Live from SaaStr Europa 2022: The Secrets to Working with VCs with Coelius Capital

Making sure you ask though, because I think that's the easiest way. Like, let us know how we can help you because often, you know, we want to and it is a long relationship. So, okay, Greg. Yes. Let's get that mic.

Thank you. This is super helpful, by the way. When you're working with multiple investors, How— and you're working with all these individual players across them— how important is it to you, from your perspective, to facilitate relationships, have them collaborate across each other, at least be comfortable working together? Important, not important?

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, oftentimes I think best companies do connect their cap tables. Reality is oftentimes the cap table is connected anyway. You know, it's a small world and a lot of investors know each other and, you know, a lot of the players we talked about know each other. And so, you know, I think to the extent that they don't, connecting them is helpful, right? Because you can also— so you're telling someone, the investor, why you're excited, but another investor can also share how they were excited, right? And how they're thinking about the opportunity. And, you know, maybe they're deep sector experts and this is why they picked your company. And so I think, again, just like the more reinforcement you have around like the why, really, Really helps what you would add there.

Yeah, one of the things that you'll often find between different participants in the ecosystem is that we have to play a long game with each other. So like, we're gonna be interacting around multiple deals for potentially decades. And so, I actually can't lie to Tiffany. Tiffany can ask me, she can be like, "Hey, is this company doing well?" And if it's doing poorly, I'm gonna be like, "No, it's actually doing pretty poorly." Because if I tell her that my company is doing great and it actually is doing poorly, she's gonna lose trust in me, and that trust is incredibly valuable in this ecosystem because a lot of these deals are built on trust at the very core, and things move very rapidly because everyone trusts each other. And so, you'll often find that like the back channel that happens behind the scenes where different investors and different angels and different participants in your cap table talk to the next round investors is just as important as what you say when you're at the front of the table talking to them about your company. And so you always need to be very careful about it. And then one thing that you can do is you can go to your angels and be like, "Hey, I'm getting ready to raise a round. When somebody calls you and they ask you how I'm doing, what are you gonna say? And let's talk about that and let's make sure that we're all on the same page and that you understand kind of how that's all gonna play out." Because it can be very, very powerful in the, in the process.

Yeah, and one good way to do this is like incredible investor updates. You know, some people are amazing about sending out investor updates, especially if you have so many people on your cap table. You're obviously not gonna, you know, call all of them and give them an individual update every time, but a powerful investor update is really helpful. Arms whoever's, you know, chatting with the next person about, you know, what your company's doing, what you're up to, and again, it has like all the highlights in there for the reel.

Yeah.

Investor updates. Actually, there's this weird thing that I've seen is that my best companies always have the best investor updates. And my worst companies always have the worst updates. I don't know what it is, but it always seems to work out to be true. I would definitely agree with that. Any more questions?

Yeah.

Thanks.

It's really good.

Do the associates also have a role after the deal is closed?

Yes.

Because of that knowledge.

Yes, absolutely. And again, like they can be great advocates for you, not only getting you through the deal process, But everything post as well. And again, it varies by firm, right? And, you know, some will actually meet with you weekly or monthly. And but again, it's kind of like ask them what you need. You know, do you need benchmarking? What are, what is the margin profile of other companies in your space? You know, what does go-to-market look like in other characters? How do you think about hiring? What is the VP of people search looking like right now? Like all of those questions would be great, you know, for anyone working on it, whether it's the associate, you know, Might be others on the deal team as well. For example, at GGV, we have a platform services team that also comes in and helps you. And so really like to all of those people, ask how you need help because it'll just be easiest for them to direct their focus that way.

Yeah. One thing you'll often find is that the general partner is incredibly busy. So, I mean, between sitting on boards and dealing with LPs and interacting with the other partners, like they just can barely keep up with their day-to-day. Whereas the associates often have more bandwidth, and so for firm resources, introductions to potential customers, introduction to other portfolio companies, ways to utilize what the firm can do for you, the associate can often be your best resource. And so making friends with them, it's in your best interest. Like, no, really, because they can spend their time however they want, and they often aren't incentivized to like spend time on you, the company, any more than any other company. But like, you know, you send them a bottle of wine after the deal gets done, you take them out to dinner, you build a relationship, you show that you are a good friend to them, you provide value to them, maybe you introduce them to some other cool companies, suddenly you'll find you can have this very powerful team member who can help you build your business.

