In this episode of 'Never Too Early,' host Lauren Ipsen is joined by Jonathan Schneider, founder of Moderne and US Army alum. They delve into topics crucial for business leaders and operators, such as multi-year deals, pricing strategy, and knowing when to fight versus fold. Jonathan shares his journey from Netflix to founding Moderne, his insights on pricing models, challenges with enterprise deals, and the importance of aligning incentives with customers. The discussion provides valuable advice for founders, including the idea of 'planning to lose' and being prepared for rejection.
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:53 Jonathan Schneider's Background and Journey to Founding Moderne
03:24 Diving into Pricing Strategies
04:04 Multi-Year Deals: Pros and Cons
07:22 Dynamic Pricing Models and Enterprise Sales
19:26 Knowing When to Fight or Fold in Business Deals
28:08 Reflections and Advice for Founders
31:13 Lightning Round and Conclusion
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Transcript
LAUREN IPSEN: Welcome to Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I'm Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, and this is my founder therapy series.
Today I am super excited to introduce my guest, Jonathan Schneider. Jonathan is the founder of Moderne, formerly was at Pivotal Software, and before that, Netflix, and is a US Army alum.
We're diving into some really critical topics today that every business leader and operator should be thinking about, from multi-year deals to pricing strategy overall, and knowing when to fight versus when to fold.
So I'm super excited to introduce you to Jonathan. Welcome to the show. JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Thanks. Great to be here.
LAUREN IPSEN: We're really excited to have you here. And I think this is going to be a super critical session for so many of our founders, so thank you for joining us.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Of course. Yeah.
LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. Cool. Let's start from the beginning. I would love to just hear a little bit about yourself, and if you kind of always knew that you'd be a founder one day.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I'm definitely not the kind of founder that set out to, like, build a company, what are the—like, put a bunch of ideas on a whiteboard, what's the thing I think I could build? I think there was a lot of things that led to this point that kind of dragged both myself and Moderne's co- founder, Olga Kundzich, into this.
I think it started—in terms of this technology, it started back at Netflix for me. I was working on engineering tools. And there was only a couple of us on that team. There was about 700 engineers, I believe, at the time. They had that freedom and responsibility culture, if you've read the old Netflix culture deck, V1, which meant, as a central team, we couldn't impose any constraints on what product engineers did. So it was a little bit special.
We were trying to get them to move forward, you know, like, adopt more recent language versions and frameworks and things like that, trying to provide them context about where they were relative to what—where we wanted them to be.
It wasn't enough to make them move forward. If I would talk to product teams, they would say, “Do it for me, otherwise, I got something else to do.” So there was that early kind of signal of, like, okay, I think there's some automation that's necessary here.
And then I had gone on to Pivotal VMware, and we were—Olga and I, that's where we met. We were working with large enterprises doing something, an unrelated product, and we kept hearing this pain point. And so, it's—it kind of got dragged out of us.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. Awesome. I love it. So ultimately, the company itself and the idea kind of found you more than, hey, this is I'm destined to be a CEO one day. Cool.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: That's right.
LAUREN IPSEN: So now you embarked on this journey. and you are in this seat. How's it been? How's everything going?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: It's been so interesting. I'm an engineer by background. We're actually both technical founders, but we find such interest in, you know, layering together the technical engineering with social engineering, with pricing engineering, as I think we'll talk about it in a little bit, and the relationship between all those things. I think it's just so much more enriching and fascinating than just working only on the product. So it's a great opportunity to do that.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And I wouldn't do anything else.
LAUREN IPSEN: I love it. Cool. So as discussed today, we're gonna talk a lot around pricing specifically.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Yes.
LAUREN IPSEN: And it's something that I think so many of our founders, especially our deeply technical founders, come up against and really don't know where to start. So I'm excited to get some of your insight based on what you've seen and what you've seen work successfully, and maybe some things that weren't so successful too.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Absolutely.
LAUREN IPSEN: And we'll just kind of walk through it together and break it all down, if that sounds like a good plan.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: That sounds like hopefully a useful plan for everybody listening.
