CEO & Founder Eiso Kant talks about building a billion dollar business
Eiso on outbound sales, passing the Mom Test, and the decision to go big
Welcome to Traction, your weekly interview series with founders who share their stories and reveal secrets behind their early traction.
I am very excited to introduce Eiso Kant, Founder and CEO of Athenian. I was introduced to Eiso by a mutual friend and investor Taylor Clauson of Abstraction Capital (whom we both love).
When I first met Eiso, I could tell that he was different from many of the other founders that I’ve met, and what struck me was his affinity for cultivating deep relationships with others.
Eiso shared his thoughts on many things including what it means to try and build a billion dollar company. I enjoyed learning about his approach to getting early traction (which is counterintuitive to what you might see on LinkedIn).
This is my eighth conversation for Traction, and the first unedited full-length interview. It was a pleasure speaking with Eiso and I’ll definitely chat with him again soon.
There’s tons of gold in here… enjoy!
Joshua: Hey Eiso! So, what’s the story behind Athenian?
Eiso: Yeah, so I'm a big geek and have been for quite some time… but Athenian really started out of the fact that I got to spend time with a lot of software engineering orgs.
As I was building my previous company in the developer tooling space, and as we were as I was spending time with engineering, there's something that became very apparent: the best engineering leaders were managing and running their engineering orgs very differently than everybody else.
They were running it as a professionalized function where they were looking at metrics and data. They were goal setting. And they had incredible visibility over the bottlenecks in teams and processes and tooling in the org, where the rest of software engineering, and most other companies, were still doing this in a very anecdotal manner.
There wasn’t metrics, there wasn't data or goal setting yet. And that led to the inspiration of starting Athenian, because it's just very hard to imagine that as time progresses, software engineering is managed and improved as it is today.
So when we started the company, we had a bit of an unusual starting point compared to many other startups. We started the company not with the idea that we, in the next 18 months, want to be building a venture-backed hyper-growth company.
We had this vision of the future, of the way we believed that engineering organizations could be run and could be improved, but that vision was early.
There were a few engineering leaders who were thinking about metrics and goal setting, but it was still a very niche idea. So we started with some seed financing with a very clear message to our investors:
That this might not ever become a big company. We don't know. This might turn out to be the size of your local bakery.
But, we do know that there's a vision of the future that we want to build.
Joshua: What’s your background before Athenian? And can you tell me more about your thought process when you started the company?
Eiso: I went and worked in digital currencies in 2009. Then I built a job platform in Europe in 2013. I did an AI thing five or six years ago… and so I've been too early too many times. And it's okay if you're too early. There's nothing wrong with being too early.
But by the time the market catches up with the future, you need to have the right foundations. That is everything from your cap table to your team to where you truly are at at that moment in time.
But always in the back of my mind, if we see that the wave is coming with lots of momentum, and it starts building, then there's something really big to be built here.
Then we can decide what we want to do. And that only came about 18 months after founding the company. All of a sudden we started seeing that wave and then decided to say, “okay, now if we want to build this into a really large business, what are the puzzle pieces that we need?”
Those puzzle pieces include: what kind of investors, what kind of funding, what kind of leadership team… and then the decision came down to: “do we truly want to build a billion ARR company or aspire to do so?”
….And every founder says they want to build a billion dollar company.
But I think very few actually truly do. Because if you want $30 million in your bank account, as a founder, if that's your motivation, then building a billion dollar company is really not the easiest way to get there in my opinion.
If you want to build something that has a massive impact, then you really need to ask yourself if are you willing to go along for a journey that's 15-20 years. You need to ask yourself if you willing to have your life structured to reflect what that means.
I had spent quite a few months reflecting on and talking to people about and thinking through and talking with my partner and, and really figuring out like, “hey, is this what we want the next decade of our lives plus to look?”
We came to conclusion, yes. Go big or go home.
Joshua: So, what did traction look like for you guys early on?
Eiso: The first 100 engineering leaders that we spoke to told us that there's something here but it’s not something that they’d buy that quarter.