Any more?

Awesome. Thank you for coming. We appreciate it. Thank you all.

Yeah, great to see you.

Check. Okay, dude, this is a limit. Don't go there. If you want to do presentation, do you want this? No, no. 10 minutes.

It's not my biggest issue, so I'm like, every time someone's like, I'm like Hey everyone.

Hey everyone. So, thank you for coming to watch this Payhawk demo. For those of you that haven't already got a drink, we're serving drinks over there as we speak. So feel free to also go and grab some drinks, come back, and enjoy the demo. But before we get into the demo itself, just a quick introduction to the two of us on stage. So my name's Jack, I'm the VP of Product Marketing at Payhawk, and then we have Nicky.

Hello all, I'm part of the product team at Payhawk, and I develop the integrations with external systems.

So in this demo, we're going to cover two aspects of the Payhawk platform. So firstly, we're going to run through the kind of user experience that business travelers like yourselves who are on business trips spending company funds, the experience that you're having. And I'll kind of run through most of that. And then afterwards, Nikki is going to take us through the kind of the back end of the platform, which is the experience that finance leaders, accountants have when using Payhawk. So the first thing I'm going to show you is our cards. So I'm gonna hand this mic to Nicky so I can get the cards out of my pocket. So I guess the sort of core of our product for the— well, actually, I guess before I kind of show you the cards, just a very, very quick overview of Payhawk's platform. So we're a company cards, expense management, and reimbursement solution that operates globally. And so, you know, I guess the sort of core problems we solve for our customers are just kind of simplifying those time-consuming finance processes and, yes, simplifying kind of global expansion and international growth when you're kind of growing into new markets. So here are two of our cards. The green one I have here is our metal card, and the black one here is actually my card. And I guess they're sort of, yeah, not just sort of traditional bank cards. A few things to kind of mention about them. Firstly, they're Visa cards, so unlike kind of Amex cards, which lots of businesses use, these are widely accepted. So you don't have any of the kind of acceptance issues. When you spend with them, you get free 3% cashback. So if you spend 100 grand a month, sort of a typical business spends something like this, you'll get free, free grand cashback. So direct revenue to your bottom line. We can issue them in currently 5 currencies. So we support USD, euros, pounds, Romanian lei, and Bulgarian lev. So you have one, one card solution to use globally. You can also obviously spend in different currencies too. and we have very low FX rates, sort of 1% lower than most bank cards. Also built into the cards is kind of your governance and controls that you need, that your finance teams need to manage this at scale. So, you know, if you're a large business, you know, sort of 200 employees or something, you're going to need to have different policies about what your employees can spend, whether they're in your management team, exec team, or kind of more junior employees, and we give you the controls you need to manage those, manage all of that at scale. So for example, you know, do you want your employees withdrawing out of ATMs, for example, or spending online? All of that can be controlled by the backend platform. So then I think let's just show you an example of the, of the platform in action. So This is firstly the mobile app, and so what we see here is a spend that Nicky had this morning on his taxi from the hotel to Sastra. And so that's popped up in the app automatically as a transaction, and he's simply just scanning the receipt here that is then going to kind of automatically go into the platform on the backend and allows the accounting team to review and accept that expense. So all he's doing is, you know, inputting a simple description of the expense and then indicating a category such as travel that allows the finance team to synchronize that with the accounting system. So also in the app, you can manage the cards like, I guess, a lot of modern consumer banking platforms. So you can see the different cards you have available, you can see the funds you have associated with them, and you know, if you're in a situation where, you know, you've run out of funds, you've hit the limit, it's a couple of clicks to simply request additional funds to the card. So, you know, I think in this instance it's going to automatically approve, but let's say I was kind of Nicky's manager, this would be popping up on my phone and I'd just be hitting a few buttons just to kind of approve that expense, approve that new limit, and it automatically adds to the card. Now it You know, as well as spending on the cards, there's obviously times when you don't spend on the cards. So here we're going through a flow of when you use your car for business purposes. So, you know, you're entitled to kind of reimbursement to cover the costs of using that car. So here's the simple app that we have that allows you to submit your mileage expense. So all you have to do is enter the start and end location, and it automatically calculates the expense value. And in a minute, Nikki will show you how we can also then, in a couple of clicks, reimburse the employees directly for their expense. So whereas traditionally, you know, when you're submitting expenses like this, you would wait a couple of weeks, submit them at the end of the month, you then have to wait another month or so before you actually get the reimbursement in your bank account. This all happens with Payhawk in a couple of clicks. So I think that covers the kind of overview of the user experience that the kind of business travelers have. Nicky's now going to talk you through more of the kind of finance accounting features that we have on the platform.

