1
MANAGING
HYPERGROWTH WITHOUT
SACRIFICING CULTURE
The pain and gain of growing
from 30-100 employees
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3
We would like to thank the following organisations who took the time to speak to us about their
experiences and insights:
John Thompson, UserReplay
Alastair Paterson, Digital Shadows
Keith Wallington, Investor, Non-Exec & Advisor
Kevin McGovern, Blis
James Osmond, Triptease
Eldar Tuvey, Wandera
Jonathan Gale, NewVoiceMedia
Brynne Herbert, MOVE Guides
Alejandro Artacho, SpotaHome
David Okuniev, Typeform
Research and interviews were conducted August 2016 with SaaS organisations ranging in size
and sectors. Each interview aimed to establish the background of the organisation and the CEO’s
experience of maintaining and developing their culture and values over time. Specifically we were
uncovering insights on the main challenges and opportunities they’ve encountered when taking
businesses through a steep growth period.
At Kommol we see every day how growing from 30-100 people
can be both an exciting and daunting experience. Companies
on this journey will have already been through a lot to get
product/market fit, initial revenue, a decent client base, market
di–erentiation, and most likely are now funded to really scale
– great news. Yet it is at this stage of growth that so many
companies stumble. Taking too long to navigate to the next
stage of growth can make all the di–erence in whether emerging
tech companies have time to gain a competitive edge and the
continued interest of investors.
It requires a very di–erent skill set and leadership team to take a company from 30-100 employees
than it does to grow from a team of founders to 30 people. To delve deeper, we spoke to a select
number of CEOs at B2B SaaS companies, headquartered in Europe but growing globally, who have
already successfully gone on this journey – with some taking their companies to e–ective exits and
others earlier stage and rapidly approaching global teams in excess of 100. I’d like to say a big thank
you to everyone involved in the report for helping us bring to life the success stories and enabling us
to showcase the top leaders across the SaaS space to ensure we are always looking for the teams of
tomorrow. We hope you enjoy the insights and learnings contained in the report and that it gives you
inspiration going forward.
CONTENTS
WELCOME
Michelle Williamson
Director, Kommol
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8
10
12
14
16
18
20
22
24
“I definitely think we could have been
bolder and recruited faster, but it has
meant we haven’t eroded the quality of
our people”

John Thompson, UserReplay
“I wish I spent more time
understanding what a great person
looks like for a particular role before I
hired them”

Brynne Herbert, MOVE Guides
“One of the most rewarding things
for me is watching people’s career
progression within the company. It’s
great to give the team
new opportunities”

Alastair Paterson, Digital Shadows
“Stick with the team you’ve built
from the ground up because they’re
passionate and prepared to roll their
sleeves up”

Kevin McGovern, Blis
“Hiring the wider team
shouldn’t be seen or
treated as less important
than hiring at exec level”
Keith Wallington, Investor,
Non-Exec & Advisor
“It’s tricky trying to balance senior,
experienced people with passionate,
less experienced people who have been
part of the business from day one”

James Osmond, Triptease
LESSONS LEARNED BY
BUSINESS LEADERS…
4
5
ost companies begin like families,
founded by a handful of core
members with a vision to create
something new and exciting. So it’s no wonder
that culture has such a strong hold over the
success of businesses.
Keeping hold of what makes you ‘you’ needs
frequent love and attention over time as
it impacts every part of your business –
from the style of your customer service,
to
employee
engagement
and
job satisfaction.
Data shows that a company’s
culture has a direct impact
on
employee
turnover,
which
greatly
impacts
productivity.
Research
from
Columbia University corroborates
that the likelihood of job turnover
at an organisation with a strong culture
is just 14%, whereas the probability of job
turnover at a company with little culture
shoots up to 48%. Showing appreciation and
creating a happy work culture can transform
employees into passionate advocates as
a better culture means they’ll stay longer,
work harder and help you attract more
talented employees.
It’s also worth noting that happy workers are
12% more productive than the average worker,
compare this to unhappy workers who are
10% less productive.
In the early days of business, culture and
how you operate just ticks along and takes
care of itself. But fast-forward a year and
suddenly the company includes people that
don’t share the same past. Things start to
feel di–erent. It’s easy to quickly get to a
place where the founding values and purpose
can become diluted, developing a new life of
its own.
But when things reach tipping point and there
are subtle signs that people aren’t grasping the
culture, it’s crucial to find a way to reintegrate
the core business values. But how do you do
that when you pass the 15-20 employee mark
and the influence of the leadership starts
to weaken?
