048 - The Fear & Greed Index - Right Now Every Partner Pro Needs to Stand Tall

So everything feels weird right now.

We’re all exhausted and we’re a little scared. And we can’t even feel ok about feeling bad because look how lucky we have it compared to “waves vaguely at every war torn country.”

But something else is afoot.

Today’s conversation was prompted by Warren Buffet’s saying, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”

Given our current financial situation, the uncertainty of war, and the unplanned events of the past two years, becoming anti-fragile is a must.

What will change if (when?) bear markets roar? What sequence of dominoes would fall? How would it affect you and your company? And most importantly, what moves should you be making right now given your unique understanding of and position in partnerships?

These are important questions to answer BEFORE everything takes a turn.

Armed with some insider information, we see people anticipating this turn. People either benefit from major events or are divested by them. They either become leaders or look to leaders.

Listen to today’s episode, cut down on the non-essentials, and prepare to become a leader in the changes that are to come.

SUBSCRIBE & LISTEN ON:

  • Apple
  • Spotify
  • Or literally, anywhere you get your podcasts. Seriously. Ask Alexa: “Alexa, play "PartnerUp the Partnerships Podcast” and magic…

Transcript

Jared Fuller  00:00
All right, what is up, partner up? We're back. We got Isaac and Jared today. Because this is a little bit of a special episode. Isaac and I were doing one of our many slack rants, kind of going back and forth discussing all things partner in philosophy and economics and more of a zoomed out picture. And I feel like this is one of those times where we should probably talk about things happening outside of our walls, and what's happening in the world. Because macro events, black swan events, as we saw happen in 2020, can affect everything about business in ways that we weren't paying attention to. And I think we're seeing something very similar happen right now. So Isaac, let's, uh, let's set the stage a little bit, I think. I think you've talked to him in the past too. But for Breece, we kind of kick this off with an article that he wrote kind of about global capital markets. unpack that a little bit for me, and we can kind of riff on how, through this show, this is going to affect everyone in partnerships.

Isaac Morehouse  01:16
Yeah, so you shared this article from Fabrice. I don't know if it's Grindr, or GreenDot. He's French. So I'm sure I'm pronouncing it wrong, regardless. But GRI NDA, and Fabrice is like, he's like one of the, like, biggest and most successful angel investors ever. He's like a super angel. He's invested in literally hundreds of companies, a lot of marketplaces. But I did, I did actually talk to him when I was raising for my last company. He was one of the best knows I ever got great conversation, I learned a ton from him. And he, you know, he was very, very upfront about his thesis and all that stuff. And why didn't fit but one of those guys where I was like, I could just sit and listen to this guy and ask him questions for forever. So he had a really recent article on his blog on kind of macro trends, like what to expect this year. And he sort of broke his predictions into three, you know, either the most optimistic, the middle and the least optimistic. And he was pretty bearish, like, on markets in general. So, you know, we have, we have had so much inflation as in as in money printing in the last couple of years, I think, I think something like 40 to 50% of all of the US dollars in circulation were created in the last two years. Like that's how much money has been created, which obviously affects capital markets got these prices going up, you got all this crazy stuff happening with you know, and we've seen it in, in every single asset class just prices just going crazy going crazy. And it's obviously affected startup valuations as well. Now, the Feds kind of like, okay, we got to raise rates, we got to like, we got to, you know, be careful before things get crazy. And I and you're starting to see the beginnings of a bear market and for Brees argues that he thinks it's pretty likely there's going to be a pretty pretty serious pullback and a pretty serious bear market and maybe, maybe a pretty long one. And so taking that into account, right, you don't you don't even have to have the really negative picture but it's clearly financial markets are very unpredictable and really just the market in general is very unpredictable the last few years I mean, just have these crazy spikes and things and these drops you've got supply chains, you got all these different things that are feel like the unknowns are outpacing the knowns lately. So we were just talking, what does that mean? And I kind of have to

Jared Fuller  03:45
before we even go there, I want to I want to unpack those three things that Fabrice talked about a little bit right. So, like he said, he had an optimistic case he had like this middle case and then there was the you know the worst case and he kind of assigned some percentages to each of them through you know, his analysis and the monetary supply stuff that you obviously problem interest rates, but then also the global supply chain right, like we have this restriction happening with like commodities so commodity prices are shooting up oil is a is a bellwether for many things and has been you know, multiple times in our past I mean, $150 per barrel oil has correlated to downturns in the past, but in the the most optimistic one. It's like, hey, we can kind of pull through technologies deflationary, I think we could argue over the the terms inflation or deflation as it relates to what that actually means. But it basically gives you more purchasing power, right? It reduces your costs. He assigned that about a 33% in decreasing and decreasing chance and I'm like, okay, you know, predictions or predictions, whatever. But the signals are just too many too fast. The second one he described stagflation, which is kind of a weird one. But basically, if the rising costs, you know, right now they're saying it's 7% kind of month over month, year over year, in terms of price, price inflation to be clear. If that if the best case scenario or like the the middle case scenario is that if wages rise at the same time, right? Was that the thesis of number two, like, which he kind of calls middle scenario stagflation. He's saying, hey, if things stay at 7%, and wages rise at 7%, then we're kind of in this stagflation airy not good, but not recession.

Isaac Morehouse  05:39
Yeah, I think something like that, essentially, a sort of a, a period of normalized either flat or declining at a, at a predictable rate, quality of life, essentially, the purchasing power is sort of declining, but in sort of a predictable way that's not happening in any major dip. And people are kind of baking that into their projection, we're basically just societies essentially normalizes equilibria, as to the fact that things are kind of slowly getting a little worse, it's a little harder each year to buy the things you want, it's a lot you're gonna have to have, you know, down, reduce your quality of life around these realities in sort of a long drawn out way. That's, I'm probably not doing it justice. But that's kind of what I took away from his middle scenario. And I think you're right about his first scenario, it's essentially that person productivity gains, which all technological innovation, you know, ultimately, as a productivity gain doing more with less, that, you know, if those basically keep pace with or outpace the, you know, inflation and the malinvestment, and the other and the sort of the consequences of yesterday's inflation and malinvestment that you won't notice them, right, you're you'll be living in a, in a world where if you didn't have all those other things going on, you'd be seeing massive increases in quality of life. But instead, you'll just see nothing because the increases are happening, but they're getting eaten up by you're basically using the present to fund the past, so to speak, and staying level on that, like you said, he sort of assigned his side all of these an equal weight, but the the optimistic case dropping, dropping in probability by the day and the most pessimistic pace rising case, rising probability by right. And

Jared Fuller  07:25
that's where the, the the worst case scenario, recession. And we don't have to go into all the macro geopolitical, you know, things around that. I think the the context by which he framed this, although is something that I think is a very good mental model, and something that I have always just talked about, I'm like, Wait, I got Isaac here now, like, we get to talk about first principles more and actually do more than just talk about how do we do co selling and stuff like that, which is important. And it's a partnerships podcast, which is amazing. But I think these first principles help us become better stewards of our ecosystems and our cross departmental things like, if we are partnerships, people, if we live in ecosystem, by that very definition, we live in market. Whereas I think people that don't take the profession seriously, or their job seriously, they live in similarly, they live in their company, they're just thinking about themselves. So we need to bring these pictures to bear. What he talked about was the fear and greed index. Right? And if you just think from that basic

Isaac Morehouse  08:30
principle, which which comes from the famous Warren Buffett, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful, right? For those who don't know, right?

Jared Fuller  08:42
That means that we're at a moment right now where quick action can and should be taken. Because you only look like a genius, whenever you're in that bull market. Right? You're you're making money, everything's great. And then afterwards, it's like, oh, shoot, yeah, we were just all making money. Everything was better for everyone. It's in the bear market where people right before a bear market where there is potentially a stag, or like recessionary environment where you make those moves. And I think that's why we needed to record this right now. I think there's some moves that need to be made as quickly as possible, because I think we're gonna see some things happen. From the the predictions episode, I think I called out one of those things. But, Isaac, you said, you had a couple of questions. Maybe I bring that up.

