The Toughest Roadblocks When Breaking Through to $15M ARR with Dataiku, Talkdesk and Tasty

Hi everyone. Welcome to this panel. Thanks for joining us. Hope the day has been good so far. I'm Matt Turk. I'm a partner at firstmark. Firstmark is an early stage venture firm based in New York who invests all over the country and very much in Europe as well, including Paris. So you guys have had lots of great sessions so far. All very practical, interesting stuff. We're going to try and keep it in the same vein. We are going to talk talk specifically about the road to 15 million in ARR. So as we all know, different companies or all size companies have different types of challenges depending on the stage. When you're at the seed stage, it's all about building that small team and that early product and getting to product market fit. At the other end of the spectrum, when you try to scale to a massive company and you sort of at that series D and later stage, it's all about getting ready for that ipo. But this session is going to be sort of that middle stage, whether you call it series B, series C, somewhere between the series A and C where you already have a business going, you have customers, things are going well. You're not at the massive scale stage just yet, but you're building the foundations to get there. So with me, I have three amazing entrepreneurs that are going to be talking about all of this. I'll let you guys introduce yourselves.

Thank you. So I'm Alex. I'm a CEO and co founder of AB Testy. So AB Testy iBTaste is a SaaS. We are helping companies to improve their user experience online through personalization and a B testing. So a B testd today is a company of 160 people. We have offices in Paris, London, Cologne, Madrid and New York. And we have 700 clients.

Hi, I'm Florian. I'm CEO of Data IQ and Dataiku is a software platform that enable business analysts and data scientists to work collaboratively to deliver large machine learning projects. And so we exist for five years now. We are 150 people in between Paris, New York and London.

Hello everyone, I'm Cristina Fonseca. I co founded Talkdesk in 2011. Talkdesk is a call cent cloud call center platform for enterprise companies. Right now the company is more than 300 people based between Lisbon, Portugal and Porto as well and San Francisco. And I'm not working in the daily operations of the company anymore. And I'm launching a VC fund for early stage companies.

Very good, thank you. So in order to keep this snappy and practical, our gracious organizers suggested that we bring some, some slides. So obviously we could be talking about this topic for days. So we decided to take three specific topics which are hiring, culture and sales. And then each speaker will have will provide just one sort of snappy and very practical comment on each of those topics. If you guys can bring up the slides, that would be great. If not, I think we know our points. All right, so why don't we. While they bring up the slides, hopefully. Let's start with hiring. So how do you build a hiring machine to get the team to that early scaling phase?

Yeah, so of course you all know that to scale hiring is key. So us at ibit, we've done good things and a lot of mistakes as well. So to avoid mistakes and to scale, we have built what I call the perfect hiring process. So it's not perfect, but we tend to. So it's all about writing and playbooks to help all the managers to hire their team. So we've built a playbook on the culture. What are the good questions to ask to see if people are online with the culture and. And then on competencies. So just to give an example, I have my sales team in France who've built a great process. The candidate is receiving before arriving a document with what is going to happen during the process. So he's going to have an interview and a reverse interview and a use case then. And he's going to meet all the team, the manager and the team. And then if he has all these steps, he will spend half a day or one day in immersion in the company. And whether you are taken in the company or no, then you receive a feedback, a PowerPoint with how you succeed or not. And it's just really important to build something very good because it shows that if you have a good hiring process, that your company is serious and that you are going to learn a lot of things. So that's why we build it. So it's not perfect everywhere, but some teams are doing a great job and now we avoid a lot the mistakes.

Very good. Thank you, Florian.

Well, one thing I wish I had realized like two years ago and not like one year ago when I went through the barrier, was that the simple fact that my team will not scale by cloning, which seems obvious. Well, first, because cloning is not legal in most countries of the world and takes time, probably.

This is expensive.

It's expensive, yeah, very expensive. But also because the people you will hire at some point to scale won't be exactly the same one as the one you had hired before your first hire will be very typically highly in the pioneer kind of mindset. And maybe the people you need to hire for scale won't be exactly in the same mindset. And so it has some implication in the hiring process also hiring culture, but also more importantly from also a very practical perspective, onboarding or you do initial onboarding. And so one thing I wish I had set up before also and related to that was like the very simple onboarding week. I'm like just talking about the three or four initial days of someone within an organization where they actually need to understand the culture, understand who does what, understand what do you sell? Like very practically what do you sell? Well, are you selling software or not? Well, what exactly who to call to where the information could be or would be and so on. And so just set up a very dense organized onboarding weeks with sessions, parties and everything. What is really needed so that people get connected to the company. Made a lot of sense. And so we managed to just made it in like three or four days beginning of each month, very processed. And so I wish I had done that like one year before.

