This Week in Startups - E990: SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie on driving growth by listening to customers & employees, importance of a strong & diverse board, direct listings v. IPOs, lessons learned from WeWork; plus LAUNCH Scale Partner Talk featuring Yosiat Gimbernard from Odoo

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

1:45 Zander’s take on the recent volatility in the public markets 3:38 What are the lessons learned from the WeWork disaster in terms of corporate governance? 6:09 Importance of diversity on BoD 10:18 Where does WeWork go from here, and how will the situation resolve? 12:35 Why Venture investing is so skewed towards growth, and why the best investors focus on gross profitability 14:41 What is SurveyMonkey’s current business, and why did they go into Enterprise SaaS? 19:20 How listening to customers & employees drives growth 23:33 How Dave Goldberg discovered SurveyMonkey and turned it into the company it is today 25:47 How Zander wound up as CEO after Dave’s passing 28:51 Zander’s thoughts on a Direct Listing as opposed to an IPO 30:42 Getting Serena Williams on the Board of Directors at SurveyMonkey 35:12 Motivating & hiring Gen Z & Millennial employees 37:45 Yosiat from Odoo on integration enabling scalability

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Start your 14-day free trial by going to Monday.com slash twist, then use promo code Twist to get 10% off of a paid account. We are very focused on startups here, obviously, But startups get big and they scale in this conference to scale. So we're very lucky to have my very close friend, Zander Lory, with us, who is the CEO of Survey Monkey. Big round of applause. So you went public in the last year?

A year and a week ago. A year and a week ago. Congratulations. Stock's been up. It's done great. And you're able to get out. And now we're looking at a public market that seems to have, I would say, been rocked? pulled back on the latest crop of offerings for founders who are looking and saying

okay this has some impact on me obviously there's a trickle-down effect what is your take on what just happened in the last three months well I think for all the folks in this room who are building and scaling businesses an IPO is like 0.001% of your cognitive load right now like you are so focused on hiring achieving product market fit, building a sales motion, scaling internationally, unity economics, like all of those things around just hiring people is such a hard effort. And I give you a lot of credit for what is incredibly difficult work. But the rest of the world, the media especially is laser focused on the IPO market

because the media is built around scoreboards. And advertisers want scoreboards and the talking heads like to talk about what's up and what's down and what went out and how much demand there was for particular. offering. So I think right now as the world introduces more volatility, we have a ton of volatility right now. We're going to be in a year-long impeachment process. Everybody knows some form of a recession is coming. Multibles need to come down. So IPOs tend to be the most volatile asset class. IPOs are going to be the ones that get pulled back first. We work is essentially an Enron-like event, and it will have an impact like that on the industry. And VCs and public market investors will look to

punish poor corporate governance, and there's a lot of it to punish right now. So for folks in this room who are in the early beginnings, just let it be like media fodder and continue to focus on what you need to do to be successful. And when you're ready to get out in the public markets, if you have a growing business with good economics and a diverse and governance-focused board and management team, you two will be successful. It's just a matter of time. The public markets have worked for American businesses for over 100 years, and there's no stopping.

I think that's a great arc to kind of explain what's happened. Let's zoom in for a second since it's of the moment. And you mentioned governance. What do you think went wrong at WeWork in terms of governance? What is the lesson that should come from that when founders, let's say series A, series B founders, are starting to think about, hey, how do I codify this governance, this, you know, board of directors into an actual meeting and into actual votes? Yeah, I mean, it's a great wide-ranging question.

I think for folks in this room who are CEO or founders, who you're asking for folks to put a lot of trust in you, whether you're recruiting or whether you're signing up customers for long-term commitments or you're recruiting shareholder money, you're asking for a lot of trust and you want to build your brand around trust. And usually when you see these stories unfold in the New York Times, you know, usually it's about a breach of trust. And so for me, we have this incredible board of directors,

which includes some very famous and well-known business leaders, activists, people who have built their careers and their reputations. Trust is the thing that you will not compromise on. And you've got to ask yourself, what's the role of your board? If you have a small board that you've just raised money from and you're using them to help you build a marketing plan or build out a sales go-to-market or really help on recruiting, that's one thing.

