Han Yuan 0:06

Hello, hello, hello. When you're ambling on your career path, how do you know when to keep pushing through tough

Introduction

Han Yuan 0:15

times, when to change directions, and how to tell if you're going the right way? In this episode, Hitesh and I sit down with Sagar Shukla, CEO of Foresight. Sagar shares with us how hard times early in his career opened doors he didn't know existed, and how later, when he tried to advocate for himself, but those doors weren't available, he chose a different path entirely. We explore his thoughts on being in the arena when the going gets tough and why he loves it. So without further ado, let's do this.

Hitesh Chudasama 0:59

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Career Journeys Revealed. We are your host, Han, and Hitesh. Today, we have an exciting guest, Sagar

Sagar's Background

Hitesh Chudasama 1:11

Sukla, the founder of Foresight. Sagar is a visionary leader who has been part of B2B SaaS companies for close to 10 years, has been a growth factor for companies like DealCloud, which is a competitor of Salesforce, and Intap. Now at Foresight, he is focused on putting retention at the center and helping protect revenue for enterprises. Welcome to the show, Sagar.

Sagar Shukla 1:42

Thanks so much, Hitesh and Han. It's great to be here with you all. I'm excited for the conversation and awesome intro. I appreciate that.

Hitesh Chudasama 1:48

It's awesome to see the career progression that you've had over the years and how you continuously kept on taking on more and more challenging roles. Can you walk us through your career journey in regards to the different progressions that you've had? Absolutely.

Sagar Shukla 2:05

Yeah. So I started my career in the enterprise SaaS, wild world of SaaS, about 10 years ago when I joined as an early employee at DealCloud. Actually, my career before that was in telco. I should start there at a company called Red Ventures. So this was after I graduated college. I was a sales business analyst for a large company. distributor of internet and TV products. So we sold DirecTV, we sold Verizon, we sold Google Fiber, all these things. And I was a SQL analyst doing a bunch of backend querying for the business. This is a pretty boring job, to be honest. So I left and joined a startup, which is DealCloud, as you referenced. I was employee number 10 there. This is back in early 2016. And we were a startup that was $2 million in ARR and competing with Salesforce, as you mentioned. And my job was in customer success implementation. I was the one responsible for ripping our customers off of Salesforce and locking them into the old cloud. And we were working with private equity funds, investment banks, fund to fund. So a lot of large financial institutions. I did that for a few years and learned a ton about the SaaS industry, about data, about databases, about CRM. And I love being in front of customers. That was my favorite part. I wasn't as big of a fan of being behind the screen and deep in the queries or the data model. So I actually transitioned and I moved to New York to be part of our sales effort, and I was the solutions lead. So I was the sales engineer, value engineer, demo, solutions consultant, taking all that knowledge that I'd built up to ultimately help drive new revenue for the company. And during that time, we got acquired by a company based in Palo Alto called Intap. So it was right place, right time for me, and the leadership of Intap bought DealCloud ultimately to take our CRM capability and embed it into their go to market for new verticals, such as the legal and accounting consulting industries. And so I was tapped to help with that. And so I worked with the leadership of that organization, the president, CEO, and leadership to ultimately take the DealCloud system and then configured for these new verticals. So I did that for the remaining years of my time there. And in 2021, we went public. So it was a great ride. Like I said, right time, right place. Really enjoyed it. Went from 2 million to 250 million in ARR, from 10 people to 800 people over that six-year journey. I grew a ton professionally. I traveled all over the world. I lived in New York for a number of years. I was by coastal for some of that time. So very grateful for that experience. And ultimately, after that ride, I realized, well, I helped build other people's dreams. I want to focus on my own. So I joined forces with my co-founder, Nigel, from Intap, and we had worked together during that time, and we left in 2021 to start Foresight. So I can go to the Foresight story, but I know that's part of our discussion today.

Hitesh Chudasama 4:41

This is great. It seems like you had an awesome ride. Since you were the 10th employee at DealCloud, we'd love to understand from you in regards to as you came in, what were some of the challenges? Because I know at a beginning stage of any startup, you're wearing multiple different hats, taking on different kind of roles. If you could maybe share with us, what are some of the challenges that you face at that point?

