October 14, 2025 • 48 mins
Dan Balcauski speaks with Brandon Card, CEO and Founder of Terzo, an enterprise AI platform focused on contract intelligence for Fortune 500 companies. Brandon shares his journey from working at tech giants like Microsoft and IBM to founding Terzo, highlighting the challenges of targeting enterprise clients and creating new budget line items for AI solutions. They discuss the importance of charging for proof of concepts, focusing on long-term thinkers in the hiring process, and identifying 'Mavericks' within enterprises who are willing to drive innovation. Brandon emphasizes the necessity of patience and integrity in building a successful company and reveals how Terzo uniquely approaches the complex enterprise sales cycle.
01:55 Brandon Card's Journey and the Birth of Terzo
03:59 Understanding Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)
06:34 Focusing on Enterprise Clients
17:50 The Importance of Charging for POCs
22:28 Targeting the Office of the CFO
26:39 Challenges of Saying No to Potential Clients
30:45 Recruiting the Right Sales Team
42:03 Creating New Budget Line Items
47:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Guest Links
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Brandon Card (00:00):
Our advisor said, you're crazy to go after the
(00:01):
enterprise.
Sales cycles are too long, tooslow, too complex.
You don't have a brand name.
You cannot win the SMB inmid-market and think the
enterprise is gonna trust you.
It's a very different market.
There's very few VCs in theentire world that have probably
even had of the volume In theenterprise, that I've had.
Always play fair, not charge.
(00:22):
You don't have to charge a lotof money and make profit, but
the act of doing the transactionand getting money makes that
customer more bought in more allin and going to put more time
And effort into the project.
That's, part of being anentrepreneur is everyone's
telling you're wrong and thenstill waking up and believing in
what you're doing and neverquitting.
(00:42):
All the beautiful things in lifetake time, and that's what a lot
of people learn, whether you'rein this business or many other
things in life.
sales are won and lost when youare not in the room.
That is the truest thing I'vesaid on this podcast the whole
time.
Dan Balcauski (01:19):
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories from the leaders of the
best scale up.
B2B SaaS companies.
I'm your host, Dan Balcauski,founder of Product Tranquility.
Today I'm excited to welcomeBrandon Card, CEO, and founder
of Terzo, a leading enterpriseAI platform, transforming how
Fortune 500 companies managecontracts spend and supplier
data with 99% accuracy andcontract intelligence.
(01:40):
Brandon combines a background inMicrosoft and IBM with a passion
for mental health consciousleadership, and AI's role in
reshaping business.
Brandon, great to have you onSaaS Scaling Secrets.
Brandon Card (01:49):
Great to be here.
Dan.
Excited for the conversation.
Excited to share some stories.
Dan Balcauski (01:53):
I am excited to hear them.
And Brandon, for listeners whoaren't familiar with Terzo, can
you give us the elevator pitch?
What do you do?
Who do you serve?
Brandon Card (02:02):
Turso is an enterprise AI contract
intelligence company.
We read supplier contracts andcustomer contracts for the
largest companies in the worldand show them where all their
revenues coming in from and show'em where all
Dan Balcauski (02:14):
Okay,
Brandon Card (02:14):
is going across their supply chain by extracting
metadata from these PDF contractand
Dan Balcauski (02:21):
lots.
Brandon Card (02:21):
with the CFO procurement supply chain people
who are managing finances, butwe are an office of the CFO
solution
Dan Balcauski (02:30):
so deep into the critical business.
data that is trapped insidePDFs.
And whether that's contractsaround the invoices.
What what led you to start torsoafter your time as an employee
of Microsoft and IB.
Brandon Card (02:46):
I started my career actually at Oracle.
So I worked at Oracle IBM, andMicrosoft, and I was working
with Fortune 500 customers theentire time at all three
companies.
And then I started to hear aboutthis problem almost every single
day when I was working atMicrosoft 20 15, 20 16, 20 17.
My customers had really complexrelationships with Microsoft
(03:10):
across the world that we weremanaging oftentimes 20, 30, 40
active contracts.
And they would always ask us forthe contract data and we
realized that they didn't haveany of this data in any systems,
And we thought, wow what theheck's going on?
I thought there'd be, there's acategory for this called CLM.
we learned a secret CLMs werenot being used by people in
(03:32):
procurement or IT or finance,and they were only being used in
pockets of the business.
So all of our customers keptcomplaining about not having
analytics or insights into theircontracts, and that's how Terzo
was born.
I realized that our, wonderfulfriends and brilliant people at
Microsoft weren't building thisapplication layer.
They were focused on Azure.
So we went out in March, 2020and started focusing on building
(03:52):
Terzo AI on the Azure platform.
And building our proprietaryneural network to read all of
these contracts.
Dan Balcauski (03:59):
That strikes me as surprising where you say that
there's this whole category ofCLM or contract lifecycle
management, but it wasn't beingused by the folks you were
talking to, to get operationalinsights, where were those
solutions primarily focused?
Brandon Card (04:15):
Yeah, so it's a great
Dan Balcauski (04:16):
I.
Brandon Card (04:16):
That's one thing I learned very well before
starting Touro.
Contract lifecycle management'sbeen around for almost 20 years.
It was designed for lawyers todo drafting templating and as a
storage repository.
It was not designed to oneextract metadata from documents.
It was not designed to have anytype of financial insights,
(04:38):
which is a huge problem.
They don't have spend data orfinancial data from the contract
in these CLMs.
They're basically a repositoryfor legal, and that is the
secret we discovered.
And in the largest organizationsin the world have a hundred
thousand plus employees, maybe20 employees.
Out of the a hundred thousandwould have access to the CLM
(04:58):
That is the secret we discoveredbefore going out and building
Terzo.
We thought it was one of thebiggest problems in the
enterprise was that thissolution was a point solution
only being used by a few peoplein the company.
It wasn't an enterprise wideapplication.
And that's the Huge opportunitythat we saw Dan back in
Dan Balcauski (05:16):
So mostly focused on helping the attorneys in
their workflow, the approvals.
But then once those wereexecuted, it went into a folder,
a bucket somewhere, and the restof the business couldn't extract
any operational details out ofit.
Brandon Card (05:30):
Yeah.
And the reality is when you lookat a big company, they're saving
the same contract in manydifferent locations.
So let's just talk aboutMicrosoft for a second.
I would give my customer,fortune 100 customer, the
Microsoft contract.
Legal might put it in their CLM.
Finance might put it in OneDriveprocurement might put it in
Ariba, Dan, and it might put iton a C drive.
(05:50):
These documents are stored inmany different siloed locations.
That's why when you look at abig enterprise today, they have
contract data in 30, 40, 50different systems.
And that's one of the bigchallenges that we approach is
to figure out how to aggregateand centralize all this siloed
contract data.
And you think about all thepeople that turn over in these
roles, right?
Dan?
(06:11):
These people come in they like adifferent solution.
They'll save it in box, forexample, right?
Or they'll save it in, on theteams folder.
So the bottom line is thiscontract data is extremely
important, precious data, andit's living all over the place
in the enterprise.
It's not centralized.
There's no reporting, there's nosearch, there's no analytics.
That's why terms was created.
Dan Balcauski (06:31):
You hinted at it several times in that you guys
are focused on the enterprise.
I'm curious,'cause I would saymost SaaS companies, the default
is to maybe start like SMB andthen move up market.
You did the opposite with thiskind of pure focus on
enterprise, why'd you decide tomake life hard for yourself?
Did you view it that way?
Why go enterprise first?
Brandon Card (06:50):
Yeah.
We did view it that way.
Everyone viewed it that way too.
Honestly, there's a few reasonswhy we started with the.
And day one, we were building anenterprise SaaS company because
our goal was to get a productout that our customers could
start using.
But our strategy behind, closeddoors was to build an enterprise
AI platform, but we needed to goget the venture capital to go
invest and build the AI
Dan Balcauski (07:12):
Hmm.
Brandon Card (07:12):
day one, we knew when this team came together, we
wanted to be an AI company, butwe'd have to go get millions of
dollars of venture capital toactually build the ai.
So to get started.
built this enterprise SaaSapplication that was not powered
by AI day one.
And the reason why we went afterthe Fortune 500 is my experience
(07:33):
and my co-founder's experienceat the time was primarily big
enterprise We understood thosecustomers very well.
We understand the challengesfrom IT perspective.
We understood their IT stacks.
two, this was a much biggerproblem in the enterprise.
If you look at the Fortune 100alone.
Amazon, Microsoft, JP MorganChase, they spend 95% of all the
(07:56):
money across all B2B activity inthe world.
So when you look at all thedollars, the majority of it's
being spent in the Fortune 100,fortune 500, that's where the
majority of the waste is.
That's where the majority ofoptimization opportunity is.
So we knew companies werebleeding billions of dollars in
the Fortune 500 or smallercompanies are still losing
money, but it's probably 30grand.
(08:17):
It's not gonna move the needlefor them.
Big customers, like the banksare losing billions per year
because they don't have thisdata and they're not tracking
all these important contracts.
So we thought if we're gonnamake an impact and we're gonna,
actually help people, then thisis the best place to start.
And I can tell you, investorsaid that we were crazy.
E even the angel investors whowere friends of ours said,
(08:39):
you're crazy to go after theenterprise.
Our advisor said, you're crazyto go after the enterprise.
Sales cycles are too long, tooslow, too complex.
You don't have a brand name.
You gotta start SMB atmid-market.
And we understood thosechallenges.
We understood that, strategybecause that's how most
companies have success.
But we knew that we could solvethe enterprise problem and all
we needed to do was land a fewmarquee logos to get that trust
(09:01):
and credibility early on.
So that's where we put all ofour, focus and energy early on,
was figuring out how do we landa couple big logos to then go
get that momentum andcredibility to land more large
enterprise.
Dan Balcauski (09:13):
So the Tam story makes sense.
The money being spent attachedto those contracts is in the
Fortune 100, fortune 500 to.
Appropriately serve that market,you're gonna have to go raise
capital.
You start talking to people whohave that capital.
They tell you you're crazy.
Go this other direction.
I guess how did you respond tothat?
Obviously you somewhat ignoredtheir advice
Brandon Card (09:35):
Yeah,
Dan Balcauski (09:35):
where you're today.
Brandon Card (09:36):
so yeah, I did ignore a lot of their advice and
I was stubborn about it, which alot of entrepreneurs are
stubborn, right?
That's a pro and con of dealingwith a guy like myself or any
CEO and founder.
We're very, delusional incertain things and we're
stubborn with what we believein.
And I promised the investorsthat we wouldn't go out And
raise a lot of money until wevalidated that we had enterprise
(09:56):
customers and we landed two.
Marquee enterprise customers,the largest financial
transaction processor in The,world.
And then we also landed thesecond largest retailer in.
the world.
And when we got those twocustomers to.
sign these first contracts, thatis when some investors said to
me, oh, this is interesting.
I had some people starting tobelieve, wait, you guys can go
(10:19):
through these motions.
Okay.
So we went out and webootstrapped the company in the
very beginning to get theproduct live.
And then we took in just a verylittle bit of venture capital in
the seed round to go get thoseearly customers.
So we didn't go out and raisethat, that$16 million series A
that, that was publicized.
We didn't go out and raise thatuntil we already had a handful
(10:40):
of enterprise customers onboard.
So the risk was a little bitlower.
But I can tell you that eventhen many VCs came into the
round and said, Hey, I think youshould be going down market more
velocity, lower the A SP.
Get more pipeline, get morewins, learn more, get more
logos.
And we just thought toourselves, and I still believe
this today, Dan, this is thething that I'll tell
(11:00):
entrepreneurs.
we go land 10 mid-marketcompanies and we have a ton of
success and we get a lot ofmomentum, we will still not be a
trusted enterprise player.
You cannot win the SMB inmid-market and think the
enterprise is gonna trust you.
It's a very different market.
So we knew that having successin mid-market wasn't gonna help
(11:21):
us.
Go upstream.
if you look at the companiesthat had success in the
enterprise early on, companieslike ServiceNow, companies like
Workday, companies likeCrowdStrike, they didn't start
off SMB and Mid-market.
They started off in theenterprise and built enterprise
trust.
They didn't go down, they wentdown market later on.
But that's one thing I knew thatI'll never get Walmart to trust
(11:41):
me.
If I have every small mid-marketcustomer in the world.
Walmart's still not gonna thinkthat we can serve them.
