Prioritizing Company Goals | Sendinblue COO, Olivier Legrand (Podcast 228)

It's true in this environment. It's true in At Sandin Blue today, every member of your executive team is both the custodian of partner, they're responsible for, but more importantly, their essential goal is to make the company win, not just their department win. And when people understand that what's going to get the company closest to a win is to follow. The priority that we've all agreed upon.

Today is Send in Blue COO Olivier LeGrand. SendInBlue is the leading all in one digital marketing platform for small to medium sized businesses. In his role, he is responsible for overseeing strategy, operations, go to market talent and international growth. Before joining SendInBlue, Olivier was the VP and managing director of Asia Pacific and China at LinkedIn. And under his watch, LinkedIn's Asia Pacific doubled its membership and tripled in revenue. Prior to that, Olivier served as a Director of Marketing in Asia for the Wall Street Journal's Asia franchise, driving marketing and advertising initiatives across both print and online platforms. Olivier holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Paris School of Business. And Olivier, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Thanks for having me, Cameron. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad. I'm actually speaking to someone from Paris. I'm going to ask you, when we're done, some specific questions about some skiing because I'm taking my boys to go skiing in, in France this year, so I might have some questions for you if you're a skier.

Oh, I'm, I'm your man. I love skiing.

Okay, well, the three valleys is where we're probably going to go, so I'll ask you some questions when we're done.

Good. Big. Very good.

So let's go. I'm going to ask you about sending Blue in a few minutes, but can we just go backwards? And I want to talk, I want to talk mostly about your experience of working in the Asia Pacific area and what you were doing with LinkedIn and then just ask you what you're seeing with that region right now. And so maybe just talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I mean, I just came back to France after 19 years in Asia Pacific, so I spent eight years in Hong Kong and about 11 years in Singapore. Hong Kong was a place where I started my first business, by the way. That was my, my journey into entrepreneurship. I started a company called Croatia over there, then worked for the Wall Street Journal and then, long story short, I did a lot of digital jobs for non digital companies. I started in banking for a big French bank called BNP Paribas then, you know, worked for myself in agency, then worked in publishing. And so I wanted to be working for a pure player. And that's when I came across LinkedIn at the very early days of the business in Asia Pacific. So joined LinkedIn in 2020 12. Funny enough, LinkedIn at the time was pretty much the size that sending glue is today. It's about 600 people and about 100 million AR. So did the journey from 100 million to 10 billion with LinkedIn and all of that from, from as. What can I say about Asia? I mean, an incredible region, very, very diverse. You know, when, when your region goes from Australia to India, from Japan to China, you have to learn that Asia is not one market or one region, it's a multitude of markets. And you spend a lot of time, especially in, you know, global companies. I work for LinkedIn, which is a, you know, Silicon Valley based company. You spend a lot of time educating about the fact that you don't have a region, but you actually have a portfolio of markets. And, and I used to think about that portfolio in the form of, you know, core venture and strategic and saying, okay, my core markets are Australia and say Singapore. Because a lot of the behaviors on the LinkedIn platform back then looked a lot like what you would see, for example in the UK or in the US and then, you know, I would say strategic market for me, for example, where India for the longest time and then other, other parts of Southeast Asia, I would say outside of Singapore, particularly Indonesia, because there we had both a strong product market fit, but different kinds of challenge. When it came to monetization, the type of members were acquiring were different, the type of customers were servicing were different. And then I had a bunch of, a bunch of venture markets, which was typically Japan and China, which were the hard ones, where the product market fit was complex, the monetization piece wasn't straightforward. And oftentimes this piece required for us to think about product. And when you build a global business on technology, especially global software business, we all want to build a product that's as ubiquitous as possible, that everybody can use pretty much in the same way everywhere in the world. And the more you can achieve that, the better it is for your ability to scale the business. But sometimes you come across markets that have very unique, whether it's business requirements, if you think about China or cultural requirement, if you think about markets like Japan, for example, or even India, and that forces you to think about your value proposition slightly differently. And so that's sort of what I've Learned during those 20 years in Asia is to focus on. On the core and the things that are common. Because I think, although across the world, whenever you talk to your team, and I have the same here at Send in Blue, when you go to Germany, people tell you, oh, it's different here in Germany. And then you go to India and they tell you, it's different here in India. And it's very true. But there's many things that are common. You know, business is a business. You need to make more money than you spend. Like, there's a bunch of foundational things that are. That are common, but there's also sometimes the need to listen and understand how you can do better and serve better the audiences that are in this market and what differentiate them from. From others.