LAUREN IPSEN: Okay. Awesome. All right, let's kick things off with something that every company faces at one point or another—multi-year deals. Some love them for predictability. Others find them super-risky. What’s your take?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: So this is gonna be the first time I say something that I think will come back again and again. But I really love building incentive alignment in different ways between us and a customer, between us and potential partners.
So I look for where can—where can we both win, and that be the foundation of how we build product and pricing and so forth. And so, with respect to multi- year deals right now, I think one thing we've noticed in the enterprise is that there's a latent fear of signing a new deal with a partner that's unknown to them because there's been so much price shock recently.
I don't know why. I don't know if price increases have been caused by valuation declines from 2022 on, and so people are trying to catch up, or if it's a natural economic cycle. Haven’t been around doing this long enough to know. But what I do know is that pricing shocks are really hitting customers hard right now.
And so I can think of a couple vendors, one that came to multiple of our customers with a 15 times price increase year over year. And so their reaction to that is like, “Hey, I bought this. I spent time integrating it. Now I just wanna rip it out, and I wanna displace it.” And so then there's a fear of, like, if I build a relationship with you, are you going to do that to me?
LAUREN IPSEN: Mm-hmm.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And so I think of, okay, understanding that that is, like, a— it's like a recent trauma where it's still a lot of our enterprise customers.
LAUREN IPSEN: Totally.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: What can we do about that? And so I think I can do multi-year. I'm not going anywhere. I don't want to have this 15X sort of— you know, I don't wanna come back next year with a 15X deal. How can I promise that to you? Part of that's promising a multi-year deal. What can I receive in exchange? What's important to me? You know, we say you want 120% net dollar attention. What if we just lock in increases year over year and do a multi-year, so it's comfortable for my business, it's comfortable for your business, and—
LAUREN IPSEN: No surprises.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And we're both—we're both happy. And so I found it as a way of extending an olive branch to a kind of scared buying population right now.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think you're right. I don't know if—you know, I think parts of it are post-correction. I think a lot of people—or a lot of VCs are pushing for more revenue or increased revenue.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Yes.
LAUREN IPSEN: And naturally, unfortunately, sometimes the people that get the brunt of that are the ones that are paying customers already, right?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Right.
LAUREN IPSEN: Because then they're already—they're already in need, right? Or they're already using it, so they're the easy target.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Yeah.
LAUREN IPSEN: So I think this is—I think you're spot on, and I think it's a really smart way to focus on aligning both incentives and making sure that it's more of a longer partnerships. But it's also, yeah, keeping some surprises out of the picture and just allowing things to be consistent
Now, do you think that all companies should push for them, or do you think that it really depends on kind of certain factors like company size or industry or stage of growth that go into play?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I think it depends on the kind of activity you're doing and whether you're a customer views this as something that is going to be a long-term activity for them. And I think—so for our kind of product, we feel like it's not just a one and done, sort of like I'm doing this now, but I'll do something else later. This is the—we're gonna shape part of—at least part of our software development life cycle around the capability that this product has, which implies a long partnership, which in turn, you know, how can we make sure that long partnership is comfortable to embark on in the first place.
I don't know that every product has that characteristic. And so, I would, that's— the big difference to me. And also, I think what you're hearing is in another economic cycle, in a different world, is our incentives may be more aligned to single-year deals. So it's very much situational, I think
LAUREN IPSEN: So more of a dynamic pricing model than anything else, and just listening to the market a little bit, it sounds like.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Listening to the market.
LAUREN IPSEN: Okay. So talk to me a little bit more about that strategy. So early on, do you think that a company should have one clear strategy, or do you think it's better to have multiple approaches, especially when targeting large enterprises versus smaller companies?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I believe that you probably need at least two or three different strategies, depending on the size of customer. And so one dynamic is—with respect to pricing, is do you want a lot of line items in the contract and complex pricing, or do you want few line items and simple pricing? And for a long time, we saw this as an either/or proposition. We should either have simple pricing or complex pricing.
And over time—so let's take a simple pricing metric as an example, and one that's—for us, it's kind of a fixed platform fee plus a variable component, like a per developer sort of metric, per contributed developer metric. So you've got a fixed component. You've got a variable component.
Obviously, you're going to wind up with volume discounts on that variable component in one form or another. And so for a small enough—and I—by small, I mean, you could even be talking a fairly substantial organization, but one that's say, you know, 2-, 3000 employees. That variable metric with some amount of volume discounts is probably still attractive to both parties.
