Our Top 5 Mistakes in Scaling with Monday.com's co-CEOs Roy Mann and Eran Zinman

So just to give you context about us as a company before we dive in. So we are a platform that allows everybody to manage any aspect of their business, from work management to managing processes to project management, CRM, hr, whatever process you might have. And we're very diverse as a company. So as you can see, we have customers that have anywhere from two people within the same account to 5,000 across 190 countries. And I think something that's very unique about money.com is the fact that we have customers from over 200 different industries, which is a great thing, but also kind of complicates things and kind of the magic behind our platform. Another interesting fact is 70% of our customers are what we call from non tech organizations. So a really broad audience. If you can see the graph on the right, which represents our revenue growth since 2015, it's been quite a ride. And I think this is why we thought this is an amazing opportunity for us to share five things that we feel that enabled us or worked for us during this journey and five things we would have done differently or five lessons that we learned. We now have more than 110,000 customers using our platform, more than 650 employees across multiple offices in Tel Aviv, New York, London, Sydney, San Francisco and Miami. So this is really in a nutshell about us as a company and let's start.

Cool. So I share everything Iran said about Saster. It's been amazing when we visited it physically and I think it's also really amazing now online. We read a lot of all of it, all the time blog posts and the tweets. So the five things that we wanted to start with are actually the things that do work for us. And the reason why is because I personally had two startups before Monday that failed and I didn't repeat the same mistakes I did in the first one. On the second one I found new ways to make completely new mistakes. And what actually made me learn more is seeing how a successful company works rather than keep making different mistakes all the time. So I think we try to narrow down the five things that are really core to what we feel helped us succeed and then we'll go on and talk about a lot of the great failures with so point number one. So it was really important for us to measure everything from day one. And you can see on the left, like the first dashboard when we had six customers and I think it was almost hard coded the six customers and like how it is today with a lot of other metrics and, you know, details and and it was an evolution. But it was important for us to start with one metric and see those numbers. And the point behind measuring, which everyone says you have to measure. But the key is that it was important for us to measure it ourselves, to track it in our own database. We built a system we call now Big Brain. But we didn't start off that way. We started off with just recording it in a database. It was important for us to own the data, to know exactly what was going on, that when you click refresh on a page, it goes up by one. And when you have problems, you don't have anywhere to hide, like you own the data, it's yours. And that was instrumental in our ability to scale, because whenever we had an issue or a question, we could always go back and search the real data. It wasn't behind Google Analytics or any other system that kind of hid the data from us. So that's like one core thing and still believe in it today and run the company today.

Thanks, Roy. The second point we wanted to emphasize, and this is, I think it includes two things that we feel was very important to us. Being able to build a company and scale so fast is to give people full ownership over what needs to be done. But in order to enable this, we built a culture of transparency within the organization. So since literally day one for us as a company, we've been fully transparent with everybody in the company. And when I say fully transparent, I mean we share everything from our revenue numbers to how much money we have in the bank, what's the burn rate, churn numbers, marketing numbers, everything. We have one exception, which is people's compensation. But apart from that, every metric, every number, every figure is available to everybody in the company. The way it is available is through dashboards that we have across the office. I think we've seen some of those in the video in the beginning. Big Brain, the system that Roy mentioned in the previous slide. So everybody in the organization have access. Everybody can see the dashboards. I think what it really creates. And by the way, this is valid still today, when we're over 650 employees, everybody in the company knows everything. No silos, no discrete information. Everybody can see everybody else data. And what this created is a very strong feeling of ownership within the company because everybody is feeling like they're aiming at the same direction. Everybody have all the knowledge. Nobody can come, you know, to you as a person and say, you know, I think this needs to be done in a very specific way because I know the numbers, everybody knows the numbers. Everybody understands how the business operates and people can help us. It's not just about the management that know what's going on. Everybody know what's going on. So people can point mistakes, people can tell us if something doesn't work. People find issues and just help make the company better. The way we think about it is that we in a way harness everybody's intelligence towards making the company better, as opposed to having only a limited amount of people that kind of control the information and know what's going on. This led on purpose to a very strong feeling of ownership where people, when they're being assigned, whether it's a specific goal or a project, they feel like this is my ownership. I want to make it successful. Not only that I need to do this, but also I want to make sure it's successful and it's being done in the best possible way. One example I can think about is our developers. When they're developing a new feature, it's not just writing the code, but everybody cares about the product, the design of it. And then when we launch it to our users, the feedback that we get, the bugs that are being reported. So this is just one example, but across the company, in every department, people feel a very strong feeling of ownership and their ability to fix things and just make them good. So this is something that we feel that really makes us strong as a company.

Okay, Number three, move fast. So moving fast is also well known as something important like iteration until perfection and those kind of stuff. It was super important for us and still is to start quickly. Like, don't. Like when you plan without doing the first step, then you're actually planning in the point that you know the least about what you're trying to do. So we want to make the first step the quickest that we possibly can, like a week, two weeks, like release it gradually, but. But get it out there and get the feedback from people, whether it's internal or external to our customers. We want to get the feedback loop going really quickly and it gets addicting. And when do this quickly, it. It changes the whole mindset. So I'll give an example. In the product, when you want to make a change, if it takes you three months to do something, then people have opinions and different opinions and they get into a place where they need to make a choice. Right? So you need to have people agree on stuff and then it becomes something in the middle so no one really gets what they want. And then when you launch it and it fails or succeeds, you don't exactly know why? Okay, so, and another point is that when you launch something and it takes you three months, then usually you want to make it perfect, right? Because you worked so much about it, so you're less willing to feel that it's not going to be good, so you invest even more time. And then when you get the feedback, you would less likely be willing to change it, right? Because you invested so much time. And when we look on the other side, when it's quick, okay, when the iteration is super fast, then if it takes you a week to launch something, you're not that tied to it, so you're willing to get feedback faster. Instead of three months, in two weeks, you get both people to get whatever they wanted to try out. So everything becomes smoother, work is better. And I think we're all privileged that we're doing online tools, right? And online stuff, that we're actually be able to do gradual things, right? Like we always say, if we would have built an airplane, you know, you don't want to try it out first flight and see if it fails, right. Even there, you could do iterations, obviously, but you know, we, we can do way more iterations and move way faster. And we think it's also a key differentiator for us. When we understand we need to change course in the company or take the product into a new area, we can do that really quickly. We don't have to make massive decisions. We just like try it out and see and then people something that is already formalized and it's easier for them to get on board with it and go quicker, rather than you need to make a change or get into something new and it's a big investment, like you need to invest months. So again, more deliberation, more questions at the point that you actually know the list.

Cool, Great. So number four that I want to go through is be open to change. And we try to be open to change constantly. I'll give you a few examples because it might not sound obvious, but as you grow as a company, you have many points of where you need to make a decision. And for some reason, I think it's kind of more of a human behavior. It's easier to stay on course and keep doing what you're doing. And it's harder to make a change or make a bet, if you like. And I think a key part of kind of the way Roy and I are thinking is that we think that not taking bets or not taking risks is kind of the riskiest thing, because just keep doing what you're doing kind of blocks future opportunities and not allowing you to grow to your potential as a company. So I'll give you a few examples. It was, you know, four years ago or three and a half years ago where we knew that we need to change our name, rebrand the company. Before being called money.com the name of the company was the Pulse and not the Pulse with the but da Pulse. And we got a lot of negative feedback about the name. We got great feedback about the product, but negative feedback about the name. People didn't know how to pronounce it, they didn't know how to type it into the search engine or browser. Some people dislike the duh in the beginning and I understand why. It's a decision Roy and I made in the beginning of our journey. And the main reason was because the domain was available 999 when we started a company. And the problem was that we were growing super fast. We had a lot to lose. I don't remember exactly how much ARR we had back then but I would guess around 15 million of ARR and a lot of customers and a community. And we said to ourselves listen, it might look hard to do this right now but it probably the best decision we can make. We kept saying to ourselves this is not the right timing. There's so much pressure, we're growing, there's so much to lose here. But like any decision, the best timing is just do it now. And it felt like a huge risk. Also not everybody in our community liked it in the beginning because people don't like change. But in our mindset we said to ourselves we want to build a big company. We know where we aiming for as a company, as a brand and the Pulse just doesn't represent it. Monday.com does and we were open to that change. We were open to taking that risk. And I can say now in retrospect that it really paid off. But back then it wasn't obvious. Now it seems obvious but back then it was a big thing for us and we kind of kept that mentality of constantly changing, constantly thinking about what needs to be done in order to build a better infrastructure for scaling our company and other examples such as the column store that we built. So we kind of rebuilt the entire architecture of our tool. We didn't have a sales team in the first four years so no sales reps and and we just built that two and a half years ago again a new growth engine that we didn't have before. So a lot of non intuitive decisions that we've made that really paid off in terms of growth.

