From Overengineering to Overachieving with Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub

In this episode, Dan Balcauski sits down with Todd Greene, the CEO of PubNub, to delve into the fascinating world of real-time event-driven apps and the entrepreneurial wisdom that comes with it. From Todd's humble beginnings to the rapid growth of PubNub, we explore the pivotal moments, international impact, and scaling complexities that have shaped his entrepreneurial path. Join us as we uncover the secrets behind Todd Greene's tech journey, the evolution of PubNub, and the challenges of pricing, communication, and scaling in the SaaS world.

Guest Bio
Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub, is a serial entrepreneur, having founded multiple companies that have significantly impacted the tech landscape. His journey began with CascadeWorks, an early SaaS company acquired by what is now Upwork, followed by Loyalize, a real-time mobile app that synced with live TV shows, acquired by the owner of American Idol. At PubNub, Todd has been at the forefront of developing a platform that simplifies the development and scaling of real-time, event-driven apps, a tool now essential for thousands of businesses across SaaS, B2C, and IoT sectors worldwide.

Guest Links
PubNub.com
PubNub on X
PubNub on LinkedIn

Transcript

Dan Balcauski: 0:01

Hello, and welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that dives through the trenches with the leaders of the best scale up B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today, I have the privilege of interviewing Todd Green, the CEO of PubNub. Todd is a serial entrepreneur having founded multiple companies that have significantly impacted the tech landscape. His journey began with Cascade Works, an early SaaS company acquired by what is now Upwork, followed by Loyalize, a real time mobile app that synced with live TV shows acquired by the owner of American Idol. At PubNub, Todd has been at the forefront of developing a platform that simplifies the development and scaling of real time event driven apps, a tool now essential for thousands of businesses across SaaS, B to C, and IoT sectors worldwide. And he's traveled to over 40 countries with personal passion of mine, so I'm sure we'll dive into that. Join me as we dive into Todd's journey exploring the complexities and triumphs of scaling innovative tech companies and uncover the secrets behind the successful growth of PubNub. Let's dive in. Welcome, Todd, to SaaS Scaling Secrets.

Todd Greene: 0:56

Thanks so much. Glad to be here, Dan. Thanks.

Dan Balcauski: 0:58

Well, Todd, for those in the audience who are not intimately familiar with you or your journey, can you please just briefly introduce yourself, tell us a little about your journey in the SaaS world?

Todd Greene: 1:07

Yeah, well, yeah, I think you just did a great job. you mentioned three companies that I started that were successful. I tried many others that didn't get that far, either just. Broad projects with friends or, or ideas that didn't go very far, things I did on the side. But, I started my career actually, as a management consultant at, what's now PwC, and, I always felt wrong there. I always felt like, there's, the internet was exploding and, here we are in suits and ties having to code in a corner. It just didn't feel right. So I joined a startup in the late nineties, mid nineties, actually called NetDynamics, which was the first app server for the internet. And that's, I think, where I really. A it's really fun to run your own business, start a company, this guy, even though I wasn't the founder, it was just watching the founders and watching the company grow from I think 12 people to when I joined to when we were eventually acquired. so that kind of gave me the bug and even at that job, I did, I had a whole bunch of different roles in sales and marketing and consulting. and then really from there, just, been starting companies ever since, Cascade Works was the first one, like you mentioned, and on from there.

Dan Balcauski: 2:06

Amazing. Well, I'm sure you've, you can help calm the fears. if you started in the early, mid nineties in the tech scene, this is now you may be your third or ish, tech recession. So, so you've got some calming words for the rest of the CEOs who may be listening. as we bear through whatever this, sort of period is here after this wild times, during COVID and zero interest rates. Well, let me ask you, kind of go back to the early days. An anthropological researcher, watching you, not creepily, but just, monitoring early Todd from the ages of 12 to 18. Would they have noticed anything unusual?

Todd Greene: 2:44

Wow, I don't think we're particularly self aware, so I'm not sure I can even be self aware of myself at 12 to 18, but, for me, I, that was 12 was about the age that I really discovered computers and coding. I grew up in a Small towns fishing village in Spain, where we didn't even have a telephone that you had to literally, I think there was, this is a long time ago. It was probably some bribery involved to get like infrastructure, like a telephone. So we, as American expats, we pretty much lived, with electricity and that was about it. and so I, I always loved gadgets, but you didn't get your hands on a lot of them right at age. So we moved back to the States and that was around the age that I saw my first computer. So really from 12 to 18. We came from a family with not a lot of money. I spent most of my time begging parents doing odd jobs so I could, get a monitor for this little computer I built and then, then buy, a hard drive or whatever. so, just, eventually building up something so I could hack on it. So that, to me, that was like my complete obsession was just, to some extent, I'm still that way. I'm still running two Raspberry Pis at home and a Linux server, but that was where I kind of, came back to the States and just completely got obsessed with technology.

Dan Balcauski: 3:49

Was there a, I guess, so this is kind of pre internet, like, how did you even realize that this was a thing? Like, it sounds like, were you immersed in a culture with some other friends that like had similar interests or was thisthis your subscribing magazine? Like'd you even about it?