They're gonna label us an SMBmid-market company and that is
the what I knew from my years ofworking with these comp
customers.
We cannot be labeled amid-market enterprise company or
mid-market small businesscompany.
Excuse me.
We have to be an enterprisefocused player, which means
we're gonna have less customersoverall.
(12:03):
We're gonna have bigger dealsizes, and we're gonna have
longer sales cycles.
It's just part of that game.
Dan Balcauski (12:10):
I'm curious'cause you said, hey, in order to
secure this funding to prove wehave traction, we've gotta go
land some of these accountsfirst and that's.
I think maybe, probably not areal barrier, but a lot of
people view that as a realbarrier of Hey, I'm gonna show
up to these first coupleaccounts and ask them, Hey just
trust me.
And they are enterprise, how doyou view that situation where
(12:32):
you feel like, I guess obviouslyyou took those steps and were
landed those first few accounts.
In the enterprise, in a marketsegment that requires, high
trust and validation.
What, how does your perspectivediffer from, say, the status quo
bias out there where yeah, I'veheard that story before of yeah,
you gotta go prove out in themid-market for them to trust
you, and you're like, no, we'regoing after that.
And so those first fewconversations, how did, like,
(12:53):
how did you approach those earlyfolks?
Brandon Card (12:55):
yeah that's a really good question.
So first of all.
I've done, I ha My experience isvery important because I've done
hundreds of enterprise deals.
I've won hundreds of deals, I'velost hundreds of deals.
I've lost a lot of deals.
I've learned a lot about theenterprise, There's very few VCs
in the entire world that haveprobably even had of the volume
(13:16):
In the enterprise, that I'vehad.
Have the knowledge andexperience in how these
customers operate.
I know how they think.
I know the psychology of thebuying cycle.
I know what matters to'em.
I know their checklist.
I sat in these offices for yearsside by side with these people.
I know these buyers, so I knewwhat we needed to get in with
And I knew what type ofrequirements, simple things.
SOC one, SOC two, ISO 27 0 1,just to get in the door and get
(13:39):
approved as a vendor.
Really basic checklist, right?
Running in environments likeAzure and AWS and having all the
security requirements that areneeded just to get in.
the one thing that we did, Ithink that was unique was that
we went in with.
customers like Home Depot andSwift Financial and Blue Cross
Blue Shield, and we said, look,here's our platform.
Here's the problem we'resolving.
(14:00):
They all agreed on the problem.
The problem was huge.
And we said, if you start withus in a proof of concept, we
will build what you need in thenext year.
And they said, really?
And we gave one in with a verylow price, gave'em the solution,
listened to the requirements,and started working with them
every week.
getting feedback and iterating,and we were doing proof of
(14:21):
concepts and building out a lotof our platform early on with
these customers.
And we turned this into aninnovation project for them.
And we knew that they hadinnovation dollars and we knew
that AI was something that wasgonna be important to their
leadership team.
So we, basically found a way toget them to give us their data
early on.
(14:41):
And we provided a lot of valueby taking their feedback to go
develop things in our roadmapand build product for them for
very low cost compared to whatthey would do with, the
alternative players in the spacelike the Accentures or the
Deloittes of the world.
You're talking about$30 millionto get started with a provider
like an Accenture.
We are going in for under ahundred K and saying, Hey, we'll
(15:02):
build something similar.
So that was the give and take wehad early on was to really make
a bet on ourselves and ourengineering team.
And work very closely with thesecustomers, and the biggest
challenge we had, andentrepreneurs probably know
this, is getting the time andfocus from these enterprises.
was one of the hard things thatwe needed to figure out.
How do we get customers to payattention to us?
(15:22):
How do we make this importantenough and a high enough
priority?
The way we did it is because wewere talking about cost
optimization during a macroenvironment where everyone was
panicking during COVID, so weplayed off those tailwinds.
And we realized every companywas trying to figure out how to
cut expenses.
The stock market obviously washot in the beginning.
(15:44):
There was layoffs happening likecrazy working from home, all
these things, right?
But CFOs and a lot of leadersbehind closed doors were trying
to figure out how do we optimizeour expenses and all this new
world we're living in, and howdo we track all these dollars
that are going outta thecompany?
That was a big focus for a lotof people in procurement and
finance during that time.
And then, as we went through a,a lot of turmoil and chaos in
(16:08):
the macro environment.
And leaders got scared.
They got scared because politicswere horrendous, beyond
horrendous in the, at thefederal and, the global level
stock market was, up and down.
People were gonna work fromhome.
There's layoffs left and right.
There was so much instability,so much uncertainty that we went
in and said, Hey, we're gonnahelp you optimize your expenses.
We're gonna help you save fiveto 10% if you do this project
(16:28):
with us.
So we played off of that macrotheme of cutting expenses,
consolidating and figuring outwhere all this money's going.
It was a good time for us to dothat.
So that's how we got customersto actually do these projects
with us.
Dan Balcauski (16:41):
It's in that arc there you laid out.
I was thinking.
I don't know if this resonatesat all with you, but Palmer
lucky with his company and Orelnow where he's going up against
the big defense contractorswhere he's bringing a product
model as you were discussing.
What are the relevantalternatives these other folks
have?
It's to get an Accenture,Deloitte to come in and build
(17:01):
some big custom software wherethey're paying time and
materials for some, solutionwith and your value proposition
is.
Hey, like we're taking a productmodel.
We're gonna come in and be a,you're gonna be a design partner
alongside of us, and we're gonnabuild, and you're gonna, you're
gonna pay us as like a productcompany.
It's, no matter what that, thatprice is, it's gonna be a
fraction of what you're gonnacharge for this bespoke,
Consulting software that youmight get otherwise, which I
(17:23):
think is super interesting.
One, one.
thing I wanna double click onthere is, You did say that you
charged, These design partnersfor POC.
And so this is a, I spend all mytime in the pricing world and it
doesn't come up super often, butevery once in a while folks will
ask about charging for POCs andsome folks will be like we're
really getting all the value outof it, so we feel bad charging.
But you did, I'm curious how youthought about that decision and
(17:47):
how you thought about that valueexchange within that sort of
design partnership.
Brandon Card (17:50):
yeah.
It's a great question.
It's a great point too for youraudience.
They should, this is some pointthat I would nail home, and I'll
probably talk about it a lotthroughout the rest of the year
on other podcasts and then even,in front of audiences, we always
charge for POCs.
We still charge for POCs and wewill always charge for POCs.
That's never going to changebecause it has nothing to do
(18:11):
with the actual dollars.
It has to do with the humanpsychology of them doing a
transaction and paying money forsomething.
Therefore, they have skin in thegame and therefore they show up
with purpose and actually care.
No one cares in life if they getanything for free.
They just don't.
That's the psychology of thehuman mind, right?
if we went into a big companyand said, Hey, it's$30,000 to do
(18:35):
this POC, that's really nothingfor them, it's basically free.
if we go in and say,$0 to do APOC, you're gonna start seeing
people not showing up for thecalendar invites and the cadence
calls.
You're gonna see people notresponding to emails.
This is a free thing, whatever.
It's not a big deal.
It's the mental psychology.
You pay 30 K, which is what somecustomers paid us.
Next thing they're taking itseriously because they actually
(18:56):
paid for something, so theythink they need to get something
in return for it.
That is the psychology that werealized after.
I've done POCs for free foryears, other companies.
I wasn't the ultimate approver.
Now I realized, wow, I mademistakes in the past.
Every time I did a free POC.
People didn't care that much,right?
People would maybe care half thetime.
(19:17):
People were not all in.
So we needed our customers to beall in and we didn't really care
what that price was, but weneeded a dollar amount for them
to pay us to get that convictionthat, okay, we're actually gonna
put real skin in the game.
We're gonna put real people onthis.
We're gonna take this seriously,have a project manager, project
plan, and we're gonna be justlike every other project, we're
(19:38):
gonna be a certifiedcompany-wide project that has
dollars behind it.
And that is the psychology Iwould tell every founder in the
world to think about.
you give anything away for free,you dilute your brand.
You dilute yourself, Becausethese entrepreneurs that are out
there building great productsand, and solving complex
problems, their time ain't free.
(20:00):
Why?
Why should they get on calls ofcustomers all the time?
They gotta build, building acompany.
They got a lot of stuff to do.
Investors and employees andproduct.
You have to have respect foryour own time as well.
And I truly believe that thecustomers you wanna work with,
if they respect you and theybelieve in you, they don't
expect anything for free.
(20:22):
That's really the truth of you.
You talk to'em behind, I talk to'em all the time right on the
side, and they said, Hey, weknow you guys, you care.
You're passionate.
You show up, you do your bestwork.
We don't expect that for free.
We don't expect that level ofservice for free.
So my, my coaching entrepreneuris, is that.
Always play fair, not charge.
You don't have to charge a lotof money and make profit, but
the act of doing the transactionand getting money makes that
(20:45):
customer more bought in more allin and going to put more time
And effort into the project.
And that's what I've learned alot throughout my career.
Rear.
Dan Balcauski (20:55):
I absolutely a hundred percent agree with
everything you just said there.
and I've talked about this inother venues, so I'm not gonna
go into my rant, but I reallyhate freemium and I think people
make the same mistake withfreemium approaches in general.
But if you guys want to hear mytake on that I've covered it in
plenty of other venues.
Brandon Card (21:09):
I'll pick on our friends at Microsoft.
I love Microsoft, right?
And I have nothing but respectfor the company, the leadership,
everyone over there.
I couldn't say enough goodthings about Microsoft they're
crushing it for a reason.
'cause they have incredibleleadership.
But when I talk to their salesreps all the time, their sales
leaders, when you, when they gointo customers and say, Hey,
we'll do a free POC withcopilot, do you think the
customer cares?
(21:29):
I think the
Dan Balcauski (21:30):
No.
Brandon Card (21:31):
Puts their best people on it.
They're like, ah, Microsoft'soffering a free POC.
All right, cool.
Yeah, we'll, we'll try it onFriday afternoon.
And then Palantir goes in andsays, Hey, you wanna do a POC
with us?
It's 10 million bucks to getstarted.
Very different.
Very different approach, right?
And, Palantir is getting thatmoney for these projects because
they're saying, no, no, we knowwhat our time is worth.
We know how imp we know how goodwe are.
You're not getting anything forfree from us.
(21:51):
and that's a great approach aswell.
Also a phenomenal company.
but, my point is, even if you'reMicrosoft and you're$4 trillion.
Enterprise behemoth and youwould offer something for free.
The end customer's oh, this isfree.
Don't really have to do much.
Don't care.
So always remember that, right?
'cause it's happening right now.
Microsoft is going into accountsand telling them our customers,
(22:14):
they can do similar things thatTerzo can do with some of this
AI and we'll test it for free.
Have they had success yet?
Not yet.
And they won't have successdoing that.
So that's something that I youknow, hearing and seeing all the
time even in the big enterprise.
Dan Balcauski (22:28):
I'm curious, going back to the beginning of
our conversation when you saidthat, you're selling these days
focused mostly on the office ofthe CFO, Contract management.
As you were outlining it, right?
Traditionally, CLM was focusedon the attorneys and their
workflow.
But there's so much businessdata that other areas of
operational business need accessto that's valuable for.
(22:51):
How, How, did you end up on theCFO?
I could see, 10 or 15 differentstakeholders within a large
enterprise.
that might be The rightstakeholder to, to go after.
Especially when you're talkingabout large enterprises.
I know a lot.
I was talking, I was on a callearlier today and that, it's
like large bank.
Everyone, every large bank has achief AI person.
Like why not be like, Hey, chiefAI person, we got an AI tool for
you for contract management.
Brandon Card (23:12):
we're dealing with Chief AI people, but the, here's
the thing, and this is animportant point that I always
talk to everyone about, and I'mgonna talk to you about it too,
right?
Everyone on the finance side ofthe house for the last 30 years
has ignored contracts.
are a financial asset.
They're not a legal asset.
(23:32):
They have legal terms.
Contracts are bringing moneyinto your company.
Contracts are, making money.
Leave your company, right?
That's, it's in and out.
It's revenue and expenses.
Revenue expenses.
These are businessrelationships.
The CFO has been relying uponthe ERP for the last 30 years.
All that is is historical ledgerdata.
Yeah.
Finance teams actually need thecontract data to know what is in
(23:56):
the forecast, to know what theyshould be budgeting, to know the
big commitments they've madeacross different, customers and
suppliers.
