Principles of a CEO Overview

1. www.sorensoncapital.com
DEMOCRATIZING THE FOUNDER
PLAYBOOK
Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors
Chapter 1: CEO Overview Best Practices
January 2023

2. Proprietary and Confidential
Maintain Focus on your “Strategic Imperatives”
Sorenson Notes
• Maintain focus on the key
initiatives that must be
accomplished this year
• Results-oriented goals
Overview on your strategic imperatives for the upcoming quarters
Overview of Strategic Initiative Metrics / KPIs
Achieve Top Quartile
ARR Growth & GTM
Unit Economics
• Goal: Achieve top-quartile SaaS growth & efficiency metrics
‒ Grow new logo quota capacity & build out customer
success function to support customer base and enable
upsell bookings
• Rationale: Prove ability to achieve repeatable, top-quartile go-
to-market motion
• Meet 2023 ending ARR budget of $20M (>200%
growth YoY)
• Achieve New Logo ARR growth of >200% YoY
• Achieve >$1M ramped per-rep-productivity
Improve Net
Revenue Retention
• Goal: Build highly predictable upsell and retention motion
‒ Finalize modular pricing and upsell strategy
‒ Ensure sufficient capacity from customer success function
to support customer base and upsell goals
• Rationale: Improve GTM efficiency, create more value for
existing customer base
• Achieve >90% renewal rate from customers with
contracts expiring
• Achieve >130% net expansion
Release Scalable
Second Product
• Goal: Release second scalable product for general availability
by year end
‒ Finalize product, test in beta, and release for GA
‒ Finalize modular pricing and sales strategy for existing
customer base
• Rationale: enable upsell, expand TAM, add more value for
customer base
• Roll out and attain >10% adoption of new product by
year end; >25% adoption by 6-months post- general
availability launch
Hire Key Leadership
• Goal: hire CFO and CMO
• Rationale: improve financial controls and predictability;
improve top of the funnel lead gen & brand awareness
• NA
Note: all metrics and commentary are illustrative examples

3. Proprietary and Confidential
Maintain Focus on your “Strategic Imperatives” (Cont’d)
Sorenson Notes
• Maintain focus on the key
initiatives that must be
accomplished this year
• Results-oriented goals
Overview on your strategic imperatives for the upcoming quarters
Q1 Initiative
Target
Completion
Forecast
Completion
Status Issues
Achieve Top Quartile
ARR Growth & GTM
Unit Economics
• Maintain 3x YoY growth
• Hit new logo bookings
target of $2M in Q1
12/31/2023 NA
• Maintaining sufficient pipeline
coverage to support sales
capacity growth
• Staying ahead on AE hiring
Improve Net
Revenue Retention
• Finalize modular pricing
• Finalize expansion
quota program and
incentives for customer
success team
2/28/2023 2/28/2023
• Managing account executive
morale now that upsells are
directed to CS team
Release Scalable
Second Product
• Beta test MVP of
product to >100 users
9/30/2023 11/30/2023
• Degrading time to remediate
bugs on flagship product &
slowing rate of feature updates
for flagship product
• Need to scale SMB product
team
Hire Key Leadership
• Onboard and transfer
ownership of sales
process management
to CRO
6/30/2023 8/1/2023
• Finding a CFO that is focused
heavily on accounting cleanup
and financial infrastructure
= ahead of plan = on plan = behind plan
Note: all metrics and commentary are illustrative examples

4. Proprietary and Confidential
Exceeding Expectations
● Business goals or metrics that
remain stable / high performing
● Areas we have seen process
improvement
What Keeps Me Up at
Night
● Key competitive concerns
● Significant business threats
● Persistent Problems
Today’s Discussion Topics
and Objectives
● Have we spread ourselves too
thin in certain areas?
● Are we focused on the wrong
key questions or problems?
● Areas to optimize performance in
future periods
Structure & Calibrate: Align Board on Priorities
Example Sorenson Notes
Overview on what is and isn’t working across your organization
• Communicate most critical
topics facing company
• Provide opportunity for
management team and board
members to raise questions
and concerns
• Be willing to adjust agenda
and reserve time for high-
priority concerns and
discussion topics
Note: all metrics and commentary are illustrative examples

5. Proprietary and Confidential
Balance Big Picture/Details: Performance Update (Example 1)
Example
• We typically evaluate software
businesses across five key
metrics:
‒ ARR growth
‒ Customer satisfaction
‒ Product profitability
‒ Sales efficiency
‒ Cash burn & liquidity
position
• While sometimes more is
considered better, in this case,
clean and concise summary
slides like this can help keep
discussion focused on core
business performance metrics
Sorenson Notes
Note: all metrics and commentary are illustrative examples

6. Proprietary and Confidential
Balance Big Picture/Details: Performance Update (Example 2)
Example
• Provide context around
metrics. Explain what
decisions drove outcomes and
how to improve future
outcomes.
• Include commentary on
performance trends and
underlying drivers: What drove
variance to plan; which
decisions worked as expected,
etc.
• Disciplined approach to self-
diagnosis can help drive
company improvement.
Sorenson Notes
Note: all metrics and commentary are illustrative examples

7. Proprietary and Confidential
Reflect and Introspect: Progress by Department / Goal
Example
• OKR example 1 provides static
view of business goals. OKR
example 2 communicates
organizational health by
department over time.
‒ Understand goals defined
in prior meetings and
measure performance
over time on quantitative
and qualitative basis.
• Effective board meetings
typically produce follow-ups,
deliverables, and action items.
• Track, prioritize, and execute
on board meeting action items
and provide progress updates
to Board.
Sorenson Notes
Sales
• Expanded sales engineering team
• Reduced sales headcount by 4 AEs
• Sales cycle shortened by 60 days on average
Marketing • Significant improvement to MQL generation, pipeline regularly up
• Hiring larger content marketing team, focus on whitepapers
Product • Understaffed and focused on maintenance, need to expand
• Urgent hires required on senior product manager side
Engineering
• Product team ‘subbing in’ to help with maintenance
• New features rolled out in 2022 were buggy
• Customer satisfaction and NPS remains high
Team • Outhired in 2022, team in place to execute on 2023 plans
• Reduced headcount with RIF of underperforming employees
G&A / Finance
• Closed bridge loan from existing investors
• Aligned budget to decrease burn and increase
runway
Great Problem
Note: all metrics and commentary are illustrative examples