Steve King is a five-time CEO with many exits to boot and now sits on the boards of exciting companies. With more than 25 years of leadership experience in the information technology sector, he has demonstrated a wealth of experience and complementary strengths, notably his proven expertise in Sales, Marketing and Financial Leadership and ability to execute in highly competitive environments. Prior to joining DocuSign, King led venture-backed Virtela and ZANTAZ as president and CEO.
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Joining E*TRADE During the Dot-Com Bubble
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We only had a handful of customers, but the largest financial services firm in the world at the time was our customer. We had optimized our platform to scale to that level. We became one of the only games in town with a purpose-built platform for high-volume email archiving where you could actually retrieve the emails in the case of a regulatory investigation or a discovery request.
We were building our own hardware and establishing our own data centers. It was a very capital-intensive business and very hard to manage. Our customers recognized that as well. They gave us credit for the fact that we were doing a reasonably good job. That's why we were able to grow the business the way we did.
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AS: Welcome to the Experience-focused Leaders podcast! I am privileged to introduce you to one of our mentors at RELAYTO, friends, and investors. A cloud pioneer that we're privileged to have occasional chats with. We wanted to share the insights from one of these chats with Steve King.
Steve is a former CEO of DocuSign, but is really a five-time CEO with many exits. Now he sits on boards of exciting companies.
Without further introduction, Steve, tell us a little bit about your background and how you've come to pioneer a few cloud-based solutions, especially in the enterprise content space.
SK: Well, it's great to be here. You're right, I am a friend of yours and RELAYTO and have really been excited to watch the progress along the way. I will continue to be on the sidelines, rooting for success, which I am absolutely convinced will come or is coming.
Boy, I've been in Silicon Valley a long time, so I'm not sure how far back you want me to go. But I moved here from Seattle back in the mid-'80s because I wanted to be a part of this. I was reading about the emerging companies in Silicon Valley. In particular, I was in content and managing content. I was excited about the idea of taking this paper content and converting it into digital form. So it could be more easily managed, and information could be retrieved much more easily. The power and the knowledge in that information could be leveraged more easily.
I was with a company called Ziff Davis. It was owned by the Ziff family. They were in magazine publishing primarily. But they were experimenting with online information distribution. I wanted to be a part of that and came here to Silicon Valley.
Ultimately, what really propelled my career was leaving them after they were acquired by Thomson, which is now Thomson Reuters, and joining this quirky little company in Palo Alto called E*TRADE. I had some friends who had left Ziff, joined them, and were trying desperately to recruit me to do strategic business development. I said, “Why do I want to work for a broker? I'm not a financial services person.” They said, “No, you don't understand. This is a pure-play internet opportunity.”
I met with the CEO, Chris Kazacos, a very charismatic entrepreneur who really repositioned E*TRADE into a technology company. He had me convinced in five minutes of meeting with him that this was a great opportunity I should join. In the four years I was there, we grew from a couple hundred employees and 50 million in revenue to 5,000 employees and a billion and a half in revenue. It was a pretty chaotic time, but it was right in the middle of the dot-com bubble. As it was so chaotic and growth was exploding, there were lots of opportunities if you wanted to raise your hand and take on additional responsibilities.
I fast forward through the first three years, but last year I was asked to take over an e-trade ventures company called eOffering. By this time, we were pretty full of ourselves with how we had really disrupted retail trading, and we were going to do the same thing with investment banking. I had no investment banking background, but I was asked to sit on the board of this investment that we had made, which was supposed to get us into investment banking again. Short version: it wasn't going very well. They inserted me as the CEO. I was the accidental banker, an investment banker, and then I was the accidental CEO.
I had no intention of being the CEO, but somebody needed to come in because e-Trade had made a substantial investment, and they were not managing it well. I jumped in, and that really was my first CEO opportunity. I learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes, but it was a great experience. We ended up selling that to our primary competitor at that point. I moved on, and joined another technology company. I was ready to build something again, and e-Trade had made an investment in a company called Zantaz. It was archiving important documents that were created digitally or converting paper to digital form and then storing them in the cloud. It wasn’t called “the cloud”. Back then, it was called “on-demand”.
