Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal, excited to have with us today Ryan Austin, founder of Cognota, who has raised $11 million in funding. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Austin: Yeah, thanks for having me, really excited to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So Ryan is CEO of Cognota. He champions corporate learning with over 10 years of experience. Cognota's innovative tech has won multiple Brandon Hall awards. Ryan also co-founded GoFish Cam and Stack and Sprout, and is an active angel investor, mentor. He studied at York and Western University in Canada and is located in Canada. So great. So uh Ryan, before we dive in here um, walk us through a little bit about your journey. How did you get into technology and building technology companies?
Ryan Austin: Yeah, so you know, I, I've always been an entrepreneur since I was a kid. So it's kind of that typical story. Parents are like, "You have to get a job you know, summer job," all the way back in high school days. And you're like, "I don't want to do that, I'm gonna create a mobile car detailing company or gonna go and you know cut our neighbor's lawn or whatever," and you, you kind of get your taste from, from there. Um my first tech company was in university. Um I started doing drop shipping before drop shipping was really a thing. And uh I had no tech at the time um, and I was also um drop shipping inventory to my campus room. Um and so I turned my, my dorm room into a competitor to the uh university shop. And I got in a little bit of trouble and they're like, "You can't do that, you have to get rid of all this stuff, you can't have a store in, in your dorm room." And uh, and so uh I created my first platform and I just brought everything online.
And it was, it was pretty cool because started off as pure you know "order stuff I'll drop ship it to you," um but then I, you know other students were asking me like "how can they get involved, how they, how can they make money?" So what I started to do is created white labeled e-commerce. Um so I would clone the store that I created for myself and allow a student to rebrand it with their own logo and color. And I would place all the inventory on their store and we'd do a profit share if they generated sales from their store. So I started having a lot of these. Um, you know, but it was also my, my first uh failure. Because um you know, I'm a go-to-market expert, I, I build technology companies, but I'm not a technologist. You learn over time like what to do and what not to do. And at the time that was my first one. So I just partnered with these guys that uh were supposed to be kind of the tech partners to help me scale this. And they ended up being crooks and it got messy and yeah, kind of lost all my savings. Had to go through my first lawsuit to uh try and win the savings back.
And it, it's funny because it kind of led to what I do today in, in a way. Um so during that whole period I had to get a job just to survive. Um so I came into a company to build some sales teams. And long story short um, saw that their, that company's competitors did corporate training and they didn't. And so I pitched the board like "Hey, let me build this, this new revenue stream inside your company uh around corporate training." And so that's how I fell into corporate training um you know a long time ago. And, and then since then did different endeavors outside of corporate training, and then also one that led to Cognota.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I mean corporate training is I know such a need for a lot of companies. Um for people that don't know about corporate training, how big is that market in terms of the spend of companies that are spending money? For example you know you spend money on marketing, on education, on learning, on a lot of different things in companies. How big of a market share is that within a company when they spend?
Ryan Austin: Yeah. So corporate learning and development globally is a $320 billion market. And um that's for corporate learning spend. And if, to put in perspective, it's about $1 billion more than what marketing teams spend on advertising every year. Um and, and that, that was how we started to form more thesis over time. It, it reminded me you know, after jumping into corporate learning, started to see trends of how these teams were cost centers and then they became more strategic. They don't, they still today aren't the best to operationalize their business function. It's really hard for them to demonstrate ROI. Kind of reminded me of marketing back in the day when CFOs you know had heartburn because it was hard to show return of ad spend. And uh no real good way to track that until these purpose-built operating systems came to market like HubSpot, Marketo, etc. that make that easier for these marketing leaders. And uh that was the opportunity we saw, um and what we're solving at Cognota as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I want to walk through a little bit about what you talked about, learning and development or education. So I'm not an expert in this area but I did a little research, and what I gathered was Learning and Development, often abbreviated as L&D, refers to the process of acquiring knowledge, skills and competencies, as well as enhancing one's potential within a personal professional context. Is a broad field that encompasses various strategies, methods and activities aimed at facilitating learning and growth in individual or groups. So when we researched you and your company, we thought about "okay, what is it that you really do?" And then we thought "okay, well if you look at marketing, you have a platform like HubSpot which helps you gather the operational aspects of everything you're doing in marketing from campaigns to um a lot of other areas in marketing." You know, that's kind of one platform. Or CRM for example in sales with Salesforce. It's a really good platform. But what you're creating is, it's not just a product, it's a category really, kind of how we see it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but operations around learning and development. Or a platform that helps you better orchestrate how you bring it into market and then be able to measure what's working, what's not working, without a lot of disparate systems that you're kind of working through to, to try and get to the same result. Is that accurate? If it's not, kind of correct me here.
