Growing Pains and SaaS Gains with Avi Freedman, CEO of Kentik

Dan Balcauski hosts Avi Freedman, Co-founder and CEO of Kentik, on SaaS Scaling Secrets. They discuss Kentik's evolution under Avi's leadership as a network intelligence platform, his extensive background in recurring revenue, and lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey. Avi recounts his career from founding the first internet service provider in Philadelphia to serving at Akamai, shares his 'superhero transformation moment,' and delves into the challenges of leading Kentik. The conversation explores the nuances of product-market fit, the impact of early-stage funding, the importance of self-service customer onboarding, and the perpetual complexities of pricing and packaging in SaaS businesses.

00:58 Avi Freedman's Journey in SaaS
05:59 Challenges and Insights in Leading Kentik
08:01 Product Market Fit and Customer Engagement
13:19 Funding and Bootstrapping Experiences
21:12 Scaling Challenges in Sales
22:17 Customer Engagement Strategies
23:16 Product Investments and Improvements
26:16 Pricing and Packaging Insights
29:46 Balancing Technical Expertise and Leadership
34:19 Reflections on Leadership and Growth

Guest Links
avi@kentik.com
avi@avi.net
Avi on X/Twitter
Avi on LinkedIn
avi.net

Transcript

Dan Balcauski: 0:20

Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up. B2B SaaS Companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to speak with Avi Freedman. Avi is the co-founder and CEO of Kentik, a leading network intelligence platform. Under his leadership, Kentik has evolved from serving technical champions to becoming a critical enterprise platform for network visibility and performance. Before founding Kentik in 2014, Avi served as VP of network infrastructure for Akamai during their rapid growth. Let's dive in. Welcome Avi to SaaS scaling Secrets.

Avi Freedman: 0:49

Thanks, Dan for having me.

Dan Balcauski: 0:51

I'm excited for our conversation today. We were wrapping right before the episode about some of our shared love of the network infrastructure space. I gave folks a little bit of taste of your background, but can you tell us about your journey in the SaaS world?

Avi Freedman: 1:02

Sure. So I've been doing recurring revenue. Which is not necessarily SaaS since I started my first non-con consulting company. I did database consulting in, in, in the eighties, but I started the first internet provider in Philadelphia in 1992, so that was recurring revenue. It looked like a multi-line bulletin board system, but you know, happened to have the internet inside. And then I was at an ISP where we build people, recurring called above net. And then I was at Akamai, which did still infrastructure but recurring. And then I actually took a brief diversion, if you've ever seen the show, Silicon Valley towards boxes. We built sensors that watched packets and everyone said, what do we do with all this data? And then I said, aha. Would you pay me, to have this in my lab? And they're like, we'd rather have you run it as a service. I'm like, awesome. And SaaS was just becoming a thing. So decided to move to the Bay Area and raise venture capital and start out the SaaS journey that way.

Dan Balcauski: 2:01

Well, we'll dive into some of those experiences during this conversation.'cause you have a rich history in recurring revenue that I'm sure you've seen. Many things evolve and change and probably a bunch stay the same, that for whatever reason the marketers wanna call new and different. But. Before we go there, on your journey, like everyone has what I think of as a superhero transformation moment. So you're Peter Parker, normal high school student. One day, get bit by a radioactive spider. You wake up the next day, you're Spider-Man. What has that been for you in your journey?

Avi Freedman: 2:31

I was very fortunate that when I was eight, so this is 1978, so think way back machine. So computers were not littered all over the place. Then my uncle gave me a book on basic at a family Seder, a family dinner, and my father was like, oh, we have computers that run basic at the hospital. And he had a wizard working for him, Steve Robinson, who had fallen into the Unix camp in the way back. And he became, available as a mentor to me and taught me that anything that some human created you can understand given sufficient time and patience. And so I think that insight made real and of, plus growing up in a day when you actually could understand everything about a computer has been the superpower risk. Thing for me, and I see a lot of people that don't really believe that they can understand anything, and I think it holds them back. So,

Dan Balcauski: 3:27

That's what such a great confluence of factors there. It reminds me, I think you're talking to me from Seattle and I think there was a story about Bill Gates was one of the few, folks kind of early on with access to a computer that he could work on. And that definitely is highly transformative in his, for his life and hopefully yours. I remember I in I think fifth grade, we had some computers in our classroom and we programmed in basic, and I got the computer to do the Star Wars theme because it and I think I had some little crappy asie art animations of stars, like, like Supernova,