Todd Greene: 4:07

it was literally a kid who brought his home computer to the school for show and tell. And I was like, what the heck is this? This is the coolest thing. I came home that day. I was like, I need one of those things. And my parents say, that's a fad. And, six months later, I was still screaming and yelling and begging and got my grandmother to finally buy me something. And, it was just, that was it. It was literally like a show and tell. And it just blew my mind because it was only. It wasn't long after I returned back from Spain, where I had really been exposed to any of that, and then later on it was what they used to call BBSs, Dial Up Modem, and then you start discovering all these hacker communities, mostly, like, in Scandinavia and Germany, where you could download these crazy hacks for computers that people thought were impossible, and they would just do things that predominantly just to show that they could be done, being able to, do things with the hardware that, using software that people thought just wasn't possible and, hack around limitations in the hardware, to the point where I remember in college I had to write a paper in sociology about subcultures and, I wrote about the hacker subculture and the thing that was different about it was none of them had ever met one another. They had all, they were all, collaborating online and, This was, still early enough where the professor was just blew his mind. He's like, you should publish this paper. it's amazing because I think that was really the beginnings of where, there was cultures of people who had actually never physically met. And that was a pretty momentous thing. I think we're obviously seeing that in spades now, with,

Dan Balcauski: 5:24

It's exploded! We have world has

Todd Greene: 5:27

Social media. Yeah,

Dan Balcauski: 5:29

Exactly. Large player, multi, world, games where people never meet in person

Todd Greene: 5:33

exactly

Dan Balcauski: 5:34

that's fantastic. And you, obviously you had this, sounds like a very interesting childhood in this fishing village in Spain. And you were just talking about, these subcultures of hackers. But, one thing I mentioned in my intro for you is that you traveled over 40 countries. And which is a personal passion of mine. Like, how has that sort of experience in the international environment, changed you and your perspective on the world?

Todd Greene: 6:00

It's a good question. I mean, there's a personal and a business answer to that, right? I think from the business side, it was always interesting to see How technology gets adopted in these different places and the way people think about it. when I moved to London in the late nineties, England was really very trailing in terms of people having internet adoption. And so it was a shocking number. I think it was like in like 98, only like 12 percent of people in the UK actually were online, which was crazy. And then you went across to like Sweden, it was like 80 percent penetration, right? So, just country by country. But what more interestingly, I think is like what I've discovered more recently. Is that, well, actually going back for a while now is like that when countries are behind in one area, technology lets them leapfrog. So, when cell phones came out, going back a long ways before really I was, in the business world, the countries that didn't have much of a wire telephone infrastructure had much faster adoption. Obviously, then places like the US, which is one of the trailing, right? And you move that forward to something more recently like financial services, right? So some of these, like, new, new generation fintech companies are getting much more penetration in emerging markets where there was never a good banking infrastructure. And so they're able to literally sign up millions of consumers in those countries. especially Southeast Asia is in a great example, where, they're just growing at a much faster pace than, new fintech companies in the States because they're competing against all this incumbent banking infrastructure in that case.

Dan Balcauski: 7:20

Here you have a revolt when we want to put chips in our credit cards and everyone says, ah, no, I got to wait three seconds for it to process. No, never again.

Todd Greene: 7:28

right. Well, if you think about like an Uber here, we've had this for a long time now, and we all kind of know what Uber does, but you get to a country like in Indonesia, where the company that was competing with Uber there. Was able to also use that for food delivery. Okay. That's not too surprising. Uber does that as well, but also is banking because, guess what now they can start to see spending habits. They can start offering credit to certain people. Those people generally have banks. They can start using the drivers as tellers effectively to take real cash and give credit to the app. So there's all of this kind of like. ability to innovate in ways that wouldn't ever happen in a more, developed nation. So I think. And from a business opportunity perspective, it's really interesting to take a look at, and in fact, PubNub's been very successful by doing this, looking at regions where there's going to be an explosion of growth in certain apps and focusing there. And so, for example, Southeast Asia has been a really fast growing, region for us recently because these kinds of large scale apps, are really taking off there now. So anyway, it's a, I think that's, from a travel perspective, that's been really interesting to see.

Dan Balcauski: 8:24

that's, that is fascinating because yeah, we tend to have at least, American entrepreneurs and ones that I've talked to and just, you hear about, we tend to have a very, build in the U. S., be successful here kind of first, and then kind of go overseas versus I think what you're pointing out is, there's incredible opportunities for. New innovation disruption that isn't even available here. And so you, it's not, you would actually have a harder time starting it here than going, to one of these cultures. It's interesting. That's fa that's fascinating. I think, I've traveled quite a bit myself. I think mine, I take a little bit more of a personal, takeaway. Mine was just, seeing how much happier. A lot of people were in other countries that from a material living perspective had what we would consider to be nothing. and then seeing all of the, incredible material, success that we have here in the U S and everyone seemed quite miserable by comparison. and for me, that was, that was kind of my, transformational, experience, from traveling and just realizing that we've done a lot to optimize for GDP, but maybe not for personal happiness. that was kind of one of my takeaways. I don't know if you had anything similar.

Todd Greene: 9:32

No, absolutely. And I, I have a personal perspective because growing up in Spain, Southern Spain at the time that we had very little, I, I think like, for the holidays, we'd get like, one toy or something. That was a big deal. And now, I have kids and, when, gift time comes around, but a birthday is anything else. It's like, 5, 000 plastic toys that they play with once and then it goes away and there's, there's not a lot of happiness and a lot of products out there, but I think I'm not an expert at this at all, but I know the nation of Bhutan has some kind of like global domestic happiness metric that they measure their country on. as opposed to GDP, so I find that interesting and absolutely, I've had very similar experiences traveling.

