Hunters + Unicorns: The 33 CxOs - Cedric Pech #023

Hey, thank you very much, Simon.

Years ago with people. I joined the company and I was trying to recruit some people. I remember me calling someone, one of my friends, to come and work with me, and it was pre-IPO. I think the stock price was the price, obviously the company wasn't public, right? It was the board defining it, I think at $8 a share. And I remember that guy, I'm not gonna name him, who was telling me, 'Sorry, it's too late. I want to join a very early stage IPO startup. I want to get all the wealth out of the potential growth, and you guys are too late.' It was before the IPO, believe it or not. And then I... Now it's too late, right? I called him again at $60 a share. I remember telling him, 'You should join. This is just the beginning of a long, long wave.' That was the last time I called him. At $160, he called me. It was too late. I had already filled and put my leadership team together. And now we are at $500, and I still have people which tell me MongoDB is a late stage company and the growth is behind us. And I'm still puzzled because the implication of that means that those people don't understand the difference between market cap and market potential. And MongoDB today, despite the fact that the... It's a market which is, if we were having 5% market share, we would be bigger than ServiceNow, just to be clear, right? ServiceNow today. So, unlike what many funders or companies pretend when they start their business, they are operating in a giant marketplace, which obviously everybody has interest to say. At MongoDB, it's not difficult to prove, right? The world has turned into a software world, that behind every application there is a database, right? And MongoDB has moved a long time ago from being a small niche player... In a far more simple way, giving back power to the developers. And there is so much headroom ahead. We see it in the market intuitively every day, right? Our deal size is just exploding right now. We are celebrating million dollar deals a few years ago. We now hardly celebrate the million deals, right? So that tells you there is a lot of momentum in the market and it's accelerating. In fact, if you look at the last growth rate, despite the fact we are already almost a billion dollar business, Atlas growth rate is accelerating. It went from 78% to 80% to 82%. I don't remember the number specifically, but...

Yeah, it's been... I wish to tell you that it was all about analysis and intentional decision making, and I think I would lie to you. I was actually... I had my passport to live in India. I was in a lobbying company... Hadn't made the difference between a commission check and a fixed salary. So I still needed to figure out a lot of things. Anyways, I went just out of curiosity, bumped into this company, went to whatever interview process, met the guy who was the head of Europe at the time. And I remember him asking me one question. He said, because I was French, I was already living in Turin, Italy, and he said, 'Where do you want to go and work?' Because he had positions everywhere in Europe. And that may be the last time I interviewed anyways, but that was the only time where I gave a good answer in an interview. I told the guy, 'Wherever in the world, as long as you...' Who is the leader who had the most impact on my entire career? And I think it's very important in general, by the way, early days when you are still young and malleable, you can even get destroyed by a bad leader or even an average leader, or get inspired by a good leader. And I got really lucky to bump into this guy. Think of him like, in 93, 94, 95, we were like 900 reps at PTC, and out of Bologna, Italy, not the most advanced place you can think of as far as selling software is concerned, it was consistently the number one in the world selling software. Then he got promoted as RD, and I just started to work with him.