It sounds intuitive, like having a salesforce.

But like in the beginning, well, not for us.

I said like, we're not going to have a salesforce because we wanted. So I needed to swallow my words and admit that I was wrong. And, and when we went on doing it, and also in the column story, you know, like we really love ironing out every product and then that everything works together well. And Then like from 5 to 50 to 50 columns or 30 columns back then, you know, we said like we need. We had to let go. We had to let go of stuff that we thought brought us up until that point.

So yeah, and just to kind of summarize the point, it always happened when everything was going well. It didn't happen because of a crisis. And this is the tricky part because when it was going well, we kept thinking to ourselves, what's the next step? What are we not doing? What we're not building, what can I. What in our infrastructure or how we build will block us from scaling in the future. It's not obvious. And this is something that we keep reminding ourselves to constantly rethink what we're doing and change and be open to change, even if you're growing and everything is going well. So this is kind of my perspective on this one.

So don't default on what others say or do. So a lot of times we look at other companies, we look externally to get confidence.

Okay.

We look at what is done outside what is common with other companies and we actually get a lot of reminders from everyone to what everyone else is doing all the time. Okay. So what we, I think kind of polished throughout the years is to take the advice and try and understand like what are. If we are missing something and not be defensive about it, but at the same time try to drill down to why others are doing it. Like, we're not going to do something that someone else is doing just because they are doing it. We need to understand why. And when we've done, the sales team, for example, okay, like we understood we needed one and we needed like customers were calling and saying like, help me. And we just had support and they always got a different person and they were frustrated. So we understood we need someone to help them and we call ourselves in the consultancy group, which they are, they consult our customers. But when we went on about it like every model was commission based and we didn't like that, we thought differently and our team is not based on commission. Why? Because we wanted them to have the Same objective as the customer, not try and drive that up artificially. Just do whatever is best for the customer. On another end, we wanted teams to work better together and not everyone just like trying to get their own quota out because their salary is based on that. Okay. So it also was significant in how we build the sales team, in how we build the culture. So it's not commission based, but it was due to the fact that we didn't take that as an obvious. Although so many other companies are doing it, we took like some that are not doing it and took the cue from them because we felt like that. And there are a lot of other examples for that in terms of BI systems that we built our own. I didn't take one from the off the shelf, but a lot of other things. So like do things what makes you feel like if you feel strongly about something, go down to the details and understand what you want to do and try and get confidence about it. Because for us it always meant that we'll own it because we've made the decision and we knew why. So even if we were wrong, we could have changed it afterwards because we owned the decision and we didn't do it because someone else told us, you need to do it that way and we didn't understand. So now we're off to the.

Yeah, these are the five things that we feel that we've done right when building a company and now we're going to share five things that we would have done differently. So five mistakes that we've done and then sometimes we can see how we fix them if we did. But five mistakes that we want to share as part of our journey. So mistake number one is don't only focus internally. So this is kind of tied to what Ri mentioned in his last point where, you know, on the positive side, we always try to kind of look internally and kind of understand what we want to achieve. And like we mentioned, you know, we decided not to have commission on our sales team. But I think, you know, this is both a good thing that we have as part of our, you know, partnership and as a company, but also it does in a few occasions to making mistakes because we were too focused on ourselves as a company. And this is kind of, I think also kind of something that people, CEOs or any founders of the company kind of feel that kind of the company kind of sucks you in into the day to day. And it's very important to kind of go outside and get other people's perspective. So I think this is something that we haven't done in the past. We were very focused internally and I think as both of our characters also always kind of try to find answers ourselves, so come up with the answers. We always take ownership and try to find solutions. But what we found along the way is that consulting with other people and getting their perspective and learning from others is very important. I would say one thing that we've learned is always try to understand when people give you advice, what background they're coming from. Because everybody have their own experience. If somebody is looking for advice from me, I always say, this is my experience because I've done XYZ and this is why I give you this advice. Other people have different experiences and therefore their advice is going to be different. So we do try to kind of keep debugging as the developers that we are the reason behind the device and why people came up with this conclusion. But just learning that and getting their perspective is super valuable for us as a company. And now we consult with other CEOs, other CFOs, other leaders in other companies, just getting their perspective. And it's something we haven't done in the past and I really feel it hurt us in several occasions. Over to you, Roy.