Dan Balcauski: 10:05

Well, I do want to shift over a little bit to what you're kind of working on currently with PubNub. For those in the audience who aren't familiar with PubNub as a business, can you just tell us a little bit about the company and its mission?

Todd Greene: 10:17

Absolutely. So PubNub is a company that focuses on letting people building software. This could be B to B companies, B to C companies, IoT, but people building software that has real time interaction, allow them to build that at scale, to manage the op, those apps while they're running, and then to optimize those as time goes on. And the, the reason that we exist is that, when you start to having apps where there needs to be a real time interaction between people or people and machines, whether it's, Anything as simple as a chat app to device control to turning light bulbs on. anything that's what the tech people call event driven, real time signaling. The tech for doing that is different than the tech that people have built traditional websites and mobile apps on. And what you find is if you have to do it all yourself, you end up spending more time. On all of that technology for that real-time interaction. Then actually the app itself. And so the premise when we started PubNub was can we build a global network, basically global infrastructure with very simple to use API. So any app developer could build any large scale. Real time application, whether it's a social app, whether it's a SaaS application, that has, real time interaction in it, without having to write all that infrastructure and be able to scale it. And so that's effectively what we've been doing for the last, effectively the last decade and pretty successful at it. we've got, Thousands of customers now, thousands of apps running on PubNub. We have over 800 million devices that connect to our network now in any given month, trillions of transactions going through our network, and use cases from, everything from social apps, games, to healthcare companies, IoT companies, transportation companies, and supply chain. we power fueling at 150 airports, so really a very horizontal, wide set of industries that are all using us effectively for real time, interactions in some way, shape, or form.

Dan Balcauski: 12:00

Got it. Got it. Well, yeah, so one of those companies, I started my career at a company called National Instruments is in the test and measurement space. And one of the things was like, you've never heard of our products, but we make the products you do know work it was like making sure they get tested, et cetera, before they roll out. So I feel very similar about what you described about PubNub, like a very critical piece of infrastructure that is probably being used by many of the things that you're touching on a daily basis. And you have no idea, because unless you're in that. The middle layer,

Todd Greene: 12:27

That's absolutely true. We are in many of the mobile games, the top mobile games in the App Store. We are in the Yelp application. If you happen to use Yelp, we, like I mentioned, If you ever fly through Heathrow, probably the fueling of your plane, and a whole bunch of other airports as well, went through a PubNub transaction, we really are all over the place. and, but yes, most people, never know that under the covers, the, all of that data and all those real time interactions are actually going through our network.

Dan Balcauski: 12:50

Well, we're going to change that with this conversation, Todd. Todd, look, you're a three time founder. I'm curious, obviously you said there was, some successes and some, not so successful ventures beforehand, but you know, what surprised you about building PubNub that you didn't expect given your, experience building your first two successful companies, CascadeWorks and LoyalEyes?

Todd Greene: 13:11

It's a good question. I think, what surprised me about PubNub, PubNub was really one of those companies that started in the way you kind of always hope companies will start where, you get all of this, viral attention, viral growth, Signups. I think, we had over a hundred transactions a second going through our network before we even started talking to an investor. and in fact, the reason we started talking to investors was that my co founder who was doing all the heavy lifting, cause I was CEO of another company while we were doing this on the side, he called me up one day and said, Yeah, I got good news and bad news. the good news is we've just hit 100 transactions a second, steady state. The bad news is I think we have to shut down PubNub because I haven't had time to build a billing system yet, so we can't collect any revenue. And I was like, okay, no, we gotta, we should probably, go hire some people and scale. So, I think that was the exciting part and it was probably new, in the other companies I started. we, we did, find product market fit. we signed big customers and, but those were, in my first company, I think the first customer we signed was Autodesk. The second was, Charles Schwab. This goes back to, my first company, Cascade Works. And those were not just sort of like people who discovered us. We did a lot of pounding the pavement to find those deals. And so, just that initial, Then the growth of the initial set of customers from PubNub was pretty exciting.

Dan Balcauski: 14:23

Got it. So, so if I could take it away from that, it was a little bit more of, this was a more of a bottoms up or a kind of a self-discovery kind of, go to market, than the previous companies.

Todd Greene: 14:33

That's right. Exactly. and it was, I mean it was always a hope that it was going to have, but it was really interesting and exciting to see it, to take off like that.

Dan Balcauski: 14:41

that's a great sort of origin story. And it sounds like obviously we're successful at either building that billing system or getting that round of investment, given that you're here today. But as companies sort of grow and scale, they tend to. run into a series of unexpected challenges. what do you think is wrong about, conventional wisdom about scaling a company like PubNub? Like, is there been sort of advice or is there something out there in the, the, era that you hear that just hasn't rang true in your experience?

Todd Greene: 15:13

I think we all like to pattern match. So especially if your board of directors, your investors. Will always benchmark you against other companies that they think are similar other SaaS companies. But I guess what I found is that, there's always specifics to your business. And, I remember when we started, our investors had this like SaaS playbook of like, you should expect this cost of customer acquisition, anything above or below this is, wrong, or this net retention, or this upsell, whatever these kinds of SaaS metrics were, or this time to monetization. And the reality was for us. And I think for almost any other founder I talked to, it's like, those are interesting data points, but usually your business is unique enough that there's going to be some areas where overachieve and some areas where you're dramatically under. and that's okay. If net, your company's growing and you've got, you found a path to success, but it's easy to get hung up on trying to. Match some perfect set of SaaS, biblical metrics that are important, only to, only to find that your business has some differences.

