The 115th episode of Datacast is my conversation with Alexa Grabell, the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a Revenue Data platform that is purpose-built for GTM teams to analyze, visualize, and action data about their prospects and customers without needing engineers.
Our wide-ranging conversation touches on her education at Vanderbilt, her early career in consulting, her transition to technology at Dataminr, her time as an MBA student at Stanford GSB, the founding story of Pocus, the rise of Product-Led Sales as a GTM approach, the long-term vision of Pocus product roadmap; the unique opportunities of evolving a category, a community, and a product all at once; tactical advice on hiring and fundraising; the importance of female empowerment; and much more.
Please enjoy my conversation with Alexa!
Listen to the show on (1) Spotify, (2) Apple, (3) Google, (4) Stitcher, (5) RadioPublic, and (6) iHeartRadio
Key Takeaways
Here are the highlights from my conversation with Alexa:
On Her Upbringing
I grew up outside of Philadelphia and consider myself lucky to have been raised by two awesome parents with different career paths. Both of them were the first generation in our family to attend college, so they placed great emphasis on education and hard work.
My dad pursued a more traditional path in finance, while my mom was very entrepreneurial. She started her own physical therapy practice and later a consumer goods product. I learned a lot from both of them, especially their grit, hustle, and work ethic. They taught me that no task is too big, which was really cool.
Growing up, I never thought that being a woman could limit what I could do, thanks to my mom's example as a successful female entrepreneur. I saw her crush it, which gave me the confidence to pursue my own adventures in the future.
It's funny how many founders can relate to this: my parents don't quite understand what I'm doing, but they think it's awesome and are proud of me. We don't typically discuss product-led growth, but having them as mentors and my rocks throughout this process has been an exciting journey.
On Her Education at Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt was an incredible experience for me. Moving from Philadelphia to Nashville was a significant change, but it was super fun and eye-opening. One thing that attracted me to Vanderbilt academically was their interdisciplinary engineering major called Engineering Science.
This major allowed students to pair an engineering degree with anything they wanted, so people paired it with law or medicine. I chose to pair it with a business track, which was very exciting because I loved math and science in high school but didn't know what to do with that interest.
Having a generalist engineering major with a business spin was perfect for me. I took relevant classes, including all computer science courses and courses on technology forecasting and tech entrepreneurship. These courses ended up being really relevant to my career afterward.
When I came to Vanderbilt, I didn't even know that founding a business was possible or what software as a service was. I just loved solving hard problems and being analytical. That's what attracted me to Vanderbilt, and it was an incredible experience that I feel fortunate to have had.
On Being A Consultant at KPMG
As is typical for many, I didn't know what I wanted to do until I found something that was generalist enough to challenge me in areas that I found interesting.
After college, I found myself in this position again. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I felt that consulting would be a good place to start. I loved working with data and diving into different analytics, and consulting allowed me to learn both the hard skills and soft skills required for client-facing roles.
What I found particularly appealing was the chance to explore a variety of industries and work on different problems in short periods. For example, early in my career at KPmG, I was assigned to a project on autonomous vehicles. As a recent graduate, I was expected to quickly become knowledgeable about self-driving cars. This forced me to conduct speedy research, ask the right questions, and figure out the best approach to be successful. This type of ambiguity and problem-solving experience has been immensely helpful throughout my career.
Although consulting was not a lifelong career path for me, it provided a fantastic start to my career. I am an operator and builder at heart, and consulting helped me develop the skills necessary to succeed in those roles.
On Transitioning Into Technology at Dataminr
During my time in consulting, I focused specifically on self-driving cars. However, I realized I was more interested in building and executing innovative software than just advising others. I wanted to work with a team to see tangible results, join a mission-driven company, and make something cutting-edge.
Dataminr was the perfect fit for me. The platform was literally saving lives, which was incredible to me. I joined the company around Series C with around 300 employees, so it was a fast-paced startup where I could have a big impact. Although I didn't know what SalesOps was, I found it exciting because it involved problem-solving and analytics while working with other teams.
When I first joined Dataminr, the VP of SalesOps quit on my first day, so I was in charge of sales ops within my first couple of weeks. This experience was challenging and taught me valuable skills in problem-solving and handling ambiguity.
Moving from consulting to Dataminr and then to Monte Carlo and Pocus was a learning curve. The pace increased as the companies got smaller, and there was less red tape. I had to adjust to the mindset of figuring things out, executing rather than pontificating, and asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Despite the challenges, I was eager to dive in and do it.
On Leading Sales Strategy and Operations at Dataminr
Dataminr was transformational for me because I worked on a problem that ended up being very relevant to the founding of Pocus. In my role of sales strategy and operations, which I fell into by chance, I got to see what kind of data sales teams and broader go-to-market teams like marketing and customer success need and where that data is stored. The data was always in places the engineering, data, and product teams had access to, such as Snowflake with Looker or an internal admin portal. However, there was no connection between the dots. I had to hack together internal solutions and ways to get sales teams access to that data, ultimately leading to Pocus's founding.
At the time, I was shocked that sales reps only had access to Salesforce, which contained all the data they needed about a customer, such as the ACV, contract size, sales cycle stage, industry, and other information. If they wanted to figure out data around how users are engaging with the Dataminr product to help inform how to close a trial, drive upsell or expansion, or renewals, they had limited access to this information through an internal admin portal that was not built for a salesperson. It was confusing and clunky; everyone knew their internal admin portals were not the best.
When we started implementing Snowflake and Looker, I remember one of the funniest moments was when there were 30 of us in a room applauding the Looker account managers because we were so excited to have this data. However, Looker is still not built for a salesperson. It was for the data team, product team, and engineering team.
It was shocking to me to be able to sit in between and have exposure to the product and engineering side of the world, as well as the sales, just the lack of data tooling available for salespeople. I remember thinking that this couldn't just be a Dataminr thing and that there must be a solution. I spent three months interviewing around 300 teams about how they solved this problem. Everyone's answer was the same: they didn't have a solution. They were doing something internally which was hacky and not scalable.
On Starting a Women’s Group at Dataminr
Another transformational experience for me at Dataminr was recognizing gender inequality in the fields of engineering, consulting, and tech. Despite growing up believing that women and men are equal, I saw that there was still a lack of gender diversity in executive teams and leadership roles. This frustration led me to create Dataminr's first women's group, which became a successful community with hundreds of members.
Building communities has become a passion of mine, and the process is similar, whether it's a women's group, a fund, or a community like Pocus. It involves bringing like-minded people together to learn, give back, and support each other through shared experiences.
To build the Women's group, we organized monthly events where we invited speakers who shared their emotional and tactical life experiences. We also did volunteer events and smaller group circles to promote mentorship and peer support.
Similarly, with Pocus, we bring people together for AMAs and encourage authentic and genuine connections. I find fulfillment in connecting with others and fostering a supportive community where everyone can be themselves, learn from others, and find mentors, mentees, and peers going through similar experiences.
On Getting An MBA from the Stanford GSB
I went back and forth about whether or not to go to business school, but I'm grateful that I ultimately decided to go. My goal was to make a difference for women in tech and figure out how to empower future generations of women.
Initially, I thought I could achieve this by becoming a venture capitalist and investing in female founders. So, I went to business school and focused on empowering women and diving into VC during my first year. I became a fellow for a VC fund and started a fund called the 21 Fund. We raised 2 million from our classmates and invested in about 25 female-founded companies. I also created a platform team around this effort.
However, I found myself getting jealous of the founders and spending more time with them. I became more energized by getting in the weeds with them around their path to product-market fit, gaining traction, and the scrappy things to do versus making investment decisions.
I realized I could follow my initial passion by becoming a founder. I could create my own company with its own culture and values that reflect what I wish I could see when I was first coming out of college. Through this, I could empower future generations of women that work for my company or others by showing them that female founders can succeed, even in male-dominated industries like data or sales.
Thus, I quickly shifted away from VC and onto the founder route.
On The Mindsets of An Investor and An Operator
Stanford offers incredible entrepreneurial options and almost breeds classes of entrepreneurs and founders. As a fellow starting a VC fund, I spent a lot of time with founders, meeting them for coffee or going on walks, hearing about their problems, and seeing how I could help them or make introductions.
