Episode 4: This Podcast Could Save Your Life with Ted Elliott

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Sean (00:00):

Sean (00:10):
Welcome, everyone, to Episode 4 of How I Launched This, where we talk to founders, chief product officers, entrepreneurs, building solutions in and around the Salesforce ecosystem. I am very pleased to welcome Ted Elliott, who is currently the chief executive officer of Copado. Before we formally welcome Ted onto the big stage here today, let me give you just a short background of Ted and Copado. So before joining Copado in November, 2018, Ted spent 18 years as CEO of Jobscience, one of the first ISVs on the Salesforce AppExchange. He sold that to Bullhorn in March, 2018. As an ISV leader, Ted learned firsthand the experience of challenges of releasing innovation solutions on the Salesforce platform, and that’s one of the things Copado really does well. Copado is leading dev ops platform solution. They’re helping companies digitally transform in the cloud.

Sean (01:23):
They’re backed by Insight Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Copado is accelerating deployment, simplifying the release process, and increasing developer productivity. They have more than 1,000 customers, which is phenomenal. Those customers process over 50 million dev ops transactions per month, so super, super exciting point in time for the Copado and the whole team. Ted has a ton of experience, both from a Jobscience standpoint, as well as his new journey with Copado. So Ted, thank you for joining me today on How I Launched This, giving back to the entrepreneurial community. I really appreciate you carving out some time today, so welcome.

Ted Elliott (02:08):
Thanks for having me.

Sean (02:09):
So let’s start with the obligatory, none of us know exactly what we’re going to do in life, but what did you study in school and what did you think you wanted to be when you grew up way back when?

Ted Elliott (02:22):
Yeah, interesting. I was just having lunch with my daughter and we were talking, since she’s looking at college, about this exact topic. I told her that I took the H train to higher grades, which was the history train after a rough freshman year, having a little too much beer. Then, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer until I started giving people advice once I became a lawyer and I decided I was tired of people not listening to me, so I’d go make my own mistakes. But I said, “All the different education I got was all helpful in building towards something. I just didn’t understand what it was at the time.” Then I, of course, asked her, “So what do you want to do with your life?” I think she was a little overwhelmed by that, but I had a passion for history because I think it repeats itself. So I thought it might be a good manual for the future. I’m not sure that’s panned out so far.

Sean (03:13):
Nice. Nice. Okay. Well, Copado is certainly on a roll. You and the team are expanding rapidly and you’re heads down on hiring and motivating great talent. We’re going to get into that in a little bit, but let’s go back in time in chat about Jobscience. So you spent 18 years creating and incubating an ISV brand new to the Salesforce platform. Obviously, you’ve learned a ton doing that as a first step. You have a successful exit. You sell it to Bullhorn, as I mentioned. You’re taking some time off. It’s the spring of 2018. Copado isn’t even on your radar, as we talked about. You had two impactful moments personally in your life that we talked about in our prep call and you wanted to share. So right around that 2018 mark, what happened and share those two events for us.

Ted Elliott (04:16):
Yeah, so it’s odd. Actually, two weeks after we sold to Bullhorn, Mike Witherspoon, who helped start CodeScience, actually said, “Hey, do you want to go to dinner with these two guys from Spain? They’re doing a startup in the dev ops space.” I said, “I’m going to Australia for a month, but sure, I’ll come to dinner.” I met them and they started talking to me about Salesforce appointments going wrong and that spoke to me. They started talking to me about this idea of people going home for dinner on release days and that spoke to me and I said, “Geez, do you guys need an investment? Do you need help?” They said, “We won’t take any of your money unless you can give us advice that we think is helpful.” I was like, “Wow, these guys are also pretty brave.”

Ted Elliott (05:06):
So I sent David Brooks over to DX to take a look at their products and he loved it and came back to me and said, “Hey, this is great.” I told him, “I’m still going to Australia, but let’s stay in touch.” We went to Australia, I came back and my wife had a heart attack about in May of 2018. When I asked her a week or two after her heart attack, “What do you think caused this?” She said, “I think I’ve been under a lot of stress because I don’t know what you’re doing with your life. I need you go find a job because it doesn’t matter that you have had financial success and you don’t need to work. It’s that when you don’t have a purpose, you drive me crazy and I need you to go find something to do and get out of my house.”

Ted Elliott (05:53):
So I kept working with the guys from Copado and it took a couple months for me to come around to, “Yeah, maybe I should get back into things.” But by November we had talked and they said, “Hey, do you want to come on board?” I got very excited about the idea of solving this problem. But I think I was really more interested in the fact that it was like, “Oh, I can get back up on the horse. I can keep my network alive. I can maybe flip this thing.” It wasn’t like a long-term like, “This isn’t my show; it’s someone else’s show.” So that was the beginning of the Copado journey. I loved what they were doing. I love the idea, I didn’t incubate it. I didn’t start it. Now, Jobscience has really been three companies in an 18-year period, because we originally got financial backing from the Washington Post and a company called Brass Ring back during the dot com boom. They offered me $12 million to buy the company when it wasn’t a company and then April 2000 hit and that fell apart.

Ted Elliott (06:55):
So we were like a surfer out in the ocean on a wave waiting for that next wave to come through. We thought the next wave was building our own stuff, but it turned out it was the third wave was the right wave to catch with Salesforce. I remember the first night that Multiforce or AppExchange was released downloading as many apps that I could into my Salesforce environment until I ran out of tabs. I think they got me from that point and I’ve never really let go. So it was very natural to come back to Salesforce and to developing on Salesforce, so that was the first gotcha moment. What I didn’t expect, Sean, when I joined Copado, was that about three months into the job, I started feeling not so well myself. My 12- year-old-daughter, she was, I think, 10 at the time, said, “Dad, I’m worried about you, not just mom.” I’m like, “I’m going to be fine.” What are the chances that your wife’s going to have a heart attack and something’s going to happen to you?

Ted Elliott (07:50):
Now, of course, I bought a black Porsche and that’s probably where my health went wrong because I’m very superstitious and I’m pretty convinced that that’s why I got cancer. When I went back to the dealership, the guy’s like, “How do you like the car?” I’m like, “The seats are really hard. I didn’t realize it was going to give me a six centimeter tumor in my rectum.” So I got rectal cancer and it was late-stage rectal cancer. I really wasn’t expecting it and I had a tough couple of days the first couple of days I was diagnosed and I had to make a decision. Did I want to keep doing Copado or did I want to go focus on being sick?” For me, denial is a great river. So I decided to focus on being at Copado as opposed to focusing on being sick and really decided just to work, work, work while I was being treated so that I could compartmentalize sickness as a problem, not as a dominating factor in my life.

Ted Elliott (08:52):
Luckily for me, it worked out. It doesn’t always work out that way, right? But for me, after having cancer has been the hardest part, because you’re really thinking about, “What am I doing with my life? What’s my purpose? What am I focused on?” I’ve just decided, “Listen, I want to do things that matter to me that I feel have an impact that I don’t care if anyone even understands what I’m doing. As long as I understand what I’m doing and I feel like it’s helping people, I want to be part of that.” That’s really, I think, shifted my mindset. I always wanted to help people, I think, in what I was doing. But when you realize that you’re living on borrowed time, which we all are, by the way, it’s just some of us get the memo, you think about things just a little differently. So I don’t know if that gives you a good sense of the journey that I’ve been on, on the last few years, but we hired 300 people while I had cancer.

Sean (09:46):
Wow.

Ted Elliott (09:46):
Okay? We grew the business from $4 million in revenue to, I think by the time I was done with the cancer, we were at 30 million and now we’re close to 40 million. But in ARR, we did things that I probably would’ve never done if I was well, because I was like, “F it, why not? Why not grow? Why not spend the money? Why not get the best people? Why not? In the last one, I was like, “Oh, we’ve got to conserve our options. We have to have optionality. We need to protect ourselves from failure.” When failure equals death, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that sticker in San Francisco with the equal sign, Silence Equals Death? Well, this is like if failure equals death and you’re just like, “Hey, I’m going for it. Whatever, let’s go for it.” It’s amazing what you can do when you’re not worried about falling off the wire, right?

Sean (10:37):
Yeah.

Ted Elliott (10:38):
I think that that’s really helped me and I try and remain salty post-cancer because I think the minute you start thinking about failing, that’s when you fail. When failure doesn’t matter, it’s just another thing that happens, then you can take some really big chances. I’m going to run with that until it doesn’t work, and then I’ll reflect, but so far so good.