Dan Balcauski: 16:13

It's an interesting topic because I've talked to several other CEOs on this, about this, either companies that publish sort of these type of benchmarks or use them, explicitly and yeah, because benchmarks themselves are, they're measures of very complex interconnected systems, right? And then those systems are working in support of some objective. And so then you take an aggregate all of these different businesses and average their metrics. Well, How do you average different objectives? You got one founder who wants to grow a profitable, free cash flow, positive lifestyle business. You got another one that's a, venture, series D, unicorn rocket ship, and they're going to, they're going to have very different. Operating metrics, but then we're just going to average those together and say something in the middle. I feel like we'd never get that in the benchmark reports where it says like, well, here, a company with, that's trying to achieve your exact sort of targets and your sort of market, like here's where it should be that, that's sort of left on the side to the, as an exercise for the reader, as they would say.

Todd Greene: 17:14

Well, yeah, and I think it's more than just like, founder philosophy or even, corporate trajectory. It also comes down to the type of product and the speed of adoption and. what it's used for. like I think if you look at companies like PubNub, we have a, a longer time to monetization because once you've made a decision to use PubNub to, build your platform, your app on top of, so you've chosen PubNub as a platform, we don't really monetize until you've gone live, right? Until you yourself have built your product, launched it, and driven traffic. So, Obviously for us, then just by the nature of our business, the time to monetization is longer, right? But, with all that extra investment in time, and hand holding with our customers now that, that actually, is, it builds longer term relationships than, a more, a more pay by the seat SaaS company where you just go, Oh, we need to have as many seats. We need twice as many seats. So you just see a very different pattern there and it's not, one's not better than the other, but it's just making sure you're comparing your metrics appropriately.

Dan Balcauski: 18:09

Yeah. Yeah. it also creates interesting constraints because, the story you just told, reminded me of, Unity's, most recent, pricing rollout debacle because they had a very similar sort of community of developers that needed to spend a very long time developing games. And then sort of overnight it was like, Oh, we're going to change this out from under you. And there's. Look, I, we could talk for an hour on that alone, but, but yeah, it does create some interesting constraints, right? when you have those, different monetization models and go to market models, for sure that,

Todd Greene: 18:39

yeah. And not to switch subjects, but I mean, on the subject of pricing, I will say that, in all companies, but especially at PubNub, that's actually, figuring out the right pricing model has probably been our biggest, challenge or, ongoing challenge as our business evolves, as our customers evolve and figuring out what aligns with customers it's pricing is an, I think an undervalued skillset in terms of really understanding how to create the right pricing model.

Dan Balcauski: 19:04

well, well, I appreciate that because that's where I spend all my time. and, I did not pay Todd to say that, anyone So, no, I would,

Todd Greene: 19:11

kickback for that, but

Dan Balcauski: 19:12

no, it's a, dark art. It's actually more science than art, but everyone else dark art. well, look, what another dark art is trying to explain something as technical as your platform to a. I imagine you go to a, I don't know, an operator at Heathrow, who's going to buy your product and you're trying to explain, PubNub or, any of these other clients as you've grown your company. It seems like making the technologies you build understandable to a broader, less technical audience would be a hurdle. How have you sort of approached that as PubNub has grown?

Todd Greene: 19:48

it's a good question. So, first of all, the people we sell to our software development teams. the end of the day, so, we're not selling, for example, to, in the fueling case, to go back to that, we're not selling to Heathrow Airport. We're selling to a SaaS company that builds a platform that powers fueling, right? So we're the underpinnings of their product as we are with, many others. so when it comes to speaking to customers, we either speak in terms of. the core tech itself, if we're already at that level in, in the understanding of what they need and what we need, or we'll talk to the use cases, if they're a game company, we're obviously not going to talk a lot about fueling at Heathrow, we're going to talk a lot more about the other game companies and the social experiences that they've built on top of PubNub. So we go down that, that kind of, use case conversation, but I think the big. then there's a whole other set of constituents who may not be direct customers, but they're investors, analysts, people who, look at IPOs, bankers, those kinds of people, how do you talk to them? how do you explain it to your mother kind of, kind of thing? And I think that for me, one of the big breakthroughs is probably like 2017 or 18 was, in, in the early days of PubNub, most of. The examples we gave about what you could build on PubNub, they were aspirational examples. They would say, we would say like, look backward, look at, World of Warcraft. That was a multiplayer experience. Or look at WebEx, which was the only Zoom product back then. Or look at E Trade, their streaming stock quotes. Those are all examples of real time experiences. and so people are going to use PubNub in the future to, to build these things. but by 2017 and 18, now there were all of these unicorn companies, all these IPOs that were completely predicated on the need for real time technology, right? So all of a sudden we had Uber and its competitors, and Uber really wouldn't exist without the ability to see cars moving on a map, without the ability to real time dispatch a request for a ride, without being able to see a dashboard of where all your cars are driving and things. So, that, Uber was completely predicated, but so was Peloton. Right, another PubNub customer. They were predicated completely on real time. The difference between all of the other exercise bikes out there and Peloton was that you could get into a class, you could get streaming video, but then you could see where other people were in that same exercise class and who was pedaling the fastest, and so you had this real time synchronization. And then you started seeing large scale chat applications, then you started seeing More of these large scale live event products, like we powered the IPL in India, which is a very large cricket tournament there, and you had 25 million people through PubNub, chatting, playing predictive games and getting points if they predict what the next play was going to be, seeing sentiment analysis from all the other people watching. All of these different examples were now large scale, unicorn size apps and companies, and it became very easy now to say, You never thought, Peloton, Uber, India cricket tournaments and all these things had anything in common, but then you could bring it right back down to the fact that they all needed, if you're not technical, you'd say real time interaction. If you are, you would say, event driven synchronization across events, right? Expresses a sentiment. Well, that's an event. You want that sentiment to go into PubNub. Then you want PubNub people to aggregate the sentiments of all of the different people and then publish back out to everyone else. What's the rolling 10 second average of all those sentiments. So what the end user sees are little bars going up and down, of, the aggregate sentiment. And so if you think about PubNub, what is that? Well, it's a global scaled. Network that connects to all these devices, it collects events as they fly through, it can do computation on those events, but most importantly, it sends then results back to people. So whether that's a chat message going between you and I, whether that's an aggregate sentiment, value going to the entire audience, whether that's a light bulb turn on event that needs to get to a light bulb, or whether that's the location of a truck in a supply chain system, it's all really about. Bidirectional Event Processing at Massive Scale. And so that became a lot easier now because I could start pointing to all of these, very real world, everyday use cases that really didn't exist when we started PubNub.

