How a Unicorn CEO's Role Scales with the Company with Tipalti Co-Founder and CEO Chen Amit

my own role changing and my experience with that. I'm going through that right now as we speak, and I'll talk about it later in the talk. But it's not only the company that needs to change and scale, but also myself and my role that needs to adapt and change. And I'll tell you about that experience. Just a few words about Tipalti. We automate global accounts payable for high high-velocity disruptive companies who are scaling and changing rapidly, and they need to automate to facilitate that growth and controls and go global, etc. We do that by automating the accounts payable process, and by doing so, we remove the workload. We save 80% of the work associated with these functions. We improve financial controls, both very important under COVID days, any day, but definitely under COVID days. We improve visibility and accelerated financial close by 25% and enable scalability to some of our very, very high-growth customers with a specific vision and mission to liberate CFOs, controllers from the tedious, time-consuming, risky functions of accounts payable and letting them do what they went to business school for, what they built a career around. It's not about managing suppliers and paying suppliers. I like to say that the only people around who are really passionate about suppliers, managing suppliers and payments, are Tipalti. We want to liberate the CFO and the controller to do more value-adding work for their companies. We've been on the Inc. 5000, the Lloyd 500, and Best Place to Work 3 years in a row. It's a very limited group of companies who did that consecutively. So we're happy with that and are working to continue to be on those lists and continue to grow and be a great place to work at. Earlier this year in September, we announced that we raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation. It's an important milestone for the company. We're growing very fast on all metrics. We are around 360 people right now, will be almost more than 700 by the end of next year. Growing 80 to 100% year over year on most metrics, or almost all metrics, but depending on which metric you look at, it's 80 to 100%. And one of the key metrics we are most proud of is 1% gross dollar churn, very high net dollar retention, but gross dollar churn of annual 1%. For us, it communicates what we know, what we see in the more granular data around how our customers appreciate us and value what we do for them and the quality of service we provide. So this is definitely something that is near and dear to us, and we're proud of that. Back to the main topic of today's presentation. So over the last few years, I've experienced the same sensation every 12 to 18 months, like, what am I supposed to do now? What is my role? Where do I add value? Where should I influence the company? Where should I poke my nose? Where should I take a step back? What am I the key steward of and I cannot I rely on others to carry? And what do I enjoy most to do? So these are questions that are being presented to me by the changing nature of the company. And the company and my role actually does change every year, every 18 months, and it requires me to reflect and to change how I operate and what I do in the company. So I'll start with the early years before we decided to scale. I'll just skim through that because we don't have a lot of time, and then we'll go to the actual years of scaling. We took— we are 10 years now, we're just celebrating 10 years. So some companies go through that in a more compressed way. We, you'll see, we took our time in a way. First year, one-person company, I'm doing everything, signing customers, writing code, integrating with partners, one-person company. I had a resource on Upwork that did the QA for me, but other than that, that was it. There was no other person in the company, outside the company, around the company. Other than my co-founder is an investor and he's the chairman, but on a day-to-day basis, I was there. Second year, quote unquote, we doubled the company, the two of us. I was in Israel, I'm currently speaking from Israel and I hired the person in California, but still a very small company, very nimble, bootstrap-ish, bootstrap, not ish, company just doing almost everything. By the second year, we figured that we're onto something, we've hit product market fit with product number one And we won customers in Israel and the US and we started growing the team a little bit. And I hit the first time that one of my engineering leaders, he's currently the CTO, at the time he was a team leader, told me, "You shouldn't be writing code anymore." And that was a shock for me. It's really, first of all, I enjoyed it, but I also, I was in the code, it was my code. So I held on to one more project that I felt was really important, but then yeah, I decided it's time for me to let go and let the pros do their thing. I'm nowhere near their capabilities and take a step back. That was my first growth moment in Tipalti. Hired the first executive. That was also a very interesting experience for me. Interviewed everyone. I interviewed everyone for years because we took a gradual growth process. And my influence was through certain— my influence was across the board, but key, I think every CEO every year makes a few key decisions that are defining the company, and that happened to us in those early, first early years. Two places where I think, again, were important for me was one, when some hiring managers felt that we are making it too hard for people to join Tipalti and asked to lower the standards and the need to stand and, you know, define what is the level, what are we requiring professionally and personally from the people we bring into the company. And also the first termination I had was really critical. It was an important, quote unquote, good termination because it conveyed again, what do we require? What do we expect from our team members? What's the culture that we want to build into the company? I'll skip quickly. We've expanded the product. Initially it was for a certain market. We now expanded it that we solve