Avi Freedman: 4:01

On the other hand, it is worth noting most of the people that I know that are, I will just. I know this is not, there's a lot that goes into what we call intelligence. The people that I would say that are at the next level that I want to be around that push my, strain, my understanding or whatever, a lot of them can take the fun out of it sometimes, because I remember I got an a DD card, a music card, sorry, I called it a music card for my computer that I had bought with some of my Bar mitzvah money. And I went to this wizard, Steve, and he is like. Oh yeah, that's just an a DD card, a d to a card. You're like, would you like me to explain to you how that works? And I was like, but he plays music. And he is like, no, no, no. This is just math and signals. Let me explain it to you. It is like, but he plays music. So, sometimes familiarity, you have to retain wonder in the world. Even as you under you understand it grows.

Dan Balcauski: 4:47

Well, yes some, somebody at some level has to understand the brutal details, but let the kids have their magic As long as they can last. Well, so that's, so, that's fascinating. And obviously your passion for technology has not waned as it's been evidenced throughout your career. You find yourself, co-founding Kentik 2014 and now leading the company as CEO. For folks who aren't aware, can you just give us a 32nd overview of what Kentik is?

Avi Freedman: 5:11

Sure. If I talk to an Uber driver, I would say we make the internet go. If I, Talk to a level down we make all the infrastructure fast and secure for enterprises worldwide. So we take network telemetry metrics, traffic, data performance routing, all the stuff about how things connect to each other and how applications run through networks and our big data platform. Use ai, generate insights, poke people on the shoulders, say, Hey, you have a problem here. Here's what you should probably do to fix it. Mostly around security, cost optimization, performance. So we're a SaaS company, 200 people and growing, focusing, but on enterprise and also have a large service provider business.

Dan Balcauski: 5:50

You had mentioned in the intro that, obviously you had found an ISP. You've been in recurring revenue. You obviously rode the wave of Akamai during their incredible growth. What surprised you about leading Kentik that maybe you wouldn't have guessed from your experiences prior to starting that this company?

Avi Freedman: 6:09

Oh, I mean, how much I suck at being CEO. I mean, I was like, well, I got this. I was, I ran engineering. I worked for, well, the CTO Co-founder at above net, about a month, maybe a month and a half after I started at Akamai. I merged a group run by a friend of mine who was one of the a, my co-founders with the technology group. He had run the business side group of the network group and ran that, reporting to the CEO was, I've been, I've started a couple smaller companies and sold them and I was like, okay, well I know how to do this. And, it turns out that especially the go to market side, a lot has changed since since I worked closely and, working besides. A lot of the go to market versus having ultimate responsibility for it. Very different. But again, think back to before, I started Kentik in 2014. So think back to the last I had been in enterprise sales, was. Really more actively involved. 99 to 2004. So obviously a big jump from there to there. And, SaaS coming into a thing and all the similarities between legal, SaaS, marketing, SaaS technical SaaS that everyone was figuring out at the same time. So, all the things I need to learn and ways to do better at building a company, building the product, going to market, all that stuff.

Dan Balcauski: 7:21

Well, I absolutely love the vulnerability and transparency and I think you are in good company among the impressive leaders I've talked to on this show where something about a growth mindset and constantly running up against your own deficiencies and. Figure out how to overcome them. Is the reason that you know, a lot of folks such as yourself are successful? Because we don't take no for an answer and we we realize we constantly need to overcome new challenges like every CEO faces challenges along the way. As you think about your journey growing and Scaling Kentik to the point it's got today, is there a specific challenge that just stands out to you, a crucible moment that's kind of, really shaped your view of how to grow a SaaS company?

Avi Freedman: 8:01

I think it's worth as you grow as a company, going back to what we saw early on at Kentik and what I advise founders, which is, we talked to our first a hundred customers, and I think half of them both asked. How much does it cost, which is a really good buying signal, and when can I have it? And so if you're a growing company and you're thinking about things that customers are asking for, it's like, oh, well I, my customer, I buy this from them and I want this and I want that. If you then show it to people. And they're not asking those questions. And instead they say, oh, that looks interesting. I might try that. Maybe that isn't worth going deep on until you get the right kind of customer engagement. So, just remember your search for product market fit and and and bring that to your future explorations as you try to grow the platform.