Sean (11:05):
So we really captured that as a decisive moment for you the, “Do I live or do I die?” decision point and the steps you decided to take and you articulated them perfectly. One thing you missed, and I want to tie it back to the previous podcast we did with Heather Lavoie of Geneia, whose whole solution is about helping payers and providers in the healthcare space optimize preventative medical conditions. You skipped over the step in between, I think, the time your wife had the health care and how you weren’t as proactive as you probably should have been, especially given the fact, we just went through COVID and are still going through it, but coming out of it, there’s been a lot of delay in people being proactive to see their doctor for preventative measures. I want you to take a few more minutes just to highlight the impact of your story and the importance of that.

Ted Elliott (12:13):
I’m glad that you brought it up, because your preventative medicine should not be, “Hey, I don’t know what’s in the toilet,” and “Hey, I don’t know why everyone’s looking at me like I look pale,” and “I don’t know why I’m getting up five times a night.” I literally had a colorectal cancer test that sat by the side of my toilet for nine months and I should have seen a lot of the signs. I want to first off, as one of the first of the 10 steps of dealing with this say, “I want to apologize to everyone who flew on United Airlines from Sydney to San Francisco. Having horrible flatulence was a punishment that no one should deserve.”

Ted Elliott (12:54):
I’m telling you that should have been the sign something was wrong with me, but I did nothing about it because I didn’t want to believe I was sick. I didn’t want to believe there was something wrong with me. And men who are under the age of 50 are getting colorectal cancer in the United States at double the rate they were 10 years ago. I’m pretty sure that a combination of, now this is just my theory, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I’m not a medical person, but I ate a lot of beef jerky and I drank a lot of Red Bull and vodka and I’m pretty sure that those are not good for you. I’ve been watching these videos on YouTube where they put the Red Bull and Febreeze in a cup and then they drop a fork and it disintegrates.

Ted Elliott (13:32):
I’m like, “Well, I drank like 10 of those a night when I was in London for a long extended period of time on business meetings, I’m wondering if maybe that contributed?” So my general advice to everyone is if anything looks weird, go see the doctor. Don’t listen to your doctors when they say, “Oh, you can wait until you’re 50 to have a colonoscopy.” If anything feels weird, go get the colonoscopy. By the way, a colonoscopy is nothing after what I’ve gone through, so I can tell you, you can totally grin and bear it. It’s very important that if you aren’t feeling right, that you don’t grin and bear it, but you go and see someone. I think especially, Sean, for men, that’s a really hard thing because we’re not used to going to the doctor and embracing medical care.

Ted Elliott (14:12):
It’s very important that we do do that. I’ve been thinking, actually, about building an app. When I’m done with Copado, I’ll build it and I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring up on this call because it has to do with fecal matter. But net of it is, it’s really important to take what’s coming out of you seriously. I would encourage everybody to think that when if you see something, say something. If you feel some way, just go get checked out. It’s not going to hurt you. And be vigilant because I don’t know how old you are, Sean, but as you get closer to 50-ish, parts of the car is starting to break and you need to get them serviced. So I don’t know if that is helpful, but hopefully, if someone’s listening and they’re feeling a little weird, maybe it will have an impact.

Sean (15:00):
Nice. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, I have turned that milestone, so I’m very aware of those kind of things. Okay. We talked in our prep call about walking in on a theme for this discussion, Ted. So you have, what we referred to earlier, is the decisive moment in time when you commit to, “Do I live or do I die?” You decide, “I want to live and live aggressively and passionately,” and then when we were discussing, “Hey, what would be a great thing to maybe share back from a leadership standpoint and lessons learned,” you didn’t even hesitate. You said, “I want to talk about having an impact and a theme and in business,” and what you’re trying to do at Copado and the team you’re hiring. So walk us through what that is and why you picked it and how you’re applying it from the day you started at Copado to today and lessons learned for the audience.

Ted Elliott (16:06):
Yeah. So, Sean, I suspect you remember this, but in the early days of Salesforce, I remember people going to Dreamforce or going to Salesforce events and being pumped and super excited and it was almost like a religious event to go to a Salesforce conference, right?