The bigger you get and the longer you've been in business, the more the board has a very fiduciary-type role. I can't go to my board and ask them, to rewrite our marketing plan. You can do that once. The second time they're going to say, Zander, you need to get your shit together. Like, get a marketing leader who can help you do this.

Ultimately, these boards are governance arms. They are there to help oversee the culture of the company, audit committee, comp committee, nom and gov committee. And you as the CEO are responsible for who's on that board. And what is that board's role? How are they going to help you be a great steward of shareholder capital build that company over the long term? So whenever you see these stories of the CEO who it's usually a he and he demands certain levels of controls and it blows up, it is a failure of governance.

It's a failure of controls and having the right people around the room to make the kinds of decisions that are going to ensure those customers and those employees thrive over time. The advice that founders get is investors are kind of the adversary. You don't want to have, or some of the bad advice they get, you don't. You don't want to have a board, push it out. You want to have board control. This is put out there as almost the brass ring. Control your board. Don't have any governance.

Push governance out. Crazy talk. Why? I mean, how many people in this room have all the answers in this incredibly competitive dynamic environment? You wouldn't be coming to kiss the ring of Jason for a day if you had all the answers. And so a board of directors is here to help you throw. They're not your adversary. They're not in conflict with you.

These are people who you get the chance to recruit to sit around the table with you, to answer your text and emails, to be available to you. They are at your service. That is the role of a board. They're at your service to help you achieve the goals of the enterprise that you are building. So recruit an awesome, diverse board of directors who will challenge you, who will push you, who will help you think about situations where you don't have expertise, you don't have a network, you don't have access to capital.

If you have all the answers and you want control, full-stack control, you're way smarter than I am, and you probably would have already been wildly successful in some other area. These control areas where you need 1,000 votes to every other human's vote, they usually blow up. It's very strange how this manifested itself over the last couple of years. And when you look at WeWork, it's very troubling that, that the person was allowed to buy,

and I know this is anecdotal and it's one company, but it is the Enron of our moment, even more so than Theranos, because Theranos didn't have any tech investors in it, this one did. The product was loved, they had product market fit, but the founder was buying a G650, which I believe is the most expensive plane you can buy.

What do you have? What's your favorite? I'm not talking about that. I have business premiere on Southwest. It's pretty business select. It's pretty nice. You see Jason Strongline people in that A line. I'm just like elbowing families.

A1. The mom who's got twins. He's like, excuse me, preferred A class. A one. I have to say it is pretty pathetic. Like I literally am absolutely in awe every time I'm able to purchase a business class. Just that own, like for me, it's such a personal, huge victory just to be up. You walked uphill to school both ways.

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Everybody loves this thing. It's incredible. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. If you could uncover what happened that we were up, what do you think it will? it will be looked at five or ten years from now. And what are the chances that a save defined as it's a viable business that becomes public and has a value over a billion dollars?

Where are the chances of a save is one question? And then how did it become so off the rail seemingly? So I think there are entrepreneurs who definitely can put a product out there that has product market fit. I agree with you wholeheartedly. There's absolutely a product market fit for WeWork. We use it all over the place. it is a great service, well-priced, that is meeting the demands of the market.

But we're in an environment where there is endless capital for good ideas. For everybody in this room who has a great idea and the wherewithal to execute on that, there is no shortage of capital. There's no such thing as an entrepreneur who's got a great product and can't find access to capital because the capital is there at your disposal and we work is Exhibit A. And it's the greed versus fear spectrum which got way out of whack and it was funded at a valuation that was never achievable, at least not in this century. So I do think it will get out. I think it will be well worth north of a billion dollars.