When you start getting into large enterprise and you're dealing with tens of thousands of people and whole trained procurement departments, those procurement departments are almost, like, trained to attack that variable metric in a way where you're just gonna lose on it.
You're gonna wind up with a, you know, what will this cost at full roll-out of 60,000 people. You give that number, and then suddenly, it's like, great. We'll apply that number to 5,000 people now or something. You know, it’s just—it's really hard. And if you're not careful—and that curve, that variable curve gets too depressed as volume grows, then you wind up supporting a very complex customer for not much more value than you're achieving out of a much smaller customer.
And so, while the procurement departments of a large enterprise are—they latch onto those variable metrics and attack them pretty hard, if you—if there's other things you can add—like, you know, you want advanced firewall configuration, there's a charge for that. You want a technical account manager that's ever- present in your organization, we’ll add a line item for that. You want additional capacity, we’ll add a line item for that.
That actually tends to make them more comfortable. And the perspective of that person of your company is that you're more mature. So the moment we added technical account managers to large enterprise contracts, we had one of our banking customer goes, “Oh. I see. You look like Red Hat now. Now I know”—it is like relief. Like, now I know how to think about you.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I buy a platform, I pay people. And together, it makes it hum. And just that palpable sense of relief made me think, yeah, we clearly need to do a different thing for this kind of customer than we do for others.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah, makes good sense. I think especially when you're dealing with large enterprises and specifically customers that are really used to working with larger companies, right?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Yes.
LAUREN IPSEN: And larger entities that just have a different approach to doing things and a lot more steps involved. And, yeah, so it still comes back to the same thing, which is just like, mitigate and try and avoid as many surprises as possible. So, yeah. Okay with additional costs, just let me know on the front end and explain to me what's included.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Absolutely.
LAUREN IPSEN: All right. Let's talk money, specifically pricing models. Consumption-based pricing is a hot topic right now, so I'd love your take. Is it the future, or does it only work for certain businesses?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Going back to the incentive alignment piece, one thing I hear a lot is, I want consumption-based pricing at the beginning when I'm unsure of whether I will see substantial consumption, and I want predictable ELA pricing, sort of, you know, very shortly thereafter. And so it's like, I want consumption-based at the beginning. I don't want consumption-based at the moment that I've proven the value of the product.
LAUREN IPSEN: Right.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And so, again, this feels like an either/or proposition. Do I give them consumption-based pricing to accelerate initial land deals at the expense of expansion friction later on, when, you know, they want to expand, but they can't because the pricing is prohibitive, and I don't have the budget for it right now, so I'm gonna have to actually attrit usage a little bit in order to keep.
Or do I say I'm not offering consumption-based pricing at the beginning because I'm looking out for your longer-term interests, which then adds friction at the front.
LAUREN IPSEN: Right.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And so, it's tempting to think of this as an either/or proposition and, you know, zero sum game, in some respects.
And so, we find a way to package things in such a way that they kind of get the benefits of both. So, for example, we talked about platform fee plus a contributing developer thing. If that's a contributing developer, that's a subscription that’s annualized. It's predictable. It's not consumption-based.
Those people can do as much work as they wish with the platform. They know how much it's going to cost.
One way of giving them the feeling of early consumption-based pricing is simply to substantially discount or zero out that variable metric in an initial term. And then—but you've communicated what that price is and what the volume discounts are and what the expectations are about it, so that in that subsequent term, nobody's surprised, and they have the feeling that, okay, now I've proven value. Now I don't have a problem. Or you've looked out for my interests in the longer-term deal.
LAUREN IPSEN: Makes good sense. And then for companies that decide against consumption-based pricing, how does that impact the way that they should build their product?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: It does vary. You have to be careful about how you think about building product and the—you know, are the services that you consume consumption-based, first of all. And so, obviously we deploy single tenants file solvent times, and we have an AWS bill. And AWS is fundamentally consumption-based on some level.
But do I build my system as one where it auto-scales with use? If I do, and I've got a very fixed pricing metric, then my margin fluctuation can be pretty substantial. Or do I bake in and scale the solution to the expected max usage at the beginning, with reserved capacity, and the margin then is fixed and predictable to us, and the pricing is predictable to them.
