Ep. 185 - This SaaS Didn’t Scale With Hype — It Scaled With Systems

Guest: Kevin Jacobson, CEO at Foxen 

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Most SaaS companies try to scale by adding headcount and channels. Foxen scaled by tightening fundamentals.

In this episode, Kevin Jacobson, CEO of Foxen, joins host Ken Lempit to explain how an overlooked market — multifamily housing — became a durable SaaS growth opportunity through operational discipline and relationship-driven GTM.

Kevin breaks down why traditional industries lag in SaaS adoption, why consistency matters more than speed, and how Foxen scaled through direct sales, referrals, and systems built to support growth. He also shares lessons from raising growth equity and why systems, not people, ultimately unlock scale.

Key takeaways:

• Underserved markets reward execution over hype
• Consistency precedes scalable SaaS growth
• Direct sales still win in relationship-driven markets
• Systems, not headcount, enable scale

If you’re a SaaS leader selling into traditional industries or rethinking how growth really happens after PMF, this episode delivers a grounded, operator-first perspective.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS and AI CEOs and go to market leaders, accelerate growth and enhance profitability.

Our guest today is Kevin Jacobson, CEO at Foxen, a company operating in a surprisingly massive corner of the housing economy, one with more than 50 million rental units and persistent operational gaps, the technology has barely touched. Hey Kevin, welcome to the podcast.

Kevin Jacobson: Thank's for having me Ken,

Ken Lempit: Yeah, it's a pleasure. I'm really excited to record your episode, but before we jump in, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself that we might not know from your LinkedIn and about your company Foxen?

Kevin Jacobson: yeah. Happy to do it. So, I'm 

CEO of Foxen. We're based here in Columbus, Ohio. We operate. In the housing sector, as you said, there are 50 million units and we primarily focus on, on multifamily, but we're a prop tech company. So what we're trying to do is work with owners and operators in that space to make their worlds more efficient.

increase net operating income and, and revenue per door and metrics like that while helping them deliver a great resident experience. Kind of a fun fact about me is I started my career in finance, and then got, thankfully got into the company building startup ecosystem world.

And now this is, third company I've been fortunate enough to work at. and just seeing a lot of interesting patterns over the years, in, in, in terms of how to grow these types of businesses. And, learned a couple things along the way that I'm 

excited to share.

Ken Lempit: That's great. I, I think pattern 

recognition is one of the advantages of experience, right? You, you can see things happening that if it's your first go, you might not notice. So, I think that makes a, an executive more attractive right, to the investors as time goes on. So let's dig in.

So in our prep call, you noted that the US rental housing market includes this more than 50 million units, but only a fraction have, this kind of technology, in place. and to me, I guess it seems hard to believe that this TAM is so underserved, seems gigantic. So I wanna know why do you think that was?

And then we wanna dig into a little bit about what steps you've taken to accelerate growth.

Kevin Jacobson: So, uh,maybe, just quickly what our solutions are. We offer three solutions. Think about, you're, a multi-family owner operator. You owner operate let's say 5,000 units across. A few different states. we do, we can do three things for you. We can make sure that all of your residents have,renter's insurance and are compliant with the renter's insurance requirement in the lease at all times.

And that's important to eliminate, the risk of something bad happening with, with no insurance in place. second thing we do is give your residency opportunity. To have their rent payments reported to credit agencies so they can build credit. many, many residents don't have, a, a trade line as it's known, established with, with any credit agencies.

their financial history is, is missing some, some information. we wanna solve that and make sure they get, they get the benefit of that. Then the last thing we do, is all things in pet compliance. So, that's shockingly, nowadays more, the majority of people nowadays have a pet who are renting.

 this comes with a whole host of challenges, both operational, with respect to liability. and these are, at the end of the day, it's another living, breathing thing, living in the unit. So you've got a lot to, to deal with, with respect to that. And with the majority of the market having a pet, it's become a, a big topic and a big challenge for our, for our customers.

So we,, try to take care of all three of those things so our clients can, get the benefit of that. With respect to the history, I think, classically speaking, you know, if you talk to someone who's worked in, in property management, or you know, has tracked the property technology market, they'll tell you stories about.

not that long ago, 15 years ago, where we're, we're printing out leases and we're doing, you know, we're getting in a room with stacks of leases and we're manually checking them hand by hand to see, Hey, is this lease compliant with the, our, our new standards? Or is it, are we tracking, the right amounts with respect to rent and other, other fees and that sort of stuff.