Dan Balcauski: 23:39

PubNub, I imagine it's a, sort of tongue in cheek on PubSub, the publish subscribe, technology. Okay. I didn't want to make an assumption, but, it seemed logical. but I could, what I want to just highlight for everyone, what I loved about your answer, because, I see technology companies do this all the time. Like we've got this widget, look how cool this widget is. It's got feature X, Y, and Z. And the plain truth is that one, nobody understands, and two, nobody cares. So what I loved about your answer is it's like, okay, here's a concrete. Example of Uber or the cricket tournament. They have some fundamental need in common. We support that need. And that is much more, and then, yeah, eventually if you're deep into a sale, you can, your sales engineer, whoever can, here you go. Here's all the sort of technical, how many, transactions can you port a second and blah, blah, blah, and global infrastructure, blah, blah, blah. But that's not where you start. And whether it's investor or analyst or these other groups, their eyes are gonna go into the back of their head. They're just not gonna understand or listen to you very long because you're just gonna leave them ground. so was that an evolution for you to sort of grasp that, and to be able to tell a story? Because it's, it sounded like obviously there, you've guys have been successful and so you had these sort of data points. But like, as you think about, your, ability or your founding team sort of ability to sort of tell that story, like, were there sort of learnings, for you along the way that helped you sort of really grasp that?

Todd Greene: 25:03

Yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, that story became easier to tell when these apps existed. and, and the profile of the customers we were closing were changing and getting larger. in the very early days of PubNub, we realized At one point, our CFO looked back and said, well, I've got, I've got some kind of bad news. And we said, our growth rate's pretty decent, but, this is early days of PubNub. He said 85 percent of our revenue is coming from companies who are themselves prerevenue, and every one of our Hey, are we going to make our number this month? Well, it all

Dan Balcauski: 25:32

It sounds like we work.

Todd Greene: 25:33

Yeah, it's exactly. Is the customer going to close their next round of financing? So that's really changed now. now, today, we obviously have customers that run the gamut from 10 person companies, but we have, 100, 000 person plus companies that use PubNub. What's been interesting to see has been the way that, as the smaller companies have, I hate using this word disruption, it's so overused, but have disrupted, or at least gained notice of the larger companies. The larger companies are, how did they build that? What did they do? Hey, let's go to PubNub. And so we've been able to build relationships with, from small to now very large companies, who use us. And I'd love to drop some names. I can't remember who's referenceable or not, so I should probably be careful and just not drop names, but big, big names you'd see. And going back to your question, Our need to tell that story in different ways has evolved because if you're talking to the CTO of a 10 person company, who is also the head of product and also the lead developer, you can have a much shorthand conversation. He's, he or she's also the decision maker, right? but now you want to talk to a very large telco. You have to be able to tell that story to the people in procurement. You need to tell that story to the executive signing a check who's never, barely knows how to use a mouse. and then you got to tell that story to, to the hardcore developers who are actually right. So we have had to learn and, we're still getting better at this, right? I think that we still struggle with, how to simplify that as much as possible.

Dan Balcauski: 26:50

Yeah. Well, I, and don't hold yourself to too high a standard. I think every company is on that journey, right? It's a North Star to be strived for and never to reach, right? we're always improving our communication. It's really hard to make, it may be the hardest thing in the world to make complex topics simple. I am not a, I'm not particularly talented in that area myself. So I do not want to hold myself up as some, paragon of success. But, going back, something you said reminded me of something you said earlier in the conversation where you were talking about, the kind of the origin story of PubNub and this ground up, swell of sort of, bottoms up motion of companies. But now it sounds like, you've got a, at least a, quite a distribution of maybe go to market, sales motions where you've got, maybe more enterprise or at least mid market, accounts, as well as maybe some self service, still around besides sort of the change in messaging, like. Can you talk a little bit about like going through that transition and any lessons learned as you sort of realized like, okay, now we need to build out a team that can actually go sell into a mid market enterprise account and how did that look at PubNub and any lessons you could share?