Mistake number two. Okay. Yeah. So Iran, when he saw this slide, he said, that's yoi. It's like I would venture and say that whatever, at least for me, whatever I'm passionate about, I live like it's going to be. Blow up in my face at the end because, like, you like doing something, it sucks. You, you even might be good at it. Okay. And then you don't. You have other things and you move and because you're good, you keep it to yourself. You're. You're not moving forward. So we have, I think, like at the moment, I think a lot of good examples that blew up in our faces and then we fixed them. Like one in the beginning was the product, I feel, which we like, both Iran and I came from this background. This is what we've done our whole lives, building product. And we kind of, you know, let that part ourselves. And it was really hard for us to let go in a way that we didn't really know how to. Okay. And over time, we understood there is a problem. Like we think about stuff that should be done, we have it all in our heads, but the process is not there. People don't really understand it and we can't scale the team that way. So over time it became, in the beginning we could do it well. And over time it became not so great because people needed more, more of our time, more of our effort to understand that. And the demands became bigger than we could ever fulfill. And on the same time, we had other stuff to do in the company, so we had even less time. And so we've made that change and added the product. And maybe we'll talk about KPIs and how we led with that later. Another big mistake, a personal one of mine, is that I really love online marketing. And I did a lot of that in the beginning. And as it grew more complex, it actually excited me. Like, I love that even more because it's like really an amazing world of, of how the early stages of a user with your product, right, like their early beginning of what they understand, what they don't. I see it as a product and what I didn't do is build a lot of infrastructure in the team in a lot of other areas. They're like really true good management and you know, we paid the price for. And it took me a while to even understand that because I really liked it so much. So wherever you enjoy yourself and like, and you know, when you feel bad about something, you go and do the thing that makes you feel good. Be careful, it might be a hoard your digging.

Great point. Okay, point number three that Ria and I learned and a mistake that we've done is just because you have leadership doesn't mean you have a leadership team. So a few years ago, we kind of started building our leadership team and we hired a lot of great VPs, and every one of them was super talented on its own. But something that we kind of discovered along the way is that it's not enough. So it's not enough to hire super smart people. It's not enough to hire great leaders. I think the most value that you can get is when the team is working together. And I think, you know, founders in the beginning of the company are very dominant in terms of, you know, setting the direction and, you know, people follow them and that's okay. But as you scale the company, I feel that kind of founders need to take a step back and give more room and build a true strong leadership team. And what I mean by that is a leadership team that can communicate within itself, that can solve its own problem, that help kind of dictate the strategy and how we get there. And the stronger I feel the stronger that you can build the team and make it successful and let people work together, the stronger you become as a company. And I think that for a very long time, we didn't do this properly. So Re and I kind of kept being the way different leaders connected with one another. And once we kind of understood that, that we were becoming a bottleneck, that we're becoming a way to people to communicate and solve problems or kind of moving forward, we decided to make a change and we kind of stepped back and kind of improve how people work together. And I can say now that it's a totally different leadership team, same people, same quality, but just the way they communicate, the way they push the company forward has been super valuable for us in the company.