So this is, property management and, and real estate to some degrees is considered a technology laggard by many. so some of the things that we take for granted that we see in our day-to-day lives, oftentimes haven't, haven't always made their way to the, the real estate or, or multifamily world.

so, you know, Foxen Has been a part of that company's been around almost 10 years now. there was a moment. about, about eight years ago now, where, the founder of our company, who is a, is a multifamily owner operator himself, had the exact scenario that I described happen to him and a resident at one of their communities.

basically there was a scenario where there was a significant. Fire. And there, at the end of the day, there was no renter insurance policy in place despite the fact that the lease,suggested that the resident need needed to have that in place. And so that just leads a down a whole slew of, of, unfortunate situations thereafter that you really just wanted to avoid.

And that was kind of the genesis of the company, but to deliver on this type of solution. We, we are leveraging a lot of the modern technology and,different solutions that are available to us, that were maybe not present. In, in the years prior. so it's kind of one of those things, you, you look back on how we do what we do today.

It really wasn't possible 10 years ago, at least in the way we're doing it now. and so I think that definitely played a part in it. There's a little bit of the industry being a technology laggard. And then, I think, you know, some of the developments, like I I mentioned with respect to, to pets right now the majority of renters have pets.

That was not true 10 years ago. COVID was a big accelerator of that amongst other things. So, so I think it's one of these things where you look back on that kind of a convergence of things, put us in a great position to be able to deliver value to clients. And they've rewarded us by, going with our solution.

And, and we've tried to deliver 

for all of them.

Ken Lempit: That's awesome. I mean, what a, what a great 

opportunity. And I guess it's, it's interesting , we spoke about pattern recognition and one of the things that, I see is a lot of what we call subject matter experts becoming software industry entrepreneurs because they recognize, you know, a need in their own business and they feel very confident that they can address it kind of uniquely as opposed to 

an outsider coming in.

Kevin Jacobson: You know, having worked in the finance world, I've worked with a lot of clients in, in banking and then seen in, in private equity, got the opportunity to meet a lot of different entrepreneurs and it is oftentimes exactly what you said where, someone, who works in a specific area or industry or niche or whatever the case may be, they stumble upon something.

You combine that with a kind of a predisposition, just like an entrepreneurial nature and just curious problem solver type of individual, and they just can't imagine leaving this unsolved and they're like, I must get this, you know. And then you, you fast forward, you know, 5 years, 10 years, all of a sudden you've built a company out of it.

So that's, it's, you're right. I think it's,and it's a story as it tells all this time. And I think it's only gonna get even more so that way with the evolution of a new AI tooling and different ways that people can leverage technology without having to go get a PhD in computer science. And so I think that's gonna be an exciting part of the, the years to come.

Ken Lempit: I agree with you.

We have some of our clients coding applications, coding AI agents. It's, it's a fascinating time for sure. Hey, I, I wanna turn our attention a little bit to the steps that you've taken since you joined the company to kind of ignite growth. So I'm, I'm wondering, you know, what does it take to take a company that is operating, you know, operating well enough, but to make it really a growth story?

So, what are, what are the things that you did, since you've been there and, and how long again have you been at Foxen?

Kevin Jacobson: So company's been around 

just under eight years. I've been with the company almost four years. So I came in a little bit past halfway through. That was,you know, think about three, four years in, we went from, the founding of the company, which meant there was really only one client at the time.

It was the original company that it was kind of founded within. And then you fast forward,three, four years when I joined. We've got a number of clients of which the founding companies just really figured out who are we selling to? What are we selling? how to, put together the solution that you have to keep building on top of the solution to make sure that it's actually delivering the right value.

There's all sorts of, you know, you get into these things and you realize, oh, this client would prefer it this way, this client would prefer it that way. How can we build something configurable that satisfies both their needs? And those types of things are always part of the building process. So a lot of that had been done, the company realized, Hey, we're onto something here and how can we grow this? Uh, raised some outside capital,and we can talk more about that. and then started a new chapter of really growing and scaling the organization at a pace that was, not the way that the company had scaled previously.

We had capital, we had a desire to grow and scale. Really realized we were onto something, and wanted to get it out in the market. So I think there's two key buckets of activities. One is, really professionalizing the organization. and what I mean by that is just creating a scenario where within every department you can have an expectation of consistency.