Sagar Shukla 5:06

Yeah, absolutely. So we were working with what I would describe now having worked with a number of different end markets and industries, probably the hardest persona to deal with, which is partners at private equity funds and investment banks. And so I was dealing with these people every single day and I got to know many of them and build personal relationships and

Challenges at Early Stage Companies

Sagar Shukla 5:24

many of them became really great clients of ours. But as a young 20 something first time in the shoes, it was difficult, right? They had very high expectations. We were essentially expected to work the hours they did, which was 80 plus hours a week, nights and weekends. but got paid fourth or fifth of that, or not much. So it was an interesting time. One of the biggest challenges that I had was we were pretty understaffed as a company at the time, right? It was chaos and startup land. Our sales team was closing deals left and right. There's only a few of us in the post-sales side to drive delivery and implementation. And at one point I had 15 projects that I was working on. These were 15 private equity funds. I had to migrate off of Salesforce into DealCloud by myself, right? There was no data team. I couldn't ship it off to India or another country till I do a lot of data work, you know, which a lot of companies do. So I was in there in SQL in the Excel sheets doing all this stuff. And there's one moment where I was stressed out late at night, right? It was 9 p.m. I had a big go live happening on Monday. This is Friday night. And I made a big mistake. I basically took a huge export from Salesforce, millions of records. And in my... You know, in the fray of things, I forgot to pull over the primary key. So this is pretty detailed and in the weeds, but a really important part of data migration is making sure you can actually map it over. I didn't do that for whatever reason. I ported everything into the system. The system went live. That was great. And then a week later, the managing partner comes back and says, hey, we have a new fresh cut of data from Salesforce. Can you please refresh the system? I said, okay, sure. And then I had my hell moment looking to the abyss and I realized I have no way to do this because there's no mapping back to the data. And so ultimately, and I can go into more details if you want, but that led to the six hardest months of my life. Honestly, I was much tougher than even starting the company because I felt like I was totally alone had to come out of this hole myself. And it was just some data mess. I had screwed up the data so many ways back and forth. And it was just a bug after bug because I didn't have all the mappings done. And it was just a tumultuous time and a lot of escalations, a lot of traveling to see the client, a lot of Sunday night, you know, blow ups from the client's perspective. And so learned a deep lesson in terms of client journey, how to manage expectations, how to actually drive execution to plan accordingly. And it was a it was a trying moment for sure. And like I Like I said, there's numerous Saturdays. It was 12 p.m. It was a sunny, beautiful day outside. I was in the 10th floor of our building. All my friends were out having a good time, and there I was on the computer trying to fix all these data issues, and I didn't leave the office until 9 p.m. because of that mistake for weeks on end.

Han Yuan 7:59

Tell us a little bit more about the clients and just how difficult they can be.

Sagar Shukla 8:04

Absolutely. So I'll give you a very, and I'm going to anonymize the name here because he might be watching this. I'll call him Johnny. johnny private equity uh

Managing Difficult Clients

Sagar Shukla 8:16

he was a principal or vp on his way to become partner right so he was brought in to get promoted and his this was his project to implement deal cloud to be able to make it to the to the next stage and he was in chicago at a large billion dollar you know assets under management fund and this is a guy who had had a pretty tough string of career uh work basically right he had gone from firm to firm really hard worker but for whatever reason um had had missed the boat on becoming a partner so this was his chance right um in his early to mid 40s and uh and i was his roadblock basically to getting there because if the dashboards weren't right if the data wasn't in there what he told me 9 p.m the night the last night wasn't ready by 8 a.m the next morning i would get a phone call expletives like this guy was just All over. I mean, even on our first call, our kickoff call, he was dropping F-bombs here and there. And at one point he said like, are you sober right now? Because are you understanding what I'm saying? And this was like 8 a.m. on a Monday morning. having a conversation. If I didn't say exactly what he wanted to hear, he thought something was wrong with me, right? And I was like, this is just crazy. I escalate to my sales team. I think this is an extreme example, but he was under a ton of pressure and a lot of duress. And he's grown up in an industry where that's the norm, right? You're put under the pressure ball every single day for hours on end. And I got the brunt of that as his analyst, as he essentially coined me. So those are the types of personas. So basically what would happen is I would have to fly up to Chicago multiple times a month on a day's notice to go and meet with with him and get him over the cliff

Han Yuan 9:53

on the end of this. Man. So life is awful. Why didn't you quit?