To all of this important costdata around your supply chain to
know what you paid per unit fordifferent products that you're
purchasing for your physicalgoods.
Finance teams actually realized,holy shit, we need the contract
(24:17):
data to make decisions.
That was the big epiphany thathappened in the 2000 twenties
and why it was happening in 2000twenties.
ERP systems cannot providecontract data.
The P two P systems like Coupaand Ariba also don't have
contract data.
They're repositories.
And then the CLM, again, is awedged away point solution that
somebody paid 40 K for andlegal, and no one cares about
it.
(24:37):
So then you talk to the C ffo,got a bunch of people reporting
to them like procurement andobviously, fp and a and other
groups.
And the only system they have torely on is the ERP.
That's the only system they haveto rely on to get financial
data.
So that's why they live inspreadsheets all day and they
live in, Tableau, power BI typeof solutions.
But most of the CFOs and theprocurement people that we talk
(25:01):
to, we're trying to track all ofthe dollars being spent in the
company.
when we say office of the CFO,that could be the Chief
procurement officer that reportsin the CFO, that could be the
head of supply chain thatreports in the CFO, could be the
head of fp and a reports in theCFO.
Our point is that we're gettingbudget from the CFO office and
the CFO is trying to govern ofdollars of revenue and spend,
(25:26):
and he can't, they can't do itin the ERP.
is the big epiphany that acustomer's had.
And no one expects SAP or Oracleto go build this AI in their ERP
platforms overnight.
So that is why we found thatnice niche in the CFO office to
go sit on top of the ERP andsupercharge and compliment that
system.
'cause we're not a rip andreplace, right?
(25:47):
We go sit on top as anintelligent data layer and
finance teams love this datathat they don't have today.
Dan Balcauski (25:55):
I, to, to continue on the area of focus.
I think, it's interesting.
So you have, yeah.
Everyone, investors friends andfamily, hey, don't go after the
enterprise.
You're like, Hey, yeah, yeah.
You ignore that advice.
You go enterprise.
First anyway, but any businessowner will tell you that just
because you decided on a targetdoesn't mean that folks that
maybe are outside of that won'tcome knocking on your door.
I'm curious, I'm imagining with,the platform you've built that
(26:17):
you do get folks who are outsideof that Fortune 500, potentially
mid-market customers coming toknock on your door.
Are there ways that you thinkabout.
Keeping the organizationfocused, like saying, like
explicitly saying, Hey thesefolks aren't a fit, and we're
gonna say, we're gonna say no tothis group of customers, even
though they might be wavingdollars interface to come buy
(26:39):
from us.
Brandon Card (26:39):
that honestly, Dan, that was one of the hardest
things we had to do.
of the hardest things I had todo, if you ask me from a sales
and go to market perspective.
Was to say no to really greatcompanies who wanted to use our
solution, we said no becausethey weren't willing to pay for
the value that they werereceiving in the solution.
(27:00):
They were all about price.
So for example, a lot of greathigh growth companies would come
to us and say, Hey, we'relooking at a CLM for 12 K.
Can we get a quote for Zo?
And we say, oh, we started200,000.
We're not ACL M, but even thoughwe compete with some CLMs, we
have a lot more value than that.
And they'd say, oh our budget'smaximum 18 grand.
that doesn't work for us.
Our price starts at 200.
So we would constantly turn awaypeople because we knew that if
(27:24):
we started getting distractedand started onboarding all these
customers paying us 12 and 18grand, we learn a lot.
We'd get some nice logos, butwould have to put so much time
and.
Effort into our CS anddeployment and customer
operations group that we wouldbe pulling away from companies
like Home Depot and Cisco andDelta Airlines.
And we thought, wait, we can'tdo this early on.
(27:45):
This is too risky.
How can we have a customerpaying us 400 K and the customer
paying us 12 K?
Dan Balcauski (27:50):
Mm.
Brandon Card (27:50):
We're building an enterprise business.
So one of the challenges that Ihad to make, and a lot of people
probably thought I was foolishor stupid for doing it, we'd
have a lot of great companiespre IPO companies come to us and
say, Hey, we want to use Terzo.
I'll pay you 20 grand.
I said, no, thank you.
You, and we've had customers.
Now public companies are greatcompanies that say, Hey, our
budget this year for contractsoftware is 36 grand.
I said thank you for yourbusiness.
(28:11):
See you later.
You're not our customer.
Our customers know that they'regoverning billions of dollars in
contract assets, and that ifthey even optimize two, three,
4%, it's millions of dollars inreturn.
How can you wanna pay$30,000 forsomething that you're gonna get
millions of dollars in ROI for?
a huge disconnect in anunderstanding, and that's not
(28:33):
the right DNA.
But the funny thing is, right onthe flip side, had mid-market
companies come to us and say,Hey, this is a$30 million
problem for us.
We're willing to pay sixfigures.
We're like, really?
they're like, yes.
This is a massive problem forus.
We don't have any of ourcontract data.
We're losing money every month.
We got audited and we're willingto pay whatever it takes'cause
we think that we're leaving 25to$30 million on the table.
(28:54):
It.
So interesting enough, we dohave some mid-market size
customers that pay enterpriseprices because they perceive
this as a huge problem.
are the type of customers thatwe try to qualify, right?
But early on it was very hard.
We had some sexy logos coming insaying, Hey, we'll pay you 20 K.
I'm telling the sales team wedon't want those deals Politely
(29:14):
say no, and let's go focus onthe big wells.
And that was something,especially during the 2020 2 23
time period, people were like,why you.
saying no to some of these greatcustomers, they, they could pay
you a hundred K in three or fouryears.
I'm like, or I could go get aFortune 500 customer and they
could pay me two 50 K next week.
that's where we're gonna put ourtime and effort.
So that was a strategy thing anda preference thing that, we
carved out.
But I also looked at, know, thepeople that have done this
(29:37):
before, Palantir, C3, ai,ServiceNow, all these type of
companies.
ever dropped their pricing toget new logos.
They focused on their targetICP, and that's exactly what we
do.
And that's a public, Fortune 500or Fortune 1000 entity.
Dan Balcauski (29:54):
I, I, that's yeah, I love that focus and I'm
sure that was not.
It's not easy, right?
It sounds smooth as you tell it,but I'm sure there was emotion
behind that when someone'swaving tens of thousands of
dollars not maybe the hundreds.
Brandon Card (30:04):
would call me up and say, why would you not take
$20,000 B.
Why would we not take, why wouldwe not go onboard this customer?
It's not a huge scope.
Let's go serve this customer.
And I know what it takes toserve a customer the right way.
We never want to do anythinghalfway.
We always wanna give a hundredpercent to every single one of
our customers.
And I knew we were not in aposition to do that, and I knew
(30:25):
that we needed to be reallyfocused.
But on honestly, was probablyone of the most painful.
Periods going through that wheneveryone disagrees with you and
you have to believe in yourselfand stick with your strategy
when everyone's telling you'rean idiot.
And That's, part of being anentrepreneur is everyone's
telling you you're wrong andthen still waking up and
believing in what you're doingand never quitting.
Dan Balcauski (30:45):
I'm curious so on that, on operationalizing that
because you could sit in yourchair at the seat of the company
and say no to everyone.
I'm curious how you thoughtabout bringing the right people
into the company.
Who who maybe understood that?
'cause I can imagine right?
There's, there's CS of, ofsalespeople or go-to market
people out there and they havesome playbook from, Some
(31:07):
mid-market or s and, b focusfirm.
And and potentially these aresome of the folks coming to you
being like, Hey we sold, I got arelationship over here.
We sold to'em at my lastcompany.
They wanna pay us 20,000.
Like, why not?
I guess how did you think aboutf bringing in the right DNA of
folks that adopted your point ofview on this situation?
Or was it just whack-a-mole totry to change folks?
Like how did you think aboutthat as you grew the personnel
(31:29):
inside the company?
Brandon Card (31:30):
yeah, that, that was a definitely a challenge as
well because in the beginningwhen we were recruiting sales
reps, we didn't have unlimited,budget to throw and pay these
people massive salaries likeAmazon and like Salesforce and
like the Microsofts of theworld.
we knew.
Even day one, before we hiredour first sales rep, that we
need enterprise experiencedsales reps that have lived in
(31:51):
this world.
So we wanted to find people thatworked at Oracle, people that
worked at IBM, people thatworked at Microsoft, people that
worked at Salesforce that weresupporting big global
enterprises and understood thatcustomers paid millions and
millions of dollars for softwareand services and have that
perception of the world.
So that's one thing we did isreally focused on going to get
(32:12):
enterprise experienced sellers.
That have done seven and eightfigure deals throughout their
career.
Now the challenge is, is thosepeople are really hard to
recruit early on because theyrequire big base salaries and
big on targets of course.
And they deserve it because theydrive revenue.
So we had to make someadjustments and to say, okay,
we're gonna have to get guysthat are a little more junior to
so we can afford them, and thenwe're gonna train them on the
(32:35):
enterprise motion, I'll be thefirst one to admit was a
complete failure.
Complete shit show.
Dan Balcauski (32:43):
What happened?
Brandon Card (32:44):
And we brought in people that had, great people,
honestly, great DNA great highenergy people that just didn't
have any experience selling tobig enterprises.
And they struggled super hard tofigure out how to get into these
companies, how to haveconversations with them, how to
qualify pipeline, how to evengenerate real pipeline in this
(33:06):
segment.
And we realized, wow, we'd haveto build a massive enablement
organization
Dan Balcauski (33:11):
Is lemme just ask real quickly, is that even with
the.
The first round filter of thesefolks came from the IBM or the
Oracle world.
Like they still struggled'causethey were earlier in their
career.
Brandon Card (33:21):
so, to be clear we, only got a few people that
had the IBM Oracle type ofexperience Because the market
was too competitive and It wastoo costly to bring in these
senior folks.
So then we decide, okay, westill need to hire some reps.
We're gonna go bring in somepeople that are a little more
junior that had success inmid-market companies
Dan Balcauski (33:38):
I got it.
Brandon Card (33:38):
and enterprise SaaS.
And then we brought in those,those people crushed it.
I saw their, I saw their statsand I saw what they did at
companies.
They came into Terzo and it waslike, wow, this is a whole
different game.
I have no idea how to talk to afinance leader at a Fortune 500
company.
Wow.
I have no idea.
Customers pay$20 million a yearfor software.
they're try.
They're transactional.
They're thinking like, oh, Igotta get, three deals done a
(33:59):
month and I'll do this deal onthe.
credit card for 12 grand.
I thought, wow, there's a hugelearning curve here.
I didn't, I underestimated howbig of a learning curve it is.
So then we went through arestructuring in the summer of
23, 1 of the hardest times of mylife, honestly, two years ago,
and I just blew up the entiresales org and the biz dev org
and said, Nope, we're startingover from scratch.
(34:20):
Even if we have less people,we're only getting enterprise.
Experienced people.
And that was one of theepiphanies I had.
And that's what I learned, isthat you can't really bring
mid-market s and b people in andthink that you're gonna train
them in a remote world andthey're gonna get up and running
and understand how to sell theenterprise.
So we realized, okay, instead ofgoing out and hiring six people
that are you, high volume,really good, we're gonna go get
(34:42):
two people that can drive reallycomplex deals and go wide and
deep into accounts.
And that's still where we're atright now.
If you look at our sales team.
We just brought over a gentlemanwho's been at Microsoft for
eight or nine years supportingFortune 500 customers, right?
I brought over a services sellerthat the same thing.
So that's our strategy and howwe change, and that's how we're
gonna continue to change in thenext, couple years here as we
raise more capital is we'regonna bring in people that have
(35:04):
a ton of experience in theenterprise segment.
Dan Balcauski (35:07):
Got it.
So the.
I'm just trying to place in timewas that layer of actually we do
need folks from the Oracles ofthe world.
The learning during that sort ofround two.
I, and I guess my follow onquestion is, I guess was there
anything besides big companylogo that you learned?
Was it like a sniff test forlike interviews?
I'm just imagining like a lot ofother founders, CEOs try to in
the same position.
(35:27):
You don't have unlimitedcapital.
You can't you can't spend thesebig dollars on some of these big
whale hunters.
Right off the bat, Are therethings that you learned besides,
I think at Oracle on the resume,that like you could sniff out in
interviews, questions you wouldask to really detect?
Brandon Card (35:41):
that's a great question, Dan.
That's a really great question.