I could speak about that for hours, but I'll try to be more concise here. I learned very early to have healthy self-reflex. I learned that I made all the mistakes and got coached the hard way on those mistakes. I learned to qualify really, really hard without any illusion. I learned the importance of champion building, as he was an amazing champion builder. And many other things, but... Vividly, which helped me immensely. I remember being in this... I always say this story, so I'm hopefully not going to bore you guys. There is... I am a few weeks in the job, and it's really hard. I hardly speak Italian, and my brother joins me in Bologna, Italy. We spend the weekend together, and at the end of the weekend, my brother and I go to dinner. The day after, he's leaving for a worldwide backpacking trip. And he sees my life in this crappy hotel in the outskirts of Bologna, and he's like, 'What the hell are you doing here? Why don't you join us and go for this trip?' And I... Sweating at 7:30 in the office because I have to quit on Carlo, and I'm dreading this moment. And I remember he walks to the door at 7:30. I was hoping he was going to go into his office straight without coming to me, but because the guy is so intuitive and smart, he sees me there down in a corner and comes straight into my office, looks into my eyes and says, 'How are you doing?' And I felt like, 'How do you know?' So I stopped mumbling and I told the guy, 'I'm not sure I made the right decision. I'm a little hesitant right now. Maybe sales is not for me.' So he cuts me off and he goes... 'Settle in the city, take care of yourself, and when you're ready to go and come to work, you show up, you come back.' Obviously, I stopped him and I said, 'You don't understand the story. I don't even have the money to make a down payment and start renting an apartment.' Before I finish, he writes a check and hands it to me and says, 'You take that check, you go and find an apartment.' I've known the guy for like a month and a half, more or less, and I'm like, 'Dude, I just don't do this kind of things.' That was probably the largest check I had ever seen in my life at that point, and I'm like, 'I'm not going to do that.' And he had that line which is what great leaders do. He said, 'You and I...' I told him, 'I'm not going to be able to reimburse you this money anyway.' The conditions to win, to earn any amount of money by selling software. And all of a sudden, I realized that the guy believes in me more than I believe in myself. And you know, take the check, get the apartment, tell my brother to fly back on his own, and keep going with Carlo for many years. The point I remember and the lesson I remembered is how much of an impact can a leader which understands the people which are around him or her can have on people's life. At that point, I could have quit feeling sorry about myself. He could have ignored me. He had many things going on in his life as well. He could have not detected what was going on. He wasn't obliged to write... Going. So that was a big, big lesson. I've got many others after that. Carlo was an example of courage, intelligence, and a great businessman, probably the best salesman I've ever met in my career. So I've got many other stories around him, but that's one big one.

Clearly, great leaders create the conditions to help you find your voice and be a more centered person, and do things for the right reasons and not for the wrong ones, and stay being driven for the right reasons and not for the wrong ones. I still think that the impostor syndrome, even the most successful people in the world, and I know a few of them, I don't think this is something that completely gets eliminated. I think the awareness of being victim of it is very important, so that you can start focusing on... I think being aware of it helps you... At least this is my world, right? And I think it's a journey that many leaders meet, and it's a struggle. It's almost like a quest in your life. You try to become a better, more egoless... Not that it's easy. But what I think though is that bad leadership early days in your career can really hurt people and creates... I think bad leadership can really hurt people which could have become very good leaders over time. I think that early success obtained too easily destroys, it builds huge egos. I see that all the time... I think that this was what he means, right? There are stages of your career that you have to go through, and when you are through them, you don't see them always as a blessing, but then when you look back, you say, 'Thank God I wasn't promoted too fast. Thank God I had the time to make that mistake. Thank God my leader was smart enough to let me fail and without smashing me and destroying me, but keeping, helping me, and sustaining me, and supporting me.' That you look back and you say, 'Thank God that happened.'

I think in the early days, there was a mix of me having big dreams for myself. In some ways, I didn't know where I would end up, but I was thrilled by... I wanted to make a name for myself, that's for sure. And therefore, I kept feeding that fire with reading, with exposing myself to... When you're in a spot, you need to learn to manage your motivation, right? And in the early days, when it's just raw motivation and raw drive, you need to be able to also, especially as things get rough, to nurture and to feed that. So I did focus on that. I used to read a lot. I still do, but at the time, it was really almost like obsessional. I think I read everything you could find which was related to my different jobs. I did spend a lot of time with high quality leaders. And I think also something which has been very exciting to me and it's still now is the experience of learning, the intellectual stimulation associated... A way of traveling almost, right? And that was early days. It was very, very important to me. I believe it or not, I don't think I've ever looked at my paycheck until I was maybe in my 40s. I do think that there is a bias in the industry toward an unhealthy relationship to money. I don't think people build long-term successful careers by focusing on money. On the other side, most companies out there, especially startups, when there is little to offer, the only thing that you offer is you're gonna make a million next year. And therefore, people start thinking, especially in sales but not only, that what success looks like is... You are having finding people which are better than you to get yourself exposed to those people. And you see many people which are running their careers because of that. In my like 25 years ago, whenever I was in the early stage of my career, that was still a problem but far less acute, I think, than today.