Dan Balcauski: 8:54

I love that. So, how much does it cost and when can I have it now? At the beginning of that, so was that were those signals that you were having sort of, when you had, before you had built the product, or I guess what stage of the company were you at where you kind of noticed that pattern?

Avi Freedman: 9:08

I mean, the product at the time was the front. So, I, it turns out I'm really good at building distributed systems and databases. Dom and CSS make me. Like angry, like I actually want to go, use the kicking bag. So, our front end for this product that we were demoing, basically the insight was as opposed to companies where you have worked large amount of data coming in, observability really hard to store it all. So we built distributed system, let people ask any questions, so they don't need to know in advance what they want to ask. They can solve these problems with complex hybrid infrastructure. So to demonstrate it. W the front end was a con jobb emitting. HTML with JavaScript for high charts that had data embedded in it. And then every five seconds it would go do a database query and then it would auto refresh. That was the ui because like, web, website, I don't even know web office was a thing back then, but whatever. I mean, you don't want to get me involved in the front end stuff. It'll be like, go to the website there, I fixed it. It'll look like that. But code. So it was a, here's what it could be and then I would quickly use. Usually for giggles I would use cathode on OSX, which looks like an old CRT terminal and I would show them that they could use the CLI to ask any question in SQL or whatever. And some of the first nerds were like, Ooh, that's cool.'cause at Akamai we did that. We wanted to use sql, but it turns out no one wants to use SQL for this. But and so, but people would see it and go, aha, that's the kind of question I want to answer. So it was enough of a thing that we could, they could see we were taking the telemetry, we were storing it, we were letting them ask any question. And they're like, okay, you need to finish this. No one actually was ready to pay for what we had at the time. But we were looking for that signal and we did get some of the biggest networks in the world to send us their telemetry without an NDA without. I mean, we were a company, but we had no money in the bank, all that, just because I helped to train them in the nineties about how routing works. And they knew I was a good guy. So, that helped the system and it helped us demo with some stuff. And I had a company doing Usenet, which is this old. I, well, got it. Pains me to say it's like Reddit, but Reddit is like, he's not, not using it as like Reddit, but lots of computers, distributed systems. So we had a demo environment and we could show people, based on that. So, yeah, it was

Dan Balcauski: 11:24

Well, for those listening I take with extreme irony, your hatred of Dom and CSS when sitting behind you on your bookshelf is Pearl Cookbook and Pearl for Dummies. Which if anyone has ever dealt with Pearl it's enough to get your blood pressure

Avi Freedman: 11:37

No. I completely disagree. PHP is uppity web pages, right? People say PHPs, like I say, I, you can write a pearl if you are so inclined. But you can also write C like Pearl and I have written some fairly large systems. It is possible to write good pro. Most people don't,

Dan Balcauski: 11:54

It's possible. It's, yes, it is possible. I will let you win that argument. But you mentioned something about, okay, so, so first of all, I love this, so like having, getting signal on what you wanna buy, or that customers are asking, buying questions, when can I have it? Urgency and how much will it cost? They're already thinking about, swiping that

Avi Freedman: 12:13

Budget. Budget. Yes,

Dan Balcauski: 12:14

budget, right. So, so those are really important because, I spend all my time in pricing and packaging and, it's unfortunate how often

Avi Freedman: 12:22

for doing the Lord's work.

Dan Balcauski: 12:24

Well, we try, but it's very sad when I get a call from a company that says, Hey, we built this thing, we're gonna ship it in 30 days and we need to think about pricing and packaging. And I said, nobody has asked the market what if they're willing to pay for this thing yet. This seems like a terrible mistake of resources. Like we did not have this conversation earlier than this, but, you talked about having no money in the bank and on a, remind me on a previous podcast you were on, I heard you discuss some of the pros and cons of getting funding outside of your customers early on and what that can do. And and I was curious if you could elaborate on your perspective and what you see as kind of the. Maybe the undiscussed side effects of taking funding as a growing company and what that can, like, maybe what that helps you like focus on or not focus on to your peril downstream.