Yeah. So I'm a big fan of the process as well. And I think the only reason why we were able to go into hyper growth mode at some point was because we had very structured hiring process. But I would also, especially in Europe, if we are all trying to build world class companies that are meant to compete in the global market, then I think we need to find the best talent available not only in our local ecosystems, which is challenging in some countries more than others. So especially in Lisbon, that was a big challenge. We had to hire people that had. Sometimes you need people that have like either the AI playbook or engineering management at scale for a product company and not for a services company which is more common in some ecosystems. So we tried to recruit people from abroad, we relocated people from the US and my pro tip was during the Christmas season I used to try to schedule calls and coffees and meetings with everyone that worked abroad. Like Portuguese people working abroad that were visiting the country. And that's a special time of the year where everyone wants to consider moving back for the right challenge. And then I think another good one, and I see lots of companies struggling with that is if you can find talent locally, go and open an office abroad. Lots of companies resist to get out of their comfort zone in the early days. So they delay this decision of going where the talent is at an early stage. But I think it's like you need stop players to be able to succeed.

Very good, thank you. And hiring people abroad doesn't matter in terms of stage. You can do it early, you can do it later.

It depends, right?

You want to be pragmatic about it.

So once you reach a certain level, I think like startups, especially in the beginning, you have very limited resources, so you do things best effort, but you reach a level where it's pretty clear that you need to like, grow up as a company. And I think we delayed that a bit maybe because we didn't have the right investors and the right people putting pressure on us. And the first person doing that was actually Jason Lemkin, which was when we grew up. Jason invested and he said, no, guys, now you need to go and do things properly, like find the VPs, hire super senior people that have the playbook. So that was our thanks, Jason.

Thanks for the water, Jason too. So let's switch to the next topic. So more tips and tricks. This time we're going to talk about culture. All right, well, there you go. Very nice. Thank you very much. All right, so let's reverse the order. Maybe start with you, Kristina, your tips and tricks on building a growth culture.

So in our case, especially because we went from 30 people to 150 in a year, one thing that was crucial was the knowledge part of it. So traditional companies train people yearly or quarterly, but if you are trying to get an advantage, the knowledge that's available to your team needs to be real time updated. So one initiative that we invested a lot of time and effort in was creating an academy. Basically, we hired a team to capture, organize, and make sure the knowledge of the organization was always up to date. Then we built a video academy with all that material, which became the sales and support and success training onboarding. It was used as a reference to customers as well. And later on, we launched the proper academy with a certification program based on that. So we started as an internal initiative to make sure everyone knew at least the call center terms. So I remember people joining the company and they had no idea what they were selling. They didn't know. Like customers would ask, oh, my headset doesn't work. Like, I don't like, are these tickets always like this? This is very technical. And that was our day to day. So I remember feeling, oh my gosh, how are we going to make sure these people have the knowledge they need to do a good job? And then with the additional challenge, and I'm sure lots of people feel that in this audience of having teams, both in Europe and in the US in our Case we had, especially in the beginning, we had a lot of context on the European side of things because the engineering team was here, the product team was mainly in Portugal. And when you start hiring like crazy in the us, People, they don't know, they can't know. So this was a great initiative that we put in place at the time.

Very good, thank you. Where there is a fire, fire.

When there is a fire, fire. Yeah, a little bit of drama. Flame, flame. Flame of fire. Well, the thing is that another thing I wish I realized before is the fact that a company culture is unfortunately not only about values you put on your wall, but also about tough decisions. And that empirically, so maybe I'm bad at my job, but empirically, if you grow at scale, you don't have like a 100% perfect fit in terms of hiring. You not have always people that fit the culture, whatever the hiring process, that get aligned with your strategy. Also because your strategy can change. And so at some point, maybe every six months, every nine months, I don't know, you start having something happening. It can be a rumor, like discussions, people that are not happy with their job or like, and I'm not talking just random people, like possibly manager or so whatsoever. And this usually when it gets back to you, like this kind of rumor as a CEO, especially at some scale, it does mean that like possibly for like several weeks, everybody is talking about it. So something is happening, in fact. And so the thing is that I think that company culture is also about. Sometimes takes tough decisions. And I guess that especially in this mid stage where you still have like, not so many middle managers, you actually need to have the leadership skills where you are able to take those decisions. And basically when there is a fire, sometimes you need to fire. And I wish I had learned to fire before in some decision which especially when you're coming from a European culture, is possibly tougher compared to other culture.