Ryan Austin: Yeah. No, that, that's exactly what we do. So we're the first, first purpose-built operating system for corporate learning and development teams. If you look at the, the market or the landscape today, you have hundreds of content creation platforms to create content. You have hundreds of delivery platforms, so once you have content how do you actually deliver it to the employees? But those are all the back end kind of tools for content creation and content delivery. There has fundamentally been this big part missing for decades around operations. Um you know, how do you make good decisions? How do you manage requests from different business partners internally? Prioritize those requests. Tie resources or time and money and budgets on how much are we going to spend, what's the impact this is going to have on the business? How do we measure if that's going to be effective? And all of those upfront processes are done either manually or through disparate IT tools right now. And so Cognota, we've built the first operating system. We call it "LearnOps", the category. Um just like you know in revenue you have RevOps or development you have DevOps. Same type of idea. What's the framework for LearnOps? How do you streamline the work processes in these upfront processes so that you can capture the data, eliminate the silos, and actually get to a place where you can measure impact on the business for the dollars and time that are being invested into these employee programs? And uh so that, that's where Cognota comes in and you know where we can be a big uh a great partner for certain, certain size corporations or enterprises that we work with.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: It sounds great. I mean I worked at Oracle. There was a lot of training all across you know the US and internationally. Tell us a, some company brands that you work with that we would know about.
Ryan Austin: Ernst & Young, Truist Bank, Comerica Bank, um Sun Life Assurance. We, we work with about 150 enterprises right now.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. I know on your website there's a couple others too that um, Home Depot and a few others that you know I looked at and thought "Wow, you guys are into some pretty big enterprises." So is your, is your product for big enterprise type companies, or is it for earlier stage companies too? What's, what's the fit?
Ryan Austin: Yeah. For us we're, we're more focused around mid-market and enterprise, kind of that a thousand employee company plus. And the bigger the better, because the bigger the enterprise, the more disparate or decentralized learning and development teams are. Meaning there's multiple learning and development teams across the enterprise, not just one, pockets across the company globally. And their job is to partner with different business units so that they can solve problems for those business units whenever those business units think that training can solve the problem. And so our software manages that whole partnership process from business partners or stakeholders to the various L&D teams, and then helps them collaborate through the life cycle to the point where they get to you know content creation and then they can go and use all those different tools or, or whatnot.
Um and so it's really interesting because you know it's very esoteric. You would never know that this is a big problem to solve unless you come from the industry. But when you think about how much money is being spent on these programs, it's, it's pretty significant. I mean Slack just announced in the news the other day that they're shutting the company down for an entire week because the company's behind on training. So they're trying to use that week to catch people up. Most likely it's something to do with compliance, they probably got fined or something like that. But having a tight learning operations will prevent things of that nature from arising. And not only can you save significant time and costs on running a tight, tighter operations and better business partnerships, but also avoid things like you know what Slack just announced in the news.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I've read about that too, it's pretty crazy. Um as a company you raised $11 million. How long have you been around and how big are you employee-wise today?
Ryan Austin: Yeah uh we're about 28 employees. Um so you know pretty small still. Um most of the team is on the product management, engineering side. And we're starting to scale up the uh go-to-market engine um now that you know we're, we're ready to scale enterprise adoption. Um the last round we just announced literally a few days ago. Our Series A led by Grotech Ventures that was five and a half um million dollar round um for the Series A. And we've been around for a few years, but um you know we only launched our first product feature at the end of 2018, early 2019. So it took a few years to get to a point where the platform reached maturity that it was ready for enterprise and could actually solve workflow challenges for these larger corporate L&D teams.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: As a, as a startup yourself, as you're looking to navigate and, and build your product awareness and get into markets and scale, what's the number one focus for your company today? When you wake up every morning, what is it you're thinking about or worrying about that you need to improve?