Sagar Shukla 10:00

That's a great question. I mean, there's times I was like, why am I doing this? I was so stressed out. And I was in Charlotte at the time. I grew up in Charlotte, right? And I had my family here. It was one summer evening. We were walking around. And it was awesome. And I just felt so... dark and gloomy inside. I was like, this is hard. Why am I doing this? I just want to enjoy my life. I want to have fun. I want to be able to enjoy my weekends. I'm working my butt off all week. But something just hooked me. I thought I could not give up on this. I owed it to my clients. I owed it to myself. I owed it to my company. And I don't like leaving things half done. And ultimately, You know, maybe this is my masochism and why I'm a founder ultimately, but the moments that I look back on is when it was those late nights or sometimes even middle of the day, I would go into the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror and just like try to meet myself where I was, right? No matter what the situation, I had to be like, hey, man, we're here. We're in this together. Nobody can help us. The only way out is to keep going. Are you ready to do that? Right. And I would just look at myself for minutes on end. And I needed that to to get that that boost to get to that extra level to realize, yeah, we're in the shithole right now, but we can get to the other end. It's going to take effort. It's going to take focus. And let's just go do it. And the feeling that you get once you're on the other side is absolutely worth the pain. So I think I got it. used to that and I kept finding myself in those situations as time went on. So not a great answer for you, but I don't know. It's just something that I gravitate towards, I guess.

Han Yuan 11:44

If anything, you get a good story out of it. So that's awesome.

Hitesh Chudasama 11:48

Yeah, it's great to hear the fact that you were able to cross that chasm being part of a really, you know, growth startup and going through the number of clients and, you

Not Quitting When The Going Gets Tough

Hitesh Chudasama 11:58

know, helping in regards to different aspects of the company it was growing. I know that like being part of DealCloud and then getting acquired by Intap, I mean, I bet that was a transition as well. It would be great to see, and I know eventually Intap and IPO, would be great to see what were some of the different experiences that you had, especially going from a growth startup to being part of another company?

Sagar Shukla 12:22

Yeah, absolutely. This was a big realization for me being early in my career of what different cultures are like. When I was at DealCloud, it was a group of, at that point, maybe a hundred of us. Most of us were in our early careers, right? Under 30, 35. And we bonded a lot because of the challenges. I mean, I wasn't the only one going through this. We were all going through it together in some form or fashion. And so we had each other to, be together through this journey on, and we had that camaraderie, right? Intap was a different beast, right? It's a 20-year-old company at the time that we were acquired, seasoned professionals, right? They'd been there for much of their career, later stage professionals who had families, who had settled down into their careers. And so when you bring those young, hungry, go get an energy with, hey, this is how we do things. This is how do we drive a stable growth and community. There is definitely a tension there. And so I think it was difficult initially to try to make change happen and take the reins as I was describing, right? If a problem is there, you just have to go figure it out. But now there's a lot more steps you have to take. So anyways, one of the key moments here in the projects that I was tasked with was, as I mentioned, after going through the rigor of the past six months, It paid off for me, right? Our leadership was looking at me and saying, hey, Sagar was able to do this. He's capable. So they basically recommended me to the leadership of Intep that if you've had any special projects, throw this guy on it. He'll do something, right? So I was like, okay, cool. And so they came up to me and said, we're trying to launch a new product into the legal market. And we need to basically take all of DealCloud for financial services, retrofit it, and Can you learn this new market and can you help us sell? I said, sure. That sounds great. Sounds exciting. Something new. So now, rather than working with my peers, I was working with the Intap leadership and people I'd never met before. They'd acquired a bunch of companies and so I was working with people. They'd acquired a company from Singapore and Australia and they were flying in. So I was meeting them for the first time actually on a train via Sela Amtrak from New York to D.C. because they bought the company and said, hey, work with this guy and You guys have to pitch, you know, Thursday afternoon in D.C. And I had never met these people before. So we were bonding on the train and figuring this stuff out. So basically two, you know, two, I guess, planes coming together. And we both had to learn how to do that. So it's a moment of immense learning and adaptation and learning how other people worked. And I basically was in listening mode. So. um i basically i went on this tour for four months i was on a trainer plane every week with folks from intap with folks from the other companies they acquired and i was just listening we're gonna three law firms a day i would get their requirements get their feedback on the solution they'd tell me hey we want to see a pipeline dashboard we want to make sure our lawyers have visibility xyz just tons of requirements i'd go back that night to the hotel spend a couple hours just synthesizing trying to configure the platform for that we go to the next day show them iterate, iterate, iterate. We probably had 150 of these meetings within three months. And I learned a ton, right? And so it was just a hyper adaptation period of trying to bring the culture and the products of two companies together to ultimately generate a result, which is closing big deals.

Han Yuan 15:48

Were you ever worried about having a reputation as a fixer?