That was the first version of the cloud, or as a service provider, was another term, but we didn't want to really leverage that because we were more than storage. We had a smart platform to manage documents of all types. However, because this was late 2000 when I joined, we realized very quickly we weren't going to be able to raise any more money. It was really easy to come by up to that point, and we needed to ensure that we had enough runway to prove. We had a beachhead market, and the beachhead market we chose was archiving emails for financial services firms for compliance. There was no real defined market. There were no analysts, there was no Garther to report.
But having come from financial services, I knew that there was a requirement to do this. We happened to get a little bit lucky and had some tailwinds. The headwinds converted to tailwinds when things like Enron and WorldCom, the investment banks on Wall Street, were pumping up certain stocks to get more business, basically because of the simple way to describe it. All of a sudden, the SEC, regulators, and law firms realized the smoking gun in these cases seemed to always be in the email. These financial services were very motivated at that point to get something in place.
One of the advantages of SaaS today is ease of implementation. Everything's managed by somebody else. You don't have to build infrastructure. We had basically done that. We had optimized for large financial services firms because our largest customer was Citigroup.
We only had a handful of customers, but the largest financial services firm in the world at the time was our customer. We had optimized our platform to scale to that level. We became one of the only games in town with a purpose-built platform for high-volume email archiving where you could actually retrieve the emails in the case of a regulatory investigation or a discovery request.
We did sell that business as well, and from there, I decided to take a little time off.
AS: The Zantaz story is one of the first cloud successes that ended up with huge hundreds, multi, 100 million dollar exit. And then ended up as part of HP.
One of the things that I find interesting is that it would probably be much harder right now. SaaS is known, and people are comfortable. You don't need to justify the model that you're selling to go and pioneer a solution and unknown category to such conservative institutions. What allows you to succeed there and bring this company from the brink of collapse to such an early success and being a leader in the space effectively?
SK: There are a number of factors. First, we had a management team who believed in what we were doing. I still look back on that to this day in awe and wonder how the team was so committed and believed so much that we were on the right track. Two, our customers were the largest. Our initial beachhead customers were the largest financial services firms in the world. And we had access to senior-level people in the technology groups who were telling us we were on the right track.
They said, “We see everything. We have an opportunity to evaluate every technology there is. In essence, that's relevant to financial services. We can tell you what you're doing is unique. First, it's in the cloud. But two, you've created this infrastructure to scale. As long as you can scale, we're gonna have a mutually beneficial relationship. But the second we believe that you can't scale, you've hit the wall. Then we're gonna have to look for alternatives.”
So we were constantly motivated to improve our platform to scale with the largest financial institutions in the world. We got a reputation and became known on Wall Street as the go-to solution when you didn't wanna build it yourself. The other thing, though, that made it hard wasn't just convincing the customers. It was actually building it in a reliable way. I mean, you don't have the infrastructure that you can rent, like AWS or Google Cloud.
We were building our own hardware and establishing our own data centers. It was a very capital-intensive business and very hard to manage. Our customers recognized that as well. They gave us credit for the fact that we were doing a reasonably good job. That's why we were able to grow the business the way we did.
We eventually went to adjacent markets like electronic discovery for the legal field. That was a big market for us. We saw that that was a natural adjacency. We ended up making an acquisition to accelerate time to market and get into that market quickly. We had customers who were prospects, who said, “No, we'd never do this in the cloud”, who eventually became customers once they realized how hard this was to do.
We had market factors that shifted in our favor. We were the only one that was doing it the way that we were doing it. We were building to scale, and we had proven that we could do that.
AS: This is fantastic. We've fast-tracked to another CEO gig that you've done. That's near and dear to our hearts, and most of our audience knows DocuSign really well. There's a lot of interesting nuances that you and I were talking about. What made you realize that DocuSign had an opportunity before the rest of the market did? You took it from a very rough and unproven space. It was a really interesting technology to establish initial market leadership.