Thank you very much, Jack. So I'm gonna take off from where Jack actually finished, and as you can see, that is Jack's mileage expense that he submitted. And the next steps, and actually reimbursing him straight out of Payhawk, takes literally one click. So what happens is the finance controller, or the person that's responsible for reviewing the expenses, can have a look at whether all the information provided is correct, and if they're happy with the result, they can mark the expenses as reviewed. When marking an expense as reviewed, the action that we are actually doing is, is we're pushing that into the external system that we've currently connected. So we have a direct API connection with NetSuite, which allows us for seamless integration between all the account codes, all the tax rates, all the departments and all the classifications that you need from NetSuite. In addition to that, what actually happens is that we have a direct link with NetSuite, which is nothing that an expense management solution at the moment has. So what we actually can do is jump into NetSuite with a single click and see the actual expense from NetSuite, which allows you for full duplex communication between the two systems. In essence, accountants and finance controllers can pretty much have all the data synchronously exported into one system to another, and without having any CSVs or any type of imports and exports going around. In addition to that, as Jack mentioned, the next thing that actually happens on the system is we allow you to manage cards at scale. So Jack went to SaaS, he He has his card. He requested additional funds for having a little bit more cash for beer yesterday. But the whole point of Payhawk is simply not managing one or two cards. It's all about managing cards at scale and having many of your employees using the cards and the product that you have. So pretty much the most important bits and pieces are the controls that we have built in. And that's what we call as spend policies. Those policies allow you to define a set of rules that are applicable to a wider audience. So let's say at Payhawk right now we have a spend policy which is for employees, and by design each employee that has a card and we've attached the spend policy to the employee will have access to €200. They will be able to withdraw cash on ATM, they will be able to make online payments as well, and In addition to that, they will be able to request additional funds based on an approval chain that we've specifically defined for them. When you couple this with the fact that issuing cards on Payhawk literally takes one click and they get shipped physically within 3 business days across Europe, or virtual cards become instantly active and you can put them in your Apple Pay or Google Pay, you pretty much have an all-in-one spend that would be able to cover all the use cases for your business travelers or what is more neat since we're in the SaaS events, subscription spending. So as you can see right now, we have Gary's card, which has a subscription attached to it. And when you add to that the fact that we already scan your inbox and your expenses for recurring payments, we can be smart about it and we can issue a warning telling Gary that he has an upcoming payment of €820, but the current limit of the card is 500. So there's a huge possibility that this will decrease, decline the next transaction. And just to finish off, we do provide full management of all the subscriptions that you have on Payhawk. So what actually happens is we scan all the transactions that go through and give this analytics on how month by month Payhawk subscriptions change. And you have a full overview of one of the biggest chunks with modern companies, and that's pretty much the SaaS spend. And those are the main bits and pieces. As you can see, this information gets seamlessly integrated with NetSuite, Xero, QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics, and a bunch of other ERPs that we have in the pipeline. And all the finance controls that you can do are just at your fingertips. So thank you very much for this.

If you have any questions, we'll be stood over there by our drinks, which you're also welcome to. Come and have a drink with us and yeah, answer any questions that you have.