Sean (16:22):
Yeah.

Ted Elliott (16:22):
When I joined Copado, I was first on the board of directors before I joined as CEO. First off, the founders bought these crazy billboards all around downtown San Francisco that said, “I got to go home for dinner and it was a release day.” I was like, “These are dumbest things I’ve ever seen. Guys, why are you spending money on billboards that say, ‘I got to go home for dinner and it was a release day?’ Like, what?’” I was at a hotel during Dreamforce and this guy saw I had a Copado lanyard on and he came up to me, he goes, “I work at Toyota and I just want you to know that I will never do another release without Copado.” I was like, tell me more. He walked me through how tough his life was and how he didn’t get to go home for dinner before Copado and now he goes home for dinner and people actually liked him at the office. I was like, “Wow, that is pretty cool.” I started telling people we were hiring, and you’re going to go to events and people are going to come up to you and it’s going to be like the old days of Salesforce and they’re going to be like, “What?” I’ll just tell you a couple more stories that I’ve really enjoyed. So I sent these guys down to Texas and they’re at our booth and the folks from USA, one of our customers come up and they say, “Can we get our picture with you guys at the booth?” I’ve never heard of any vendor having people who had customers come up and ask if they want to get their picture at the booth. Then, we were at Javits Center in New York before COVID kicked in and a woman had written us a poem about how her life changed because people liked her and she did releases. That’s when all of a sudden I was like, “Wow, we’ve hit on some area where no one is thinking about the problem, but the problem must be pretty deep.”

Ted Elliott (17:56):
Now the final story I’ll tell you is there’s a large networking company that has a bridge in its logo and I was talking to them a couple of weeks ago, and I said, “Well, what’s the impact been of Copado so far? He goes, “Less divorces.” I was like, “What do you mean, less divorces?” He goes, “Can you imagine you told your wife you’re going to be home for dinner. It’s now 7:00 PM, 8:00 PM, 9:00 PM. You’re still at the office until 6:00 AM in the morning. Everything blows up. You come home. You’re burned out. Your wife’s angry that you didn’t come home for dinner, or the kids are wondering what’s going on. The stress level in the household is way up. Imagine if that was your life every week you had a release and then you get Copado and you don’t have those problems anymore.” So he said the net effect of Copado on him is talking to a lot less of his employees about family crisis.

Ted Elliott (18:42):
I told that story to Masa Son from SoftBank last week, because he was asking me what do we do? I’m like, “Well, we make it so that people’s lives don’t suck.” I go, “Not all people, just the people who work on releases, who, in turn, help everybody else have a better life,” because the funny thing is when it goes well, no one is like, “Who did the release last night?” Or, “Who got this stood up?” No one cares when things go well; it’s only those mornings when things go horribly. I remember in my 18 years at Jobscience was, I had a number of nights where, as a non-coder, I felt bad about leaving the guys at the office, so I would go get pizza. I didn’t usually get them beer because they had to fix things, but I would get Coca-Cola, lots of caffeine and lots of pizza and I’d sit there because I’m a sailor and you never leave the boat until we all leave the boat, right?

Ted Elliott (19:27):
So that really spoke to me when I started thinking about this concept of not having any more of those long nights because the worst thing about a bad release day is the next day when the customers started calling up complaining and I hated those days. So that’s why I got a passion for this area of impact, because I don’t think anyone tells you that they’re not good at releasing. You just learn you’re not good at releasing by the byproduct of a bad release, which is things going horribly wrong. If you want to talk an losing your business sponsor, think about how many deals Salesforce has successfully sold, telling people how easy it’s going to be, because it is much easier than everyone else, right? But when it goes wrong, you start losing your business sponsor. You start losing the confidence of the business. You started having all the naysayers question things. When things go smoothly, it’s much easier to have digital transformation.

Ted Elliott (20:13):
So I thought that was an area we could impact and it was an area that we didn’t have to be the center of attention, but we could make sure that things ran smoothly. If you’d asked me 15 years ago, I wanted to be the center of attention. Now in life, I don’t want to be the center of attention. I want to see things work and I want to know that I helped make that happen because we don’t control anything. We can only influence change, right? That was something I learned from the cancer. I couldn’t control this thing that happened to me. I couldn’t control why it happened. I couldn’t even control what was going to happen to me. I could only potentially influence change by picking the best doctors, going to the best hospitals, practicing the best practices around infection. Those were things that would influence the outcome, but they wouldn’t make the outcome. I think the more we as entrepreneurs, as individuals think about what can we influence, that will make us more effective. So that’s my soapbox moment.

Sean (21:07):
Well, what I like about it is once you focus your mind to look for how are we having an impact, whatever it is, then you can build focus with the team and you can really start to drive momentum and the outcomes and what I call ‘energy’ in the room. You’ve got your sales team, you’ve got your service team. You’ve got your R& D team. Everybody can get excited if they know why they’re having an impact into what, right? You had talked about you’re taking this so seriously to drive the point home, the endeavor to find what impact we’re having, as well as correlating that to time in going fast. Didn’t you buy some clocks?

Ted Elliott (21:56):
I bought everyone clocks. Yeah. So all my managers at Christmas time got these chess clocks in the mail and they’re like, “What’s the point of the chess clock?” I said, “Listen, we’re running out of time,” and I said, “We’re not getting our time back, so I’d rather have you make a mistake and figure it out really quickly so we can adjust, than hold off making a decision because holding off making decision is much more costly than making the wrong decision. We can fix the wrong decision; we can’t fix losing our time.” So I think there are two things that I emphasize to the management team at Copado. One is, time is of the essence and I’m always running out of it. The second is, what is the issue we’re trying to solve? One of the things in law school is that we learned this methodology called IRAC, and it’s not a country in the Middle East. It’s issue, rule, analysis, conclusion.

Ted Elliott (22:46):
I don’t know if you know this, but most people fail the bar exam in California because they write in the answer to a question that wasn’t asked. They prep all night, they prep all weekend and they write these essays that go on for pages, they had never read the question. They just wrote the essay they wanted to write. Part of the problem you have with a management team or any other group is, “Are we all trying to solve the same issue? Are we on board?” Whenever I have people who are in disagreement, I’m like, “What is the issue we’re trying to solve? Let’s start off with that. Are we both trying to solve the same thing because maybe the reason we’re not getting along, or we’re not seeing it the same way, is we’re not focused on that same issue or mission, right? Once you can get that alignment of mission, then you have really great conversations with people and you save a lot of time.

Ted Elliott (23:27):
So I would encourage anyone who’s listening to this podcast, if you find that you’re with a co-founder or you’re you’re with someone that you love them, it started great, but now you’re in this conflict moment, it’s really good to step back and say, “Are we trying to solve the same issue? If we’re not, why are we trying to solve two different issues and where can we agree? Which issue is the most important issue to solve?” We may never agree on that. That may be where things fall apart, but what are we trying to do? That, then, helps you understand the impact, because I had the guy at Jobscience and he was the hardest working guy ever, right? He was always there until 4:00 in the morning. I’m like, “What does this guy do?” I had no idea what the hell he’s doing. So one day, I just decided to stop by his office. I’m like, “Well, I was just curious, Andrew. What are you doing?” He laid down all these things I’m doing.

Ted Elliott (24:15):
I’m like, “Who asked you to do this stuff? “No one, but I think it’s important.” I’m like, “That’s really interesting because here’s the one thing that is important that you’re not doing and I’m glad you’re doing all this other stuff, but it’s not what we’re here to do.” I can’t tell you how many people, I think, spend hours and hours doing things they think are super important. They’re not doing what they’re being asked to do and it’s because they’re not reading the question. They’re not focused on the same thing. They don’t even know what they’re trying to impact, because being busy as not being effective. Honestly, I didn’t think that way before I got sick. My daughter was asking me, she was like, “Why are you focused on trying to fill up every second of your day?” I’m like, “Because I’m not getting my time back.” She’s like, that doesn’t make sense. That’s the luxury being 17, right? You don’t have to think about the clock running out.