Ryan Austin: Oh it's tough, because when you're building a category, nobody's built LearnOps before. We're, we're the first. I mean if you Google it you'll just come across Cognota literally. And um, and so it's really early days for this market. And so one of um, one of the things that I've been very focused on is building strong IP moats um to help us maintain a market, market leader position. There's a lot of category leader horror stories that you hear about, that they build these up and then these bigger technology companies with deeper pockets come in with the know-how, and, and you know they're able to, to quickly scoop up some market share in that regard. So you know, outside of building the best software and having IP associated to it, we've been thinking about um the go-to-market motion. Um what works the best for LearnOps, and how do we plant competitive advantages in the actual go-to-market motion that will make it really, really hard for somebody to come in? They would have to kind of reinvent their own go-to-market motion.
Um you know we've partnered with subject matter experts. We have exclusivity agreements with those subject matter experts. So if a competitor comes in you know, they may not be able to work with that CLO if it comes down to learning operations for example. Um or uh you know we launched the first LearnOps community on learnops.com. Well if you're an L&D professional you're probably not going to join two learning operations communities. And we also have that first mover's advantage at doing these things really well. It creates more work than if you weren't creating a category, you know you could do your typical inbound, outbound and stay focused there. But [it] becomes a little more expensive, a little more time consuming to build go-to-market motions around a new category because you're literally not only building the software but leading the way for the overall ecosystem of that category as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That sounds like double work, but also double opportunity. If you can create it and you build the right way, um you will own that market if you do it right, which I think is an incredible opportunity. You're the first company we've had on the show that actually is building a category, not just a company, which um I'm really excited to see how things go down the road for, for you as you continue to progress. Is your market focused on North America or are you international?
Ryan Austin: Yeah, so right now we really focus on North America. We do have some customers in Europe as well, but our, our primary focus is North America given that it's the largest market for us. Um that said, uh you know at the end of this year and going into next year you, you'll start to see us expand more into European markets as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Sounds like makes sense. Um you know AI is such a big topic in today's world and you know ChatGPT brought it all to the awareness of consumers and everyone. What, what's your process, strategy or integration with AI, if at all?
Ryan Austin: Yeah. So the, the cool part about operations is that there's a lot of input um in data collection and so you can do a lot of things in that regard. Um we have a feature that we built called Sidekick um that is an add-on um to a user license. And you know, our value prop is strong in either use case uh you know. On one side, without AI, it's "get rid of three to eight disparate IT tools to do your work. Move into one platform that's purpose-built and will streamline your entire process, give you access to data so you can make better business decisions and, and demonstrate impact on the business." With Sidekick, which is a $500 add-on per user per license per annum, um it's a panel that is just an AI assistant that sits on top of the entire application. So if you don't want to manually generate a report using our insights feature, you can just ask Sidekick "give me a report on this," or you know "what are the top 10 requests that my entire company had over in H1?" right. To pull these insights from the underlining data really, really quickly.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Makes sense, that's really cool. Wow. So AI is essentially integrated pretty well into your product. As you build your company, and for a lot of companies out there that are building you know, culture is important, the employees you hire are important. Um what are non-starters for you when you bring people on board to be part of your company as you build, in terms of their core competencies, their values? What are the things that are important to you if people are outside listening in and you know at some point want to connect, maybe even work for your company, what are you looking for?
Ryan Austin: Yeah, so we, we have a set of values um with some of the most important ones being um "Breaking Down the Walls". So looking at every relationship as a partnership and it needs to be transparent and open, communicative. Like I, I, I'm not interested in building a politically driven company. Like top downs just takes the fun out of it, not, not for me. Uh sometimes I'm probably like too transparent with employees, but I think that's a good thing and I'd rather them be the same way with us um as well. So making sure that I have strong belief and certainty that um you know this is going to be a partnership uh and um we're going to be able to have that level of transparency. So you know, "do I trust you after I meet you, after I meet the team? Like am I buying your story, do I trust you?" um and, and vice versa.
We also have a value, "Embrace Uncertainty", which is really, really hard to do. It's a, a skill that's really hard to learn as a human being because as humans you want to control everything. And you know when things aren't going your way, which it always happens in life um, and you try and control it, you, you, that's when anxiety and stress starts to come up. So I like to ask people about situations where they've had to embrace uncertainty. Were they forced? And like what, what did they learn from that? Because in a fast growing startup, especially technology, you're always going to be dealing with uncertainty. There's always going to be something that comes up and, and whatnot.
