André Christ: The Dark Side of SaaS, SaaS Management, Security & Control #137

This episode is sponsored by the Financial Due Diligence Framework course. If you're doing any type of financial analysis and participate in M&A, strategy, or turnaround projects, you absolutely need to check out this course. By completing this comprehensive video course, you'll be strongly armed to analyze the P&L of any company and to be able to provide actionable, insightful reports. This course teaches you how to properly understand the methodology of how to conduct thorough financial analysis and what is important in financial due diligence. If you're looking for a career in transaction services in one of the Big 4, in a transaction services boutique, or to be a better private equity professional or M&A associate, you'll get a solid foundation to land your next job. And as a special offer, if you use the code SaaS District, you'll get $100 off the entire course made specifically for our listeners. So if you're interested, go check out horizoncapital.com/learn-due-diligence. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about the dark side of SaaS, SaaS management, security, and controls. Today we have our guest Andrei Christ joining us. Andrei is the co-founder and CEO at LeanIX, a SaaS for managing enterprise architecture and multi-cloud environments for better, faster, data-driven decision-making. Andrei is passionate about enabling companies to build better products and transition to a modern IT architecture, and he's experienced as a management consultant. And during his studies of information science, he built modern software for both startups and large enterprises. He's a global thought leader and has spoken at several high-influence industry events, including the Gartner EA Summit, Hamburg IT Strategy Days, and Rethink. So welcome, Andrej. Super excited to have you on the SaaS District show today.

Thank you, Akeel. I'm excited to be part of the show, and it's a pleasure to speak to you today.

So I want to get right into kind of the concept which you speak a lot about, which is called the dark side of SaaS, which, you know, it's not highly spoken of, and it's kind of the challenges, you know, CIOs face, CFOs, and IT leaders. Can you speak to our people listening in, our audience? What exactly is the dark side of SaaS?

Yeah, I think it's always about 2 sides of the coin. First of all, I love SaaS because the huge ecosystem provides endless possibilities to increase productivity or to improve customer experience. And you can evaluate and get a SaaS solution in place super fast. But this comes with the other side of the coin. Which is questions about employee productivity. Are all the SaaS solutions really used? Cost efficiency. Do you really need all those subscriptions you have purchased? And security. If you log into your systems, is that secured through single sign-on? Because SaaS is purchased often in a decentral way, so everyone can buy it with a credit card, you easily lose track of all the SaaS solutions. So that results in the need to actually keep that transparency in an automated way. And this is where we now come in and help organizations figuring that out. So it's a massive problem. We experience this ourselves at LeanIX, where we have like 400 employees, $1.8 million in IT spend just for SaaS. So easily, if you look at that, we're paying roughly $5,000 per employee per year. So the problem easily gets substantial.

Yeah. Who would think about that, right? Just how quickly it adds up as you start adding it and everybody using their own kind of platform that they need for their own job. Yeah. Speaking more about LeanIX, for those who also don't know, what is enterprise architect management, SaaS intelligence, microservice intelligence? I mean, and why is that important for SaaS founders to understand even myself?

Yeah, let's, let's talk about enterprise architecture management first. The key idea here is to enable companies to transform their IT landscape and manage risk. What does this mean? It means understanding the enterprise on multiple levels, from the strategy level over the business architecture, the applications, and down to the technical level. So you can imagine that there's like a big initiative going on that the company wants to become more multichannel. So that's kind of part of the strategy. It breaks down into new capabilities to deliver the multichannel. So for example, adding mobile sales or potential ways to purchase services via phones and so on. You need specific applications for that. And in the end, you need technology to power this. So enterprise architecture gives you this holistic picture and then helps you take decisions how you come to this target state. This helps you, for example, if you launch new products, if you merge businesses, if you implement different strategic platforms into your landscapes, or if you need to modernize your legacy IT stack. So that's all around enterprise architecture. And it's relevant mostly for companies starting with a specific complexity. SaaS management, or what we call SaaS intelligence, is all around discovering software as a service and optimizing cost and productivity. So addressing some of the challenges I mentioned earlier. Microservice intelligence is more on the side of product teams who build own software for example, as part of a software as a service a company is providing. Easily today, as teams are building more and more smaller software components on different tools and using toolchains like CI/CD or even low-code, no-code platforms, it is so much harder to lose track of all what is built. With Microservice Intelligence, We're helping those companies to keep track of all their software they're building, their services, and ensure that the team's getting productive and that the software they're producing is reliable. So if you think about like those 3 topics, they go all the way from making sure that the software you're purchasing on the market is in a good state, like the software as a service, that you actually transform and improve your existing IT landscape, and that the software you're building, for example, for your own products, that that is reliable and your team has a great output. So these are the 3 topics which are specifically important, I believe, for growing companies and what LeanIX is today tackling.

