Battle Scars of a Sales Leader
Understanding the stories of resilience, strategy, and leadership is essential for success in the competitive sales world.
James will uncover the raw and unfiltered real-life experiences of sales Leaders, exploring the ups and downs and lessons learned in the high-pressure sales world.
Battle Scars of a Sales Leader
Disrupting Markets and Scaling Up with Matt Loop
Building a robust team culture and scaling tech companies internationally is no easy task.
Learn from Matt's inspiring journey from his early days at Salesforce to impactful roles at LinkedIn, Slack, and now Rippling. We promise you'll gain invaluable insights into the importance of passion, perseverance, and smart risk-taking in the fast-paced world of technology and cloud computing.
Matt shares practical advice on navigating career opportunities in tech, offering a behind-the-scenes look at his work with LinkedIn's Sales Navigator product in Asia and his strategic move back to the U.S. Discover how he evaluates emerging companies and trends, the significance of leveraging a strong network, and why understanding company culture is crucial. Matt’s stories from Salesforce, Slack, and LinkedIn emphasize the importance of coachability and continuous learning in leadership roles, shaping his current contributions at Rippling.
Dive into effective hiring strategies for startup growth and the complexities of building culture in a hybrid workforce with Matt's expert guidance. He recounts success stories of hires from non-traditional backgrounds and addresses the challenge of hiring in conservative markets. Additionally, explore the nuances of international expansion, from conducting thorough market research to leveraging local networks and advisors. This episode is a goldmine for anyone aiming to succeed in the dynamic tech industry, offering a comprehensive guide on building high-performing teams and expanding globally.
I'm wearing long sleeves because to cover up the battle scars, there's plenty of them.
Speaker 2:You pick Salesforce, linkedin, slack, rippling all incredible organizations in the infancy Like how did you, how did you nail that every single time Joining us to shed light on this is.
Speaker 3:Matt Loop by Matt Loop. Matt Loop. Matt Loop from HR and Work specialist Rippling Matt.
Speaker 1:Loop, the tech titan disrupting the SaaS industry landscape for the last two decades. Right now in growth mode and in this you know, first 12 months we've gone zero to roughly 50 staff. We don't have the local playbook, we don't have the massive customer base. We're learning every day. Are you going to be someone who rolls up their sleeves and says I'm going to build?
Speaker 3:Hey guys, as many of you know, when you're starting a new project, you're not always going to get it right every single time. With our interview with Matt Loop, we had some amazing content, but unfortunately our audio card got corrupted. For that reason, the audio is not quite as good as it should be, but please do listen anyway, because there are some amazing nuggets and an incredible story.
Speaker 2:In diving into your history, what I noticed is that you're not just a VP of sales, you are a builder. You have successfully built some incredible brands and I know how difficult it is my time in building a couple of businesses in the APAC market. There's some highs and lows, there's some tears, there's some late nights and there's some lessons and we kind of deal on those mistakes that we make and the lessons that we learn and we take them on to the next roles that we have and I'm super excited to introduce you and have a conversation around. What are some of those battle scars that you had and earned along the way and how has that impacted you to date?
Speaker 1:I'm wearing long sleeves because to cover up the battle scars, there's plenty of them. I've been blessed without question 20 years in an exciting industry of technology, largely all around cloud computing, software as a service. I got my start with Salesforce kind of the pioneer of this whole space, the disruptor of the on-premise software world, the disruptor of the on-premise software world and I joined them. Everyone knows the brand, certainly today, 80,000 or so employees and certainly the leader and the instigator of that whole cloud computing movement. But I joined it. It was 2003. It was 250 employees, it was private and it was very much unknown, certainly outside of the US. There were incredible people there in early days, not just Mark but a variety of other people who have since gone on to start incredible companies. But I was very fortunate to join there to, I think, learn what a great sales culture looks like, one that invests in all of their employees and a massive beneficiary of that, one who's a disruptor and scaling rapidly, certainly a byproduct of the growth at all costs world.
Speaker 1:That was Salesforce and some of the other companies, although that's hugely tapered back.