It's interesting that you mentioned that. I was just speaking to my wife the other day where We've been to 34 countries together in the last four years. I've been to 62 countries. 64 countries, something like that.

Now, how did you do this during COVID Like, it's crazy.

We just figured. We figured it out. But what was interesting is we were driving on a highway. Where the heck were we? I don't remember. Where were we before? Scotland? Anyway, we were driving and I said, it just seems like, oh, we were in Poland. I said, so much of what we're seeing in Poland is the same as North America and yet it is so completely different. Like, it looks at times like you could be in any North American city. I'm from Canada. But then culturally it can be so different. What I'm curious about is how do you operate the business with so many of these distinct markets, these three distinct types of markets you mentioned? Do you operate with very different plans for each market or very different teams for each market? How do you keep them focused? When one group is working in one direction, one is different, you know, in a completely different direction.

Yeah, it's a bit what I meant when I talked about this, you know, cost, strategic and venture applied to the way we looked at the markets. And so it was sort of a proxy to maturity and to, you know, product, market fit and to ability to monetize. But we also had a similar approach of our activities through a core strategic invention. And the core things were the things that were, to my earlier point, quite ubiquitous, that we're working across multiple markets and from which we're getting the most leverage. And on this, you could really line up your team and focus on execution, you know, and. And really be basically going through A playbook, like taking a playbook that you've done somewhere else and, and take it and roll it out and, and, and apply that playbook. And so that allowed to have a lot of consistency across your team everywhere. And then you get into your, your strategic and venture bets within those markets and it's, it's a bit like you're managing your money. Like, you don't put everything on the venture, you put some on, on safer bets. And there really what you need is an incredible team. It's, you know, I spent 19 years in Asia. If I were to tell you that I'm an expert in India, Japan and China, I'd be stupid. Like, you know, even after 20 years, you just, you just keep learning. But you do lean on people who, whose culture is China, whose country is China, who have been doing business there and who lived and grew up in China and people the same in India and Indonesia. And, and so you, you become, you have to listen really, you have to hire very well, very smart people, people that are very aligned with your mission, your vision, the culture you want to build because they're going to be your champions in these markets and you have to work with them. And, and a lot of part of working with them is to listen to them, to hear them talk about, you know, what's different and what's specific and, and how they think. You, and then your, your job is to parts parse through all this and, and prioritize and decide what is it that you're not going to do and what is it that you're going to pursue because you don't want to, you don't want to run after every, every opportunity in the same way. So a lot of prioritization, a great team, Focus, focus, focus.

Yeah. And that was what I was really going to ask about when you mentioned leverage. I'm curious as to how you decide what your ROI or what your decision around that leverage is going to be. You know, we have those resources of people, time and money and how to get the highest ROI off those. And you mentioned some of it has to be strategic allocation. How do you, how do you prior, how do you prioritize or how do you decide? And then how do you also let the people down or let the departments down that no, their idea isn't getting used or it's not getting used now? Like, how do you say no without killing the spirit and the energy when we become this kind of kumbaya group hug that, you know, we don't want to hurt people's Feelings.

Yeah, it's a great question. I, I think so. I, I'll, I'll use the proxy we use at LinkedIn. You know, it's hard when you're in a large Silicon Valley company. You optimize a lot for the tools and the features that are going to be used by, by the maximum number of people. And so if, if you look at some of the venture bets we did, they were essentially in market that has huge tam. Like if you look at China, if you look at India, if you look at Japan, those were very big markets and very big opportunity. And so there's a moment where you're looking at, you know, okay, I'm going to do some things slightly differently. Are we going to try to approach our value proposition slightly differently? But it's worth it because the amount of opportunity that we're going to unlock at the back of, of this, of these initiatives is worth the venture bet.

Yeah.