Sagar Shukla 15:52

Yeah, man, I don't think I ever... At some point it did get taxing because this was now when we're a bit more mature. I became, because I was developing all the subject matter expertise with a small group of people. And so whenever a deal was happening, the account executives would come to me and say, hey, can you run this demo? Can you run this demo? And so initially it was exciting and learning, but I think it definitely did get exhausting after a while. And I realized, okay, we need to start to set better expectations and start to ultimately drive you know, the company to success. And I can't be the choke point. I can't be the bottleneck because that's not scalable. We need to start to embed this knowledge into the company. And so I think that came

The Darkside of Being the "Fixer"

Sagar Shukla 16:33

a year after the acquisition and I was getting a bit burned out from all the travel and being, you know, my hand raised. But the initial stage of it, I loved it. I love learning. I love being in random, new, uncertain environments, the unknown. I think that's where I really find my motivation and find the fine purpose, honestly, is taking the gray area, the vague, unknown to call it that, and trying to find the truth in that for whatever the situation demands.

Han Yuan 17:02

So how did you manage the transition in terms of talking to your leadership team and saying, dude, we need to do things a little bit differently? How did that go down? Yeah,

Sagar Shukla 17:13

so it was interesting. There were some good parts, there were some not good parts. So ultimately what I... what i came to this was about a year and a half in is i realized hey you're i'm i'm the the the fixer if you want to call it that for a lot of these things and helping to figure things out but i need i need a help right i need a team i and i want to lead this team to ultimately take any uncertain unknown problem or proposition and then turn it into like a scalable sustainable path and that was in my i was still early career at that point right in my 20s and i think So I put together a whole proposal. And actually, let me mention one detail, why I built so much confidence and leverage. So after this six-month rodeo of going and doing all these deals, I was actually very fortunate, kind of crazy timing. We ended up getting in the boardroom of one of Intep's biggest customers. This was in Washington, D.C., It was a long boardroom, 40 lawyers of this global firm came in to essentially see our pitch and demo, and the leadership asked me to run the demo. And here I was in a room of lawyers of pretty intimidating stature, and ran the demo for two hours, and it was a wild time. Ultimately, what that led to is we closed a huge deal, like a multi-year, eight-figure deal. I was awesome. I felt amazing. It was so great. The leadership gave me some recognition. It was awesome. I'm not necessarily saying that was the whole reason I was doing this, but it was a great win along the way. Anyway, the point is I took that. I said, okay, now I have some leverage. We generate this amazing result for the company. At that point, you could call it hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. net asset value for the company because of these deals that were closing. So now this is my moment to put my pitch together and run this team. So I put a whole PowerPoint deck together. I got feedback from my mentors in the company. And then I set up time with the entire leadership and said, hey, in order for this to happen again, this is what I need, right? I want to be the head of this team. These are the people that I want to hire. This is how we need to organize it. And this is what we can go and do. And he said, yeah, that sounds great. Like, awesome. Love it. Good. We'll get back to you. Okay, cool. So, all right, great. That was awesome. Patiently waiting weeks, months. You know, I keep checking in once in a while. Hey, any progress there? They said, oh, we'll get back to you. We'll get back to you. Nothing really happened. And then a big reorg happened, right? The company had to reshuffle, reorg. We acquired more companies. And ultimately, they made the decision to bring in one of the seasoned executives to do a similar effort, right? They weren't willing to entrust an early stage, hungry, early stage career person who was able to prove themselves at least in this other deal to do it. And so for me, that was a signal of, okay, I've hit my limit here. I'm not gonna be here anymore. And that ultimately paved the way for me to say, okay, in the next six months I'm out and it's time to do my own thing because if this company can't see the value of some of these efforts, then I need to go create the value outside the company.

Han Yuan 20:32

It's so fascinating to hear you talk about that because if you didn't push or had the conversation around this is what I need, you would have been just grinding it out endlessly and ostensibly the company would have just kept using you because you were delivering.

Sagar Shukla 20:52

Absolutely. People always say know your worth or ask for what you need. I think that was my moment for sure. I think I'm so glad, to your point, that's a great call out and insight. I'm glad I did that because that was opening my eyes and awareness of, okay, how do I need to view myself, not in the midst of the company, but in the industry, in

Know Your Worth

Sagar Shukla 21:13

the corporate world, in the startup, whatever world I'm in, how should I be viewing myself agnostic of my employer or my team? And who do I want to be when I grow up? And I think that was a big growth moment for me in realizing, I no longer want to change the company, right? I want to change an industry. And what does that even look like? So that then started to plant the seeds for future endeavors.

