with everything else. If your market is huge and you have millions of people that you’re going to need touch, 100 customers a year, you’re never going to get there.
So it’s not like… I can’t give a one-size-fits-all answer. But I think the important thing is to do the work to build that funnel and then figure out what’s the lever that you can use.
So right now, I use just sign-ups. I don’t even look at Web traffic for our company. I just focus entirely on sign-ups and the quality of the signups in terms of if they’re qualified. And then, obviously, I look at revenue. So those are the two that I look at right now.
I sort of don’t know if I agree with the single metric thing because I just think it’s so dangerous. I think… at least you want two metrics that should work together. It sort of depends for each founder.
Jonathan: Absolutely. I think you make a good point that it’s all tying back to overall goals, too. And then, it really just kind of zoom in on the right levers that are going to help you get there.
Danielle: I think it is important for every person to have a goal. Every person should have the one they’re going to do that week that’s going to move the needle. And I think as you get bigger, you have different levels of abstraction. So different people focusing at different goals at different levels is awesome.
Actually, you just take all those metrics that you have and you’re kind of assigning them to different people. So somebody is watching each one.
Jonathan: That brings up something interesting. As being a founder, a CEO, a former Director of Marketing, you’ve been in charge of managing a lot of people. And so, do you have any advice in terms of management and assigning goals, assigning maybe specific metrics?
Danielle: Yeah. So my team here is 22, 23. So it’s actually just crossed over. It’s larger than the team I manage. It’s really my biggest team. Unfortunately, I have other managers, so it’s not just me managing everyone directly.
As far as setting goals, I think it comes down to the reason for being for each thing that you have in your company. So we have different teams here with different high-level goals. So even within engineering, there are a couple of high-level things. One is around engineering product. Another is around engineering data. And another one is engineered around kind of customer experience. So it’s sort of the back end of the product, the front end of the product and then the data consumption.
So I think goals just kind of come from “Okay, the high-level company goal is a certain degree of revenue growth, a certain degree of customer growth and a certain degree of customer happiness.” Probably, those are the three ones I’m thinking about.
And then, everybody fits under at least one of those umbrellas, if not more. So I think you want to keep people pretty connected to the high-level goals. Otherwise, they kind of get to a point where they’re like “Why am I here? What am I doing?”
But then you also want things you can actually move in a week. If you tell an engineer that one of their goals is revenue, that’s sort of unfair. It’s hard to see the connection in a way that doesn’t require me breaking it down for them. You need to give them a goal. Like “Ship X feature because this feature is desired by Y set of customers. And long-term, that will generate Z amount of revenue.” That’s a better way of thinking about it.
So I think people have to both be connected to the mission on a high level, but then also connected to something they can actually see. All of us want immediate gratification. A week is a long time to wait, actually, in a startup for some kind of gratification. I’m always trying to balance between those two things. We’re building little machines, right? Inputs and outputs.
Jonathan: Right, exactly. Switching gears, again, you’re going into now, the VC world. It’s one that you’ve probably always had connections in to. But now, you’re really in the thick of it. And I was wondering if your time now at Mattermark has shifted some of your perspective at all? If there’s any insights that you’ve developed? And specifically, is there any advice now that you would have to give founders about how they approach VCs, how they can vet and kind of find the best match?
Danielle: I have way more advice for VCs. So first of all, we actually really didn’t have a lot of connections to venture capital before we started this company. I think it’s important to point that out because people assume that “Oh, you guys must have already been really networked, so this was easy for you.”
And that really wasn’t the case. We had our own investors, but I had never fundraised for a company before. A lot of that was just built by hustle.
But I think a couple things I would say is one, founders are much less knowledgeable about how things will work than you might be think. I think VCs think that they write a blog post once in 1998 or something and then somehow, everyone has read that. I’m sorry, but the kids that you’re funding right now, they haven’t read what you wrote two years ago.
So there’s this need to continuously recycle the important lessons and to continue to communicate those things. And I think that’s something we’re going to actually work on helping with, is really pulling up the good content from the past and bringing it back.
I think founders suffer from an asymmetry of information that they don’t even know is there. One of the biggest things people stress out about is how big of a round should they raise at some stage.