To be very clear about our,journey.
After we got our first series Adone we did two tranches of the
series A,'cause the markets werechaos, we got a big round of
capital in the business.
We went out and hired a bunch ofpeople,
Dan Balcauski (35:53):
Mm-hmm.
Brandon Card (35:54):
And that's when we realized, oh wow, we made some
mistakes.
Dan Balcauski (35:56):
Yeah.
Brandon Card (35:56):
then we said, okay, wait, we're gonna trim
these people.
And then we had still had somecapital left.
We went out and fixed it at theend of 23, heading into 24.
We learned.
Made some mistakes, failedquick, and then we changed
course and went out and hiredpeople.
So if we couldn't get enterprisepeople we have one gentleman on
the team that's absolutelycrushing it that doesn't have
any enterprise experience, butthe one trait that I look for as
(36:18):
a CEO and a leader, I waslooking for long term patient
people.
That was the one trait I waslooking for in the interviews
was, do these people wantinstant gratification?
Because a lot of people do, andit has nothing to do with their
background or experience.
A lot of people want instantgratification.
It's just how their brains work.
(36:39):
Or are these some other folks,are they willing to work three
years for a deal?
Do they have that level ofpatience and that level of
long-term vision to actually gothrough a sales cycle for three
years, but not just sales cycle,anything?
Are they willing to work out?
For seven years to get results.
Are they willing to diet and,change their whole entire,
(37:00):
nutritional program?
And I was starting to dig intoother parts of their life to see
other decisions.
Do they have long-termrelationships?
Are they married, right?
All those types of things.
How are these people see theworld?
Because the challenge we have,and I know that other founders
feel this too, we live in aworld where I could go
downstairs tonight, in my littlehack away room, build an
application, and then nextweekend it's got 14 million
(37:21):
followers and I'm super rich andI'm a hero.
And that's what, that's theworld everyone lives in.
Or I do a YouTube video and itgoes viral.
Next thing you know, I'm famous,right?
Overnight success, lotterybullshit, all this short term,
instant gratification, nonsensethat, that we live in.
And, and I don't blame thesepeople, right?
You're a female.
You can go on only fans and make50 KA month by showing, yourself
in a bathing suit.
(37:41):
It's ridiculous, right?
The world has given you all thisopportunity to go make money
overnight.
And honestly, it's the biggestfacade and a bunch of bullshit
that I've ever seen in my life.
nothing good happens in a shortamount of time.
All the beautiful things in lifetake time, right?
All the beautiful things inlife.
So when I realized that, wow, alot of these people, they're
(38:03):
short term thinkers.
They want to, get rich quickovernight.
This is not gonna work for us.
I don't care if they can sellthe enterprise or not.
So I started to look atpeople's, thought process and I
started to spend time with'em inperson and do lunches and
dinners and really spend timewith'em and thinking about how
do you see the world?
Are you willing to, are youwilling to grind?
For 3, 4, 5 years before you getyour first big commission check.
(38:24):
'cause I was right and I had to,back then I didn't get, I didn't
get into a big sales rep role,my first job outta college.
I had to work for years andprove myself to get in those
roles.
So that was the one thing I wasconstantly looking for.
Long-term thinkers versusshort-term thinkers.
And I can tell you, I've donestudies all over the world with
different people.
If you look at the population,Dan, and they did a Stanford
marshmallow study on this too.
(38:45):
75% to 80% of the human beingson this earth in that range are
short-term thinkers.
So that leaves you about 20% ofthe population is the long-term
thinkers.
So that really disqualifies thepool of people, and that's one
thing I continue to do now, evenfor hiring for engineering, or
hiring for marketing, or hiringfor, finance.
(39:05):
It doesn't matter.
I'm thinking about, I wantlong-term people on this journey
with me because that's the onlyway we're gonna win.
Dan Balcauski (39:11):
The business marshmallow test.
I love it.
And I I think the shortestexecutive or the shortest
C-suite executive in tech is theCMOA year and a half.
But I think most sales repsdon't even last that.
Most companies too.
So if you're planning on jobhopping every 12 months, And
you're not gonna hit your firstcommission check sell in this
really complex thing for threeyears.
I can imagine that's gonna,that's gonna work against you in
(39:32):
that filtering as well.
Brandon Card (39:33):
quick story for one of our sales reps.
He's our first sales rep,Spencer, right?
Incredible guy.
Dan Balcauski (39:40):
Shout out Spencer.
Brandon Card (39:41):
so Spencer, yeah, he's incredible.
I'm proud of him.
So proud of him.
But I made him a promise.
I said to him, Hey, you come in.
He came in April of 2021 and Isaid, my friend, I'm a very
transparent CEO.
I'm not gonna lie to you.
gonna take years for you to makebig money here.
We're just building the companynow.
We're in the seed stage.
not gonna get big commissionchecks right away, but I promise
(40:04):
you.
If you work hard, you'repatient, you're focused, you do
the right things, you act withintegrity, you act with honesty.
You treat everyone fairly.
You are going to make a lot ofmoney, probably year three or
year four, being very real withyou.
Probably not gonna be year twoor year three, right?
Year three, year four, if I hadto guess.
And he said to me, wow, that's areally hard thing to hear.
(40:25):
And I said I, I just wanna behonest with you.
He said expectations becausethis is the type of, world we're
living in now.
But you signed up for this.
I wanna make sure you're we'reon the same page.
He said.
You know what?
I'm willing to wait as long asthe reward is big enough.
And I said, you know what?
If you do all the right things,that reward will be big enough.
Here we are, 2025.
Spent four years been on boardwith Terzo.
(40:48):
He is going to make more moneythis year, then 99.9% of sales
reps in and I'm so proud of himhis patience.
And doing all the right things.
But he had in his head the wholetime, Dan, gonna take me a long
time to get that big commissioncheck.
It's gonna take me a long time.
(41:08):
But guess what, he brought thatenergy to customer meetings.
He brought that energy tointernal meetings, patience and
consistency and he was verymethodical with how he did
things.
And when I see that and I also,I see that he's gonna go this
reward now, it brings a lot ofhappiness.
To my heart, I remember havingthat conversation four years
(41:29):
ago, and I remember howdisappointed I was in myself to
have that conversation with him.
'cause I'm thinking to myselflike, how can I tell a sales rep
he can't make a lot of money forthree or four years?
It's ridiculous.
but that was the truth, becauseI never wanna lie, I never ever
wanna mislead or lie to mypeople because then I lose
trust.
I remember he said to me, geez,man, that was a tough
conversation to hear.
But he stuck it out.
And I'm, I wanna reward him somuch for that.
(41:49):
But that's just a story forother people out there too,
because.
All the beautiful things in lifetake time, and that's what a lot
of people learn, whether you'rein this business or many other
things in life.
Dan Balcauski (42:01):
Man.
There's so many topics.
I we're closing up on time, soI'm not gonna have time to, to
touch on all of it, in the worldof patience.
I am, I do wanna click on youare selling something that as
you illuminated at the beginningof our conversation was not.
Necessarily a line item.
You're not replacing like theirexisting cybersecurity tool or
their existing like ERP system.
(42:23):
It's something new.
Layer onto that.
There's AI is the hypest of hypecycles ever and Fortune 500,
fortune 100 and the office ofthe CFO are not particularly
hypey people.
I'm curious what you've learnedabout that conflation of factors
of selling to a traditionallyrisk averse buyer with a
(42:45):
incredibly bleeding edgetechnology.
Into a problem set that theydon't have budget spend today.
Like I, what have you learned inthat whole unholy triumvirate
like to, for, to be successful?
Brandon Card (42:57):
Anytime.
And I, I laugh'cause I'm likethe next company.
I go start, I'm definitely goingafter an existing budget that's
already there.
I'm not gonna go create newbudget because that's what we
had to do at Turso and that'swhat a lot of our friends
listening probably have to godo.
We had to go create new budgetline item, which means we needed
to go figure out whatstakeholders in the business are
going to create the businesscase and stick their neck out
(43:20):
there and take that risk andsay.
need new budget for a newsolution because of this problem
we have.
that is a very hard thing to do.
And because these companies, itdoesn't matter, right?
These companies have massivecommittees of people creating
budget.
And if it's not already thereand you want to create it for
next year, you're gonna get alot of scrutiny.
(43:41):
So the first thing we realize isthat even if people love us,
Dan, even if people love youoverall and your product, and
they're nice people.
Are they bold enough and arethey enough to go even submit
the business case for newbudget?
'cause that's not easy becausethese people work in massive
corporations.
(44:02):
Their natural behavior is, theiractions are to not get fired, to
be a maverick and go out thereand say, Hey, I wanna bring in a
new solution.
No one's ever heard of.
They're like, oh, that's highrisk.
That's really, interesting.
You wanna do that?
I wanna need a million dollarsfor it too.
So we zeroed in and we said.
Who are the type of people thatwill actually do this?
We found our Mavericks, right?
(44:22):
We call'em Mavericks.
At Terzo, we found Mavericks inthese different companies that
wanted to be the innovator.
They wanted to be the data guru.
They wanted to go to the CFOoffice and say, Hey, I have a
new solution for you.
Wait till you see what I got foryou.
So we identified thosecharacters.
We didn't even look atcompanies.
We were looking at charactersthat we would meet at events and
conferences and we'd say, andwe'd see what companies have
(44:45):
brought in New Tech before.
'cause those are the type ofcharacters we wanted to deal
with.
So when we were trying to figureout how to create budget from
scratch, we were oftentimesgoing after people that we knew
had the personality types to gotake this risk and create the
budget cases.
Because even though we're asolution that could help you
save money and was verystraightforward, filling the
problem that everyone knew gocreate budget for next year for
(45:09):
AI line item was very hard.
You needed a whole committee tosay yes to this.
So we were always trying tofigure out who is the person
that will actually go present tothe committee when we're not in
the room
Dan Balcauski (45:22):
Yeah.
Brandon Card (45:23):
sales are won and lost when you are not in the
room.
That is the truest thing I'vesaid on this podcast the whole
time.
We can say as much as we want toour stakeholder, but as soon as
they go to that internal meetingand we're not in the meeting,
they're selling for us.
And it's really difficult to goarm those people to go sell your
solution for you when you're notin the room and build a business
(45:44):
case and a budget.
But they have to really havesome incentive to do it.
They have to either want to getpromoted, wanna be known as the,
the guru of the organization,have this chip on their
shoulder, an ego about, beingthe smartest person.
We those type of people tofigure out how to go create
budget and.
We learned a lot about how to dothat over the last couple years.
(46:05):
And then now, I'm not gonna namethe financial company for
confidentiality purposes, butone of the biggest financial
companies in the world.
We have some great relationshipsover there.
They told us we're not gonnahave budget for AI until 2027 or
28.
And we said, really?
And they said, yeah, we're notgoing to no matter what.
Why?
Because our board and our CFOand everyone decided it's too
risky.
We don't need it.
It's not gonna impact thebusiness enough.
(46:27):
No budget for that.
Okay, perfect.
Done.
That happens all the time.
We also went to so manycustomers that we knew well,
prospects, they told us we'renot gonna have budget for ai,
have budget for ai.
Okay, perfect.
Disqualify you.
And then there's other companiesthat said, oh, we can create
budget.
So that was another thing wewere doing with our propensity
mapping, right?
Our sales propensity maps.
Figuring out what companies arenot gonna get AI budget, no
(46:50):
matter what financial services,oil and gas logistics companies.
You see a lot of trends, right?
Which companies are gonna beable to at least submit budget,
retail, tech, consumer goods,all these type of companies.
So then we started getting thepropensity mapping down to see
what companies can we go targetto create new budget.
And that was the majority of thework that myself and the sales
(47:13):
team were doing.
Dan Balcauski (47:14):
I love that idea of, Finding the personality
within the person versus thisfocus on the account.
And obviously you've layeredthat in there with, industry and
purchase patterns of othertechnology.
But I think that's a really keyinsight there.
Man, there's so much I wanted totalk to you but We are running
up on time.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll get we'll invite you backfor round two sometime.
Brandon, this has been great.
(47:36):
If folks wanna learn more aboutTerzo, wanna follow you around
the internet any place you wannasend them to.
Brandon Card (47:41):
Yeah, I would say my LinkedIn, i'm pretty active
on LinkedIn.
It's the only social channel I'mprobably on every day.