Avi Freedman: 13:19

I had worked with venture capitalists. At Above net and Akamai talking to their board. There were folks on the board that were venture capitals, but I'd never started a company with venture backed money from the beginning. And so, I, was reading about this and thinking about scale. Companies thought it was a big market. There was billions of dollars of revenue to be had. And I looked at it and said, okay, is the market big enough? Yes. Do I think I know first customers that can buy and that I can. I don't think triple, triple, double forever or triple, triple, triple, double forever, whatever that rule of thumb is, go 1, 3, 9 and then double forever was a, was a thing. Then it was like, okay, big enough market we could do that. And so venture both growth can accelerate that. And I'm not unhappy with the path that we took, but if I could do it over again, I would have, as you're suggesting. Bootstrapped for another year or so because the first six months of 2014, really before we raised, I was using computers that I had running in this Usenet company that I had that was making some money. So I was sucking money from myself from other stuff to do that. It was basically self-funding, so I would've self-funded or maybe gotten some angel stuff, but more self-funded and bootstrapped for the year or two. And the reason for that is not minimizing dilution. The reason is that it would have put what people now call product led a little more of that DNA into the beginning of the company in terms of onboarding and systems and processes for that. Not only the UI and design of it which once you start designing the company to have every customer have. A sales team and a customer success team, which is needed absolutely for a lot of these larger enterprise customers and people are running the most complex infrastructure in the world using Kentik. And, we solved at the beginning to do the super set of that. It might have been better and left us with the base of a simpler thing that we could do more product led with to compete again, like more with the SolarWinds. Like you just need something basic. If we had done that kind of bootstrapping and then we would still have, all the more advanced technology because we built the system underneath to be able to support it. And so there's some technical examples and product examples, but, I think that it's, we've spent a lot of time. Four, five, three and four years ago, moving to taking the trial, which we've always had, and making it even easier for people to self-serve and get in and onboard and all that, that if we had done that at the beginning, probably would've been easier than taking the company at scale and building some of that DNA in.

Dan Balcauski: 16:08

Well, I live this we were talking before we hit record where I was at SolarWinds, and a lot of people didn't really get this from the outside, but you know, when we would acquire. Companies and stick them into our go to market model. I was on the product team there and a lot of our focus was not on adding a bunch of bells and whistles from a, feature perspective that demo really well. And of course, sales and customers would ask us for those things. But because of the go to market discipline that was there, a significant portion of our roadmap resources were just dedicated to making sure that. Customers could self-service on their own. So, so for folks who haven't lived there, so, so is that mostly the stuff that you're referring to where you're able to kind of paper that over with people instead of solving that through technology?

Avi Freedman: 16:54

and it's we rarely, the only times we've done NRC non-recurring, revenue is small customers that want training that we would give big customers for free. People that are like, I'd like to pay for this POV. Okay, sure, you can pay for the POV if you'd like. It's not like we build things as one-offs, but. I think it's solving for the best on, subset. Now there's whole schools of thought about, are you trying to get people to activate with one thing? Are you trying to show them less of everything? What are you trying to do in that onboarding? Or if you have a freemium or a cheap as I call it, something, what are you trying to do there? That's a whole thing, but just, I'll just say onboarding. So for example, in Kentik, a lot of our customers. Really need to be able to understand what all the parts of the network are. And we have systems to let them do that that were built for initially for some of the most sophisticated customers in the world who their routers move packets. They have things called interfaces or what the packets go in and out of. And. Interfaces can have names, and the names can be like backbone data center peering if they're connecting to another network, whatever. So we built this system for companies that have those interfaces programmatically deployed that lets us, lets them tell us what all the parts of the network are from that, and we built that for that first wave of customers. And then you discovered that a lot of networks in the enterprise that had been around for. Since this thing called Sneakernet, if there's an interface description, it's wrong. So we actually built it for sets of people that were like the biggest web companies and service providers in the world who were like, aha, Tik, I need this. And then going to the enterprise. It turns out maybe it would've been a better way of doing that if we had built it for the minimum common denominator and built the product so that it didn't want to know all that advanced classification. Again, it would've been a little bit easier for us to. Take some novice people because a lot of people, you come in and you want to see something without doing a lot of setups. So we would've removed some setup steps, which we have since it's actively done in cloud. It's a lot easier. It's harder and easier in different ways. But there's some of that process we would've done. And again, like at SolarWinds you had this thing called flack. Not, I really haven't seen in the SaaS world. Anyone do. Like, have you seen any big successful SaaS companies use community forum based support

Dan Balcauski: 19:24

No. I've seen people try, but it's really hard.