Isaac Morehouse  09:26
Well, yeah. And, you know, by the way, regardless of this is not like, Oh, if scenario number three happens, you need to do X. It's more like, it almost doesn't matter which scenario happens. I mean, it does, but for this broader point, the fact that someone like him is like, I don't know, there's an equal likelihood of any of these, the uncertainty alone about what might happen. It changes the game. And in a time of uncertainty, I remember right when March 2020 He hits and all these, you know, COVID policies start going into place. And everybody's like what's going on in the world? What's gonna happen? One of one of the investors, really phenomenal investor and I was on a call with, he was like, Look, we're telling all of our portfolio companies normally because he's a really early stage, and he's really aggressive. And he's always like, you know, 18 months is the max runway you should ever have, you should be Go, go, go, go go, right. And if you're not doing that, what's the point? He was like, I'm telling all my founders, get all the money you can get right now get your burn as low as you can and get 36 months minimum runway. And I'm like, really, for really, he was like, Yes, he said, just total uncertainty. And, and he didn't regret that, even though maybe, you know, 346 months later, things really picked up again, those companies were not in a worse position for kind of getting themselves. In fact, many of them felt better. They had shed a lot of things, they had gotten lighter and leaner. And then they were the ones who were most able because they had all this capital reserve, when the market started picking up again, they could dive in and do a lot of aggressive stuff. And now two years later, we're at a similar spot where I think you're going to see that I think you're going to see this touches on your prediction. Any way we can reduce burn or just reduce spend if you're a profitable, you know, company. What does that mean? Yeah, your customer acquisition costs your those those experiments, those? Well, let's throw a bunch of money at this and see what happened. Here's the problem.

Jared Fuller  11:29
I think this is the point I want to make really quick. prices rising. We're in tech, we're in partnerships, right? Are you all raising your prices by the same price of commodities and goods right now? Is that Is that what your CFO is doing? I haven't seen software prices rising. Have you like that's yeah, that's got it.

Isaac Morehouse  11:49
You got to sass a SaaS product that tracks the the price of lumber every day.

Jared Fuller  11:54
I mean, like that, that that that poses a problem, right? Because the the purchase, that effect is not, no one's talking about that for this entire industry. I mean, unless your sales force that bakes in annual price increases or whatever is a negotiating chip, it's just like, wait a second, I'm using the similar amount of services or whatever. Now granted, they use like, think they charge by the megabyte of data, which is very strange, a megabyte of data. But for most companies, like a lot of sass companies, they don't have consumption, right, based in like, you know, AWS and credits and those things, but the per unit price, are they going to start increasing the per unit price? Shoot, they might have to. But the other thing that's going to happen that I think partnerships folks really need to pay attention to is that, like you said, Isaac, the the budgets are going to come under screen, not just from a headcount perspective. But I think from that customer acquisition costs, because if you're not making the same dollar per customer, how are you going to be spending the same dollar per customer if you can't? And I think that's, that's something that we need to get in front of right now. And I think partially why partnerships are sort of having this moment and why conversations are so interesting, is we talked in kind of the the stability of systems episode about how a more stable system is more diversified, right? And if we're really reliant on demand generation, even ABM tactics, where we're advertising and spending more expensive dollars on it, what's the number one thing that's working right now, the most, the least expensive, highest yield thing in the world is partner marketing?

Isaac Morehouse  13:36
Well, and here's, here's what I think often happens. And you can correct me on this for your experience at larger companies if I'm wrong, but I've definitely seen this with smaller tech companies. When you have a time where you're trying to cut back expenses, you're going to pull back your CAC. You now suddenly, those low CAC channels that no one really cares about, because they're not seen as very scalable. So you got a whole bunch of channels that are pretty low, but they hit a ceiling, it's like, okay, those, those are really low CAC, but we can only get so much out of them, who cares, we want to dump money at a big experiment, we're, you know, yet cost a lot more, at least at first, but we could potentially do way more scale, suddenly, you pull back on some of those experiments. And you're like, you really care about all those low CAC channels, even if they're small, because a whole bunch of those, if you can get them again, it's like so suddenly the things that maybe you've been as a partner leader, you've been maybe not that interesting to the CRO or the CMO. I think you're gonna get a lot more interesting to them. And I also think, because correct me if I'm wrong on this to Jared, but the the cycle for partnerships is typically longer than direct sales or marketing. If you're, if you're like waiting until companies are like, alright, we're cutting our CAC to then go start pursuing partnerships. You might be too late like get the wheels turning now get the seeds planted now so that when that cap comes down, you've already got all these, you've got a pipeline of partnerships ready to go, you know,