During this time, I realized that I was getting energy from building and that I am much more a builder and operator. It's a mindset shift; some people are good at investing, and some are good at operating, but not many can do both. I would be a bad investor and a good operator and builder.
There are overlapping similarities, especially in early-stage tech, where you need to be passionate about emerging technologies, know everything that's going on, know the right people, and be networking all the time. It's a question of whether you want to learn a little about everything or everything about one thing.
For example, I like going very deep on one thing and knowing everything inside and out versus a little bit of everything. The second question is, would you rather strategize, think, and advise, which also overlaps with the consulting world, or do you like to build things, test, iterate, and execute? It's a different mindset and skillset. Both are hard to do, but both are awesome careers. It's just a different path.
On Interning at Monte Carlo
Monte Carlo was an incredible experience. I joined Monte Carlo at Series A, the same stage Pocus is now. It confirmed my hypothesis that I wanted to be a founder. Working with Barr Moses, the CEO of Monte Carlo, was awesome. She showed me what a high-performing, fast-paced startup at the series A stage looks like.
I feel fortunate to have worked with Barr and now have her as a mentor and investor in Pocus. I think she's one of the best founders and CEOs out there. One thing I've learned a ton from her is her motto on shipping and iterating and just continuing to move quickly in 30-minute increments. Don't think about perfectionism. Think about lots of cycles and iterations.
So let me tell you how we do it at Pocus. If we have a project, let's say we want to write out our customer journey and figure out what it looks like. Instead of spending three days in multiple brainstorming sessions and whiteboarding, we take a first pass at it. Everyone spends 30 minutes writing their ideas, and then we get feedback from others. We iterate, experiment, and hypothesize rather than spinning our wheels on our own. It's all about consistent iteration and feedback.
I remember Barr asked me to draft up one of our investor updates. At first, I thought her request to see a draft version in 30 minutes was crazy, but I got it. She just wanted an outline and to keep getting feedback. I now do the same thing with my team, so I appreciate that learning from her.
On Founding Pocus
While at Stanford, I met my co-founder, Isaac, and we applied to a Lean Launchpad class. This program incubates 10 teams across Stanford schools, including engineering, business, and more. Isaac and I spent three months speaking with hundreds of go-to-market teams to validate our hypotheses around what I had observed at Dataminr.
We found that non-technical teams like sales, customer success, and marketing often don't have access to the powerful data, such as product usage, that live in places like the data warehouse. Over those three months, it became clear that this was a huge problem that needed solving. This was especially true for product-led growth companies with tons of users and usage data, which is vital for driving revenue and identifying the best users to convert to a sales opportunity.
There was definitely a moment when we felt called to build this solution. We were getting interest from customers and investors, so we knew we had to move forward. However, I did not have a strong network coming into Stanford, so I sent hundreds of cold LinkedIn DMs every single week. It's a common misconception for early-stage founders to think they can buy an auto tool and reach out to a few people who will answer them. I spent my nights and weekends on LinkedIn, cold-reaching out to people and finding every angle I could to reach out to sales leaders.
Isaac and I were also very diligent about hypothesis testing. Every week, we had a different hypothesis and conducted 10 to 15 interviews throughout the week. By the end of the week, we would validate the hypothesis and decide whether to double down on it or scrap it altogether.
I spoke with about 30 people in the engineering school at Stanford, but Isaac was the one person I wanted to work with. He was very hard to get, and my roommates also talked to him as potential co-founders. This was because he had started his first company at the age of 12, which was a successful gaming company that managed 20 engineers. He is a highly mature and skilled engineer and leader, and we share similar goals, vision, and alignment for how we want to build a team and shape the future of Pocus.
It took some effort to sell Isaac on working with me, but now we feel very lucky to have each other as co-founders. The co-founder relationship is crucial to a company's success, and I couldn't be luckier to have Isaac by my side.