And so a lot of the education and a lot of the work that I was doing with, with our, you know, leadership team, Jeff Winner and the rest of the team was around building those cases and saying, okay, we're asking here to do something in a slightly different way. But we're not running every opportunity equally. We've been, we've done our work and here is the opportunity that's ahead of us. Can we do it? Yes or no? And this happens on the multi year process. And so one year, India, Mexico and then two years later China makes the cut. Because as you know, we live in a finite world from a resource perspective. There's so many engineering man hours that you have, there's so many go to market people. Even if you're a very well resourced company and if you hire really fast, takes time to hire people, ramp them up and, and the throughput is the throughput. Like you can't, can't go further. So it's all about prioritization. And so to answer your question on how you don't, you know, ruin it for everybody, like I've had those conversations so many times with my team in Asia because when you are the guy in Japan, day in, day out, you're breathing the Japan opportunity and you see it in front of you, you see all these things that you could be doing and basically you come and you fight for them and sometimes you get them and sometimes you don't. And so you're, you know, you know that you potentially go to disappoint. A portion of your team is going to be disappointed because their projects aren't going to make the cut. What we did is we were extremely transparent about the process. We're saying, hey, from the beginning, know that we're not going to be able to do everything. We're exploring all of it and here's the choice that we've made and here's why we've made those choices. And by the way, you're a shareholder of the company and your incentive is for the company to win, not just Japan to win. And I think you need to build a leadership team. And it's true in this environment, it's true. At San and Blue today, every member of your executive team is both the custodian of the partner they're responsible for, but more importantly, their essential goal is to make the company win, not just their department win. And when people understand that what's going to get the company closest to a win is to, you know, follow the priority that we've all agreed upon, they, they'll wait and, and the good news is, you know, six months later, a year later, they'll get a win and they'll be able to, you know, address one of those pain points that they've seen and that's been, you know, hurting them, like in their guts because they know they could, we could do better for their customers. And so I, it's funny, I had this conversation with our, with our German country manager recently and my point to him was like, never give up. Like, you know, you're asking for these things that you believe and you know, will improve the experience of your German or Dach users. And of course, we're not going to always going to be in a position to say yes, but never get tired of fighting on behalf of the customers you represent because you're doing your job when you're doing this. And even if it's not a win at every fight, it's okay, you've got to be mature about it. You got to understand that you're here for the team to win and not just your subset of the team. It's a system subsystem conversation. Basically, you work for the system and you're responsible for a subsystem. How do you balance your position there so that you optimize somehow for your subsystem or you create, you inform and you create and you give the information to the team that's going to make the arbitrage. At the end of the day, the best job you can do is to make sure that you represent as fairly and as accurately as possible the opportunity that sits in your market so it can be arbitraged in the best way possible so that the best decision can be taken for the system for the company.

Yeah, makes sense. Okay, I want you to go back and just tell us a little bit about SendinBlue. Like what does the company do? Who is SendinBlue? And then I want to find out why the heck you would leave a huge company like a LinkedIn to join. Not a, not a small company like you said. I think you're about 600 employees now. But why, why would you have left such a huge organization to go to more of a mid sized organization now? What was the. What what grabbed you?

Sure. So, so Saniblu as you said, is a one stop shop for digital marketing CRM. Basically all ch small and medium businesses need to communicate to their customers. And our vision is to really democratize access to digital tools and technology that for the longest time were made available to larger organization. And when I say democratize I mean we want to make them accessible in all forms. Accessible both from a usability perspective when develop tools that are simple to use that very small businesses can use and can onboard it on quickly and that are also affordable to use so that it's really something that fits into the unit economics of small businesses. And so now we're serving like 300,000 customers across 170 countries. The business is. 85% of our business is self served. We're building a really solid mid market and enterprise component as well. Some of our customers are graduating to be bigger. But, but really we, we grew from the ground up. And, and Armand's vision was, was our CEO, he started the company 10 years ago in India and then came back to France. Is this French was really this, this democratization was this idea of like empowering the small guys so that they can, they can compete. And this has not changed like the, the true north is there. We're going to continue to do this. We just you know increased the, the, the fashion that we're doing this. Like we're doing this for email marketing but also for SM notifications, CRM, et cetera, et cetera. And many of those new features by the way were happened through also a bunch of acquisition that the company has done.

Interesting. Okay so and, and then for you, what was it that grabbed you? What, what was it that you.