You know, I just want to dig deeper into the idea of, you know, SaaS intelligence, you know, where you're optimizing, you're managing your subscriptions, where We have so many softwares across so many different employees, but it's super powerful in terms of tracking improvement, adoption, optimization, your cost. But is this kind of solution for everybody, or would you say, is there a certain stage or type of SaaS company that they start looking at a solution like this and why?

Yeah, look, like I mentioned before, at a company size where you have maybe 100 or 150 employees, you start to have a significant sum of money going into SaaS subscriptions. We see, and this is proven also by market figures, you end up around like $4,000 to $5,000 per employee per year. So this ends up in a significant cost. So I believe that the topic around SaaS management starts to become super relevant in this in this range of 100 to 150 employees, because then if you systematically manage it, you can actually not only generate cost savings, because that is, I feel, the trap here. It's not just about saving money. It's also about ensuring that the solutions you get from the market, that they are really used. So I, as a CEO of a fast-scaling SaaS company, I have an interest that the tools we've put in place, that they are really used. Because in the end, it means also we are following the processes. So a simple example, many companies use Salesforce as their CRM. But if you see that out of, like, let's say, the 50 salespeople you have, only 40 salespeople log into Salesforce on a regular basis, something seems to be fundamentally wrong.

Right.

So for fast-growing SaaS companies, it's not just about, or it's specifically not about just cutting costs. It's about ensuring productivity. And the other topic is, if we as a company go to market, our customers ask us to be compliant. For example, be SOC 2 compliant or ISO compliant. In order to do that, you need to make sure you have certain controls in place. And one of the topics is to make sure you have only users and employees in your systems who are still active and are with the company. So you cannot afford to have people accessing your crucial data who have left the business or changed roles. So that's why with SaaS management platforms, you can identify those SaaS systems in your business which haven't been secured, for example, with a single sign-on solution. So it's, it's not a cost topic. It's also a part of how do I grow my business. And that's why I believe It plays a role on the agenda of a CEO.

That makes perfect sense. So if I'm a SaaS founder and I have 100, 150 employees, I'm kind of getting into that stage. Can you maybe share some best practices so maybe that they can start optimizing their overall SaaS management productivity?

Yeah, look, I think the first best practice here is often like the rule of 20/80. So what we see is that 20% of the SaaS applications sum up to 80% of the cost. So if you think about Salesforce, Office 365, or G Suite, then many companies have HubSpot in place early on, and then they might roll out Slack or Zoom. So if you focus first, really prioritized by the number of users or the spend, and then think about optimizing them, I think that's For that, that's the, the very fundamental way to do it. The other is be careful of not establishing too many manual processes. So for example, having a person running around behind all the people and trying to understand for who is using what SaaS and so on. So that is not a scalable approach. You need to put in place a way to automatically detect changes in those SaaS systems and also understand if someone has like purchased a new subscription. So that's an important thing. And third is with SaaS, we have now this whole topic about renewals. So you probably know this, often a week after you've renewed the software, it's almost like striking, oh my God. So if we would have looked at this renewal a couple of weeks earlier, we've renewed the software for like $30K, $50K, $100K for the next 12 months. But we have, we have, we have not seen the value of it. So we could have downsized the cost if we have only known before, or we could have gone to the vendor and say like, we want to expand, give us a better rate for the next 12 months because we're increasing the usage. So typically getting the renewal dates right is a crucial step because there's a lot of, there's a lot of potential in there too.

Nice. And what about on security? Because I know we mentioned that at the beginning of the show. Do you have any kind of recommendations or best practices on the SaaS security and any insights you can share there?