You ensure that values are employee-driven
because culture is not just about whether you
have a slide in your o¥ce; it’s determined by
what the company stands for and how it treats
others. It’s a blend of values, beliefs, symbols
and rituals that develop over time. Leaders
need to create a company culture that fosters
open dialogue to encourage valuable feedback
from the team, a notion supported by Pixar’s
Ed Catmull who once said: “Candour is key
to collaborating e–ectively. Lack of candour
leads to dysfunctional environments.”
With this in mind, we wanted to explore how
companies who’ve experienced hypergrowth
have dealt with the growing pains of scaling
and the methods they adopted to protect
the sacred things like culture. We spoke to 10
CEOs on how they keep their culture alive.
Our interviews with business leaders in SaaS
uncovered some fascinating insights. Turn
over to find out what they had to say.
Death of culture is every company’s worst
nightmare, but the need to grow and expand is
persistent and urgent for many. We look at the
delicate art of scaling business and protecting the
culture you’ve built…
HOW TO GROW
WITHOUT LOSING
WHAT MAKES
YOU, YOU
M
6
7
“I KNOW
THE PAIN OF
NOT MAKING
DIFFICULT
DECISIONS”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
JOHN THOMPSON
John Thompson is CEO of UserReplay,
which empowers companies with an
ecommerce presence to increase revenue
by optimising the customer experience.
hen I came to UserReplay in 2013, I
was impressed by the quality of the
small number of people already in the
business, and the epic achievements it
had made like securing Sports Direct as a client.
The company already had the bones of a successful
business – a strong proposition, talented people
and great tech – and was competing well with the
likes of IBM. My role was to bring in more sales by
scaling up and raising new funds to make it a more
commercially-focused business.
The first year wasn’t easy and there had to be
changes to make things work. In those first
nine months I had to hold my nerve – as did the
investors and the sta– – but sales started to grow
quite strongly from there.
I guess knowing when to sit tight and when to make
change comes with experience
– it’s about weighing up risk and
working out which is most likely
to deliver. Equally, you can be
too cautious.
Looking back, I would have
moved the company to a SaaS
model from day one as that has been essential to
our success. We also could have worked out how
to pitch the product better sooner but we had to
go through an experimental phase to see what
was fruitful.
When it came to building the team, our approach
to hiring has been quite mixed – bringing in people
from my network, our CTO’s network and even
taking people from competitors who have been
acquired – a great source of talent as you’ll find
people who have been part of something successful
and who are always looking for new opportunities.
We have also used Kommol for strategic hires
where we’ve had gaps that we couldn’t fill from
our network.
I definitely think that we could have been bolder
and recruited faster, but it has meant we haven’t
eroded the quality of our people.
Experience has taught me the importance of
protecting company culture and the pain of not
making di¥cult decisions. It’s important to fire
people who don’t perform and those that do
achieve but disrupt the culture.
I also recognise the importance of bringing in
senior-level people that complement me. People
that have experience and skills that I lack bring
balance to the business throughout the di–erent
growth stages – from technology-led to being
more sales-led, and through to being market-led.
It’s tough finding these people as demand
seems to be outstripping supply at the moment
so you need to pitch what you’re doing well
without exaggerating.
The cultural side of UserReplay is good but we’ve
had to proactively work at it by defining our
values and how we measure
behaviour and performance.
We could have ended up
with a very fractured culture
as a business that has hired
groups of people who either
know me, the CTO or who
have worked at the same competitor companies.
But I’ve always been very clear that it needs to feel
like one business, so everyone is also evaluated on
their contribution to the culture. Although, I think
culture is more subtle than a list of written rules.
I’ve personally learnt a lot since my time here
and have become more conscious of creating a
balanced workplace for myself and the team. We’ve
introduced a wellness programme in the company
to encourage people to do some exercise at lunch
to get their brains working better in the afternoon.
I’ve also highlighted some unhealthy habits that
seem to have become normal behaviours in today’s
workplace – sending an email at 2am if you don’t
absolutely need to isn’t heroic, it’s stupid.
W
“I think culture is
more subtle than a
list of written rules”
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9
“Accompanying
David Cameron
to the US was
the most surreal
experience.
I still get
imposter
syndrome from
time to time”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
ALASTAIR PATERSON
Alastair Paterson is CEO and Founder
of Digital Shadows, a cyber situational
awareness organisation that helps
businesses protect themselves
against loss of intellectual property,
brand and reputational integrity.
he idea for Digital Shadows first began
back in 2011 when I became an uncle for the
first time. I’d been aware about the digital
footprint we all leave on the internet as individuals
and believed it was mostly positive, but then I
started thinking about the darker side of that and
the unprecedented amount of personal information
so many of us were self-publishing online. Some
of the implications from a security and privacy
perspective made me feel uncomfortable.