Sean (25:08):
Yeah. I go back to if you’re focused on having an impact and you’re working through, it’s the right impact where we’re collectively, as a team, trying to drive through. It becomes your compass and it really helps make action-driven moments a lot easier. Conversely, if you’re not things get a lot harder and messier, especially, as you grow your organization and your customer base, which clearly is what the Copado team is doing. So let’s transition to money. We talked about that a little bit in our prep call. You guys just raised $96 million, which is phenomenal. It’s multiple raises. I forget how many you’ve had. Money is a tool. It serves its purpose, but it also brings on certain pressures. So a lot of the folks listening might be thinking about raising money, might be wondering how to go about it, might be wondering, “If I get it, what the heck do I do with it?” You just went through this process, so first, congratulations, but second, let’s talk through that particular journey because I think it’s a really important thing to highlight.

Ted Elliott (26:26):
Sure. So, I’ve had three different experiences where I’ve raised capital. My first experience, I was general counsel of the company in my 20s where we raised about $250 million for a drug that failed. What I saw there was how quickly you can spend $250 million. At Jobscience, I was offered $12 million to buy the company before the company got started back in the dot com. We took $3 million and then, there was a great desert of not having any money, right?

Sean (26:58):
Yeah.

Ted Elliott (26:59):
Then, exited from that business and literally, Insight and Salesforce Ventures, myself, and a couple of other people, we invested in Copado at a early stage, seven half million dollars in total capital. We’ve raised about 111 million into our B round and more to come. My view on capital is you should spend it as quickly as you can. It does no value to you to have that money sit in the bank and you need to have a plan for deploying it. When you start seeing that you’re not spending it fast enough, that is as dangerous of a symbol as spending it too fast, right? Once you come up with a plan, you need to drive the spend and it’s okay to make mistakes as long as you recognize the mistakes pretty quickly and you correct, right? Course correction is fine as long as you don’t veer 30 degrees off course, but you need to deploy that capital very quickly. I think that when the window’s open, you should always take more capital.

Ted Elliott (28:03):
So what is your plan to spend the capital and what is a pace at which you can raise capital? I wouldn’t raise every month, but I think it’s every six to eight months raising additional capital forces you to keep evaluating the business. What investors do is they really force you to defend what you’re doing and that’s a good experience. I know a lot of early stage entrepreneurs are like, “Well, it doesn’t matter if venture capitalists support us.” You know what? If you go to pitch 10 VCs and they all think your idea is horrible, and no one wants to give you any money, you might want to think about not doing it. I know no one ever gives people that advice if you might not want to do it, but the market speaks pretty loudly and they’re really smart and this is what they do. Now, I do not want to get in trouble with all the great investors out there, especially if it is we might raise capital again, but sometimes you can think of venture capitalists as money grocers.

Ted Elliott (28:54):
Their job is to get money off the of the store and into your pocket because they’re in the business of raising money, charging people a fee for managing it and getting it deployed and growing it. It’s very important that you understand that that’s their number one job is deployment and retrieval, right? When they don’t think they can retrieve it, they’re not going to be your friends and if they don’t think it’s worth deploying, they’re not going to be your friends. In fact, don’t think of them as your friends; think of them as your money grocer, right? They always want to give you advice, but they don’t have to operate. So you have to respect them, but also realize that their motivations may be different from everyone else’s motivation. So when you’re strongest is when you’re aligned with your investors, right?

Ted Elliott (29:42):
We’ve done a pretty good job of spending the money and raising the money and we’re not afraid to keep raising because we think that’s validating what we’re doing. But what it also is doing is it’s forcing us to aim higher and higher. When I first came into the business, we thought it would be great if we made the business worth $300 million, right? Well, that’s way in the past now. Now what we’re focused on is if we raise more money, how can we deploy that money within 12 months to get to our next fundraising goal? It’s a very different model than a small entrepreneurship with a couple of seed investors. I had a really interesting call with a venture capitalist about two months ago when he called me and asked me about our business. He said, “Do you think the folks in this business would be happy with the $20 million exit or do you think these folks wouldn’t be happy unless they had a $500 million personal exit?”

Ted Elliott (30:36):
He goes, “Because I don’t want to invest — the type of investor he is. He’s only going for the really big ‘hit it out of the park’ plays.” That was very interesting to me because there are different types of investors for different types of businesses and I think you have to decide if you like to shop at Whole Foods, Safeway or Costco, right? Those are the different types of investors. I think most people look at venture capitalists and just think they’re all a monolith, but they’re very different with different types of experiences, with different values, they bring to the table and you need to see them as that or you can get yourself into a game where you think raising money is a great day. In our last round, I think I may have mentioned this, Sean, I got a call from the investor and he said, “Did you receive our wire?” I think it was for $70 million. I’m like, “I don’t know.”