Todd Greene: 27:57

yeah, good question. I mean, I think the thing I talked about earlier, which was that really nice surprise of that really great initial organic viral, I don't want to say viral, but organic growth of word of mouth and people finding us online. and really self servicing their way up into the use case also ended up being, to some extent, a detriment in the sense that, PubNub is really designed for the fou to be the foundation of mission critical applications. Now, if you're going to, build a foundation for your house or your piece of software or your jet airplane or anything else, you probably want to have a really strong trust relationship with that vendor who's helping you build that foundation, right? And if you've self serviced your way through a platform, And their platform is maybe not AWS that everyone knows, but it's PubNub at the time when we had probably, a smaller number of employees. there's a couple of things. you're going to maybe not use PubNub in the most mission critical places. or if you do, you may not use it the right way because, we continue to add functionality in our platform, so more things you could do. Which also, it's like the Spider Man joke with great power comes great responsibility. So if we didn't have a solution architect, they're really helping you through architecture decisions on how you do the best event driven design. What we found later on was that those early companies would scale really heavily, but then they might drop. maybe they churn. And when you would talk to them, it was always, Oh, I thought, I didn't know you had this feature. Gosh, I wish I had known that. Or God, I didn't realize that, if I just implemented this way versus that way, it would have been better. And so we started to realize that, this self service model, while it was exciting and a great way to build leads, that we had much more success when we established relationships a lot earlier with the customers. And so we really, invest in that sales motion where. it used to be that the first time a salesperson would talk to you was after you'd been alive for a year and you contacted support and ask some technical question and then the salesperson might jump in and go, Hey, we've been talking about long term contract, now, we really try to catch you early. We try to understand what you're building. We try to understand how we can help you build that. and that tends to drive a lot more. puts customers on the right path. It drives a lot more relationship building and trust. so there's, they can call up if they have a question and they know people by name and so, so forth. And so that's just been, something we've continued to invest in over time is really making sure we catch people earlier in their cycle and getting them, successful.

Dan Balcauski: 30:07

Well, I want to compare maybe to, and if you're not familiar with it, I'll kind of briefly explain. I think it was, Airtable, they made some news, recently because they made a big sort of, what looked like a abrupt switch. So Airtable, being a, I'm sure the Airtable, CMO is going to punch me in the face if they hear this, but you know, like a very super powered Excel on the web. and, much more powerful than that. But they had sort of a bottoms up, self service motion. A lot of people built sort of basic, products, with it, and they recently, I'd say the last, was it three months or so? I think CEO came out and says, actually we're self service. Small customers are no longer for us. We're changing all of our pricing packaging and our entire go to market. It's all enterprise mid market for us from now on. And so that was sort of a, like hard line in the sand. I'm wondering, as you sort of hear that. How did you sort of think about, I guess, where you started from to now in terms of, okay, like how are, like, are we going to sort of, add on this incrementally? Like how far are we going to push ourselves? Cause there's always this tension, right? you get too far in the enterprise and all of a sudden those deals take all the oxygen out of the room and at the C suite or like, cause they, one or two deals can make an entire quarter and, oh, they want these, 10 custom features and that's going to throw off a roadmap. for the rest of the broader market, right? So I guess, how did you sort of think about that, transition as you guys were sort of going, more into a more robust, say upper market or away from the self serve, motion?

Todd Greene: 31:32

It's a good question. It's probably, going back to the question you asked me earlier about what are some of the things that surprised you about PubNub different from the other companies. we heavily over engineered PubNub in the beginning, and I think that, normally that's the wrong thing to do. You want to get to market quickly. and I think we, we did a good balance in the very early days of PubNub because if you think about the use cases of PubNub in the early days. Most of them, very first year of PubNub, most of our customer use cases back then were not particularly mission critical, yet they're running on this massive five nines, multi data center replicated, like, secure network that we spent all this time and effort to build. And, That so it wasn't that we had to make a decision to say, okay, now we're going to go mid market. Now we're going to go large enterprise, right? To be honest, we're, we've been successful and we're pretty agnostic to whether your software team is a 10 person company or whether you're, one of the largest companies in the world building software. We, we now a have the, yeah. The scale numbers to always to back up just about maybe any use case that we've ever seen. So we know we can scale. We know we've got all this kind of security, ISO and SOC two and all of the kinds of things that you need to make sure that you've, you're compliant. GDPR compliance, those kinds of things. And some of those things. HIPAA compliance, we actually got that certification very early in the life of PubNub, so we did a lot early. To make ourselves ready for any of these use cases and then the rest of it for us was just the proof points of having, not just be able to point to the success stories of a 10 person company, but some of the largest companies. And we've built that out. You can see on our website on our customer page. We've got, a huge number of use cases from some really great blue chip companies. and so the sales. unlike some companies that, I know have to make a really concerted decision, a good example is like, I heard years ago, Box started as a, really a consumer targeted company, and then they went, mid market, and then they shifted again and went enterprise. And every time they did that, they literally is Got rid of the entire sales force, got a new sales force, entire sales force, new sales force, new sales strategy, new marketing, like each time. And it was a successful kind of transition, a very painful one for them. I mean, for us, absolutely. We've had to improve and change, and we're continuing to try to optimize our marketing and sales motions. I wouldn't say by any chance, that by any means that we've nailed all of those things, but that said, we are not saying, oh, we, we have to. Pivot to a mid market model and therefore the product needs to pivot along with it and then we're going to pivot to an enterprise model. So for us, we've been pretty fortunate in being able to service customers, across that spectrum. we, like I said, we've got a, some of the two, two of the world's largest telcos now using PubNub. We have, one of the world's largest, if not the largest, video game company in the world using PubNub. and we've got tiny game companies and little voiceover IP mom and pop shop. So we've got everything in between to those things.

