Therese Tucker, CEO and founder of BlackLine

Today we’re here with the one and only Therese Tucker — she’s the CEO and founder of BlackLine, the enterprise SaaS company that helps businesses, like Coca Cola, EBay, Nasdaq and more, automate accounting. Blackline was a leader in the first wave of the cloud movement, founded in 2001, and went public in 2016.

Key takeaways from this episode include:

• The problems money can’t solve when creating a new market: “The reality is that creating a new market is a fairly slow process, no matter how much money you take and throw at it,” Therese said. “Getting people aware, doing the education piece, getting through sort of a process and seeing that develop does not happen overnight. I still get frustrated because we have over 3,000 customers and I’m like, ‘Why don’t we have 30,000?’ And so much of that is because of our market, and because our buyer is risk-averse and moves slowly.”
• Advice for solo founders wondering if they should seek co-founders: “Someone once told me that it’s very hard to get things done by committee. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with one person, not a committee. Even among the companies that have co-founders there is still the lead who makes the hard decisions,” Therese said. “Unfortunately, I’ve also seen companies where some of the co-founders are not true co-founders. The moment it gets difficult, they become employees. Honestly, I think having a co-founder adds complexity; the minute you disagree, you’ve got a very difficult situation. And the minute you run out of money, you’ll see very quickly who’s actually willing to go without their salary to make it successful and who’s in it because they’re sort of riding along.”
• Characteristics to look for in employee number one: “You need to find the kind of people that don’t fit well in a corporate structure. And frankly, sometimes that’s because they’re just too bright. They don’t have a tolerance for bureaucracy, for BS, and they want freedom to get things done. And those are the type of people that you look for in a startup,” Therese said. “And you know what? Those people are really fun to work with. The other thing that you can do in the early days is you can offer people flexibility. One of my early programmers was a musician, and he toured three months out of the year. He’s an excellent programmer. I was able to hire him for a fraction of what I would have paid somebody who got three weeks’ vacation. Because he had a life, he had a full-time steady job when he wasn’t touring. And then he got to tour with his band for three months out of the year. Flexibility. It was beautiful. We just worked with it.”
• How founders should lead differently in 2020 and beyond: “I think that we are all learning, that no matter where we are at, we still have some pretty deeply ingrained beliefs that are probably wrong,” Therese said. “The built-in advantage of diversity is that people from diverse backgrounds do think differently. And so you get the advantage of just a lot of different types of thinking about problems and a lot of different ways to approach problem-solving. You end up with a stronger company and a stronger product set because of that inherent diversity.”