Yeah, I think 100%. Even when you pick a company... The single biggest factor for success in the long term is who is at the helm, in my opinion. Because if the right executive team, the right even your first line manager, the right leader is ahead of you, high quality decisions are going to be made, and therefore you have a little chance to navigate all these hurdles and issues that you will meet by definition. If the quality of the leadership is average, then they're going to make bad decisions and it's going to hurt you. It's true for companies, chief executives, even boards. I think it's true for an RD or a first line manager or second line manager, right? 100%. I think you join a leader, you join a person. You join a company as well, but to... Working with that person is going to be foundational. You join a great company with a bad leader, and that's not going to work for you. And I think very often, younger generations tend to think in terms of what's the market share and what's the market potential, which are still very important factors, right? But they forget about the most basic things: who is the person which is on the other side? Not the second, third, fourth line manager, the first person that I'm going to work day-to-day with. And is this product actually a product? Will I lose my face with my customers by selling something which has very little product market fit? Or is there an issue with the product quality which is going to hurt my customers and therefore my name and my reputation?

I think it was... Obviously, you guys have done like 30 or 40 interviews, so I'm not going to say anything new. Obviously, the leader there was world class... Carlo died in an accident in 2005, and so John called me and said, 'Why don't you join the band?' And I don't think I made that decision too intentionally in the sense that I didn't understand what BladeLogic was about. I don't think I understood the tech. I just understood what John was able to give me. And I think like many of us at the time did the same thing, right? We joined a good leader. Maybe some of us did their homework a little better than others, I don't know. But as far as I'm concerned, I was surely not aware of what server management was. I had worked in the... Logic. I just wanted to see customer face. I think many of us did that. And the rest is... The rest has been a lot of hard work. A lot of hard work. I started Southern Europe. I was alone here. My first pre-sales person was coming from New York. And John, while sending me those resources, is proof of a good leader as well, right? Imagine you don't invest in Italy when you are a startup based in Boston, you make $10 million of revenue. Why would you ever hire someone in Italy, right? It's like, what the hell are you doing? There are so many other markets where you start from, right? But what he did at the time, he said, 'I'm gonna put a leader in that market. I believe in the...' He gave me all the resources I needed, and it was a good decision. That's another lesson, by the way: never invest in the market, invest in a person in enterprise software sales.

Yeah, it was an assignment because it was the part of the scars which build character, right? And I think my journey in that company, it was a giant turnaround... And a lot of issues. And therefore, this turnaround, obviously like most turnarounds, are complex, right? Especially when the labor laws are super, super stringent. So I spent more time in court than selling software. But it's not been... I don't remember those years as years of fun, back to your point. In fact, I ended up burning out and quitting and taking time off because I was exhausted. But looking back, I think it's for me it's been quite a private moment in the sense that I went from... Everything yourself substantially, right? And I made many mistakes which, if I hadn't made them, maybe it would not have helped me later on, right? But yes, because it was so painful, it was a big lesson. I also learned the fact that if you don't take care of yourself, we are not infinitely... Before BMC, I assumed that with energy and drive and willpower, you do everything and every problem is resolvable. After BMC, I realized that that's not true. I realized that we do have limits, we are fragile as leaders... At the same time, these are obvious statements. It's just that until you hit the wall, you don't understand them. And for me, that moment, BMC taught me. It also taught me what I didn't want to become as a leader, because I've seen a lot of bad things at play. So in some ways, I'm grateful it wasn't an easy ride. I'm very grateful about those years. I just think that now that I'm in a different position, I try every day to avoid my teams going through that, because hopefully there is a way to learn and grow which is not as dangerous.

The majority of my time doing that, and I'm not a finished product, but yes, those lessons I use them. Also, I think the fact you get a little older... My son is 15 years old, so when I see a 25-year-old in my SDR team or my BDR teams or in my inside sales team, I always think, 'If he was my son, how would I like his leaders to behave?' Or my daughter, which is 14 years old, right? 'What kind of environment would I like them to find in my company?' So that they are pushed, they are stretched, they are treated like they should be. There is no greatness without pain, but on the other side, there is... I'm not in the software business. I'm 100% in the people business. And as such, my job is to help people fulfill their dreams. It happens that the technology we sell is so differentiated, so powerful, so much more stable and helpful to our customers, and it helps building the most sophisticated applications out there, and those applications are helping the world. Many of them are helping the world become a better world, so it's easy for me to help people fulfill their dreams, right? It's easier than if I was selling a software which is looking for its product market fit, or when I sell it, my customers get pissed off at me. It doesn't help building... Modern dynamics between open source, big data, cloud. We are in all these markets at once in one single company with one technology, one platform. So clearly, this is an amazing vehicle to build confidence and build a new generation of sales leaders which can thrive and enjoy the ride at MongoDB and after MongoDB, right? At this stage of my career, I just think about that more. I hope those people will become chief revenue officers, heads of North America, heads of Europe, heads of Asia Pacific, whatever they become. Remember the days at MongoDB as hard but very satisfying.