I would actually add to that that although it's a management team, it works differently than the team because each one has their day to day separately from the group that is that team. So it's like it took me at least a while to understand that it's a different kind of team management that is required here. While everyone most of their days are not with each other and regular teams most of the day is spend with each other. So it's a different type of dynamic and it's a different to get to the same point that the run made, to get to the same level of teamwork, you need to have different tactics and different ways that people work and talk and meet and work together. Okay, Lead by goals. I'll make this one short because I gave the example before in the product. So for us, leading by goals or by KPIs or by an objective that is clear for everyone, that is the success is key. Why? Because it allows us to take a step back and feel confident about it. So this is what happens for us in the product. So it was really important for us to have a great ui, to have a great experience, to have everything in a way that we understood on how to build great products. But then how do you scale the team and reach the same level? How do you get that confidence that the product will stay the same? So in terms of like ease of use and all the stuff that was important for us and once we understood how to build the goals for the product and it came in a turn of a KPI that for a certain area that we know and worked a lot to improve and know that everyone is aligned towards, like for example, onboarding. So we wanted the conversion in onboarding to the product and that people succeed with it. Okay, so if the KPI will sign up, then you can argue if it's quality or not and if you're just forcing people to do stuff and if the UI is good, but if your KPI is Let's say three days down the funnel and make sure they return. Then I say, okay, they got value. No one can hack that. You have to. Users need to get real value, to reach, to come back and actually start. And then once you understand that, you're able to let go and give people the freedom to experiment, even to the point we got that they did exactly the opposite of what we thought might be good, but it doesn't matter. I knew that the KPI we set together was going to tell us the truth. And guess what? Like a lot of times I got things right and a lot of times I got it wrong and people thought of new ideas or places I wouldn't think of. And it gave us freedom, that we gave people the freedom to experiment and try things when they know that if they succeed, we will both learn it from the market itself and not by what I think is right or what someone else thinks is right. So that's important for us. And that step of defining the KPI and agreeing on the success, on what is success is crucial because it's not just like having a KPI. You need to really say if that thing moves, if that number moves up, then we agree this is the success. And for some areas it took us like two, three weeks to even get to something that we really agree and narrow down. And that is the key that the goal is set for a KPI that you trust to be a success and then you can safely, let's say, let go.

And to our last mistake.

Well, it's not the last mistake.

Well, the last that we managed to squeeze into this slide into the stack. I think this is very important as you scale maintain a culture of constant feedback. I feel that for a very long time we use different methods of giving feedback that wasn't very effective. So we had feedback talks, but once every six months or once every quarter, which is great, I think. And we always had one on one meetings on all levels in the company. It was very important. But I think something that we didn't build in the right way in the past in our company is people giving other people constant feedback. So let's say you just finished a meeting, you have feedback for the person who presented or somebody else. You know, it's very important to give the feedback very, very, you know, soon or a few hours after the meeting or the day after, because, you know, it's fresh, people can relate to that and they can learn. And I feel that we didn't do this enough as a company and not giving feedback and people not kind of hearing what they need to hear sometimes leads to frustration or people feel like that they can't comment on other people, job or behavior. So I think this is something that was very important that we changed. And now we give constant feedback on a daily basis. We still have the performance talks every quarter or every. But basically it's no surprises because people get constant feedback. They know where they're standing, they know exactly where they are. And I feel this really creates a culture where everybody feel open to give back to one another. I think one very important thing is that, you know, I myself as a manager and all managers, I ask for feedback proactively. So it's not just important to give feedback, but also ask for feedback. Because once people feel comfortable giving you feedback, they also feel uncomfortable on getting feedback. So this is a, you know, become a very important part of our culture that we didn't have in the past and definitely was a mistake that didn't allow us to move as fast that we as we could. So that's our points. I'll really quickly recap on the, I would say the highlights. So number one is measure. So we talked about the dashboard that measured from day one and the fact that we built a system called Big Brain and also transparency, how we share everything within the company. The second point, it's all about the team. And this relates to everything that we discussed about the management team, about giving people ownership and giving them goals. So you know, we hire super smart people, super talented people and they don't need to be micromanaged. Just show them the goal and they'll get there, be open to all kinds of change. I think this is one of the most important things that we have in our culture, our ability to change. Rethink what needs to be done, take and make bold steps and don't be afraid to take bets and kind of think what's the best thing for our company as we scale. Number four is move fast. I think this is very important. This is the fastest way to get to perfection is through iteration. So moving fast just allows you to become a better company over time. And like, like RI mentioned, none of us is building airplanes or a skyscraper where every step need to be pre calculated. We're building software and we have the privilege to test it. So moving fast I think is so critical to software company success. And number five is feedback. Feedback from your team, feedback from a management team across the board. Very important so people can know how to improve and be open to feedback from one another. This is the recap of everything that we've discussed. I think we're done going through our slides and I think we have some more time to questions from the audience. Thank you.