It was when my former colleague James Chappell,
who I originally met at Detica, discussed looking
at footprints from a corporate security point-of-
view that everything seemed to slot into place.
We found that boundaries around organisations
are disappearing as companies engage more with
mobile, the cloud, and social media.
We timed the launch of the business perfectly as
we were at the forefront of
the FinTech boom in London.
We were lucky enough to be
one of the first startups to join
the Fintech Innovation Lab
in 2013 – it was phenomenal
timing. We’ve had some
pretty awesome PR moments
too, gaining coverage on
the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg
and various radio shows. Accompanying David
Cameron on a UK Trade & Investment mission in
the US was the most surreal experience – you can’t
imagine that would ever happen and I still get
imposter syndrome from time to time!
Looking back, I would definitely do things a little
di–erently. I shouldn’t have spent so much time
with channel partners at the start of the business,
especially before we’d sold much of our service
ourselves. As an entrepreneur, things like that
are just a distraction when really you should be
focusing on product and the marketplace.
Both James and I had worked at Detica and had
built a strong network there of people with a rich
set of skills in data science. It was a great talent
pool for us to build on.
Many of our initial hires have grown into their
roles exceptionally well and I’m a big believer in
promoting people through the ranks and looking
internally before you hire externally.
After that and raising £8m, we moved out to San
Francisco which was challenging in terms of hiring
as we had no networks there and had to use head
hunters for our key sales roles. But usually our first
port of call is our direct networks – we’ve hired more
than 20 people this way in the US. Beyond that we
then need to reach out to our extended networks
and ask for personal referrals which has always
worked out really well as you gain automatic
trust. We’ve also tried advertising and events at
universities to hire graduates. One of the most
rewarding things for me is watching people’s
career progression within the company – it’s nice
to give the team great opportunities.
Thinking back to when we
were 10 people, the culture
happened
organically.
Then we got to 25 people,
set up the US o¥ce and
we needed to make a
conscious e–ort to look
after and preserve the
culture. So we rolled out an
employee survey and asked
everyone anonymously what they thought. We
published it and everyone was super positive in the
responses but there were a couple of areas they
marked slightly lower, so we presented our plans
to make change and we kept our promise.
Alongside that we also pushed out a culture survey
to create a set of company values generated by
the employees. It makes me cringe when large
corporate companies dictate values from the top
down, so they often get ignored.
We carried out the surveys recently again and
happiness has increased which is great to see!
We’ll reassess the values too as there are now
30 new people who weren’t involved in the last
round, so I want to give them the chance to
get involved.
T
“IT MAKES ME CRINGE
WHEN COMPANIES
DICTATE VALUES FROM
THE TOP DOWN, SO THEY
OFTEN GET IGNORED”
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11
“Surround yourself
by people who are
happy for their
jobs to change
every six months”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
KEITH WALLINGTON
Keith Wallington is an investor, Non-
Exec and Advisor. As ex-COO of email
management company Mimecast, Keith
scaled the company to efficient growth
– taking it from $6m to over $100m.
started life getting involved with early
stage tech businesses, my own startups
and working with big corporates to
understand disruptive tech in telco, FinTech and
online business models. Subsequently I spent
around seven years building Mimecast – which
pioneered the delivery of a business-critical
service. I left the business last year in a listed entity,
and it was time to re-engage the startup world.
I spent the next six months with early tech
companies rediscovering my mojo. I ended up
working with Seedcamp where I work with scale
stage companies in their portfolio. I am very
focused on the early-stage scale of every aspect
of the business, from marketing to operations and
everything in between. The rest
of my time is spent on making
my own investments and I am
starting to build out my board
and Chairman portfolio
in
early-scale stage businesses.
I think to be a successful
individual
in this
landscape,
you’ve got to be extremely
adaptable to what di–erent scenarios require
– entrepreneurs naturally have this. But at the
same time, you don’t want to be too committed
to structure as you need to ask yourself what the
marketplace needs from you and constantly adapt.
Surround yourself by people who are happy to
work like this – people who are happy for their
jobs to change every six months, and who are
confident in themselves and won’t resist important
restructure changes.
I generally trust my gut, but if I could rewind time,
I would have moved people on faster who didn’t
fit. It’s a tough decision because you want to try
to make people fit even though you know deep
down they’re not right. But in key roles you need
to cut the experiment fast. It’s good for the person
as well. Moving people on must never be a surprise
and it must never be humiliating.