Avi Freedman: 19:26

so SolarWinds is really the grandmom, granddad of SaaS in many ways.'cause you look at the SaaS, you look and they're not SaaS metrics, it's renewal and subscriptions. They're very SaaS like. I mean, when you got gross retention. On the support stuff, in the high nineties and net in the, above a hundred. And it's like, is this a SaaS business or downloadable software for a long time, even post the breach. It is very impressive. But the thwack, the community support model, people try community support, but it's not exactly, usually it's not run by product. Like, what? And then there on the other hand, when we were, we have partnership with New Relic, I was like shocked because. New Relic had just released a new platform. So I went to town and opened like 50, like, Hey, this is confusing, this is wrong, this is broken. Every single one, a product manager got back to me and I was like, wow, this is like the summon product button. It's like with the complete opposite of guides some group conversations to get the feedback. So, it's interesting.

Dan Balcauski: 20:24

Well, I'm curious, so kind of going back to what we were talking about where the, this early funding sort of maybe allows you to, to not worry as much about solving with technology and you can solve with people and kind of paper it over as you're sort of accelerating, growth in that space, I guess, is there. Is it the sort of thing where the ca the genie's sort of, outta the bottle at that point? Is there any way, as a leader, you've been able to sort of exert pressure back on the organization to be able to focus on, assisting your, go to market with technology and not just, by handholding with more people?

Avi Freedman: 21:02

yes. It's just harder when you're already running it at Scout, so. I mean, there's very traditional sit with the CFO physics of a company. Reasons why this is helpful, because, Scaling is expensive. Reps can't be productive faster than a typical sales cycle, right? Because they're gonna, have to make us, start a cycle. And until they start having some cycles closed, they can't be, have attainment unless they're just walking into what we used to call house accounts or, someone else's account. And so if your sales cycle is six months. Then your reps are not gonna be at 80 per, productive for six months, which means that there's a limit to, and in fact, it might take longer than that in enterprise sales, which means that you're investing ahead of that, which means you're burning, and then that affects your cac, payback your customer acquisition cost payback. And so, like, even at our most. Let's take the top 5% complex customers away who run again, like, I mean, they just run crazy infrastructure and they might wanna buy four of our products and do everything. So that's a whole separate question, is should you try to get them on one product and then, drive the NDR or not? But, 95% of our customers, we have not spent, probably more than 15 hours with them in the POV. Probably less including like work on our backend, but these people are very busy. So you get a shot at them and then the next meeting might be in two weeks. And especially post covid, it's not like you're gonna go swarm them for two days and just make it all happen, on pre, on site because there's no on site for them to go to, even if they have an office because it's a distributed team. So if you have 10. Interactions in A POV and it takes one to two weeks between them to do inter, discovery and some stuff, even if, the more that they can do themselves and the easier it is to do that, that can take a couple months off a sale cycle, which is a material effect to a Scaling business. So there's real economic reasons why you might wanna do that, and we've done a lot of investments in. I mean, in the product we have a self-driving demo with tool tips so that people can do discovery and say, oh, I might want the cloud product so that generates pipeline. Or they can say, I'm trying to set this up and how does it look once it's set up, a lot of that investment, it just would've been more, easier and had more impact had we done it earlier. And we've needed to, even just things like that we could be doing better at like. Customer analytics. We use Pendo. We love Pendo. But are there ways we could be using it better? Yes. Could we have done some of that design into the product a little better? Probably so like how do we enable the field? How would do we enable customers? That's continual improvement. And the more focus you have on that earlier, the less, work you need to do. Training everybody on what that even could mean and then building it, et cetera, which has been a journey for us that we're doing pretty well on. I mean, I tell people in the company'cause most startups would love to have our problems. It doesn't mean we don't have problems and things we could do better at. But you know, the more you focus on some of these things earlier, the easier it is.