Hitesh Chudasama 21:36

I think that's great. The fact that Sagar, you listen to your inner voice and making sure the fact that you meet the bold step to be able to go on your own. So, I mean, It seems like you've gone through the struggles and the challenges of a startup and led initiatives within a large corporation. Now at the next phase of your journey, it seems like you co-founded Foresight. So we'd love to understand from you what made you want to go ahead and start that and what are some of the things that you've had to deal with because you've been at Foresight or at least you have been working on Foresight for the past four years. You know, what were some early struggles and challenges that you faced and what keeps you going at this point?

Sagar Shukla 22:23

Yeah, great questions. So to start off, what was the motivation and really what led to it? And then I'll talk about what's keeping us going. So, yeah, my co-founder and I both worked that deal. I went through the transition of Intab. We actually met. This is a fun story. First time we met, we were both in New York. I had just moved to New York. He was moving to London. And we were on the PATH train going from Jersey City, where our office was, back to Manhattan. And on the PATH train, if you've ever been in New York, it goes under the Hudson. And we were just there chatting. And we would never have known that, fast forward three years from now, that we'd be working and starting a company together. We were just catching up as colleagues. But something struck me then that... Meeting someone at your company who shares similar ambitions, similar ways of thinking about the world is really powerful. And I guess that stuck with me in my mind. And then a bunch of things happened, right? I gained all this experience and confidence with selling that big deal, having to undergo all that duress of adaptation, vouching for myself and realizing I've hit my upper limit. And so I think there's three things that ultimately were the

The Three Signs You're Ready to Start a Company

Sagar Shukla 23:30

culmination of, okay, we need to leave and go do the next thing. First one was self-esteem, confidence, sort of viewing myself, right? At that point I felt I have what it takes to take the next step. Number two was network. So are there people who can vouch for me? Are there people who can help me raise money? The board member and CEO of DealCloud ended up having a great exit. They actually became some of our early investors. So felt like I had a good community. and co-founder now too right and then the third one was the idea right what is the problem not necessarily the idea but what was the problem now this is the the biggest thing and i'll connect this to foresight so as we're going through this crazy journey of scale the number one challenge because i had worked in post sales and customer success implementation pre-sale sort of both sides of the revenue chasm if you want to call it that was retention, right? This is incredibly important for companies as they scale because retention is your growth strategy. If you want to go from a $10 million to $100 million company, you have to keep your customers. You have to grow your customers. This was incredibly hard across our journey because we were very siloed and we weren't measuring the right leading indicators of retention. We were indexing on things that were easy to measure, like product usage or telemetry or engagement or CRM, all things that we cared about as a vendor, but ultimately, what mattered to our executive buyers was not necessarily quantified. And I was in rooms with these executive buyers who would say, hey, we're leaving your company because we're not getting value out of your solution. They're paying us six, seven figure deals, right? So those are all aha moments that made me and my co-founder realize there's a big opportunity here to solve this problem of quantifying business impact, measuring perceptions of value from our customers outside in perspective, and then turning that into a ultimately platform a process and a way of doing business that can help customers and SaaS companies scale. So all those three things came together and in 2021 left to go on this founder journey at Foresight. Let me pause there if there's any questions on that before I can go.

Han Yuan 25:30

I was wondering if you could give us insight into when it comes to your customers, like how much do they spend to acquire a customer versus how much does it cost for them to retain a customer?

Sagar Shukla 25:43

yeah i mean this is the big we call it the the value gap right customer acquisition cost is incredibly high especially now and software is very saturated so um and this is some stats that you know it's a colloquial

The Value Gap

Sagar Shukla 25:57

but i can share some data on it is customer acquisition like if you take a look at what it costs to retain a customer versus acquire a customer i mean it's it's like almost divide by zero error because you have retention is free right they're already your customer There's no cost to retain. They're already there. Don't mess it up. Don't mess it up, right? But whatever it takes to acquire a customer is going to be way more than it is to retain because it's free. And so oftentimes at that company, we were seeing thousands of dollars to acquire a customer. And if you're losing even one of those, like you're losing six or seven figures on one customer, that's just not worth it. And so that's why I'm saying retention has to be a growth strategy in today's market with all the stuff that's going on in the macro. because that is your most efficient form of growth and your efficient form of ultimately getting you customer acquisition. So yeah, I mean, it wasn't just Intap and DealCloud facing this problem, right? It was the entire industry and we were seeing this. And so we were seeing a lot of signal to then go and pursue this.

Han Yuan 26:59

It also strikes me that, you know, given those kinds of dollar amounts, it's very possible, depending on how you price the product, that a company might not even break even on the CAC within one renewal period or potentially even sell it at a loss out of the gate. So that is a huge problem, right?

