Episode 9: Ted Elliott, Copado

Second Acts with Krish Subramanian

In this episode of Second Acts, Krish speaks with Copado’s CEO, Ted Elliott.

Ted shares (with refreshing wit and candor): the pivots that defined Jobscience (the previous business he helmed for 18 years), a veteran’s view of building and scaling software (Copado has raised over $300m for its DevOps platform) within the Salesforce ecosystem, what causes M&A disasters, Mungerisms, and much more.

Ted: “What caused the disaster acquisitions? Lack of alignment. Lack of having the same interests. Lack of wanting to be here for the long game to make it happen. You really cannot acquire…If you want to acquire a businesses because they are cheap and you think you can just pick up something on the fly and press them in a box you should be a private equity firm. When you’re a growing venture-backed business, you’re doing acquisitions to get bigger faster, to get some innovation you couldn’t build…”

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Chapters:

(02:57) An introduction to Copado

(04:32) A brief snapshot of Ted’s path before Copado

(05:16) The 3 kinds of pivots that shaped Jobscience (Ted’s previous, 18-years-in-the-making bootstrapped venture)

(06:44) “…you really never want to burn bridges”

(08:09) A heart-to-heart on the peculiarities of (startup) time and life itself

(11:45) Learning to balance “founder mode” style involvement by scaling “people, processes, and products”

(17:22) Why Ted believes Salesforce is still largely misunderstood as a cloud platform

(22:26) How Copado’s grasp of the Salesforce ecosystem has helped them spot a compelling gap

(23:22) The 3 stages (one being the “Valley of Death”) of building on Salesforce

(26:18) Why opportunistic, financials-driven M&A deals don’t work for mission-driven, high-growth companies

(32:37) Remembering a Mungerism: “Tap dancing to work”

(33:47) Working with a massive platform? Know your swim lanes

(37:19) Why Ted hires for “speed of trust” and how he decided on leading Copado

(43:44) Hiring a CFO early and 2 other impactful decisions Ted made in his first year as Copado’s CEO

(46:38) A talent insight Ted realized while working with his father

(49:27) Taking away the right (hard) lessons from this down cycle

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Mentioned/Resources:

Copado Celebrates 10 Years of DevOps for Enterprise SaaS Solutions

Meet the CEO of a Salesforce DevOps $1B Unicorn [Interview]

Ted Elliott of Copado: I Survived Cancer and Here Is How I Did It

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Connect with Ted:

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LinkedIn

Connect with Krish:

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LinkedIn

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