York IE Podcast Tour, S3E5: The Silicon Valley Podcast

Episode Summary

York IE CEO Kyle York joined The Silicon Valley Podcast, hosted by Shawn Flynn, principal of Global Capital Markets. The duo discussed how the B2B SaaS market has changed, how to disrupt the prevailing venture capital model and advice for investors and early-stage companies alike.

About The Silicon Valley Podcast

The Silicon Valley Podcast opens a window into the minds of the most successful leaders, investors, creators and inventors — sharing Silicon Valley business acumen with entrepreneurs around the world. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify

Key Takeaways

Startup content creation

“A big part of what I foster, as an operator and an angel advisor over the years, is to help founders, executives get out of their comfort zone and find their unique mediums and pathways to spread their message. “When we spent time at Oracle, my boss there hated public speaking. He didn’t like to prioritize content production, per se. A lot of times what we would do inside internal meetings is transcribe everything he’d say, and then pull out a lot of quotes, use them as social assets, create short-form blog posts and Q&As with him. Then we just had to wait for him to give the approval to post it. He didn’t even necessarily know he was doing it. This is very commonplace for us and how we have to work with many tech founders.”

Recurring revenue and customer expectations

“How many subscriptions do you get that are actually just monthly — that you can walk from at any time? What that’s doing is making the market have to deliver an amazing user experience and customer service to not just win the account, but expand that account, retain that account, turn that account into a loyal advocate and let the flywheel persist.”

Venture capital management fees

“If you think about a 2-3% annual management fee on a $500 million, $1 billion, $3 billion fund, that’s a ton of money running around. The average venture capitalist, just on management fees alone, can make half a million to a million dollars per year. Depending on where you live, that can go a long way. That’s whether or not they’re good or bad investors. What I always like to say is that the client of a venture capital firm or private equity firm or hedge fund is the [limited partner]. It’s not the entrepreneur or the founder they back.”

Remote work’s effects on B2B SaaS

“I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be a B2B SaaS business. If you think about it, everybody going home means everybody is now online and everybody needs to do their job from a very transient environment, whether they’re at home, in the office or on the road. The world’s just changed. We’ve actually seen nothing but momentum in B2B SaaS. “That’s why you’re seeing so much money and capital fly into B2B SaaS. There’s more and more companies that are going to be able to get really big in B2B SaaS. There’s going to be these big platforms and consolidators, which means there’s going to be more and more [mergers and acquisitions]. That only leads to more and more value creation for entrepreneurs and talent and folks that are in our professions.”

Watch