How to Pivot The Model, The Playbook & The Team When The Macro Changes w/ Carina Brockl (fmr. CRO, Aurora Solar)
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Hey folks, quick plug before we get into today's episode. I'll be at the HubSpot AI Summit 2025 in San Francisco on June 11th. This is an invite-only event that's bringing together some of the top founders, enterprise leaders, and investors in the AI ecosystem.

I'm joining some colleagues from Replit and LiveX AI for a session on how autonomous agents are starting to disrupt the SaaS ecosystem and what it means for go-to-market, product strategy, and how we build software in the next decade. I've got 10 invites to share with listeners of the Science of Scaling. If you're building in this space or investing in early-stage AI and think you should be in the room,

Request a spot with the link I'll put in the description, and make sure to put Science of Scaling in the Referred By field. I'll review and handpick the 10 folks who will get approved. Hope I see you there.

When a company is still small, you want to make sure that every single employee is motivated, is in seat, wants to achieve, wants to get to where you are. And I mean it, every single one. Today, I'm joined by Karina Brockle, former CRO of Aurora Solar and Stage 2 LP. She joined Aurora in the early part of this decade, navigating them to unicorn status. And then, boom, the macro changes.

They had to pivot the model. They had to pivot the playbook. She had to pivot the team. And we're going to unpack all the challenges as a leader as she managed that adversity through the transition. I'm Mark Roberge, and this is A Science of Sky. A Science of Sky

Karina, welcome to the show. Yeah, what a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for making the time. So Aurora was quite the journey in a very interesting vertical. Can you maybe take us back to the beginning? A lot of our listeners are early sales leaders who might be, or even salespeople who might be picking their first sales leadership job at a company.

And I think like I'm always curious, speaking to someone like yourself on how they should diligence that opportunity. There is a standard set of data points you can gather. So I think the first one where I typically start is what is your ARR? What's your annual revenue? It depends, of course, what business there is.

I would caveat a bit, now AI companies, the numbers are very different now. So I would say the benchmarks that you used to look at, in this case, it's a SaaS business towards what you're now comparing, careful, very different. There's also very different expectations around it. But the first set of data that I look at is how healthy is the business on anything attached to revenue, especially as a revenue leader stepping in, and especially when you're looking through the sales of, or a lens of sales.

What is retention looking like? There is a set of KPIs that I usually dive into here. And then it's where do you want to grow into? So what's the valuation right now of the company already? What are already the expectations that have been set by the investors, sort of VCs? And then what do you have to, what are the expectations that as a leader or a sales manager,

in your function that you're going to step into and you have to grow into. So I also, of course, ask for the growth numbers, but careful again, when you're starting from a very low base, growth might look wonderful, even crazy numbers in growth, but it gets harder. Hey folks, just Mark here. Pay attention to Karina here. She's showing quite a bit of maturity, sophistication, wisdom in selecting her next role.

You're like that, that diligence is so critical. And she's walking through some of the stuff that I think a lot of folks do well, like, okay, where's the ARR? Where's the growth? Where's the net dollar retention? But that valuation thing is tricky. Even for founders, there's this tendency to want to just have the biggest valuation possible, lower dilution. I can start doing the math about how much my equity is worth, but it can get you into trouble.

If the valuation multiples off, you're joining a company, 20 million high flyer AI company just raised at a billion dollar valuation. It's happening. Okay. That's a 50 X multiple on the valuation to the ARR. I don't think there's any sector that doesn't return to earth at some point. It's going to happen. So just imagine, okay, you're, you're valued at a billion, you're doing 20 and then you go have two phenomenal years.

Okay, like good years, double 20 to 40, 40 to 80. You executed. But guess what? The sector corrected back to 10X. Now you just doubled 20, 40, 80, and you're worth 800 underwater. Nevermind all the obvious things about like equity options being off. Nevermind the expectations and pressure you're going to have to grow faster than you're capable of.