Dan Balcauski: 34:07

That's amazing. You talked about this. You used the term we over engineered it upfront, and I think that there's a lot of tension as companies are scaling, right? Because you, you do have, you probably have that argument on a daily basis between the CEO and the CTO saying like, like, we, we can't do that. We can't support that. They're like, well, we're going to sell this customer. Then we're going to make it work. Right. Whereas the CTO would like, I would like to be able to support the next five years of customers before we sell the first one. Right. And it sounded like you, maybe we're a little bit. for, for better or worse, maybe a little bit more on the latter than the former, if you had to replay that, like, do you think that was the right decision to, to, cause you said overengineered. So like, was there like, if you had to go back, like, do you think, I don't know, like, would there be a lesson that you would tell your younger self of like how much to, to invest, to be, future ready on that technical aspect?

Todd Greene: 34:59

You I think this is a very PubNub specific answer. And by the way, I think if you polled members of our engineering and operations staff, some of them would say, Todd, so full of it, man. have to do a lot more to further harden our infrastructure. If they hear this podcast, they're going like, what is this guy talking about? There's all this work we should be doing to make it better and stronger and more bulletproof and scalable. So. I don't, we definitely have struck some kind of balance there that, makes everyone a little unhappy, which means we're all kind of in a good place. but specific to PubNum, no, I think it was the right decision for us. And I'll tell you why. We provide, these core building blocks for building real time applications. We provide PubSub, which is the core of what we do. Messaging globally around the world at scale, whether that's like a chat message or IoT message, in app events, messaging, whatever you want to call it. And then beyond that, we provide like presence detection. So. Which devices are online or offline. History of the messages from the past. The ability with something called PubNub Functions, where you can stick your code up into our network. So you can do very low latency kinds of everything, from like filtering out bad words, translating French to English, or aggregating IoT data in the network, rather than having to bring it down to your server. So there's all of these kind of core services that we provide that it's kind of like the Lego building blocks for what you need for your real time app. Now there's lots of other ways to skin the cat. Right. There's lots of other ways to do those kinds of things at low scale, but the difference has always been with PubNub that we do this globally. So everyone gets the same kind of low latency experience, regardless of where that app happens to spin up and run with, regardless of what kind of app it is. And regardless of what kind of local regulations you need to fulfill. And I think that the biggest differentiator with PubNub isn't just the functionality we provide, but the fact that we provide it at this global scale. So I think, if that's the core value of PubNub. It would have been antithetical to launch something that didn't provide that because then we're just another one of, another way to solve the problem. But I think we're saying, look, we, you can solve this problem with PubNub, but only PubNub lets you do it, securely at massive scale. And I think so we, in our case. We had to do it now on the flip side, I can't tell you how many founders will come chat with me or whatever, and really brag about their amazing technology and they have really cool stuff. They still haven't closed a customer. They've over engineered the heck out of what they've built and they haven't thought. more than two hours on their go to market and, the go to market challenge in most cases is takes an equal amount of time and effort as the actual engineering challenge. So I think PubNub was somewhat unique, but absolutely like, the error of over engineering is, is a big Silicon Valley and now more global tech, sin that you see everywhere.

Dan Balcauski: 37:37

Yeah, I love that because, it was, so it was justification because the core differentiated value proposition relied on this robustness of the infrastructure.

Todd Greene: 37:49

From day one.

Dan Balcauski: 37:51

It wasn't just your email spreadsheet, SaaS replacement tool that if, it wasn't available, for five minutes, could kind of get on with their day. It's like,

Todd Greene: 38:00

That's right. Which is, I, and I can't speak to Airtable. I'm not an expert at all, but I think like, many more products probably similar to them, can be targeted different places, but probably that have significantly more, changes to the required features they're going to need as they go to different constituent size companies. Right. Again, speaking completely out of, no knowledge at all about Airtable

Dan Balcauski: 38:20

I don't think they released publicly much information as to the why, except maybe there's some financial reasons why, but, but anyway, I'm not going to let you go because you did mention pricing before, and, I do spend a lot of my time, in that world. What lessons have you learned about? Pricing and monetization over your time at PubNub,