And, and then just really ensuring that they, they are joining us because they believe in the mission and our vision, they're excited to be a part of that. And that their val-, overall values align to ours. That's one. Um I don't really care about school or credentials. Like I, I did go to university but I actually ended up dropping out. And so I you know, I can't be a hypocrite and just judge people on that because you know that, that didn't work for me and [I'm] in an alright position without that, um although it might be fun one day to go back and just do it. Uh so it's really about life's experiences. Like I really like to understand people's journeys and what they've gone through and how they've you know fought the good fight of life to you know come out better every time. And like how they've taken learning and applied it to their journeys. And I, I think that's important because you can teach skills, um but uh you know you can't really teach grit and how to be persistent.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's very true. You know every company really is in the people business. You know, without the people you really, I mean you might have an idea with the product, but if you've got the wrong team it just doesn't scale, doesn't work well. Um when you started your company and started creating this category, did you start in one path and have to pivot to where you're at today? And if you did, kind of walk us through that process of what was that breakthrough moment where you said "we got to make a change" or "we're on the right track and we don't have to make a change, but we got to do something different?" Walk through that a little bit because we know most companies, they go through that and some succeed, some don't. And it's a, it's a process.
Ryan Austin: Well I'll, I'll highlight the words grit and persistency again. Because um if you really go back to how Cognota was founded, um we didn't start as a software company a long time ago. Prior to having any software I, I started a service, training services company. And you know we built it up to being about a 2 million dollar uh revenue business. Um wasn't annual recurring because it wasn't software, and we primarily served oil and gas and energy customers. And then back in uh 2014, 2015, the energy industry just took a huge hit. And we went from like 2 million probably down to like 20 or 30k in like less than one week. It sucked!
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Ryan Austin: And so I, I was forced to kind of pivot um during that. And, and while running that company, I had this idea of operating system in L&D, like "why doesn't it exist" or whatnot. So I'm glad that that happened because it pushed me out of the comfort zone to, to really focus on like pivoting and um using my know-how to, to go and build a business. And that's when I started getting into software. And uh and we first, or the first workflow that we ever worked on was "how do you, how do you take knowledge from an employee and transfer it into learning content so you could teach others what that person knows?" And you know in corporate L&D that process is called instructional design. It's pretty cumbersome and like very old-fashioned. So our, the first feature we built was around that content design process. And we tried to make it like TurboTax but for content design. So that anybody can do it. Like take this cumbersome complex process that literally has something called Adult Learning Theory (very boring uh) associated to it. It's like the science behind how people learn and how do you build workflows that people can follow um without being that expert around adult learning theory to build good quality content.
Um so we did that, and um landed some pretty big customers early on. But you know we weren't going to build a very big business with just being a single feature tool. And that's when we had to make a decision. Um do we go into the content creation side of the market where it's a little busy um, or we have this inkling around "what if we went to the operations side" which is very manual, nobody's doing that. And you know um luckily we, we chose the harder path. But call that pivot number two. Even though it was more of a maturing our, our product, listening to the market, it still went from being this knowledge transfer tool to trying to become this end-to-end LearnOps platform essentially.
And uh so we went for it without knowing anything, and we listened to the market. And we got to a place where we realized we had to rewrite the entire product because it wouldn't scale at enterprise. You know that comment I made earlier on about being how a lot... the bigger the company (which is where the big bucks lie for us) the more L&D teams that are decentralized and they're planted all over the place. And the product that we ended up bu- building could only work with centralized L&D teams, essentially one L&D team. There was no way to have multiple teams. It was single-tenant instead of multi-tenant. There's a lot of backend problems that would just prevent us from scaling. So that's when we leveled up. And I brought in our head of product who came from a company called Allocadia, which was in marketing operations. And um there's a lot of synergy be- behind marketing operations and learning operations. So he came in and built the team and helped me um really built an enterprise. And we launched that in '22 and really started to scale the business from there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. It's all you know, you brought in the right person that could help you scale. Sounds like you are very partner-driven with your own employees which I think is great. When there's tough times in the markets like there is today for many companies, when you have funding it's not as tough because the money's there to kind of continue to build, grow. But at the end of the day, investors do want to see like, "Where's my investment going? How far are we to getting to profitability? We're not necessarily looking only at growth, we want to actually see some tangible results for you." Um when you go out and you get these big companies, who's out there selling and are you doing it online? Is it a team? Are you getting appointments, are you on site? Is it all remote? What's that look like for you?