So that's what Karina is talking about here when she says doesn't make sense. That valuation multiple is important. It's not always about maximizing it.

It's about settling into something healthy to set you up for success in that role. Let's get back to her. You just need to be ready. It gets every year, you're doubling, tripling, quadrupling. I mean, again, different benchmarks now. So that's what I usually spend as a first set. That's where I spend quite a bit of time. You know, climate is good for the soul. And that was a unique experience for you. So talk to us about that. When I joined Aurora...

that was a mere 3%, 3% of energy in the US produced by solar. And so, so much opportunity, so much more space, so much more to do here. The technology is there. The shelter had made huge jumps. So the price per kilowatt,

Because of the panels getting so much better. I'm not going to get too technical. But because of technology jumps and the hardware piece, now the software could get much, much better too. And these combinations just made that now all of a sudden the cost of a kilowatt hour or kilo in solar reduced so much. And that was so exciting for me. So you had a really, you have two sides, huge demand.

People are more conscious about climate, but it's because it reduces the electricity bill. And that to me, that's right. And that to me, absolutely. And so I could get very, very excited. So huge room, 3%. I mean, we can go grow so much more. Technology innovation, making solar or just the cost so much better. And then real savings for consumers. Biggest question I get every day. How do you build the next unicorn?

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Yeah, I want to dive into one piece of that too that you said, which I think is also seen almost all the time in a successful startup journey, which is their appetite to go upstream. These startups come out and they sell the small business. This is great. Great starting point. And they're a rocket ship. And at some point, and this is the right call, what are 5, 10, 15, 20 million in revenue, and they're higher when you join.

It's like, hey, we should go upstream now. What do you want to look for to know that a company is ready to go upstream for you to come in and make that impact? You have to dive into the product. You have to understand, is it ready for enterprise? And now I want to be a bit more precise. Enterprise and solar is companies that are not actually that big. So solar installers, typically there's a lot of small, but then there is a few in the medium, but not that many. And then there's a

There is a good cluster of very large ones. Those are nationwide installers who nationwide install solar panels. The product needs to be ready to actually cater for more scale, meaning that in the enterprise, there is more requirements around security. There's more requirements about does the product now, not only within a small team, but also all of a sudden, if you have 500 people on the platform, does it still work?

Am I going to pass these workflow and security requirements of the enterprise?

And it doesn't have to be perfect. I want to say that. But the company needs to be ready and focus on the enterprise because the product will need work in there. Typically, it will not be perfect. And so you need to have that appetite to wanting to collect those things, work with the product org to then take the product where it's right now to already. Sometimes it's already ready. That's that's ideal situation. And you just go out and then actually, you know, your market and you sell.

But most of the time you'll have to collect with the customers what's still needed to grow into that. Yeah, this assessment of going upstream and their readiness is important for many directions as the CEO, founder, board, and Karina joining. And so you've seen a lot of these and the commonality you see amongst those that are successful hit many of these points. Number one,

They're what they call, quote unquote, pulled upstream, meaning they weren't purposely going there yet, but customers were showing up, large customers, like at the booth in the inbound, just like, we love what you're doing. We need to be more strategic. And they're willing to be a design partner with you. So oftentimes, like if it's really ready, you'll already see a couple logos there that are on board. Maybe it's not a full rollout.

But that is a remarkable foundation by which to start. The other thing is you don't want to commit to a revenue target right off the bat. You have to repeat the product market and go-to-market fit journey, as Karina is saying here. And that happens all the time as folks are over-optimistic that

The motion that they've built, the go-to-market system they've built, the way they generate demand, the playbook, the sales hire, the comp plan, the pricing model is only going to need to be tweaked to go upstream to the enterprise. That's usually very, very wrong.

Like we've got to reestablish product market fit and understand the gaps. We have to reestablish go-to-market fit and understand how our messaging, how our sales hires, how our comp plan, how our territories need to change to align with this enterprise opportunity. And the last thing we want to be doing is walking into an annual planning process, having not already reduced all that uncertainty and committing to a target. Like we're going to do 10 million next year in the enterprise, even though we only have three beta customers.