And there’s sort of just math for this, right? So you know that the investor at a certain stage is going to take a certain percentage of your company. In 99% of cases, you’re going to be in the normal VC process, you’re not going to be one of those outliers.
So a lot of these things that people worry about, there’s just already answers for. And I would say for founders, they really should just be talking to other founders who have raised money and not investors for advice on that.
Because not that investors have any ill intention, they don’t. It’s just that’s not the same thing. So there’s just a lot of work left to be done helping new founders get the same resources.
I’m 29. I think about the resources that I took advantage of when I was 23 and just getting into startups. And I think about “What’s the 23-year-old now getting?” And it’s probably not the same.
And I don’t know if I would say it’s better or worse, but it’s just that there’s not someplace that you can go and you can just ask all these questions and get answers. And I think that that that’s just an important thing as a founder to realize is that there is a lot of other information out there.
I think everyone should read Venture Deals. I think it’s the most important book for founders who want to understand fundraising. It’s written Brad Feld and Dick Costolo who’s now at Twitter. And I think it’s really nice.
It kind of reminds me of when you’re learning calculus. One of the things they focus on is just learning the language of math and understanding what all these things are, even before you start to do anything cool with them.
I think Venture Deals is similar. “What’s the dictionary? What are the things people are going to talk about and how can you learn what they are so that you’re not surprised when they come up?”
Jonathan: I’ll bite. What about VCs? Do you have a couple pieces of advice for them?
Danielle: Yeah. I would just say, err on the side of very clear communication. I think there’s a lot of times when I see deals go badly because the founder feels like they’re getting screwed and I don’t think that’s what VCs mean to do.
But founders, they feel the sense that they don’t know what’s going on, but they can’t put their finger on it. And unfortunately, I think sometimes, it leads to things not working out that could have been really great.
I think founders don’t understand how a term sheet works. Founders don’t really understand cap tables. Founders don’t understand dilution. Founders don’t know how to talk to their employees about the stock options that they have.
There are a lot of opportunities to help founders feel like they’re on a level playing field in terms of information. And I think that VCs, having been around longer, these funds are living for 10, 20 years. These VCs have been in the business.
And so, there’s just a huge opportunity to build the trust the good old-fashioned way. Like, when VCs say “How can I help?” I’m like “You already know how you can help. Just do it. Just do these basic things.” And I think the most successful investors I’ve talked to, that’s pretty much why they’re winning, is because founders love them for just being so genuine.
And generally, I have a really good impression of the industry. In fact, it’s even better than when I started. I think there are so many people that are working so hard to make it awesome. And I think things would just move a lot faster for everyone if things were more widely understood on both sides.
Jonathan: I wanted to kind of dive into this issue that a lot of people are talking about right now. And it’s one that’s highlighted by Whitney Wolfe [inaudible 00:20:06] against Tinder. The reason I wanted to bring it up with you is I caught another older blog post that you had written called Startup Marketing: 2nd Class Citizen, 2nd Rate Results.
And this is bringing up a point that I think has come up again during this most recent issue that there’s this pattern; we value people who are making things, right? It’s usually coding and programming and the developing and that’s traditionally men.
And then, some of these other things that are a little harder to quantify sometimes; community management or some aspects of sales and marketing. It’s looked upon in a way where it’s not as highly valued. In some cases, it’s even derided and then the worst case is like this, it actually leads to people’s work being erased from the success story.
So we’d love to get your thoughts on the experience with the work of women, specifically. And more generally, the work of sales marketing. Some of these kind of harder to understand quantify aspects of startup work.
Danielle: Yeah. So I think separating the gender issue and just addressing the posts I wrote Startup Marketing: 2nd Class Citizens, 2nd Rate Results. I think there is an important change that’s happened. And the rise of growth hacking and quotes is kind of a good thing because it took marketing and it made it cool to developers. I don’t know if it’s by adding the word “hacking” or what have you. Making it more quantitative.
I think that’s interesting because Silicon Valley does still… I hate to say anything [inaudible 00:21:37]. It seems like a startups still value building stuff more than selling it, which is what I was writing about. I think the funny thing is the market doesn’t care about that. If you look at some of the most incredible exits lately, ultimately, you do have to sell something and it’s sort of just a question of how early are you going to get good at that?