And why? Yeah, why? I so you know, incredible decade at LinkedIn. Absolutely life changing organization. I learned so much there. But you know first of all when you're 10 years into, into an organization you, you get you get comfortable and, and I think I got to that place where I wanted to get outside that comfort zone that LinkedIn had become for me. It wasn't always a comfort zone. I, I got stretched and pulled in in so many ways in this organization. But after a decade when you're running a region, I felt, I felt wanted to get a stretch and, and when I was started to reflect back on okay, what was the, you know, what was the moment in the life of the company that I really enjoyed the most? I think that moment where you've established a product market fit which is the case for sending Blue. You know, when you have this amount of customers and when you're starting to hit like a certain level of velocity and you're looking at a very large total addressable market, which is, which is our case. This moment of scaling is really one that I found super interesting and super exciting and so that's kind of the energy I wanted to find. And after 19 years in Asia, so I first decided to leave LinkedIn. I took 10, 11 months break, which was amazing and spent quite a bit of time in France because we weren't able to come back during COVID Asia was, was pretty close, as you probably know. And when the time to look for a new opportunity came up, you know, with my wife and my kids, the question was like okay, do we look, do I look again for another round of like 5, 6, 7 years in Asia or is it time to look in, in the direction of Europe and get closer to home? Although I, you know, I can call Asia home in many ways or call this your home for a long time. And this is when I came across Sailing Blue. I met Amo and I was really interested with the stage the company's at that moment of velocity, that moment of strong product market fit and that moment where the organization was big and cross border 600 people in North America, all over Europe, with people in Paris, in Berlin, in Seattle and Toronto and Noida, India. And so there's a whole set of new complexities on how to scale the foundation of a company like that that was, that was really, really attractive to me. And of course the vision and the mission of the company, this idea of like helping the little guys compete is something that I like.

So I've, I've always been nervous about hiring somebody from a big, a big organization, big corporate and bringing them into a not entrepreneurial. So I guess you're really not entrepreneurial anymore. You're more, you are more of that mid sized organization. But what do you think that you had to do or what did you do to make sure that that transition was smooth for you to, to move into more of a leaner, faster, you know, organization than, than LinkedIn?

Yeah, I, I think, or am I wrong?

Maybe LinkedIn was, was more entrepreneurial because it was tack too.

So LinkedIn was very entrepreneurial for, for a very long time. The other thing is LinkedIn continued to grow at a really fast pace at massive scale. You know, when you're starting to grow, when you have a multi billion dollar, you know, business that's growing at 40, 45 year over year, it's a very different experience. The same sign business, the same size business that's flattish or growing in like low teens. And so, and so that's, that's sort of really what was, what was impressive and interesting at LinkedIn in terms of the challenges that it was bringing that look a lot, you know, like what we're living here, which is, you know, the business is growing 40 plus percent, you know, not at, not at a multi billion dollar scale. But that's our objective. Like we want to, want to 10x the business from 100 to a billion in revenue. And, and for that you need to continue to grow at scale. That's really important. You know, in terms of, of the transition. I'm, I'm six months into the, into the business. So you know, I don't want to be presumptuous that I, I am fully transitioned as well. But you know, I, I felt I had to, you know, I, I, how could I say that? You know, the first day, interesting enough though, you know, we decided to two business together and I joined Sandin Blue and I started early April and I remember that first day when I, you know, left my place in Paris, took the tube and went to San and Blue. Although I had, you know, interviews with a lot of people, I'd been to the office a bunch of times and so on. I was very nervous. I was like, oh, what is it that I'm gonna find? How different is it gonna be from what I've experienced for, for the past decade or even the past like three to five years. And, and one thing that I was really worried about was am I going to get into a very French office and a very French environment and so on. And so what I'd say is the culture I found the team, I found the work environment I found here was a lot more familiar than I would have expected. Like the standing blue office in Paris. You hear like people speaking English, Italian, Spanish, Every meeting I was in was conducted in English. Every notion, documentation, slack, everything's happening in English. So the company was already even before I came in, like very international in nature because of how the company was built over time because of the nature of our customers. You adapt as well to the customer you serve. And so what I'd say is it made it a lot easier for me to actually come in and feel at home from day one.

That actually led to my next question which was what, what was your first kind of 90 days like or, or even maybe give us the first three months in three, in kind of three segments. What was month one, what was month two? Once was month three. What did you do? Focus on, et cetera. What did you avoid doing?

