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Interviewer: The Virginia House of Delegates 25th District’s seat now has two candidates. The seat is held by a Republican, Steve Landes, who is not seeking a re-election, but instead is running for Augusta County Court Clerk. Republicans recently chose Chris Runion as their nominee. He will face Democrat, Jennifer Kitchen, in the November election. The 25th House District includes parts of Albemarle, Augusta, and Rockingham Counties. And joining us is Democrat, Jennifer Kitchen. She is an Augusta County resident, and native, and a community organizer. Thanks for being with us.

Jennifer Kitchen: Absolutely, thank you for having me.

Interviewer: So, why are you running for the Virginia House of Delegates?

Jennifer Kitchen: So, there are a lot of reasons why I chose to run, most of which is that I am a mother of two. I am, of course, a rural Virginia native, and I’ve chosen to raise my family here in rural Virginia, and I am tired and I am frustrated that rural Virginians’ priorities aren’t being heard and represented in Richmond.

Interviewer: Okay. What are your qualifications?

Jennifer Kitchen: As a community organizer, I’ve been having these conversations with residents of the district for years. I’ve been listening to their problems, helping them to come together and join resources, and actually move forward to solve the issues that they have and move forward to living in a community that they want.

Interviewer: Okay. For some that maybe aren’t familiar with your community organizing efforts, can you give us an example?

Jennifer Kitchen: Sure. I’m the Founder and President of SAW Citizen Action Network.

Interviewer: SAW stands for…

Jennifer Kitchen: Staunton, Augusta, Waynesboro.

Interviewer: … Staunton, Augusta, Waynesboro. Okay.

Jennifer Kitchen: And we are a social justice group. We bring people together around issues. We’ve organized around March for Our Lives and we’ve organized around the lawsuit that was brought against the Juvenile Detention Center in Verona last year.

Interviewer: Okay. Biggest issues for you in the race.

Jennifer Kitchen: So, one of the biggest issues that we’re facing here in rural Virginia is access to broadband internet. It’s holding us back in education, it’s holding us back in industry, and it’s holding us back in health care as it’s becoming more and more necessary to have internet access to transfer medical records.

Interviewer: So, what do you do about that, though? Because obviously, if the companies have the incentives to, or if there is enough density, they would be running all sorts of wires too, though.

Jennifer Kitchen: Sure. So, I’ve been attending the Augusta County Broadband Committee meetings. And there has been a lot of work going into getting people to the table, people that are working with Comcast, who are working with Dominion, who are working with the Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative. It’s going to need to be a cooperative effort. We know that there are some pieces of the infrastructure that are already there, but because of our very unique topography, we’re going to have to be looking at, sort of, a multi-step solution.
There are going to be areas where we can run fiber on existing electrical cables. There are places or companies like Comcast have fibers already laid, that they may be able to lease out for other internet service providers. And then, we’re also going to have to be able to look at fixed wireless transmitters in areas where laying fibers is just not going to be an option.

Interviewer: Okay. Does it need state incentives or state subsidies for it to happen?

Jennifer Kitchen: Absolutely. And the Governor has committed to a 10-year plan. There are different localities who have received grant money, matching grant money moving forward, but we’re going to have to make that more accessible to rural communities. And we’re going to have to make sure that when these contracts are put out there for people to bid that they aren’t only bidding on urban areas where the projects are going to be easier. We’re going to have to make sure that they are also focusing on prioritizing rural areas at the same level.

Interviewer: Okay. Other issues.

Jennifer Kitchen: Other issues are, of course, are infrastructure and looking towards Interstate 81. That’s something that we’re moving forward on. I’ve also endorsed the Virginia Green New deal which is something that’s going to bring a lot of green energy jobs and a lot of money towards local farms in our area, and give farmers the opportunity to diversify their operations and look into investing in things like solar and wind in order to make more money so that they can hang on to their farms, in a lot of cases, they’ve had in their families for generations.

Interviewer: Okay. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Jennifer Kitchen: One of the other things that I’d like for us to look much more seriously at is industrial hemp. Industrial hemp is a carbon-negative plant. It’s great for soil remediation. It can be used for fiber. It can be used to replace a lot of different plastics. And it can also be used as a fuel source.

Interviewer: I believe that industrial hemp has been moving forward, right?

Jennifer Kitchen: It has, but we need to make sure that there’s money there available for these farmers to be able to make that initial investment so that they can grow their own operations.