So, you know, within finance, we're gonna produce financial statements,on a consistent basis to allow us to learn more about what's going on with the business financially, and make sure we're asking the right questions, from an analysis perspective about what's going on, what's not going well, where can we do better, that type of stuff.

Certainly in customer support, you know, we want every client of ours. When they engage in an experience to interact with our support, and there's multiple layers to that. In the case of our clients, you know, we interact with residents, we interact with property staff, we interact with,leaders atmanagement companies.

So we have different folks we interact with at any time. We want to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience. and as they're easy words to say, it's hard to do. So you have to ask yourself, how do we do that consistently? Technology. We want the technology to work as intended every single time.

our case, we're interacting with property management systems that are the core system that's really, used to manage these real estate assets as well as the resident experience in many cases. And so we're interacting with those systems. We need our APIs to work consistently.

we don't want to have an issue where we thought we were gonna do something and it didn't work. So, you know when a company goes from zero to something. All of that work is not done yet, right? You have to build your way there. So I just would say the one bucket that I think people, and why I wanted to start there is people often lose sight of it is, if you're a growth company or if aspire to be a growth company, you still have to get the basics right 'cause that's what got you there. And you know, your next client that you wanna win.

Your current clients don't really care. You know, they're like, that's great. I would love it if you guys keep growing and investing in the business and all that. But I signed up to get a great solution for me delivered right now. So I, I'm most concerned about that. I'd love it if you guys could keep growing too.

So I think it's important, and I always tell this when we're talking to prospective clients. It's like we have a commitment to ourselves and to our, you know, organization. you gotta be clear about what got you here and what got you here was delivering a great solution that provides real value, consistent customer experience, consistent technology, all the other areas.

So I think that's, you know, at a certain point in the company when you're past the kind of founding insight, there's capital and so forth, you have to get to that point where you're delivering consistency. The second part of that is more,directly to your question. It starts to ask yourself, how do you scale what we're doing?

for me, it's really just like we tried to go really back to the basics. If you look at our clients that we got traction with, and you look at the market as a whole it's just a simple question, where should we be focusing our time and attention?

who are the most likely clients to work with us that could get the most value, who we could reach efficiently? those types of things. And then the question just becomes, how do we reach them? from our business, we have a direct sales model.

We're at industry conferences. We ask for customer referrals. we work with,insurance brokers that are having a conversation, whereas we're talking about ranchers insurance,compliance inside the unit. Theinsurance brokers are talking about the commercial policies associated with,these apartment buildings and even the businesses themselves.

So it's actually a complimentary conversation. So that's another channel that we work with. Again, back to basics. Who could get value from our solution? Who can we attract efficiently and acquire as a customer efficiently? And then where are they and how do we get in touch with them and let them know that we exist?

And you go from there. And of course we've grown the sales team, we've invested more in marketing. the dollar investments can go up over time too. But I think variations of staying focused on those basics has been to me where.

and just consistently focusing on that every day that's what compounds, you know, and then by the way, it feels nice when you build on top of a solid foundation like that because you might have a great growth year. You win one client, you kind of got lucky and it was a big client and it puts a big growth number on your year, but you got lucky.

You know, like, so I think you want to build, something more durable than that in both of these areas. 

Ken Lempit: Makes a lot of sense. you 

mentioned that you raised capital and that's a pretty, kind of a watershed moment in a young company. So, you actually started the investment that you were making, the investments you were making, kind of led to a situation where you were negative, right? On your, on your ebitda.

So, i'm curious like what that was like within the organization. Was the founding team the founder, comfortable with the idea that they were gonna raise dough and then spend more than they were taking in? You know, did you obviously had the experience as an investor seeing how that could play out positively.

So I'm sort of wondering how, you know, how did you make the investment scenario make sense to, I guess, 

your board really?

Kevin Jacobson: Yeah, so, 

it was, kind of coincidental. I came on after that decision had already been made. But I would say the pattern associated was very similar. I think it's a very healthy pattern. A lot of times that situation we describe someone has a founding insight, that, you know, it becomes a genesis of a company well.

 technology in general are whereyou see a lot of this, I'm raising capital and I'm gonna go negative and go unprofitable for a period of time. these days with AI it's like, I'm gonna spend a ton of CapEx, I'm building an AI, data center, and you see these crazy numbers, right?