Yeah, look, I think our key use case is to provide visibility which SaaS systems are connected into single sign-on today. I believe with solutions like Okta, OneLogin, or Azure AD, or other single sign-on providers, it is mandatory that as a company you early on start adding your SaaS solutions into single sign-on. I know from our history at LeanIX, we have started this after a while and made sure that all the critical systems are in there and it has paid off because as you grow as a company, you have more employees coming in. And join the business. And if you are going for a SOC 2 certification or an ISO certification, you need to do a regular access review, and that can become a very painful and manual process the more SaaS systems are not connected to a single sign-on provider. So that's something I would really recommend to establish early on, even if you're only using a few SaaS systems. But if you intend to build a big, huge technology business, adding a lot of employees, I think you're better off putting that in place early on.

And who's generally the person who's managing that role? So you have a lot of people coming in and out, giving access, setting them up and making sure when people leave, You know, you're managing that. Is there somebody you kind of like to define that, you know, this is your kind of role and should be taking that on and keeping track?

Yeah, it's a good question. And this role probably evolves over the growth of a business. Typically, you have a sysadmin who takes care of rolling out laptops or email accounts new employees and also make sure that those are decommissioned. So in the early days, you have also maybe someone looking at your internal support desk. Later, you have people in your finance department who take care of the cost. So those are the initial like 2, 3 people who have a genuine interest in it. We at LeanIX, for example, we have added a head of information security over time who took care of our compliance. So that person has an interest too. So that's like, I would say, the initial group which drives forward the interest. So it's clearly not just an IT topic, but it's also a security and a finance topic. And over time, of course, it is in the interest of the CFO to set up good IT procurement team, and for the CIO in an organization to set up a good InfoSec and IT management team, making sure that all the business systems the company has is actually under good control.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And then switching gears, talking more about the microservice intelligence. So we hear organizations are taking approaches where They're using spreadsheets to manage it, or they're building their own catalog like LinkedIn or Spotify. Would you say this is the best practice, or is it better? And what is the advantage of using a third-party solution versus that way?

Yeah, look, I mean, if you are a LinkedIn or Spotify or maybe also a Netflix, you have a ton of resources and you have a big team to actually spend time and money on developing such solutions. What I always say is, like, not every company is a LinkedIn, Spotify, or Netflix, and you should not reinvent the wheel. Especially now, cloud-native architectures and microservices are part of this new wave. It's becoming mainstream. So it's no longer that you should be venturing in an area where there's not so much tooling around. So what we see is there's many, many standards establishing in this space. Kubernetes is one of the most prominent examples of it, which is more or less like a de facto standard of how to run microservices. So as much as you also don't build your environment to run microservices, for example, with Kubernetes, you also don't want to kind of build a solution to manage all the information around your microservices in your company. And this is where actually then LinaX as an example comes in. And instead of you putting that into an own catalog or putting that into a Confluence in a manual way, LeanIX helps you to do that in a very automated fashion. So you can capture the information where they are created. So in the CI/CD toolchains, in the source code repositories, extracting them from monitoring tools, from security tools. So the, the big push here is to make sure that engineers and developers have more time building great products and do not waste their time in documenting the stuff they are building. I think this is an important aspect of it.

Any other challenges you see, like when, you know, from the tech implementation side of having all these microservices within your business?

Yeah, look, I think there's always those waves in IT, right? So there's a wave of consolidating and going to bigger systems. We've seen that like 10, 15 years ago where the big idea was, let's put larger ERP systems into place. Now we have this big push towards more fine granular services, microservices who are connecting to each other via APIs. I think the truth is it's very important to decide what's the best pattern for the job. For example, we at LeanIX started in a more monolithic way initially. We didn't start with microservices in the first place when we were a very, very small company. This allowed us to very fast iterate with a small team on one product. As we're now branching out, of course, we want to divide and conquer the problem. We have now teams who actually build their separate microservices. But this comes at a cost of coordination. as you have interfaces who need to communicate to each other, teams need to align on them. So it's always that question of like, how should you cut your microservice? I believe personally that there's no other way around cutting software into microservices as you grow and as you scale, but you need to be clever about what is the right cut of it. Because easily, if you end up with too many microservices for size of the team, it can be also quite challenging and overhead of maintaining all of the dependencies and all of the different assets. So I think that is probably not so much a tech challenge. It's much more, let's say, an organisatorical challenge of it.