Guide us a little bit on that journey. What helped you see the potential of DocuSign and how you restructured the company to really innovate on the go-to-market? Not just pure enterprise, but I think you really were pioneering bottom-up and enterprise approaches at the same time. I think that would be really fascinating for anybody going to first principles to understand who were the first companies doing it? What were the challenges? Because when you're trying to do it yourself, sometimes I think we get too cut up and look at the latest examples. But I think you really learned the most from people.
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Changing Playbook and Market Strategies
In the early days of Zantaz, there was no market study and no Gartner research. There were some analysts who were curious, but none that were really sizing the market. Fast forward 10 years, and it's a multi-billion dollar market.
We had a CMO who really took the lead in developing a strategy, working with our board members, and other outside resources that we could tap. And so we just didn't, “Hey, wake up one day, this sounds like a good idea, let's go do this.” We put work into it, we let the data drive our decision-making.
(13:53-23:00)
SK: Great question. As we were talking about earlier, there's an E*TRADE connection and also a Zantaz connection. First, the E*TRADE connection. When I was first approached about the CEO opportunity at DocuSign, it immediately clicked for me because, at E*TRADE, we were big proponents of the idea of electronic signature. The way we're growing is opening accounts as quickly as possible. We knew we could automate the signature process. From opening brokerage accounts or bank accounts, there's a lot of documentation and administrative stuff. We lobbied the state of California to pass to make electronic signatures legal.
Well, that's great for California. But if you've got customers in Texas or New York and the law does not apply to them, then it's not that relevant. It turns out that law was then used as the template for the Federal E-Sign Act, which passed in 2001, I believe. I was approached about the DocuSign opportunity in 2009. DocuSign has been around for a number of years.
There have been a couple of other companies that were also trying to make a go of it in the E-Sign space, but no big companies and no Gartner research on E-Sign back then. And so I got to thinking maybe this E-Sign should just be a part of something else, a bigger application. I was able to do some research, use the product, talk to the management team and ultimately was convinced there is a market here. It was just being done the wrong way by the early incumbents.
Some of the early entrances into the E-Sign market were actually building on-premise solutions. Just imagine how cumbersome that would be to try to manage the E-Sign process. DocuSign was really the pioneer of doing it. There were others. EchoSign was acquired by Adobe. But DocuSign was leading in terms of product development in the cloud. I was convinced that there was a market here. And this is where the Zantaz connection comes in.
In the early days of Zantaz, there was no market study and no Gartner research. There were some analysts who were curious, but none that were really sizing the market. Fast forward 10 years, and it's a multi-billion dollar market.
That was really what propelled me to accept the offer. And then, once I got into the company and started to evaluate what was working and what wasn't, my playbook coming from Zantaz was the big enterprise.
AS: The big enterprise stuff, right?
SK: Still, we had multi-million dollar customers there. But I started to look at the landscape. Not just at what EchoSign and other E-Sign companies were doing. But also what Box, Dropbox, and others, what I call SaaS 2.0 at the time, were doing to go to market. And I realized that's what we needed to change. We had some false starts before I got there in the go-to-market strategy, but what was really working at the time was that mid-market. What Salesforce probably still calls commercial.
So we readjusted the investment that we were making. We had this high-low strategy. To push more resources down into commercial and even self-serve and reserve the enterprise sales motion for the opportunities that were obvious. Whereas before, we were trying to cultivate the enterprise market when it was probably too early. When we were having so much success, or relatively speaking success, in the commercial market, why not invest more there? So that's the short story.
AS: So you changed the playbook even though you had some traction.
You probably had a few early wins in the enterprise, and then you said, “But it's still a lot of hard work. It's hand-to-hand combat. Here we have momentum, we have happy customers and viral capacity built-in.” And then it's like, “If we work with this mid-market segment, it's gonna keep us disciplined and make the product even more amazing. Then it will help us eventually in the enterprise.”