So, a lot of that pattern exists really in the technology markets in a way that it doesn't in the rest of the economy. When you start a restaurant, you're not thinking, oh, I'm gonna go negative for a couple years. a lot of that has to do with,the development of technology and building, large software systems or certainly data centers and things like that, just requires a significant amount of capital to get it to the point that it's really adding significant value.

And so there's just a kind of a necessary investment required. Well, in our case. Similar to what you were kind of getting at is,that was not the background of the company. And that's certainly not the background in property management or in real estate we're not going negative for periods of time.

So I give tons of credit to our, our, founder who realized, Hey, we've built something here, but we're just getting started and we're onto something and it's really working. How can we accelerate that. How can we make the solution even better? How can we become, a market leader?

What other solutions can we add that would create value for clients? So it kind of came to that, realization on its own and then, explored what opportunities existed. And there found an opportunity with our current investors that was attractive for everybody. You know, it has to bea deal.

In these situations. You're offering someone the ability to own some of your company. So you gotta make sure you know who you're working with here, and everyone has to feel good about the terms of that transaction. So we were fortunate to find two great investors in,Summit Partners and Level Equity.

and coincidentally, I used to work at Summit Partners, which is a coincidence. It's not, it wasn't related. So we can get into that, whatever you'd like. But, But yeah, so they,decided to raise capital, was able to get a deal done with some great partners at terms that worked for everybody.

And then we were off and running. we made those investments. We, we grew the team, we won clients, we built our technology stack. We, invested in the customer experience in many different ways. And so to do that, you can't, you know, we decided we were gonna do that ahead of the revenue payoff for a period of time.

And that's always the case when you do these types of investment rounds. You have to, that's the whole point. Otherwise, you wouldn't need the capital if you weren't gonna do that. and so thankfully it worked out exactly as we drew it up. We had substantial growth over the years that I've,been here and I've, you know, I've played a part in that, but so have so many other people.

We've built our technology, we've invested in customer experience. we've grown the team with some great people. And now we're back to profitable at a much larger scale and feel like we've added our third solution that was not present,when this occurred.

We've grown our second solution. so yeah, it's really off and running and entering like a newer chapter. 

That's really exciting.

Ken Lempit: It is exciting and 

good to see a success like that. I'm wondering, if we drill into, just go to market for a moment, what was, you know, like early changes to your go to market? You know, you hinted at, you now have investors with expectations that were different than what.

Proceeded it. So how did you build your go to market to start climbing if not getting to the hockey stick kind of curve, you know, to, to get the revenues growing soon after the investment. 'cause I think that's sort of a gut check time.

Kevin Jacobson: Yeah, absolutely. 

So I think it was a combination of things. So like I said, we grew the team.

We had a small number of salespeople representing us out to the external world. And in our case, the, you know, not, not every company does direct sales like, like I'm referring to here, but in our case, it really does make sense.

The, the multifamily real estate world is, is a pretty networked and small world. if you think about it, like someone does a development project, they're building something from the ground up, then they, they need equity for that. So they're getting, you know, they're getting investors. Then those investors need someone to operate the assets.

So they're hiring a, you know, property management company or maybe there's a, maybe it's a vertically integrated owner operator scenario. There's all sorts of, of different models. but then, you know, you have assets in one location and another, and, and that operator doesn't serve both those locations, so you work with a different one.

And eventually you're gonna sell that asset, you're gonna sell it to another investor who's working with a different operator. So it's like you, if you're in the business for periods of years, 10, 15, 20 years, you're gonna, you're gonna be highly networked. And that's one of the things that, makes the direct sales model really work, work well for us.

One of the keys was just scaling our, our sales presence. we hired people in. specific markets that had some experience in, prop tech or property management or had kind of a, a foot in the door on that, of experience in, in, in our market, which we think was, was really helpful.

and just really expanded that. So that was something we couldn't have done had we not taken the investment, right? So we expanded our sales presence. I would say we also, expanded our presence at conferences. So our industry has a big, conference circuit and, being there and having good conversations with prospective clients who are exploring how can I, our, our prospective clients, when they go to these conferences, they're thinking.

Who can I meet and what ideas do I not know about that other people are using to run better communities? To increase ROI to in increase the efficiency of, our property staff, deliver a great resident experience, those types of things. So we, we increased our, our presence there. I would say, I mean, a lot of people don't think about, or some people think about customer experience and customer success as a department, as a part of go to market, classic go to market, and some people, people don't.