Yeah, that makes sense. Andre, you know, I think, you know, something I came across is that you guys made an acquisition of a company called Clean Shelf. You know, especially at Horizon Capital, you know, we're part of, you know, we do a lot of M&A, and we understand kind of the strategic part of, you know, taking on a company. From your perspective, what was the strategic fit that you guys thought of, and what was the thesis and objective of that acquisition? And if there's any data you can share, that'd be helpful as well.

Of course. Yeah, look, so we are observing the space very carefully since more than 2 years now, especially with the fast adoption of software as a service, not only in cloud-born companies like us, but also now in enterprises. It was very clear to me that there needs to be an increase of automation around this topic about how is SaaS managed. When we started originally, our products were centered all around this idea. We need a single place where you can have a view on all the applications the company is using. Now with software as a service, it becomes harder because you can buy it quicker. It is bought more decentrally by different business units, and it's good so. So that's why it was always clear to me that over time we need to become more intelligent about discovering software as a service and helping organizations optimize it. And that's why we were excited to partner with CleanShelf and then actually execute the acquisition because the technology of CleanShelf had been developed for a couple of years. They had very good proof in the market, not only for small cloud born companies, but also for larger enterprise customers who have used the technology and, and tested it. So that, that's where the strategic fit comes from. So it allows us as a company not only to deliver additional value to our now more than 500 customers, but it also opens up for us a way to help smaller organizations to manage their landscapes. And they might not be yet ready for a full-fledged enterprise architecture, but they still need to manage their software as a service. So it's actually like a win-win for everyone. And that's why we were excited to complete this acquisition in the beginning of the year.

That was this year in 2021?

Yeah, exactly. That was like in this year and maybe to share share some data on it. So CleanShelf is actually 4 years, or was 4 years in the market. So there was a lot of experience building the technology with machine learning, discovering the data from different data sources, and then matching them against the SaaS catalog. And now with CleanShelf, we have at LeanIX 3 more offices in Ljubljana, in San Francisco, and Denver. We actually got 40 new very skilled colleagues from CleanChef who are now part of LeanIX and more than 4,000 integrations with SaaS solutions which allow us to dig deeper into these products. And of course, this provides our customers now a million of opportunities to actually use SaaS in a more productive way and optimize their portfolios. So we believe it's a great fit for us.

So the fit wasn't— and the play there wasn't entirely financial play. It was more, you know, hey, this is the team, this is the product, it fits really, really well, and this is how it's going to enhance the value of what we offer to our existing users, right?

Exactly. So I think it's a very strategic fit to what we are trying to achieve. And we were excited that there has been great proof in the market by the team already, a proven technology, a go-to-market which is established. And now we have paired this up with our go-to-market teams in order to deliver more value to our customers and prospects.

Cool. So, I mean, you're probably still in the kind of integration phase and trying to get things kind of sorted out. How's that been so far with the overall challenges of the whole organization and fitting them in?

Yeah, I think we've been fairly quick. on the integration side because CleanChef is so complementary to what we do at LeanIX. So we early on had a clear vision of how it would fit into our existing product offerings and what we would give to our customers. So the 2 big things we're providing now and working on is making sure that not only we have a new standalone product, but also that our existing customers benefit from the Discover capability. So essentially every customer we have who is using our Enterprise Architecture Suite automatically gets Discover functionality already as of today, and everyone can actually use that already. And in the upcoming weeks, we are now enabling that the data from the discovery is showing up in real time in their inventory, so their view on the application landscape. And this is kind of on the technical part. So there has been immediate value by providing them with the scanning and discover capabilities. And the step which is now conceptually completed and now for delivery in the next couple of weeks is to make sure the data flows in. And on the commercial side, we have gathered a lot of great experience now of the go-to-market teams selling the solution to new customers and showing it to our existing customers. So there's been countless demos. So the team has been, has been very, very busy showing, showing the new solution.

Cool. And just one kind of final question on that. Was that a decision made from, you know, you as a CEO to say, like, what's out there? We need this solution to fit in. And this was an active decision to go out there and see, you know, what's applicable? Or was this something that kind of came your way and you were like, you know, maybe we should explore this. This could be a good fit. You know, because the reason why I asked this, because maybe there's founders who are building products right now and, you know, obviously at some point they want to get acquired or, you know, exit. You know, is that something how they should be thinking is like, you know, we build a really good product, we will get noticed, or should we say, you know, when we're at some point we should go out and look for the right fit?

