NICHOLE: In the early days of Credit Karma, I was doing marketing, data partnerships, even PR–I had many jobs back then. How has your role changed since you first took the CRO seat in 2014? Credit Karma is built to last and has been through a few evolutions in its 15 years. A true customer champion, Nichole is the architect of Credit Karma’s win-win-win business model and has been instrumental in scaling it, finding the right mix of financial partners, and optimizing data science capabilities to ensure members and partners get the most value from their products and services. This month we spoke with Nichole Mustard, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Credit Karma, which was acquired by Intuit in 2020 for $8.1B and has more than 120M members globally. Read on for lessons learned and mistakes made, perspectives from the top, practical advice, and ideas on what’s next.
Each month, our Operator Spotlight gives you the inside track from one of our incredible Operator LPs (Limited Partners) who are changing the game – building and scaling some of the world’s most successful companies. Scratchpad announces $3.“How did they do that? How did they get there?” Companies succeed because of the people who build them – operating leaders who grow businesses to new heights and make decisions every day that can impact entire industries. This phenomena of viral spread is rare and indicates a very strong product-market fit,” he said in a statement. “Once a rep starts using Scratchpad, two things tend to happen: it becomes a daily habit, and they share it with their teammates. Sacks says that he liked the viral way the product has been spreading. Customers include Autodesk, Brex, Lacework, Snowflake and Twilio. It’s resonating with thousands of users (although Salehi didn’t want to share an exact customer number just yet). This includes notes, which usually don’t make it into Salesforce, but provide a lot of context about interactions with customers. The company has completed the initial work of building the individual salesperson’s workspace, but the next phase, and part of what this capital is going to fund, is building the team workspace and seeing how this data can flow from individuals to a team view to give management more insight into what their individual reps are doing. What the paid tiers provide is a way to bring all this data together and get a bigger picture view of what’s happening on the sales team, and it helps ensure that people are using Salesforce because the data in Scratchpad links to the Salesforce database automatically. Scratchpad gives them an interface like a spreadsheet or notes application that they are typically using to hack together a workflow, but with a direct connection to Salesforce. They are essentially databases and even with a visual interface, it doesn’t really match up with the way they work. Traditionally, sales teams don’t like the tools that are thrust upon them. This approach of getting the end users involved early allows them to gain traction with members of the sales team before approaching management about paid versions.
The bottoms up approach is certainly something we have seen with developer tools and with software for knowledge workers, but companies often take aim at sales through the sales manager, rather than trying directly to get salespeople to use a particular tool. In fact, the company caught the attention of Craft because they were hearing about Scratchpad from their portfolio companies. He says that lead investor David Sacks, who has built some successful startups himself, really got what they were trying to do, and the deal came together fairly easily. We had plenty of runway, but we started to see a lot of bottom-up user growth, this bottom-up motion just really started to take hold,” Salehi told me. “To be honest, it actually wasn’t on our radar to raise again so soon after we raised what I consider a substantial seed. Co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi says that he wasn’t really looking to add capital, but the investors understood his vision and the money will help accelerate the product roadmap.
The company has now raised a total of $16.6 million including the $3.6 million seed round we covered in October. Today, it announced a $13 million Series A led by Craft Ventures with participation from Accel. Scratchpad is an early stage startup that wants to make it easier for sales people to get information into Salesforce by placing a notation layer on top of it.