Ted Elliott (31:24):
He’s like, “What do you mean? You don’t know?” I’m like, “I don’t really care.” He’s like, “What do you mean, you don’t care? I just sent you $70 million.” I said, “Worst day of my life.” He’s like, “What do you mean, worst day of your life?” I said, “Dude, you sent me all this money and now I need to go figure out how to five X it, minimum.” I go, “How do you think I’m going to turn 70 million and turn it into $350 million and be happy about that?” I’m like, “Shoot, if I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t be working for you.” I’ve had this conversation multiple times. There was a guy named Dixon Doll, Doll Capital, he was going to be investor in Jobscience in the early days. I went to go see him and he said, I want to know how you’re going to turn my $5 million into $500 million.”

Ted Elliott (31:59):
I was like “Well, dude, don’t invest in me.” He’s like, “Why?” I’m like, “Because if you think I know how to do that, you’re screwed.” He’s like, “I totally want to invest now.” I think that’s the thing is that we get so afraid of people because they have money and asking for money because it’s such a taboo in society, but somehow we assume just because you have it means you know what to do with it. I think what you need is a solid plan once you get it and you need to be very transparent with people so that they understand exactly where you stand and you need to be honest with yourself about what they need to accomplish and what their goals are and why they’re giving you the money in the first place. They’re not giving it to you because they like you or they think you’re a nice person; they’re giving it you because they want to see their money grow. When you’re honest with yourself, by that, it makes it a lot easier to perform.

Sean (32:46):
So that’s an excellent description, very scary for people who aren’t in that mindset to think that way, to be blunt. But what you didn’t cover is where you’re now putting that money and why you think you’re going to get the outcome-

Ted Elliott (33:04):
Yeah, so-

Sean (33:04):
… not all of it, help people understand your mindset, you are growing SaaS subscription business, where’s the investment going and why?

Ted Elliott (33:13):
Yeah, so we believe that no software company gets [inaudible 00:33:18] marketing machine, right? When we looked at the dev ops space and we look at GitLab and Circle CI and Lazio, all these guys, basically we think their model was to go bottoms up, credit card swipe and that we didn’t think there was an enterprise sales play. So we decided to go invest heavily in finding people from Salesforce, people from Velocity, people from Appirio, people from Jobscience who want to do enterprise selling and to build an enterprise selling machine. So that’s the first area that we’ve invested in, is build a brand and build a machine, right? The second thing we’ve done is said, “Well, we have a great anchor tenant in our shopping mall called CICB.” I can’t announce it on this podcast. Well, when is this podcast can be broadcast, a couple of weeks from now?

Sean (34:00):
Oh, a month. Yeah.

Ted Elliott (34:01):
Yeah, by the time this is broadcast, we will have announced that we bought a couple of companies in the testing space.

Sean (34:06):
Nice.

Ted Elliott (34:06):
We determined that once you have a process for deploying software, you actually, the number one thing you need to do is test, test, test, test, test, to make sure it won’t break, right? We acquired a security company because we think that you need to be secure in what you’re deploying, because the number one way the CIO can get fired is if someone intrudes it and does bad things, right?

Sean (34:30):
Yep.

Ted Elliott (34:30):
So we’re looking at security. We’re looking at testing, we’re looking at building the sales machine and then finally, it’s analytics. Why do people migrate towards a solution like Salesforce? Because they want actionable data. They want to be able to see what’s going on in their business. So why would that be any different in the dev ops space? So what we’re really doing is taking the capital and saying, “We think we can build distribution. We’ve gone from zero sales reps to 50. We’ll have 100 by the end of the year. We built a marketing organization, a customer success organization, a training organization,” and we’re going, “How do we learn from what the first 10 years of what Marc did with Salesforce and recreate that for the dev ops space?”