Yeah. So look, in this case, so like I explained, we had a map of the functionality which we wanted to kind of own and not partner with third parties. So it was always clear to us we would either have to build it ourselves or to buy it from the market. And over the last couple of years, LinaX has raised $120 million from companies like, including Insight Partners or Goldman Sachs. And part of that investment rounds we've done was it allowed us to actually accelerate our roadmap. And therefore I reached out and evaluated a number of solutions And eventually then we found out, reaching out through an investor network, created the contact to the founder of Clean Shelf, Dusan. And in that case, we started speaking and it was good timing on both ends. And this is how it started. So I think in this case, it was a reach out through investors, which obviously sometimes also a great way of doing that. But of course, I've seen other ways where companies who are like, want to go to market, they do it actively too. But probably for the setup in our case, it was great that the timing fitted well together.

Love it. No, thanks, Hugh. That's very helpful. Andrei, I want to switch towards kind of more the personal side, trying to understand you, your background, how you got to where you are today. You know, in a quick kind of couple of words, can you share Kind of what's your background opportunity you saw in the market, right? You're a management consultant, but you saw like, hey, like we want to tackle this and we want to build and launch, you know, LeanIX, you know, years ago.

Yeah, look, I started LeanIX, co-founded the company 10 years ago. Before that time, I worked a number of years at a global logistics company, DHL. And there I saw the challenge that if you, if you're transforming your IT landscape, you need to deal with a lot of dependencies Because you sometimes have a number of global systems in place and they are connected to countless local systems in the countries you're operating in. So if you imagine you want to upgrade one of those systems, well, then what do you do with all those dependencies? You need to understand them. And then I looked to the market and together with my co-founder, we said like, okay, there's plenty of opportunity to optimize this. And this is how we got started. in the early days. So it was clearly from the practical view that there's a big problem, and this problem is only going to become more relevant as the digital transformation is going on. And then we saw into the category of tools, which is existing for us. So we didn't create like a— or it wasn't a greenfield opportunity. It was much more looking into a category which we thought was probably rather broken at the time. And then we thought about how can we fix this category and make it much, much better. And so this is how it kind of started.

Very cool. And then, you know, so you're part of the founding team, management team, you know, CEO, and now you're managing 400+ employees. How do you measure your own leadership success within your own team?

Yeah, look, it's probably a very, very difficult question to measure it. I mean, At LeanIX, of course, you can look at it from different perspectives. If I look into the last, like, 18 months during the pandemic, we at LeanIX have been able to create more than 220 jobs in our company and have been able to get on board some of the most skilled people in some of our areas. And I'm quite proud that in these times. Now we kind of have more and more people employed at LeanIX than we had employees before the pandemic started. So I think this emphasizes that we can help organizations become more digital, drive forward the whole digital transformation, and getting that opportunity, getting to that opportunity and making that happen. I think that is what I measure leadership success to. So how can we have an impact on the success of our customers? And again, there are so many ways of measuring it. So you can measure it by the Net Promoter Score for how your company, how your customers evaluate yourself, by the company value towards our shareholders, for our investors, by the feedback of our employees. How they like it at the company. So there are so many like different metrics to look at. But overall, if I think about it, then it's always like, how can we how can we have an impact on on what companies do and and how can we increase that impact over time? And so looking at the last eighteen months, I'm convinced that we we can actually help organizations really move faster. Becoming more digital, becoming more insightful on how they manage their IT.

Yeah, I love that as a core, right? So you have your goal of, you know, your lag indicator, your lag goal of, you know, value and impact, but then you kind of reverse that into, you know, your lead indicators, which is gonna be your NPS score, your churn, your LTV. So the longer they stick around, the more they, you know, expand and, you know, stick around, you see, okay, well, this is actually working, we're actually onto something, and you wanna, it gets you excited to keep building more onto it, right? Yeah, that makes sense.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah, Andrei, if you were to start again today, what are some opportunities, right? You saw this when you were working with UPS, was it? Or sorry, DHL?

DHL, yeah.

DHL, and you saw this opportunity clearly within— now years later, you're pretty familiar with the market. If you were to start all over again today, maybe some opportunity for a new founder listening in could tackle in the SaaS industry, what would you suggest to them to look at?