But LinkedIn is where I post alot of stuff about the company,
a lot of my personal stuff onmental health and, conscious
culture and being good leadersand making sure that we're,
changing the way things are inthis new world we're in.
And I appreciate anyone that,that follows me and supports me
on LinkedIn.
Dan Balcauski (48:00):
I will put the link in the show notes as well
as a link to torso's website forour listeners, everyone that
wraps up this episode of Sask GASecrets.
Thank you Brandon for sharinghis journey and insights.
For our listeners, you foundBrandon's insights valuable.
Please leave a review and sharethis episode with the network.
It really helps the podcastgrow.
Our advisor said, you're crazy to go after the
(00:01):
enterprise.
Sales cycles are too long, tooslow, too complex.
You don't have a brand name.
You cannot win the SMB inmid-market and think the
enterprise is gonna trust you.
It's a very different market.
There's very few VCs in theentire world that have probably
even had of the volume In theenterprise, that I've had.
Always play fair, not charge.
(00:22):
You don't have to charge a lotof money and make profit, but
the act of doing the transactionand getting money makes that
customer more bought in more allin and going to put more time
And effort into the project.
That's, part of being anentrepreneur is everyone's
telling you're wrong and thenstill waking up and believing in
what you're doing and neverquitting.
(00:42):
All the beautiful things in lifetake time, and that's what a lot
of people learn, whether you'rein this business or many other
things in life.
sales are won and lost when youare not in the room.
That is the truest thing I'vesaid on this podcast the whole
time.
Dan Balcauski (01:19):
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast
that brings you the insidestories from the leaders of the
best scale up.
B2B SaaS companies.
I'm your host, Dan Balcauski,founder of Product Tranquility.
Today I'm excited to welcomeBrandon Card, CEO, and founder
of Terzo, a leading enterpriseAI platform, transforming how
Fortune 500 companies managecontracts spend and supplier
data with 99% accuracy andcontract intelligence.
(01:40):
Brandon combines a background inMicrosoft and IBM with a passion
for mental health consciousleadership, and AI's role in
reshaping business.
Brandon, great to have you onSaaS Scaling Secrets.
Brandon Card (01:49):
Great to be here.
Dan.
Excited for the conversation.
Excited to share some stories.
Dan Balcauski (01:53):
I am excited to hear them.
And Brandon, for listeners whoaren't familiar with Terzo, can
you give us the elevator pitch?
What do you do?
Who do you serve?
Brandon Card (02:02):
Turso is an enterprise AI contract
intelligence company.
We read supplier contracts andcustomer contracts for the
largest companies in the worldand show them where all their
revenues coming in from and show'em where all
Dan Balcauski (02:14):
Okay,
Brandon Card (02:14):
is going across their supply chain by extracting
metadata from these PDF contractand
Dan Balcauski (02:21):
lots.
Brandon Card (02:21):
with the CFO procurement supply chain people
who are managing finances, butwe are an office of the CFO
solution
Dan Balcauski (02:30):
so deep into the critical business.
data that is trapped insidePDFs.
And whether that's contractsaround the invoices.
What what led you to start torsoafter your time as an employee
of Microsoft and IB.
Brandon Card (02:46):
I started my career actually at Oracle.
So I worked at Oracle IBM, andMicrosoft, and I was working
with Fortune 500 customers theentire time at all three
companies.
And then I started to hear aboutthis problem almost every single
day when I was working atMicrosoft 20 15, 20 16, 20 17.
My customers had really complexrelationships with Microsoft
(03:10):
across the world that we weremanaging oftentimes 20, 30, 40
active contracts.
And they would always ask us forthe contract data and we
realized that they didn't haveany of this data in any systems,
And we thought, wow what theheck's going on?
I thought there'd be, there's acategory for this called CLM.
we learned a secret CLMs werenot being used by people in
(03:32):
procurement or IT or finance,and they were only being used in
pockets of the business.
So all of our customers keptcomplaining about not having
analytics or insights into theircontracts, and that's how Terzo
was born.
I realized that our, wonderfulfriends and brilliant people at
Microsoft weren't building thisapplication layer.
They were focused on Azure.
So we went out in March, 2020and started focusing on building
(03:52):
Terzo AI on the Azure platform.
And building our proprietaryneural network to read all of
these contracts.
Dan Balcauski (03:59):
That strikes me as surprising where you say that
there's this whole category ofCLM or contract lifecycle
management, but it wasn't beingused by the folks you were
talking to, to get operationalinsights, where were those
solutions primarily focused?
Brandon Card (04:15):
Yeah, so it's a great
Dan Balcauski (04:16):
I.
Brandon Card (04:16):
That's one thing I learned very well before
starting Touro.
Contract lifecycle management'sbeen around for almost 20 years.
It was designed for lawyers todo drafting templating and as a
storage repository.
It was not designed to oneextract metadata from documents.
It was not designed to have anytype of financial insights,
(04:38):
which is a huge problem.
They don't have spend data orfinancial data from the contract
in these CLMs.
They're basically a repositoryfor legal, and that is the
secret we discovered.
And in the largest organizationsin the world have a hundred
thousand plus employees, maybe20 employees.
Out of the a hundred thousandwould have access to the CLM
(04:58):
That is the secret we discoveredbefore going out and building
Terzo.
We thought it was one of thebiggest problems in the
enterprise was that thissolution was a point solution
only being used by a few peoplein the company.
It wasn't an enterprise wideapplication.
And that's the Huge opportunitythat we saw Dan back in
Dan Balcauski (05:16):
So mostly focused on helping the attorneys in
their workflow, the approvals.
But then once those wereexecuted, it went into a folder,
a bucket somewhere, and the restof the business couldn't extract
any operational details out ofit.
Brandon Card (05:30):
Yeah.
And the reality is when you lookat a big company, they're saving
the same contract in manydifferent locations.
So let's just talk aboutMicrosoft for a second.
I would give my customer,fortune 100 customer, the
Microsoft contract.
Legal might put it in their CLM.
Finance might put it in OneDriveprocurement might put it in
Ariba, Dan, and it might put iton a C drive.
(05:50):
These documents are stored inmany different siloed locations.
That's why when you look at abig enterprise today, they have
contract data in 30, 40, 50different systems.
And that's one of the bigchallenges that we approach is
to figure out how to aggregateand centralize all this siloed
contract data.
And you think about all thepeople that turn over in these
roles, right?
Dan?
(06:11):
These people come in they like adifferent solution.
They'll save it in box, forexample, right?
Or they'll save it in, on theteams folder.
So the bottom line is thiscontract data is extremely
important, precious data, andit's living all over the place
in the enterprise.
It's not centralized.
There's no reporting, there's nosearch, there's no analytics.
That's why terms was created.
Dan Balcauski (06:31):
You hinted at it several times in that you guys
are focused on the enterprise.
I'm curious,'cause I would saymost SaaS companies, the default
is to maybe start like SMB andthen move up market.
You did the opposite with thiskind of pure focus on
enterprise, why'd you decide tomake life hard for yourself?
Did you view it that way?
Why go enterprise first?
Brandon Card (06:50):
Yeah.
We did view it that way.
Everyone viewed it that way too.
Honestly, there's a few reasonswhy we started with the.
And day one, we were building anenterprise SaaS company because
our goal was to get a productout that our customers could
start using.
But our strategy behind, closeddoors was to build an enterprise
AI platform, but we needed to goget the venture capital to go
invest and build the AI
Dan Balcauski (07:12):
Hmm.
Brandon Card (07:12):
day one, we knew when this team came together, we
wanted to be an AI company, butwe'd have to go get millions of
dollars of venture capital toactually build the ai.
So to get started.
built this enterprise SaaSapplication that was not powered
by AI day one.
And the reason why we went afterthe Fortune 500 is my experience
(07:33):
and my co-founder's experienceat the time was primarily big
enterprise We understood thosecustomers very well.
We understand the challengesfrom IT perspective.
We understood their IT stacks.
two, this was a much biggerproblem in the enterprise.
If you look at the Fortune 100alone.
Amazon, Microsoft, JP MorganChase, they spend 95% of all the
(07:56):
money across all B2B activity inthe world.
So when you look at all thedollars, the majority of it's
being spent in the Fortune 100,fortune 500, that's where the
majority of the waste is.
That's where the majority ofoptimization opportunity is.
So we knew companies werebleeding billions of dollars in
the Fortune 500 or smallercompanies are still losing
money, but it's probably 30grand.
(08:17):
It's not gonna move the needlefor them.
Big customers, like the banksare losing billions per year
because they don't have thisdata and they're not tracking
all these important contracts.
So we thought if we're gonnamake an impact and we're gonna,
actually help people, then thisis the best place to start.
And I can tell you, investorsaid that we were crazy.
E even the angel investors whowere friends of ours said,
(08:39):
you're crazy to go after theenterprise.
Our advisor said, you're crazyto go after the enterprise.
Sales cycles are too long, tooslow, too complex.
You don't have a brand name.
You gotta start SMB atmid-market.
And we understood thosechallenges.
We understood that, strategybecause that's how most
companies have success.
But we knew that we could solvethe enterprise problem and all
we needed to do was land a fewmarquee logos to get that trust
(09:01):
and credibility early on.
So that's where we put all ofour, focus and energy early on,
was figuring out how do we landa couple big logos to then go
get that momentum andcredibility to land more large
enterprise.
Dan Balcauski (09:13):
So the Tam story makes sense.
The money being spent attachedto those contracts is in the
Fortune 100, fortune 500 to.
Appropriately serve that market,you're gonna have to go raise
capital.
You start talking to people whohave that capital.
They tell you you're crazy.
Go this other direction.
I guess how did you respond tothat?
Obviously you somewhat ignoredtheir advice
Brandon Card (09:35):
Yeah,
Dan Balcauski (09:35):
where you're today.
Brandon Card (09:36):
so yeah, I did ignore a lot of their advice and
I was stubborn about it, which alot of entrepreneurs are
stubborn, right?
That's a pro and con of dealingwith a guy like myself or any
CEO and founder.
We're very, delusional incertain things and we're
stubborn with what we believein.
And I promised the investorsthat we wouldn't go out And
raise a lot of money until wevalidated that we had enterprise
(09:56):
customers and we landed two.
Marquee enterprise customers,the largest financial
transaction processor in The,world.
And then we also landed thesecond largest retailer in.
the world.
And when we got those twocustomers to.
sign these first contracts, thatis when some investors said to
me, oh, this is interesting.
I had some people starting tobelieve, wait, you guys can go
(10:19):
through these motions.
Okay.
So we went out and webootstrapped the company in the
very beginning to get theproduct live.
And then we took in just a verylittle bit of venture capital in
the seed round to go get thoseearly customers.
So we didn't go out and raisethat, that$16 million series A
that, that was publicized.
We didn't go out and raise thatuntil we already had a handful
(10:40):
of enterprise customers onboard.
So the risk was a little bitlower.
But I can tell you that eventhen many VCs came into the
round and said, Hey, I think youshould be going down market more
velocity, lower the A SP.
Get more pipeline, get morewins, learn more, get more
logos.
And we just thought toourselves, and I still believe
this today, Dan, this is thething that I'll tell
(11:00):
entrepreneurs.
we go land 10 mid-marketcompanies and we have a ton of
success and we get a lot ofmomentum, we will still not be a
trusted enterprise player.
You cannot win the SMB inmid-market and think the
enterprise is gonna trust you.
It's a very different market.
So we knew that having successin mid-market wasn't gonna help
(11:21):
us.
Go upstream.
if you look at the companiesthat had success in the
enterprise early on, companieslike ServiceNow, companies like
Workday, companies likeCrowdStrike, they didn't start
off SMB and Mid-market.
They started off in theenterprise and built enterprise
trust.
They didn't go down, they wentdown market later on.
But that's one thing I knew thatI'll never get Walmart to trust
(11:41):
me.
If I have every small mid-marketcustomer in the world.
Walmart's still not gonna thinkthat we can serve them.
They're gonna label us an SMBmid-market company and that is
the what I knew from my years ofworking with these comp
customers.
We cannot be labeled amid-market enterprise company or
mid-market small businesscompany.
Excuse me.
We have to be an enterprisefocused player, which means
we're gonna have less customersoverall.
(12:03):
We're gonna have bigger dealsizes, and we're gonna have
longer sales cycles.
It's just part of that game.
Dan Balcauski (12:10):
I'm curious'cause you said, hey, in order to
secure this funding to prove wehave traction, we've gotta go
land some of these accountsfirst and that's.