Sagar Shukla 27:15

Yeah. And so payback periods are a really key metric in enterprise software, which is how many months does it take to ultimately win back, like break even on that particular customer? And I think best in class is like 18 months, right? A year and a half, if you're crushing it and very efficient. But for many companies, that's trending upwards, right? I've seen payback periods of up to three years now for many enterprise

Han Yuan 27:37

households.

Sagar Shukla 27:39

So you have to keep that customer for three years before you make any money on it. That's like paying off your mortgage, and then you can start building equity. Like, that's crazy. And in this environment, you know, many customers are turning after the second, first year or second year, like you are just losing money. So if you can't fix that, you are never going to make money as a company. You're not going to be profitable. Your valuation is going to tank. Net revenue retention, NRR, is the number one metric to correlate to retention expansion evaluation. And 75% of companies have reported that has dropped in the last year. So the industry is getting hit hard, right? And retention is king. But if you don't have a more scientific way to measure it and ultimately align with what your buyer is paying you, you're going to be in trouble. What I'm hearing from

Han Yuan 28:25

you is you're providing the insight so that folks know, hey, we are messing up as a company. And so therefore, the customer is going to churn. Because otherwise, they wouldn't know the customer churns, you lose money. It's horrible. So it's an amazing problem to be attacking. And it's so cool to see how you started a whole company to tackle this hard problem.

Sagar Shukla 28:50

Yeah, I think the biggest validation is when the problem that you tried to solve at your former company is now something that they want. So we ended up signing That's awesome. So it's like a full circle moment of, hey, I want to solve this problem internally, right? And it's not working. So it is just great to see. And I can say that because we do a client announcement about Intep. It is on the record. But yeah, so it's been amazing to have that journey come full circle. Now I'm working, it's pretty funny, right? I'm working with a leadership that I was pitching to run this team now as an outside vendor. and having the same conversations, but now doing it with full autonomy and control of what our destiny is. So that's always a nice feeling.

Hitesh Chudasama 29:32

That's really nice. So Sagar, based on, you know, being at Foresight for the past, you know, three, four years, I mean, you've gone through a lot of different phases and especially growing from, you know, like just the two of you to growing to what it is at this point. Like, what are some of the things that you still continuously keep on getting challenged with or things that you feel like, especially if anybody who's starting up a company right now, especially at this stage where you have so many abundance of companies, especially in the AI space coming on board, What are some of the tips or maybe even advice that you would give to somebody who's starting up right now?

Sagar Shukla 30:10

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, so this is something I was thinking about a lot over the weekend and I'll share it here. If not, you can push me to be more specific. But we call ourselves founders, right? We found something, we found a product, we found a problem, whatever. But I think a more apt name for this whole journey is to be finders. Like we're constantly having to find solutions, right? You've never found and you've never completed something. It's always iterative.

Finding not Founder and Building Resilience

Sagar Shukla 30:39

You're trying to find product market fit. You're trying to find your first customers. You're trying to find investors, trying to find. You always have to be problem solving and finding and it's never done. And I've talked to entrepreneurs who are way more successful and way more seasoned than I am, who've run three, four, five, 10 companies, exited many of them. And they all say, no matter what stage of my career, no matter how many startups I've done, the one thing that is true is that you are constantly having to learn and reinvent yourself. And if anybody tells you, hey, this is how it's done, they don't know what they're talking about because the market's different, right? The environment, the technology is different. Everything's different. Even trying to do the same product 10 years ago and then do it today, everything's going to be different. And so I think having a mindset of... no matter where you are or what you're doing, you constantly have to be in a state of learning and that's okay. Don't feel like you are entitled to anything because you are always going to be wanting to give up in that stage. And Han, you made a great point about quitting. And I think honestly that the, and I'm not the only one who said this, this is like pretty common, but the number one reason startups fail is that people quit. And they can't weather the storms, right? They're not able to fuel the tank back up when it goes empty like 25 times. And so the resilience I think is really critical. And I think I'm learning like that's really what this journey is about, about resilience and learning how to be resilient and what you uniquely need as a human being, emotionally, spiritually, economically, whatever, to continue going at it every single day. because that's what it's all about, right? It is absolutely a marathon. So advice I would give is do not come in with the expectation that you're doing a startup so it's going to be a huge success or whatever, right? I think people who have even grown up in very entrepreneurial circles, I mean, Bay Area, right? There's a lot of like, hey, this amazing outcome happened. I'm not going to do it and I might have that same outcome. Maybe, but don't expect anything because the only thing you can expect is that you are going to have to be find a way to get back up every time you fall down. And if that resonates with you, if that's the type of lifestyle and person you are, then great. Otherwise, take a hard think about it before you get started.