So just have the right mindset around the path and journey and steps and the timeline it's going to needed to be able to go upstream. Let's get back to Karina. When I arrive on a job, the first quarter, what I do is just listen. And I listen very carefully to what the organization is saying. And then the second part is I listen very carefully to the customer. But it's really just to listen. Where are the biggest topics?

And for Aurora, it was actually really easy already. So the team was already ready. They needed a bit more structure. So there was the internal side where it was structuring more. There were things like you need to have territories. What were they doing?

They were round robin, but they were too big at this point. It just wasn't set up fairly. It wasn't set up in a structured way. It was hard for anybody really go to a market to understand how did they get the set of accounts. And so just setting up.

A structure that is balanced, fair, is explained well, that matches with the comp plan, which just was a first. They just needed clarity on that, which takes a bit of time. You know, do you want to make sure that your marketing, you're not only doing that in sales, but marketing, customer success is all brought along so that a go-to-market team can actually really operate on a joint scale.

territory philosophy, really. And it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be very simple, can be very easy, but just to have a structure and that the teams can rally around and understand why do I have these five accounts and not the other five accounts, for example. For folks that go through that, because that's a pretty common, I guess, cleanup or up-leveling or professionalizing that occurs. And just to coach the folks that haven't gone through that transition, I imagine there's a lot of like,

my territory sucks, this isn't fair. The most important thing to me is transparency in this. It can be geography, it can be postcodes, it can be size of the customer. It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be very easy, but really transparent in communicating. Those are the one, two, three variables, how we carve and how we select or how accounts get selected or territories get selected.

And then communicating that very transparently and that usually 95% of the complaints go away by that and writing it down so that everybody can look it up.

Having a good, again, nothing complicated, but having a few policies just around, hey, if we have a dispute, where do we go? What do we do? And then consistency, consistency, consistency. I cannot say more than a word. Everybody just will settle into that. If it's set and it's consistent, then people know what to expect. And then that already sets it up. By the way, no territory will ever be 100% balanced. I also set that expectation straight up.

It's just not possible. You will also, you know, we call it a bluebird. Sometimes, you know, a deal will fall and nobody even thought about that. You can't plan with that. And also being very transparent about that. We'll do our best. It will never be perfect, but we have a set of rules. We have a set of variables.

And so people can plan with it. What were some of the other execution items in the first two quarters? I just also look at work structure. You know, we just looked at, you know, what are the roles we have? You know, you sometimes have a manager that actually has, you know, let's say they have a team of SDRs or outbound. But then at the same time, they also manage the lead flow and they manage the system behind and they manage...

They manage events. And what you want to do is just make sure that people are, you know, that the workloads make sense, that they're right, that they actually match the job descriptions. And so there is a bit of just assessing people.

your talent, making sure your talent is in the right spot, because that sets your people up for success. They know what their job is. They know how they're getting paid. They know their territory. So there is just some baseline things that you want to be thoughtful. And then, you know, I spend time also about, you know, what does motivate you? You know, what do you hear in the conversations? And, you know, when the company is still small, you want to make sure that every person

single employee is motivated, is in seat, wants to achieve, wants to get to where you are. And I mean it, every single one. All right. And then, of course, the industry saw some massive headwinds. The macro changed. And so let's talk about that story. Give us the context. How far in were you? Where was the company at? What happened? And then how did you react? I mean, Mark, the first two years at Aurora,

We're hiring, hiring, hiring. So I was, I was, it was just. I remember hearing about it. You were, you were like running all over the world. It was insane. Yeah. And I mean, what a fun journey. So joined around the 20 million. We scaled all the way over the a hundred million beautifully. You know, it was really, it would be proper rocket ship. It's same, you know, you get the same feeling as someone as a sales force, someone as a box. All you're trying to do is again, structure, give the,

give team transparency and in the, in the craze, you know, and I want to say that because sometimes that falls a bit to the sideline. Of course. Yeah. I hear sometimes leaders to talk about amazing structures that are put in place. It's still chaotic. You know, it still has a mess. It's managing chaos, right? It's like you never, it is chaos even for the winners. Okay. Just if you haven't, if you don't know this already, I think it's really important that you, you grasp this.