It probably won't be worth $47 billion until they execute on 10 plus years of profitability. So investors sometimes will let things get out of control. And if you're a CEO that has to buy planes and do things that clearly aren't. in service of building a great enterprise, that can come back to the roost. And when you look at unit economics and running a business properly, the standard in Silicon Valley has been for a long time,

you know, don't worry so much about profits if you're growing fast, but I don't remember anybody ever saying have horrible unit economics. And when you look at the companies out there like we work, there's a question there if that actually has good union economics or not.

Like the reason we might all love it is because they're taking on a big portion of the cost. And then we see a bunch of other companies, Amazon-like, I think Uber and Lyft losing 50 cents a ride, which seems like a pretty easy gap to cover with just cost-cutting or raising prices. Is that model of growth is more important if you have good union economics than short-term cash? Is that a good playbook or a bad playbook? your mind. So if you look at how most venture investors, asset classes below public markets, how they're compensated, it's the classic two and 20, right? They're paid an asset management fee of 2% and then 20% of the upside in the investments they make. That asset class demands risk.

And risk usually rewards growth. And that's why when you get in this, you know, boom boom environment, people will say kind of growth, growth, growth, even at the sacrifice of cost. But you should recognize that growth needs to come at a future kind of understanding that there is positive unit economics in these businesses that if I reach some semblance of scale I will be able to deliver a profit to my investors and so that's why I think most good investors usually focus on gross profit ultimately what is every incremental dollar of revenue drive in terms of gross profit if you're in a very low gross margin business and you have high operating cost it gets very difficult to ever generate profit for investors. There's a famous article in 1999, I think it was called

the best business of all time. It was selling dollar bills for 101 cents. Because you would only lose one cent per dollar and you would have this endless scale business. And clearly, growth is really, really highly valued until the environment looks really rocky and then all of a sudden people look and say, can this business deliver profitability? If not, it gets thrown to the wolves. And then you ask, what's the floor on this asset? Like what should? it would be valued at. And a lot of them are worth zero. A lot of businesses that have some product market fit but don't have any scale, don't have any durable moats around their business, can't price up, are worth nothing because ultimately there's just no profit associated with it.

So don't fool yourself and don't reward investors who just push you to spend, spend every last dollar, more paid marketing, buy more Google ads, just drive growth. Because ultimately they get flushed out. They've got a bunch of other investments. You're left holding the back. Tell me what is SurveyMonkey's business today? I know that it started as takes some surveys, but I know that you added a bunch of new features and products. What is the business as constructed today in terms of the current revenue base? And then where is it going in the coming years?

Yeah, so SurveyMonkey's mission is to power the curious. We're a 20-year-old business. It's a software SaaS business that is largely end-user-driven, 80% of our revenue is derived from people coming to our website, learning about SurveyMonkey, and then signing up on a subscription to send surveys to collect feedback. And we very much believe we're in this feedback economy, that your ability to harness the feedback of your customers, your shareholders, your patients, your students, your employees to drive growth and innovation in your business is what's going to enable you to thrive.

So every day there are hundreds of thousands of surveys sent, 25 million questions answered on our platform every single day. We have over 50 billion survey responses in the largest canonical data set in the world. And we've taken that end-user business where we have 17 million active users, paid users inside of a half million different organizations, to layer on an enterprise sales business

so that in a large organization, there may be 50, 100, 500, 100, 1,000 survey monkey users, and we have over the last three years built an enterprise offering that does all the things that enterprise, SaaS, businesses do with single sign-on and enterprise domain lockdown so that we can sell to the CMO or head of HR or head of IT and really help you understand your CX program, your employee retention program. You know, we very much believe that we're in an environment where it's really, it's pretty

easy to start a business, right? You're off-the-shelf software, you buy keywords, social, and get in business quickly, but to build real competitive differentiators and modes around your business, you've got to differentiate and understand better what's going on with your customers, your employees, to ultimately build a sustainable business. And our really good customers, that's how they use SurveyMonkey. So we're going to continue to steer into helping our customers build better businesses, deliver for their customers, their employees in a better way. And how much of that has to do with sort of closing the loop on sales and products?