Hitesh Chudasama 32:53

And some of the takeaways based on what you have been talking about is it seems like throughout your whole career, three different qualities of leadership that has definitely been there consistently. One is in regards to you being adoptable. and making sure the fact that you're, depending on the environment, the different kind of companies and people, you've been able to adapt to that. Also, the fact that you continuously keep on learning. And then the third one was the fact, as you mentioned, in regards to being resilient, and especially being a founder or finder now. I think that's awesome, the fact that you keep on trying to go and learn and just being adaptable and resilient no matter what comes your way.

Sagar Shukla 33:34

Yeah, I love how you put it, right? Those are, I think those are, not just great qualities for finders or founders, but really anybody in their career. And I know that your audiences are folks who are trying to level up in their careers and make it get to the next stage of growth. And I think those are all great qualities that I learned from my peers, from leaders I respect a lot is nothing is going to stay the same. You have to keep learning and approach life with that mindset, approach your work with that mindset, because then you'll be able to figure it out. I have a higher chance of figuring it out. Nothing certain.

Han Yuan 34:10

Kitesh turned me on to this book called The Master of Change. And in that book, there's this part of the book where they talk about having a road versus a path. And I thought that was fascinating because the road is well paved. You really can't get lost. There's signs and whatnot. And then there's this idea of a path where it's more like a hike. Some people have crossed the path, but there are many ways to get from point A to point B. And it does strike me that when you're talking about the entrepreneurial journey, especially the language around finding things, you're talking about

Roads Versus Paths

Han Yuan 34:42

a path. I guess my question for you is how do you know when you're lost as you're walking around this path? And what are your techniques to figure out how to get back on the path?

Sagar Shukla 34:54

Well, yeah, these are some great questions. Man, I don't think you would know. If I'm reflecting on the last four years, when I was lost, I didn't know I was lost. I had no idea until six months later that I was like, damn, I was very lost at that point. But you would never have the benchmark because it's all relative. And I think... So I'll just give you an example here of when we were early, maybe two years in, we had signed a few initial early customers. This is three pivots ago or whatever. And we thought we had the thing. We had product market fit. We had what people wanted. We could charge a lot of money. We were selling to market intelligence community, like basically selling to communities to get market intelligence on their ecosystem, not even related to retention necessarily. And we thought, wow, we're really getting some traction. We've got a bunch of people using our product. By the end of the year, we're going to be at a million in revenue, right? Yeah, yeah, good luck. I mean, that took us many, many more years to get to. And I don't think we realized at the time of, we were actually at 1,000 feet. We thought we were at 10,000 feet elevation, but we were at 1,000 feet the whole time because we didn't build that awareness. So I think you're not going to know your loss until, years down the road, but that's part of the aperture opening up and the eyeballs just being more aware. One thing I will say on this, and this is my analogy, I love the whole road path component. Something that I have become drawn to is, you know, in a lot of video games, I used to play StarCraft back in the day. And so, you know, I'm sure there's a bunch of gamers in the audience as well. But so, you know, I would be in my map, like just a black box in the map, right? And every time you move, now it gets illuminated. Like that path gets illuminated and you eventually move around a lot. And like the whole thing is just shaded and it's bright and you can see exactly where you've been, right? Like, I think that's my analogy for startups, for life, for everything is you just have to keep exploring your map, right? Like just keep exploring your map, but you will know when you went this way and then you end up going here. You don't think you're lost. You think you're making progress, but then you make it back to where you were maybe a year ago. You're like, whoa, did I even make any progress? And that's when the aha moment goes like, I think I was just rambling around for the last year. I don't think we did anything. But actually, you explored a whole bunch of your maps. So now, every time you touch those nodes again, you're going to know exactly where you were, why you were there, what made you get there, and you have much more context. So long-winded answer to your question. You're not going to know until you do it, and it's going to take some time. And to get back on the path, it's all about, well, I keep asking myself if I'm on the path right now. I don't know. Like, I think I'm on the path. Ask me again in six months, maybe I'll tell you I was lost the whole time. So that's my answer.

Han Yuan 37:47

But what I'm hearing from you though is, and I think it's interesting, is it's like a GPS, right? Where you have some general sense of where you're going. And if you happen to be going somewhere else, you've basically unlocked the fog of war, so to speak. And so you know, okay, I'm not going to go there anymore because I've already been there. So because you know you went the wrong way, if you were to make a direction change, at least you're generally moving in some direction.