accounts payable for every— literally every company in the world can benefit from Tipalti. That was an expanded— the first expansion of our offering. And, you know, we've reached product market fit of that part of the product. Hired the CRO, which was the first exec we thought of in terms of ability to scale up put processes. When I interviewed him, I remember that the fact that he spoke about enablement is so much— it was key to the interview process. I really felt, okay, that, that will pull us up, that will— it's the next thing that we need to do as we grow. So again, I'm still really involved in everything. Every new process I'm running, you know, we are a fintech, but a regulated fintech, so We get audited by banks, by regulators. The first audit, I think the auditor was surprised to see the CEO in the 3 days of the audit, but yeah, I wanted to experience firsthand. So I'm still highly involved. I know all the employees. I know pretty much everything that goes inside the company. Year 7, year 7 was really an interesting year. You can read a little bit more about it. INSEAD, it's a business school myself and my co-founder went to, that's where we met. They wrote a case study on it. Google "A Tale of Two Founders in INSEAD." It was an interesting year. It started by fundraising, you know, January through March we fundraised. Then we paused. There was an M&A, there was an acquisition offer which we entertained for a few months. Then we decided to walk away from that opportunity. You know, we felt that this was just the wrong match for us and went back to fundraising and fundraised again. So that year was the year we decided that we need to switch to scale up from, you know, product-market fit and growing and kind of babysitting the company to switch gears to scale up and the fundraising was around scale up. That was what we came out to the market with. It also was a very important year for me because I was away. I was fundraising in the very early part of the year. I was in this M&A discussion for the mid part of the year and then fundraising again in Q3. So I was away a lot. Which means I had to let go. I wasn't there. It wasn't my choice to let go. I just wasn't there. I wasn't there in engineering. I wasn't there in operations. I was there to some extent, but to a large extent, you know, every one of my executives was independent, had to care for their own departments. And that's, I think, was the first change that I experienced in how how I manage the company. I'll fast forward to today, like the— this chart ends today, and this is what happened between that decision to scale up and today. So I continued interviewing everyone until we were about 130, so sometimes in 2018, but You can see visibly that as much as we wanted to grow as fast as we could, the first year was a learning experience. And it's only until, only in 2019 that we start really hit the acceleration pedal even harder. And that first year of growth was an adjustment, right? We needed to build the recruiting engine, we needed to build the enablement engine, we need to learn some of the skills that are required for us to grow at that pace. But it's also obvious when you look at it that whatever my role was in the first few years, it cannot be the same onward, right? You— I cannot be doing the same things I did before 2017 when you see that growth rate. I need to focus on other things And that's the change that I needed to make in my role during these years. And those are some of the companies that we won around that same timeframe. Great companies, we love serving these companies, some of the great out there. So made a decision to scale, fundraised for it. Now we need to execute on scaling. What does that mean? It means that I had to switch from doing everything to talking about doing. You know, it's an exaggeration, but it's about defining policies, defining strategies, building systems, building processes, setting goals. It's not about me being involved in each and every process and doing each and every process, but really ensuring that we're all rowing in the same direction We're all sharing the same values and culture. We are hiring the people that we all will appreciate to work with. We're terminating the people that are not the right fit for us. But as the company grows and I'm not in every meeting and I'm not in every place in the company, actually, again, I live in Israel. The headquarters engineering and product is in Israel and all the go-to-market functions are in the US. To get to bridge that gap, I started commuting every other week. So every, sorry, every 2 weeks, I would spend 2 weeks in California, 2 weeks in Israel. Since 2007, for 4 years until COVID, that was my schedule. And that was my way to bridge all these gaps, both the geographic gaps and the gap that I'm now a step further away from the details of everything that is going on in the company. It's not— I cannot feel and sense it in my own hands, every aspect of the company. And then I need to build mechanisms to do that, to accomplish that. How do I know what's the health of the company? How do I test the pulse of the company? Yes, I'm visiting, you know, I'm spending time in each office 2 weeks, but Is that enough? It's not enough. I can tell you that it's not enough. And we need to build the systems and processes for us to, you know, check the pulse of the company and understand that we really are hiring to the right culture. We really are hiring to the right quality and the product and the service is at the level that we require. So that required me to step back from almost all of operations I still interviewed all the seniors in product, but I no longer knew every employee and met every employee before they joined the company. The last couple of years were those high acceleration and then COVID this year. And yeah, HR challenges galore, right? Both when you hire in any day, when you hire that much, when you almost double the team year over year, you will have HR challenges, and this time we need to step up to those challenges. And then helping the executive team and myself to develop and scale, right? It's not given that we know our work. It's not