Because sending out a survey is something people do, like as a one-off. It's like, things aren't working. Send a survey. But it seems to me that a whole other class of product development. has emerged, I think driven by the popularity of net promoter score, which is the question, how likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10? I think everybody knows what it is here, which is something nobody knew then. How much of this is not just about being reactive, but doing it sustained every day?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question. The programmatic use of listening better is what we believe is differentiating the really good businesses. So how many people have you served a monkey or come across, serve a monkey in the past? Thank you. Oh, my Lord. Thank you. So, you know, that literally was everybody. We tend to have a really good, positive brand association.

I believe because our software sits between one human being, asking another human being for their opinion. And if we've learned anything about sports and culture and politics, people are dying to share their opinions. And we're, you know, 25 years into the commercialization of the World Wide Web. and there are billions and billions of billions of reviews on glass doors about good employers. If you are paying women in your company less than you are paying men, you are going to be exposed by glass door. If you are pricing your products unfairly or delivering crappy customer service, somebody's going to blow you up on Twitter. Like the water just goes to the nearest place to be released,

and the web is really amazing at exposing. So NPS mentions are up 5X on earnings calls over the last three years, and we're just seeing more and more programmatic use. A company called Happy or Not just raised $25 million to put green, yellow, red buttons all over the world. They're in every bathroom stall in the airports. Like, who is hitting those buttons in the public airports? No, it's crazy because I just thought. Nobody even washes their hands and they're hitting the bucks.

I was like, wait a second. Is this a trick question? Because if I click good... It's an intelligence test. It was an intelligence test. I was like, clicking good means making contact with features. material. I didn't know that was going to come up. That was not, that was not, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, nobody, nobody thought that was absolutely, Figgle-Bet-o-Bel. I just thought to myself, nobody, who's pressing this, the person who, yeah, no. So people want to share

their opinion, thanks, Jay. People are, and if you were the company that is better at listening, I mean, I just came out of a management meeting where we're evaluating our employee benefits for next year. I'm a 46-year-old white guy with three kids. We have employees in 13 different offices on 4.4. continent. As you think about new medical benefits, employee health, mental health benefits, infertility benefits, like, I don't know what benefits we offer employees. So we ask the questions, and if you do a better job listening than other employers, or if you do a better job listening to what, you know, restaurant delivery service, that is how you take kind of the sentiment, opinion data of your constituents who matter to your business, your employees, your customers,

and you drive growth and you drive innovation. So whether you use SurveyMonkey or use one of competitors' products. You've got to listen, unless you just have the best design taste out of anybody and don't need to ask. But we haven't seen many of those folks. Yeah, I mean, they come along once in a while, Steve Jobs or whatever. They just have incredible taste and it happens to click. Even Steve Jobs got 30 years of feedback from the world. Maybe his design intuition got better because it was tested over a lot of reps and a lot of it bats. People don't know this, but having spoken to somebody who worked there, they told me that 99% of what they did. designed was never seen by anybody outside of like 50 people.

So literally he just played a numbers game. Once he had unlimited capital, he just had buildings of people making hundreds of versions of every product. And he would walk in and just have a discussion with Johnny and they would just leave, they tell and just didn't talk about it. But you know they only release one product every three years, a new product, a new product every five years, AirPods.

watch, phone. I think that's the entire 10 years. I mean, maybe there's some iPads in there or whatever versions, but in terms of major new products, can you imagine employing that many people to make that many versions that nobody ever sees all that work? The chances are if you're an Apple designer, statistically, nobody has seen your work.

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And head to dashlane.com slash twist and get 10% off a premium subscription. That's dashlane.com slash twist to get 10% off a premium subscription. Thank you so much to Dashlane for supporting independent media like this weekend start us. You got introduced to Survey Monkey because our mutual friend Dave Gorbord, who passed away four years ago, three and a half, four and a half, yeah.