By doing so, in some ways, running a service in that way means that I will have provisioned and reserved capacity that goes underutilized in periods or is heavily utilized in other periods. But actually, you know, allowing that to be the case simplifies the scope of things that my engineering team needs to consider.
It goes kind of back to an experience I had at Netflix, which did auto scale quite a bit. They did something called reactive auto-scaling at the time, which was, I'm looking at a metric. That metric looks bad for some reason. We're gonna add or remove more capacity.
They famously had a problem with the Super Bowl. Whenever the Super Bowl would start, people would just, like—this was before they did an international expansion. They would just leave the service in droves.
And so, you know, reactive auto-scan, and we’d kind of look around and say like, okay, well, let's just tear down capacity, right? And then, I think when the Super Bowl ended, people synchronously came back. So they kind of slammed the service all at once. And there's not enough time to react. So there was almost always an outage around the Super Bowl of some sort, like a sort of—or operational degradation at that time.
I was talking to a group from Twitter at one point, and they had mentioned— Twitter at the time. Yeah. When it was called Twitter. They said they don't do auto-scaling at all. And I just was so shocked by that. I was thinking, but isn't this just, you know, like what at-scale tech companies do?
And they said it's actually cheaper for us to run peak capacity reserve than it is to, you know, reserve something below peak capacity and use on demand in systems into our peak. And that was like—again, it was kind of a shock. I had gone back to some of the infrastructure people at Netflix, like, why are we doing this?
And it's because off-peak, Netflix would use that unused infrastructure to do video encoding, which is like a really computational and expensive operation, but didn't matter when it happened. And so they had this internal spot market. And so I think Twitter's argument was, like, we don't—we just don't have that massive computational workload to do off-cycle.
So I guess what I mean is people tend to design their way into a pricing model as opposed to, you know, engineering simpler to a pricing model.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. We're gonna shift gears just a little bit. I wanna talk through something that I think a lot of founders struggle with, which is knowing when to fight versus when to back down.
And you've said before in previous conversations that, you know, you kind of have to plan to lose sometimes. Can you talk to me a little bit about what you mean by that and share some of your early learnings in this regard?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Absolutely. Plan to lose sounds so negative, but I mean it in a positive way. When you engage, especially in a large enterprise deal, you're gonna sign a master services agreement, and then there's gonna be an accompanying order form that goes along with that master services agreement that sets the commercial terms.
And that master services agreement is gonna have paragraphs that cover a wide range of topics, from indemnity and limitation of liability to, you know, service availability to some things that are a little bit obscure. I mean, one we've seen a number of times is code escrow, that, you know, we should place our proprietary source code in escrow with a third party in the event that we become insolvent, that our customer is able to retrieve the code from that escrow party and run it on their own.
I don't know if that's practical. So you could look at something like that and think, would they—even with the code, would they be able to run it? And obviously, there's, you know, a cost to us in sending code to a third party and having to do so regularly, and how do we agree on that party?
And so, it's tempting to just say, no, let's strike that provision. Let's fight over this. Right? And any time you fight over something like this, you're just going to just drag out the process longer. And it's a continual surprise to me when we hear founders that will let legal review drag on back and forth and back and forth for extended periods of time, because I promise that's hurting you more than the customer.
So we look at clauses like this now. So we used to be very concerned about having clauses like this, and what does it—what does it imply to our team if we just accept? But what I've noticed is that by first agreeing to the MSA, which may have a clause like code escrow, and then later, after this is signed, go back and consider the order form, there's an opportunity to say on the order form, hey, we can do code escrow like you asked, but it's gonna have an impact on me. So there's a cost associated with that. Put a number on it. Put a hundred thousand dollars on it. Put whatever number it is, and add that as an additional line item on that contract.
And then that gives the buyer an opportunity to say, but I don't wanna pay for that, right? And that's the natural point where we can have this conversation of, like, I don't really wanna do it either. You know? If we can agree that we should just strike this, then in the order form, you just reverse the language that was in the MSA. But the MSA is already signed. It's already done. It's already gone. It's already—you know. And so you've just limited the time spent there.