Jared Fuller  15:07
so this is this is my, my advice, so to speak or like, what what I'm doing and what I'm thinking about and what I'm kind of evangelizing, so to speak, if I'm a partner leader, we're, or even just a partner person, of all the available things that I can go focus on right now. It's like I'm trying to do my job. But where am I going to have outsized leverage that really sets up myself in an area where you do need to be thinking about like, how am I going to be dealing with this change, like this is going to happen to my business? You know, whether or not I'm the CEO, or I'm, you know, partner, person, partner, leader, whatever it is account executive, how am I going to be dealing with this? I would be leaning in hard right now to develop relationships with the marketing organization. Right? Like, they're, let's be honest, they've been getting slammed the past year, marketing has why I mean, the available channels like advertising and dollars, the the ad unit prices have skyrocketed. Why will everyone flooded to the ad channels, right? Every all the digital transformation happened during COVID. So it's becoming harder to rank in Google, it's becoming harder to get the hits with ads. It's just not working like it used to. Then combine that on top with like, oh, shoot, everyone's about to flood, the next best thing. And every marketer knows, hey, you're gonna do a little virtual event, you're gonna do some campaign, you're gonna do something. If you bring 1234 companies together. You're marketing to who? A network. These are known people. This isn't like marketing to the void. Like, let's just throw out some content. And we'll see what happens with Google. Okay, let's target and you're, and you're potentially sharing the cost. Exactly. It's shared costs. The CAC is cut by 123 4x. So why is this so important right now? Well, guess what, this is going to be the next channel that gets flooded. Like by the end of this year, not even this year, I think this summer, where there's just going to be like cmo evangelists for partner marketing and all this everywhere. Like, this might become the the season, so to speak of like, you know, the partner marketer. And you know, if that hadn't been your strong suit before, if you hadn't seen those things, I mean, those were panda doc and drift, my two experiences, those were the best things that we did them by far the most successful, the campaigns we did with driftin, six cents, or whoever, well, in the

Isaac Morehouse  17:29
fact that you started so early to on, like, at least I know, with Panda Doc, you know, you started working that relationship. You know, some might say too early, you guys were too small to be trying to do that, right you but you're you're like I got to get this going. Now this this partnership with HubSpot, I've got to get the wheels turning. Because you're gonna miss that window if you don't. And that's where I think like a if you've got a window now, where your budget hasn't been cut yet, where people aren't yet clamping down. Stuff, start to put deploy those resources to get some of these things going ASAP. And I think this is the

Jared Fuller  18:07
the olive branch or conversation starter with the CMO or your VP of marketing or your whoever, like whoever your champion needs to be in a moment like this, like who do you need to partner with the organization? I think you need to start having these conversations very transparently, with that marketing persona or leader and be like, so I was thinking, if these things happen to be true, are we or are we not going to get pressure on our marketing spend? I feel like no history has taught us anything that feels like that's going to happen. And then if that happens, you know, we know partner marketing, being able to go to market with some of these partners that you know, would have been trying to go to us or whatever. It feels like we should get ahead of that because everyone's going to rush to it. And you know, start to start to really double click on like, Okay, what is great partner marketing, how do I how do we drive real value to both of our customers and kind of develop some expertise there? I think that's going to become in very high demand is a skill set on how to market together. I was ironic today I just posted on LinkedIn to debut Avanos new book, The partnerships economy. There's a lot of b2c examples in here. So like, you know, Airbnb or Walmart or Harry's, or the b2c