Tragically. Tell me about how Dave found this amazing company, this diamond in the rough, and shepherded it to such amazing heights. Yeah, so the company was founded by a guy named Ryan Finley, who's still on our board today's my age. went to Madison, Wisconsin, he needed to collect feedback for an online music company he was working at. Couldn't find a good survey tool on the then-1999 web, wrote some code, shipped it. People liked taking the survey. They asked him if they could use it, started a little business, drove out to Portland, Oregon to start the company. Fast forward, 10 years later, he had a grand total of 12 employees after 10 years.

It was generating $25 million of revenue and $22 million of pre-tax profit. Hold on. Let's pause for a second there. work. Two million per employee in revenue, top line, and 1.9x million in profit per employee. He comes to our board meetings, and he's like, what do you do? Because I used to, like, build the product, do all the customer service, everything. Kind of go down the list. I just waved my arms. So the venture capitalists found this business, as they do. And they asked Jason and my dear friend Dave Goldberg if he would be the CEO of that business. So Dave went from a Yahoo media career

to running a pretty under the radar survey business, moved the business down to the Bay Area in 2009. That's when I joined the board. And he really built, scaled this to be an international business in a couple hundred countries, currencies, translation, making the product a lot more feature rich and powerful. And then as Jason mentioned, he passed away sadly a heart attack at 47 years old and you know we as the board were really tested we have 450 employees at the time and this beloved leader died tragically and it it really tests your medal in terms of your ability to demonstrate resilience and rally folks and we went through a journey which had a lot of ups and downs how did you make that decision to fill those shoes I mean he was a close friend of all of ours you were deeply

involved in the business the first thing people thought was okay we got to do a CEO search. Did you just step up? I know you stepped up as interim, and then you decided you wanted to do this and carry on the legacy? Take me through your decision process. I was working at, I was with Dave when he passed away.

We came back to the office Sunday morning, the board convened. First thing we did was decide that we were going to have it all hands the next morning, 9 o'clock. We had bereavement counselors on staff, and we let folks know that they were welcome to go home or there to support each other.

And the company really rallied. Engineers were shipping a product later that week, and they stayed late and kind of created a hashtag of Make Dave Proud, which got people rallied up. So the folks really wanted to support each other and continue to carry his legacy. The board asked me to be interim executive chair to lead the search for the new CEO and to help oversee budgets

and be available. And I committed to GoPro end of the SurveyMonkey Board that I wouldn't be a candidate for the job so that I could help lead the process and interview internal candidates, et cetera. So we can, we can. conduct a search we hired a really seasoned executive from HP to become the CEO he started a couple months later he just didn't work out he was done in three or four

months and the board came back to me and asked if I would take the full-time job and over the period since Dave's passing I'd really developed conviction about our strategy and I felt a lot of I felt a lot of desire to see Dave's plan carry through and we obviously had a lot of shareholders and employees that I cared about so I took the job in January of 16 and it must have been an amazing feeling to get the company public and then to know that Dave shares in the company Cheryl pledged them to a non-profit and foundation in his name yeah so for the folks who don't know is my understanding Cheryl Sandberg is Dave's widow she's the CEO of Facebook they own about 10% of the company and Cheryl pledged all of

those shares which are worth about a quarter billion dollars to a charitable trust which will continue to do great work as she has as she has done over the last several years and it was very fulfilling It's neat. Many of you in the room, hopefully we'll have that feeling of taking the company you started to go public, and I did not start SurveyMonkey, as you know. But it's an incredibly fulfilling journey to have lights on the NASDAQ or the big board and have the world see all the great work that your team delivered. And it was neat for a lot of folks who spent years building the product, selling the product, to recognize that vision. And, you know, one of the great things about going public, it's expensive and it's time-consuming. That's not the great part. The great part is that accountability and rigor and excellence that it demands of your team.