It's never easy. Even if you're building the next trillion dollar company, it always feels like chaos. Customers are churning, employees are leaving, and, you know, hopefully they're going to regret it.

So just know that it's like if you're changing jobs all the time because you're looking for easy street, you're looking for that rocket ship, that like champagne clinking, you know, just easy quota attainment. It doesn't exist. If it does, that's temporary and it's probably not going to be good for your company in the end. So just know that it's always a grind.

The high level numbers you'll get a sense of and hopefully they're going in the right direction. But the enable of that is tough. That's what we're signed up for. Let's get back to Karina.

Switching to policy changes. And interest rate. Actually, I would say interest rates is so much the tech sector got affected in this journey. Yes. Yes. So solar has these up and down swings and it will always have it. It had always had it as an industry. It goes up to the right. But you're going to have these years where it's going to be tough. And that's usually because of some event. Macro event usually happens.

So what happened a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, is you had actually two of them compounding. So you had interest rates. Practically all of the financing volume was through loans in solar. And that basically stopped or had to really shift dramatically.

once you had the huge spike in interest rates, because now it didn't become as affordable anymore. Back to my original, you know, costs are so great, solar installations are great, but if you can't pay the down payment, if you can't, then you can't put solar on your roof. The salespeople in the solar companies are really struggling to actually tell a consumer, tell Corina, hey, this is a really, still a great, this is still wonderful and great energy source for you and it's still cheaper, but now you have to finance it through a company

to release way more complex as a product they were caught a bit off guard and so we had to also because Aurora also integrates with financing options so you can actually in the software you can get you know a loan or a

or a PPA, it's what it's called when it's a lease. So you could see all of that in the product. And we had to also switch quite a bit here because the industry was, well, it wasn't there yet. And then you had a

A policy change, it's called NEM, it went from NEM 2 to NEM 3. So what happened is when you have a solar installation and you usually have energy that you're not going to use, it's excess that you feed back into the grid, which is wonderful. And we're usually you get a dollar per kilowatt from your energy provider.

They changed it. They changed it to a system where it went actually not as favorable anymore. And so when you were feeding back into the grid, you wanted to feed back actually at certain times,

where you could get more money back for your solar installation. So the ROI of a solar installation all of a sudden changed. And that is big because now you have two topics that actually change the economics. And I go back to that moment because you see, obviously it wasn't like, you didn't know how bad it was going to get. The NEM3 change was coming. So you could see that already. We were tracking it. So by the way, this is my, I mean, this is my job.

So you need to track macro and you need to track what is going to happen in the industry. But it wasn't as clear how bad. And what we didn't plan well is the compounding. Compounding of both interest and policy change at the same time. Do you think you should have seen it or was it just impossible? Like, were you kind of overly optimistic as a company? And I've been there too. Like, I think everyone has. And I'm trying to like...

take away the learning here of like,

Should we look ourselves in the mirror deeply or react faster? Or was that just impossible? First of all, we hired. So freeze. We didn't hire anymore. We stopped hiring. It's the first step. Let's try to get this demand and make it happen. So we stopped just hiring. It was the first step, which was already, we took down expectations. We also corrected numbers in that year. We actually really downsized our targets and we did that for everybody. But then

But then we just didn't do it deep enough, Mark. We should have probably reacted way stronger, way, you know, probably we were always, how it felt for me, we were always one quarter behind. Yeah, I'm thinking about this one. It's so hard. I mean, not only have I had it as an operator, but I've had it so many times as an investor. It's like, are you reading the tea leaves right? Are you overreacting or underreacting? Usually under. I think the main...

best practice and pattern on excellent execution here is managing your business through leading indicators. Because at the end of the day, you're going to be judged by your lagging indicators and your outputs. You're going to be judged by how fast is ARR growing? What is net dollar retention? How are customers happy? Are they renewing? Those are the outputs of all the work.