On Product-Led Sales
When I started Pocus back in April 2021, there was a myth that product-led growth (PLG) companies, those with a self-serve or free trial option where the product could sell itself, didn't need sales teams. Companies like Slack, Notion, Calendly, Airtable, Dropbox, and Atlassian were cited as examples. Over the past year, with the help of our category creation and content, this myth has been busted. PLG companies all have and need sales teams.
Users can engage with a PLG company's product without talking to a human, which is great. But they then get to a point where they crave human interaction to discuss things like upgrades, options, centralized development, and security procedures. This is where a salesperson comes in. Successful companies like Dropbox, Slack, and Atlassian have huge sales teams. There's a huge need to layer sales on top of a PLG motion. You're setting your company up for extreme success when you can do this.
You can use users from the PLG motion as a funnel for conversion and upselling expansion. There are different opinions on the topic of hiring enterprise sales leaders for a PLG company. Some say to add sales when you hit a certain revenue marker or have a certain number of people in the company. I like to think about it when you feel the pull from your customer.
When you start to get requests that go from more of a support request to a sales request, like how to create one license for several teams, that is a sales conversation. It is driven by the end user to say when you need salespeople to interact with them at the right time.
On Use Cases of Pocus
I can walk you through the different use cases for Pocus, but I'll focus on two common ones. The first example is if you're an account executive at Slack and responsible for selling to enterprise customers. Before Pocus, you would have to manually search through tools like Looker, Mode, Intercom, and Salesforce to find good opportunities that need to move from a self-serve option to an enterprise consolidation. But with Pocus, the process is quicker and more data-driven.
You'll receive an alert from Pocus in Slack saying that, for example, Nike has become a product-qualified lead. The AE in charge of the Nike territory can research in Slack or open the Pocus dashboard to see why it's a product-qualified lead. For example, it might say that five different teams at Nike are using Slack, and that usage has spiked over the last week. As the AE, you can dig in to learn more about the teams and users, identify the right person to reach out to, and send personalized outreach.
The second example is from the perspective of RevOps and growth. If you're a RevOps leader at Slack, you create product-qualified lead definitions and get them to the sales reps at the right time. Before Pocus, you'd get a list from the data science team and manually disperse the list of PQLs to SDRs. But with Pocus, RevOps can visualize the different PQL scoring and see how the scores are calculated from usage data and customer fit data. If RevOps hears feedback from the sales team on why a score needs to be adjusted, they can adjust the score without writing any code. Sales reps can feel trust in the score and know why it's a PQL. RevOps can also build workflows so that these PQLs appear in sales reps' inboxes at the right time.
On Product-Qualified Leads and Sales-Assist
A Product Qualified Lead (PQL) is a user or account that meets two criteria: they have shown strong product usage and fit your ideal customer profile. PQLs are similar to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), but instead of looking at marketing data, you're looking at product usage data. This includes what they clicked on, what they shared, and how active they are in the product. PQLs are a strong indicator of what a good customer will be because they already show usage and love of your product.
Sales-assist is a powerful tool in a product-led growth (PLG) organization. Dropbox and other companies have hired sales-assist personnel to help existing users throughout their journey. This is not aggressive selling but providing touchpoints to help users solve problems or get value from the product. The role is a mix between sales, support, enablement, and training. One of the benefits of this role is that they can provide valuable feedback from customers back to product, marketing, or sales.
On Pocus' Product Vision
Pocus' broader high-level vision is to bring the power of data to non-technical teams. This means that our product roadmap is informed by this vision from a technical perspective.
The modern data stack is an important topic that comes into play here. The modern data stack is an incredibly powerful tool for product, data, and engineering teams, with many popping up. However, go-to-market teams are often left behind in realizing its benefits.
At Pocus, we believe that in this future vision, the modern data stack should be and will be as important to sales, marketing, customer success, and operations as it is to data engineering and product. Every company and role will realize the benefits of this new data world.
Our longer-term vision and product roadmap are geared toward unlocking the data warehouse for go-to-market teams so that they, too, can realize these benefits. We aim to make it accessible and actionable for non-technical users.
There's an infinite amount of things we can build, but in the near term, we're particularly excited about predictive analytics for PQL and building more purpose-built tooling for sales, leadership, customer success, and marketing.
We're already working on partnerships with modern data stack vendors like dbt, and there's a lot of opportunity to integrate with data warehouses. We are currently thinking through those possibilities.
On Hiring and Building A Company Culture
Hiring is one of the most critical responsibilities of a CEO and takes up a significant amount of time. Many early-stage founders fail to realize the amount of time that goes into sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, and everything else involved in the hiring process.
At our company, we put a lot of effort into the interview process to ensure that candidates align with our values. This includes traditional interviews, take-home challenges, case studies, and reference calls. We test for our values, such as being a humble overachiever, in all of these interview methods.
Our team is made up of extremely skilled individuals who are the best in their field. However, nobody has an ego, allowing us to collaborate effectively on any task, regardless of size or complexity. We make sure to test for this trait during the interview process and also by asking for references on how the candidate works with others and if they have a big ego.
When Isaac and I were working together during the three-month class, we tested not only our ideas for the product and company but also if we shared the same values and work ethic. After just three months, we codified our values, which included being a humble overachiever, lighthearted, fast (but intentional), inclusive, and having a growth mindset. We ensured these values were also present in our first five employees and plan to continue this as we grow.
Although we primarily hired engineers for a long time, we recently started building our go-to-market team. Our first hire was a Head of Marketing who focused on creating valuable content for our community and building the category with them. Our go-to-market team will always be smaller than our engineering team due to the technical nature of our product.
On Building The Product-Led Sales Community
The community building and product-led sales community have been my favorite part of building Pocus. One of the most exciting things about how the product-led sales community originated was when I started a Slack group with 20 go-to-market leaders at product-led growth companies last July. I observed the type of conversations that were happening organically between these 20 people, and there were consistent themes like how to set up a PQL, what sales assist is, and what sales compensation looks like in a product-led growth world.
My job was facilitating the first AMA with one of my investors, and people were excited to learn more about product-led sales from sales leaders. Everything happened organically from there, with a focus on providing value for people and helping to educate and answer questions. We wanted to give people an authentic space to ask questions, and as people invited their friends, peers, and bosses, the community grew to over 2,000 people.
We always thought about quality over quantity, figuring out how to add value in events or Slack discussions rather than simply getting more people in the community. It has been an incredible experience so far, and I feel very blessed to have met all these incredible people in our community.
We think of our community as a product, and we're constantly learning from our users instead of the users of a product. We figure out their needs and pain points and how to solve them. We experiment with different initiatives like events, activities, and discussions rather than just experimenting with product features. We test these hypotheses and constantly iterate, constantly learning and evolving.
As we grew from 20 to 2,000 people, we needed to create a community code of conduct and started to add community ambassadors. There are many cool things coming in the future that I can't share yet, but we have a big community strategy vision in our near-term.
On Evolving A Category, A Community, and A Product All At Once
Building the category in community and product simultaneously has been a significant breakthrough for us. It's one big feedback loop where we learn from community members about how they think through product-qualified leads. This information informs how we think about category creation for defining a product-qualified lead, guiding how we build PQLs into our product roadmap.
Initially, many people pushed back against our approach of creating it all at once, as it was not expected. However, it ended up being the best thing we could have done for Pocus, our community, and our users. By building a category and a product with community members, we have created a community-led category. The challenging part is that things are constantly evolving, changing, and pivoting in the early days, so we need to be agile and continue to learn with our community.
For example, we have evolved the definition of product-led sales from July 2021 to July 2022 by listening to our community and constantly trying to figure out the most value we can add to them and the broader category of product-led sales. This is a question that every company needs to figure out, and everyone faces.
The hardest problem I face is prioritization. We know there's a lot we can build, and we need to make sure that whatever step one is, it's the right decision before moving on to step two. So, we listen to our customers, our community, and future perspective customers to determine the most critical product right now versus nice-to-haves.
We take the ship-and-iterate approach with our product, saying, let's build the MVP, the solution we can get out in two weeks. We'll iterate and make our hypotheses more advanced if we can validate them. It's constantly listening and iterating.