And so while all of you are trying to hire people and drive OKRs and lead management meetings, you know, when you go public, the world kind of helps you because your team feels that pressure and wants to be accountable, wants to deliver, wants some meat quarters and, you know, win market share. And going public, you don't want to do it until you're ready. But if you're ready, I think you will find that it's you're playing on the big field and the lights and the pressure can actually help deliver that performance. And you chose to do it the traditional way. Our mutual friend, and Dave's mutual friend, Bill Gurley,

has been on a bit of a mission to promote the direct listing. Direct listings did exist, I believe. You went out after Spotify, which was a direct listing, but before Slack, which was also a direct listing, you went the traditional route. Did you consider the direct listing? Yeah, it's a great question. Bill Gurley is one of the best investors of all time. And as Jason said, he's very focused lately on the importance of the direct listing.

We've only seen two of late, Spotify and Slack. They tend to be more popular considerations for bigger companies that have more scale. For Survee Monkey, we had a pretty unique shareholder base given our age that we had private investors for over 10 years. We only sold about 14% of the company in the offering. So we thought it would be very important to get help from bankers to go out and tell that story. You go to a nine or 10-day road show. You talk to a couple hundred investors. Bill Gurley very much disdains the large pop that some IPOs get.

We had about a 45% day pop, which is to say, did we leave money on the table? Potentially, it's not necessarily clear because you only go public once that we would have been able to raise money at those higher prices in a direct listing. So there is the risk that that kind of early churn and first-day trades, you know, accretes value to folks who didn't really drive value in the business. We didn't spend a lot of time considering because we thought a lot of value in going the traditional route and seeing a lot of institutional investors. But I do think it's going to get heightened focus and Airbnb and other big candidates coming up will probably put more attention into it than companies that went public over the last five years.

You landed Serena Williams for your board. Tell me about that. So Serena Williams, we were really looking to reshape our board of directors. I am a big believer and I'm happy to spend time with folks in the room. If you're the CEO, if the company, if you founded the company and it's your board, build a board that you will be proud to merchandise on your About Us page on your website for when you have a thousand employees. If you have five white men on your board, get to work. Like that's just not a board.

You should be proud to show all of your employees. It is the ultimate reflection of you, the CEO. of your ability to recruit. And for us, we didn't need somebody who could oversee our financial statements. I've got three ex-CFOs on our board, ex-CEOs, I've got friends that can help me do that. I was really looking for somebody who could elevate the resilience and grit and culture of winning that Serena brought. So when I met Serena, a mutual friend kind of put us back together. She wasn't on a board. She had won 23 grand slams tied for the most in history. She grew up in Compton with, you know, a low-income family took on the lily white sport of tennis to become the most dominant athlete,

arguably of our time. You know, she plays girls today who weren't born when she won her first grand slam. She started businesses. She's invested in over 40 businesses. She's been a huge advocate for issues that we care about at SurveyMonkey around equal pay for equal work. And she was really stoked to do it. So it's really fun. She was eager to join the board.

And she's been a huge, huge kind of lightning rod for energy. I tell the story sometimes where shortly after became CEO, my first time as CEO, I kind of went on a listening tour. I was meeting one of the sales guys in one of our offices, and I was sitting down in the kitchen with notepad asking how I could help. And he kind of lit into me. He's like, you know, whenever I finish my morning calls, I come down to the kitchen and all the vanilla bean Chabani Yogurt's are gone. And I'm like scribbling this down. And I was like, what, what am I doing? Like, where is the grit and resilience?

It's like, wait, this guy's grandfather fought in World War I, and he's bitching at me for the vanilla bean. Aren't there any apricot you over it left? Yeah, go strawberry. So that's the kind of thing that goes strawberry. But, you know, for Serena, who's overcome illnesses and injuries, like she just, she has a spirit that demands excellence in winning, and when she stands in front of our employees, she gets people pretty motivated.