Yeah, look, I think it has served us really well to solve a problem which we have experienced. I think there was always founder teams who like screen the market to understand what problems are out there and then think about the problem, what is like the most promising problem and then approach this. Like, I can only speak about solving a problem which I've experienced, and I'm super passionate about that it's relevant.

Sure.

So I think that for me is an important indicator. When we started at LeanIX, many people told us, so why on earth would you want to go in that small category? It doesn't make sense. There are vendors in it. It's not sexy. It's really like, it hasn't grown. So we faced a lot of objections to what we were doing, not only from like friends or family or like investors who like didn't believe in it, but I think we were passionate about the space and about the problem. And we knew that it's a real thing. So I think sometimes like believing in really what this problem is all about instead of just going by like an analytical way of where can you build a profitable business and exit it fast. So I'm now in this journey since 10 years. So it's not that we have started and architected this business for like a fast exit or fast return. So, but we're architecting this for the longer run.

Yeah.

So for getting to the bigger picture and really found a technology company which has a big impact in the world. And so this is kind of what I would say, what I would do again. If I, out of the many topics which I would do differently, pick one, I think I only learned about Objectives and Key Results as a way to manage a company, as a business, probably like 3 years ago. So quite far in the journey. I can only remember— only recommend to other founders to start earlier with it. So I think at a company size of like 20 to 30 employees, it already makes sense. So if I had only like known about it earlier, it was— if it was more prominent, it would have been a bit better. So that's the one learning. The other learning is at LeanIX, we did 3 years of bootstrapping. So for the first 3 years, it was only the 2 founders and one other employee. That was hurting us a lot in terms of how do we get the culture across in the rest of the team. So this is what I would do differently. Bootstrapping is great, but don't do it for like 3 years. So that's too long.

Yeah. OKRs, Objective Key Results. That's a fantastic tool. If you're not already implementing that, start doing that today. A great book that I recommend if people are interested to learn more is called Measure What Matters: OKRs, the Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth by John Doerr. You've read it? Yeah, yeah, that's a great book if somebody's looking to, you know, kind of get in. Uh, that's, that's a good book. Um, Andre, kind of moving, you know, rapid-fire questions. Um, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known? And, you know, looking, going back in time, you would tell your, say, 25-year-old self?

Yeah, look, I I founded or co-founded LinaX when I was like 30, and I always played with this idea of founding a company. So I think I was always already in touch with the whole SaaS ecosystem. I would have loved to have a bit of a deeper view into it. So that is something. So it took us It took us a while to actually dig into all of that, to open up. So I was almost like after 4 years working for a great company, DHL, I was almost like away in a different path, like in the corporate world. And it was a bit like here and there by chance to actually open up the mindset again for SaaS, for technology companies, for all of that. if I would tell something to my 25-year-old self, it would've been like, while working in a corporate, which was a great education, it was very, very important to me personally, but be more open to what's happening left and right in the startup ecosystem. So that's probably some advice I would give myself because you easily get like, Yeah, sucked into a certain career path if you are not like careful about it.

Exactly. Yeah, that's advice I actually give to a lot of maybe entrepreneurs who are looking to get into SaaS is like, you know, go work for a startup, go work in SaaS, understand it, work with a high-growth company, what it's like, the ins and outs of that kind of life. And then I think that'll open up a lot, you know, different world than working in corporate, right? Which will help you along the way. Yeah. André, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow LeanIX? Meaning, you know, what's really keeping you up at night these days?

Yeah, look, it's many things keeping me up. Although I must say I sleep well, so that's all good. So yeah, I mean, look, a company at our size obviously has growing pains. In the last 18 months, we've added 220 employees in a time where communication shifted largely from— largely into asynchronous communication and a lot of Zoom meetings. So clearly a key topic I have is how do we make sure that we evolve our company culture, which has been fairly office-centric like 2 years ago. And when you're like 100 employees, then you have this, you have the spirit and the dynamic in the office. Today we have decided for a working mode which we call connected remote. So we believe in the concept that employees now also post-COVID will have a stronger influence on the way they want to work and where they work. And that's why it remains important. How do you connect employees to each other? How do you make sure that working for Lina X makes a difference compared to any other company you can connect to via Zoom. So that's a key topic which is high on my priority list. And then of course, as we're growing, making sure that we stay close to our customers. So I think we today, and we have early on established a customer success team which works with our customers and keeping up that pace of innovation, delivering, improvements to the existing products, but also expanding into new areas and providing more value. So balancing this out, so not just going out and delivering new stuff and not caring about the existing customers. So I wouldn't say that we're doing this completely perfect yet, but this is kind of What requires a lot of attention to make sure that this doesn't get off balance because the early believers you have as a SaaS business, you want to keep them. You don't want to lose them because churn is the last thing you actually want over time. You want to have successful customers who go with you a long time.