Now, how do you do it? Do you sort of investigate the matter? Do you talk with a bunch of people throughout the company? How do you. How do you. Obviously it's a very tough decision and something that any CEO you know probably doesn't enjoy. How do you. How do you think about the process of getting to a firing decision?

I think it must be like, well, obviously it needs to be a thoughtful decision.

And.

It'S probably not something where you reach, when you want to reach a full consensus in the sense that you never want to actually ask anyone directly the question, like you don't want anyone, but you take responsibility if you are to take the responsibility. In a sense, you don't want to actually delegate responsibility, but you want to actually get information and like a good understanding of what is happening or not. And I would argue that in some situation, company culture, meaning what you really want to achieve or this management style whatsoever, actually makes the decision obvious. But even if it's obvious after the fact, it takes some time.

Great. Alex.

Yes. So as Florian said, when you are in hypergrowth, of course it's, it's not easy. Every day as we have set up the value very, very quickly, we always speak about that, but that's something really key because in hyper growth you don't really know sometime how to behave. And the culture and the values give you a direction and a framework of behavior. And I think it's really, really, really important and more important that, that we think, for example. But it's important of course, as Florian said, not just to put it on the wall, but to leave it and to put tools on it. So as for example, for each one of our values, we are concrete tools on it. For example, one is client satisfaction. So for that we have built a big, big feedback culture. For example, we receive on our channel Slack the NPS of the clients every day. So every day we have notes on the tool. When there is a 10, for example, the CSM in charge receive a bottle of champagne because we know we like to party as well. During the last month we had a lot of champagne, so that's great. And of course our clients receive as well a survey on the work of their csm. They receive a survey as well on the work of their key account manager. So every people who is in front of the client is evaluated by the client. So this is all the tools we have built.

Do you use any specific survey tool for it?

We have a survey tool which is really great, an internal one for the people that rate the company every day, which is called Office Vibes. I don't know if you know, but it's like an internal one and it's great because you have for me it's a little bit my NPS of CEO to see how is the company, how are the people. And every day I receive feedback of the people of how they behave in the company and et cetera, et cetera. And so I have a global note and I can see it by team so I can know if a team is going bad or good or et cetera, et cetera. And for the NPS we, we use tools like wutric, et cetera. And for the survey we use Google Survey for asking the clients and for.

Your internal NPS score. Is that anonymous feedback or.

Yes, absolutely, it's anonymous feedback. We've set it up like four months ago. So far it's the managers that are answering, but we are thinking about making the HR answering because some people tell us, yeah, yeah, we know that it's anonymous, but sometimes you know who it is because with the team you can know. So maybe we are going to try to. We don't know, but maybe the HR will answer to all the questions of the people. But it's great because since we have put set up this tool, it has changed a lot of things because we had a lot of feedback that we didn't really have before. Even if we speak a lot with everybody every day, I think that put it, putting it on how to rate it. People are saying much more things and to rate things as well. People see much more things when they rate, but they rate everything. You know, it's wellness, it's alignment, it's satisfaction. It's like everything.

As a related question, when did you guys start bringing in a VP of people or head of hr? How many employees did you guys have before you brought in somebody?

Also we did a big mistake. So first HR arrived when we were 80 and I think that was the biggest mistakes we've made. And today they are not enough. We are looking for talent acquisition people because we don't have enough people in the hr. And I think it's still a good big mistake. So we are trying to resolve it. But. But you don't have to. You have to invest in HR very quickly. It's so important.

And what you just described on the internal NPS score, that's part of hr. The HR does it is the process owner for what?

Today it's the managers. But we are thinking about giving it to the hr. But so far they have too much work because they are understaffed. But we'll have even enough people. We are thinking about giving it to the. To the hr.

Very good.

And out of curiosity, when did you guys bring in a VP of people or head of hr?

I don't have a VP of hr.

You have a VP as well?

Well, you did a Chief Happiness Officer.

Yeah, I do have happiness people. Yes, actually. And we started to have happiness people since we are 20. And actually, actually they make people happy in the literal sense. Like food, you can talk with them and so on. And actually that's a part of the culture. Like you've got someone who makes you happy. Well, you can argue that business is not about being happiness, but that's worked in practice for us.

The happiness people. That's an interesting concept. Right. Which is not that. So happiness Chief Happiness Officer is not a like a fun way of saying hr. It's truly people who are in charge of building a happiness culture in the enterprise.