Yeah, and I don't think it's just a philosophical question. It's a very practical question. How can companies scale and become amazing companies if this is only about shareholder value? And it is about shareholder value as well, right? Don't get me wrong, 100%. But there is no way to produce value in the long term if it doesn't go through people thriving. And on the average, I'm not saying it's the case for everyone, right? Unfortunately, we don't get it right all the time. But on the average, I think people do need to... Learning a job to a point that you'll never have to worry about getting a well-paid job for the rest of your life. Which is very important because now economies are soaring, at least in the tech industry, and nobody, most of this generation, hasn't seen what it looks like when these things turn around. And it will turn around, 100%. Everybody knows it. And at that stage, if you built your career seriously and consistently, it's all about freedom of choice. You don't have to worry about getting a job. Companies still need to sell software. It's just that there are far less jobs. And by building these careers powerfully, we can really help people for the long term. And the other aspect of that is... The young Dutch which go to school. When the pandemic hit, obviously this platform got hit by millions and millions of additional people which were in need of learning by staying at home, right? That platform scaled in humongous proportions because Atlas was behind it and MongoDB was behind it. And the people who sold that deal were very proud of what they've done because the chief executive of the company, the developers which were there, everybody was very grateful because there was a sense of mission behind scaling these applications to help kids to go to school. We've done that with most COVID applications in the... Which is a substantial IoT application which allows elderly people to stay home by putting sensors in their home and detecting what behavior they have, if they have issues, and so forth. That's a company with a strong mission. But they told us, and the salesforce was amazed by that, how powerful it was for them to work with MongoDB and have scaling as well, their application in a grateful way. So all of those things, I tell these stories because when you are a salesperson, you do want to understand that what you are selling is having a real impact in the world, right? I'm not saying we're in the non-profit industry, but still, we are not only in the database industry. We are in something much more than just... A billion of revenue, a bunch of people are making a lot of money in the process. And there is a moment where these people are wondering, especially if they hadn't internalized and asked themselves why is it that I'm putting so much energy in my job today, they get to a point where money is not an issue or less of an issue any longer, but still they need to fill this fire inside them, right? So what's left if you always thought that your reason for selling software is making money? And at a certain point, money is not an issue or not as much of an issue it used to be, then many people are like, 'Okay, what's next?' Right? And this is where I think it's very important as a... Amazing. I couldn't have thought, as far as I'm concerned, it's been more like a call or a vocation than a job, right? There is nothing more exciting than turning a no into a yes, to be clear. But then there is also the why am I doing it? And if it's only exclusively about getting a big commission check and there is nothing else into it, it becomes very quickly... It's too hard to have the resilience to excel at that job if you do it just for money.

No. There was no... Actually, I'm probably the only chief revenue officer of a publicly traded company living where I think there is another one since a few weeks ago, a good friend of mine. But it's very unusual to have someone living where I live in Europe and taking over these responsibilities, which by the way, we could talk about that later on, gave me a great series of insights and a great series of lessons as well. But at the time, I wasn't even thinking about it. And the reason I wasn't thinking about it is because I was taking for granted... Often, there is a... And I know a thing or two about that. But at the time, I was out of BMC, I was burnt out. I needed to gather myself. It took me a month to do that. I needed to do some introspection about the ugly side of Cedric Pech. It took a long time not to figure it out but to accept it, right? I'm just joking, but not that much actually. And then... I wasn't good. I made a bad choice joining a company because I didn't do my homework. I chased a paycheck and didn't do my homework. And very quickly, I figured that out. And... And therefore, my boss wanted to take bigger responsibility, so I asked my family if they were open to move to the US, and we moved to Boston. I'm very grateful for that opportunity because it taught me a lot as well. But I wasn't planning for it when I joined Fuse. I had no idea that I would ever be offered that opportunity. And that was very positive. But I'll tell you more: when I joined MongoDB, I had no clue as well about becoming the chief revenue officer of MongoDB. My boss was a guy named Carlos de la Torre, you probably know him. And I joined because I thought the company was a great deal... Because I wasn't ready to move back to the US. I didn't want to do that. It was too big of an impact on my family. Thank God my boss, my boss today is the chief executive officer, David Charia. He's a very open-minded person which is not easily convinced by dogma and goes to the bottom of things. And therefore, he said, 'I'm going to convince the board to give that guy a shot.' And since then, we worked together. We had to organize ourselves well obviously because it has consequences. But I wasn't planning to do that at all. And I didn't even think that anyone would give me a chance to do that. That's a real story.