Sagar Shukla 38:18

For sure. And I think the compass GPS is actually a great component to this because In order to find yourself back on the path, you need to know why you're doing what you're doing and on multiple different levels, right? Both your motivations, like you asked, why didn't you quit earlier? And I don't think I realized at the time, but I wasn't able to. I needed to see it through. That was my intrinsic motivation. I needed to see it through. I'm feeling that right now, too, as one of the founders of this company. When it gets really tough, we need to see this through, whatever that looks like. We're not going to know until we make it. Maybe that's an exit. Maybe... You know, we hit it big, we IPO, maybe we fold, maybe, who knows what's going to happen. But we have to see it through to one of those endpoints. And so that's one of the motivations. You also need to know why you're building this company, right? Why is this product, why is this problem so important? And I think those are the two intrinsic GPS compasses is you need to know your personal why and you're doing this. And then also the business why, like why does this business deserve to exist? A great, you know, sage, wise founder that I've learned from, told me this. This guy's done four or five companies. He says, every three months, my co-founder and I get together and we ask ourselves this question. Do we deserve to exist? And this guy's at a $50 million annual run rate revenue business, right? So I'm like, okay, you definitely deserve to exist. We're not even close to that. But if he's asking those questions, I think that's key too. So that has to be your compass is constantly stress testing the why of your business, the why of yourself. And as long as you have those two pieces guiding you and being aware of your surroundings, like, hey, I've been here before. Maybe we should try this direction. Maybe we know this path works. Let's go back on that path again. Then you'll ultimately start to build the intuition, awareness, and internal instinct, right? I think instinct is key, but that takes time to

Wrap Up

Sagar Shukla 40:10

build.

Hitesh Chudasama 40:13

Thanks, Agar. Thanks for your time. I mean, and also the insightful story. I mean, I appreciate the fact that you shared so many different personal as well as professional tidbits in regards to all the things that have helped you along the way and things that you've done. So really appreciate that. Absolutely. I

Sagar Shukla 40:30

hope it was helpful to people listening.

Han Yuan 40:32

I'm inspired. I mean, just the stories that you told, the grit. You know, what I also loved was just you know, how authentic you are when you're talking about your journey. And it's really enlightening to me because one of the things that I got out of this conversation was also sometimes when things aren't going right, it's really helping you guide you to where you could be going, whether or not it's in your business or even in your sort of personal career, you know, back when you were in a more conventional J-O-B. And I think that's... That's really, really interesting.

Sagar Shukla 41:13

I appreciate that. I love these conversations because it also takes me out of the weeds working in and on the business and reflecting outside. I appreciate both of you asking such insightful questions and helping me to reflect because I think we all have those moments in our careers, no matter if you're doing a J-O-B or doing a F-I-N-D-I-N-G or whatever it is. being aware of those moments of growth, of realization, of awareness. We all have them, and I think we need to make those part of our own compass, right, and make those part of our own GPSs. So no matter what situation we find ourselves in, we're able to navigate home, right, or navigate to our destination. So thank you for helping me articulate.

Han Yuan 41:57

And foresight's amazing. I think your mission is incredible. If you guys succeed... Invariably, and almost by definition, you will help all these other companies succeed too, right? That is truly magical. Like you could not only make yourself, but you will make companies. That is amazing.

Sagar Shukla 42:21

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. And that's really going back to our why, right? Where do we go when the tank's empty or when the times are tough? What's going to help us refuel it is, you know, my co-founder Nigel and I always say that we made the choice to not change a company, but to change an industry.

Hitesh Chudasama 42:38

And we

Sagar Shukla 42:38

fundamentally believe that the enterprise software industry is going through an existential crisis right now. It's been attacked from a lot of different angles, from the inside, from the outside, from buyers and AI and saturation. And in order for this industry to ultimately grow, succeed, evolve, and provide more value to the market, we need to change. And we hope to be a part of that change, right? And help to shift it because there's immense potential and we need to rethink the way we've been doing things. And retention, I'll come back to that, right? It's the secret sauce. You keep your customers, you grow them, you do it at lower cost, you're going to make more money, you're going to be able to invest in your employees, you're going to be investing in your buyers and your market, you're investing in your product, your team won't get diluted, right? You don't have to raise a ton of money because that comes at a cost and ultimately everybody's going to be better off. So the time is now and we'd love to catch up in a couple of years and we'll see where things have ended up for us and for you all as well.

Hitesh Chudasama 43:39

Thanks once again, Sagar. Wishing you, as well as Foresight, all the best going forward.

Sagar Shukla 43:45

Thank you all so much, Han and Fish. It was great speaking with you and really looking forward to this going live and seeing the reception to it.