But I would say, we felt that our investments in the customer experience, was a, was a big differentiator for us. If you look back over the last several years in the sense that, we did what we wanted to do, we started to deliver very consistent client experiences and good client experiences.

About 25% of our business comes from customer referrals right now, who they're, again, back to the network industry. You, if someone's working for you, if. You're, you've got friends in all over the place, you're gonna tell 'em about it, right? So, that's working well for us. And then I would say , we also, I mentioned our relationships are working with, insurance brokers.

 We put a little more direct emphasis on that. It kind of came naturally. I mentioned that conversation where we're talking about risk inside the unit. A broker's talking about risk of an the entire, you know, building or, or, the commercial policies of the company. We stumbled into that insight and then we thought, how can we invest more directly in this area?

So those were some of the things, that we did. But it was all from the standpoint of what's working, where are we seeing traction? What is a proper way to incrementally invest in those areas and scale those areas to create more

opportunities for us.

Ken Lempit: I think, has to be 

kind of highlighted here that the go to market, especially leaning on a, you know, bag carrying Salesforce. It's a little unusual for people, like the reflex for most go to market leaders is, you know, what's my electronic footprint? And in this case, it's a shoe leather footprint,

right? That's what we're leading with.

Kevin Jacobson: that's right.

Ken Lempit: I think it makes a lot of sense for these, you know, I don't want to, it's not pejorative in my mind, but it's sort of an old school business. You know, you have a lot of individuals, right? You have families that own these properties. I mean, obviously there are publicly held, you know, multifamily operators as well, but this is a business that, you know, was kind of built on the work of family, you know, family dynasties, right?

So. Absolutely,.

Kevin Jacobson: And you 

definitely notice that you get into these, you know, regional and regional and like super regional areas where it's like. You hear the story and they're like, well, it started with, we bought this building, you know, in 82, and then, you know, you fast forward and now it's just this, we've got this five state presence of all these assets and we, we own some of them.

We operate some of the, you hear it all the time. It's very similar to what you just said. And I, I would venture to say different, you know, I think in a positive way, it's a very, very cool story. It's very, it's kind of the classic American dream in some respects. but it's not necessarily like that in every single market, and 

definitely in this one.

Ken Lempit: Clearly not. But I, I just think 

as a, you know, if you're a new CEO coming into, leadership at a software company, you know, you have to really think what is your footprint? What is, what's the most efficient way to reach the kind of people most likely to buy from you? Certainly I'm in the business of doing electronic marketing, but also marketing strategy, so it's learning from me as well.

Kevin Jacobson: you're right, it's not, we actually did expend quite a bit of energy thinking about our digital footprint, how we get in touch, you know, our presence on LinkedIn, what our website looks like, what, how we're funneling people there, what's the flow we, but I would say, in terms of kind of orienting around importance and, and what has driven results, I kind of started, you know, where I started, like you said, the shoe leather footprint.

So that, that 

really made a difference.

Ken Lempit: That's very cool. I wanna, I 

wanna move on. I wanna sort of build on the, there was a little serendipity about you finding this company. You mentioned that you had worked at one of the companies that ended up ultimately investing. Can you give us just a couple of minutes about this kinda unusual path to becoming the CEO here at Foxen?

Kevin Jacobson: it kind of started during COVID. I was working at a high growth software company in Chicago, and that company went. Necessarily at that time, we hired a hundred people in 30 states, when everyone went remote. fast forward, we also raised a large, large series seed financing round.

And, and things were going well, company was entering a new chapter. and oh, in parallel,we were, one of the folks who moved locations at that time and I moved back to Ohio. we're based in Columbus here. I just kind of decided that for me personally, 

living life on Zoom, managing large teams was not my favorite experience. So, you know, tried it out for about 18 months or so during the COVID times. And,I just found it was not where I was doing my best work or living my best life. I know it works great for some people and I, I fully, fully supportive of that.

for me it wasn't going great. So I started to look around and say, Hey, what other opportunities,are here? And I found, looking around Columbus and thenhappened to come across,Foxen. this was a little under four years ago. And,it just so happened at that time that they were, that the time period I described where they was like, Hey, we're onto something.