But then we started getting to the right people, they’d say, “oh, this is something I could see us buying.” But we knew it wasn't really legit until people started saying, “we're looking to buy something this quarter.”
Joshua: How long had you been building the product up until that point?
Eiso: So we had the first MVP in the hands of small SMB companies. I would say about six to seven months after we started the company.
I heard advice from a founder many years ago and it really stuck with me and he said, “look, start with the SMB, start with the smallest possible customer and build for them, learn from them, and then progressively go up market.”
It’s like a ladder. If what you're building is relevant for companies with 10 engineers, start there. Then try with the ones of 25, and then maybe reach and try with 150, but never go more than two rungs up the ladder.
Get solidified logos and solidify the learnings at each rung of the ladder before you go to the next one. It's really useful advice because it meant in the early days, we were selling a couple of $100/year customers and we started selling a couple of $1,000/year customers, and today we sell $60k deals.
If we would have tried to go directly to those mid-market customers that we're going for right now, we would have realized that we were missing 80% of features, the knowledge on how to sell the content, the credibility—all of those things that took time to build up.
You gain a lot by going one step at a time.
Joshua: Do you recall any specific experiments, growth experiments, that stand out in the earlier days?
Eiso: Yeah, the one that has been very defining for us is outbound with SDRs.
So, this is not common—many companies in the early days, startups don't like having SDRs. There's a lot to be said for PLG motions, but in our space, PLG didn't make sense for a lot of specific reasons.
But we saw early on that once you get outbound sales to work, and you get kind of the SDR motion such as cold outbounding people who have never heard of you and get them to buy… that’s powerful.
Cold outbound is one of the most honest channels that you have.
It's not your friends and family. It's not the people you happen to know. It's that random person in Idaho or New Zealand that's decided to pick up the phone and talk to you. That took us a lot of time to get right.
We had some early indications that this would work, including the fact that we have some adjacent competitors that were building SDR teams. So we knew that it would work. But it took us quite some time to get right. And we made the classic mistakes of hiring someone in a sales leadership position who should have been an individual contributor.
We had to rebuild the SDR team about three times until it succeeded.
But we knew this it can work because we had evidence that it does. Don't stop until it works. And just keep trying keep investing keep figuring it out. Today it's a huge pipeline driver for us.
Joshua: Are your SDRs hyper-focused on accounts or is it spray and pray? Can you share any learnings there?
Eiso: So, we've defined our ICP over time, and the more focused the ICP is, the better everything became in the entire company.
When you know who you’re for and who you're not for, and you're very strict about this, it focuses an early stage company incredibly well.
The funny thing is the older we've gotten, we're still narrowing our ICP. You'd expect the opposite. We’re constantly narrowing.
If you're for everyone, you're for no one.
There's the Superhuman framework where they keep refining the people who love them the most. Then we say no to everyone else.
Joshua: I'm curious about luck… do you think you created your own luck, or was it just sheer luck—the kind that you happen to stumble on?
Eiso: I think anybody who says that luck doesn't play a role has has a huge ego or blind hubris.
I would say that the way we were able to create luck by being patient, and being able to let it manifest.
We've always made sure that we have lots of runway at any given moment. There's a huge amount of runway in our bank account and that’s helped a lot.
But the biggest luck that we've had has always been around people. That just at that moment in time, someone came on the market when we needed them—people who've had a huge impact on the trajectory of company.
Joshua: Is there any advice that you would give to someone who's starting a project or starting a startup or to someone just trying to get their thing off the ground?
Eiso: Read the Mom Test. It's a very simple, cheap book online. Not as well known but it's a book about how to truly do non-biased interviews. It helps you validate every single idea before you ever hire, before you ever spend money, before you ever write a line of code, before you ever build a product.
It helps you identify the one idea where you're like “holy shit, this needs to be done right now” because it will save you a whole year and a half of waiting (like what we did). It will save you lots of things. And it will make everything easier along the way.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out Athenian right now. And if you’re new to Traction, check out the other featured interviews. If you’re not yet subscribed, sign up below to join hundreds of founders, investors, and operators learn about growth.