Building Roam w/ Howard Lerman (Former Yext CEO)

Hello and welcome back to the Collin Cadmus Podcast. Today I’m joined by Howard Lerman.

Howard went to Duke University where he founded his first company with two of his classmates, JustATip.com, which they sold for $150,000 in 2001 while still in college. After school Howard founded Yext in 2006. By 2016 the company had $89 million in revenue and in 2017 it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2022 Howard stepped away as CEO of Yext in order to focus on his newest project, Roam, where he serves today as the Founder and CEO.

This is the first time I’m speaking with Howard, but I’ve known of him since my very first sales job in 2012 at SinglePlatform since we sold competitively against Yext. Our companies even competed in Dodgeball and Basketball tournaments in NYC, so the competition was fierce but all in good fun. I’m excited to finally get acquainted.

In this episode, we react to a series of Howard's LinkedIn posts.

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TOPICS:

00:00:00 Intro

00:01:20 Best cultures are cults

00:10:30 Top salespeople

00:12:22 What you want VS Reality

00:16:19 Politics at work

00:22:38 Success and risk

00:30:07 Threat of OpenAI

00:31:20 Sales AI

00:38:12 Remote Work

00:41:15 Customer led growth

00:51:29 What is Roam?

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QUESTIONS: (1-6 are from Howard’s Linkedin posts)

1. The best cultures are actually a cult, and that is the foundation upon which greatness begins.

2. I’d take a top seller at a medium company over a medium seller at a top company any day.

3. There will always be an annoying gap between what you want the world to be and how it actually is. Knowing when to stand your ground or when to be flexible is one of the most important growth skills you can learn.

4. The most successful people I know didn’t work the hardest. They took the most risk.

5. Founders, I would be very, very, careful about launching an AI startup right now. Unless you have something extremely special and you know exactly what you’re doing. The overwhelming odds are you will be buzz-sawed by OpenAI.

6. Too many companies make the mistake of forcing unnaturally fast growth right now at the expense of compound growth later on.

7. What is Roam?

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LINKS:

Roam: https://ro.am/

Howard on X: https://x.com/howard

Collin on X: https://x.com/collincadmus

Modern Outbound System: https://www.collincadmus.com/the-modern-outbound-system

Sales Coaching: https://www.collincadmus.com/sales-coaching

Founder Coaching: https://www.collincadmus.com/founder-coaching

Collin Cadmus Podcast: https://www.collincadmus.com/podcasts/collin-cadmus-podcast

Revenue Growth Blog: https://www.collincadmus.com/blog

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Sit back, relax, enjoy the episode, and thank you for listening, viewing, and subscribing.

Available on: YouTube, Rumble, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.