Let's start scaling was that time. And so they were looking , to bring on a COO into the company. and then unbeknownst to me, the firm that I used to work at and one of my former colleagues was behind the scenes, it hadn't been announced yet, closing the financing round with Foxen.

and so then eventually all the dots got connected and,it was a great opportunity to, you know, I was looking at different opportunities and trying to find the one that I felt was best. And,in this case the ability for my former investment firm, I worked at Summit Partners to be a part of

the Foxen story, to me, it created a lot of confidence because I know that,Summit's a great partner and that they do their diligence about companies. So whatever questions I hadn't asked, they probably did ask, and that was, helpful. and then, you know, I had a great,relationship with the founder and,we ended up

coming up with a game plan around, working on a CEO transition over a period of years,where, you know, I had the opportunity to really get to know the business and get to know the industry and,we did a lot of the building together and so it's been a great relationship and a great,experience.

But it's like. one of these things where you, you couldn't draw it up and if you looked at the track record of, firms investing in Columbus, there's certainly not as high as Chicago or the Bay Area or other places like that. So, like the probabilities of all this coming together was pretty slim, 

but, I'm grateful that it did.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean, I think it's amazing. 

You know, I look at the research. I don't know if you follow, Kyle Poer.

Kevin Jacobson: Yes. Yeah, he was great.

Ken Lempit: Brilliant guy, right? He had a recent, uh, post on his substack about the odds of making it as a startup software company. Pretty terrifying. I, I guess I would call it somewhere between discouraging and terrifying.

Kevin Jacobson: Yeah, I agree. The 

numbers are pretty stark. And so yeah, when you start to think about, that, that, you know, being able to build a company of that much less, the probability of all these kind of relationship things and opportunities coming together, it's, it's like 

kind of, daunting.

Ken Lempit: I, I think one of the secret 

sauce things here though is relationships. Sounds like, you know, you're a guy who keeps his relationships strong. Then when you move from one thing to another and, I've met my share of hard driving, you know, GTM leaders and CEOs, who I don't think have a lot of good relationships in their wake.

So that might be a little bit of a secret sauce for people, especially earlier in your career if you're listening, you know, you never know when somebody you worked with is gonna be the person you, you need, and they, they need you too.

Kevin Jacobson: I couldn't agree more. And I 

think, this experience, is one of the full circle experiences for me that has definitely highlighted that. did always take the approach of there's absolutely no reason to burn a bridge. and that was always my mindset. So, you know, even when, there was times where I was leaving companies in scenarios where they would've preferred that I stay.

and our interests are not aligned in that situation. So how do you navigate that? And I think you know, as an example, you have to do it very graciously and, you know, try to find opportunities to add value even though you're going in a different direction and,

if you're feeling frustrated about something, the Abraham Lincoln thing, and just like, just write the letter and put it in the drawer and see if you feel that way in week, you know, I thinkis great advice. I did hear this from,someone in my past.

Why can't the goal be to be a hundred percent referenceable? what if I told you you could just up the phone and call anyone I worked with? we might have had different experiences together that are varying degrees of relevance, but if they can all say, Hey, this is a great person.

There's a hardworking person, they're gonna, you know, they have great skills necessarily, whatever. It as opposed to, eh, well, it was good for a while, but then it kind of got bad and it, so it's like, why not be a hundred percent referenceable? You know? I think you can actually do that even, when you know, if a situation goes poorly and you need to be kind of forthright about your frustration or something or so, you know, and you have to address it head on, you can still do that and have that person leave the situation feeling like they respect you, not like they're gonna now a negative reference for you.

So or maybe the good question is, how can I do that in this situation? Right. And ask yourself that. So I would agree completely. I've gotten paid off from that mindset and it wasn't easy. there was moments where. I could have just done the thing that felt a lot easier, but I didn't.

and I have come to 

value that I did that.

Ken Lempit: Agree. I, I, I wanna kind 

of build on that in a new direction and talk about the relationship, you know, between the investor and the operator. And, you know, you've worked in both the growth equity side and now an operator. And can you talk a little bit about what a healthy relationship looks like between operators, investors and operating partners and you know, how do those relationships work best and you know, are there things to watch out for?

Kevin Jacobson: Absolutely. 

and because. I would say my experience working, so I worked in investment banking. I got to see a lot of clients and and situations with management teams and investors. And then I worked on the investing side for a time and then I've had three companies with three different boards and three different investors and situations.