Yeah, so first part was a lot of listening really, you know, trying to, what I was trying to avoid is to assume that I understood the business before being in and to. Sometimes you tend to oversimplify businesses and I have to say I'm glad I did this because the sending blue business is actually quite complex because companies that have cracked SMB acquisition in the SaaS world, you don't have that many, most SaaS companies are going for the higher end customers because that's where it aligns better with their cost of sales. We crack acquiring at scale very small businesses on a self serve platform. And so you know, the first part was listening, getting to know the team, understand the talent like the people that were in there, understand the energy that was, that was in there. The second phase was to try to identify, I don't want to say quick wins because that's not really what they are but relatively obvious places of opportunity. And so one of the things that I realized quickly is as the company grew there was an appetite for more structure. Like in every conversation I was having with the marketing, with the sales team, with the customer experience team, with our, with our product team. There's this moment where like everybody was saying well like we have a lot of things going on at the same time and it's getting more complex. And so there was a bit of a, of a push or a pull toward like more, a bit more process and a bit more structure which was really interesting. And for me the second phase was to identify those, those areas of opportunity. So I think for us we have a massive area of opportunity in North America, for example, we are, it's about 20, 25% of our business. It could be way bigger. And so I'm looking at this and I'm like, oh that should be super interesting. We Have a very high performing mid market and enterprise team which was a surprise for me and a good surprise. And I started to think oh that's kind of cool. When you're developing tools for the small guys, when the big guys are starting to buy it, like it kind of means that you're doing good on your mission and vision. So you are actually democratizing and bringing tools that allow the small guys to compete. And the small businesses, I shouldn't say the small guys, the small businesses, they're proper businesses, the real businesses. And, and to see that bigger companies are, are sometimes gravitating toward that simplicity, that efficiency, that cost efficiency as well and are buying your solution. And so you know, one of my first reflection to Alma was like, you know, when something's doing well on a company, I'm always wondering how you can push that further. Like you know, put gas on the fire basically. And so, and how do you make space in a company that has such a strong self serve DNA for, for a proper go to market team that is going to be speaking to bigger customers and service them and so on. So bring some of that. So I think that's, that's one of our opportunity, it's something that, that we can pursue going forward.

I wanted, I wanted to ask you about that a little bit about the, the go to market stuff, but specifically even more on the sales and marketing side. I'm curious, you're, you're really a marketing SaaS business. Not, not so much a marketing agency but a SaaS marketing. How much, what percentage of revenue does, does send in blue spend on sales and marketing?

Oh, it's, it's a big portion. I mean our, I mean performance marketing is, is, is the big engine like for us. If you think about a business like ours like marketing is sales for the self serve business and sales is sales for the enterprise. Business like this, this is how we grow. This is how we bring in and acquire small companies and bring them to the platform, onboard them to the platform and have them start using. So you know, marketing is a big, big chunk of our, of our investment. I don't have the percentage top of mind but marketing acquisition is really important business like ours. If you want to trying to build a scalable high velocity business like the one we have. It's, it's a, it's a growth, it's an important growth engine. The very important.

And are you working with any outside marketing agencies? Are you doing it all in house? Are you at the.

No. All in house. All in house and we go we do the whole like you know, performance marketing, SEO affiliation partnership. Like you know we we also you know connect with through plugins with all the ecosystem from Shopify to you know to to to Presta and other or you know the web editors et cetera. Like so we we have to be on all those marketplace and plugged in. You know our customers can be can have needs of of you know, classic email marketing needs or SMS marketing needs. But we also have of course more and more with COVID of our customers that started to build a presence on commerce on E commerce and so which has been driving some of our M and A as well and some of our acquisition.

Okay, how many, how many companies have you acquired and what are you what is your focus around M and A? And then I guess part to that would be what percentage of your growth is going to be focused on M and A versus organic.

