Milin Desai is the CEO at Sentry, an application monitoring tool for developers. Sentry has recently passed two key milestones: 100K customers and over $100M in ARR. Before Sentry, Milin was a GM at VMware and scaled their cloud networking into a billion-dollar business. Prior to stepping into leadership roles, Milin was a PM at Riverbed and a software engineer at Veritas.
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In today’s episode, we discuss:
- The key ingredients of Sentry’s success
- Sentry’s developer-centric approach
- Lessons on pricing, packaging, and product from VMware
- Being an external CEO at a startup
- Forging successful relationships with founders
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Referenced:
- Building for the Fortune 500,000: https://blog.sentry.io/building-for-the-fortune-500-000/
- Carl Eschenbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-eschenbach-980543/
- Chris Jennings: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriskjennings/
- David Cramer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmcramer/
- FRC’s product market fit framework: https://pmf.firstround.com/
- Martin Casado: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/
- Pat Gelsinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patgelsinger/
- Raghu Raghuram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghuraghuram/
- Riverbed: https://www.riverbed.com/
- Sentry: https://sentry.io/
- Todd Bazakas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-bazakas-b5a2533/
- Veritas: https://www.veritas.com/
- VMware: https://www.vmware.com/
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Where to find Milin Desai:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milin-desai-464757/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/virtualmilin
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Where to find Brett Berson:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
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Where to find First Round Capital:
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(03:03) Joining Sentry as an external CEO
(06:27) The CEO/founder relationship
(09:37) Lessons from VMware
(13:04) What PMs did differently at VMware
(18:04) Becoming the need, not the want
(20:53) Scaling Sentry
(23:07) Building for the “Fortune 500,000”
(27:02) Open versus closed source product
(30:43) The key ingredients to Sentry’s success
(36:21) How Milin updated his playbook at Sentry
(38:49) Focus on packaging, not pricing
(40:29) “Build for the many, not the few”
(41:53) Sentry’s B2D model
(45:10) The second product mindset
(51:03) Contrarian take on building for enterprise
(52:50) Several people who influenced Milin