Isaac Morehouse  19:25
ones are always so much sexier. No, that's that's our job to make b2b. sexier. Yeah. I

Jared Fuller  19:32
mean, just more consumer grade, right? Like the the things that we expect. I mean, that's wait till we, you know, announced the full partner hacker.com Like, you know, we're gonna put our money where our mouth is and try to make it a consumer grade experience. But I brought up the book because there's lots of examples of how companies do these things today. He doesn't priority and b2b You know, just one lag behind so I think the partnership economy launching with impact calm they're like the leader in partnership tech for b2c, you know, like of the affiliate referral world, that doesn't necessarily apply to b2b. But how these companies utilize and leverage each other's audiences and networks is clearly an advantage, right? And b2b is just that one thing away. So I think there's a lot of first mover advantage and opportunity there to get ahead of that now, because then the fear and greed index, you know, tying this back together to what Buffett was talking about. The money's made, right before the turn. Yeah, once the turn happens, and everyone's adjust their behavior, then it's like, you're the laggard

Isaac Morehouse  20:34
well, to one really quick thought on internally. You know, because because some partnerships, obviously involve the product team as well, you might have to, you know, adjust the roadmap to build certain integrations or to you know, do various even, you know, co innovation. Again, starting those conversations early, hey, I can see this coming, I can see, we're going to need to focus on bringing down CAC, I've got this partnership that's kind of been sitting there, but we haven't jumped on it, because it requires product stuff, and we're waiting on product, maybe it's a time to reassess the product roadmap as well and say, Okay, some of these, you know, nice to have features that are taking a risk to go into a new market, we can put on the shelf and do something that's a sure thing, that's, you know, serve these partners, whatever it might be. But the but the other point on the, the fear and greed index thing, one thing that I think is really important to think about is, how can you position yourself to be like, the one who's not afraid, right? As as you know, some people say, like, you know, be that be the person who's composed at a funeral, so to speak, right? When times are crazy. How can you be when people are afraid, and oh, my gosh, budgets are getting slashed markets are going crazy, this consolidation is happening, blah, blah, blah. Because that's where you can sort of take a positive message, you can be my good friend, TK Coleman calls it tough minded optimism, you're not you're not fake, you're like, everything's fine, guys, it's real, hey, this is realistic, we're facing a tough time, here's what we're gonna do about it, you can sort of take that with you into your organization or into your talks with other partners, hey, let's lead off with this. I know everybody's getting slammed, and customer acquisition costs are killing us. Let's work together, I think I have a way we can bring this down and be in that person. I remember in 2008, when there was the big, you know, economic sort of slow down. And a lot of people were out of work looking for jobs, I had a friend who worked in HR, and he just started a Twitter account was called like Job angels or something. And he just literally was like, this is really tough. Let's all just help each other. If you know, anybody that's hiring tweet at me, and I'll tweet it out. And then I got all these people, if you're looking for jobs, follow my account. And he just and like, based on that, when the when that recession ended, he built a massive HR business, his next thing, and that was a big, because instead of just being like, oh, man, things are hard, things are hard, things are hard. He was like, things are hard. Let's help each other out. Right. That's the time when the help each other message is the most appealing to people. And that's what partnerships are all about. So I think you have a chance to really like, if we do face some of these recession, and some of these, you know, less favorable scenarios, get your psychological game, right? And get yourself in a spot where you're somebody that people are like, thank goodness, they're all right, let's work together. Let's

23:21
do this.