But if you can be running your operation based on the leading indicator activities of the sales activities that are leading to the pipeline and the pipeline that's leading to the forecast and the forecast that's leading to the revenue, oftentimes you'll see issues three quarters before everybody else notices in the outputs. And you can intervene.

And that's what I see about the best in class businesses is they are shining spotlight and obsessing over those leading indicators and reacting to those such that no one ever sees the pain and the changes and the pivots because they protected the outputs.

All right, let's get back to Karina. So we did have to have layoffs by the end of that year, but we were trying to hold the line as best as we could. We hired so many amazing people. We really did. And you just don't want to let go of that amazing workforce. Before we get to that part, because I think there are some companies that this is going to, you know, always the case. We have to, you know, unfortunately, the majority of seed funding startups need to go through a range like this.

But what about the training side? Because you knew the NEM 3 change was happening. How did you mobilize that quickly? Because the team's quite large at this time. It wasn't easy, you know, big changes and big shifts. And then you need to explain the product also better. We work very closely with our product teams also just to get all these changes into the product. Batteries really started to become very, very popular because what happened is

Instead of feeding directly to the grid, you would hold the electricity or you would hold your kilowattage in your battery and then feed back at the optimum time during the day where we get the most dollars for your kilowattage. And so battery attachments to solar installations is what spiked. But then you need to have a product that also can actually map that battery, our product org,

worked really hard to get that into the product as fast as possible so that we could go and then also have that in our solutions. Okay. So now it becomes real and you have to make some cuts and talk through that process. So, you know, in the industry, we don't talk much about it. And unfortunately, if you're a mature leader in this space, um,

Very likely you're going to be in this position at some point. The first step, so you want to know where you're right now, of course, in your revenue numbers, what a projection is going to look like for the next year. And then you need to just match the numbers to your workforce. And so that's a tough thing sometimes. In our situation, the industry was contracting by January.

40%. It's not, that's not, that's a lot. That's a lot. You also moved into multi-product. So you don't want to cut the energy and that, and you know, those, those really big, that innovation, all of that good stuff that happened there. Yeah.

So for us, a very big and important part was to discuss where do we need to make the cuts? Where are the strategic priorities of the company? And then alongside that, make those choices. And I'll be very concrete. Is it, are we going to continue our geographical expansion? Yes or no. So we were just about, we just launched in Europe, for example. We had just our first project.

great results in Germany and then do you stall that there? Do you refocus more on the US market? I'll give you another example. Do we go back to just our core elements and then we drop the future product developments?

Or do we more lean into that? Yes or no? And again, here, there was actually really hard discussions among the LT team. But of course, you pull the team in. I mean, you ask the team, you ask the customers, you get the feedback. I don't think you should have just be in your little leadership box and discuss amongst you. It's easy and it's comfortable. I get why it happens more than you would like. But then just going back to, you know, actually being back in, you know, with your frontline, with the...

You go back into a call with a marketer or an AE and you actually just experience what's actually happening right now. Helps you so much to get to that. So what are your strategic priorities? And you didn't have to match where you're going to have your workforce and where you're going to invest into. And then explaining it to your organization. Would you mind going into the details of how you even communicated that day? You've made a decision on X number of people on this particular day. Like, how do you do it?

Chris, our CEO, he was the one mainly communicating. Chris wanted to do it and...