Dan Balcauski: 24:19

I think really key what part of what you just said there was, looking at things like that, sales. Cycle length and how little time you really have with the customer and how much, or the prospect and how much ability you give them to work without you in the room or on a call like that has meaningful impact on top line. Business metrics. And I think one of the, one of the traps that companies can get into is you say like, oh, well, we'll always have a sales engineer there if they run into trouble. Or we'll have a customer success rep there, right. To help. And it becomes, and that was, I think one of the pressures, as a product person at SolarWinds that we didn't have was. There was no customer success sales engineers, I think if they exceeded being on more than 10% of any given any deals that went through your product, like your product was kind of failing because the cost model was not effective there. So there was, we rarely could reach in that bag. So, but I like the idea of being able to kind of. Focus in on, hey there's actually real business value and allowing your customers to, to move forward, without you in the room. And that has real, real

Avi Freedman: 25:25

Which happens to also maybe make them happier and, add to virality and have other side effects of benefit too.

Dan Balcauski: 25:32

Yeah. Well, you mean they don't just love being on calls with salespeople all the time. I.

Avi Freedman: 25:37

They love being able to figure things out. The challenge is some of our happiest customers are like, leave me the hell alone. I'm happy. Why are you talking to me? Why are you asking me whether I'm happy? Of course I'm happy you would know about it if I wasn't happy. So it could be hard with, technologists, especially prima technologists to figure out what the right balance of not bugging them and being, having that engagement is so.

Dan Balcauski: 26:00

Well, well, you've mentioned different. Elements of, monetization in this our discussion so far of like, hey, do we land and expand? How much do we balance sort of the first money in the door versus their net revenue retention and a dollar retention increasing over time. As you have grown Kentik, like, have there been any good lessons you've learned about how to, how pricing and packaging and has affected your go-to-market model?

Avi Freedman: 26:25

Oh my God. Pricing and packaging. That's a whole thing. Do you know companies that love their, that, that are like, oh my God our pricing and packaging is the most awesome thing ever and only helps to accelerate the business and everyone loves it and understands it, and it optimizes every opportunity. Have you seen companies like that?

Dan Balcauski: 26:41

The most common is everyone is unhappy with their pricing. Like they're unhappy with the current state of their product. It it's functional, but it could be a lot better is usually sort of the status quo.

Avi Freedman: 26:52

Yes, ours could be better. It is not slowing the business down. But you know, we also have said we're not trying to be primarily product led. We wanna be, product discoverable, but you can't self fulfill on your own. You do need, you can set up and be ready to pay. And some people do that without and say, leave me the hell alone. I'm happy. But then you do have to talk to somebody and we won't draw it out. If someone's ready to buy, we're happy to take their money. But we're not trying to be purely product led and let people self fulfill and then do that for various reasons we can talk about. So I I think that we're. At Kentik we, you could think of it as basically having a platform fee and then charging in various ways based on usage. But it's not the 25 cents per gigabyte or whatever.'cause no one knows. How many flows per second, or metrics per second, or whatever that is. And they need a way to think about it. That's the common way they do. And it could probably be better and probably help the business better. There's more around quoting and having to explain it. Or at renewable time could probably be better for us. But you know, we also debate every. Probably not year, but couple years, should we simplify it, et cetera, and have come back to not doing that. So

Dan Balcauski: 28:08

So you do discuss every year, which is I do wanna flag, I applaud you for it. Okay. Alright. Well, well, that's better than most I see a lot of people are like, oh yeah, we did pricing five years ago. That's totally fine. Assuming that you still live in 2020 co environment or whatever it might be. I am curious, so just about that, like, is that, like, how have you instituted a conversation even every two years?'cause some. CEOs are just like, oh, yeah. Like it never comes up, so we never talk about it. Or like, is there, like, are you forcing that in in your, yearly planning

Avi Freedman: 28:38

Oh no, the field's like our pricing needs to be better and here's some things that don't work. And so we just queue it up and say, okay, well we just talked about this a year ago and like, what's the new data? And then, so it could be less. It, it could be more formal, I guess, but it's not a, it's not a cadence. Like when we think about are we focusing on the right strategy? Do we, are we tracking the right competitors? All that stuff is more regular cadence, yearly, or six months or whatever. Then pricing and packaging just happens to have been more organically. Every couple years the stuff bubbles up and we look at the pile and say, okay, well what's working? Not working? Should we do something? I will tell you that we did. One time, maybe twice, trying to get some consultants involved. I, there might be some times that that's worked. I don't think it's a function of which consultants, it's it's a hard problem. It's a hard problem. There's a lot of optimization to be done, and sometimes you need some creativity. And maybe the next time we'll try taking some of the newest people at the company or finding and asking them they've gotten a little bit into it, but not, they don't know all the sins of the past, so.