Yeah, I agree with that. André, I see you read quite a few books behind you on your bookshelf. Who or what would you say are your 3 best resources? That can be books, That can be people, mentors, or people you follow who you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years.

Yeah, you actually picked one of those. So I will backfill one of the 3 you had. So Measure What Matters from John Doerr definitely belongs to that a bit later in the journey. As I said before, Lean Startup from Eric Ries is probably the one thing I read early on. And I think it's a classic. It totally makes sense. The other is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. From Ben Horowitz is something which is healthy for a founder in a scaling phase because you're seeing that there are other companies who have challenges and the way you deal with that. If you're interested in marketing, there's a fantastic book I discovered over the years called No Forms, No Spam, No Cold Calls by Letanie Koniantz. So that's a fantastic book. Which I can only recommend because of course getting out to market is super important if you want to have your product being used. And a part of that, of course, my board members Jörg, Thomas, Teddy, Ali, Bernhard, who have helped me in different situations in different ways, and also the other members of our investors have been really fundamental in that time giving guidance. So these would be probably the ones to mention.

Yeah, those are great books. I haven't read that one though, No Forms, No Spam, No Cold Calls by Latane Konantel. I'll have to definitely check that out and we'll add it to show notes for people to check out. Andrei, what does success mean to you today? Whether that's personally, business, financially, life, I guess there's no right answer.

Yeah, look, I think the What I feel, can we, like, it's all around, like, what impact can we have as a company on the economy, but also what impact can we have on, yeah, the society as such? So let me give you a bit context here.

Sure.

So I think if I think about, like, inventing new stuff, inventing technology. What personally drives me, of course, is that there haven't been too many technology companies being founded, especially over in Germany or in Europe. So I think we're lagging a bit behind. And this is what's kind of driving me. If you only think about like SAP was founded 40 years before LinaX was founded. Yeah. And then you have a few other great companies In the meantime, companies like TeamViewer done a fantastic job. And then some smaller companies also from Germany like Celonis or Signavio or others. So, but I think being able to kind of invent and found something and provide a way for people to actually take jobs which challenge the status quo. So that is for me, like success in the end. Yeah. So if we can provide that, because it allows us to push us as a society forward and therefore it's, yeah, it actually kind of, so like rising the tide is like rising every boat. Yeah. So kind of, and I think this is what I find find very important, um, if, if speaking about success.

And what's kind of your end goal? Is the IPO the, the big magic, magic day for you?

Yeah, look, I, I get, get this question every year and then, but, um, I, I think of, of it a bit more differently. IPO is a way to kind of finance a business. Um, you can do like financing through an investment round, through an IPO, through nowadays through things like a SPAC and others. I believe more into like how much companies can we serve? How much value can we deliver? How important can we become for the success of other businesses? And so this is probably harder to quantify and express, but of course on this journey, if we are able to actually serve a substantial number of global businesses around the world. And like I said before, we're now serving more than 500 customers. There's like 50 Global 500, 40 Fortune 500 companies within that. So we're seeing like the start of that impact already. And if we're doing that, and if we're doing that successfully with sustainable like customer retention, then eventually An IPO is also possible and totally meaningful. Yeah, but so I see it more as probably a lagging indicator of it. And I'm much more focused on like the leading indicators, which is probably like things like customer retention and the market reach we can have.

Yeah, building a great company, right? Which just sounds like you're on the right track. So keep it up. André, love this interview. Love chatting with you and learning kind of about your background. For people listening in, founders or entrepreneurs who want to get in touch with you, learn more about you and your ventures, how can they connect?

Yeah, look, I mean, you could connect with me on LinkedIn, or if you are interested in what we do as a company, of course, visit our website leanix.net. So it's leanix.net. Ix.net and find out what we do. And yeah, probably the best way is to find me on LinkedIn.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Andre. Appreciate you jumping on today on SaaS District Show.

Thank you, Akeel. It was really great to talk to you and thank you again for inviting me.

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