Joe Sweeney, he's a great leader. He really transparently just communicated the strategy and where we're going to make, why we're going to make the cuts. On the first day, by the way, I'm going to be very tactical here. I'm just going to explain. In the first day, it's very hard. People are really shocked. And especially, you know, there might be a friend that all of a sudden is not there anymore or their job is impacted. So on the first day, it's all about being transparent, being very precise, being

letting people know who is impacted and who is not. And then the explaining actually for the people that are now still at the company. By the way, they don't feel great either. They actually feel remorse because they're surviving. They survived this. And so there is actually, you have to really take care not only of the people departing. And what we did is we actually went live

as much as we could one by one. So really then, you know, there's a lot of partnering with the people organization. And then you really want to make sure that in the next call, so you're going to have usually one call. If you're face-to-face, then you'll do it, of course, usually in an all-hands situation.

It's the next two to three meetings when you bring the company together, you really need to explain why and where, and then where also is the company still going. She's just highlighting some exceptional best practices on this very difficult situation. Okay. So first off, one, this is not about starting with the people and like who's good, who do we have to keep? It's starting with the strategy.

So this is more bottoms up than it is top down. This is not like, give me 100 people that we need to let go. This is not necessarily cut 20%. This is more of like a bottoms up of like, what should this business be given the reality of the macro? And then we can build the people around that. All too often, I see organizations that are built around people, not the strategy. Number two, the human element of this is devastating. You get to know these people.

You get to know their families and their situation. And it just can't come into play on this decision, even though it keeps you up at night. And it still haunts me to this day on some of the calls I've had to make. But in your position, your job is to the mission of the business and its survival. The human element is so challenging. And then three, once it's over, it's not done.

There are people that are still with you that are critical, that need to have a reset and be jazzed about what's ahead and why they're part of that mission. They need to be taken care of. And there's so many successful companies that had to go through this. That success is real and ahead of you. But those people need to be motivated and not go and looking for a job because they're worried. So that final phase is critical to the pivot phase.

and the future growth of that company.

Let's get back to Karina. We were very transparent when we made mistakes. If not cutting fast enough, not being always a quarter bit behind that. Those are the topics that we told our org. Being humble in that. As leaders, you want to be humble. Yeah. And then really actually repeating it. Repeating this is still our mission. This is where we're going to go. This is how we're excited for the next three years. This is where the outcomes are going to drive towards. Yeah.

and then getting the org excited again. So let's end on a more exciting note. Thank you for that transparency that is so helpful and valuable.

But yeah, what's next for Karina? So I'm right now on a family break. Wonderful. My husband asked me, Karina, you cannot work for at least six months. Wonderful. And I'm joking a bit because I did it once before and it did me the world. And what I mean by that is, you know, each company you join...

You usually give your all. You're so in there. And you do work really, really hard. These are hard sprints. They really are. And you really, I at least dove in so much into the solar world. For four years, all I was living and breathing was solar. And just to replenish, reflect, and

on my learnings that I had because you always learn, you always do, you stretch yourself. Also reflecting on the good, on the bad, and then you're just having a clean reset, you know? So, and then, you know, I want just to goof around with my children. I do want to say that I'm really excited

And I feel the same energy as I did when I moved from SAP, which was client server, to Salesforce, which was SaaS. And I'm showing a bit of my age and how long I've been in tech. This, what's going on right now with AI is,

is in so many ways, it's amazing. It's also a bit scary. There are so many meaty, exciting topics to explore. And I mean it on both sides as an operator, if you're not going into AI, but using all the tools that are out there now and all the technology. Mark, I'm going out and testing all of this. It's so exciting. Crazy. I feel very excited about this chapter because I think there are so many things to figure out. It's hard to compare

how big of a moment this is for humans. Yeah. And I'm just so excited for you too, to see where you end up and the impact that you're going to make and take all of your collective amazing career and experiences to go in that direction. So I think with that Karina, I wanted to say namaste. Thank you for

sharing the ups and downs of the roller coaster ride that we all go on. And sometimes we're not fully transparent about it. But you showed tremendous vulnerability and intelligence in the entire journey that you took. So

I just want to thank you for coming on the show today. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Mark. Namaste. Namaste, Karina. All right, that does it for today, folks. Our episode was written and produced by my favorite producer, Matthew Brown. Editing comes from Patrick Edwards.

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