So what are the—for us, the things that are most important or the one—the thing that's most important? And I won't—for any procurement people listening, I won't say what all of them are, but IP encumbrances are definitely the things that we'll fight on.
So if it's a, you know, we own everything you've ever produced in perpetuity and every variation on it and every enhancement to it, obviously, we can't accept that. But there's few things beyond that that I think are existential.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. When you kind of came to this conclusion or came to this thesis of ,that it's okay to plan to lose every now and again, I'd imagine there were some learnings along the way or, you know, some different opportunities where you felt like maybe you didn't come in with the right mindset, per se?
Talk to me, maybe, if you have any examples of times that ultimately helped kind of shape your—how you approach deals just more generally and how you come into these types of calls.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I think the outcomes probably haven't been very different in the end. I think we did often successfully strike the more obscure clauses, but it was more stressful. And—
LAUREN IPSEN: More back and forth, more stressful.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: More back and forth. You just feel like it's unfair, potentially. And there's something freeing to just be like, I'm just planning to lose some of this clause and this clause and this clause, I’ll be able to say, because I know that later on in the order form, we’ll just invert it, or we’ll put a charge there. And if they really care about this, then we'll agree to it in some way.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. So ultimately, through reps and just kind of getting the same repeated back and forth, you came to the conclusion that it's better to just come into these conversations and kind of call out the areas that, you know, you don't really wanna budge on or whatever it might be. And then you ultimately end up in a better place, or potentially in the same place, but just at a far quicker cycle ,it sounds like.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I think it's rarely productive, unfortunately, to come in and say the things that you care about the most and are unwilling to budge on.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: But you should know. And for everything else, plan to lose.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. Keep everyone's expectations right where they should be. Yeah.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Correct.
LAUREN IPSEN: Okay. Cool. All right. I think we covered a lot of good stuff on the pricing component. I know that you have successfully sold into six or so out of the 10 largest banks in North America. Is that correct?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Yes.
LAUREN IPSEN: So did you have the same kind of strategy going into all of those, being that they're—you know, it's a similar buyer. They're all enterprise buyers. Or did you feel like those were pretty dynamic, too, in the final days of getting them over the finish line?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: They're more similar to each other than dissimilar. And we’re not constrained to just banking. So we've seen similar dynamics in retail, healthcare, elsewhere.
So it’s many of the same points of negotiation from one to the other. You know, we actually have two product tiers, and for the largest enterprise, we know there's an on-prem air gap solution. This is another dynamic, right? And it's a product dynamic.
Matt Carbonara from Citi Ventures has this really great phrase called activation energy. The activation energy needed for a potential buyer to be even willing to go through the process with you.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And we think of ways that we can lower the activation energy as much as possible. So if you're selling a SaaS solution into large enterprise, that can be—require higher activation energy.
At the same time, curiously, even those large enterprise buyers want a SaaS, in many cases, those things are at odds, right? There was a particular moment where one of these banking customers—I was there talking to one of their managing directors. And this sentence came out of his mouth. “I only wanna buy SaaS solutions. Let's start on-prem.”
LAUREN IPSEN: Hmm.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Like, all one, unseparated, for—and it was just like, I appreciate where you're coming from, right? Those things sound completely contradictory, and I get it because the activation energy to go through cloud security review is brutal.
So can I deliver a lower tier product on-prem and then—and significantly, make sure that when they do that cloud security review later and transition, that it doesn't represent a replatforming? That they don't have to, like, start over again on the onboarding.
LAUREN IPSEN: Right. Right.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And if you can do that, then, again, aligned incentives, you're able to say, “Yes, we will provide you a SaaS solution on- prem.”
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I mean, just—it's a matter of when, right, each of those things is happening.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Okay. Let's reflect on your journey a little bit as a founder. What's one thing that you wish someone would've told you before you got started?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: If you're like us, you do need to be prepared and thankful for some degree of rejection. Maybe this is a “plan to lose” thing again. I hate that this—I hope this doesn't become a thing I'm known for. I have seen folks around us, like, companies in our same vintage, that had a very easy time raising a seed round for one reason or another because they kind of fit every— you know, checked every box of the cause du jours.