Yeah so so we've acquired six or seven companies. So the first acquisition was Newsletter to Go which is was a big German competitor of our really buying company that was doing that we're doing since. Since then we bought Pushal Metrilo, Meat Fox recently. So a number a number of companies and and they are a lot of the so there's been one or two acquisitions that were in the core business. The others were really to bring in features. So if you think about push all it's all about push notification in the Shopify ecosystem. If you think about Metrilo it's really about E commerce analytics and being able to provide this to our users that are starting to build their E commerce presence. If you think about Meat Fox it's about scheduling and how when you run a small business at some point you want to be able to create like as part of your CRM easy ways to scale your schedule time with a customer success person or a salesperson. So it's really addition and I think that's one of the things that I've appreciated at Sunnyblue and I've told Alma is I think we're very pragmatic from the build versus buy perspective. I worked in a lot of like if you think about most Silicon Valley tech company are build company first. You know you work with engineers that are really smart and that tend to.

Think that they want to build stuff.

They can, they can build anything and they want to build stuff and sometimes you point them at something and you say hey look like there's this thing we want to build. Like somebody's already done it, it's already there.

Like why are we Building a car. There's a car right outside for sale.

Exactly. So how about we bring these guys in and you know, like, maybe their business standalone is not as strong, but their business is. Part of us, you know, is. Is finding a lot of leverage. And so coming from Silicon Valley companies, there's this strong DNA and strong like so default toward. Toward build versus buy. Although LinkedIn has done a number of great acquisitions, so, you know, it's not that restrictive. I find that here Amo and our tech team a lot more pragmatic about this and recognize that, you know, CRM is something that not everybody knows how to do. And yes, you can learn, but, you know, if you. You can bring in people that are really good at it and understand it deeply, they'll add up to the opportunity that E Commerce and Shopify Presta ecosystem are interesting, but they have their own complexities and some people are really fluent in them and know how to leverage them in the most efficient manner. How about we bring in people like that? And typically Shashank was the CEO of Pushao is amazing at that and he's bringing a lot to our exact team by, by bringing that expertise and a lot more. To be honest, I don't want to reduce him to this.

I have a couple of questions again. Still on the transition. Then I want to go back in to talk about Asia Pacific for a second. On the transition, just briefly, how long does it actually take, do you think, to feel like you now are in place and you, you know, the transition is over, you're kind of there and you're solid and. And then secondly, what can you teach us about when a seasoned COO is hired to come into an organization that already is there and is exists and you've got people that might have been vying for the job, or people that are now, you know, that have been there for years, that are now reporting to you. Any lessons that you can give us around that as well?

Yeah, in terms of the time to get your fit under you, I think it's pretty much now. I would say I'm like five months old and I'm starting to feel that way for. For like, I would say, yeah, three weeks to a month maybe, where you start to have clarity on what is it you want to work on, what are your OKRs? You start to have a bunch of quick wins under your belt. Like, you know, like this is the moment where you start to know the people as well. I mean, I should have started there, like, start to feel a part of the team, know the people understand their side of the equation, not just have a one sided view of, of the challenges that are, that are in front of you. So I would say, you know, it's a good, like I think three to six months all in to, to get fully situated. You know, some people might be faster than I am, but, but that's sort of like, that's what it feels to me has been my, my journey in terms of coming in to the organization. I think it varies from one organization to the other. But here, first of all, I interviewed with pretty much every single one of those people, so they had a point of view to give on whether I could be a good fit or not. I'm pretty sure through the process, even though there were probably not all of them were the final decision makers, but they played a part in bringing this in. The general sentiment I've had at SEN in blue is there's so much to achieve that they want to win. And I think a lot of what I felt, not just from my team, the people that I work with or my peers, but a lot of them were actually excited to see that the company was able to bring in someone with, with the background in a bigger organization like LinkedIn. I think there was a, there was a bit of pride as well in saying, okay, well we're capable of getting talent like that. And, and I think that's a great sign of culture. Like, you know, companies are able to, you know, bring in strong talent and see the value in this and see the value of building a winning team is incredible. And so I, you know, I have a document which is sort of like my first 100 days thoughts and so on. And, and I feel what we've had over the last four months is both a combination of a really solid like historical team like our, our CRO, our cpo, you know, our, our CEO. Of course, like a lot of people that have been here a long time. But we also, I came in, but we have a new CTO that just came in. We have a new Chief People officer Laura, that just came in. That is amazing. And, and so this ability to build that team has been incredibly encouraging for me and I think it's been a very strong signal to the marketplace and to, and to the team.

