Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal.

Regular listeners of the podcast have probably heard us say, more than once, that entrepreneurs

should raise prices. Why? And the other question that comes up often is how. On this episode of

the A6 and Z podcast, we talk all about pricing, packaging, and more. Joining the conversation,

our general partner, Martine Casado, who was formerly the co-founder

and CTO of Nesira, which was later acquired by VMware, and most recently he served as a general

manager for one of their major business units. Also joining is Mark Cranny, who heads up our

go-to-market practice and our EBC or executive briefing center,

and he was a former VP of Sales. And moderating the podcast is managing partner, Scott Cooper.

Hello, everybody. This is Scott Cooper. I'm here with Martine and Mark. And we are here to talk about

pricing. One of the reasons that this podcast in general is so important is I think that pricing

is one of the least intuitive things for technical founders, having been one. It certainly was my bias, you know,

coming out of like my PhD and doing a technical startup that you almost always want to like

take whatever your technologies and get into everybody's hands. And then you kind of assume

later on that like you can somehow monetize it. Ben Horvitz was on my board at the time.

And I was explaining, I was like, well, I think that we should kind of enter at a very low price.

And that way we'll have more people that use it.

And he looks at me and has this very stern look.

And he says, I want you to be very careful because no single decision will impact the valuation of your company more than the decision you're about

to make on pricing. And so that kind of started my foray into pricing.

As long as you've got the mic, I mean, let's start there. So what's wrong with that? So why not,

why not be cheap? And then why can't you just raise prices later? What's the problem?

...