given that we know what we need to do. Neither of us were in these phases of a company's growth before, so, you know, I used an executive coach for many years and still do. Offered executive coaches for my execs and, you know, trying to learn from others and to get support from others. So today I'm literally not doing almost anything hands-on. It's all about managing and driving the company's vision and strategy and policies and tactics. Communication and alignment are key to ensure that we're all rowing in the same direction. You need to have a certain cadence, you need to have a certain level of communication to make sure that everyone understands the vision, understands the strategy, ideally shares the vision and definitely shares the strategy. And then shift— now we're accelerating, you know, guiding the next level of acceleration? Can we shift gears yet again? So this is fast forward to today. I mentioned before that, or at least it was on one of the slides, that there are certain values or strategies that work well in early stages and don't work well in later stages. I'll give one example. When you start, you want to be nimble, you want to be just agile, you want to use every dollar that is available for you in the most efficient way. I title it, again, so when we hire, when we build something, when we buy something, it's after we've had some scratches, we've had some pain, we've experienced the pain of missing that function, of missing that person, only then do we hire for that function. It's kind of an agile version of organizational development. You don't build everything up front, you just, with the feedback, now it's the feedback from the company, you build into the company. That doesn't work when your goal is to scale. When your goal is to scale at the pace we do, you need, if you wait until it hurts, you'll break an arm or a leg. It'll be too painful for the organization if you wait and you don't build some infrastructure in place, some hiring ahead of time, some systems that help the company grow. One area is obviously automation. Automation, when for a company that needs to hire so many people, needs to bring on board so many people. If we can replace people with systems, that is an immediate go-to decision for us. And we are heavy on systems and enabling systems. This is just a snapshot for you. Obviously Tipalti, but in all honesty, I've started using Tipalti when we were a one-day company or first version. Actually hired my CFO in 2018, right? We are a payments company without a CFO for the first 8 years of the company, largely because we used Tipalti and, you know, it solved so many of our challenges and pains that we didn't need to have a finance team. It's not only the CFO, we didn't have a finance team altogether. 2 systems that I really think are important are Culture Amp and Slido. You can use other systems, but Culture Amp we use for employee surveys, engagement surveys, you know, hiring surveys and offboarding surveys. But these are great to really understand whether your organization— just get a very detailed in-depth view of your organization, how you're doing. And generally we know how we're doing, but I think in almost every survey we are— I think in survey number 4 or something, there was one or two things that surprised us, and I loved it. Obviously I'm not looking forward to the surprises, but when I am surprised, it means that I'm identifying something that we can do better. Slido is part of our cadence. We have these We have these town halls. Slido allows us to hear questions from the team, hear concerns from the team in an anonymous way and react to that. And then other systems that helped us grow. We're running out of time, so I'll jump right to the end. Where we are now, now we are in rinse and repeat. We are now starting 4 or 5 new initiatives We've expanded the vision for the second time. We're now going to do more for the finance teams, and that entails starting 4 or 5 initiatives, each of which is the scale of what DiPaolte was when we started, and the potential is similar, each of which requires the same level of attention, the same level of resources in terms of, you know, Tipaldi had a CEO, it had VPs of finance, of product, of marketing. That— now we need to have each and every function have the same level of care, the same detail. And that's the reorganization, redefining my role. How do I dedicate myself more to those new initiatives where I need to bring more value to and how do I switch, how do I change gears within the company. A few of the methodologies or techniques we use to keep alignment in the company are, you know, having a quarterly 3-day executive meeting. Used to be called offsite, now it's all over Zoom where we review the previous quarter, the next quarter, and long-term vision. And these are tremendously important to keeping the executive team aligned, then communicating that with the management team and with the broader company. I have my own weekly and some— with some execs, daily check-ins, especially given COVID and given the geographical distance. Really critical to keeping alignment and having everyone on the same page. And then monthly all-hands, as we mentioned, and biweekly status meetings. So these are some of the tools we use to keep alignment, to keep communication, to keep everyone on the same page, both in terms of the vision, the strategy, and the status of the company and transparency and everything else. I'll pause now. This is really— so I'm now focused on obviously continuing to grow the company, but I'm gearing myself to having a greater focus on these new initiatives. Expect them to take 20-25% of my time. So I need to find my time and dedicate also to geographical and product expansion. So these are some— it's a very brief session, so I had to run through this. But these are some of the changes in my role, some of the challenges that I'm experiencing as the company grows and changes. So I think, yeah, I think we're out of time. So we'll take your questions. We'll try to respond. Come to our booth, we'll try to answer there. If not, we'll try to respond elsewhere. Really appreciate you taking the time and coming to