Revenue is a Feeling

One of the best conversations I had was with a COO who works for a solo founder. Partway through I asked what it was like to work for his founder. After warmly describing his vision and creativity, he sighed, leaned forward, and said “you know what? We had two years in there where my founder kept telling me one thing over and over again. He kept saying ‘revenue is a feeling.’”

On the recording, you can hear me laugh, awkwardly and loudly. “But revenue is the exact opposite of a feeling!”

“I know,” he said. “I went nuts. I was like, I think I need to quit. I talked to my wife about it.”

But this COO stuck with it. He didn’t ridicule or debate.

“One of the tricks to my role and working with a founder like I do is [to] firmly believe that a COO’s job is to bring a founder’s vision to life. Everything they want to do is real, useful. And I knew in this case there was something behind it.”

So after years of cautiously cajoling and calmly responding, he began to understand what his founder was saying. It’s not that revenue itself is a feeling. It’s that a spreadsheet won’t tell the founder if things are growing or working. It’s that he knows it before the numbers on the spreadsheet are ever shown to him.

Framed like that, it feels obvious.

Anyone can walk into a startup and feel it if it’s happening. Support tickets are overwhelming the team, ops teams can’t keep up, engineering has to retrench and focus entirely on bugs because scale is breaking things, or all of the above. It’s palpable to every employee.

This founder was saying is that he doesn’t need to know the revenue number to know that things are working. He’s seeking that feeling, because it’s the predecessor to the spreadsheet number going up.

Another COO I interviewed shared a shockingly similar story.

“When I first joined,” she shared, “our co-founder wouldn’t even say the word ‘revenue.’ He’d say, “sales is just an experiment we’re running. Can you imagine being an AE on the ground who’s constantly being told, wait, I’m an experiment?”

This COO also stuck with it, and eventually figured out what the founder was saying. He wanted the company to grow through product-led growth only, without enterprise sales. As it turned out, that wasn’t a good fit for their product. So the COO led the founders and board through a process to figure that out.

Both sentences are laughable at first, and both COOs dug underneath that to uncover what was really being said. And despite the difference (one was expressing an insight, the other a preference), in both cases the COO’s role was to decode.

Decoding takes patience. After that, you have to decide what to do with what you’ve learned.