Yeah, it sounds like you've done a really, really good job with the transition and I love that whole point of, you know, it's a bit of a badge of honor when they can realize they are able to now hire these people. That's, that's a huge sign for the organization. It's, it's kind of an exciting stage. I know that this is going to be an impossible question to answer, but what are kind of, what are kind of like one or two lessons you can teach us about working? You know, what are they doing better in Asia Pacific that North American or European companies can learn from? You know, what are they doing better in India? What are they doing better in China? What are they doing better in? You know, maybe what. Pick something from each of the three types of areas you talked about in the apac.

Oh, man, that's a hard one. I think what I love about, especially the emerging part of Asia, I would say India, China, to a certain sense, I don't know if I would put it, it's the scrappiness. Like the people are hard working and they can be scrappy. They can. They try every angle. Like really very, very strong resilience and scrappiness, I would say, which I think comes from, from their. They are bringing the, the, the environment in which you grow up, the opportunities that are presented to you. The moment, you know, if you think about Europe or the US or, or, you know, we, we generally, we, we have a pretty sweet life. Access to school, access to many things is, is taken for granted and in some parts of Asia it's not. And I think it creates a grit and a scrappiness in people that I think is a superpower. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, it does. The scrappiness is really intriguing, for sure. All right, I want you to go back to, you know, you mentioned that you were hitting this kind of flat period at LinkedIn and you wanted to be challenged again. So now that you're back into this next organization, this next role for yourself, where are you growing? What are you focusing on in terms of your skill set to continue to grow? Because I think we always are.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm learning. I'm learning a ton. I'm challenged a ton, I think. So I'm growing a ton and really getting understanding and getting into the details of the business and of what everybody in my team is doing. I feel that during my entire career I had the belief that I needed to hire people that were better than me, than me, or what they're doing. I do not need to be a better marketer than our cmo. I don't need to be a better seller than our sales head, nor being a good customer experience person to lead the person that needs customer experience. But I do need to have a base understanding of what their day to Day business is so that I can be helpful, so that I can coach them, so that I can help them look in a direction that because they're day in, day out in it, they might not. And so I, you know, in LinkedIn, because I grew with the business, I felt like that baseline sort of grew with me here. I need to sort of fast forward that, that, that, that learning and, and it's kind of a back to school and, and that's one of the things that for example, Amo, our CEO has built this business break by break for the last decade. And the level of instincts, the level of hunch and understanding that he has for the business that's really, you know, situated in, in so many repetitions, situations that he's seen leading. You know, like A means B means C. That's the part that I find super challenging. I lean a lot on, on him at the moment, on his instincts and sort of my role is also to go and like check the data and try to find like if those instincts can be converted into actual action that will make the business better. But I really, I really want to build more and more of my own, my own answers. And so for now my own, my own instincts are more anchored in external experience and the fact that I'm new to the business and that I have a new angle to it. I want to add to it depth and knowledge onto it and I think that's going to take time. The other part is in a company our size is the, the breast. Like I mean, you know, my almost, you know, he's the CEO, so he obviously has an overview on everything but really focuses his time on on tech and product. And I'm more on the go to market and customer and HR side of things. So I like you know, revenue marketing, customer care, HR operations, but you know, there everything is sort of like interconnected and intertwined and so how our product and engineering team, so really the variety of challenges that are coming our way over the course of the day is incredibly fast and there's a lot to learn in this environment.

What you touched on earlier was about how you don't need to be as good as the people reporting to you in their functional area, but you need to understand that enough to be able to coach them and develop them, develop them and support them. I think that's very unique for the COO and the CEO is how, how do we, because you know, the head of marketing could almost be the head of marketing for any organization. The head of it could almost be the head of it like very, they're very, for the most part, fairly plug and play. But the COO is so different because you have to understand the whole organization and all the different functional areas and be really good at the stuff the CEO doesn't want to work on. How, how do you get good at that stuff? Is it just by osmosis? Is it by being around it? Are you just a quick learner or are you.

Well, you know, I'll, I'll. I'm relatively new at being a CEO, so I don't know that I've nailed it already. I, I think there are a few, there are a few things though, that set you up for success. And I think one thing that attracted me as well to, to send in blue is how complementary Alma and I are in terms of, you know, our, our past experiences are our personalities. Like, we're very, we're very different persons. And, and I think a lot of the opportunity come from that complementarity from, from him being incredibly good at things that I can absolutely grow toward and me having a certain expense in some areas. Amal, you know, came out of school and started this company and it's, it's, you know, it was home run, almost home run for the beginning. Of course, there was a journey to get to where he is today. And, and so there's been some difficult times, I'm sure, but he's been basically investing as, you know, life and blood in this organization. I worked overseas, worked in different industries in different. And so it's. The complementarity piece I think is extremely important.