So you're conserving your resources, you're focusing the business. But there must have been a big change. I would imagine every VC in the land was thinking, “Enterprise — big deals.” What were the tools and the conviction that you had, especially given your past success in the enterprise? Is it just the data? Is it a belief that you had to be different?
SK: By that time, we had built a management team. We'd filled some holes that existed. We had a CMO who really took the lead in developing a strategy, working with our board members, and other outside resources that we could tap. And so we just didn't, “Hey, wake up one day, this sounds like a good idea, let's go do this.” We put work into it, we let the data drive our decision-making.
We analyzed history and sales and realized that our growth engine continued to be that mid-market where there's less friction and lower customer acquisition costs. The other thing that DocuSign did, and then this had just been put in place before I got there. We continued to leverage it. It was a beachhead market in real estate.
Again, referring back to Zantas, our beachhead market is financial services. We knew we wanted to go beyond financial services, but we needed to prove that we had something that could scale and provide value that customers would pay a lot of money for. And with DocuSign, that being in real estate. In addition, it's a horizontal platform that is used by every industry you can think of today. But having the partnership with the National Association of Realtors and having them as an investor gave us some endorsement.
The other thing that we did very quickly was we put a partnership together with Salesforce. We became a premier partner. They became a customer. We had some early wins with their sales team, and that also helped fuel the business.
AS: So you have a combination of a horizontal platform with some trying to tap early adapters horizontally. But then, at the same time, DocuSign still has specific solutions for real estate if you go to the site. I think there are some markets where people expect that they're unique or they're large enough that there's a specific solution to them.
People are coming in M&A opportunity. These bankers come pitching you, etc., all the time, and you got pitched to acquire one of your competitors. I think a lot of people don't really know what's going on in these situations and what's the thought process. Why do you invest, why do you not invest? Shed us some light. It's a pretty well-known part of the market. EchoSign is the company that I'm thinking of. It's not past history, so there's nothing sensitive in there. It would be good to get a little bit of a perspective of a CEO, of a potential buyer. How you're thinking about that opportunity, and how do you think about it now from perspective?
The Strategy of Acquisition and Growth
I believe that if you're gonna sell into enterprise, sell in B2B, you need to have a plan, a strategy for how you're gonna outmaneuver the large incumbents. Especially in the beginning, while you're establishing your market presence.
(23:00-31:38)
SK: Yeah, keep it high-level. Too many of the nitty-gritty details, but at Zantaz, we actually grew our business organically. We also made four acquisitions when I was there. At E*TRADE, my job was their strategic business development. I was responsible for the first two acquisitions the company did. I'm familiar with M&A as a way to grow. So I’m always open to those kinds of opportunities. But if you're gonna evaluate that first, doing a private-to-private deal is really hard. Establishing relative valuations, where are you gonna get the capital? On the other side, take your equity. Are you ever gonna be able to negotiate relative valuations to make it work?
We explored that opportunity. I believe there are a couple of things that have to be in place for something like that to work. Because it's so hard to pull off. There's gotta be obvious synergy. If it isn't really clear, it isn't gonna get you to market faster, plug a product gap, add substantial revenue, get you into customers that you aren't into. But if you're just doing it to take out a competitor, you give up a lot. At DocuSign, we were not really in a position to give up a lot back then.
AS: I'll share my experience with SuccessFactors. I was at some point in charge of competitive analysis. I was screening out who we wanted to buy. We had a criteria. Is this addressing a customer segment that we are not in? Is this addressing a product category that we're not in? And is this addressing a geography that we're not in? Especially as you've started scanning up an enterprise. It was really pretty amazing if you could have had something in Europe or Australia and happened to have some global presence and validations.
You could blow it out across your geographies. It's a new product capability, and you might acquire it at a discount. And then, by the way, it helps you address a new persona of a customer or some larger customers of the vertical that you haven't addressed before. That’s a mind process. I don't think it really gets very clearly covered in the press when people talk about acquisitions. People get cut up in the buzz of it, the excitement of the multiples, and so on. But it sounds like that's the methodical approach that you were applying in your analysis as well.
