Mire CRO Zhenya Loginov: Hiring Tips for Sales; Why Dropbox Lost Enterprise | 20VC #900

Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. Zhenya, this is such a pleasure to do. I've wanted to do this one for a while. I heard so many great things from Peter and from Olga. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Harry, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Not at all, but I wanna unpack a little bit of the background, 'cause there's some incredible history here. So talk to me, how did you make your way into the world of tech, and then how did you come to lead some of the most powerful revenue and sales orgs, most recently with, you know, where we are today?

Yeah. I think my kind of upbringing and education, uh, probably, uh, kind of prepared me for the world of tech. So in high school and college, I did a bunch of, like, computer programming competitions, all Russian competitions, and so on. Um, but then eventually went, instead of, kind of becoming an engineer, which was the, the path that I think I was prepared for, I went into the business side, um, and spent, you know, five years doing consulting and finance. And then eventually made it to tech, uh, by starting a company. So I saw friends of mine, uh, start their own companies. I thought that it's exciting. Wanted to see, you know, what it's like and started a company in e-commerce space. Um, and then found that I loved it. Uh, and so eventually, you know, when I closed that company, made it to larger companies like eBay and then Dropbox and then Segment and Miro.

Uh, I mean, I, I love the way you just kind of glossed over some of those companies 'cause I wanna unpack a couple of learnings. If we look at, say, um, Segment and Dropbox. If we were to isolate one to two learnings from your time there, what would you say are the one or two biggest takeaways from each? Can you unpack them for me?

Sure. I think the biggest one for me from Dropbox was that you have to win the enterprise market. If your market kind of includes the enterprise, you, you have to figure out as a company how to be in the enterprise market. Um, I think at Dropbox when I left, uh, my biggest learning was that, y- you know, we had an opportunity to be Dropbox for the enterprise and we sort of lost this opportunity to other companies, and I never wanted to be in this position again at, uh, others. So when I was joining Segment after Dropbox, uh, one of my biggest things that I wanted to accomplish was take the company into the enterprise and make it a major enterprise player in that space.

Now, I, I just wa- I just wanna pause there.

(laughs)

I'm too interested 'cause I most often see founders and they say, "We need to move into enterprise." And I always say to them, "Listen, SMB is deeper than you think it is, and you can build a bigger business than you think you can staying there. Don't move there too soon." How do you think about that, given the need to also win enterprise?