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Launching the AI Center of Excellence: Moving AI from Prototypes to Production
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We are excited to welcome François Dufour to Decibel! Prior to joining our team as our first marketing partner, François was VP of Marketing at Twilio and has also served as interim CMO and advisor to many founders in high growth startups including Algolia, Apollo GraphQL, and Lattice. François has helped companies at almost every stage market to developers through open source and freemium models, reach “Line of Business” stakeholders, and also sell directly to executive buyers. We are excited that he is now going to be working directly with founders in the Decibel portfolio and asked him to share his thoughts on helping companies in our Q&A:
I feel fortunate to have grown my career in three amazing technology companies that experienced hypergrowth. Though they were all at different stages and targeted separate markets, they were organizations that shared a universal focus on end user experience and deep customer empathy. Whether you’re introducing someone to a new feature on a consumer platform like Yahoo or LinkedIn, or designing a self-serve experience to teach someone how to use Twilio’s API, you have to think in terms of what’s most valuable to the customer and the user community.
At Yahoo, we were focusing on driving engagement at scale, on very large consumer web properties. At LinkedIn, we learned to master self-serve adoption and how to upsell premium products to certain segments, such as LinkedIn Talent Solutions which served recruiters on the network. And at Twilio, we learned how to build a world-class enterprise sales motion on top of a very strong developer-centric product-led growth model. There were some really great lessons I learned from all three companies that I try to impart to startups that are scaling today.
After working in several large companies I was asked to serve as an acting CMO in high growth startups including Algolia and Apollo GraphQL. I have always loved coaching and quickly learned that every startup can use external advice and mentorship as their team grows. It is incredibly fulfilling to roll up my sleeves and dig in wherever needed - helping execs with hiring, importing best practices that I’ve learned, or guiding founders on how to build and lead a marketing team.
One of the great challenges for every startup is fine tuning your initial story and positioning, and this is my personal passion as a marketer. Every startup has a great story to tell, and helping technical founders hone, simplify, and share their story can have an outsized effect on that company’s growth. And it is incredibly fulfilling to see the immediate impact when you can clearly explain your product to customers, prospective hires, and the outside world. It is what motivates me to work with young startups every day.
Without question we are in an era in the software industry where a company’s growth is determined by how quickly they can enable a customer to find, learn, and try their product. We’ve all seen the downside of building barriers between a customer and the product. When a customer has to wade through non-optimized UX flows and schedule multiple calls just to try a product or get a price range, they’re less likely to use it. Product led growth is incredibly empowering for users of software. The companies that have the best trial, onboarding, and purchasing experiences grow much faster than those using traditional sales and marketing processes. I think most people underestimate the amount of time that is required to get the right “user journey”, including everything from documentation, training, and product telemetry. People also discount the massive upside of having technical sales people, including even technical BDRs, as their first sales hires.
Decibel's vision is to create a VC firm that combines traditional early stage investing with highly differentiated services that are of greatest need to technical founders. We all believe that establishing modern go-to-market strategies and approaches can be game changing for founders, and want this to be a core part of the experience of working with our firm. Whether you are looking for early adopters, fine tuning your go-to-market, or looking for advice from founders who are deep in your domain, we believe we can create an unfair advantage for startups from the earliest stage. I’m excited to be a part of the team and to make this vision a reality!