At Mattermark, we’ve been selling our products from the very beginning. So I think being good at selling just makes sense. If you’re going to bother doing it at all, you might as well do it well.
I think selling product also has another huge implication which is if you sell it, then you have to make something people want to buy. So selling gives you a lot of data around if you’re building the right things. So I think makers should desire things to get sold in the sense that [inaudible 00:22:21] if they’re actually making something that people want.
I think that it’s not just a women problem. I think one of the biggest stereotypes in the Valley is the business development guy who gets hired at the startup before the startup knows what it’s doing. And he pretty much just goes out and buys everyone drinks and is very social but no one really knows what he does.
It’s not really gendered. You see it on both sides. It’s just happening. Because a lot of these startups have no idea how to actually be businesses.
Because the startups don’t know how to be businesses, they kind of treat it like “We have to do this business thing now. We have to do sales or we have to do marketing.” It’s like a box to check, instead of realizing that in most mature companies, sales and marketing are the biggest expenses the company has.
Like R&D in most mature companies, even technology companies, is not the core of the workforce. Because you don’t need as many engineers to build something as you do sales people to sell it.
I think it comes from people being completely ignorant about how to run real businesses. And they’re very focused on being Instagram and building something with a bunch of engineers and just selling it. That’s not what I’m trying to do and I think there are a lot of other people who also see that that’s not how actually things get done. That that’s this weird outlier case.
As far as women, what can I say on this that hasn’t already been said in different ways? I think it is an issue… sexism is just an issue in the world. It’s not just in tech. It’s a completely pervasive issue that affects more than half of the population that probably is the least talked about issue. Lately, it’s a lot more than we talk about a lot of other issues. But it’s not just a special interest group, right? It’s half the population.
So yeah. I think that because it’s an issue in the world and startups are a microcosm of that, then you have the same issue. But then, they get put into this pressure cooker of tension and stress that comes with trying to start something new and I think it makes it worse.
You do see a lot more women in those roles. It’s more that you don’t see as many women in the technical roles. And that has to do with factors that go back all the way to education and to being a girl and not having to be cool to be smart when you’re a kid. So we can dig into that if we wanted to.
I don’t really know how to address this. How do we fix this? Well, probably treating women better and hiring them would be a great place to start. But beyond that, you just have to kind of do it. I’m trying to do what I think is right in my company.
Fortunately, as a woman, I get more women who apply here than most startups do. So that’s great. We’re not quite 50/50 split female and male. I think we’re 35% women here, I’m just looking around the office. The applicant pool for women applying for engineering jobs is still very low. And I would still say, we still get far more than the average company just because there already are female engineers here and no one has to be that first female engineer.
Jonathan: Going back to the point where you’re talking about… at least as far as this relates to other roles in the company, not just development and engineering. Do you think that the rise of the co-opting of the hacking term and the rise of big data and having more people talking about sales and marketing and startups. Having just more people talk about this conversation at all, do you think it’s resulted in some change, even compared to maybe five, four, three years ago?
Do you think there is a change? Or do you think it’s still something that’s coming?
Danielle: No, I think there is a change. I think the biggest thing is there’s just more people that are operating their startups like real businesses. The truth is that sales and marketing actually are metrics-driven and they never weren’t.
In startups, they weren’t because startups didn’t know what they were doing. But in real companies, those things have huge budgets assigned to them and they have very important metrics to hit around revenue. Those are the people who own the P&L, usually.
So I think there’s just a professionalism. There’s a higher quality bar for founders now. Also, you have the benefit of founders doing multiple companies. So they’re taking lessons learned either from their previous founding experience or being an employee; I was an employee at Twilio and got to observe and learn and create systems of growth that actually did work.
So I think there’s just better quality founders. And that trickles down to everything else. I think Y Combinator is part of that, I think all of the accelerators are part of that. Holding people accountable for metrics and teaching all of these different crafts.
The Internet is very young. So Internet startups and professionalizing how they’re operated is very new. Even though we may feel like there have been startups ever since the Internet was created… in the whole span of history, we’re just at the beginning.
Jonathan: Well, Danielle, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. This has been great.
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