For us in 2020, that was, are PLG? Is that your primary motion? And it's probably not gonna surprise you that, like, when we're talking about our customer base, it sounds like an enterprise sale. And we always kind of portrayed ourselves that way. And that was not popular in 2020 or 2021.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: If you really came on strong as an enterprise seller, they just didn't want to hear it.
LAUREN IPSEN: It was all PLG.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: So it was all PLG. Yep. Then somewhere around, you know, 2022, it—what, the capital efficient enterprise growth. Or not everywhere, but certainly, there was a big—pretty big tone shift there.
So we took quite a bit of rejection at the beginning. And I think that really helped build—really sharpen the message and build something a lot more valuable and enduring in the end.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. I love it. Plan to lose. That's it. We're gonna—
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Hate it in some ways, but yeah.
LAUREN IPSEN: It's good, though. No, I think it's, like—a lot of founders have kind of one motto that they really hold on to, and it resonates across multiple different facets of a business or, you know, day-to-day, so that's yours. And I think it's—I think it's great, honestly.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Yeah. I promise that isn't our company cultural statement or anything like that.
LAUREN IPSEN: Your board members would be bummed.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: That’s right. Wouldn't that be horrible? So speaking of that, but provide the alternative—like, what is the more—the motto, I think?
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: There's an article from, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years ago in Harvard Business Review called “The triumph of humility and fierce resolve is an unusual combination.” And I like to think that this—that characteristic of humility is actually related to this “plan to lose” thing. It's like, you'll approach customers and try to really understand what their concerns are, what their activation energy is, and just find ways to build towards their needs.
LAUREN IPSEN: Totally. Totally. Yeah. I think it makes perfect sense.
Okay. We're gonna wrap up with a lightning round. So, in basically one or two sentences max, you're gonna answer a couple of questions for me, okay?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Okay.
LAUREN IPSEN: All right. A book, podcast, or resource that you feel every founder should have.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: There's books on so many subjects, but the one that we've talked the most today about pricing, I think probably the best book is Confessions of the Pricing Man.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: So go check that one out. A lot of nuance there.
LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. Great.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And for podcasts, of course, Never Too Early.
LAUREN IPSEN: Thank you. Shameless plug. I appreciate it.
Okay. The best piece of advice that you've received to date as a founder,
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: That you should only accept 50% of the advice that you hear.
LAUREN IPSEN: I love that.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I do remember—speaking of the rejection sort of thing, I remember having two 30-minute back-to-back calls scheduled with two funds that were telling us why they were going to pass on our seed round.
And the first one said—I don't even remember what it was, but it was like, “You look like a circle, and you should be a square.” And I was like, okay, cool. Take that feedback. And I swear the second one said, “You're a square. You should be a circle.” And I was just—
LAUREN IPSEN: Are you serious?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Wow. That was—because of the proximity of them to one another. I mean, I literally hung up with one and picked up the phone and heard the exact opposite thing.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. You’re like, “I was trying to be a circle.”
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: I was trying. I don't even know what I am anymore. And so it's just—you know, I mean, there's great advice out there, but there's a lot of that too.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that's super helpful. I think that a lot of times, when you're a founder, a lot of people wanna help and a lot of people have a lot of opinions, perspectives—
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: And they’re gonna form opinions about you quickly, right Which, it's just the nature of that. You can only know somebody so well in a quick period of time.
LAUREN IPSEN: Totally. So you take it with a grain of salt and do what you feel is best. Jonathan, where can listeners find out more about you or Moderne? Where can they reach out if they have questions or additional things they wanna run by you?
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Absolutely. So I hang out on LinkedIn, like every enterprise B2B seller, probably, so I'm easy to find there. You can check out Moderne at Moderne.ai.
LAUREN IPSEN: Amazing. Cool. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. This has been incredibly helpful. It's a topic that's been coming up more and more as of late, and I think that your wisdom is incredibly timely and super, super helpful. So thank you so much—
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Thank you
LAUREN IPSEN: —for joining me. I appreciate it. Thanks for the candor. Thanks for the fun. And we'll be in touch.
JONATHAN SCHNEIDER: Okay. Thanks, Lauren.
LAUREN IPSEN: All right. And thank you all for listening to Never Too Early. More to come soon.
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