Yes, thank you guys so much. That was great. It's always great hearing the secrets and the mistakes and things you do again. So we've got a ton of questions that have come through that we're going to run through. Feel free to turn off your videos if you're comfortable. If anyone wants to answer a question live, just go ahead and turn off your video and take yourself off mute. We'd like to prioritize live questions, but I'm going to go ahead and kick things off and go through some questions in the chat. So first I'll let you guys kind of tag team and figure out who's going to answer what. Were there any processes, structures which you implemented especially early in the product's development, which enabled you to build momentum while still ensuring all features were fully thought out and fit with the business model?

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Okay.

Okay. So I think the question was specifically about product development and our ability to iterate on our software. So this is, I think, one of the most critical processes that we've built. I mean, in general, we're not very, we're not trying to optimize for processes, but I feel in this specific occasion it was very important. So we already mentioned the fact that the way we run our product teams is by setting very specific goals and not telling people exactly what to do. So the point is to give them ownership and kind of allowing the team, the product manager, the developers, the designers to make their own decisions and being the product that they believe in and not to do what Roy and I have in our minds or anybody else in the company. So just in order to keep people in the loop, we had this process where we set a very specific goal and then we have a session that's called the kickoff, which is a one hour session where the product manager go through all the opportunities and how they kind of plan to reach the goal. And then we have like once every two weeks we have an update where they share their progress, the A B test, and it goes throughout all the teams and it's our responsibility to be part of that. If you want to be in the sessions, if you want to give feedback, it's our responsibility. So the team is moving forward and it works for us across all teams and allows to scale the company super quickly.

Great. Next question. How did you balance executive decision making versus working level ownership for building products and features? That is how often do product marketing launch. How often do product or marketing launch things which you hadn't. Sorry. How often do you do product marketing launch things which you haven't seen or approved?

I think all the time.

That's like when you first of all, like for a long time, I think Ron and I, like were in the trenches, okay? We're not like deciding from top down. We go down and like actually design and do stuff together with the team. And so even in the beginning, it wasn't like a top down decision. It was together, okay? Like the team had other ideas, we crafted it together and we shaped it together. You know, you start off one place and then you end up in another. So it was always teamwork. And I think this is exactly what we're optimizing towards today. Again, when you set the KPI, okay, an objective, where we want to go, that's the executive decision. Okay, where we want to go. And usually by the way, the product who is leading that team is the one who sets the KPI. We can attune it together as a team again, but then people, you know, go and understand it on their own, make decisions on their own, launch things on their own. Like, the speed here plays a big part in understanding this because we deploy like, I don't know, like it used to be almost like, I don't know, 50, 60 times a day. We deployed product into production today. We kind of made it on an hourly basis, but so people can try new things. They can release a feature, go to a small amount of customers that try it out and give feedback back. Right? So if there is good feedback, people try it, they show us the data. What kind of decision do we have to make?

Did you guys see every push before it went live? Like, do you personally have to approve or.

Nothing?

No. I used to write code up until four years ago, and at some point they revoked my access to GitHub. So Rory and I have no control over it.

They revoked his access to GitHub, but for me, they had a party when they removed my last line of code from the system.

Next question. Moving on to about culture. What are the winning ingredients to creating a culture that moves and iterates fast? How do you communicate it to your team? How do you hire for that DNA fit? How do you align it with compensation? How do you keep your team leads going along with that goal? These are really deep, long.