Jared Fuller  23:22
So you've been, you know, the the subject of things like this in the past where you're like, I feel like, I'm not quite understood, or I don't know how to, you know, break through or X, Y, or Z. Because it can't be me, startup SAS technology, like growing a company is hard. Or even working in one of the giant companies, right? Like you're trying to grow a company that's already at Microsoft, I mean, and the size and complexity is already so difficult. What you just said is so important that that mindset and in stepping up. When there isn't a clear solution, there's so much noise and confusion. And again, like sort of fear, so to speak, I feel it i i don't feel scared, so to speak. But then at the same time, it's like how can you not war? It's like, I'm not scared of business. But then you're like, wait, these effects seem very real. I mean, it's a it's palpable, online, it's palpable in our homes. It's consuming all the things that we do. And then when we go into our work life. I mean, are we talking about this on our zoom calls? Are we talking about this in our Slack? So we talking about this with our bosses, our peers or our partners? Not really, because it's so all consuming and you don't know what to do? Well, what you can do is you can do exactly what Isaac said, is that you can get yourself composed and go. These are the trends that I'm seeing you seeing it the same way. What if we really double down on the things that we know are going to strengthen us, make us more stable, attract partners, because we go hey, we're partner centric. We we mark it together, we win together, build some trust. In a world where there's very, there's increasingly less and less of that there's far more skepticism than there is, you know, trust, I mean, currencies, crypto misinformation in the media, you know, financial institutions like there's there's a lot of mistrust in the world right now. And I think if you can be that Bellwether that signal and get ahead of this with your organization, I don't know, I see a moment for partner leaders to step into their kind of their own right, or even just icees, right? Like, it doesn't mean that you have to be the VP, a partner talking to the CMO, you can be a channel account manager and Alliance Manager Go out, reach out to the product marketing, IC, and just go, Hey, I know you're getting slammed right now or a demand gen person I know you're getting slammed right now. Can we work together on something on the side, and then we can take this up to the chain?

Isaac Morehouse  25:56
You know, what one other thing one other implication of, you know, a potential bear market is really thinking about what it means for your customers, the end users of your product. And I was thinking through for myself now I'm, you know, having run some smaller startups, for some companies, I'm definitely in your target market. I mean, I use 5060, SAS tools, but for others, it's maybe larger companies. But in any case, I know for us, when this kind of stuff hits one of the first things I do, when I'm looking at reduced monthly spend the dreaded SAS audit, I go and I look at what are what am I getting hit with on my company, you know, credit card every month? What are all these things? Do I still need them? Do I still need segment? Are we using that? Are we still using outreach? Or did we you know, are we still using type form? Or did we replace it with and I'm just like going down the list of SaaS products. And what happens during that process of assessment. While I'm cutting back on anything, that's not completely essential. And one of the first things to go, are tools that don't integrate with other tools. Just the other day, we had this where I was looking at my suite of analytic stuff. And I'm like, I just realized that every bit of weekly data that we are interested in on our sort of dashboard was coming from two or three tools that all work together. And then we have this one bit of data, one particular type of user behavior, that is the only thing being measured by a third software tool. And that tool didn't integrate with the others. And I'm like, we don't need that piece of data that much get rid of that tool, right? It didn't play nice, it didn't integrate, it didn't fit into my stack, I had to I had to create separate workflows for this stuff. So anything, long term cost centers, if I'm locked into, you know, my my contract comes up and they want me to do a yearly renewal, I'm probably not going to do a yearly renewal, right now I want to do something monthly, I want to do some write anything that like is integrated into my stack, and I can't pull it out without messing up a bunch of other stuff. And it's in it's great. I'm going to keep it but if it's not, if it's a standalone tool, much less likely, it's going to get cold, right? There's no time for luxuries right now. And then the final tool for kind of assessing, you know, what are your customers thinking? If they're gonna keep your product or not? Is does it provably either increase revenue or lower cost? Is there some kind of way that I can actually tell? And sometimes if you tell without measurement, you're just like, yes, if I got rid of slack, the whole team would fall apart. I can't really measure that. But I know that we use it all the time, right? But the more tangible it is, the easier it is. So like, if you have that stuff, and this I'm thinking enablement right here, right, put in front of your people, ways to prove how your product does this. Don't take it for granted, people are going to be a lot more ruthless and scrutinizing of what tools make it into their stack right now,