Monday.com is team management made perfect. We use it here at this week in startups, and in fact, you may have experienced it yourself. We did office hours. I said, I have this new project, Prash, and Prash and Nick and Charles got to work. And here they are. They made a beautiful Monday board outlining the process and setting up our open office hours. And you can see Prash is assigning tasks to different team members.

And he set up a type form integration so that we could see the status of our founders and their biggest challenges, which is what they ask about on office hours. Hey, this is my biggest challenge. And then he made the board public on our website. So everyone could see the topics that were going to be discussed. and you can see this all at officehours.launch.co slash August. What this does is it makes your organization transparent. Everybody in the team can then help, and you get rid of long meetings, you get rid of whiteboard sessions, ridiculous spreadsheets everywhere with disparate information, and you have accountability.

And boy, Monday's got a great mobile app, and it's the perfect operating system for your company to build on. That's why startups love it. Our startups love it. Ben, from Neighborly, one of our investments, He uses it to build out new locations. And Pete Davis from Amtrar, he uses it for his marketing projects. They have a ton of templates. And here is your call to action. This is what you are to do right now.

You get in front of that computer and you start your 14-day free trial by going to Monday.com slash twist. Please go to Monday.com slash twist and get control of your organization and let all the different people in your organization contribute to the projects you're working on, create that accountability, create that transparency, and let people who want to rip through stuff do that work and impress you, the founder.

Get that transparency, give everybody a chance to contribute and go to Monday.com slash twist, and you will get 10% off a paid account just by using the promo code Twist, TWI-S-T. Thanks again for making great software at Monday.com and for supporting independent media like this week in startups.

Let's get back to this amazing episode. Do you think there is a generational... entitlement going on or when you now that I guess we're both gen Xers when we're hiring obviously millennials we've had a good couple of decades working together but this next generation Gen Z how do you manage each of those generations do you see any trends in why they're coming to work what they expect from a job or a career I think for younger folks they tend to be more mission driven and want to work on something with great corporate purpose and if you have You know, we are operating in what is the tightest human capital labor market in the history of humankind.

If you're in San Francisco, New York, L.A., London, in tech, finance, there's never been a more competitive time. So if you're on the supply side, it's a great time to be a young person who's got skills in data science or developer, marketing, sales, et cetera. And when you have a plethora of choices of where to allocate your time and your resources, you want to work for a CEO and for a company. that has a bigger purpose than just making money. And so I do very much agree here with Mark Benioff and others that you have a responsibility, not just to your shareholders, but to your customers, your employees, the community you work in. And we're in an environment where you are going to have to show

we do more than just deliver a product or service to make money. We have a role. We can help grow your career, mentorship. And if you can't deliver that total employee value proposition, I think you're going to lose out. And so it's easy to paint millennials as lazy. Yeah, sure. I think that's a company usually that doesn't have a strong enough proposition to attract those really talented young people.

Yeah. Hey, as we wrap up, Dave was a special guy. What made him so special? I mean, the value I take away from Dave every day is to live a purpose-driven life. And however you spend your time with your children or your spouse or you're recruiting employees or you're building product, just you only have, he only have 47 years here. And, you know, even just as a friend or as a poker player, everything he did, he did with vigor and gusto. And that's the way you want to bring your A game every day when your feet hit the floor. Like, whatever you're going to do, whether it's fun or work or play or charity,

like get after it. And an unbelievable amount of caring for people. Well said. Yeah. All right. To the memory of Dave Goldberg. And thank you so much for sharing. Thanks for having me.

Nice to see all. Okay, I'd like to introduce Yossi from Odu, who's going to talk to us a bit how integration enables scalability. So, one welcome for Yosey, please. Good morning. Today I'd like to talk about something that everybody in this room has in common. And it's how to make our business successful. However, we first must need to understand those workflows and those efficiency matters that we must put in place before getting there. My name is Yossiat Jim Bernard.