I think maybe, probably not areal barrier, but a lot of
people view that as a realbarrier of Hey, I'm gonna show
up to these first coupleaccounts and ask them, Hey just
trust me.
And they are enterprise, how doyou view that situation where
(12:32):
you feel like, I guess obviouslyyou took those steps and were
landed those first few accounts.
In the enterprise, in a marketsegment that requires, high
trust and validation.
What, how does your perspectivediffer from, say, the status quo
bias out there where yeah, I'veheard that story before of yeah,
you gotta go prove out in themid-market for them to trust
you, and you're like, no, we'regoing after that.
And so those first fewconversations, how did, like,
(12:53):
how did you approach those earlyfolks?
Brandon Card (12:55):
yeah that's a really good question.
So first of all.
I've done, I ha My experience isvery important because I've done
hundreds of enterprise deals.
I've won hundreds of deals, I'velost hundreds of deals.
I've lost a lot of deals.
I've learned a lot about theenterprise, There's very few VCs
in the entire world that haveprobably even had of the volume
(13:16):
In the enterprise, that I'vehad.
Have the knowledge andexperience in how these
customers operate.
I know how they think.
I know the psychology of thebuying cycle.
I know what matters to'em.
I know their checklist.
I sat in these offices for yearsside by side with these people.
I know these buyers, so I knewwhat we needed to get in with
And I knew what type ofrequirements, simple things.
SOC one, SOC two, ISO 27 0 1,just to get in the door and get
(13:39):
approved as a vendor.
Really basic checklist, right?
Running in environments likeAzure and AWS and having all the
security requirements that areneeded just to get in.
the one thing that we did, Ithink that was unique was that
we went in with.
customers like Home Depot andSwift Financial and Blue Cross
Blue Shield, and we said, look,here's our platform.
Here's the problem we'resolving.
(14:00):
They all agreed on the problem.
The problem was huge.
And we said, if you start withus in a proof of concept, we
will build what you need in thenext year.
And they said, really?
And we gave one in with a verylow price, gave'em the solution,
listened to the requirements,and started working with them
every week.
getting feedback and iterating,and we were doing proof of
(14:21):
concepts and building out a lotof our platform early on with
these customers.
And we turned this into aninnovation project for them.
And we knew that they hadinnovation dollars and we knew
that AI was something that wasgonna be important to their
leadership team.
So we, basically found a way toget them to give us their data
early on.
(14:41):
And we provided a lot of valueby taking their feedback to go
develop things in our roadmapand build product for them for
very low cost compared to whatthey would do with, the
alternative players in the spacelike the Accentures or the
Deloittes of the world.
You're talking about$30 millionto get started with a provider
like an Accenture.
We are going in for under ahundred K and saying, Hey, we'll
(15:02):
build something similar.
So that was the give and take wehad early on was to really make
a bet on ourselves and ourengineering team.
And work very closely with thesecustomers, and the biggest
challenge we had, andentrepreneurs probably know
this, is getting the time andfocus from these enterprises.
was one of the hard things thatwe needed to figure out.
How do we get customers to payattention to us?
(15:22):
How do we make this importantenough and a high enough
priority?
The way we did it is because wewere talking about cost
optimization during a macroenvironment where everyone was
panicking during COVID, so weplayed off those tailwinds.
And we realized every companywas trying to figure out how to
cut expenses.
The stock market obviously washot in the beginning.
(15:44):
There was layoffs happening likecrazy working from home, all
these things, right?
But CFOs and a lot of leadersbehind closed doors were trying
to figure out how do we optimizeour expenses and all this new
world we're living in, and howdo we track all these dollars
that are going outta thecompany?
That was a big focus for a lotof people in procurement and
finance during that time.
And then, as we went through a,a lot of turmoil and chaos in
(16:08):
the macro environment.
And leaders got scared.
They got scared because politicswere horrendous, beyond
horrendous in the, at thefederal and, the global level
stock market was, up and down.
People were gonna work fromhome.
There's layoffs left and right.
There was so much instability,so much uncertainty that we went
in and said, Hey, we're gonnahelp you optimize your expenses.
We're gonna help you save fiveto 10% if you do this project
(16:28):
with us.
So we played off of that macrotheme of cutting expenses,
consolidating and figuring outwhere all this money's going.
It was a good time for us to dothat.
So that's how we got customersto actually do these projects
with us.
Dan Balcauski (16:41):
It's in that arc there you laid out.
I was thinking.
I don't know if this resonatesat all with you, but Palmer
lucky with his company and Orelnow where he's going up against
the big defense contractorswhere he's bringing a product
model as you were discussing.
What are the relevantalternatives these other folks
have?
It's to get an Accenture,Deloitte to come in and build
(17:01):
some big custom software wherethey're paying time and
materials for some, solutionwith and your value proposition
is.
Hey, like we're taking a productmodel.
We're gonna come in and be a,you're gonna be a design partner
alongside of us, and we're gonnabuild, and you're gonna, you're
gonna pay us as like a productcompany.
It's, no matter what that, thatprice is, it's gonna be a
fraction of what you're gonnacharge for this bespoke,
Consulting software that youmight get otherwise, which I
(17:23):
think is super interesting.
One, one.
thing I wanna double click onthere is, You did say that you
charged, These design partnersfor POC.
And so this is a, I spend all mytime in the pricing world and it
doesn't come up super often, butevery once in a while folks will
ask about charging for POCs andsome folks will be like we're
really getting all the value outof it, so we feel bad charging.
But you did, I'm curious how youthought about that decision and
(17:47):
how you thought about that valueexchange within that sort of
design partnership.
Brandon Card (17:50):
yeah.
It's a great question.
It's a great point too for youraudience.
They should, this is some pointthat I would nail home, and I'll
probably talk about it a lotthroughout the rest of the year
on other podcasts and then even,in front of audiences, we always
charge for POCs.
We still charge for POCs and wewill always charge for POCs.
That's never going to changebecause it has nothing to do
(18:11):
with the actual dollars.
It has to do with the humanpsychology of them doing a
transaction and paying money forsomething.
Therefore, they have skin in thegame and therefore they show up
with purpose and actually care.
No one cares in life if they getanything for free.
They just don't.
That's the psychology of thehuman mind, right?
if we went into a big companyand said, Hey, it's$30,000 to do
(18:35):
this POC, that's really nothingfor them, it's basically free.
if we go in and say,$0 to do APOC, you're gonna start seeing
people not showing up for thecalendar invites and the cadence
calls.
You're gonna see people notresponding to emails.
This is a free thing, whatever.
It's not a big deal.
It's the mental psychology.
You pay 30 K, which is what somecustomers paid us.
Next thing they're taking itseriously because they actually
(18:56):
paid for something, so theythink they need to get something
in return for it.
That is the psychology that werealized after.
I've done POCs for free foryears, other companies.
I wasn't the ultimate approver.
Now I realized, wow, I mademistakes in the past.
Every time I did a free POC.
People didn't care that much,right?
People would maybe care half thetime.
(19:17):
People were not all in.
So we needed our customers to beall in and we didn't really care
what that price was, but weneeded a dollar amount for them
to pay us to get that convictionthat, okay, we're actually gonna
put real skin in the game.
We're gonna put real people onthis.
We're gonna take this seriously,have a project manager, project
plan, and we're gonna be justlike every other project, we're
(19:38):
gonna be a certifiedcompany-wide project that has
dollars behind it.
And that is the psychology Iwould tell every founder in the
world to think about.
you give anything away for free,you dilute your brand.
You dilute yourself, Becausethese entrepreneurs that are out
there building great productsand, and solving complex
problems, their time ain't free.
(20:00):
Why?
Why should they get on calls ofcustomers all the time?
They gotta build, building acompany.
They got a lot of stuff to do.
Investors and employees andproduct.
You have to have respect foryour own time as well.
And I truly believe that thecustomers you wanna work with,
if they respect you and theybelieve in you, they don't
expect anything for free.
(20:22):
That's really the truth of you.
You talk to'em behind, I talk to'em all the time right on the
side, and they said, Hey, weknow you guys, you care.
You're passionate.
You show up, you do your bestwork.
We don't expect that for free.
We don't expect that level ofservice for free.
So my, my coaching entrepreneuris, is that.
Always play fair, not charge.
You don't have to charge a lotof money and make profit, but
the act of doing the transactionand getting money makes that
(20:45):
customer more bought in more allin and going to put more time
And effort into the project.
And that's what I've learned alot throughout my career.
Rear.
Dan Balcauski (20:55):
I absolutely a hundred percent agree with
everything you just said there.
and I've talked about this inother venues, so I'm not gonna
go into my rant, but I reallyhate freemium and I think people
make the same mistake withfreemium approaches in general.
But if you guys want to hear mytake on that I've covered it in
plenty of other venues.
Brandon Card (21:09):
I'll pick on our friends at Microsoft.
I love Microsoft, right?
And I have nothing but respectfor the company, the leadership,
everyone over there.
I couldn't say enough goodthings about Microsoft they're
crushing it for a reason.
'cause they have incredibleleadership.
But when I talk to their salesreps all the time, their sales
leaders, when you, when they gointo customers and say, Hey,
we'll do a free POC withcopilot, do you think the
customer cares?
(21:29):
I think the
Dan Balcauski (21:30):
No.
Brandon Card (21:31):
Puts their best people on it.
They're like, ah, Microsoft'soffering a free POC.
All right, cool.
Yeah, we'll, we'll try it onFriday afternoon.
And then Palantir goes in andsays, Hey, you wanna do a POC
with us?
It's 10 million bucks to getstarted.
Very different.
Very different approach, right?
And, Palantir is getting thatmoney for these projects because
they're saying, no, no, we knowwhat our time is worth.
We know how imp we know how goodwe are.
You're not getting anything forfree from us.
(21:51):
and that's a great approach aswell.
Also a phenomenal company.
but, my point is, even if you'reMicrosoft and you're$4 trillion.
Enterprise behemoth and youwould offer something for free.
The end customer's oh, this isfree.
Don't really have to do much.
Don't care.
So always remember that, right?
'cause it's happening right now.
Microsoft is going into accountsand telling them our customers,
(22:14):
they can do similar things thatTerzo can do with some of this
AI and we'll test it for free.
Have they had success yet?
Not yet.
And they won't have successdoing that.
So that's something that I youknow, hearing and seeing all the
time even in the big enterprise.
Dan Balcauski (22:28):
I'm curious, going back to the beginning of
our conversation when you saidthat, you're selling these days
focused mostly on the office ofthe CFO, Contract management.
As you were outlining it, right?
Traditionally, CLM was focusedon the attorneys and their
workflow.
But there's so much businessdata that other areas of
operational business need accessto that's valuable for.
(22:51):
How, How, did you end up on theCFO?
I could see, 10 or 15 differentstakeholders within a large
enterprise.
that might be The rightstakeholder to, to go after.
Especially when you're talkingabout large enterprises.
I know a lot.
I was talking, I was on a callearlier today and that, it's
like large bank.
Everyone, every large bank has achief AI person.
Like why not be like, Hey, chiefAI person, we got an AI tool for
you for contract management.
Brandon Card (23:12):
we're dealing with Chief AI people, but the, here's
the thing, and this is animportant point that I always
talk to everyone about, and I'mgonna talk to you about it too,
right?
Everyone on the finance side ofthe house for the last 30 years
has ignored contracts.
are a financial asset.
They're not a legal asset.
(23:32):
They have legal terms.
Contracts are bringing moneyinto your company.
Contracts are, making money.
Leave your company, right?
That's, it's in and out.
It's revenue and expenses.
Revenue expenses.
These are businessrelationships.
The CFO has been relying uponthe ERP for the last 30 years.
All that is is historical ledgerdata.
Yeah.
Finance teams actually need thecontract data to know what is in
(23:56):
the forecast, to know what theyshould be budgeting, to know the
big commitments they've madeacross different, customers and
suppliers.
To all of this important costdata around your supply chain to
know what you paid per unit fordifferent products that you're
purchasing for your physicalgoods.
Finance teams actually realized,holy shit, we need the contract
(24:17):
data to make decisions.
That was the big epiphany thathappened in the 2000 twenties
and why it was happening in 2000twenties.
ERP systems cannot providecontract data.
The P two P systems like Coupaand Ariba also don't have
contract data.
They're repositories.
And then the CLM, again, is awedged away point solution that
somebody paid 40 K for andlegal, and no one cares about
it.