It was a huge difference. I was already, let's say, I had already worked in the US which helped me a lot obviously. But I found it was a huge difference. I will tell you that I got very lucky that I bumped into a sales executive team in the US which was very smart and very good. My head of North America, Paul Kapombasis, is just a great person first of all, and being Canadian, he wasn't dogmatic at all about things. And him and I very quickly clicked, and that helped me immensely, as well as... Potential like, 'Who the hell are you to come here in the US and teach me how to sell software?' Right? That's for sure. There was this dynamic. Thanks to those guys and the work we've done together as a team, I think we overcame that. Brought a bunch of people on board, working all together, and had great results. I also was blessed that here in Europe, I had an amazing leader as well with whom I partnered a lot and still to these days, years later, he's still going through everything. So that helped me a lot. The fact these two guys were there together with their teams helped me overcome those bigger challenges like making sure Europe doesn't fall apart when you take a... The fact that I had to work out of Europe and Southern Europe specifically gave me in the very early days a strong understanding, compared to someone who lives in London or New York, that there's no way to scale if you can't develop leaders locally with a very strong understanding of a certain playbook which are autonomous or more autonomous. So if you grow in an environment where you have your team with you all around you, very close to you, you can have an impact without having them every day. You show up in the office, you see them, you feel them, you can chat with them. If you are like me and you've been living remote your whole life, far away from everyone, first you need to have good health because you need to be on... You need to learn to develop leaders locally and hire leaders locally which you can trust. That you have to find anyways as you scale and take bigger and bigger jobs. It's just like when you are in the obligation to survive in the very early days to develop a skill set around that, it helped me very much when I took over the chief revenue officer job, where we quickly found out that we needed to put together playbooks which would scale globally so that we could help people in their local theaters even if we were not close to them. And by the way, this work has been very powerful when COVID happened. At the time, we didn't do it for COVID, but when COVID happened, everybody knew what to do without... Us, I say us because obviously I wasn't...

Well, when we talk about playbooks, I think it's very important, and I made that mistake myself a few times. Whether it's MEDDIC or a sales process or any playbook, at the end of the day, it's about the possibility one day to go on the ocean and sail in the winds and the waves, and that's why you build the ship, right? So while you build the ship, you use wood and you use a hammer and a screwdriver and so on and so forth, right? So teaching people how to build a ship is very important because there is no sailing possible without it, right? But if it's only about that, then people lose the line of sight about why we are doing that in the first place, right? So if it's all about sales process and activity and operating rhythm and how to hammer and saw, and you over-index on execution, not... Grinder. At the same time, it's super important to be able to build this ship properly and fast, and build a ship which is going to resist the waves and the wind. Therefore, being amazing at qualifying and having a very strong understanding of a playbook or a sales process which fits your market, not that you brought from another company and just replicate. At MongoDB, that would have been a disaster, right? We are in the open source business initially before being a SaaS company. The sales process we had to create and reinvent everything and fit it for our own needs and enable people around that. And that's very, very... I see also, I've got even examples in my team which created some issues. In the early days, you develop those leaders, you teach them how to qualify deals and use the sales process, and all of a sudden, what they do when they take this leadership job is to over-index around that and grind their people into that, instead of remembering that their job, all those tools are there to help people be better and to develop them, not to inspect them. There's a dose of inspection in everything, but if the only reason why you build those playbooks is to inspect and make people walk faster, it's a disaster. It's just a disaster. I wouldn't have taken it as a rep, and most of my leaders wouldn't have either, right?