I am the head of product communications at Odu, and I'm right here at San Francisco. And I'm really excited and passionate about this because who doesn't love technology and what things do we need to have in place to make our companies more efficient. But before we get there, let's see exactly what we need to have and understand the market better. If we were to ask any Fortune 500 company today what they would do differently when they first started, they probably would say, I think we would have better systems in line. In other words, I would want to have a more scalable system instead of having to redo everything halfway along the way or today. So let's take a look at what that marketplace looks like.

First of all, we have these two main columns. On the left, we have traditional ERPs or enterprise. resource planning. A lot of us think that ERPs are for manufacturing or large companies. However, these ERPs that we all know, SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, were indeed created with the CEO in mind. And even though they do offer an end-to-end solution, they may not necessarily be the right solution for us.

Why? Well, there's a couple of deficiencies here. Number one, they're terribly difficult to implement. They're not flexible for this medium and small business owner. And also, number three, their barrier to entry is extremely large. These are expensive systems to have. So a reaction to the marketplace against these legacy ERPs was the rise of single use applications. These are applications that we all know.

We have Salesforce for CRM. We have QuickBooks for accounting. And even though these specific, single-use applications are robust, they're excellent in what they do, and they're fairly easy to use, they don't offer an end-to-end solution. In other words, you need a series of different applications just to manage your business. Just by a show of hands, how many of you use a series of different applications just to manage your business? Yeah. It's a pain point many of us experience every single day. and our companies and our systems internally end up looking a little like this.

This is what we call a Frankenstack. You have your customers on one end, you have your spaghetti bowl of various applications, and then you have your company and their objectives. Not necessarily the most efficient way to run your business. How come? Well, number one, there's no native integration here. In other words, a company needs open API connectors just to pull and push data. Or you have to export or import data just to get information across your various systems.

Number two, there's no centralized intelligence here. Reporting becomes a nightmare. We may not know what we have in our shelves at any point in time. We may not know how much has been inventoried or invoiced by our salespeople. Therefore, having centralized intelligence makes reporting that much easier. Number two, or number three, rather, these API connectors are indeed expensive.

When one system has to upgrade, you have to reconfigure and invest in new API connectors just to ensure that your data is moving the way you need to. And finally, teaching either yourself, disparate systems, or your team, becomes cumbersome, it becomes rife with mistakes, and data entry could be a lot of,

it could offer a lot of problems in terms of efficiency and unneeded complexity. So what do we do? We have an all in one solution. In other words, you eliminate the need to have API connectors across the board, across any of your different systems by having an all in one solution.

It's a singular source of truth across your customers, your company, and your internal systems. Now, how is that possible? How is that achieved? It's achieved through something we call modularity. Modularity is a series of different applications that are seamlessly integrated one with the other. They were created just to connect, like Lego bricks are created just to connect, allowing that one source of truth I mentioned earlier within your company.

You're eliminating complexity and increasing efficiency. Now, I can talk about modularity very abstractly, however, it's much more impactful to talk about a case study in real life. And for that, we go to VinoShare. VinoShare, like many of you, is a one-man shop. They distribute wines from Spain, and they're based in Hong Kong, to their Asian market. And the problem that Vino Share was having is that exactly one person was managing it all. From invoicing to marketing, accounting, and inventory, it became too much with manual processes and ineffective workflows. So what happened? They used Odo. They had an all-in-one solution with automated, workflows. They're using inventory, they're using accounting, sales, all in one.

They have a complete audit trail, an end-to-end solution. Their efficiency has dramatically increased and their manual workflows decreased, allowing him to focus more on market acquisition, inventory management, and developing his customers. Now, Vino shares just one out of 150,000 companies that that depend exclusively on Odu to manage their company with an all-in-one solution. We are the largest business leader when it comes to open source ERP.

And unlike our competitors who focus on marketing campaigns and branding sporting arenas, Odu focuses on building a better product and usability. Thank you so much for being here, and I hope you all. sharing the success. I invite you to see our booth right out here as well as visit us at our first San Francisco conference November 5th through the 7th of this year. Thank you very much.