The meeting was scheduled for 3 PM on a Tuesday in 2018. I still remember the wood grain pattern on the conference table where I traced nervous circles with my finger while three board members explained why Concord needed to “go enterprise or go home.”
“Matt, you’re leaving money on the table,” one investor said, sliding a competitor analysis across the table. “Every successful CLM company goes upmarket. That’s where the real valuations are.”
He wasn’t wrong. Back then, the Silicon Valley playbook was clear: start with SMBs, then march steadily upmarket until you’re closing seven-figure enterprise deals. Salesforce did it. Workday did it. Why shouldn’t we?
Here’s the thing they didn’t understand: I’d spent six months of my life manually tracking vendor contracts at a $5 billion telecom company in France. I’d built that infamous Excel spreadsheet with 52 columns and 500 rows. I knew firsthand how enterprise companies operated—layers of bureaucracy, six-month implementations, and software so complex you needed a PhD to navigate it.
That wasn’t the company I wanted to build.
The Pressure to Please Everyone
For the first few years of Concord, I made a fundamental mistake: I tried to please too many gods. When one board member pushed for enterprise features, we’d build them. When another wanted SMB simplicity, we’d try to maintain that too. When someone suggested a new integration that only 1% of our customers would use, we’d add it to the roadmap.
The result? We became what I call a “Cheesecake Factory” product—a massive menu where you can’t be good at everything. We had features hidden three layers deep that even our own team forgot existed.
By 2020, we had an almost perfect three-way split: one-third SMB customers, one-third mid-market, one-third enterprise. On paper, this looked like success. In reality, it was killing us. We were burning cash trying to serve everyone, and serving no one particularly well.
The Moment of Truth
COVID changed everything. As companies worldwide scrambled to manage contracts remotely, demand for CLM software exploded. But we were hemorrhaging money, spread too thin across too many market segments. We had to make cuts, let people go during an already difficult time, and face some hard truths.
I remember another board meeting, this one over Zoom in late 2020. The pressure was mounting to double down on enterprise—after all, they had bigger budgets, longer contracts, and could weather the economic uncertainty better.
“Matt, this is your chance,” the same investor said. “Enterprise companies need you now more than ever.”
That’s when I finally found my voice.
“No,” I said. “We’re done trying to the everything to everyone. We’re going to focus on SMB and mid-market, and we’re going to be the best in the world at it.”
The silence on the Zoom call was deafening.
The Fallout
I won’t sugarcoat it—the next few months were brutal. One investor questioned whether I had the “vision” to build a billion-dollar company. Another suggested bringing in a “professional CEO” with enterprise experience.
But here’s what they didn’t see: 90% of our contracts were being signed with zero negotiation. SMB and mid-market companies didn’t want six-month implementations and complex contract workflows—they wanted something they could set up in an afternoon and start using immediately.
We started removing features instead of adding them. We killed developments that were already built but added complexity without value. We redesigned our pricing to be transparent and self-serve instead of hiding it behind a “Contact Sales” button. We focused on making our platform so simple that my grandmother could use it—the same design philosophy that made the iPhone revolutionary.
The Validation
Today, Concord serves over 1,500 companies, or we’re profitable. More importantly, we’re building the company we set out to build—one that makes contract management accessible to businesses that can’t afford six-figure enterprise solutions or lengthy implementations.
Here’s what I’ve learned: Your investors are smart people with valuable perspectives, but they’re pattern matching based on what’s worked before. They’re not in the trenches with your customers every day. They don’t feel the pain of complexity like you do.
The enterprise playbook works for many companies, but it wasn’t right for us. When I look at successful SMB-focused companies, I see the path we almost missed because I was too busy trying to please everyone.
Lessons for Founders
If you’re a founder facing similar pressure, here’s my advice:
Write down your vision early. My biggest regret is not creating a proper founder’s manifesto when we started. Every time you face a difficult decision, you should be able to return to that north star.
Embrace constructive conflict. The best board members will challenge you, and that’s good. But there’s a difference between healthy debate and trying to fundamentally change your company’s DNA.
Trust your gut. If enterprise was in my DNA, we would have pivoted successfully. But it wasn’t. I’d lived that world, and I knew I wanted to build something different. When 65-70% of your customers don’t even have legal teams, forcing them through a contract compliance audit process designed for Fortune 500s makes no sense.
Less is more. The most valuable thing I do now as CEO is remove things—features, processes, complexity. My developers laugh because I’ve gone from the guy demanding “just 10 more lines of code” to the one killing features we’ve already built.
That boardroom “betrayal” in 2018—saying no to the conventional wisdom—saved our company. Not because going enterprise is wrong (it’s absolutely right for many startups), but because it was wrong for us.
Sometimes the bravest thing you can do as a founder is to stop trying to please everyone and start building the company you actually want to run.
Your board might not thank you in the moment. But your customers will. And in the end, that’s what really matters.
Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Before founding Concord, Matt worked with Nicholas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential campaign and later for a major telecom company, where his frustration with manual contract management inspired him to transform how businesses handle agreements.