Jared Fuller  28:41
especially your partners to like that, like partner enablement is another thing too. So for example, if you you do have these integrations, and they're kind of like add their, there's a bunch of integrations or ways that you work with partners that are, you know, superficial because of startups or just time energy resources, where you really aren't fully integrated. You're like, okay, it's kind of like nice to have or it's a kind of like, behind the scenes Zapier connectors and baling wire and duct tape. And then like, what's the real value? Is it really one plus one equals three, where if you do this, you know, you're doubling your conversion rate on certain campaigns or whatever the heck that thing is. If all of those things were on the back burner, I think you kind of opened them with this Isaac, it's like it's time to make that system more stable. You know, whenever, whenever you're going through that. I mean, if you think about a company, and its ecosystem, you know, the tools that you use as a customer, that is part of your ecosystem, right? Like not just your partner relationships, but also the stuff that you use to keep your business afloat, and then boom, pandemic hits, global supply chain gets jacked, boom, markets, we start printing ridiculous amount of dollars, because it's like, Hey, here's the response. We don't have the crash. And then boom commodity shoot through the roof boom war oil, people We're scared. So then there's this uncertainty. And I'll kind of leave with this, like, Why was I, I was like, I think we need to talk about this is I've been having a bunch of calls with institutional like big money, VCs. So from, you know, Wall Street, I won't name the names, but like, the the top of the top of venture capital to the top of top of growth equity. Yesterday, was the slowest deal day that they have seen in 15 years. Really, there was three venture deals done yesterday, three. And I was like, three, he's like three. So this is growth stage, keep in mind, and I was like, he's like Tiger was doing, like 10 a day. Just Tiger. He's like, there was three done yesterday. And he said that all this money parked on the sidelines right now. He's like that there's a, there's been a handful of indicators that like this, we're now telling companies like this is our guidance. It's very similar to pandemic, but it's almost rings closer to 2007 1999. It's like this is we're gonna have to buckle up because of the macro. The macro picture here isn't just uncertainty, it's how do we get out of this? There doesn't seem to be a solution. So that's, that's why it's timely now, I think is if you're in startup land, you might be mildly insulated from valuation things, you know, in the near term. But, you know, these things stop kind of start at the macro level at the top, you know, trickle down, do you could argue that debate all the all the time, but look at it, public markets have been destroyed. You know, Facebook lost $240 billion in one day as the single largest stock drop in history, which also, by the way, that's why your marketing costs are going up to write can advertise privacy concerns. And then it's happening to boom, growth stage companies. And then next thing is also startups. Right?

Isaac Morehouse  32:02
How Jared, I got one final question for you before we wrap, and then we got to promote your world speaking tour that just keep in length, it's like, it's like concert dates. We need t shirts, we'd like the dates in the city. I have seen a lot of people, including from race talking about, hey, keep your powder dry, keep some cash on hand, because you might be able to pick up stuff on the cheap. And so what do I think I think, you know, acquisitions, right? So how, how do acquisitions affect partner leaders, whether it's some of the some of the partners that they have getting acquired, or consolidating or them looking for an opportunity to say, hey, maybe we acquire one of these companies were previously partnering with or maybe one of our, you know, either the companies that we use as a customer or partner with, maybe they get acquired and they get shut down. And this partnership falls apart? How do you think about in a market where you might have a lot of opportunity for m&a going on, you know, as the weaker, less cash,

Jared Fuller  33:06
I don't think you actually even knew this. I was talking today to the global head of m&a at a $1 trillion market cap company. And, like, so it just had like, I honestly don't think you knew that. I don't think that was something We've even talked about. We're going to talk after this about that.

33:22
I'm going through my head about what your there's only No, I mean, it's a big company.

Jared Fuller  33:26
And I was actually talking about Bill by partner, right. It's like a corporate strategy, so like CSO and then there's like m&a, m&a, Chief Strategy Officer typically owns that if that role exists. So this was like the head of m&a that reports to the CSO. And in that conversation, I was like, here's my thesis, tell me how you're thinking about it. My thesis is, there is going there should be for the very, very smart companies, a flurry of fast m&a. And he's like it already happened. I was like, what he's like it already happened. He's like the smart money, the strategy. We've been calling this Jared, for a year. Look at all the m&a activity that's happened for the past year. He's like, Yeah, that might speed up in the next month, two months. It already happened. All the smart money took their cards off the table. Elon muscle, the stock, Jeff Bezos sold the stock. Bill Gates sold the stock, right that everyone sold, the smartest people in the world sold. So he's like, he's like, there might be a variation. There might be a quick flurry of m&a. But it's it. It seems like that window in terms of it being strategic is very, very short.