(24:37):
So then you talk to the C ffo,got a bunch of people reporting
to them like procurement andobviously, fp and a and other
groups.
And the only system they have torely on is the ERP.
That's the only system they haveto rely on to get financial
data.
So that's why they live inspreadsheets all day and they
live in, Tableau, power BI typeof solutions.
But most of the CFOs and theprocurement people that we talk
(25:01):
to, we're trying to track all ofthe dollars being spent in the
company.
when we say office of the CFO,that could be the Chief
procurement officer that reportsin the CFO, that could be the
head of supply chain thatreports in the CFO, could be the
head of fp and a reports in theCFO.
Our point is that we're gettingbudget from the CFO office and
the CFO is trying to govern ofdollars of revenue and spend,
(25:26):
and he can't, they can't do itin the ERP.
is the big epiphany that acustomer's had.
And no one expects SAP or Oracleto go build this AI in their ERP
platforms overnight.
So that is why we found thatnice niche in the CFO office to
go sit on top of the ERP andsupercharge and compliment that
system.
'cause we're not a rip andreplace, right?
(25:47):
We go sit on top as anintelligent data layer and
finance teams love this datathat they don't have today.
Dan Balcauski (25:55):
I, to, to continue on the area of focus.
I think, it's interesting.
So you have, yeah.
Everyone, investors friends andfamily, hey, don't go after the
enterprise.
You're like, Hey, yeah, yeah.
You ignore that advice.
You go enterprise.
First anyway, but any businessowner will tell you that just
because you decided on a targetdoesn't mean that folks that
maybe are outside of that won'tcome knocking on your door.
I'm curious, I'm imagining with,the platform you've built that
(26:17):
you do get folks who are outsideof that Fortune 500, potentially
mid-market customers coming toknock on your door.
Are there ways that you thinkabout.
Keeping the organizationfocused, like saying, like
explicitly saying, Hey thesefolks aren't a fit, and we're
gonna say, we're gonna say no tothis group of customers, even
though they might be wavingdollars interface to come buy
(26:39):
from us.
Brandon Card (26:39):
that honestly, Dan, that was one of the hardest
things we had to do.
of the hardest things I had todo, if you ask me from a sales
and go to market perspective.
Was to say no to really greatcompanies who wanted to use our
solution, we said no becausethey weren't willing to pay for
the value that they werereceiving in the solution.
(27:00):
They were all about price.
So for example, a lot of greathigh growth companies would come
to us and say, Hey, we'relooking at a CLM for 12 K.
Can we get a quote for Zo?
And we say, oh, we started200,000.
We're not ACL M, but even thoughwe compete with some CLMs, we
have a lot more value than that.
And they'd say, oh our budget'smaximum 18 grand.
that doesn't work for us.
Our price starts at 200.
So we would constantly turn awaypeople because we knew that if
(27:24):
we started getting distractedand started onboarding all these
customers paying us 12 and 18grand, we learn a lot.
We'd get some nice logos, butwould have to put so much time
and.
Effort into our CS anddeployment and customer
operations group that we wouldbe pulling away from companies
like Home Depot and Cisco andDelta Airlines.
And we thought, wait, we can'tdo this early on.
(27:45):
This is too risky.
How can we have a customerpaying us 400 K and the customer
paying us 12 K?
Dan Balcauski (27:50):
Mm.
Brandon Card (27:50):
We're building an enterprise business.
So one of the challenges that Ihad to make, and a lot of people
probably thought I was foolishor stupid for doing it, we'd
have a lot of great companiespre IPO companies come to us and
say, Hey, we want to use Terzo.
I'll pay you 20 grand.
I said, no, thank you.
You, and we've had customers.
Now public companies are greatcompanies that say, Hey, our
budget this year for contractsoftware is 36 grand.
I said thank you for yourbusiness.
(28:11):
See you later.
You're not our customer.
Our customers know that they'regoverning billions of dollars in
contract assets, and that ifthey even optimize two, three,
4%, it's millions of dollars inreturn.
How can you wanna pay$30,000 forsomething that you're gonna get
millions of dollars in ROI for?
a huge disconnect in anunderstanding, and that's not
(28:33):
the right DNA.
But the funny thing is, right onthe flip side, had mid-market
companies come to us and say,Hey, this is a$30 million
problem for us.
We're willing to pay sixfigures.
We're like, really?
they're like, yes.
This is a massive problem forus.
We don't have any of ourcontract data.
We're losing money every month.
We got audited and we're willingto pay whatever it takes'cause
we think that we're leaving 25to$30 million on the table.
(28:54):
It.
So interesting enough, we dohave some mid-market size
customers that pay enterpriseprices because they perceive
this as a huge problem.
are the type of customers thatwe try to qualify, right?
But early on it was very hard.
We had some sexy logos coming insaying, Hey, we'll pay you 20 K.
I'm telling the sales team wedon't want those deals Politely
(29:14):
say no, and let's go focus onthe big wells.
And that was something,especially during the 2020 2 23
time period, people were like,why you.
saying no to some of these greatcustomers, they, they could pay
you a hundred K in three or fouryears.
I'm like, or I could go get aFortune 500 customer and they
could pay me two 50 K next week.
that's where we're gonna put ourtime and effort.
So that was a strategy thing anda preference thing that, we
carved out.
But I also looked at, know, thepeople that have done this
(29:37):
before, Palantir, C3, ai,ServiceNow, all these type of
companies.
ever dropped their pricing toget new logos.
They focused on their targetICP, and that's exactly what we
do.
And that's a public, Fortune 500or Fortune 1000 entity.
Dan Balcauski (29:54):
I, I, that's yeah, I love that focus and I'm
sure that was not.
It's not easy, right?
It sounds smooth as you tell it,but I'm sure there was emotion
behind that when someone'swaving tens of thousands of
dollars not maybe the hundreds.
Brandon Card (30:04):
would call me up and say, why would you not take
$20,000 B.
Why would we not take, why wouldwe not go onboard this customer?
It's not a huge scope.
Let's go serve this customer.
And I know what it takes toserve a customer the right way.
We never want to do anythinghalfway.
We always wanna give a hundredpercent to every single one of
our customers.
And I knew we were not in aposition to do that, and I knew
(30:25):
that we needed to be reallyfocused.
But on honestly, was probablyone of the most painful.
Periods going through that wheneveryone disagrees with you and
you have to believe in yourselfand stick with your strategy
when everyone's telling you'rean idiot.
And That's, part of being anentrepreneur is everyone's
telling you you're wrong andthen still waking up and
believing in what you're doingand never quitting.
Dan Balcauski (30:45):
I'm curious so on that, on operationalizing that
because you could sit in yourchair at the seat of the company
and say no to everyone.
I'm curious how you thoughtabout bringing the right people
into the company.
Who who maybe understood that?
'cause I can imagine right?
There's, there's CS of, ofsalespeople or go-to market
people out there and they havesome playbook from, Some
(31:07):
mid-market or s and, b focusfirm.
And and potentially these aresome of the folks coming to you
being like, Hey we sold, I got arelationship over here.
We sold to'em at my lastcompany.
They wanna pay us 20,000.
Like, why not?
I guess how did you think aboutf bringing in the right DNA of
folks that adopted your point ofview on this situation?
Or was it just whack-a-mole totry to change folks?
Like how did you think aboutthat as you grew the personnel
(31:29):
inside the company?
Brandon Card (31:30):
yeah, that, that was a definitely a challenge as
well because in the beginningwhen we were recruiting sales
reps, we didn't have unlimited,budget to throw and pay these
people massive salaries likeAmazon and like Salesforce and
like the Microsofts of theworld.
we knew.
Even day one, before we hiredour first sales rep, that we
need enterprise experiencedsales reps that have lived in
(31:51):
this world.
So we wanted to find people thatworked at Oracle, people that
worked at IBM, people thatworked at Microsoft, people that
worked at Salesforce that weresupporting big global
enterprises and understood thatcustomers paid millions and
millions of dollars for softwareand services and have that
perception of the world.
So that's one thing we did isreally focused on going to get
(32:12):
enterprise experienced sellers.
That have done seven and eightfigure deals throughout their
career.
Now the challenge is, is thosepeople are really hard to
recruit early on because theyrequire big base salaries and
big on targets of course.
And they deserve it because theydrive revenue.
So we had to make someadjustments and to say, okay,
we're gonna have to get guysthat are a little more junior to
so we can afford them, and thenwe're gonna train them on the
(32:35):
enterprise motion, I'll be thefirst one to admit was a
complete failure.
Complete shit show.
Dan Balcauski (32:43):
What happened?
Brandon Card (32:44):
And we brought in people that had, great people,
honestly, great DNA great highenergy people that just didn't
have any experience selling tobig enterprises.
And they struggled super hard tofigure out how to get into these
companies, how to haveconversations with them, how to
qualify pipeline, how to evengenerate real pipeline in this
(33:06):
segment.
And we realized, wow, we'd haveto build a massive enablement
organization
Dan Balcauski (33:11):
Is lemme just ask real quickly, is that even with
the.
The first round filter of thesefolks came from the IBM or the
Oracle world.
Like they still struggled'causethey were earlier in their
career.
Brandon Card (33:21):
so, to be clear we, only got a few people that
had the IBM Oracle type ofexperience Because the market
was too competitive and It wastoo costly to bring in these
senior folks.
So then we decide, okay, westill need to hire some reps.
We're gonna go bring in somepeople that are a little more
junior that had success inmid-market companies
Dan Balcauski (33:38):
I got it.
Brandon Card (33:38):
and enterprise SaaS.
And then we brought in those,those people crushed it.
I saw their, I saw their statsand I saw what they did at
companies.
They came into Terzo and it waslike, wow, this is a whole
different game.
I have no idea how to talk to afinance leader at a Fortune 500
company.
Wow.
I have no idea.
Customers pay$20 million a yearfor software.
they're try.
They're transactional.
They're thinking like, oh, Igotta get, three deals done a
(33:59):
month and I'll do this deal onthe.
credit card for 12 grand.
I thought, wow, there's a hugelearning curve here.
I didn't, I underestimated howbig of a learning curve it is.
So then we went through arestructuring in the summer of
23, 1 of the hardest times of mylife, honestly, two years ago,
and I just blew up the entiresales org and the biz dev org
and said, Nope, we're startingover from scratch.
(34:20):
Even if we have less people,we're only getting enterprise.
Experienced people.
And that was one of theepiphanies I had.
And that's what I learned, isthat you can't really bring
mid-market s and b people in andthink that you're gonna train
them in a remote world andthey're gonna get up and running
and understand how to sell theenterprise.
So we realized, okay, instead ofgoing out and hiring six people
that are you, high volume,really good, we're gonna go get
(34:42):
two people that can drive reallycomplex deals and go wide and
deep into accounts.
And that's still where we're atright now.
If you look at our sales team.
We just brought over a gentlemanwho's been at Microsoft for
eight or nine years supportingFortune 500 customers, right?
I brought over a services sellerthat the same thing.
So that's our strategy and howwe change, and that's how we're
gonna continue to change in thenext, couple years here as we
raise more capital is we'regonna bring in people that have
(35:04):
a ton of experience in theenterprise segment.
Dan Balcauski (35:07):
Got it.
So the.
I'm just trying to place in timewas that layer of actually we do
need folks from the Oracles ofthe world.
The learning during that sort ofround two.
I, and I guess my follow onquestion is, I guess was there
anything besides big companylogo that you learned?
Was it like a sniff test forlike interviews?
I'm just imagining like a lot ofother founders, CEOs try to in
the same position.
(35:27):
You don't have unlimitedcapital.
You can't you can't spend thesebig dollars on some of these big
whale hunters.
Right off the bat, Are therethings that you learned besides,
I think at Oracle on the resume,that like you could sniff out in
interviews, questions you wouldask to really detect?
Brandon Card (35:41):
that's a great question, Dan.
That's a really great question.
To be very clear about our,journey.
After we got our first series Adone we did two tranches of the
series A,'cause the markets werechaos, we got a big round of
capital in the business.
We went out and hired a bunch ofpeople,
Dan Balcauski (35:53):
Mm-hmm.
Brandon Card (35:54):
And that's when we realized, oh wow, we made some
mistakes.
Dan Balcauski (35:56):
Yeah.
Brandon Card (35:56):
then we said, okay, wait, we're gonna trim
these people.
And then we had still had somecapital left.