Ryan Austin: Yeah. So during COVID we became a remote company and we haven't gone back. You know, I think it'll be more disruptive to try and go back than just to stay course. Um there's downsides like we need to do more in-person team events and things like that, that becomes harder. Built programs recently to, to help support that. Naturally also sales teams, um becomes harder to stay motivated as sales teams when you're remote. So we, we've acquired certain technology to create these virtual um, virtual call rooms where people can call all together so it almost feels like you're in an office. You know, the software we personally use is called Orum, although there's others that, that do that. And um, and so we do these things called "power hours" where the entire sales team, once a day, it's like an hour stand up basically. If you're at an office, come together and we do calling and cold calling or prospecting together kind of in the virtual rooms.
Um with the market, you know talking about pivots, um um as the market shifts, like we're in a really weird time. So as the market shifts you have to pivot your go-to-market strategy. Um you know if you just look back to January when things started slowing down for SaaS, everybody was like, "Oh wow, outbound's working again," and everybody started to cold call. And it worked, but you know buyers get exhausted when they start getting 100 phone calls a day because every vendor starts to do this. And it's not super sustainable when things are going to shift so quickly. So I would really encourage people right now to think about like what, what's your moat? What's going to become your advantage that's here to last?
In Cognota's case, we made a very calculated decision of going from more of an inbound, outbound model to becoming more of a community-led growth model. So we launched our LearnOps community and really focused on that. To really present ourselves as a trusted thought leader in the industry to help people think through their learning operation challenges first. No software. Put ourselves in a position where they trust and learn from us, and then when they realize "well how do we do this easier? We're using disparate tools," then at that point we say, "Hey, there's software available to do that and we can actually do a demo with you and show you that." And so that's been working really, really well um for us. And now we're extending the program into partner marketing, education actually. We're, we're investing in something called LearnOps Academy. So that outside of software we can educate and teach people this, and our bet is that it's going to lead us back to soft-, to, to software sales. So I think that um uh people need to think about what does a new, a new, this new market look like for them? And what investments can they make that will be longstanding versus short-sighted? Um it might feel like a heavier investment because everybody feels like "hey we need revenue right now," you're going to position yourself to be in a much stronger position in these downturns if you, you get it right.
From the investor side, which was the other part of your question, I think taking money makes it harder on your business. You know there's downsides and upsides to both. If you have the luxury of bootstrapping, or you've been forced to bootstrap right now, go for it. Like you, you'll thank yourself later for going through the short-term pain versus you know having to split the profits down the line with uh with VCs or whatnot. Um if you can't do it, then yeah you know, raise, raise some capital if you can. You need to be efficient with the capital. Don't raise money if you don't know what to do with it, especially right now. You'll just burn through it, and you won't build enough value to get to the next level, and essentially you're just slowly killing your company you know, and investing time into something that might not be working. So you, you got to figure it out, and that again where embracing uncertainty comes into place, having that grit, being persistent. And there's no you know, there's no one right way to, to building a startup at the end of the day. You have to find that formula that works for you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I, I really like the strategy you have where it's not just one-size-fits-all when it comes to sales. You have two or three different areas you're building up. Eventually it will lead back to revenue if you do it right with the trusted advisor type mindset. Um that's really, it's really inspirational and hopefully other companies will get that note and take that lesson to heart and figure out how to do that too. Um with your company and your employees, when times are tough and you are having to really think about the grit that you have and the people that are helping you build what you're building, what do you do to keep the morale up? When there's the ups and downs of the company. As the leader, you've got to bring energy. You have to bring a different perspective sometimes when you're going through the troughs of the ups and downs of a company. What tools, what do you do to keep yourself up?
Ryan Austin: Okay, so as CEO it's always lonely at the top. Even going through the fundraise, like I have this long kitchen counter like next to the desk right now. There was times where I was like lying on there like "oh man, like are we going to be able to do this, right?" And that's, that's fine. But you have to literally like reach deep into your soul and like find any ounce of energy that you have and just like almost trick your mind to getting that extra energy to keep going and not giving up. It's 90% hard work and 10% luck. And if you actually put that 90% work and you don't give up, you get to see the 10, the magic happen, which is that 10%. I've seen it in every business I've invested into that I've built. Um and it really is magic, it's unexplainable when that 10% luck kicks in. Um you know, that said you need to listen to the market and look for signals. Uh if you're not seeing any signals, don't invest time into something that's not working. Like go to the next venture, go and build the next thing. You don't get time back. And, but if you're hearing signals, you know, you just need to ask yourself, are you okay putting in the time? Because it's going to take way longer than you ever thought it would.