Dan Balcauski: 29:46

I wanna circle back to something we were talking about earlier in the conversation. So obviously you've got a very deep technical background and, you also said, it's like there's so many things you've learned about how not good of a leader you are. I guess, how have you thought which I, apparently you're doing a fine job. So, but how have you learned to kind of balance your sort of deep technical expertise with what I'm sure are very other non-technical aspects of the business that you have to run? Like how do you see that that impacts how you think about making business decisions? And and if so, how?

Avi Freedman: 30:22

I mean, it's true that I always come at it from a, like, where are the markets going? What's possible with technology? What holes are need to be filled? The customers are saying need to be filled, right? Because ultimately creating a business for me, tickles the same things. Well, it's a means to an end. Yes, you'd like to make money, but having the best you can create a product that solves a problem. But if you can't bring it to market, does it matter? Right? Are you actually solving problems if it's not, if no one's using it, so. To get people using it. Unless you're taking a more mineral list or open source pro, approach or whatever. The traditional way to do that is to start a company and bring it to market. And so then you have the question, is there someone that I'd like to work for? Or is it gonna be me running the company? So if you decide that there's,'cause that's a big risk, having someone else lead it. And I have always, I. I and a lot of our customers like having knowing that the, all the way up to the top, there's an understanding of what we're doing and why. There've been some very successful CEOs who come at it from, I want to build a company that sells things and is less and she or he is less particular about which things those are. But that's not me. So, if I am going to make a company and. Don't want to work for someone else doing it, then I need to make that company. But I still come at it from the perspective of how does this help us build the right things and sell them versus a little bit more of the forming and shaping of the company and optimizing it and thinking about that. That's. Equally important, but maybe a little bit, still not where my brain goes. So I think of it a lot as where my brain naturally goes is to all these interesting technology and market things, and I have to make it go to these other things also as like a crown job. Whereas there's probably other leaders that, that's, they're really thinking at all times about optimizing the organization, optimizing the go-to market, and then wanted to make sure that the product technology strategies aligned. So, I knew I had a lot of learning to do. On the other hand I. I don't know what the hell's happening with hip bro. Mark Zuckerberg nowadays. I'm glad he is happy with and with Priscilla's stretched cayenne limo. But you could look that

Dan Balcauski: 32:43

I've not seen that. Yeah.

Avi Freedman: 32:44

I. I think he and I share. We both have a GT three A, I guess, but when he started I was like, looking, reading and looking. I'm like, man, I'm a much, I know a lot more than that guy. Practically speaking. Not, Not, like intellect and like, and I look at it early. Zuckerberg and then even within three years, and I'm like, wow, look at how much he's learned. So it's like, well, if he figured it out, then I could probably figure it out. A lot of his business and Scaling stuff. And I had seen organizations, but, probably didn't put enough into organization design like some, founders do, which again you catch up with once you're,'cause it's hard when you're like, you go from, can this be a company to, is this going to be a company to. Like, should we be a company to, is this going to be a company? To, okay, we're a company to, will we survive, to, can we scale to like, okay, are, are we going to exist to, are we un killable, we're probably at that later stage. I don't wanna be, too proud, but, we're at scale. People want it. We just, it's how do we optimize it? And in the very early stage of should this be a thing, can this be a thing? The, it's hard to, for me to put too much energy into all the other stuff about the scaffolding.'cause you're busy. I'm, for me, I'm busy. Like, do people want it? Will they pay for it? Can we start doing that? And but there's other people that have had a lot of success by being very thoughtful about all those things very early on. And next time I will be more thoughtful about them.'cause I've seen, in a fast growth company, you just don't have a lot of time to work on those things. And they're more painful to, takes a lot more energy to. Change the DNA and put these things into place once you're already 50 people, even much less, 200 or 500.

Dan Balcauski: 34:19

well, you obviously have a passion for the technology and the product and making sure that product is useful to customers. And obviously that's had good outcomes for the company, I guess, and maybe less so for, less of a passion or interest of the organizational design and maybe other things related to

Avi Freedman: 34:35

It is interesting, but it's just not where my brain DNA goes. It's not where my priorities go. It's not what my EDD is chewing on, so.