Interviewer: Okay. Jennifer Kitchen, the Democratic nominee for the Virginia House 25th District’s seat. Thanks for being with us.

Jennifer Kitchen: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Interviewer: And Friday, we’ll talk with the Republican nominee, Chris Runion.

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So, now that you’re actually saying, “All right, time to find go-to-market fit,” what is go-to-market fit? What are the three parts? So, the first part is, are you lined up on an urgent wave? That answers the question, why now and not six months from now? If the answer is, maybe a year from now, you haven’t found that urgent wave. The second thing is your go-to-market model. How are you going to sell? There are certain go-to-market models that are in Vogue or Style, like, hey, we’re going to do freemium, or hey…

(00:38):
There’s lots of sales models. You can do direct, indirect, channel, web, premium, blend, expand upsell, marketing-led, sales-led, no touch. There’s all sorts of versions of this. There’s no right or wrong answer here. The only thing is there’s the right answer for you. So, you got to pick your sales model. The third part of this is your go-to-market playbook, which is, how do you repeatably find and win customers? Let’s drill into this first part about finding urgency.

(01:09):
One of the terrific things about founders is your passion and hyperfocus on achieving your mission. The trick here is that’s both a strength and it can be a weakness, which is that… And I was working with a startup in San Jose, where the VP of engineering, one of the founders came in and said, “We are just going to ruthlessly focus on our bullseye and be 100% behind that and put all our wood behind that arrow. And we’ve won five customers, so that must mean we found it.”

(01:42):
The question I asked was, “What if you’re wrong?” You put 100% of your wood behind that arrow, you’re dead. So, there’s an irony here, which is sort of the meme about being 100% ruthlessly focused is sort of true, but sort of not true. This is some of the challenges of being an early-stage founder finding a go-to-market fit, is that instead, what you need to do is cast a slightly wider net. A little bit to the left, a little bit to the right in terms of a slightly different customer. A little bit up, a little bit down in terms of a slightly different pain point.

(02:20):
And be open to and test these adjacencies because the hotspot that you eventually point at and focus on may not actually be your founding idea. I’ll tell you sort of the MobileIron story on this one. When we first went out to go sell to customers, we had this belief that we were going to solve the management security problem to enable enterprises adopt mobile as a first-class citizen, and we built this multi-OS security and policy engine that we were really proud of. Well, we won some customers that wanted to use it to save some costs.

(03:03):
That was cool, we won a couple customers there. But then, we started to see a bunch of customers that said, “You know what? Actually, I just need your help with iPhone. All that other stuff, I don’t really care about. I just need your help with iPhone.” And we were like, “But what about this other big thing?” And they were like, “No, we just need your help with iPhone.” We started to win some deals over there. So, we started to see as like darts on the board, casting a slightly wider net. And we realized is that our initial founding idea was not the hotspot.

(03:34):
The hotspot was a little bit to the right. I’ll tell you what that felt like, which ties to something Tee said, which is that it felt like heresy. It felt like we were being heretical. It was actually kind of hard emotionally to say, “Well, maybe this sort of founding idea that we were super proud of may not actually be the hotspot we focus on.” Be open to the adjacencies. Your hotspot may or may not be what you initially thought it was. Once you figure out your hotspot, the question is, how do you sell to them?

(04:14):
The important thing here is that early-stage startups can only do one go-to-market model. You can experiment with a couple, but in order to unlock growth, you get one. It’s just too hard for an early-stage startup trying to win customers to do multiple go-to-markets. Just can’t do it. The question is, what are the choices and how do you choose? So, there’s a spectrum. On the left is a sort of full-touch, heavy sales model, where you’re doing a lot of direct touch to customers. We call that sales-led. That was MobileIron actually.

(04:50):
Marketing did a little bit of lead generation. Sales kicked in and took over most of the playbook. In the middle, you have sort of a medium touch, or a low touch, where marketing does the front-end of the go-to-market motion, and then like inside sales takes over and close the deal. That’s more like Marketo. Then you have the far right, which is zero-touch, which is like Atlassian or Twilio, or SendGrid, where literally, customers just buy themselves. They don’t have any salespeople.

(05:21):
I’ll tell you, on the right is in Vogue right now. Venture capitalists love that to the right because you don’t have to spend any money on sales and marketing. So, you’re going to get pressure to say, “Go do that.” That may or may not be the right answer for you and your product. If it’s the wrong answer, you’re actually killing your company.