And from a people morale perspective, you're, if you're seeing signals coming from the market, especially as a startup or a growing company, you, you're having wins. Those wins may not be only revenue-related. Those are the best ones to celebrate obviously, um the most rewarding. But you're going to see other wins. You know for example, um one of our customers got nominated uh as a Cognota power user and it was shared all over LinkedIn. And we're like, "wow what a great idea, we should create this power user concept." But you know, that... and so I shared that and a lot of people um commented on it, but that's a win! Like you know having a company of yours essentially giving an award to somebody for being a power user of your platform. That one like you know previously a few years ago didn't even exist. Like that, that's a cool feeling for everybody who's building that. So sharing those small wins with the team.
And then being transparent as CEO. Going through the fundraise, I was really transparent with the team every two weeks telling them the updates. What's happening, what's working, what's not working, what are we hearing. So that they feel part of the process, and they're learning about the processes they go along. They might want to learn how do you fundraise, how do you build business, things like that. So being transparent, asking, answering questions you know, offering people the ability to break down the walls and Slack you or call you. Um and then celebrating things as well. So we have a lot of reward programs internally we created. Um a reward point system. So anytime an employee does something um aligned to a corporate objective or value, and if another employee calls them out for their, their great work that they did, our People Ops team um, HR team uh gives them reward points. And the reward points can be used uh to buy like unique company swag that you have to earn versus just getting it given to you. People actually like that stuff, and you know it's, it makes it fun. And so we have that. We recently put in a performance plan, we do salary reviews quite often um now as well. And I think it just comes down to transparency. People want to feel like they're making an impact, they're seeing, they're seeing their work come to fruition, and they understand why they're investing time every single day, what that's going to do for the company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's really great to hear that. You know you talked about fundraising and you know keeping people in the loop and updating them on transparency how things are going. How many times do you have to go out in today's market and present to finally close the deal? Was it 5, 10, 100, 50, 200?
Ryan Austin: Yeah. I, I mean I think the data is that you're going to have 150 conversations before getting to term sheets. That's true. Um you, you can accelerate that process. Um if... so my whole strategy for fundraising is uh, you go out the first time, you have those 150 conversations. You finally get to a term sheet. And then the people who actually said no to you that first round, they become your lead investors for the second round. So it's your responsibility to keep them in the loop, give them updates, narrow down who you want to get married to as well. It's not just about taking money. It's a partnership. Most likely somebody will have a board seat, they're going to make decisions with you, your company. You want that alignment. Nobody wants to go through a messy divorce or feel like they want to get divorced. This is not like a, a spousal marriage where that is a possibility like you know. And this is a long journey too! So, so those are, those "no"s that come from your prior round are the best ways to accelerate the process to get to... instead of having to go through meeting 150 new people, you narrow down the 20, 30 that you're the most excited to, to work with and you put in the effort over the next 24 months to nurture the relationship, get them excited about the business, build trust. See how, how you handle situations like you know market downturns or pivots or whatnot, and uh that makes it a lot faster to get to your, your term sheet. For our Series A we ended up getting to five term sheets by using that similar strategy even in this down market. And um ended up partnering with somebody who we built a relationship with for 14 months prior to you know, them getting to a yes.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What is it that they're looking for from you now that they're giving you the money, when you walk through it all and you kind of say, "Here's the number one thing they want from us." What do you walk away with going "I'd have to remember that because I got to deliver that"?
Ryan Austin: Yeah. I mean you can't have a fluff plan just to fundraise. Like if, if you come up with a model and you, you get funding towards a plan that was made up just to get funding, like you are, you already broke trust and you're, you're, you're going to be going in a downhill kind of battle. So you have to be realistic with your forecast. Some VCs will say, "What do you mean? I want you know, I want that 500% growth next year," like, "I'm not interested." Those aren't the right partners for you, because you know maybe it can happen, if it does, even better, you're going to outdo your, your projections. But, but you don't want to promise something like that or show that and then you're spending into a plan like that and you, you still haven't figured out your flywheel or how to get to that level of scale yet. So you want people who are going to help you think about your real-world problems today that you're facing and how do you together get to that next major inflection point in the business.
To answer your question: no surprises. Nobody wants surprises. So uh it's your job as CEO to build that transparency with the board, keep them in the loop on where things are at and ensure that there's no surprises. If businesses are cyclical, there's going to be ups and downs. And when there's downs it's more important to spend more time with your board. Tell them why, help them explain things so that they can see how you're thinking through solving the problem or assisting you with providing guidance and help as well. Um and um, performance. Like they bought into a plan, they want to see you execute that plan. You know, that's bottom line. Even if you're missing that, there's a short window on that you got to get caught up and figure it out.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, performance is very important as well as performance management for your current team. Like letting them know that you know that they're doing a good job or how are you managing and tracking how they're improving what they're doing. Um it all kind of tracks back to learning and develop-, which probably goes right back into your systems so. Um it's really cool. What's next for Cognota as we wrap up here? Where you, you talked a lot about where you're at, what you're doing. What's uh, what can people be excited about that are currently using your platform or might be interested in trying it?
Ryan Austin: Yeah so um you know, being a category leader it's, it's tough especially as a startup because when you're working with these big enterprises because they always need more. And sometimes um you know at the same time you want to listen to your customers and in, into their feedback. That's how you build great software. Being category leader sometimes you see things in the signals in the market that allow you to be an innovator where you can create something that your customers don't yet see but you know that they're going to need. And, and it's a, it's a conflict between the two. So um you know we're working really, really hard this year to build some additional workflows that are more around, around that innovation side. Like how do you get to true ROI and impact on learning spend, um where some of our customers are asking us to go deeper into certain functionality. So it's a race for us to January to get all the remainder go-to-market motions built (like the LearnOps Academy), get some of these additional workflows built like the ROI and impact features, um so that next year we can flip the switch to scale and say "nothing net, let's go deep in-, deeper into our investments, into what we've already invested into." And uh, and so next year if customers are listening to this you know, we're going to go deeper into the core product features, deeper into data and analytics and reporting, invest more into Sidekick around AI, and do a lot more measurement around time and value so that we can optimize the user experiences. Like our software is easy to use, people love it, but you can always do better. And, and you know we want to drive the wow factor when it comes to that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I love that. Well Ryan, uh I want to just add a couple things in here as you continue to scale your company. You know, as a company on our side, we work with founders. We help them scale up when they're looking to grow and whether it's locally or internationally. Um one of the things that we keep getting a lot of is "we don't need to hire right now, we need to maximize the people we have. How do we make them better?" And so we ended up um bringing a technology that we can take teams now and with real data, which is AI driven, can see them how they operate, how they're communicating with their customers. It tracks points. And then you could say, "Here's what our top salespeople for example are doing really well, and here's what the other ones aren't doing." And that technology along with insight helps you take your current team and make them better, or maybe get rid of the team that isn't doing well and improve your company growth. So there's just a lot of really interesting things we're seeing. It's not about hiring, it's about how do you do more with what you have. And so down the road that might be a conversation that I could, we should have, or at least I can share the insights, you can do what you want with it. But I can tell you now that, that's, that, those are the messages we're getting in today's market, is "we need to build, we need to continue to grow and scale. We don't have all the answers, but we do have I think the right people. How do we make them better and truly make better by the data, not just hoping you can get it, get it right." Um so anyway, really excited to see how you guys do. If people want to get a hold of you Ryan, or they want to find your company, how do they do that?
Ryan Austin: Yeah. So best way um, if you're looking for learning operations software and you have an L&D team that's looking to be more efficient, effective, demonstrate value especially in today's market, um go to cognota.com, c-o-g-n-o-t-a.com. If you're an L&D professional looking to learn more about learning operations and solving problems, going through that journey on where you need to uh solve certain problems that, that might not be software related, join the community on learnops.com. And uh reach out anytime over LinkedIn uh if you want to get in touch and just talk shop, startups or anything else.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well Ryan, big shout out to you for joining our, our show today and all the listeners that are listening. Uh means the world to us that you've spent your time uh out of your busy Friday to spend it with us. Good luck in your future Ryan. Uh again like I said, happy to follow up with you down the road and see how things go. Until now, this is Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off. I can't wait to connect with you all again next on the next episode. See you. Bye-bye.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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