Isaac Morehouse  34:35
Be good. Good job. Isaac. You're too late. You thought you were early.

Jared Fuller  34:38
I mean, I thought it was like I was like, hey, that's the next three months strategy. Not to say that it is wrong. There's probably some very good opportunities. But his point was, if you're a company you want to sell if you have an exit opportunity right now, because the next three to five years could be very hard. He said it's just wise to, he said but if you're a buyer, why would you buy right now? You got all the time in the world. You're gonna hold on you don't want it you want to hold on to your cash. So like, you know that I'm not sure that m&a is if you can sell probably should spars people in the world sold right before you so probably should I don't know that saying everyone's situation is different so this is not financial advice. We're not financial advisors. I don't know if I need to throw that out there.

Isaac Morehouse  35:19
Yeah, please please do not no, we're

Jared Fuller  35:20
not gonna end on that end on we're gonna end on. I think this is a, you have the opportunity to be very important to your organization right now and being a moment and I'm very pleased with the the up leveling of the profession and like how important this is. And it is it does feel like a new era. And yeah, some guru evangelizes some more. So you asked about the speaking tour. So I guess cloud software Association, April 26 20/27, to 28th. Gosh, why always, why don't we get SAS connect backwards

Isaac Morehouse  35:54
27th 27th San Francisco, you can use partner up or the link that we share for 50 bucks off. Yep. So

Jared Fuller  36:01
use code partner up whenever you register, you'll get 50 bucks off. So we'll see you there. We'll be in San Francisco. And then it just got announced yesterday, which we're one week behind keep in mind from recording is that also doing something very special at crossbeams conference supernode. So supernode is in Philly, May 17. And 18th, I believe, yes, in Philadelphia, and we're also going to be having, so I'll actually be speaking there keynoting with a special surprise kind of at the end. That is going to be I think very inspiring. So a little bit of the stuff from today in terms of not the potentially bearish news, but the responsibility and opportunity that we have to really be the mavens and connectors and the Malcolm Gladwell kind of analogies in this, in this era, is is right here right now. So I'm very excited to get to meet everyone super node. So if you're east coast, SAS connect west coast, I'm going to see some of you at both. And we'll also be putting some stuff in whenever we get SAS connect filled up because it's, it's almost there. We're gonna do something really cool with crossbeam as well and giving away a ticket to so excited to be at both of those. And then also there's another one too that I don't think online. Yeah, there's a third one too.

Isaac Morehouse  37:18
Which we can we can announce that one. Yeah. All right. Yeah. See, I told you the World Tour man just keeps keeps filling up.

Jared Fuller  37:23
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a moment, man. I keep on saying it. So all right, we're gonna wrap this one Isaac. Special episode, partner up. We will see you all next time who got next week. I have always skeptical to say who we have next week. But actually, I'll say who we have next week. So that way I can send him this one to make sure that we get him locked down. We got the godfather of martec next week, Scott Brinker. So, you know, pay attention to next week, because we're gonna be talking about a little bit of this stuff, what's happening with marketing and then what's also happening with new partnerships that he had HubSpot Global Technology program, it's gonna be a fantastic show

Isaac Morehouse  38:01
topsy turvy times like these. It's also the best time in the world to subscribe to our daily PhD. If you're not already subscribed,

Jared Fuller  38:10
absolutely. Alright, folks. We'll see y'all next time.

You've successfully subscribed to PartnerHacker
Great! Next, complete checkout to get full access to all premium content.
Error! Could not sign up. invalid link.
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
Error! Could not sign in. Please try again.
Success! Your account is fully activated, you now have access to all content.
Error! Stripe checkout failed.
Success! Your billing info is updated.
Error! Billing info update failed.