Todd Greene: 38:44

Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, it's one of the more challenging things because, it's one thing to do some ideation and come up with a better pricing model, but, and you have to implement that pricing model and then you have to, support that pricing model. And when you have thousands of customers like we do, that's, that's hard to do. So there's a big, implementation challenge and that you had to train the billing team and the business team and then the salespeople for how to explain that. So. Implementing a new pricing model is tough, but if you go back to like, we've tried different things. Broadly, I would say the evolution of our thinking around pricing in the early days of PubNub, it, we had a model that, combined, the, how many messages you're sending with how many devices, and it kind of made sense. but we had two problems with it. The metric, or the metrics we used for pricing in that, I'll talk about three generations. The generation one sounded logical, without knowing much. But it had two problems. One was the metrics that we based the pricing on were not metrics the customer measured themselves. So there's no way for them to predict Well, I don't know how many, daily concurrent user peaks I have, or whatever the metric was back then, right? so I have no idea how to predict, and you get a lot of, there's a lot of fuzziness around. Or even worse, we would, I remember in the early days of PubNub, we measured concurrency different than they did, so we were like, okay, over this hour, you had 40, 000 concurrency. We only had 8, 000, and it turns out, We were, no one was wrong. We just were measuring it differently. and the, really the perception from the customer who was very upset said, look, I don't think the amount of money I'm paying you is wrong for the value I'm getting. But when I see the invoice and it says 40, 000 devices, and I know I only have eight, I feel like I'm getting screwed. So that was the first problem with that pricing model. And the second problem was that there wasn't correlation between our cost to service a customer at scale and the value they were getting. So some customers that were using us for low volume use cases. You have to charge a lot from the pricing model and other cases where maybe we were charged him very little because their pricing model was costing us a ton. so we're getting, we were actually losing money on those guys and, were. So, so that didn't work. So then we went to a model that we tried to be completely equitable. So, kind of generation 2 of our pricing was completely based on just the number of transactions and that still works for a lot of customers. But the idea there is like, since we charge all customers on a per transaction basis, the more you use, the more you pay our. Our costs are relative, their, benefit is relative, and so on. but then you start getting to the world where, well, that's a very equitable model, and it makes sure that we aren't overcharging, but we're also not undercharging. then you start getting to a place where, as you get to larger and larger customers, and this is where we're kind of Gen 3 now, they are, what they really don't want to see is variability on their bill every month. They have a budget that's assigned every year, they want to know what it's going to cost for PubNub, they don't want to, they want to get a good price, but they're not trying to screw us either, they just want to know that their invoices aren't going to be 5x one month. And, and so as we start to understand different business models that represent profiles of our customers, we're now putting together pricing models in some cases where we, that really aligns with the way they measure their business. so we can better kind of calibrate, make sure that we're not. I'm gonna go underwater on this thing because they overuse us in a way that we didn't expect, but also in a way that makes pricing more predictable because I think when you get to larger customers, predictable pricing is everything. And when you have a usage based system like PubNub that can have massive spikes and then downtime, if not our downtime, but the customer using less, I mean, I can create a lot of variability. So, that's kind of been the evolution of our thinking right now, but again, there's a lot of We could spend hours just on that.

Dan Balcauski: 42:19

Oh, man. I love that. There's so many good points. And for listeners, I want to have some takeaways all the way from the very first thing you said, which is implementing a pricing, approach. Pricing menu can be as much, if not more work than designing it. so, which is totally, not, understood by most people. So that don't. Don't forget that, creating a pricing metric that aligns with something your customers are actually measuring and is perceived, to have aligned with the value that they're getting of the product, is absolutely huge. And I think, what is lost in all of this, conversation around usage based pricing is exactly what you just mentioned, Todd, which is. you get, these trade offs between, transparency and predictability or, the fairness and predictability. and it's like, oh yeah, I use only a little, I only pay a little, but then, you get a big enterprise client and they're like, look, I can't have my AWS bill or PubNub bill, changing, 5X per month. Right. It just doesn't, not going to work. Todd, I could talk to you all day, but. I want to be respectful of your time and our audience time. So I'm just gonna ask you one final lightning round question. If I give you a billboard and you could put on there any advice for other CEOs trying to scale their B to B SaaS companies, what would you put on it?

Todd Greene: 43:27

I wish I had some glib, awesome answer. My best answer is don't do it. There's already too many SaaS companies out there, but that wouldn't be fair. what's it, what's good advice? I really was trying to prepare a really good way to kind of close this and think about an answer there. but I don't know that I have to, I think, what I've been telling my team really, and no one really likes to hear this, but really for any business, but especially SaaS, the answer is grind. You just got to grind like there is no magic, right? It's just hard work and it takes a long time. 20 years, success overnight success story type of companies are all over the place, right? I think grind is the answer. it's, it just, there's no one magic bullet. It is an iterative amount of measurement, problem solving, trying things out, being able to say they failed and going on to the next thing. just grinding. I think that's really the answer.

Dan Balcauski: 44:12

Just grinding. Love it. Todd, if listeners want to learn more about you or PubNub, is there anywhere on the internet we could send them?

Todd Greene: 44:21

Absolutely. The cool thing about PubNub is, A, it works for just about any software project, and B, it is free to sign up. Try every iota of our documentations online. Go to pubnub. com, P U B N U B dot com. You can see us, on LinkedIn, PubNub, Twitter, X at PubNub. but really just, again, very easy to sign up. If you throw a developer at it, we used to have a thing, if you can't get it running in 20 minutes, we'll pay you 20. It's really easy to try things out. And if you have any need, To have anything in your app that's real time and synchronous, whether it's, tracking locations of things in real time, whether it's chat applications, whether it's, healthcare collaboration, you name it, we're a great place to start.

Dan Balcauski: 44:58

Well, Todd, we will certainly put those. In the show notes, for our listeners, all those links that you just mentioned. Everyone, that wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. A massive thank you to Todd for sharing his journey, insights, and invaluable tips. For our listeners, if you found this conversation as enlightening as I did, remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. Till next time, keep innovating, growing, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.