Competera Pricing Platform

Four ideas about storytelling every founder should know. Continuing to share the insights from the AI, Innovation and Growth Program with Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Endeavor Ukraine. At one of the lectures, Dan Klein shared his storytelling tips that made me rethink how we communicate as founders, especially when the stakes are high. 1️⃣ "Pretend you're an expert." His mantra, inherited from his own teacher, Patricia Ryan Madson, is simple: when you're doing something creative, don't undermine yourself or lower the bar. Commit fully and go over the top. Full commitment builds the skill faster than caution ever will. 2️⃣ Stories beat statistics when it comes to memory. An exercise from Chip Heath's Stanford GSB class: students pitched using an average of 2.5 statistics, while only 1 in 10 told a story. Ten minutes later, only 5% remembered any statistic. 63% remembered the story. We make decisions emotionally and rationalize them afterwards. If you're pitching with numbers only, your pitch will be forgotten. 3️⃣ If the listener didn't get your message, you told it wrong. The listener can't get the meaning wrong. If they walk away with a different takeaway than you intended, that's on the storyteller. Tip: For high-stakes stories, test them on a sample audience first. 4️⃣ A story where the main character doesn't change is just an anecdote. Platform → tilt → cascade → climax → new reality. The climax isn't necessarily the biggest event. It's the moment the main character changes. As founders, we pitch constantly: investors, customers, candidates, our own teams. We tend to treat the story as decoration around the numbers. Dan's session was a good reminder that it's the opposite: The story is the delivery mechanism. The numbers are the payload. #StanfordGSB #CEOLessons #FounderLife

Four pricing lessons from Maciej Kraus, one of the sharpest pricing minds in the world. Maciej and I have spent plenty of time discussing pricing since he’s one of the longest-serving members of Competera's advisory board. This time, I had the chance to hear Maciej teach at Stanford. I jotted down four ideas from the session: 1️⃣ The more people own pricing, the more it goes down. Pricing is a C-level decision. Delegate it at your own risk. 2️⃣ Find your "metallic paint." Car manufacturers charge $2,500 for a metallic paint color that costs them nothing. Apple charges $500 for a memory upgrade that costs a fraction of that. What's the thing in YOUR product that costs you almost nothing but carries massive value for the customers? 3️⃣ Price is always the strongest profit lever in the organization. Run the math: +10% volume vs +10% price. The price move wins every time, in every business model. 4️⃣ You cannot have an algorithm that optimizes volume, revenue, AND profit simultaneously. The profit-optimal price is always higher than the revenue-optimal price. That's not an opinion. That's math. And math doesn't negotiate 🧮 Grateful for people who've spent 20 years going deep on one discipline and still teach it with this much energy. This is what mastery looks like. Maciej Kraus — thank you, my friend 🙌 Endeavor Endeavor Ukraine Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Another great lecture at Stanford this week, this time with Henry Ward, founder and CEO of Carta. "My job is to make decisions that nobody else would make”, he said. And it stayed with me. Henry believes the founder should focus on the nonlinear, step-function changes that can fundamentally change how a company operates. 💡 Example: how engineering productivity is approached at Carta. The initial goal was to reach a higher level of output. The engineering team estimated they were doing 3-4 pull requests per engineer per day, when the actual number was 1. So he set a new, more realistic target: get to 2. It went smoothly. When the team reached that, he pushed it to 3. That's when the real bottlenecks started to surface. The old Jira workflow couldn't support the pace; code review became a constraint, and other manual steps started getting in the way. So the team began redesigning the workflow around AI, with Claude reviewing code, Jira integrated into CI, and some tickets being created automatically from Datadog and Sentry. Henry didn't try to optimize every part of the process. He changed the target, saw where the existing system broke, and then pushed to rethink the workflow. Endeavor Endeavor Ukraine Stanford University Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Gary Swart joined oDesk in 2005, a 15-person company at that time. He came in alongside fresh funding, hired by the investors to give the company the direction it lacked. Half the team believed oDesk was a marketplace. The other half believed it was a staffing business. Both can't be right. Once the direction was set — marketplace — the people who couldn't stop complaining about it were out. His explanation was direct: "If you're going in 2 directions, you're going in no direction." He ended up with an aligned team and a set direction. Built the company to Upwork, which went public in 2018 and peaked at nearly $8 billion. A lot of founders let the direction ambiguity live too long because the conversations required to fix it are uncomfortable. Clarity makes every other decision faster. When the direction is set, a hundred smaller questions answer themselves. Endeavor Endeavor Ukraine Stanford University Stanford University Graduate School of Business

I am beyond proud of our Company’s growth and our second year on the Inc. 5000. Moving up 353 spots on the Inc.5000 list is a huge deal. Yet the numbers also tell a story. 🟢 2 consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 Retailers continue to invest in smarter pricing technology, and that demand isn’t slowing down. 🟢 ↑353 spots overall on the Inc. 5000 list Behind this growth are Competerians making decisions every day across product, engineering, sales, customer success, and operations. 🟢 ↑118 spots among software companies Behind this number is our product and engineering team that keeps listening to customers, anticipating what they will need next, and turning that insight into better pricing capabilities. 🟢 ↑15 spots in the San Francisco Bay Area Proud to be moving up in a region home to some of the world’s leading tech companies (and to me:). 🟢 50+ enterprise retail clients It means 50+ businesses trusting us with one of their most important functions: pricing. That trust means more to me than any ranking. 🟢 Retailers across 18 countries The move toward AI pricing isn’t limited to one market. Retailers around the world are asking how AI can improve pricing decisions. 🟢 $60B+ in optimized revenue Our platform is being used in pricing decisions that have a real impact on retailers’ businesses. Inc. Magazine Proud of the team and grateful to every customer who trusts us with their pricing. #Inc5000 #Retail #AIpricing

I've been spending this week at Stanford as part of the AI, Innovation and Growth Program with Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Endeavor Ukraine. The most useful moments from lectures aren't always the ones about new technologies or business models. Sometimes they're the lessons from people who have spent years building teams and making difficult decisions. Here are 5 insights from a lecture by Chris Misner, Head of Global Markets at Airbnb. ■ Build teams that can challenge each other. The best innovation happens when 3-10 people are poking at the problem from different angles and reach a flow state where you can solve something in a new way. That's where innovation happens. ■ Act quickly on toxic behavior. "It only takes one person to fuck [everything] up." You can have the most incredible engineering and marketing teams. Have one toxic person in there, and this starts to pollute everything. ■ AI can give you access to information, but it doesn't give you experience. Using AI is like having a fresh intern in your company that has perfect memory, never gets tired, but because they're inexperienced, they make lots of mistakes. ■ Don't let success insulate you from information. The more successful a founder becomes, the easier it is for a "bubble" to form around them. ■ Hire people with more than one dimension. "I like people who are not single-threaded". Expertise is the baseline. Misner also looks for self-awareness and creativity in a new hire. Good companies are built on judgment, healthy culture, and how the team works together. Endeavor Endeavor Ukraine Stanford University