Speaker 1:In my most recent role it was Richard Terry Loy who ran Zuara, who originally hired me, aaron Ross, who wrote the Bible around predictable revenue that every SaaS company has used to build their outbound motion. To Mike Derrison, who ran all of the sales solutions business at LinkedIn. To Bob Fratty, cro of Slack. To Aaron Katz, who is the CRO of Elastic, now the CEO of ClickHouse, and then, of course, to where I am today, and Matt Plank, the CRO of Rippling. The CVs of them are insane and they've been incredibly supportive of me as I kind of try to do the international scale up for a US based company in Australia or broadly Asia. I've learned so much from them and hundreds of other incredible execs that have worked at those companies. So, look, I've always been part of growth companies. I think I've certainly fine-tuned what I love and what's important to me. It started with Salesforce and I think it gave me an understanding of I want a disruptor, I want someone who's going to make a meaningful impact in the space that they're in.
Speaker 1:I want to be part of growth. I want to be part of not just growing a revenue number, but growing a culture, a team building, something special. I think that all probably goes back to my early days of being a passionate athlete. Even when I was 13 or 14 years old, I coached the younger girls club team that was in my soccer club team and I just always loved whether I was playing or even coaching at a young age bringing together a group of people towards a common goal, whether that's win a championship or win the tournament, putting in the hard work, building trust and respect amongst your team members and just going for it. And I think I try to apply a lot of those principles in what I'm doing in the office day to day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I can relate to that sense of building team camaraderie and really creating a community within your own business, but also for the clients that you serve as well. I want to pick up on something that you mentioned that you love working for disruptive organizations or organizations that are in that disruptive mode, but you've picked Salesforce, linkedin, slack, ripley all incredible organizations in the infancy like how did you, how did you nail that every single time? Because they've been disruptors in their space. I wish you look for look.
Speaker 1:I do believe that you create your own luck. My luck, perhaps, wasn created. I was on a wine bus in Napa and Aaron Katz, who was an employee at Salesforce at the time, knew I was unhappy in the role that I was in at the moment. He said you need to come over and look into Salesforce.
Speaker 1:And so, with a few introductions, I was able to get in, have an interview, do well and get a role. So that was really the launchpad, I guess, to get in the door. I think I always keep tabs and I'm looking for emerging companies and trends, whether it's myself using them to do my job better or make my life better and that kind of plays into LinkedIn. I'm member number like 650,000. I don't know the exact number, but it's in the first million and I think there are a billion members now. But when that came out I was one of the first to jump on and you know LinkedIn gets improved as the network grows. So this was in its infancy. But the whole concept of what it was all about kind of building and developing your professional brand, being able to leverage relationships where you have them to get warm introductions I just bought into that.
Speaker 1:And in my you know, my first decade at Salesforce, linkedin became a part of how I sold. You know, if we were going into early customers like Seek in Australia, one of the early adopters of Salesforce, I would go on and would see like is there someone that I could talk to to perhaps get the meeting that we're struggling to get right now? So I was one of the early adopters of LinkedIn and serendipitously, uh, an opportunity came up when they launched their sales navigator product to do so, to have someone on the ground in Asia to lead that. And so there was no better person for me at that. No better person, hopefully, than me having done the Salesforce, built 10 years of connections with sales leaders in Australia and being a massive proponent myself of the whole kind of social selling, modern selling movement and being just a linkedin fanboy, that made my life at salesforce better, and so I made that jump, uh and and went to linkedin.
Speaker 1:I had a couple of years building up in asia and then an opportunity to move back to the us, little arm twisting of my australian wife, to go back and spend a little time with my family but also, from a professional perspective, hopefully have the opportunity to lead a North American business, perhaps something slightly bigger in scope than what was afforded to me within LinkedIn in Australia. And so we moved back from 2015 to 2019. We loved it Incredible time for four, four and a half years in North America, but then our daughter was going to start kindergarten. We always knew that there was a timeline for us to come back to where we knew we were going to establish roots and be close to our family here and there wasn't a good opportunity with LinkedIn back in Asia.
Speaker 1:So I thought I started thinking about again the companies that were disruptors. Who was doing something interesting to me and making my life better Now at the time? Now at the time I wasn't a user of Slack, but I knew I hated email. Both LinkedIn and Salesforce had the email-centric organizations when I was there and I knew something could help organize information and communicate better. And so I got you know nine to 12 months ahead of my known move back to Australia.
Speaker 2:Got you know nine to twelve months ahead of my known move back to australia started reconnecting with bob and cro and seeing a little bit of an opportunity to help expand in asia, and so that happened and is there some sort of evaluation that you go through when you're looking at these next companies of what's going to be the next big winner or a good horse to bet on that? You look at the financials, the leadership team, like where they are geographically growth year to year. What are the things that you look at?
Speaker 1:Yeah, all the above. I think again I'm fortunate having the network I've been in for 20 years so many people from Salesforce and LinkedIn and now Slack. My former colleagues have gone on and are running most of the great companies that you want to be at now or they're certainly in senior positions, so I usually have an insider to understand what's going on there, what's the business like, what are their ambitions for Asia and see if it aligns with kind of what I'm looking for. It's exactly what happened with Ripple.
Speaker 1:You know Two former colleagues are senior leaders in our North American business. They reached out to me knowing 15 plus years in the Australian market. They were launching their payroll product and they just wanted perspective on go-to-market here, what's different, how should they think about setting it up, and I jumped on the phone, learned a little bit more about the opportunity. I certainly knew the financials and a bit about Rippling and you know it was, I think, the right time in my career to make it from Slack and Salesforce. And then I went and met everyone else. I met with our COO, matt McInnes, with Matt Plank, my boss, and a number of other people to get a feel for culture to understand what they were looking to do as they internationalize the business, to ensure it aligns with what I want to do and it does.
Speaker 1:It was build something that's truly transformational, that is going to be a legacy type company that is a disruptor in the space, where you could argue, the incumbents and the ones that have been leading in our space perhaps are right for disruption. And so it's ticked a lot of boxes and actually today is my year anniversary at Rippling. I'm sure I'll do a post about it, but it's been an incredible 12 months.
Speaker 2:Incredible, incredible 12 months, and I mean when I look at the success and the growth that you've had and the brand that's already been built in.
Speaker 2:Australia like it's pretty spectacular to go from zero to where you are today. I guess that brings me back to a question around being a student of the game being coachable. That's something with Harvard was that for hiring salespeople is their coachability. But I think that that needs to continue through leadership as well, because the more you learn, the more you apply those lessons, the quicker you can do this. The second, the third, the fourth time, when you reflect back on your time in Salesforce or Slack, linkedin, are there any gotchas? Are there any things? Where you go, I messed up and I'm going to make sure that I do things differently and that's going to excite my way to go to market. I messed up all the time. Anything significant that really pulled you back and you thought at the time? I'm going to make sure I never let that happen again.
Speaker 1:Good question. So I'd say there's a few things that perhaps I've implemented here at Rippling and I think in previous lives I could have done a better job of it and I think have done a better job of it and I think, knock on wood, I'm doing a better job now. Number one is interviewing and making sure that you're attracting great talent. I'd say, earlier in my career, without the experience of hiring great people, I've probably hired lookalikes, people that I just had things in common with and didn't seek diversity. I don't think I probably focused on the right attributes and values to ensure that they're an appropriate fit for what we're trying to accomplish, for what we're trying to accomplish, and I think I've improved upon that, diversity being a big one. If I look at any role we're hiring now and my recruiter will attest I won't really engage unless there's a diverse candidate slate. I think I've gotten better at understanding and having a different risk, tolerance for different roles, taking intelligent risks in order to bring in diversity to the organization.
Speaker 2:Can you give an example of an intelligent risk that you take today?
Speaker 1:I mean I'll give two examples and I'll name them on the podcast. And I'll name them on the podcast, hopefully they watch, because they're both just incredible and I'm fine. I guess it's too right because I definitely question myself and I think hiring these two people I learned a ton about how I need to perhaps think outside the square and really assess on skill but also will and how to best do that interview process. So Anne, who was at BD at Baker McKenzie, a law firm, who came into interview for a junior selling role at LinkedIn and you know on paper it's not the fit. She doesn't come from X number of companies that we typically hire from and law firm you know limited experience in selling technology. Why would we bring her in? And you know you could tell she came in to deliver the presentation, her interviews and then finally the panel. In everything she was so prepared. You could tell her passion was just through the roof for wanting to be here. I remember asking her like how did you prepare? Because it's very obvious she hadn't. The answer was you know I did this with my husband a third of the three times I went through it. He wants me to not get the job here times I went through it. He wants me to not get the job here and uh, anyways, we hired her, you know, and fast forward to where she is now. I mean she was a top performer pretty much every year I think she's got a hundred or so people that roll up to her at microsoft. Incredible, um, human being, you know, did her job unbelievably well but was the right person in scale-up mode. That just sets such a high standard for how you show up every day, for how you treat your colleagues, for how you treat employees, our customers, and that is contagious. If you get, especially in the early hires, if you get those types of people, you get that right, the skill and the will, the culture, fit and the aptitude. Life is just wonderful.
Speaker 1:The other one was Jesse. You know he was we were doing a pilot at Staples furniture supplier. He was a sales rep who was kind of an advocate for getting LinkedIn in there to help their sales process. And I remember you know my rep coming back and saying you got to meet this guy. He's dying to get in here. I said really yeah, furniture sales guy. And again came in and just absolutely blew us away. The professionalism was just off the charts, the preparation, the precision. It was incredible. He was clearly a student of the game and still is to this day. I remember fast forward three or four years later at the sales kickoff 4,000 plus people in Las Vegas, and he's one of three people celebrated as AE of the year. So I think I've gotten much better at looking beyond the CV, truly asking the right questions to understand who these people are, what their drivers are, the values that they live their life by, as well as the aptitude to do the role effectively. I love that response.
Speaker 2:SaaS recruitment business that is focused on startup and scale-up SaaS businesses and helping them build their go-to-market teams globally, and our unique value proposition is that we're all ex-SaaS professionals ourselves. So we've all been in the trenches, we've all built those sales teams ourselves and one of the challenges that I faced early on in this new career pivot is a lot of hiring managers, particularly in a conservative market, is a lot of hiring managers, particularly in a conservative market, if we can call it that, which is an employer's market rather than an employee's market is they're looking for that paper-perfect candidate and they're looking at the CV and they're disqualifying so many people because they're not paper-perfect. But I liken it a little bit to someone going on a date in the old days. You may want to begin to settle down with someone. You've got your tick box over all of these things. You may tick all those boxes, but you don't have that compatibility, you don't have that cultural fit or that personality click and you're not going to be the right person for the business.
Speaker 2:So I really like the fact that you touched on looking beyond the CV. So I really liked the fact that you touched on looking beyond the CV. It's a nice pivot to something I really wanted to understand is you mentioned skill and will as part of your interview process there. What are some of the other characteristics that you look for in a founding team? So, when you're looking to go written here, what are the traits and characteristics of that founding team that I want to then take that into um the evolution of your hiring strategy, because I think that you've got a founding team strategy and I also think that the team that gets you from zero to one perhaps isn't isn't all the time going to be the team that gets you from one to ten and ten to a hundred. So how do you think about getting that high performing sales team to get you to where you're going to today and then at what point you begin to to years?
Speaker 1:in terms of having to bring in. I hope that that theory is wrong, like I hope that I can hire people that can scale with us. And that's always something I'm kind of probing and testing for, and I think the best thing is growth mindset. How do you test for that, like understand how people are trying to self-improve, what are their gaps or what are areas that they know self-aware or feedback provided that they can improve upon, and what are they doing to improve? You know, is it through mentorship? Is it through coursework? Is it constantly reading? You know what is their attitude towards growth Because, like you said, I'm probably not going to get all the boxes ticked on everyone. The dream candidate is rare or, if not altogether, doesn't exist. So, for the things that might not all be there, whether it's industry knowledge or product knowledge or selling to a certain persona is this person going to adapt and grow into that? Do they have just kind of a rabid appetite to grow and improve? And so I think that's absolutely something that I'm looking for. I think right now in growth mode and in this first 12 months, we've gone zero to roughly 50 staff. We don't have the local play books, we don't have the massive customer base. We don't. We're learning every day and you have to be okay and actually thrive in that environment. Are you going to be someone who rolls up their sleeves and says I'm going to build our playbook to sell to retail organizations based on what I'm doing right now with this company? Are you going to be collaborative and share that? Are you going to just be someone who is a wealth of knowledge and assisting and supporting their team members? So I think that's certainly important.
Speaker 1:Resilience I think it gets talked about a lot, particularly when it's crappy macroeconomic conditions, a lot of technology, sales companies doing it tough right now. But I think we've been very upfront and I think I've gotten better at this in each job Like this is what it is and this is what it's not. I will tell you what is working and what's good. The upside, I will be very honest and is what it's not. I will tell you what is working and what's good. The upside I will be very honest and say what it's not, to make sure that you don't waste your time and we don't waste ours and we don't get the fit wrong. And resilience right now is absolutely one. It is hard to build period Like you don't have all the resources that you get in a bigger company. Um, you're constantly changing and pivoting, and so I think that's something that I I'd call out very much to candidates as well.
Speaker 1:Any tests that need to be processed, um difficult. I think you can ask for examples of that. I think you can ask for examples of that. I think you can ask for history. I think you can look at where they've been and be knowing those organizations what's real and what's perhaps not. But I also just think radical transparency or almost disqualifying is a good thing to do. Like, if there are skeletons in the closet or if there are things that are challenging, there's no point at trying to hide that and kind of smoke and mirrors. What's happening in the business? It's a battle for talent. It's very tough. What's happening in the business? It's a battle for talent. It's very tough. Like there could be this inclination to lie about what it's like on a day-to-day to attract someone, but three months down the road, one of you is going to be kicking themselves. Right, you hired the wrong person who isn't the right fit for where we are and what we provide, or you know the employee saying the same.
Speaker 2:Hybrid work. That's something which has really changed and evolved in the last two, three years since Alvin. There's a lot of talk about from both sides. We're a hybrid workforce. Candidates will say what's the work-from-home policy? But what is your perspective on hybrid work and how do you get the most productivity out of your workforce?
Speaker 1:You know this new life that I'm looking at. I think it's early days on flexible work, whatever your perspective might be on it. I am 17-ish years of in the office every day. Salesforce, I was in every day. Linkedin, I was in every day. I joined Slack and then, a couple months later, COVID hit and I happen to be providing a platform that enables remote work. So it was convenient and serendipitous. So I'm still learning myself. I love being in the office. I was, I think, productive at home. We're a hybrid workforce right now, just full transparency. We're three days in the office, two days at home. We're a hybrid workforce right now, just full transparency. We're three days in the office, two days at home. And it's being conscious, thoughtful about how to best maximize those days.
Speaker 1:So I'll do a lot of just catch up admin work at home. I'll do a lot of my international Zoom meetings to you know, namely in the US. When I'm at home and the days I'm in office I try to prioritize my one-on-ones that I have regularly with my local team, try to prioritize customer meetings or group problem solving when we can come together in person.
Speaker 1:And I think we can better work than trying to do it remotely. I think we got really good at Slack Just one, I guess, like tip that they had. That I appreciated we had no internal meetings on Friday, so we just eliminated that and we constantly scrutinized what. Where is there fat in our calendar that we can trim? Like, what are the things that are just meetings that are pointless? We can give back selling time to the reps. We can minimize and allow people to, you know, go have a longer lunch or focus on wellbeing. But I think that's something that I try to do as well Even now at Rippling, like what meetings don't need to happen? What work can be done asynchronously In Slack? It can be an update.
Speaker 1:You used to say could this meeting have been an email? I say, could this meeting have been a Slack post? But this is an ongoing battle that employees and employers are waging. Right now. It's very topical in the headlines in Australian press. There are organizations saying if you want a kind of cruisy job, startup world is not for you. You know four day work weeks and you know breaking early. You can't do that in a startup environment, and they're right. It's very difficult to do when you're trying to build a high performance and generational company when you have big ambition and aspirations as to what you want that organization to be. And employees are equally right too, and employees are equally right too. We all kind of came out of COVID, I think, with a bigger focus around well-being and work-life balance. I think that that's fantastic and I'm a proponent of that, and employees absolutely have the ability and right now to say you know what? I only do want to work four days a week, and that's important to me. They might struggle to find a ton of companies out there.
Speaker 1:In fact, we did research and said only less than 25% of companies are actually going to import that any time in the next 12 months. They're going to struggle to find perhaps companies that are willing to take that on my time and data.
Speaker 2:we build a high performing sales team and culture, and it absolutely was not a nine to five operation. They're the top performers, it was correlation. Top performers, funnily enough, put in a lot more work than the lowest performers. Sometimes they'd be in at six or seven o'clock in the morning. They'd be staying until 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock in the evening, because they really believed in building something. Building something not just for the business but for themselves as well. And that's a piece which I, on reflection, I think is tricky when you've got these conflicting forces saying work from home, you need to work hard. But for me, one of the powerful parts of building a team is creating a culture and a sense of achievement, a sense of purpose bigger than the person themselves. And that way they're coming not just to do a job, they're coming to be a part of something, to build something for themselves for their team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is it comes into culture. It's like, how do you create that sort of I mean, do you agree with that sort of premise and what can you if so or if not? Like, what are the important pieces that come into culture that give you that platform to create that when you're working with other people? I think that for us, for Rippling, where we are, in particular in Australia.
Speaker 1:Having the three days in office, I think, is critical. I think it is much harder to establish an employee brand and a culture amongst a bunch of new starters to onboard and become enabled effectively if you're all at home. So, without question, you know we all cram into our small office. We had visitors last week from the States who loved it, like they said oh, this feels like the scrappy startup days that they craved and loved being part of. You know, we all come together in there for a couple days a week and I think that's largely what happens.
Speaker 1:We all get better being around one another. We are constantly learning. We've got a very broad and robust platform, so there's always something to pick up from one of our technical product experts or from a seller who just had an engagement around a particular product. So I think that for me, building culture still happens best in person. Now I will say that I think there's probably certain roles that can have more flexibility and be remote more often, like if a recruiter is an example, his job is to be, on the phone eight or nine hours a day to candidates the whole time.
Speaker 1:Do they need to be in the office Just locked in a phone booth or in a meeting room to have private conversations with candidates who don't want to know that they're speaking to you? I don't know. There's certain other roles that I think could be remote and maybe we'll grow and evolve to that and allow that flexibility. But for us right now it it has worked really well for us to be those three days in person and then the two days where I can just plow through, perhaps without any distraction, with a couple hours saved, and commute time. Um, all the busy work that I need to do to do my job well I think what I'm taking away from this as well is it's about being intentional.
Speaker 2:It's not just a hybrid. I was intentional in actually putting two to three days I think everyone there together with the intention of building culture, enablements, camaraderie, and then you do get a true investment for us as well. Best of both worlds. Yeah, ripley is operating and disrupting the HR tech space. It's an up-and-coming, emerging industry and, right, you said you picked another winner by the looks of things. And how is Ripley solving a lot of the HR challenges for disparate organizations that are located all over the world? With international expansion, what problems are you and the organization solving?
Speaker 1:There's a ton. So there are a ton of challenges that are facing Australian employers right now. A lot of them are front page news. You've got wage theft and 59% of companies in the last two years have had some sort of payroll error, so you're more likely to have been paid incorrectly than correctly in the last two years. This is largely because they're using multiple systems in order to do that, or they're using legacy systems that order to do that, or they're using legacy systems that require a lot of manual intervention. So I think on the payroll side, it's about automating, removing the manual process that sits with payroll professionals and making their life easy.
Speaker 1:You can take away some of the mundane tasks and kind of grind the work that they have to prep the bank file at the end of each month. That's just kind of all automagically done for you. Then I think we can help reduce the errors. If you're not having to use five different systems to combine perhaps multiple countries where you need to pay employees and bring that into one. That makes life easy. You've got gender pay gap and so now everyone's required to report those. Every company that's. Let's see over 50 employees, I believe, or 100 need to start reporting that this year and I think that number drops to 15 for next year. So how can we provide the data and insights for companies to have all of that handy and even have a recipe ready to go report that can be sent directly to the government as part of the requirement? It's devices and it's devices like part of being an employee is you often get corporate IT and something that is given to you by the company to do your job. You know, when I started I had a pile of 10 laptops in my home office that I had to like manually take to someone at a pub or meet before we enter office or ship it to them. We can do all that. We can manage all of your inventory. We can ship all those out. When you hire a new starter, that's pre-configured with all the apps that they need to do their job Great fix capabilities. If something goes wrong, we give you the box to ship it back and so that's all taken care of.
Speaker 1:There's constantly changing IR reform. We've got the right to disconnect, which comes out in August. There's constantly changing IR reform. We've got the right to disconnect, which comes out in August. But there are constantly changing minimum wage rates and modern award updates and all of these things often require going into a system and manually adjusting that. So how can we automate that and make sure that those things are happening in the background and take that burden off an organization?
Speaker 1:In general, if you think about an employee and how they work and the tools that they need to do their not to do their job, not their productivity tools but, as an employee, the systems I need to log into to get all the things I need my pay, performance and all of that it's usually tens of systems and Ripple is really trying to be focused on the employee data record at the center of everything and building a platform with all of the applications that would touch an employee's experience all in one place, with workflow, with analytics, with ai, all those things kind of baked in to the underpinning platform. So it's a big, ambitious plan. We're also looking to tackle international which is why I have a job, thankfully and to deliver payroll in a number of countries, provide payment options in hundreds of countries and really do this at a scale that no other company before us has done.
Speaker 2:Great Matt. I also want to ask another question. This is my preparation for 2025. Let's just say that we're in tough times. It's probably going to be pretty tough in the Aussie market and the West market for the next six months or so. But as SaaS businesses begin to look at expansions, they begin to look at going beyond their headquarter, whether that's in Australia, north America, europe. What are some of the strategies that you can give counsel on when it comes to deploying culture, to overcoming legal obligations, to looking at logistical issues, to making sure that you take that culture, that DNA of the headquartered organization and deploy that regionally?
Speaker 1:Yeah, a boring answer is that Rippling can help a lot of companies in going and setting up legal entities and paying employees in other countries. So we're here to support on that. Look, I've done it, coming this way US to Australia. But here's what I would say, especially when we're talking about Australian startups, I can't say that there's been a ton of wildly successful Aussie startups that have made the leap into the US.
Speaker 2:It's a very difficult market.
Speaker 1:It's a big one. It's probably the one that's on everyone's mind. Atlassian's over there, canva's trying to go and build a market over there. You know companies Aconex is an example, I think successfully made the leap there before they sold to Oracle. There's a few that spring to mind, but it's difficult. I know there's a few that I advise to and spend a lot of time with. I think they're doing it correctly.
Speaker 1:So if you're perhaps speaking to aussie startups who might be considering this, first and foremost, should you be doing like, is now the time to take on the behemoth task of going to the us or going to europe? Uh, that is extremely cost and, uh, time, expensive. Uh, exercise to do it can. It's one of those moments where it can, like, make or break a company if you don't get it right. And so, um, amidst this time of potential scale and you got some dollars to invest and you're thinking about going international. Number one is you know where are you going to go and why? Is this going to be an easy place to land? Do you have product markets fit in a new market? Second, is you know an appropriate timeline, an appropriate timeline?
Speaker 1:What I think I've seen lead to failure is going over there, with no established network partnerships, a customer advisory board or early adopter customers already in hand and showing up and expecting to kind of be successful. Someone who I work with closely had done three to four years of research before he made the leap over to the US. He himself is the founder, moved there, brought with him the you know IP around the company, the product, to establish the business in the US and to go off of that market. He's since hired, you know, a former colleague of mine actually to help him scale the business and I think he's had 10 customers and been with them for multiple years, deeply invested and connected to the VC and technology community. There has five to 10 other advisors that are the buyer persona for the technology that he sells. I think he's unbelievably well-established and mitigated a ton of risk from going over there and being successful.
Speaker 1:So I'd say, the research being super thoughtful around how to land in the market successfully, seek out advisors, seek out, as I did here, government partners who've been great for us as we've established relationships here with Rippling. They've helped open doors and make introductions, helped us find our office space, a ton of things that they've done to make our life easier. So find those right connections, do the deep research that you need to do and minimize the risk that you might face as you go into a new market. It's exciting to kind of consider the possibilities of, you know, perhaps doing it back home and being successful and then wanting to go bigger, to open up more market and, to you know, hopefully expand the opportunities for your organization.
Speaker 1:But I think there's a lot to think about in terms of mitigating risk. How do you scale culture? Certainly, I think you have to send, if not the leader and founder of the company, then a couple of the established players at your organization to go over there to be the corporate DNA from your headquarters and to help disseminate that into a new organization that you build in a new country. Fantastic, great tips.
Speaker 2:And I'm sure that will be very valuable for people across the globe as they think about peer international. So, matt, thank you very much, and I'm sure that will be very valuable for people across the globe as they think about pairing internationally. So, matt, thank you very much. We have listeners and watchers here in Australia and elsewhere. If anyone wants to connect with yourself personally or learn a little bit more about Brickling. How can they do that?
Speaker 1:Well, you can go to Rippling. It's our website, wwwripplingcom. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. Be happy to connect there. I think it's probably the two best spots to catch me or to learn more about what we're doing. Okay, great Look. Thanks very much again.
Speaker 2:And we'll catch up again soon. Appreciate it, thank you.
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