Yeah. And in fact the more I think about it, the more actually it kind of. Well, to some extent you can have happiness people in the sense of people that make sure that everything related to workspace and work environment and can actually provide support for a lot of things. So really about happiness, but which should actually be different from like people management in the sense of anything related to organization management, performance review and so on. And I think for instance one mistake I made perhaps was to well mismatch one for the other and think that you could have like happiness and performance review as a global thing, which actually I think are two different things at scale at least.

I don't remember exactly. Like I think we were around 3:30 to 40 people when we brought in the first HR people. But the VP took us a while more so we started creating these HR departments gradually.

Great. All right, so let's switch to our third and last topic which is sales. All right, so let's go back to the original order. Alex, do you want to start the sales machine?

Yes.

Yes.

So at the beginning your sales are doing everything. They are doing sdr, newbies, key code management and then of course you, you structure it and you have, you have sdr, you have key account management in charge of anti churn and upsells newbies in charge of new business. You have pre sales, you have partnership, manager, etc. Extra. So as we hire I think two, three, four people every month on the sales department. So I'm going to repeat a little bit what you said, Christina, but I think that the most important thing is to train to train them. So having a playbook and you are not going to train the same way. SDR, newbies, key account manager, etc. Etc. On soft skills you can have the same kind of training but on art skills you have to separate it. So what we've built is sales enablement team. There is two people dedicated to train the sales. So we have training every Friday. It's separate for the moment for France and for the other team because the French team is big and we do training with external coach internal as well people and we do it every week and then every quarter we do a two days sales seminar as well with, with everybody and, and we've built as. We don't, we don't have certification videos, et cetera, et cetera.

Every, every quarter you do two days for the, for the whole sales team.

Sales team, yeah.

Yeah.

But we tend to have like, maybe not a certification, but building like level for sales knowledge, etc. Because of course at the beginning you lose a lot of energy in training one and then another one. Then of course to scale you have to build as a. Christina said an academy.

Very good. Thank you.

Yeah. My point, well, just because I'm in math. So 1 million is more than 2 times 500. My point was that actually your first customer worth More than 1 million would be actually both more valuable and more difficult to get to compared to two customers at 500. The reason being, well, more valuable because it's actually proved something about your product and its adoption. And also, well, just from an hiring perspective, it can excite a lot of salespeople. Yeah, we can do 1 million deals. Yeah, that's something. And more difficult because. Well, it does mean that in order to get there, you would probably not like just do a flat deal at 1 million. It would be a customer that started at a few hundred that you upsell. So in order to get to there, you would have to put in place a proper customer success program and adoption. Raise the bar, probably go higher in the value chain within the organization, whatever you sell, meaning not just initial early adopters that you like very well, but his boss or maybe the boss of his boss and go through also possibly a tougher procurement process and so on. So these first customers that raise the bar within the organization will possibly change the perspective of your organization in terms of go to market, which also I think actually is critical for the next steps. Meaning when you want to go from 15 to let's say 30.

And do you want to just to give it very practical talk about how people are compensated when they go Precisely from the 500k, the initial sale and the upsell. How do you guys think about making this worthwhile for the salespeople?

Well, the way we operated so far, which I think is fairly standard according to the way I look at the market, is that we pay sales, a flat percentage pay on new sales and upsells. So basically when there is an upsell, they get the upsell. So they don't typically get like a specific incentive in terms of doing an upsell compared to doing a new sale. But you could argue that it should be easier to do an upsell compared to doing like just a new business.

And do you compensate customer success if they are involved in that upsell?

Yeah, customer success are globally involved into the upsells process.

But that from a competition perspective.

From a competition perspective, yes. That I think is more arguable because you could argue that customer success is responsible for customer satisfaction, which is not upsell per se. So that I think is more all over the place in terms of all the surveys I made in various companies.

So my point is something that you've probably realized already and you are all familiar with the sales playbook, meaning you need to hire sales managers, account executives, sdr. Customer success is a new function, but everyone is familiar. But actually something that I was not aware when I started the company, I thought this SaaS was self service. Like you put things on the Internet and customers come, put the credit card and pay. But actually in order to make things work you need to hire sales engineers because the salespeople, they are there to sell so they don't worry with the specifics of the product, the use cases and helping the customer during the sale journey and the salespeople as well. So then we had to put in place professional team, professional services team because like after people sell to the customer, someone needs to implement the thing, integrate, maybe do some customization, integrations. Then of course you need product marketing because these teams need sales collateral that's up to date that helps them sell the product. So I mean you've realized that in order to have to sell a product that SaaS you need an army to support the entire operation. So be prepared. It's not as easy as it might seem.

Very good. Well, lots of tips and tricks. I think we are out of time so thank you very much. Please join me in thanking our speakers.

It.