Arena Show Part II: Brooks Running (with CEO Jim Weber)

So have you, uh, gone running yet in your custom acquired Ghost 14s?

Dude, the Ghosts are amazing. They are the best sneaker I have ever known, bar none, hands down. I used to have Adrenelines. Adrenelines are also great, but I literally wear them, like, all day, every day.

But David, those shoes are only for active runners. You're, you're misusing the point of the Ghosts. [chuckles]

Well, with a baby, I mean, I'm literally wearing a baby-

[laughing]

-walking the hills of San Francisco. I'm burning more calories than I did when I was running every day.

It's true. It's just a slow run at the end of the day-

Yeah

... that's all, that's all you're doing.

Who got the truth? [upbeat music] Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

Welcome to season ten, episode eight, The Arena Show, presented by-

Ooh

... PitchBook, of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor today, back home in San Francisco. But man, what a special day that was in Seattle. [chuckles]

That it was, and we are your hosts. We're gonna go right here into the on-stage introduction of Jim and the Brooks story, so I don't wanna give too much exposition here, except to say that if you've been sort of thinking Brooks is this like shoe brand, and what can tech people possibly learn from a hundred-year-old shoe company? Prepare to have your mind blown. Jim's one of the most dynamic guests that we've ever had on Acquired, and I just got so many comments leaving the arena, just absolutely floored with all the great takeaways, and lessons, and quotes that people wrote down from Jim, so make sure you enjoy that. Now, before we dive into that, we have a fun little Q&A with our presenting sponsor, Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance. Now, as you know from hearing from Matt Spitz live in the arena, the head of engineering at Vanta, we are huge fans of Vanta and their approach to the whole security and compliance process, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. And today we've got CEO and co-founder Christina Cacioppo back with us to chat about Vanta. Um, okay, so Christina, we've been talking about your product all season. What else is unique about Vanta, the company? Do you personally have any strong beliefs about how to run a company, culture, how, how to be successful in this ecosystem?

One strong belief I've developed, uh, about the two parts of a company, go-to-market, and, you know, end product and design, is that I think a lot of folks, right, somewhat naturally run the engineering side in particular, like, as if it were engineering, industrial engineering. I actually think that side is much more like art than science. You know, like what is product development? Again, there's metrics you can put around it, but especially at the early stages, like it's a lot of, you know, when you see it, and you can go through processes, but you can't really prescribe outcomes. I think in contrast, the go-to-market side, like marketing, sales, you know, customer success, especially for a SMB business or mid-market business, should be like run industrial engineering-wise, right? You just have processes, you have like inputs, you have transformations, you have, you know, conversions, you have outputs. The spreadsheet map there is actually really helpful, and that can be a lot more predictable. Whereas again, I think on the, especially new product development side, that if you try to, you know, go full industrial engineering on it, you will just not do anything interesting. So I think part of the magic at Vanta is we've been [chuckles] able to bring those two sides together and cross-pollinate across teams, and so give folks on the engineering team opportunities to, you know, see into how we sell, and vice versa. And that's one of the things that I'm most proud of over the last few years at Vanta, and I think has contributed to some of the early success we've had.