focal podcast

Every bottom-up PLG company faces this tension:

PLG gets you in. Enterprise funds the future. They need vastly different products - how do you prioritize?

If you try to please both motions at once, you starve both.

How to balance PLG with enterprise is what I discuss with Feross Aboukhadijeh, the CEO and co-founder of Socket ($65M raised from a16z, Abstract, Dylan Field, Aaron Levie, and other).

Socket, a developer-first security platform protecting code from vulnerable and malicious dependencies. Before Socket, Feross was an open source maintainer and developer who built widely-used libraries.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:43 - How developer background dictated Socket's PLG-first strategy over enterprise
04:50 - Building a GitHub app in 48 hours to avoid launching with zero user capture
07:56 - The counterintuitive rule: launch with intentionally missing enterprise features
10:53 - Why Socket deliberately ignored vulnerabilities despite every competitor offering it
11:20 - The dirty secret of startup pricing pages most founders won't admit
15:37 - How Socket mistakenly modeled pricing after GitHub's public/private repository strategy
16:08 - Why cryptocurrency companies exposed a fatal flaw in Socket's pricing model
18:19 - Going straight to enterprise sales to defend against fast-following competitors
19:37 - Why product quality loses to inferior products with superior go-to-market
21:36 - Socket's first enterprise deal was $500 and they kept doubling until pushback
24:27 - When PLG and enterprise roadmaps become zero-sum resource battles
26:27 - The strategic mistake of abandoning PLG motion after enterprise traction
28:54 - How developer awareness creates unfair advantages in security tool evaluations
29:23 - Enterprise handholding versus self-serve product design create opposing company muscles
33:01 - Figma's playbook: how connecting free-to-enterprise destroys customer acquisition costs
36:12 - The biggest regret: not building the PLG funnel before enterprise distraction hit
40:57 - Getting SOC 2 on day one would have parallelized six months of enterprise delays
41:00 - The monstrosity trap: second-time founders who hire VPs before product-market fit
40:13 - Why the popular advice to limit cap table size is fundamentally wrong
41:05 - Why Feross regrets turning away a $10K angel investment over ego
43:24 - The technical founder's fatal mistake: choosing to code over customer conversations
45:04 - Why selling before building feels wrong but saves months of wasted development
45:13 - The Mom Test: the book that teaches founders how to extract honest customer feedback

Creators and Guests

Host
Pascal Unger
Co-founder / Managing Partner at focal.vc We lead pre-seeds in North America with up to $1M: We exclusively back AI native software startups at the very start. Thereafter, we help them get off the ground better and faster, supported by a network > 200 GTM executives. That's our singular, unwavering focus.

What is focal podcast?

Pivotal early lessons of today's best startups.

Welcome to the focal podcast where we go deep with some of today's best founders and operators on ONE crucial lessons from their early days.

This podcast is not the usual "highlight reel" startup podcast that goes one inch deep across 20+ topics. Rather, we ask the questions you’d ask if you were sitting across from them. No fluff, just the real, actionable insights you’d get if these founders were mentoring you 1on1.

We cover topics including:

- What worked and why.
- Costly mistakes and how they fixed them.
- Frameworks that truly made a difference.
- Tactics to move faster.
- What they wish they’d known sooner.
- And much more!

"Only a fool learns from their own mistakes. The wise learn from the mistakes of others."