On Fundraising
To work effectively with investors, finding those you can trust and who share your passion and knowledge in your company's space is important. For me, having a good relationship with investors means being able to share both the good and the bad, as well as areas where I need to improve.
Additionally, they need to have knowledge about product-led growth (PLG) and product-led sales. Our seed investor was a sales leader at Stripe, while our series A investor has invested in many successful PLG companies. Working with them felt natural and productive, as they brought real insights into the space.
It's important to find investors who understand what you're building and have experience on the other side of the table. At the early stage, investors are looking for the right team to solve a big enough problem that can become a multi-billion dollar business and whether there is a unique perspective or insight that no one else has.
To impress investors, telling a compelling big-picture story that aligns with their interests is crucial. While there may be cool day-to-day happenings, investors want to hear about the overall vision and potential of the company.
On Advice for Future Female Founders
I have two pieces of advice.
First, just do it. Women tend to have more imposter syndrome or verbalize it more than men when it comes to leadership positions or starting their own company. It's important to acknowledge that and then move on. Don't let it take over everything or stop you.
Secondly, I often say to younger women who are asking me about the founder experience: what's the worst thing that can happen? If you spend three months ideating on something, the worst thing that can happen is it leads to nothing. Or your startup doesn't work out, but you'll have learned a lot and be in a better position for the next step of your career. So my takeaway is to just do it. Start talking to future customers and experts in the field. Jot things down on a table or write that first line of code instead of thinking about whether or not you should do it.
Show Notes
(01:55) Alexa shared formative experiences of her upbringing in Philadelphia.
(03:47) Alexa reflected on her undergraduate experience at Vanderbilt studying Engineering Science.
(05:49) Alexa recalled her first job out of college in management consulting at KPMG.
(08:20) Alexa walked over her transition from consulting to technology when she joined the Sales Operations team at Dataminr.
(12:35) Alexa talked about her proudest accomplishments at Dataminr - seeding the initial idea for Pocus and building a community for women in the workplace.
(20:23) Alexa reflected on her MBA experience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
(24:05) Alexa elaborated on the mindset difference between investing and operating.
(25:27) Alexa briefly touched on her internship at Monte Carlo.
(27:58) Alexa shared the founding story of Pocus.
(32:27) Alexa unpacked the concept of Product-Led Sales as a GTM approach.
(35:40) Alexa provided two example use cases of Pocus.
(39:35) Alexa explained the concepts of Product-Qualified Leads and Sales-Assist.
(42:20) Alexa discussed the long-term vision of Pocus' product roadmap.
(45:33) Alexa shared valuable hiring lessons to attract the right people who are aligned with Pocus' values.
(51:15) Alexa went over the journey of building the Product-Led Sales community.
(54:54) Alexa shared the unique opportunities of evolving a category, a community, and a product all at once.
(57:56) Alexa shared fundraising advice with founders who are seeking the right investors for their startups.
(01:01:15 ) Alexa provided advice to a smart, driven female operator who wants to take the leap of founding her company.
(01:03:09) Closing segment.
Alexa's Contact Info
Pocus' Resources
Mentioned Content
Blog Posts
The Myth of "No Sales" at PLG Companies (July 2021)
When To Add A Sales Team to Your PLG Company (Sep 2021)
What Is The Sales-Assist Role? (Nov 2021)
Introducing Pocus' PLS Platform (Nov 2021)
Product-Led Sales Community Wisdom Highlights 2021 (Dec 2021)
Notes on Community-Led Category Creation with Pocus' Co-Founder, Alexa Grabell (Feb 2022)
Sneak Peek at Pocus' PLS Platform (March 2022)
Announcing $23M to Transform How GTM Teams Use Data to Drive Revenue (June 2022)
What is Product-Led Sales? (July 2022)
Year One: The Product-Led Sales Platform is Here to Stay (July 2022)
People
Kyle Poyar (OpenView Ventures)
Melissa Ross (Clockwise)
Aaron Geller (QuickNode)
Notes
My conversation with Alexa was recorded back in July 2022. The Pocus team has had some announcements in 2023 that I recommend looking at:
About the show
Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.
Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email khanhle.1013@gmail.com.
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