So I've kind of been a student of observing what, what I think really works well, and I've a couple things in mind. So first is, Even though I have a background in finance, one thing I think is really important is, that's not my job here, you know, is to, it is just job clarity, right? A professional investor and investor and a board member.

That is a certain job. My job is, that's not my job. My job is to operate and run the company and deliver great results, build a great team, all those, all those types of things. So it's like, I think starting there and just saying, Hey, yeah. We both have a job to do. Neither one's better or worse, but we have to have a mutual respect for what your job to do is you're, you know, if you're an investor, you're representing your LPs, you have a fiduciary responsibility to, to do the right thing for them.

And, and you're, at the end of the day, you're in the job of delivering an investment return. In my job I. Know that I wanna understand that. I wanna treat that with the respect it deserves, and try to try to communicate that to those, the company who need to know and really understand what's going on there.

And then in the case of, of running the company. I want our investors and our board members to have, you know, a healthy appreciation for what that entails and the difficulties there and the things that are, you know, are great about that. And the things that are challenging.

And I think that's starting there is such a great place. 'cause then there's this healthy respect and appreciation for everyone's jobs and no one's trying to do each other's jobs, right? So that's, that's always tricky if, whether it's an investor relationship or not. When you have two people trying to do the same job, that's when it, it kind of gets tricky.

 The other thing that I think has been helpful is,if you think about what does an investor or board bring to the table? Well, where you might be deep in your company, they have breadth. Part of my experience in working on the investing side, I saw hundreds of companies a year and just pretty quickly, you can only go so deep, right?

But, but you can see the pattern. You start to see the patterns. You're like. Hey, this is what, this is what top growth is looking like. And these are what some of the things that these companies are doing. And these are how first time founders, first time CEOs, whoever are, they're tripping up on accident, right?

This is some of the things we've seen over the years, pattern recognition, that sort of stuff. And so these companies that are, are in that world can be a great source of information. Nuggets of wisdom, pattern recognition and things like that. but what it requires for you to mine those nuggets, what you gotta do is have an openness to wanna learn what they are and to say, Hey, here's something I'm wrestling with. I don't feel great about it. What do you think? And then what I find is in those situations, they can really bring that breadth to be a, be a source of value for you. It's oftentimes very difficult to give in, in that situation for them to give prescriptive advice for your specific situation.

But what they can do is give you some patterns, some frameworks, some think some broader information that you can then say, okay, how does this apply to my situation? And what can I do with this? And oftentimes that leads to a very productive discussion. And the last thing I would say is many cases firms these days, it's very popular, have operating partners and, and folks like that.

 I think it's silly not to leverage that, you know, in any cases it's sometimes they have generalist approaches. Sometimes it's specialists. It's like, Hey, if you need, you need go to market help. Go to this person. You need people help go to this person. In that scenario, I think picking your spots, be proactive about something.

Again, these, these are folks that can give you broad perspectives, seeing tons of companies, they work with 'em quickly, and then you can apply that to your situation. So, I think if, alternatively if you're just showing up to the board meetings and doing the, you know, the, the presentation then you're seeing next quarter, I think you're missing out on it.

Ken Lempit: I think, In a 

world where everybody's money in terms are the same, right? What, what differentiates one investor from another? You know, it's gonna be either their ability to open doors for you like they're entrenched in your industry, or they have a bench of operating experts who can augment your, your talent base, especially if you're a, you know, a younger company.

that's a really great place to, to land our episode. Hey Kevin, I wanna thank you so much for. Joining us on SaaS backwards. If people wanna reach out to you and learn more about Foxen, how can they do that?

Kevin Jacobson: The best place to do it is LinkedIn. I'm pretty 

active on LinkedIn. and, you know, we, we try to be out there talking about what we're doing at Foxen. I try to talk about some of the things that are going on at Foxen in, in my world in general, as well. 

So, I would love to hear from you.

Ken Lempit: Awesome. and the website address for the company.

Kevin Jacobson: www.foxen.com

Ken Lempit: if people wanna reach me, I'm on LinkedIn/in/kenlempit My demand generation and advertising agency for software companies is Austin Lawrence Group. We're at austinlawrence.com. That's lawrence with a w. And if Kevin Jacobson hasn't convinced you to subscribe to SaaS backwards, I don't know who will.

Thank you so much for being here, Kevin.

Kevin Jacobson: Ken, great talk to you.