PagerDuty

Bottoms-up is sexy, but whales pay for billion-dollar companies

Kukoff pushes back on the bottoms-up adoption trend, pointing to public S-1s from Zoom, PagerDuty and Slack where revenue is wildly concentrated, in some cases around 5 customers driving roughly 30% of revenue. Bottoms-up works early, but big whales are needed for a billion-dollar outcome.

“Look at Zoom, which we're in. Look at PagerDuty. Look at Slack. And look at where their revenue comes from. I think it's like Slack, like 5 of their— or maybe it's another one, but like in many cases, 5 of their customers have like 30% of their revenue. It's super, super concentrated in just a few huge customers. And so the bottoms-up motion can— it actually can work in early days and it works for a little bit, but when you get big enough that you have a billion-dollar outcome, you need big whales to actually pay for the whole company.”