StubHub is the latest Internet leader to IPO.
It’s not quite SaaS, but there’s a connection.
Jeff Lawson, founding CEO of $16B Twilio before that … actually joined StubHub as CTO before Twilio. But he didn’t get nearly as much equity as the other CTO — because in his own words, he “wasn’t committed enough”.
So he got 1/5th the equity of the other CEO!
A good reminder to us all.
A ways back, we had some of the best founders in SaaS join us for SaaStr Summit: Bridging the Gap to buck people during the lockdown times.
It was great digital event, the peak of digital events, and we had an incredible 20,000+ attended digitally (!). But it was a short downturn, and a short lockdown too. SaaS stocks rapidly recovered.
Among others, one of my favorite CEOs and founders, Jeff Lawson shared his top learnings from tougher times.
And one thing Jeff reflected on, notwithstanding his wild success as founding CEO of Twilio, was that while he was a CTO at StubHub — now IPO’ing — he didn’t really make any money when eBay first acquired it.
Why not, as CTO? Because … and he was quite honest and self-aware … he never really committed.
As Jeff said, “if you don’t commit 100%, you never really make any money. You never really get anywhere.”
And so his co-CTO ended up with many times more equity. Which makes sense. The other CTO went all-in.
He learned that lesson personally and the hard way, and then went all-in when he founded Twilio. Today, Twilio is a $16 Billion Cloud giant and Jeff is CEO emeritus. And maybe that was how it was all meant to be.
But he could been much more successful the prior round, too, as CTO of StubHub. For basically the same amount of work and time, or close to it. If he’s just … 100% committed.
Something to think about if you’re on the fence about going all-in.