SK: Exactly! You have to have the belief that if you don't make the acquisition and one of your large competitors does, or a large incumbent who once stood on the market does,
you have to be convinced that you can compete. At Zantaz, we competed with every large technology company on the planet in that archiving space. We competed with IBM, even though we had a partnership. We competed with HP and MC. We were successful.
I believe that if you're gonna sell into enterprise, sell in B2B, you need to have a plan, a strategy for how you're gonna outmaneuver the large incumbents. Especially in the beginning, while you're establishing your market presence.
At DocuSign, we were convinced that we had a much better product, we had a bigger customer base. We weren't gonna acquire anything that was so unique that it was worth giving up a lot of our equity and, consequently, dilution to our investors to acquire it. We believe we're gonna go out, compete and win.
If you fast forward to today, DocuSign had a 70% market share the last time I checked. So DocuSign is incredibly successful in competing in that market with others who were bigger. Ultimately, that was our conviction and why we decided not to move forward. It wasn't a unanimous thing, it was controversial. But it was not something that we could afford to do at that price at that time.
AS: If we look today, we definitely would think of DocuSign in the enterprise world. No question. So it's really interesting that you had to pull back and focus on that motion, but that was a temporary decision. It doesn't mean that you said, “Hey, no, we're not doing enterprise.” Obviously, it's a bigger driver of the revenue.
SK: You're absolutely right. The long-term strategy is to own the enterprise. Should we use more of a bottom-up approach as opposed to trying to force it top-down? I'd like to say that we had this brilliant idea. But you can just look at how Salesforce built their business. A lot of SaaS companies that are public today started with a freemium version, selling to individuals, then bundled those into departmental sales and ultimately to enterprise sales. DocuSign followed that playbook.
AS: Well, I've always felt I love chatting with you because you have this pattern matching. We met through Alchemist Accelerator where we were fortunate to have you as a CEO coach. And then later, you decided to invest after seeing all the awards, which is great.
But you've had this openness to look. You got to experiment and find where you fit best. When we met, we were just tech-enabled service, effectively trying to nail the problem that we found in the documents and presentations world. And I'm just curious, when you look at companies either like us or others, how do you pattern match whether it's for investment or yourself? Or how do you guide these companies towards that niche, to what you found was DocuSign? When it's all murky, there are pockets of success here, pockets of success there, and you help them find what's going to be your beach hat and encourage experimentation versus “Okay, this is our model, and that's it.” What's been some lessons learned from coaching and mentoring CEOs? Now that you play more of that role than being yourself.
Importance of Strategy and Great People
For me, it starts with thinking. I'm reluctant to use strategy or strategic planning, especially for startups, but you do have to think through it. Where do you want to go? Where do you want to be in three years? Market factors are beyond your control, but you assume that you know the markets are stable. Where do you see yourself in your company in three years?
Once you've set that big goal, you have to back it up and say, “Okay, now what do we have to do this year to stay on the path to that goal? What do we have to do this quarter? What do I have to do this month? What should we be doing today?” That's going to keep us on the path to achieving this big goal that we envision ourselves to be, where we'll create a lot of value out into the future.
(31:38-38:08)
SK: Yeah, I worked with a lot of other companies as an advisor board member who has gone through that process as well. For me, it starts with thinking. I'm reluctant to use strategy or strategic planning, especially for startups, but you do have to think through it. Where do you want to go? Where do you want to be in three years? Market factors are beyond your control, but you assume that you know the markets are stable. Where do you see yourself in your company in three years?
And we went through that exercise at DocuSign after I got there. It was really enlightening to hear everybody's view on where we thought we could be if we executed well. Better than well, excellently. How aligned we were. We could spend two or three days in an offsite talking about this.
Once you've set that big goal, you have to back it up and say, “Okay, now what do we have to do this year to stay on the path to that goal? What do we have to do this quarter? What do I have to do this month? What should we be doing today?” That's going to keep us on the path to achieving this big goal that we envision ourselves to be, where we'll create a lot of value out into the future.
But you need to constantly revisit that. I had a process that I learned at E*TRADE when I was general manager of a business there. We formed through two acquisitions. But take the time to think about that and then revisit it every six months with the management team to see if things change. You know what have we learned in the last six months? Market dynamics are different. Is this really the right strategy, or should we be doing something different?
If you do that religiously, stick with it, and then build your planning and goal-setting around that, it becomes easy. It makes it easier to pivot because you're saying, “Ok, this is what our best assumption was with the data we had. We've learned some new things. So we need to shift. This may accelerate us to get to where we want to be in three years. It may delay. But we're going to continue to make progress.”
I don't want to jump into the nitty gritty. I don't think we have time for that. But starting back as general manager of a business at E*TRADE and then every other company I've been a part of, even as a board member, I've encouraged the management team to do something like that. It really works. It's simple. I call it strategy as the process. It's not strategic planning.
AS: You place these explicit markers. You know what really benefits everyone. You're not like an inherently evil or messed-up person because you saw something six months ago that's now completely wrong. You’re knowing what we know, knowing who we were back then, the market being what it is.
This was our worldview. We've read a review, and then, six months in, here's what we learned, and things have changed. We've gotten smarter. The market changed. We've canceled some hypotheses, we've raised new questions. It sounds like this is almost a manual for life. It's not a manual just for startups because you need a big vision for what you are going to do with your life. But you hold yourself to your goal.
How do you stay tuned to the global themes that are important to you? The reality is change, you know. What you like changes. When your team is passionate about building, also be changing. So it sounds like you're providing a natural course correction method here, but still some structure. How long was it?
Any other tips and good things you see for anybody trying to build something new? You have really unique perspective where you build business units from scratch. In the podcast in general and RELAYTO, we appeal to people who want to create meaningful change. People that want to create and bring to marketing products, launch new campaigns. To do that, they need to take risks, they need to get other folks on board. Where do people succeed with this? Where do they fail? Where can lessons be taken from startups to corporates and vice versa?
Customer Focus and Building a Team
I invested in RELAYTO because you were a force of nature, and you weren't going to let the inevitable obstacles and big walls that you're going to run into get in your way. You're going to find a way around them, and that's exactly what's happened. If you're going to build something great, you need a great team to help you do it.
I never thought I'd be a salesperson. But I was offered the opportunity, and I’m pretty methodical about how I approach things. So I said, “Yeah, I'm not going to be the flashy salesperson, I'm going to be the one who understands the market the best, who understands my product the best, who understands my competitors' products better than they do.”
(38:08-49:44)
SK: Great question. The first thing that comes to mind is surrounding yourself with great people. It sounds like a cliche. But the reason it's a cliche is because it's so true. You need to be self-aware, identify where your gaps are, and make sure that you're bringing in people who are complimentary to your skillset, who are passionate and committed to the vision that you have, and who can articulate that vision as well as you can.
I invested in RELAYTO because you were a force of nature, and you weren't going to let the inevitable obstacles and big walls that you're going to run into get in your way. You're going to find a way around them, and that's exactly what's happened. If you're going to build something great, you need a great team to help you do it.
AS: I'm flattered. I really wish my mom, my wife, and my kids would be listening to this podcast right now.
You were in the enterprise content space for a long time. You've seen unshaped categories. Especially when things are early and not proven, and the category doesn't even exist. The product may not even exist in the way it's supposed to be down the road. There's just this vision.
Let's say you have an enthusiastic and empowered individual in charge. But they're still the market component, right? What do you think about that? Maybe use us as an example. What did you see where that helped you connect the dots twice? Because you've invested over time. The first time and then the second time. How do you make those decisions?
SK: At RELAYTO, you were not sitting in a room assuming what the market wanted. You were talking to anybody you could get a meeting with about what you're doing, what your vision was. Then you incorporate that market feedback into iterating your product. Knowing that maybe you're not going to be able to convert your product to exactly where it needs to be in the short term, but over time, you had a vision for where it needed to be, based on customer feedback. Talking to lots of customers and prospects, people who are knowledgeable about your market all the time, and constantly interacting with the market is what I have done in the past.
At Zantaz, we’ve taken a big leap of faith that large financial institutions would trust what we did. We talked to them, and they told us what they wanted and that if we could meet those requirements, we would be seriously considered. That's what happened. Same with DocuSign.
You know what people really need. Let's make sure that we're using that to make our decisions, not sitting in a room waving our arms, convincing each other that we have the best ideas. That's what was going on at Zantaz when I got there. But it was easy to do during the dot-com bubble. Now you got to make that capital last, and you've got to build something that customers want and will pay for. You need to go talk to them and collect that data to let that drive your decision-making.
AS: Got it. So what I'm hearing is, especially in the tough markets, whether it's the funding from internal sources if you're a corporate thing, or external, like investors, you don't have that luxury anymore. If you do, it's much more expensive, so to speak. You need to focus on your audience and your customers, prioritizing them. That's obvious. But that's not done nearly as much because there's a momentum for this in our technology constraints. This was our original vision.
Let's debate the finer points of the products, but forget it. Why do you think people get trapped in this? Is this just what they get to love with their ideas? Is it just natural? I'm trying to scratch my own itch. I've heard that Steve Jobs did his own things and told the customers, “This is the solution.” Where do you see the cognitive blocks that help smart, very capable people lead?
SK: People just think they've got the answer and don't necessarily want to be told that they're wrong. I think it's human nature to some extent. You don't want to hear bad news, so you avoid it. That's the worst thing you can do if you're building the business. You need the unvarnished hard truths and then not get discouraged. Deal with the brutal facts and figure out how you're going to use that input to make your product better. Find better ways to solve the customers’ problems.
AS: I love it. I think this is your way of wrapping this up on a philosophical note, Steve. Whenever I chat with you, I have a sense that you have this energy and vitality. You bring that to your family, to folks that you mentor.
As a leader of companies going through significant transitions, as an advisor, how do you build the types of habits that help you deal with the “brutal facts”? You put things in perspective, and I think maybe that's wisdom that comes with experience. A lot of younger entrepreneurs and leaders could benefit from that earlier before they acquired the hard way. What would be your advice?
SK: A key thing that you can't replicate. The years and the mileage. I've learned a lot through those many years in Silicon Valley. I think my early career in sales was a huge help because that's how I started.
I never thought I'd be a salesperson. But I was offered the opportunity, and I’m pretty methodical about how I approach things. So I said, “Yeah, I'm not going to be the flashy salesperson, I'm going to be the one who understands the market the best, who understands my product the best, who understands my competitors' products better than they do.”
What I learned in my early days of sales is don't get too high when you have some successes. But don't get too low when you hit a dry spell. Manage it and deal with facts.
I had a pretty successful career in sales as a result of that. I just carried that roadmap of life with me through everything that I've done. I always say I'd like to be in the eye of the storm, not on the sidelines. I want to be in there where I can have some control over the situation and figure out how to make it better, not as an observer. It's just how I'm wired.
AS: Very inspiring. Go in the eye of the storm, but stay calm and put things in perspective, whether they're good or bad. Great advice, Steve. That's been a privilege in general, and especially today, to hear your wisdom. I hope our audience really enjoys this. Thank you so much for joining us. How can people get in touch?
SK: LinkedIn is a great place to track me down if you're interested in connecting. Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. It's been a lot of fun to talk about the history a little bit. I don't get a chance to do that much anymore. Congratulations on your success. I'll continue to be here on the sidelines, as I said.
AS: Thank you, Steve. Thank you for inspiring us and helping build definitive cloud companies that we're now trying to emulate as well. Best wishes to our audience. Hopefully, they could learn more of the stories from DocuSign and Zantaz and apply some of these lessons in their startups.
SK: Thanks. Talk to you soon.
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Author
Experience-focused Leaders is the #1 Multimedia Podcast! We talk to senior business & tech leaders about the experiences that move forward organizations, customers and society at large. True to form, we mix audio, video, web and eBook formats to turn these authentic conversations into personalized nuggets you'll remember & use.
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