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Why you must build a moat around early customers, according to Benchling’s CEO and co-founder



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Benchling’s unicorn status didn’t come overnight. Some ten years after its founding, the company is worth more than $6 billion, and the founder sees the company going public in the future. The company’s future looks like its past: talking to customers and building for power users. To that end, Benchling announced today that it recently surpassed 1,000 customers and increased its subscription revenue 90% year-over-year. It has new executive leadership, too, including the appointment of Atlassian-veteran Stephen Deasy as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer.
Benchling’s CEO and co-founder, Sajith Wickramasekara, recently spoke at a TechCrunch Live event along with one of its early investors, Miles Grimshaw, general partner at Benchmark. Together, the two explained Benchling’s early strategy that tapped a small entry market, which eventually led to widespread adoption.
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As Wickramasekara explained, early funding was hard to s …

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