#213 CEO & Co-Founder Loom Joe Thomas w/ Ilya Fushman: After the Exit

Guests: Joe Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Loom; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins

Loom CEO Joe Thomas had a lot of things to think about before he sold his company to Atlassian for $975 million: The impact an acquisition might have on the product, how to keep the Loom brand alive, the risk of remaining independent... but it wasn’t until after the deal was announced that he really understood what it meant for his team.

“I didn't know how emotional it'd be for me,” Joe says. “All of the Loom employees, current and former, that reached out when this was announced, they did their calculation and they're like, ‘Oh my God.’ That, to me, was the most emotionally transformative part of the process. I didn't fully recognize what that would be like, on the individual front.”

Chapters:

• (01:34) - The Atlassian acquisition
• (05:25) - The bittersweet moment
• (08:15) - Transforming Loom
• (13:30) - Ilya’s perspective
• (18:04) - Life-changing
• (22:55) - Doing it again
• (25:00) - Loom’s early days
• (28:26) - The Series A
• (32:33) - Turning on monetization
• (35:37) - The Series B
• (37:05) - Loom AI
• (43:13) - Revenue orientation
• (48:18) - The acquisition landscape
• (52:27) - Working inside Atlassian
• (54:04) - Atlanta tech
• (55:00) - Who Atlassian is hiring
• (55:24) - What “grit” means to Joe

Mentioned in this episode: Wilson Sonsini, Vinay Hiremath, Andrew Reed and Sequoia Capital, Zoom, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Shahed Khan, COTU Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Farquhar, the Lindy Effect, SVB, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Slack, Snapchat, HubSpot, the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, Dylan Field and Figma, Atlassian Rovo, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, and Garrett Langley and Flock Safety.

Links:

Connect with Joe

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Connect with Ilya

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm