BETH ROBERTSON: For startup founders, the prospect of expanding your business internationally into new markets can be both exciting and daunting. Now, while global expansion presents a lot of opportunities, it also comes with a unique set of challenges that require careful planning to navigate. That's exactly what we're here to talk about today. My name is Beth Robertson and I lead startups and SMBs at Stripe. I've been here just over six years, and during my time, I've witnessed that our journey expanding into new markets has been anything but smooth. You see, payments is a complicated business, as it turns out. We've had to navigate varying regulations, local hiring complexity, and a wide variety of cultural preferences when it comes to storing and moving money.

Today, I'm proud to share that our product is live in 46 economies and we have teams on the ground in 26 of those markets. Now, for every country that we've opened we've proudly hung a flag at our headquarters in Oyster Point to celebrate and commemorate some of the hard-won lessons that we received during launch. Speaking of hard-won lessons before Stripe, I helped emerging market founders raise just over a billion dollars in equity capital to fuel their expansion. And through this work, I learned firsthand that when done well expanding internationally can provide founders with an unfair advantage.

So, why is this a topic that we care about at Stripe? Well, I'm sure you heard this on many stages today, but our mission at Stripe is to expand the GDP of the internet. We believe that anybody in this room should be able to start a company today and have immediate global impact. But, for over the past few years, as many of you all witnessed firsthand, conditions for internet businesses have changed quite dramatically. For instance, in 2023 global startup investment totaled $285 billion. Now, while that may seem like a very large figure, it in fact represents a 59% decline in just two years and the lowest level of invested dollars that we've seen since 2017. But while the headlines tend to index on the most dramatic figures, our net assessment is that the startup ecosystem is more vibrant today than in history.

At Stripe, we're actually seeing a record number of startup formations and our data is telling us a really interesting story about how startups are monetizing. Let's take a look at the numbers. In 2023, we saw 13,000 companies formed through Stripe Atlas, which is our company incorporation product. That represents a 37% year-on-year increase. And intriguingly, we've noticed that startups are actually monetizing at a faster clip than we've seen before. We learned that a startup that was founded in 2022 is actually 60% more likely to start collecting revenue and process a million dollars within 12 months of incorporating than a comparable company launched in 2019. 60% more likely... 60% more likely to process a million dollars. That's incredible, that's a dramatic increase in just three years, and it's also counter to what all the headlines that I was just referencing would have us believe.

So incorporations are up and startups are monetizing faster. But where is this growth coming from? We actually were curious too. So we interviewed 2,000 founders, like many of you in the room and business leaders as well, and here's what we found. Startups are beginning to see international expansion as an incredible growth lever. Of the startups that we surveyed, 86% of them believe that it's easier to launch into a new geography today than it was just five years ago. And even more interesting is that 64% of this same cohort has already taken a step to launch into a new market in order to tap into a new pool of customers and revenue.

So in the face of tighter capital conditions, startups are seeing international as an incredible source of growth. But just because it might be easier for you to expand internationally it doesn't mean that you should. In fact, sometimes investing in more time and energy into your core market is the better strategy. So then the question becomes, when do you take a step to launch into a new market, and what is that first step? What does it look like? So, when pondering this question, we could think of no one better to help us than Adil Syed and Max Emilson.

Adil is the former chief financial officer of Rippling. He's today the senior vice president of Global at Rippling. And you've likely seen many of their ads on the 101 as you drove north today, assuming you were coming up from the south. And, congratulations to them, they recently just announced a huge $200 million Series F round, so round of applause for them. [Audience applauds.] Now the work begins, of course. And then we also have Max Emilson, who is the chief commercial officer of TrueLayer, which is an open-banking unicorn in Europe.

So, without further ado, I would love to invite these two gentlemen to join me on the stage, please give them a round of applause as they come up. [Audience applauds.] Please, sit. Both of these gentlemen are no strangers to launching in new markets. I think what I would love to kick our conversation off with is just a quick intro to who each of you are what your businesses do, and your global footprint today. Adil, you want to go first?

ADIL SYED: Sure, happy to do that. Yeah, I'm SVP of Global. As Beth mentioned, today the business is global and reaching 65 countries for our customers which is a pretty big footprint for us. The story of the Rippling business has been global since kind of Day 1, like when we started, we began by hiring people in Bangalore in the first year. So the company itself has been operating internationally for a long time since 2016 onward, but what we didn't do, and waited for a while was build out the international capabilities, so we'll talk a little bit more about like the timing of the decision and how it scaled. My journey with Rippling started in 2019. I joined as CFO at the time when the company was 100 employees split between Bangalore and the office I mentioned earlier, in San Francisco out in the Mission. And since then, we've scaled to about 2,700 employees globally. And the product is essentially HR, IT, and finance all in one. So, a single place for startups and SMBs to go and pay their employees, insure their employees give them devices, help them manage corporate credit cards and expenses.

BETH ROBERTSON: Awesome, thank you. Max?

MAX EMILSON: Hello everyone, my name is Max I'm the chief commercial officer of TrueLayer. TrueLayer is an alternative payment method. So it's an account-to-account payment method where you use your bank account instead of your credit card to buy goods and services online. We're integrated with Stripe since this quarter as it's very easy to switch on if you want.

BETH ROBERTSON: Nice.

MAX EMILSON: We're active across Europe and UK so I've been with the company approximately five years we're about 300 employees. We have offices in a couple of countries in Europe. Prior to that, I was eight years at Klarna, which is also an alternative payment method. I was part of the journey there, going across Europe and into the US.

BETH ROBERTSON: So before we dive into the broader conversation I think, just baseline-level setting, what does internationalization mean would be helpful because I feel like, when you and I were talking initially our conception of internationalization was quite different. So, to you, Adil, what does internationalization mean and how has it evolved over the past, what, eight years or so?

ADIL SYED: Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. I mean, I think the confusion when you and I talked was probably related to the company expanding internationally versus the product having international reach. And I think it's particularly complex for Rippling because the product essentially was one that should have always been global. So we're offering payroll to companies historically that were headquartered in the US and might have had employees in many different markets outside of the US. And you can imagine the tension that was building when customers were like, ”Well wait a second, I've got employees in Canada and India and the UK, and you don't support it yet.” And like 2018, 2019, ’20, ’21, ’22 go by, and we still didn't have international capabilities.

So for us, it was finding the right moment to say, “We feel good about the platform that we've built in the US and its extensibility into new markets, but also our ability to execute and build a product that like really works and nails it for Canada or India or France or, now the list of 65 countries that we're getting into.” And we didn't quite feel ready for that, until 2022. So, I think there's an international presence that the company has had since day one but we didn't have a global product offering until 2022.

BETH ROBERTSON: Got it. International presence from Day 1 was two markets or am I getting it wrong?

ADIL SYED: Yeah, it's like San Francisco and Bangalore were the two countries that we were operating in.

BETH ROBERTSON: We'll come back to that because I want to know why those two markets in particular, but let's get a sense of TrueLayer and TrueLayer's story and definition of internationalization.

MAX EMILSON: Sure, so, as a payment method, we make money per transaction, so volume is very important. We need to work with the biggest merchants humanly possible. Most of these merchants are global or international by definition. So it's incredibly important for them, when they work with us… so we are from the UK, so it's a pretty big market. So, when we go to market, we want to have merchants who have a big presence in our home market in the UK but they are expecting their partners to be able to grow with them. So I have to speak from my own experience. I don't know SME very well, I don't know consumer go-to-market very well, but rather enterprise B2B. And there, it has been very much the story of following our customers into their new markets.

And what's great with that is that you get volume in the new market from Day 1 that beat the volume. And what's really great with that is that international merchants are perhaps less savvy than the local merchants on what actual requirements do you need to be perfect in France, so to speak. So, it's been following our customers with beta merchants with large scale, but maybe not knowing exactly what they need in the local market. And so, that's been our internationalization, and when we get volume, we set up a local office and then bottom up, winning the local merchants but first after we go live with the big merchants in country.

BETH ROBERTSON: So, when you first started, Max, let's go back to TrueLayer for a second. It was 2016; correct me if I'm wrong. And you started in the UK, and was it just UK and then you followed your customers to the next market or did you expand? Tell us about the expansion strategy there.

MAX EMILSON: Sure, so, since we're a payment company, we're regulated so it's a bit complex. So, after Brexit, you have to be regulated in Europe and UK separately. So, we set up shop in Ireland for regulatory reasons to be regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. And then we realized that we needed a bunch of developers—and I should point out [that] at this point, I'm sadly not the founder of the company. They are sitting over there, so I need to be intellectually honest here. But there [are] a lot of great developers in Italy, so we set up an office in Milan. So, Ireland for regulatory reasons, Milan for developers, and then smaller satellite offices across France, Spain, Germany, Finland etc., where we have merchant demand. So it's [for] three different reasons. And then, the size of the offices is dependent on is it only commercial, is it more regulatory, or is it more from an engineering standpoint?

BETH ROBERTSON: Got it, so Milan was your engineering hub, your regulatory hub was Ireland, and then you slowly expanded from there. Let's go over to Rippling. So for you, you were in the Mission, in San Francisco, and also in India. Walk us through the distribution of jobs and responsibilities and why India in particular.

ADIL SYED: I can start with the genesis of the decision. Parker Conrad and our cofounder Prasanna Sankar had come together in 2016, started building out Rippling. And Prasanna actually had some amazing friends that were in India, like ex-Google engineers that we thought could be great for the core engineering leadership that we needed at the time. And I think the bet was that we'll get really good engineers in India and we'll see how many more we add and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. And ultimately, India ended up becoming our largest office outside of the US and San Francisco. There [are] over 800 people there today, mostly in Bangalore, going in office a few days a week—largely in product and engineering, but also there [are] other functions like G&A even some sales and marketing that represented India. And we just found it to be a really deep and compelling talent pool. And so, have been very fortunate in the success we've had in that market and recruiting and retaining these people. So that's the background of the India story.

BETH ROBERTSON: That's great, so it sounds if you're looking for engineering talent Milan or Bangalore are the right places to go, so, take note. Alright, so now let's move to signals, because I feel like a big question that founders have is, ”When do I know that I'm ready to take that that next step?” How did Rippling assess the signals for a new market launch? It sounds like you knew from Day 1 that the engineering talent was strong in India, but what about your third market?

ADIL SYED: I think the growth of the employee count was actually much more strategic. Where do we need to hire engineers? What product areas where could we find that talent? Where could we get some cost efficiencies? And so, we kept plowing away and hiring lots of great talent in India. Along the way, there were certain acquires that we made or individuals that we came across that were all over the world and they might be amazing engineers that could work on. I remember we had Salesforce engineers, implementation engineers, for some reason sitting in Mexico City. They were great, and we ended up using them for many years set up all of our CRM. We had some great engineering talent in Estonia, so, I think we're picking up small opportunistic hires across the globe, but really, India was the hub. The global, commercial strategy is a different story. That was much more focused on where do we need to be.

BETH ROBERTSON: So that was the engineering strategy, was just “Where's the talent?” Let's invest in them because it's surprisingly delightful.

Let's come to the commercial strategy in a second maybe we can talk about engineering talent and expansion for TrueLayer as well.

MAX EMILSON: Certainly, I will again point out, I'm more of a commercial leader here.

BETH ROBERTSON: You can evolve the question to commercial should you want to take it in that direction, let's do that.

MAX EMILSON: I might have more relevant experience. So I think that, again, as an enterprise international merchant you follow your merchants; that's a no-brainer. I think my learnings at my time at TrueLayer is around the path of least resistance. Don't over-complicate life, and don't stare yourself blindly on the TAM. I think Germany is 10% bigger than France in terms of TAM for us but, who gives shit, France is big enough. [Beth Robertson laughs.] You don't have to squeeze the melon too much if you believe that you have a bigger chance of winning in France for some reason. So, I think, we did all of these very complex grades of zero to 10 on product-market fit, size of market. It became incredibly intricate, but who is setting these grades of zero to 10… it's all made up.

So, I think, being incredibly pragmatic and, of course, I am incentivized on revenue I am short-term incentivized, so maybe it sort of lies in my nature of the path of least resistance. But every time we try to tie ourselves in knots in entering a new market, it's like when I remake the kitchen you take the cost times three, and you take the times three and you underestimate it a little bit. And that is like a learning that take your winnings and stand on the shoulders of what you already know, like stretch yourself you cannot only repeat what you know. But, adjacent to what you know, has proven again and again what's most successful when we think about expansion into new market or even new product, for that matter.

BETH ROBERTSON: So, natural corridors as well are what you were following too, it sounds like. How about you for the commercial strategy?

ADIL SYED: I mean, a lot of what you said actually resonates. I mean, for us we had a really strong customer pull that we could lean on. We knew that at the time our 10,000 customers had a global presence, they had employees that they were hiring in different markets and they were telling us, “This is the list, in priority order, that you need to go tackle.” And I mentioned the countries earlier, but the top four markets ended up being Canada, India, UK, and then Ireland/EU. And we did actually go after those markets in that exact order because the customer data was so strong. At the same time, you get beyond the major markets and you have this long list of countries you want to launch and the signal's not as strong, on the customer side.

And then we did the BizOps, market TAM analysis. And we were looking at what are the countries that have the largest target customer base that we could go after? What were the competitive dynamics? Were we dealing with legacy payroll providers and HR providers, or startups that were kinda mimicking the all-in-one marketing and brand of Rippling but maybe didn't have it under the hood. And then complexity—how hard would it be to build the product or localize it to this market? And the third point is actually an interesting one because we looked at complexity and didn't walk away or run away from it actually in many markets we were going head first into the most complex areas.

And the example I'll use is sending money to India is actually really difficult. And so figuring out how to do full-time employee payroll in India for companies in the US and all over the globe that might have an employee base in India. And you can guess why it was so important for us to figure out it was a hard problem that we knew we had to solve. We had to solve it for Rippling and we wanted to solve it for our customers. And I think that making those types of tough decisions on saying, “Okay, well, it may have a longer R&D cycle it may take more investment, and it's a harder nut to crack but it's worth it to plow away on some of the difficult markets,” was really important for us.

BETH ROBERTSON: I love that, what's a signal that you guys looked at or followed that was misleading... that founders in here might learn from.

ADIL SYED: I think one of the things that we're learning is that the discrepancy in where markets are in terms of maturity of HR, for us, HR payroll tech, was far greater. The range is far wider than we thought. So there are markets where HR tech, in particular payroll, looks like the US 20 years ago. And you're [like], “Okay, they're operating with sheets of paper on a desk when it comes to an onboarding process.” And there are others where startups have shown up and try to build what Rippling has. And I think adapting to the local market from a sales and marketing perspective proved to be a bit harder than we thought. That actually, showing up and saying, “Hey, let's do everything in software; it's a much better solution," sometimes isn't enough.

There [are] people that are [like], "No, the way I do things is I get a CSV file off my payroll provider and I give it to my accountant and then he goes to the bank and he uploads it and it takes five days and sometimes it's wrong, but it's okay, that's how we do it.” [Beth Robertson chuckles.] But breaking through that mental hurdle and stigma was challenging, and I think we're still facing that in different markets, but we believe we're on the right side of the wave from a technology perspective and that folks will come to the same conclusion.

BETH ROBERTSON: Fascinating. Are there any signals that are foreboding for that?

MAX EMILSON: I think, again, enterprise B2B is my context so, when a customer starts screaming about the new market and everyone gets all excited [like], “Oh my God, our biggest customer want[s] to enter Poland—holy shit, let's drop everything.” And then you stop building and you build for six months everyone is exciting and then they say, “Sorry, we had to go to India instead. Let's speak in six months.” And then product is screaming at commercial, and everyone is screaming at me and it's total disaster, so, I think there, not being naive when you're doing these large investments into new markets. Make sure you, rule of thumb, have five live customers to hit product-market fit, I think, is a good North Star.

That means I probably need 10 customers [who] are super excited. I probably, myself, need to go and interview the customer to get the real feeling, is this really something that's a priority, [and] even if something else starts burning, are you still going to do this with us? Because you're always a supplier, and, if you're working, for instance with regulated companies like we are, if the regulator starts knocking on the customer's door, they probably have to take care of that. So I think that's maybe the big downside of following your customers. It's the naivety when you are taking the big investment. And that, for me, has been a big learning that I need to be way more hands-on on those beat the merchants, and making damn sure that you have enough so you don't sit there with the ready-made product and the CPO going crazy.

BETH ROBERTSON: So when do you make the decision to divest? You go in, you identify these 10 customers. You see three or four of them, you've found something that works but you're not there yet. When do you pull back? Have you experienced that?

ADIL SYED: Do you want to go first?

MAX EMILSON: It's not my proudest moment maybe, but we have gone into markets where we have retreated. I think, I don't know how applicable this is across the board, but we work a lot with banks. So you can say they are the supplier of our service. So we are fully dependent on the banks. And in certain markets, there is a tendency of oligopoly in the market. And, so, if you have a constraint, like we do, on the supply from the banks, obviously, trying to make sure that they are willing to play ball because I think we discovered, like when we got pretty close to launching a couple of markets that actually the banks were not really on board with the model that we were proposing. And then we had to say, “This is not worth the squeeze,” and we go back. And so that, if you have such a constraint obviously in hindsight it's a no-brainer but, at the time, we didn't consider it enough.

BETH ROBERTSON: It sounds like team and partnerships are important to nail down first. Let's get to team[s] in a second. Anything to add?

ADIL SYED: No, I mean I think we've been fortunate. We haven't had any moments of retreat in a market, but we've certainly reprioritized a few times where there's been a market that we really thought we had to be in six months from now and, for various reasons, saw a signal that something is working in a completely different region, different products that it's a whole lot of work, but it's much better to go mine that thing that's showing good signal versus operating to plan.

BETH ROBERTSON: And that's just because you're seeing growth take off and so then you shift resources there, so let's talk about resources and team. And I guess in the first couple of markets that you opened, what is the ideal profile of hire that you look to bring on? And then was it a partner model or was it an exceptional individual at HQ that you ported over to this new market? Walk us through what the early days looked like and then how that's changed as you all have scaled.

MAX EMILSON: So, we have country managers in-country. And these are pretty unique characters because they're CEOs willing to not be CEOs. These are pretty odd people. Because they need to have an incredible breadth of ownership in our world, they need to talk to the regulator they need to be able to close the 10 first merchants they need to be able to attract and retain talent. They need to be able to collaborate with product back in HQ. This incredibly complicated role closely resembling a CEO but, again, willing to not be a CEO. So we have these people across Europe.

And they unlock more resources as their revenue increases so, you reach $1 million ARR, hire another salesperson. You reach $2 million, throw in two salespeople and a marketer, etc. So they have the accountability of growing with it but it's very hard to find these people, because usually they want to find their own company and be their own CEO. So the willingness of compromising there without hiring complete cowboys, which is obviously the other side of hiring wannabe CEOs, so to speak. But it's probably the toughest hire that we have in the commercial organization, finding these talents.

BETH ROBERTSON: And so expansion is within the commercial organization?

MAX EMILSON: We have a product expansion and a commercial expansion. So the unlocking the local deals, so to speak, is owned by the commercial organization, and it's a very close collaboration with the product being built in HQ. But the PM, in England, will have a hard time understanding the exact nuance of how a payment message should operate in Germany. The German guy who's been doing this for 10 years needs to be able to feed that back into product. So that's why it's way more than just a sales role this person.

BETH ROBERTSON: Interesting, I want to come back to that. I'm wondering how you structure teams and how they interoperate. But for you, what does that first hire look like, as you're thinking about international expansion early days and how has it changed today?

ADIL SYED: I mean, I think for us, because we waited on going global from a commercial standpoint until 2022, we had an opportunity to be really deliberate about how we seed the new markets that we were entering. And the example I use is probably Dublin, Ireland, which is our EMEA headquarters. We started that office in early 2023, and I actually went out there and spent a year with my family in Ireland, and we hired 125 people in that office and then another call it 75 to 100 in the rest of Europe with a big presence in London. So we have like 200 people in Europe.

But the strategy was very much to send the people from HQ in San Francisco over to Ireland to seed that office. So, there was a VP of sales that went over that's really good and is still running that office today effectively as like a CEO or GM. But he was joining me, as well as a number of our top sales reps. So people that knew how to sell the Rippling platform and product maybe didn't know EU or UK markets well, but could work with the local hires that we were making. And today, the vast majority of the people in these offices are local hires in London or in Dublin or across Europe. But that early investment of having people fly over and spend real time on the ground I think helped us a lot in connectivity back to the headquarters.

BETH ROBERTSON: I think we tended to hire a general athlete, someone who was an owner and could act like an owner, and they were primarily ex-founders that come and go and then help us understand local nuance and context and then help us build on behalf of the Stripe organization but in a new very nuanced context, because of the regulatory environment and the product needs in that region. So it's interesting that it's similar across the board. I'd love to know how did you feed commercial insights back to the product org for you, your engineering team was primarily in India, what did the interoperability of insights and surfacing those and folding them into your product roadmap look like?

ADIL SYED: We had country-level PMs, like people that had built products. A lot of times, the trickiest part of globalizing the Rippling product was either the HRIS components or payroll. And you had to figure out how to do wages in a certain country or tax laws, or how to contribute to pension plans. So the PMs we were hiring had payments backgrounds, sometimes payroll backgrounds. They were local to whatever, Germany, France, UK, Ireland. And those folks could work with engineers anywhere in the world and tell them what the product spec should look like interface with all the different teams on the commercial side as well and narrow in on the right product for that market in a way that I think was really effective. I think some of those folks we hope will grow into effectively GMs or CEOs of those countries over time. We haven't quite made it there. We're still giving them long lists of product features to build out, but eventually they grow up and they run that market because they know, bottom up, what the product requirements were and helped build it.

BETH ROBERTSON: Got it. So you send talent from HQ over to markets and they end up staying.

ADIL SYED: In a lot of cases, that's like the first point, and the second point was, some of the highly localized talent was in the product org or in the sales org, sales and marketing. And those people obviously are the ones that fine-tune the message so you're not trying to cram a US product on an international buyer.

BETH ROBERTSON: Makes sense. Is that similar for TrueLayer?

MAX EMILSON: Yeah, I mean, it's tough, because here you have French Clement who's very French, and they communicate differently and all of that jazz, so, it can become troublesome with the assumption of positive intent, when you have someone sitting alone in Paris and fighting and slacking and complaining and complaining and complaining and complaining, and HQ doesn't understand who is this entity, who is French Clement? So there I worked incredibly hard on making sure that we have a lot of in-person physical meeting[s] every month… everyone in Europe comes back to HQ. And I don't give a shit about the actual work being done. What's important is what happens at nine o'clock in the evening when the karaoke lights turn on. That's the whole purpose to create this positive intent.

So when he complains on Slack, three weeks later people don't instinctively ignore him, which is the risk otherwise because it is very lonely to sit out there and feeling that no one is listening to you. It's highly frustrating, so I think that, for me, is creating this assumption of positive intent. At Klarna, which was incredible, if you have the resources. We shipped the first three months, you worked from HQ which is obviously if you have children, all of that jazz, pretty complicated. But back then, at least when I was there, we had that opportunity.

And not only is it just to learn the culture and all of that good stuff, but it is the positive intent not only with your direct reports who might sit in HQ but everyone, into HR, into finance. All of these support organizations you're dependent on, when you sit in Paris and it's cold that they have a face, and they have a feeling of who it is. And these roles are tough. There is often churn because they fight and they don't manage and they give up and you hire someone new, so you need to keep reinventing this. But that is the biggest challenge, it's the assumption of positive intent when people don't sit in HQ.

BETH ROBERTSON: So it sounds like you had to make a big effort to bring everybody together so that they could build those baseline connections and from that understanding and good stuff came. I like that. We're going to turn it over to you in a few minutes, so get ready. I would love to understand how you kept the company connected as well specifically in these satellite offices and making sure that the team in India felt like they were plugged into the headquarters effort.

ADIL SYED: I mean, I think India was an important one because of the size and scale. It was such a big operation that, even in the early days having leadership there and a site lead that we could trust to manage the day-to-day people stuff that was happening in that office was pretty critical.

BETH ROBERTSON: And culture, I would think?

ADIL SYED: And cultural differences. I mean, we spent a lot of time letting India grow on its own, which is establish its own culture and identity and set of cultural values that are tied back to the Rippling corporate values but maybe a little bit more Indian, whatever that means. And then, making sure that folks were going back and forth. So there [are] a lot of people from India that were spending time in HQ and leadership executives, but also just managers that needed to be out in India because of who they interacted with or the teams that they managed would make trips to India.

I think all of that was really important. One of the things that we've done both in India but now even in like Dublin and in European offices is establishing local All Hands. So there's a version of All Hands that's applicable to the region, and it augments and amplifies a message for the global All Hands. And there's also obviously social events, and cross-functional meetups and things that we do to bring everyone together. But the idea was help establish an independent identity that still references back to HQ in a way that that feels organic and can be long-lasting well after I move my family back to San Francisco, and we do similar things with other executives.

BETH ROBERTSON: I remember early days at Stripe, going to those All Hands and then being [like], “Oh my gosh, we do have a really incredible product and set of team members in Singapore.” And there were videos that were recorded, both sides, and just being able to access that knowledge was really inspiring because it reminded you of the importance of this breadth of company and that they are your peers, and you're building together.

I'm going to open it up to questions. There are a couple of microphones here. Are there any seething hot topics that folks want to get into? Maybe while we get there, oh, we have one over here. Why don't you walk over to this microphone and then we'll come over to you in a second. Are there any mistakes that you made that...? No, never. [Adil Syed laughs.] I would never think that you, Max, would make a mistake. Just looking at you, you're very serious. You make deliberate decisions and they are always successful. Just looking back at these eight years, I think are there any hard-won lessons that you would put out into the audience as, “Hey, avoid this at all costs. I tried it; it doesn't work out”

MAX EMILSON: Jesus, where to begin?

BETH ROBERTSON: I told you this was coming. As you think of that, we can open up to questions and come back to it as well. Maybe we should go to our audience, and then we'll come back to you Max.

ADIL SYED: I'm just narrowing the list. [Adil Syed laughs.]

MAX EMILSON: I think I spoke on it before. Is this, for us, the mistake we keep repeating is the time from execution to product-market fit and just shrinking that time is probably the biggest... It's our biggest bottleneck is the thing that can accelerate revenue growth is just getting to that product-market fit. And when expanding into new markets, the paranoia of “I'm a sales guy and then, I know how to make money the old-fashioned way I keep selling the same product to the same customers and we keep growing steadily,” all of that good stuff. And then over here you have someone screaming, “Oh hey, here's a new market, here's a new product.” And then here I'm going to exchange what I'm getting commissions on to sell this thing, which I don't know if it works. I don't know how [much] time it's going to take until it works, and I don't know if I'm going to make any commission.

So here, you have made me coin-operated and you want me to not take the coin but to bet on the future coin. And this is the problem of how do I make this guy or girl think more long-term of “Yeah, but this new thing is 10X but I don't know if it's going to work.” And I think iterating on that model where I have, my learning there is I have to be way more aggressive on the new thing. I have to pull the people away from what they do now and incentivize it way harder. And also just very practically, from a revenue standpoint, forget about the revenue on the new thing.

You immediately start assessing, “Oh my God, if the revenue model on this new thing is 10X,” and you start qualifying those deals and everyone is getting, the CFO is going, “Holy shit, we're going to make a billion dollars.” But no. You have to assess the product-market fit. Bribe the new merchants; bribe the salespeople. Say, “Instead of the commission model you have today,” maybe say, “For every deal you sign, you get a fixed amount because I need these new merchants so much. Don't charge them anything; pay them to go live with the damn thing.” And I think there I have to take way more accountability in leaning in, in forcing them away [from] the thing that they feel safe. “I know how it works, the deck, the PM, my best friend, everything works.” And that, I think, is my main mistake of being too shortsighted there, upon reflection.

BETH ROBERTSON: That's great, so it sounds like incentive structures or figuring out how to carve out a tiger team that goes and addresses that new market so that incentives are aligned. But either way, figuring the right way to...

MAX EMILSON: The problem with that, though, is that there is a philosophy some people say where you bring in a new product you should bring in a new commercial team, to not have this problem. The problem, if you work with really big merchants, is that it doesn't work that way because with really big merchants, what happens is that you have a couple of key folks on your side. It could be maybe, if, let's say, Amazon is your customer then probably you have a PM, you have an engineer, you have a solution engineer, you have a salesperson and our CEO, we're so ingrained into this customer. And then all of a sudden comes a new salesperson and going to learn this whole intricate matrix organization of Amazon. It doesn't work that way. So, at least, again, this is my experience, which is large B2B enterprise sales. I have to play with the team that I have already ingrained because these are relationships which have built over four, five, six, seven, eight years, which with a couple of key merchants, it's probably way different if it's SME consumer, whatever, it doesn't work.

BETH ROBERTSON: Sure, that's totally fair. Let's go over to the audience, you've been waiting a minute. Why don't you tell us who you are, what company you're with, and then ask.

NIKO TANEV: Sure, good afternoon. My name is Niko Tanev, and my partner and I have created a consulting company actually to try to address some of what you have been speaking about. And so my question is related to that. So we're here talking about when to expand into new markets. You've both had a very authentic and enlightening conversation with us. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. It seems to me the conversation has been both about strategy. But also there's something that I've heard stand out in both of what you shared about your people, and the interactions and the communication the intuition that you both seem to have about the karaoke moment, it being very valuable or that who we are as a company needing to be expressed in a maybe more Indian way, whatever that means, which you said.

I'm curious how you both name what I'm now pointing at because I feel the word culture is a bit not specific or impactful and I felt that maybe if I ask this question, you guys will have something to say about it. So, how do you talk about this people and communication aspect that seems to be part of the key aspect of scaling and going into new markets, and if there's any major success or major failure that you guys, that comes top of mind?

BETH ROBERTSON: You got it; do you want me to rephrase?

ADIL SYED: I mean, it's an interesting question. I'll try to rephrase it and address it but I don't think culture has to be a bad word. I think culture is actually really nuanced and the problem is that the minute you start talking about culture everyone's got a different interpretation of what it means. It might mean hanging out late at night having karaoke and drinks it might mean the way you write Slack messages or how succinct you are in email. I think for us, there's a set of traits that we'd like to see in all of our employees that really reflect Rippling values. And I won't go through all the Rippling values but one of them is actually a really, I think, unique one that I hadn't seen in prior companies I worked with which is “go and see” and this concept of...

BETH ROBERTSON: Go and see?

ADIL SYED: Go and see, like S-E-E. And the idea is that it doesn't matter where you are in the organization you should have access to primary and raw data on whatever it is you're talking about. So if there's something wrong with the way sales reps are positioning a certain product in a certain market, the manager has to go listen to the gong calls and read the notes and figure out the answer and what happened here, versus just taking the summary from the manager that reports into them. And that is a really big cultural value it changes the way that you interact with your peers it changes how you identify problems and troubleshoot them.

So I think that was really important for us, which is [to] establish clear corporate values, and then reiterate them. They're flashing on the Zoom screen when you're in between meetings and with cool little logos and icons, but you're constantly thinking about them. And then there's the softer part of this, which is just getting to know each other in a deep enough way where there is trust building within this new organization. When you hire a couple 100 people in a year, there's a lot that needs to happen for them to gel and be effective and I think having the social events and letting people meet each other is really important.

I think what also happens intrinsically that we don't talk about is that there are safety nets that are created where when you see someone going off the path and maybe not making the right decisions. If there's a relationship and a friendship and a trust there, there'll be many people that can along the way say, “Hey, I think you should approach whatever—this sale, this partnership, this product—in a different way.” If there's no trust, and no relationship, you just end up having people on islands, and then they're either succeeding or failing on that island on their own and it just becomes unmanageable. Especially when it's an international office and you're just watching it explode in the distance. It's a terrible scenario, and it plays out all the time when people go international too fast.

MAX EMILSON: I think the problem that I see repeated over and over again, and whether it's an international staff or in the office, is the lack of communication whether that be in-person or verbal. The written communication; it kills me. And I am...

BETH ROBERTSON: The lack of written communication?

MAX EMILSON: No, the prolification...

BETH ROBERTSON: Got it.

MAX EMILSON: …of written communication, now, I am actually the leader, I write the most on Slack than anyone in the company. So it's a bit of a glass house situation over here. But they come to me and they say, “Oh, they're not listening… the PM is not listening.” And I say, “OK, have you told them this?” [Max Emilson stammers.] “OK, why have you not?” “Ah, you know,” and what it always is, that they don't have trust on each other so they don't dare to look the other person in the eye and say, “Hey, what's happening over here?” So, they come to me and I then need to sort out whatever politics. And then the answer is always the same. I put the two kids in the room and I say, “Now say what you told me.” It's like the principal, pulling them into the same room and then all of a sudden, they say it and then it's “Oh, no problem, I'll fix that” and I'm just like, “Fuck.” [Audience laughs.]

But the good news is that we have a lot of smart people at TrueLayer. So once I've done this nine or 10 times with someone, they then say, “Oh, I don't need to come to the principal office anymore—I just go to the person.” And that is the proudest moment, when I hear that they actually solve something by themselves. But I think that what kills me is the sort of lack of communication and not in quantity, but in quality. And teaching the kids today, pick up the fucking phone! Pick up the phone. Hit the digits and call them instead! As soon as you have a disagreement and it's written and someone is sitting and it doesn't matter if they sit in Paris and London, or they're sitting like one meter chatting with each other, I'm just, “What's happening?”

So, this for me, around communication, but it's interlinked with the trust part. It's from a cultural standpoint, creating these relationships It's for me more important than whatever values TrueLayer have. And I believe in the TrueLayer values a lot. It's just a relationship between two humans. It's just way more important than anything else. This is a human business, whether it's internal or with the customers, we're always dealing with humans first and just making sure that people are willing to go the extra mile, whether that is going into a physical meeting or calling someone or whatever. I keep repeating this thing, and that for me is key.

BETH ROBERTSON: I think it gets hard as you scale those. So for Stripe, what our fabric has consistently been is managing against the operating principles and making sure every conversation you have is really tied to those operating principles. And it's not every conversation, even, it's like performance and how we speak about someone's success in one-on-ones or performance reviews, it's very much codified and couched in what is the what that you're delivering to the company, but how is it also delivered against the operating principles? And I think if you are living and breathing those operating principles as leaders within the company it forces everybody around the company to rise to the occasion and align so that you avoid that type of need to go to the principal's office every time. I think you can self-help, at the end of the day.

So, I think we are at time. I'm getting flashes on the screen that say, “Please wrap.” So, I really appreciate both of you taking the time to be here onstage today. I walked away with a ton of nuggets. Adil is imminently expecting a little human to join the world and took time today to be here with us. So I wish you much luck in this next adventure this next expansion of your own family.

ADIL SYED: Thank you.

BETH ROBERTSON: Thank you both for being here. Super grateful for your time and look forward to seeing you guys thrive from here.