Yeah, but so I mentioned that transparency is a big part of our culture. Ownership is another one. Moving fast is another one. Product focus and Customer centricity is another one. I think that our culture is a key part of our why we win and our success. We actually created our own podcast as a company. It's called Startup for Startup. It was aimed to help other startups in our ecosystem. And we share a lot about our culture and our DNA, mostly in Hebrew, but we have some episodes in English. And it just allows us to people to get to know the company and people find us and kind of connect our culture. So another way that we can represent it outside of the company.

Yeah. And regarding speed, like, how do you convey that? So it's not always easy. Okay. Like, as you scale, more people join. And it's not always obvious to start doing something when you know exactly what will happen. Let's say the intuition for a new employee is to try and do things perfectly, rather than it's counterintuitive to just do something and move it fast. So it's part of how we do things. And we want, like, for example, in the rd, like the first week, they released something. Okay. In the Customer Success Team, in the first week, they have a webinar. Okay. So imagine like you join a conference and then you have a way. And our webinars have like over a thousand people each joining them. So it's like, first week, you're up in front of a thousand people, exciting system. So that's like a really good way to get them, you know, jump into the water.

Yeah. Feet first. You touched on transparency a little bit with that question. So obviously you mentioned it's key to your growth. Curious, like, how did you guys decide to prioritize that? And have you ever been hurt by it?

Yeah, it's a great question. So I remember the day that we made the decision. I think we were five or six people in the company. And it was, you know, Rory and I talking about it. And we said, this is the company that we want to build. This is something that we deeply believe in. And, you know, a lot of it came from our perspective that we worked in companies before, and we knew how we wanted to be treated as part of those companies. I felt weird that I was managing people, and I didn't know if the company I was working for was successful or not. Are we doing well? Did we have a good quarter? And we said, we want to build a different type of company where everybody knows everything. It did come with a few concerns. What if things don't go well? What if people will see that we running out of cash? Our investors told us that it's A huge mistake. What if our competitors will know our revenue numbers? And whenever we thought about those questions, we always said to ourselves, this is just fear. People talk out of fear. There's so much to benefit from. The fact that everybody knows everything, people feel trusted, people feel empowered. I feel the positive side is much more than the fear. And the fear, you know, doesn't exist. What we found is that when things don't go well, instead of people being scared out of it, they feel empowered, they want to help. They're even more motivated when they see that, you know, back in the days that the cashing was running down, everybody's helping us raise the next round. So the opposite happened. None of the fear happened, but all the positive things happen. I really feel it's a huge part of our success as a company. Yeah.

And also, if something do go wrong and there is like, I don't know, something in the numbers doesn't work, then it shows that it's all okay. You know, it makes him stronger and more resilient over time. Great.

How did you decide so rapidly, relatively speaking, to go wide and broad in your product platform?

I can take this one. It was like, actually, I think when we initially thought about it, we took it from our perspective of how to connect a lot of departments across the company. So we build a product that is really versatile. That was the beginning. We wanted to give our customers the power to build their own tools. So that was in the beginning of everything. But then when we, I don't think we understood the depth of the impact it will make. Because when we, for example, had an ad that said project management for startups, because our initial go to market was project management, now we're doing CRM software, software development, and a lot of other verticals. But back then it was project management for startup. We got a lot of churches. Okay. So it was really surprising, like, why would a church start managing their fundraising? And a lot of other stuff when they saw that kind of ad for startups and we understood that there is a deeper need. You know, when we saw. And then we measured all those verticals and try to really understand the depth of types of customers that use us. And it was clear that this is something big, that we should go over everything. And you know, when people ask us what are we focusing about, we said like, we focus on everything. So it's like it is counterintuitive focus on a massive market, but it paid off and it makes sense for the opportunity that we. We're fortunate enough to have here.

Great. Probably Time for one or two more questions. We've got a lot coming through, so sorry if we don't get to yours. We'll send these over to you guys if you want to address them in a blog post or something. But one easy one, which will be quick. Was it easy to acquiremonday.com someone wants.

To know, oh, how many hours do we have? Okay, short answer is no. It took us, I think, since the moment we made the decision to acquire the domain, until we had, you know, full ownership over it. I think it took 14 months overall and like five years from my life until we got it. So it was a long time.

The color into it, it's like someone who stole it. And then we figured that out because it came to us. And then we bought it again from the original owner.

So we had to buy twice. Yeah, it's a long story.

Second time was way more expensive.

Yeah.

Which I would assume, but that's great. Okay, one or two more questions in this question. I'll ask the question and then kind of we might have to explain or define the term. Was serendipity present at any point of your business journey? And if so, how can you position yourself for serendipity to happen? So I don't know. We don't know. Like, you know, I would assume that serendipity just means, you know, that to happen by accident or to have, like, a lucky outcome.

Yeah.

So I think we have a lot of that. And again, because of the. The fact that we let go and give the team a KPI. Okay. So then you say, you know, we need to get there. How do we do it? And then they go investigate stuff and then they bring out ideas. You know, so this is where, like, sometimes crazy ideas happen. Okay, so. And that happens a lot, all the time stuff. We were on the global scheme, we intend to, but on the small scale, we don't. And I'll give another example, we tend to do a lot of internal hackathons. Like, for example, we launched the dashboards. We wanted to add a lot of widgets to it. Okay. So we said, okay, one day, let's organize. Do a lot of widgets, whatever you want. Okay. So we did. We ended up having. One of the funny ones was that we wanted to represent the data on the board as a llama farm. Like, it's a farm with llamas running around and their color changes. Okay. So, like, that was an idea. You can guess. It was one of the ideas people thought were really stupid, but customers love it. It represents Their data, they see the llamas turning colors, their sizes is according to the size of the project or anything you actually want. And it's a fun way to look at your data. And customers love, loved it, but it wouldn't have happened if we didn't just like, let go and say, like, hackathon, do whatever you want. It wasn't on the roadmap, it wasn't planned, and, you know, if we needed to give story points to it, it would be zero. You know, we're not spending time on doing a llama farm. And then it ended up being the mascot of the company and, you know.

The rest is history.

Yeah, everyone loves llamas.

Awesome.

All right, time for one last question. Let's see here. You guys seem to have a really incredible co founder relationship. How do you maintain that and deal with the pressure together as you grow so quickly?

Yeah, wow, that's a great question. I think Rory and I are very unique. We also share the same title, which makes things even more complicated. But I think, I think relationship between founders is one of the most important things for a company to be successful. It can make a company successful and it can ruin a company if it doesn't work. And for me, one of the most important things in our relationship has been communication. Wayne. I talk about everything, and it's like couples therapy. I feel like we always open up things. We always talk about what bothers him in what I do. I tell him the opposite. We never keep things in our stomach. Even if it's hard, we always share what we feel. And sometimes my wife is a bit jealous. But, you know, this is our relationship and I think we really appreciate one another. We respect one another, and we talk about everything, good or bad. And this is. And the fact that we're kind of sharing the same title, I think it's amazing because I HEAR so many CEOs saying how much you're lonely, and I don't feel lonely. Like Roy and I, we share everything, all the difficulties. And when I'm down, he's taking control. When he needs help, I'm stepping up. And we always covering for one another. So it's really working for us.

Well, and I think we wanted to. When There are like two CEOs, we wanted the company to have a better time, that it would be better, not less good. Like, for example, I always tell everyone, like, you don't need both Iran and I to agree on something. You can do the opposite. Like, if, if I agree, it's fine. If I don't like, go to him. If he agrees, it's also fine.

Like, divorced parents, right?

You got a mom or dad.

But the point is, is that if Iran makes a decision and I completely trust him, then even if I don't agree, I will go ahead with it. And we don't try to always agree on anything, on everything, but to let go. And that makes us more powerful. If we would have needed to agree on everything, then it helps that we share, like, half of our mind is mesh together and we think the same thoughts, but. And we see the world in a lot of ways similarly.

But.

We try to work hard to, you know, that it will help the company rather than, you know, be like, more of a burden.

Totally.

Yeah.

Well, that's great. Well, that's a good way to end. So thank you both so much for your time. I really appreciate you guys sharing some of your secrets and lessons learned and just hearing a little bit more about your journey. So really appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

All right, everyone, we've got more sessions starting at the top of the hour, so be sure to check them out. Be sure to check out the networking, and we will see you at other sessions at Sasterville. Enjoy.