Ted Elliott (35:07):
Then, what’s really interesting is we’re going beyond Salesforce. Salesforce is the walled garden where we started from. It’s the same place we know, but it turns out Salesforce is no longer following the pack; it’s leaving the pack. SAP, I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people in SAP ecosystem like, “We want to follow what Salesforce is doing.” Oracle people, “We want to follow what Salesforce is doing. How can we be more like Salesforce?” So we believe we can take the same approaches that we’re applying in the Salesforce ecosystem outside of Salesforce.

Ted Elliott (35:36):
Our future competitors are probably JFrog and GitLab and folks that you’d be like, “Are you kidding me?” This is the beauty of folks who’ve been with us in the Salesforce ecosystem, we’ve been drafting behind the truck for a long time and no one ever sees us pop out of the bushes. I call it the ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ play. I’m sure half the audience does not know who Smokey and the Bandit are, but we’re coming up behind that truck and we plan on just jumping out in front of it. Everyone will be like, “Where did these guys come from?”

Sean (36:03):
Yeah.

Ted Elliott (36:04):
It’s a lot of fun for people to not know you exist and then pop out of the bushes in your Trans Am. So does that answer your question, where we’re going to put the capital?

Sean (36:13):
It does. Perfectly. Yeah. That’s the mindset of we need more people with skillset to led a sales and marketing led organization in play and then you’re going to bundle. You’re going to acquire a few firms to bundle up gaps in your solution and expand and attack the market because the market is saying, “We need more of Copado.” So it’s certainly an exciting process to watch and observe from afar. So Ted, final thing as we wrap up today, what would be a marquee lesson, leadership style wise, decision-making you think you’ve progressed as a CEO from then to now? What is a lesson you want to leave of inspiration for the audience?

Ted Elliott (37:04):
Well, this one has been the hardest one for me to understand, but I’ve been seeing evidence of it in many places. So I had a board meeting this week, and the nicest note I got from one of the venture capitalists was, “It was amazing how quiet you were during the entire call. It’s really nice to see a company that has such a deep management bench.” Now, the old Ted would have been like, “Why am I not talking to the entire time?” You can already tell from this conversation, Sean, I love to talk, right?

Sean (37:31):
Yep. Yep.

Ted Elliott (37:31):
But I’ve been trying to teach my children because they’ve been sitting in the car with me a lot listening to calls, because for whatever reason during COVID, I love taking calls from the car. They’re like, “Dad, you didn’t talk the whole time.” I’m like, “Yeah, because what I’ve learned is you’re so much more powerful when the people who work for you are talking and you’re listening because then, you can figure out what to adjust. But if you’re talking the whole time, it means people aren’t following you.” So I would say the number one thing for entrepreneurs or leaders to think about is if you’re a big talker like me, are you listening?

Ted Elliott (38:10):
I don’t know if you’ve tried this before, I call it the awkward moment of silence. I just hit the mute button sometimes during conference calls for two minutes to see who’s going to talk next. It is the most powerful thing I’ve ever done, just hitting the mute button like, “Is he still there?” Everyone’s like, “What’s going on here?” The whole purpose of spending a lot of money to hire the best people is not tell the best people what to do. It’s to let the best people do what they do and for you to figure out how to keep them in alignment with each other so they’re not driving over each other, right.

Ted Elliott (38:45):
That is a really different experience than when you feel like you have to force it forward, or you have to birth it yourself and it’s a luxury, quite frankly. A lot of the stuff I’m talking to you about being able to take the risks, being able to do this stuff, it’s really a luxury. It’s not something that comes to you naturally. You may pay for that luxury in the form of a rectum or something, but it is a luxury being able to have the freedom to just say, “F it,” right? But once you get there, you find that silence is powerful, letting other people do stuff is powerful. Being chilled is fine, being at peace with yourself and I wish it hadn’t cost me what it costs me physically, but I’ll take it. So hopefully, that gives you some lesson that might be helpful.

Sean (39:37):
It certainly does. Ted, thank you so much for sharing your story both on a personal and professional basis. I’m sure the audience will pick up a few actionable tidbits that they can apply to what they’re trying to accomplish and launch great solutions into the market, see how the market reacts and grow great businesses out there. So thank you again, Ted. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll be in touch.

Ted Elliott (40:04):
Thanks a lot. Thanks for your time. Happy Father’s Day.

Sean (40:06):
Same to you. Take care.

Ted Elliott (40:08):
Bye guys.