We went out and fixed it at theend of 23, heading into 24.
We learned.
Made some mistakes, failedquick, and then we changed
course and went out and hiredpeople.
So if we couldn't get enterprisepeople we have one gentleman on
the team that's absolutelycrushing it that doesn't have
any enterprise experience, butthe one trait that I look for as
(36:18):
a CEO and a leader, I waslooking for long term patient
people.
That was the one trait I waslooking for in the interviews
was, do these people wantinstant gratification?
Because a lot of people do, andit has nothing to do with their
background or experience.
A lot of people want instantgratification.
It's just how their brains work.
(36:39):
Or are these some other folks,are they willing to work three
years for a deal?
Do they have that level ofpatience and that level of
long-term vision to actually gothrough a sales cycle for three
years, but not just sales cycle,anything?
Are they willing to work out?
For seven years to get results.
Are they willing to diet and,change their whole entire,
(37:00):
nutritional program?
And I was starting to dig intoother parts of their life to see
other decisions.
Do they have long-termrelationships?
Are they married, right?
All those types of things.
How are these people see theworld?
Because the challenge we have,and I know that other founders
feel this too, we live in aworld where I could go
downstairs tonight, in my littlehack away room, build an
application, and then nextweekend it's got 14 million
(37:21):
followers and I'm super rich andI'm a hero.
And that's what, that's theworld everyone lives in.
Or I do a YouTube video and itgoes viral.
Next thing you know, I'm famous,right?
Overnight success, lotterybullshit, all this short term,
instant gratification, nonsensethat, that we live in.
And, and I don't blame thesepeople, right?
You're a female.
You can go on only fans and make50 KA month by showing, yourself
in a bathing suit.
(37:41):
It's ridiculous, right?
The world has given you all thisopportunity to go make money
overnight.
And honestly, it's the biggestfacade and a bunch of bullshit
that I've ever seen in my life.
nothing good happens in a shortamount of time.
All the beautiful things in lifetake time, right?
All the beautiful things inlife.
So when I realized that, wow, alot of these people, they're
(38:03):
short term thinkers.
They want to, get rich quickovernight.
This is not gonna work for us.
I don't care if they can sellthe enterprise or not.
So I started to look atpeople's, thought process and I
started to spend time with'em inperson and do lunches and
dinners and really spend timewith'em and thinking about how
do you see the world?
Are you willing to, are youwilling to grind?
For 3, 4, 5 years before you getyour first big commission check.
(38:24):
'cause I was right and I had to,back then I didn't get, I didn't
get into a big sales rep role,my first job outta college.
I had to work for years andprove myself to get in those
roles.
So that was the one thing I wasconstantly looking for.
Long-term thinkers versusshort-term thinkers.
And I can tell you, I've donestudies all over the world with
different people.
If you look at the population,Dan, and they did a Stanford
marshmallow study on this too.
(38:45):
75% to 80% of the human beingson this earth in that range are
short-term thinkers.
So that leaves you about 20% ofthe population is the long-term
thinkers.
So that really disqualifies thepool of people, and that's one
thing I continue to do now, evenfor hiring for engineering, or
hiring for marketing, or hiringfor, finance.
(39:05):
It doesn't matter.
I'm thinking about, I wantlong-term people on this journey
with me because that's the onlyway we're gonna win.
Dan Balcauski (39:11):
The business marshmallow test.
I love it.
And I I think the shortestexecutive or the shortest
C-suite executive in tech is theCMOA year and a half.
But I think most sales repsdon't even last that.
Most companies too.
So if you're planning on jobhopping every 12 months, And
you're not gonna hit your firstcommission check sell in this
really complex thing for threeyears.
I can imagine that's gonna,that's gonna work against you in
(39:32):
that filtering as well.
Brandon Card (39:33):
quick story for one of our sales reps.
He's our first sales rep,Spencer, right?
Incredible guy.
Dan Balcauski (39:40):
Shout out Spencer.
Brandon Card (39:41):
so Spencer, yeah, he's incredible.
I'm proud of him.
So proud of him.
But I made him a promise.
I said to him, Hey, you come in.
He came in April of 2021 and Isaid, my friend, I'm a very
transparent CEO.
I'm not gonna lie to you.
gonna take years for you to makebig money here.
We're just building the companynow.
We're in the seed stage.
not gonna get big commissionchecks right away, but I promise
(40:04):
you.
If you work hard, you'repatient, you're focused, you do
the right things, you act withintegrity, you act with honesty.
You treat everyone fairly.
You are going to make a lot ofmoney, probably year three or
year four, being very real withyou.
Probably not gonna be year twoor year three, right?
Year three, year four, if I hadto guess.
And he said to me, wow, that's areally hard thing to hear.
(40:25):
And I said I, I just wanna behonest with you.
He said expectations becausethis is the type of, world we're
living in now.
But you signed up for this.
I wanna make sure you're we'reon the same page.
He said.
You know what?
I'm willing to wait as long asthe reward is big enough.
And I said, you know what?
If you do all the right things,that reward will be big enough.
Here we are, 2025.
Spent four years been on boardwith Terzo.
(40:48):
He is going to make more moneythis year, then 99.9% of sales
reps in and I'm so proud of himhis patience.
And doing all the right things.
But he had in his head the wholetime, Dan, gonna take me a long
time to get that big commissioncheck.
It's gonna take me a long time.
(41:08):
But guess what, he brought thatenergy to customer meetings.
He brought that energy tointernal meetings, patience and
consistency and he was verymethodical with how he did
things.
And when I see that and I also,I see that he's gonna go this
reward now, it brings a lot ofhappiness.
To my heart, I remember havingthat conversation four years
(41:29):
ago, and I remember howdisappointed I was in myself to
have that conversation with him.
'cause I'm thinking to myselflike, how can I tell a sales rep
he can't make a lot of money forthree or four years?
It's ridiculous.
but that was the truth, becauseI never wanna lie, I never ever
wanna mislead or lie to mypeople because then I lose
trust.
I remember he said to me, geez,man, that was a tough
conversation to hear.
But he stuck it out.
And I'm, I wanna reward him somuch for that.
(41:49):
But that's just a story forother people out there too,
because.
All the beautiful things in lifetake time, and that's what a lot
of people learn, whether you'rein this business or many other
things in life.
Dan Balcauski (42:01):
Man.
There's so many topics.
I we're closing up on time, soI'm not gonna have time to, to
touch on all of it, in the worldof patience.
I am, I do wanna click on youare selling something that as
you illuminated at the beginningof our conversation was not.
Necessarily a line item.
You're not replacing like theirexisting cybersecurity tool or
their existing like ERP system.
(42:23):
It's something new.
Layer onto that.
There's AI is the hypest of hypecycles ever and Fortune 500,
fortune 100 and the office ofthe CFO are not particularly
hypey people.
I'm curious what you've learnedabout that conflation of factors
of selling to a traditionallyrisk averse buyer with a
(42:45):
incredibly bleeding edgetechnology.
Into a problem set that theydon't have budget spend today.
Like I, what have you learned inthat whole unholy triumvirate
like to, for, to be successful?
Brandon Card (42:57):
Anytime.
And I, I laugh'cause I'm likethe next company.
I go start, I'm definitely goingafter an existing budget that's
already there.
I'm not gonna go create newbudget because that's what we
had to do at Turso and that'swhat a lot of our friends
listening probably have to godo.
We had to go create new budgetline item, which means we needed
to go figure out whatstakeholders in the business are
going to create the businesscase and stick their neck out
(43:20):
there and take that risk andsay.
need new budget for a newsolution because of this problem
we have.
that is a very hard thing to do.
And because these companies, itdoesn't matter, right?
These companies have massivecommittees of people creating
budget.
And if it's not already thereand you want to create it for
next year, you're gonna get alot of scrutiny.
(43:41):
So the first thing we realize isthat even if people love us,
Dan, even if people love youoverall and your product, and
they're nice people.
Are they bold enough and arethey enough to go even submit
the business case for newbudget?
'cause that's not easy becausethese people work in massive
corporations.
(44:02):
Their natural behavior is, theiractions are to not get fired, to
be a maverick and go out thereand say, Hey, I wanna bring in a
new solution.
No one's ever heard of.
They're like, oh, that's highrisk.
That's really, interesting.
You wanna do that?
I wanna need a million dollarsfor it too.
So we zeroed in and we said.
Who are the type of people thatwill actually do this?
We found our Mavericks, right?
(44:22):
We call'em Mavericks.
At Terzo, we found Mavericks inthese different companies that
wanted to be the innovator.
They wanted to be the data guru.
They wanted to go to the CFOoffice and say, Hey, I have a
new solution for you.
Wait till you see what I got foryou.
So we identified thosecharacters.
We didn't even look atcompanies.
We were looking at charactersthat we would meet at events and
conferences and we'd say, andwe'd see what companies have
(44:45):
brought in New Tech before.
'cause those are the type ofcharacters we wanted to deal
with.
So when we were trying to figureout how to create budget from
scratch, we were oftentimesgoing after people that we knew
had the personality types to gotake this risk and create the
budget cases.
Because even though we're asolution that could help you
save money and was verystraightforward, filling the
problem that everyone knew gocreate budget for next year for
(45:09):
AI line item was very hard.
You needed a whole committee tosay yes to this.
So we were always trying tofigure out who is the person
that will actually go present tothe committee when we're not in
the room
Dan Balcauski (45:22):
Yeah.
Brandon Card (45:23):
sales are won and lost when you are not in the
room.
That is the truest thing I'vesaid on this podcast the whole
time.
We can say as much as we want toour stakeholder, but as soon as
they go to that internal meetingand we're not in the meeting,
they're selling for us.
And it's really difficult to goarm those people to go sell your
solution for you when you're notin the room and build a business
(45:44):
case and a budget.
But they have to really havesome incentive to do it.
They have to either want to getpromoted, wanna be known as the,
the guru of the organization,have this chip on their
shoulder, an ego about, beingthe smartest person.
We those type of people tofigure out how to go create
budget and.
We learned a lot about how to dothat over the last couple years.
(46:05):
And then now, I'm not gonna namethe financial company for
confidentiality purposes, butone of the biggest financial
companies in the world.
We have some great relationshipsover there.
They told us we're not gonnahave budget for AI until 2027 or
28.
And we said, really?
And they said, yeah, we're notgoing to no matter what.
Why?
Because our board and our CFOand everyone decided it's too
risky.
We don't need it.
It's not gonna impact thebusiness enough.
(46:27):
No budget for that.
Okay, perfect.
Done.
That happens all the time.
We also went to so manycustomers that we knew well,
prospects, they told us we'renot gonna have budget for ai,
have budget for ai.
Okay, perfect.
Disqualify you.
And then there's other companiesthat said, oh, we can create
budget.
So that was another thing wewere doing with our propensity
mapping, right?
Our sales propensity maps.
Figuring out what companies arenot gonna get AI budget, no
(46:50):
matter what financial services,oil and gas logistics companies.
You see a lot of trends, right?
Which companies are gonna beable to at least submit budget,
retail, tech, consumer goods,all these type of companies.
So then we started getting thepropensity mapping down to see
what companies can we go targetto create new budget.
And that was the majority of thework that myself and the sales
(47:13):
team were doing.
Dan Balcauski (47:14):
I love that idea of, Finding the personality
within the person versus thisfocus on the account.
And obviously you've layeredthat in there with, industry and
purchase patterns of othertechnology.
But I think that's a really keyinsight there.
Man, there's so much I wanted totalk to you but We are running
up on time.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll get we'll invite you backfor round two sometime.
Brandon, this has been great.
(47:36):
If folks wanna learn more aboutTerzo, wanna follow you around
the internet any place you wannasend them to.
Brandon Card (47:41):
Yeah, I would say my LinkedIn, i'm pretty active
on LinkedIn.
It's the only social channel I'mprobably on every day.
But LinkedIn is where I post alot of stuff about the company,
a lot of my personal stuff onmental health and, conscious
culture and being good leadersand making sure that we're,
changing the way things are inthis new world we're in.
And I appreciate anyone that,that follows me and supports me
on LinkedIn.
Dan Balcauski (48:00):
I will put the link in the show notes as well
as a link to torso's website forour listeners, everyone that
wraps up this episode of Sask GASecrets.
Thank you Brandon for sharinghis journey and insights.
For our listeners, you foundBrandon's insights valuable.
Please leave a review and sharethis episode with the network.
It really helps the podcastgrow.
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