Dan Balcauski: 34:43

I suffer from the same diagnosis. And I think it, a wise man once said, know thyself as a first step to life fulfillment. So, given that, like, as you've scaled the company, how do you, so, you obviously have this passion and this is where you naturally gravitate towards, but obviously the business still needs to grow around you. How have you set yourself up for success such that you're able to focus on what is. Where you're best suited but then it also makes sure that the other things that need to happen happen. How have you thought about sort of building the organization

Avi Freedman: 35:10

hire, hire, a team of great people that have different skills and are. Work together well and are comfortable telling you, if there's problems and you're full of shit. And identifying the poops on the floor and saying they need to be picked up and I mean, you have to have a team that works well together that compliments, so.

Dan Balcauski: 35:27

Well, I would love to di dive super far into that, but we are running outta time, so I'm actually gonna start closing us out here with a couple of rapid fire closeout questions. Good to that. So, if all your day-to-day responsibilities could be handled, everything would cruise along fine without you, you dedicate a full year to study any subject you wanted in depth, all your other responsibilities taken care of, what would you study and why?

Avi Freedman: 35:51

I would get to more fluency on French and Hebrew and learn Spanish. Because Spanish would be a lot less, lot more practical, even though I like French better. And I feel like not quite a citizen of the, it's like partially enabled. I have so enough knowledge to be dangerous, but if I actually lived in either country for like six months, it'd be fine.'cause I used to be able to read not newspapers, but you know, books and stuff. So, I would probably do that. And find that when I use my brain differently sometimes the best insights pop out about other things. So that's probably what I would do If I had a year off. I won't, but I probably won't. I'll probably just start another company. But if I were to do that I'd like to have time to do that.

Dan Balcauski: 36:32

Awesome. Starting becoming fluent and border languages. If. With, as you think about all the amazing people you've had a chance to work with, is there anyone who just pops mind and had a disproportionate effect on the way you think about growing companies?

Avi Freedman: 36:46

Growing companies. Um, George Conrad's was not was the CEO brought in at Akamai when he had been at IBM. There's just an amazing set of key people at Akamai. I was there 9.9 years. My brother recently passed 25 years there. And he was the first really great leader that I got to observe. And, I spent some time with KBT, Kevin at SolarWinds and watching him lead again, he's not. I say this with all respect, not the here's, oh, we need to build that. That's not where his brain goes, but consistency, communication, it's a thing with my a DD brain. I need to get, better at. And watching him, CEO, it was really instructive. So I haven't lived up to, being as excellent at some of those things as I'd like. But in terms of just thinking about how do you build a company and run it and. And and lead, just being around him and, I try to spend time with other people when I Brad Smith, who is, I think at Intuit, I used meet people like, wow, they communicate really well. I wanna be more like that. So that's probably not the most day to day, but it's more aspirational. What I would like to be like at some point. So.

Dan Balcauski: 38:03

Perfect. If I gave you a billboard and you could put any advice on there for other CEOs trying to scale their B2B SaaS companies, what would it say?

Avi Freedman: 38:12

It's your job to suck. Did you see the movie Keeping The Faith?

Dan Balcauski: 38:16

I have not.

Avi Freedman: 38:17

That's a old movie at this point, but Ben still is a rabbi and there's a 13-year-old kid, or 12-year-old, whatever, practicing his tow proportion for his Bar mitzvah, which is a lifecycle event, if you're Jewish and he's. Purposely, I mean, he's sucking in the movie, he's purposely sucking. He's like, I can't do this. I suck. And then somebody's like, it's your job to suck. You're 13 years old. This is supposed to be hard. So, just think about it like that. It's your job to suck. Most companies would love to have your problems. So just keep things in perspective,

Dan Balcauski: 38:47

That's amazing. Avi, this has been a blast. If listeners wanna connect with you, learn more about Kentik, how can they do that?

Avi Freedman: 38:53

avi@ick.com. avi@avi.net. Avi Friedman on Twitter, LinkedIn. I don't know some other things too, probably.

Dan Balcauski: 39:00

I will put those links in the show notes for listeners. Everyone that wraps up this episode of Sask Scaling. Secrets. Thank you to Avi for sharing his journey, insights, and valuable tips for our listeners. If you found this conversation as enlightening anxiety to remember, subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes.