Mohit Lad is the co-founder of ThousandEyes, a Cisco company providing some of the largest brands more visibility into how customers and employees use their networks. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Mohit Lad on how founding a company was “plan C” and why it’s important to use his role as an advisor to fight for diversity in the tech industry.
Mohit Lad is the co-founder of ThousandEyes, a Cisco company providing some of the largest brands more visibility into how customers and employees use their networks. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Mohit Lad on how founding a company was “plan C” and why it’s important to use his role as an advisor to fight for diversity in the tech industry.
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MOHIT LAD: That was a big moment, because at that point, my realization was, plan A has failed, plan B has failed. And then there's an annoying guy that keeps telling me, “Let's start a company.” And so, I walked out, and I called Ricardo and told him that, “Hey, I've just been laid off. I don't see why not right now.”
JON SAKODA: I am so excited today to welcome my good friend Mohit Lad, the founder and CEO of ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes was a company that created a technology which previously did not exist. It allowed us to monitor the performance of the internet. His company was acquired by Cisco for a reported billion dollars last year. And he now is an executive at Cisco and is a founder advisor to Decibel. And I'm excited to welcome him onto the show.
MOHIT LAD: Well, John, first off, it's great to see you. Every time we get a chance to catch up, I'm always up for it, so, excited to be a part of this and also the journey that you're on with various founders to help them through.
JON SAKODA: Thank you. So, if you don't mind, can we start at the very beginning of your journey, where you grew up, how you discovered technology, and eventually what led you to want to start a company?
MOHIT LAD: Cool. That's taking a trip down—way down the memory lane. So, I grew up in a place called Nashik, which was close to Bombay in India. My first exposure to technology, in computers in particular, was one of my uncles who was in Australia bought a Commodore 64. This was when I was in like fifth grade in the late '80s, early '90s. And that was the first time I'd seen something like that. And I started kind of messing around with it and writing some codes of Commodore BASIC and whatnot.
JON SAKODA: BASIC. You are bringing me back memory lane.
MOHIT LAD: Right. It was quite—it was actually quite something. I mean, it's just like, it's still a keyboard that had a whole computer in it.
JON: Yes.
MOHIT: And it’s still cool by today's standards. And I was just fascinated by the fact that I could get something else to do work for me. And then, since then, I would actually look forward to every summer because what I would do in each summer is I would find a lab which would teach a computer course. And it was less about the teaching, because I think a lot of that was still pretty basic in those days, given it was a new thing in India, but it was more about getting access to a computer.
So, I would enroll in these classes because I would get in front of a computer for two hours or three hours, like a PC, and then be able to just do my own stuff and write and code. And that kind of drew me to the whole field of computer science, which I decided to major in. Got my bachelor's in India, then came up to UCLA for my master's degree. Finished my master's, went on to do a PhD. And in that whole process at UCLA, really learned, got involved in this notion of understanding the internet. That was what the thesis was built around. And then went on to use some of that training and thinking around how the internet works to actually go and build a product that went way beyond what our research was.
JON SAKODA: Mohit, can I go back in time? So, it’s the 1990s and early 2000s. So, the internet now has become somewhat mainstream, but it's relatively new, right? It's less than a decade old. So, were you studying something that was cutting edge? Was it something that was widely known or understood? I guess, walk me through what was the internet like back then and what were some of the technical challenges that you guys were running into?
MOHIT LAD: I think the internet's primary use was more information on the web, like some of e-commerce and all that. That was sort of the primary use. When I started at UCLA, we would still walk down to Blockbuster to pick up DVDs. That was the world we were in, right? But we knew this ability to connect to different parts of the world in a matter of milliseconds was—we kind of had this sense that this is gonna change the world beyond what we see today. And we didn't quite know how that would be like. But we were sure that there was more than just information-sharing that was gonna be live, like a lot more live interactions. There would be other ways. The whole internet of Things, right? That's a big innovation.
So, we knew there was something in here. And by we, I mean myself and my co-founder, who I met at the UCLA Research Lab. And that's kind of what fascinated us about the internet is, it's complex. It's distributed. There is no one system, that one person that is controlling everything, but it works, and that we needed to really want to figure out how it operates, what are the challenges, visualize it, all that stuff. So, that was what our research was built around.
JON SAKODA: And remind me, I think you showed up at UCLA in 2001, right?
MOHIT: Correct.
JON: So, if we go way, way back the internet bubble had just burst. The internet was popular, but certainly, there was a lot of carnage around it. And I'm curious, how did you go from there to eventually wanting to start a company in and around this space?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah, it's actually interesting, the entry point and exit point from UCLA. When I came in, it was the burst of the bubble in 2001. It just burst. And when I exited after a PhD and postdoc in 2008, that was another burst, right? So that was like two ends of the spectrum. And the best times were in college. But I think when we—yeah, when we started, there was a carnage that was left behind. And I think what it brought me back to is the basics, right? A lot of the companies in the 2000 era were really not companies. There were some ideas that started to get massive valuations, and there was a lot of over-promise, under-deliver.
JON SAKODA: Yeah. Let me take you back to your PhD program. Did you guys have some major breakthrough in a technical insight that inspired you to start your company?
MOHIT LAD: It wasn't like we discovered something through our research. It wasn't that. I think it primarily was that everyone was starting to rely on the internet even more than before, but nobody had actually understood how it works, how things connect, what can break, model things out. So, a lot of what we focused on was building models that understand how the internet worked, being able to visualize which was a really complex network. We had been building techniques around that.
What was an eye-opener for us is when we started presenting our research to the actual networking communities. These were people who were running backbones for massive ISPs or large enterprises. We would constantly get the, “Oh, a-ha. I didn't know that” reaction. And we would go like, these folks are really good at what they do, but because they live in their own world of their network, they still don't quite understand or comprehend everything around the internet. So, there's actual value in bringing this Google Maps of the internet-like concept to the mainstream industry because nobody is seeing beyond their network. And everything we do now is dependent on the internet.
I would say the realization for us on the need to create something was more when we saw the reactions of folks. And we were pleasantly surprised that even the best network operators and engineers are actually interested in what we do because it's new and novel, the understandings we are developing.
JON SAKODA: So, it's 2009, maybe one of the worst times to start a company. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, financial crisis. Did anyone think it was a good idea to start a company back then? Tell me that story.
MOHIT LAD: My journey in the PhD program at UCLA, I wanted to become a professor. Ricardo, who was with me in the lab for the last two or three years, especially kept pestering me that he wants to start a company with me. And I was just not interested. I tried to get on a professor track in the first year of my postdoc after my PhD. And I was focusing on the top schools, but didn't really get any interviews, like zero interviews. So, at that point, I had to switch to plan B, which was, let me find a startup that is in my space that I can feel like at least my research is applying to a commercial product.
And so, I joined a startup called Packet Design that was aware of my work in the BGP research area. And then two months into that, in August 2008, when the economy started to go south, I was called into the VP of engineering's office and basically told I was laid off. That was a big moment because at that point, my realization was, plan A has failed. Plan B has failed. And then there's this annoying guy that keeps telling me, “Let's start a company.” I don’t see why not right now. And so, I walked out, and I remember going to the garage, calling Ricardo on my—I think I had a Nokia cell phone, one of the old Nokia phones.
JON: Yeah, yeah.
MOHIT: I called and told him that, “Hey, I've just been laid off. At this point, I don't think there's any harm in trying the company idea.” So, that was that. But then one thing that struck me right after that was both Ricardo and I did not have a green card. So, you can’t technically start a company unless you are able to be legally a resident of the country, right? So, that was the first thing. And it's really challenging for a resident of India to get a green card in any short span of time. So, we had a very interesting next six months, where we went through a process of going into the EB1, EB2 category, which is this exceptional researcher category. We self-filed for our green cards because I did not want an employer-sponsored green card where I would just leave after I get a green card. So we actually self-filed. I filed for mine as well and I got my green card within six months, but it was a pretty intense process. And then once I got my green card in mid-2009, that's when we realized that this could really become a reality. So, next six months, we kind of hashed some things out in our weekends. And 2010, we quit our jobs and started to work on this.
JON SAKODA: So, I want take you back, because I know it's been 12 years. But when I do talk to founders, professional athletes, people who have been through a lot of success and have also been through a lot of failure, there is commonly this view that you're able to really play at your best when you have nothing to lose, when you have no other alternatives. You wanted to be a professor. That door was closed. You had a job in a fancy company. That door was closed. This seemed like the last of the options before you were going to get potentially sent back to India. I guess, take me back to the emotion. What did it feel like to have very few options left and the clock ticking?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah. So, one, it's always stressful, right? Especially anything with immigration, it's always stressful. But at the same time, I think a lot of the way I found I operate is I tend to do well in high-pressure situations. It just brings clarity to my thinking. I tend to focus better. And it just got us more energized to prove we can do something meaningful. And I do think one of the things that I learned from another founder, who I was joking with, saying, “Oh man, you've already had a big exit last time. You're gonna crush it this time.” And this person shared that it's very different for two reasons, because one, that feeling of nothing to lose is not there as much anymore.
And the second is, you forget how hard the early days were. When you've scaled something for 10 years and you go back to like creating again, it starts to come back how difficult those days were. So, part of it is some of it has been washed out of my brain, like how tough those days were.
JON SAKODA: Yeah. I want to ask a question because I think this is universal. So, you're building a technology that explains to people how something as widespread as the internet is. I mean, everyone lives their life on the internet. Yet I still think to this day, if you run around and ask people, no one really knows how the internet works. I think about the financial system, I think about even things like cryptocurrency. I think this is a widespread phenomena of people kind of growing up with technology, but never really understanding how it came to be, and what its impacts are, and how it works. So, how is it that no one really understands how the internet works?
MOHIT LAD: I want to kick things off with a disclaimer, right, that even today, we wake up and we find that the internet breaks in ways that even we don't understand fully, we don't forecast. So, it is a really complex system, one, and it's not an easy task to figure it out. And I don't think it's one state, because the networks evolve throughout, right. People interconnect in different ways, and you don't realize.
And one great story that affected us ourselves was when we moved to our office in San Francisco, the second office, which was in downtown financial district, they used to shut off the lights at 7:00 PM. That's for conserving lights. And you had to actually go pick up a phone, like a landline phone, and dial a number and enter a four-digit code or something to turn the lights back on. So, we did this for a week. And then Ricardo got frustrated and said, “This is stupid. We're not gonna keep doing this.” Because we were working till 9:00 PM or so on, right? And he's like, we're not going to do this. So, he found Twilio. And he wrote a CronJob that would actually run a script every day at 6:59 PM. And it would dial this number automatically through that script and enter the sequence and all that, and automated that whole process. So, it worked great for seven days. And then one day, lights go off at 7:00, and we’re thinking, what happened? We have a script. And a normal sane person would have gotten up and picked up the phone and turned on the lights, but we were more interested in debugging that script.
JON: Right, right, right.
MOHIT: So, we’re sitting in the dark. We're trying to debug what actually happened here. And what we realized was, there was nothing wrong with the script. What had happened was that we were calling this API for Twilio, and Twilio was on AWS instance in the East Coast. There was a storm going on, and AWS was having an outage in one of their data centers. So, you just think about it. You're in your office in San Francisco. The lights go off because of an outage in AWS on the east coast. And that's the dependency you’ve introduced. And you don't really think about it when you call, right? You're like, okay, this is easy. I'll just make a call. So that's part of the reason is, things have become so easy that you tend to just make it work and don't really understand what does it involve, like how complex the application’s getting.
JON SAKODA: So, your business had to not only educate everybody as to how the internet worked, but also educate people on why they needed to use you.
MOHIT: Yeah.
JON: And I think many founders do tackle this job of building a product, building a category, creating something that hasn't yet existed, and they have to educate people on all sides. So, I know that you guys not only took some nontraditional approaches to building the company, but also took some nontraditional approaches to recruiting and finding product market fit.
So, maybe let's start with product market fit, because I know this is a topic that every software entrepreneur struggles with, or it seems very elusive. How did you guys go about that process?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah. So, for us, we didn't really have a lot of money. We had to actually fund ourselves through a small National Science Foundation grant, which was $150K. And with that, within one year, we had to build a product. So, in many ways, we were forced to find a product market fit because the only way we would grow would be by acquiring customers.
A lot of companies think they're building a new market category, but most companies are not building a new market category. And we went back and forth, right? For us, there was an existing category called network performance management, which talked about network analytics and monitoring, and all that. But it was very focused on data center environments. And our thesis was that the internet is becoming the new network, not the corporate data center environment. Our thesis was SaaS applications are becoming the new application stack, and that cloud is becoming the new data center. And all three actually shift control away from your controlled environments. You are losing control.
So, we argued that this is a fundamental shift which renders these technologies useless. And so, we did believe that it was a new category of problems that are going to be created because of the shift through the internet. The hardest part of that is it's so much easier for a competitor to copy you.
When you spent three years building something, they can copy that in six months, because now you've laid everything out there. And we would see some crappy competitors just ripping everything off what we were doing. Like, shit. This is just so frustrating, because why don't you come up with something original?
JON SAKODA: I think every founder has a little bit of PTSD. And it's funny, if I talk to a founder who did category creation, they all say, “My God, was that hard. If only I had just done a replacement market, that would have been a lot easier. If I had just tried to come up with a new form of CRM or a new database, that would have been a lot easier.”
And then of course, you talk to founders who have done that, and they say, “My God, it's a grind because you're just constantly sitting there trying to replace these incumbents.”
MOHIT: Yes.
JON: “And they've got these unfair advantages like ELAs.”
MOHIT: Yes.
JON: And so, I think the grass is always greener. But it is unquestionably true that category creation is really, really hard. Having said that, I do think there's a lot of advantages to having control and having the capacity to define what the market is to your advantage. So, tough question. Tough question. Did you know going into this that you were going to have to create a category, and when did you know that?
MOHIT LAD: I don't think we knew going in that we had to create a category. We were not that smart. We didn't even know what a category was. All we talked about was, okay, we have this interest on the internet. It seems like people need it. Let's go sell—build something. And really, it wasn't about even making money or anything. It was just about, we wanted to just be excited about building something original. So, part of that company creation was driven by that. We want to create something that people will actually buy, which is like, wow, this is actually meaningful, right? That's the realization.
So, we had no idea about categories and all that. I think that's just kind of, as we started creating, we learned about Gartner and all of these interesting concepts.
JON SAKODA: And so, you're creating a category unknowingly. You have a product that has never existed before, and you're starting a company at a time when money is not yet falling from the sky. So, I guess, talk me through what were some of the early hacks or techniques that you guys had to getting yourself up the mountain?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah. First one, I would say, is we were primarily focused on short-term survival, right? All we wanted was, okay, I need to get two customers so I can get another a $100K in the bank. That’s the mode of thinking we have. That’s all. It's not about category. And I felt that was very helpful for us because we really kind of got disciplined on the product value prop. We got disciplined on the unit economics. We got disciplined on discounts. I had no room for free users. And every time I raised money, and I would say, “I have X customers,” an investor would ask how many of them are paying customers. And I would be like, “Every single one of them is a paying customer. They're a customer. What do you mean by how many are paying customers? Everyone is a paying customer.” And I realized, when you have a $50 million Series B or $10 million Series A, which is now a seed round, you tend to end up trying to get a lot of these free customers to kick the tires and whatnot, and we didn't have that luxury. So, we had to get people paying us.
I think the other concept that was very helpful for us was thinking through the cost of sale and the cost of operation. So, let me give you an example where we wanted to collect data on the health of something from different parts of the internet, right? It’s like, hey, how does this appear here or there, and latencies. And we didn't have the money to go and put up servers in every part of the internet, which is what some companies were doing as a measurement methodology. And we can't do that.
But then what we did was, we realized that there is something we can do with DNS where we can leverage existing DNS servers for hacks in a positive way. I'm not trying to hack a DNS server here. Hacks from a standpoint of how you send the query. So, you get responses, but you're able to get the latencies as a measure of responses and all that. So, we started using this framework to collect data. And the first product we sold was actually entirely based on this public, freely available kind of data source that really didn't cost us anything other than building the technology. So, those are the kinds of things that matter.
JON SAKODA: Yeah. And the other fun part of this story, as I recall, you guys couldn't even afford servers, so you would crawl through people’s dumpsters.
MOHIT LAD: Yeah. We couldn't afford servers. And the one good thing for us as part of that meltdown that happened in 2008, 2009, was a lot of the companies, startups were going out of business, and they had to clear their offices. So, we would find these electronic recycle bins where there would just be servers tossed, and we would go pick them up. None of them—you can't guarantee any of them would actually work. So, you would have to just get those and then try them out. So, it was like that.
And we built that first kind of setup in our garage by getting all these servers. I think I showed you, Jon. We still have one of those servers, which was our first production server, and it has a big trash sticker on it, because you have those trash, basura, trash stickers on them so they can trash them out. It was pretty cool.
JON SAKODA: I was actually cleaning out my garage, and I still have one of my Dell servers too, from my company. And I do feel like these are going to become collectors’ items In the future, Mohit, this'll be the baseball cards of their era, where you and I can show off the servers that we once had before the cloud.
MOHIT LAD: I do think that's one part that I feel like the entrepreneurs are missing out on, is building your own server farm and running it out of their garage and all that. It was actually a lot of fun.
JON SAKODA: I was going to ask you this question. I mean, I probably should. You were relatively well-known for not wanting to raise a ton of money at high prices.
MOHIT: Yeah.
JON: And also growing at a…
MOHIT: Sustainable growth.
JON: Yeah, sustainable growth, as opposed to tripling every year. So, I mean, what advice are you giving now to people who feel that they have to triple their valuation every six months?
MOHIT LAD: When you're raising money, I think you need to align with the board. If you think the journey is, you want to double, triple, then get a board member that wants to do that, right? If you think the journey is a sustainable motion where you are thoughtful, get a board member that has to do that. And especially when you're creating categories, you have to be thoughtful about spending money and burning out, right?
So, I used to put a couple of lenses on that were really important for me. One was, I would put on the lens of an investor, right.? So, if I get somebody into the Series C, I want to make sure it is a success for them. And so, just over-blowing the valuations means they're coming in and they're going to be unhappy with the first bad quarter, you see, versus when you bring them in a valuation that is reasonable, and then you're showing upside, they're going to be excited to be a part of the company. And it makes a big difference in the boardroom when you're coming in and you're excited versus you're coming in and you're like, “Holy shit. This is really bad. Shit has hit the fan, and now I'm going to minimize my risk,” right?
So, I think that mindset is important. And I always thought I want the investors to be excited about the upside. And that would create a positive engagement model. And so, I was conscious about keeping valuations down for that reason as well. And say, look, I want ThousandEyes to be a big win for you because you are putting your personal reputation on the line in your partnership, and it needs to have some serious upside.
So, that's one lens. I think the other lens is making sure that you think about the employees and what valuation does to them, because it's not always a good thing. You can't exercise stock. And if it's not realistic, then all you're doing is you're just inflating the 409A. That's all you're doing.
JON SAKODA: Why don't founders have more awareness of this problem, or do you think they do, they just don't feel that they have a choice? They have to raise the money at the highest price.
MOHIT LAD: Honestly, I don't know. I think some of it is people make too much about valuations and being a unicorn and whatnot. And I kept reminding our employees all the time, folks, even fundraising is a milestone that is great, and we should celebrate, but our ultimate currency is customers. Customers, employees, investors.
JON SAKODA: I think sometimes people underappreciate just how important it is to train a startup on durable and sustainable motions, right? So, if a company is built on the back of high valuations and astronomical projections, and it’s like the greater fool theory, you end up with a company that's built on the back of tons of money and kind of fake it until you make it.
MOHIT LAD: And also, a likely outcome for your company has to be an acquisition, because if you're not sustainable, you can't go public, right? That's the bottom line. And one other thing, Jon, I think is a problem in the Valley, I feel, is it's okay to have a startup that is growing 25% and sustainable and continues to be a lifetime job for somebody. It’s okay. Because you're creating something and you're enjoying it. But there seems to be this notion of, you have to build something to exit, and exit big. And that's not true. So many startups can be a lifestyle business, and that's still a startup, and that's still good.
JON SAKODA: I'm so glad you're bringing this up. I mean, I don’t know. Have you ever met Marcus Ryu, the founder of Guidewire?
MOHIT: No.
JON: So, Guidewire is a company that famously really never grew more than in the high teens and low 20%. But if you do that for 15 to 20 years, you can end up being an incredibly valuable business. So, there are all these examples. I don't know if you looked at the Roblox S-1. But the Roblox S-1 is a company that basically had almost no valuation change for a decade and now is worth tens of billions of dollars. if you can do something sustainable for a very long period of time, eventually people wake up and appreciate it.
MOHIT: Agree completely.
JON: What do you remember as being the best and worst times of this entire journey?
MOHIT LAD: So, I think every time we signed up a customer, every single customer, it was a high, right? You get a customer in, you get that validation, you get money coming in. That's undoubtedly the high point. So, lows, when I think of lows, I think sometimes it's missing a couple of quarters in a row. Something like that is a big low, right? And one of the things that I was always conscious was, was I never wanted to just blame the head of sales, because it's— in general, when things don’t go right, it’s…
JON SAKODA: It's so easy to do that, right? And why is it that boards and management teams and founders sometimes just want to blame sales?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah. I think, look, I always think there's a multifaceted reason to some of this, and of course, that can be sales execution, but it could be sales DNA. When we hire sellers that came from the networking background, they do not do as well as sellers that came from the software background that did not know networking. And the reason the software sellers were doing better was because we were creating a category, and they were better at selling on value.
But what I was conscious of was when I started, I talked to a bunch of founders, and everybody had a story of, “My first sales guy was wrong.” So, I didn't want to say that story. And so, I didn't hire a salesperson until we were about $250K to $500K in run rate. And at that point, I felt like, okay, I know enough about the sales process, who's buying, why they buy, what is the value proposition that's resonating, that I can actually hire a salesperson I can feel confident, because I don't want to be another person that says, “My salesperson was wrong. That's why I failed.”
And the one I hired was somebody who had actually been an entrepreneur before. And this is a good kind of profile. I feel like you want your first salesperson to be more entrepreneurial, not a person who claims to have a big Rolodex, because that's not going to really work. You want somebody who's scrappy, who can just be a bit like you and so on.
JON SAKODA: Can we transition to sales scale? You mentioned this as something that you have a lot of deep thoughts on. Talk to me about what founders can learn about that.
MOHIT LAD: Look, I think the first thing you have to be cognizant of is it will likely take you three to six months to know that you have had the wrong sales hire, at minimum. Right? It's just, the approach “Let me just hire somebody and I'll see if it doesn't work out” is not going to work out. I think you have to be thoughtful.
When it comes to sales, I think there's different profiles of people. The one thing I realized is, we didn't do very well with the Rolodex sellers, every time we had those that claimed to have CIO relationships and all that. And ultimately, the reason they had the CIO access was they were selling something that was hot. And when they switch jobs, you'll suddenly find out that all the magical relations they had are not responding. And then they will blame it on the product value proposition. So, in general, one thing I find is every enterprise company wants to sell to the CIO, which is absolutely ridiculous. Everybody can’t sell to the CIO. So, you really have to be thoughtful about where you go first.
And then, I would tell for the early stages, it's really important that sellers are able to thoughtfully walk through a value proposition. So, the lens I use in general is, when I want the seller to go to a company, I want them to first have a really good understanding of the broader market we operate in. We have an intelligent conversation. Because as an early stage company, one of the first things you have to do is earn a right to be at the table, right? And to earn the right to be at the table, you can't just be talking about ThousandEyes. You have to talk about the market shift. You have to be able to talk about why NETSCOUT doesn't work. You have to talk about all this stuff. And you have to have a very good and crisp understanding and be able to speak beyond the product. The product comes last.
The framework I always use when I go to pitch to customers is why, followed by what, followed by how. First is, why ThousandEyes? And that's more about the market and shift. The second is, okay, now you're convinced why ThousandEyes. What is it we can do for you? And then you go to how you can do this. For me, if I don't follow that order, we're mixing things up. So, I consciously always go in that order.
The second thing that is really important is for a seller to understand the customer really well and make sure they can relate the market to the customer. And so, I always look for, are you able to really be thoughtful about how different customers are different, how they can actually approach situations differently with each customer, and being cognizant of who is an early adopter, who's a lagger, how they buy, etc.
JON SAKODA: Based on this why, followed by what, followed by how, understanding the value proposition, I've noticed a trend of many people saying, “We need to hire different types of salespeople.” And many founders take the risk of hiring practitioners or hiring people who are not from central casting, people that don't have Rolodexes. I wouldn't yet say that this is mainstream, right? I'd still say most people conventionally are trying to find people who are classically trained in B2B sales. But I wonder, if you forward forecast 5, 10, 20 years, is the role of the salesperson different, and are we likely moving into an era where the salesperson starts to look more like a practitioner or even a technologist?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah, we've had great success hiring some practitioners and even SEs and former SEs, etc., because it's just, you can have a meaningful conversation on the space and technology and so on. But I think a lot of it comes down to the trend I see in the industry is, you're not doing deals on the golf course anymore, right? And especially going forward now, it's going to be a lot more offline interactions and sort of virtual interactions and whatnot. So, I can tell you, there is nothing that’s more important than empathy for the customer. And that's not a technical skill; it's a personal skill.
So, some of the best sellers are successful, even their lack on the technical side, is because they have high empathy and they can always kind of make sure the customers realize that this person gets us. I think that means a lot to customers. And there is a case to be made to hire the nontraditional sellers for what we need, especially in the early stages of the company.
JON SAKODA: I feel like you guys were early to figure that out, but I still think a lot of founders can learn from that.
So, I usually like to wrap up the podcast by talking about the personal journey. And for you, it's been 12 or 13 years since you started ThousandEyes. You've grown up, you have a family now. When you look back, are there any lessons that you would pass on to your younger self, the younger version of you that was starting this company?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah, I think so. One thing I feel like I really kind of regret is, so my wife is Taiwanese, and I met her at UCLA, and we got married when we were in the first phase of the company, right? Like really early phase of the company. And so, didn't really have a lot of money, or any money. And the interesting with Asian weddings is, you get red envelopes, right? So, I had a whole model a built on how much I would anticipate from red envelopes, from cash, so I could offset the cost of some of the wedding. We even had my wife Amy's family, one of her family members, as a caterer, because the cost of a per seat meal for the wedding was like $110, $120. And the family rate for doing it within family was like $30. So, we basically had a whole P&L. I had built a whole P&L around that and all that.
But I think, what I would love to change if I go back is just go back to those moments, which are once in a lifetime moments, and really be able to do those in a manner where it's not skimpy. It's not like—I was in a startup mode and I was operating like that through experiences, which I think, even for extended family members, are once in a lifetime experiences, and are probably worth taking a lot more seriously than I did, at least.
JON SAKODA: Well, I always like to give people like you a chance to talk about now. What are you doing to either give back to founders, to give back to family, to give back to community?
MOHIT LAD: Yeah. So, I think one of the things that I found personally very valuable was, this is part of the Silicon Valley culture, is I could reach out to people cold, and they would generally respond, right? I would get a lot of free advice. And so, I try my best to do the same, whether it's through Decibel or through others, through personal contacts, through investor contacts. I think that's really important. And I've had a few people tell me, “Hey, can you be an advisor?” And my reaction to that is, I had a horrible experience with a lot of my advisors, where I gave them stock, and I realized, in your founder journey, especially when you're in your first time, you will learn things faster than you expect. And so, you would find somebody to be super insightful, and then one month later, you've caught up to everything the person could have told you. And now you've given them four years’ worth of stock, right?
So, the one thing I always tell people is, I don't want any advisory shares, because I personally was frustrated with that, and I don't want to be that other side. And so, my approach is similar. I would rather be involved by being a part of the investment.
The other thing that I'm keen on doing, and I'm trying to find the right ways to, is we’ve all been through a really difficult last 24 months, right, 12 to 24 months. And one of the things that really bothers me is that there's still a lack of diversity, right, in startups, especially when it comes to the Black community and women. And something I'm really keen to do is to try to find a way to be more available to founders who are coming from the black community, because I think what needs to fundamentally change is the next generation of companies have to be built by Black founders. I think that makes a big difference, versus just playing roles on the executive team—being able to actually build companies and be looked at as the next generation of leaders.
And some of this has happened with immigrants coming into the US, where they've built companies and established reputation over time and all that. And I think that needs to happen with the communities that are not as represented today. So, that's really one piece that I would get personal satisfaction from.
JON SAKODA: I am so glad you mentioned that. Actually, even in the venture industry, one of the people that I've mentored in my past is a woman who started an organization. It's a nonprofit called Black VC. And today, less than 3% of venture capitalists are Black. And I think less than 2% of partners are Black. So, there is a lot of work to be done, not just in funding Black entrepreneurs, but also in creating Black venture capitalists.
MOHIT LAD: Yeah. I agree across the board. I think this is a journey, and finding those folks early that can be given the support and confidence that they can go build something is something that I get a personal satisfaction on.
My final piece of advice to everyone is, don't take advice. Advice is always coming from a lens of personal experience, and you have to really make sure it applies to you.
JON SAKODA: Well, Mohit, this has been so much fun. You've been such a great friend to us at Decibel. You've been such a great inspiration to so many founders. It's always great to have you here and thank you for coming on the show.
MOHIT LAD: Well, thank you. It was fun. I'm always happy to talk through all my mistakes.