You mentioned something to me before we started, which was interesting and then I want to wrap up with a final question, but you said that most of your customers are the kind of real businesses. They're not, they're not all just venture backed, that they're real businesses that make, you know, they have real P Ls and so your customer base is really solid. Even though we're in this kind of bit of a weird time right now with the economy, with inflation and potential recession. Are you guys venture backed or are you, Are you.

Yeah, we are, we are. We, we raised. Our last round was at the end of 21st, November 21st, we raised $160 million. And, and so we're back both by BP, which is the, the French, you know, fund like the foreign investment fund, and, and the, and also a venture capitalist firm called Patek and a fund called Bridgepoint. And so yes, we're absolutely venture back, but we are, you know, I repeat what I said. If you look at our customers, they're real businesses. Not in the sense that venture back businesses aren't real. But you know, we're not a company that's built a SaaS product that we're selling to other startups. We're a company that was built to help mom and pops businesses and medium sized businesses and now bigger businesses start using the digital tools they need to be successful. And of course there are some startups in there and, and they're awesome and we love having them as customers but we have yoga teachers, we have like restaurant chains, we have, you know, coaches, we have a lot of different, you know, shapes and forms of companies basically and I think that's a driver of resilience for our business. You know, those businesses have been around for a very long time. They're able to adapt really quickly and one thing that we do that I think they will always need to do is we help them speak to their own customers. And, and you can think about recession, you can think about inflation. The last thing you're going to be stopped doing, that you should stop doing if you're running a business is engaging with your customers, is having a conversation with them, is telling them what you can do to help them navigate through this. And I think we, we do that with our own customers. We help them navigate, we try to understand their reality in this, in this new world. We're an affordable solution as well and we want to continue to be that and we want to help them maintain that connection with their own customers.

Well, I'll tell you, you are certainly the cool kids on the block right now because I did that a post on social media recently asking, you know, what kind of company should we look for for email automation and SMS marketing? And, and it was send in blue, send in blue, someone else, send in blue, send them blue, someone like it was two or three to one. Yeah. From a very, a fairly savvy group of entrepreneurs from the Young President's Organization and Entrepreneurs Organization, a very good group. And I was surprised because I hadn't heard of you yet but boy you were everywhere. I want to go back last question to the 21 or 22 year old Olivier Legrand. You're, you know, you're just starting off in your business, business career. What advice would you give yourself back then that you know to be true today?

Oh yeah, that's a question that I've been asked before and I always give the same answer and it's don't shy away from complexity. I, I work with new graduates in, in different, like development programs we've had at LinkedIn and other companies and here. And, and that's an experience, a personal experience from when you start work. You know, there's always that moment where you have a choice of a bunch of projects. You could do this or you could do that. And one of those products looks really hard and another bunch looks like pretty easy. And my advice is go toward the hard one. There's a couple of reasons for that. Like there's this, you know, the science behind this. First of all, if you fail, nobody's gonna, you know, nobody's gonna be surprised because you picked the hard one. And, and if, if it's been on that table for a long time, it's probably because a bunch of you. And so the expectations are different. However you look at it, you're going to learn a ton of things about the business because in complexity there's always learning, there's always growth and, and you'll have a depth of understanding and a view of the opportunity, the business that will be stronger than anyone else's. And if you crack it, you're going to roll and it's going to be, it's going to be amazing. So it feels like a no brainer to me. And, and I know that sometimes as humans we're like, oh, well, this is easy stuff I could do. Like, why don't I pick that one? It looks fun and easy, but especially when you're early in your career, go for the hard stuff.

I love it. That's cool advice. Olivier Legrand, the COO for SendinBlue. Thank you so much for sharing with us on the Second In Command podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate the time today.

Whether it's sales or being a CRO or being a gamer, it's really all about resource.

Management and numbers and understanding the levers.

You can pull to get outcomes. It really does boil down to building that strategy and understanding how to influence people.