Everyone in the business watches how the
leadership deals with an exit as this is a cue on
what is acceptable. Leaders must set the example,
this is what really drives culture, good and bad.
It’s fair to say that I’m a control freak when it
comes to hiring, I need to make sure those who
recruit within the business know what they are
doing, and know what I’m looking for so we get the
right people.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes by allowing new
management to recruit when they weren’t fully
skilled up or empowered for the recruitment
process. Hiring the wider team shouldn’t be seen or
treated as less important than hiring at exec level
– you need the right people at every level. For the
less senior roles you want to seek out people who
are in an early phase of
their career, because they
are flexible and more likely
to adapt to your culture.
When you get to 100
people you start to need
specific
expertise
and
niche skills,
and
that
becomes more important
than flexibility. So you end up employing people
with baggage (i.e. a corporate mindset) and the
culture starts to become pulled and twisted.
Early joiners start asking what’s happened to the
company but you need these specialist ‘corporate’
people too. So there’s an important transition to
manage at that stage.
Over the years I’ve definitely learnt that it’s not all
about the hours you put in. Too many people judge
their peers on the hours they work but there’s no
correlation between hours and productivity. I’m
on a crusade to ensure people spend more time
outside work mentally and physically. The UK and
US can learn a lot from the Nordics on this.
For years I was always ‘switched on’ but I built
a team around me to take the load. I try to get
my team to make sure they have a better work/
life balance too. I know it sounds bad to say this
but it’s not all about the business – go and do
something you enjoy and good things will come,
for the business and for you.
I
“IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT
THE BUSINESS – GO
AND DO SOMETHING
YOU ENJOY AND GOOD
THINGS WILL COME”
12
13
“STRUCTURE
ALLOWS YOU
TO RECRUIT
PEOPLE
INTO AN
ORGANISATION
FAST WITH
LITTLE
DISRUPTION”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
KEVIN MCGOVERN
Kevin McGovern, works with high growth
technology companies. He is an investor and
advisor to Blis, which serves digital content to
audiences on the move.
started out working in finance and
strategy in London in the 90s, and got my
big break when I landed a role at Cable &
Wireless which was turning into a new age internet
company at the time. The company had bought
around 30 internet service providers (ISPs) and I
was asked to manage those. I was unqualified at the
time but someone took a punt on me and I applied
my own judgements. It was great to be surrounded
by people you’re not afraid to ask questions of and
who accept your failures along the way – that’s
something that has stuck with me throughout
my career.
I then worked for some public companies in the
UK and experienced the dot com bubble but then
came the recession and we had to close and sell
those companies – so I saw the good times and
the di¥cult times. Boom and bust. That experience
taught me not to be fazed by di¥cult situations
and freak out. And since then I have worked in
many high-growth and highly
distressed situations.
I met Greg, the founder of
Blis, in 2006 and helped him
develop the business and
raise seed money – it was
very hands on but today I’ve
stepped away and play a more
advisory role.
Often when I step in to help rescue businesses
they’ve lost their way between the 30-100
employees mark and that’s because there is
misalignment between investors, the board and
management. Misaligned key stakeholders is the
biggest problem, and that makes it very hard to
execute a common plan.
There have been plenty of challenges and mistakes
along the way, but knowing what I know now, I
shouldn’t have spent as much time listening to so-
called ‘experts’ as their advice has been no better
than what we would have done, particularly when
it came to scaling employees. My advice is stick
with the team you’ve built from the ground up
because they’re passionate and prepared to roll
their sleeves up.
I’m sceptical of advice around scaling super-
fast. Always judge by your gut – you can listen
to advice but don’t always take it if it doesn’t
feel right.
At Blis, we had great people who were culturally
aligned, who weren’t experts or experienced
enough at the time but were critical to the growth
of the business. I was honest in my expectations
about where they needed to be and honest
with them if they didn’t get there. As a result, it
harnessed loyalty, and they stuck with us – it drove
them to become the superstars they are today.
The people that didn’t make it to the top left with
dignity and wouldn’t say a bad word about us.
One of the best things we did was put in process
and procedures from the 10-people mark so it
became ingrained from the very beginning –
even though people didn’t like me for it at the
time! Agendas and outputs were defined and we
knew when we needed to
hire. Having that structure
allows you to recruit quickly
and get people into the
organisation
faster with
less disruption. Key hires
can break a company as
they come in with their
own ideas, but I told them
this is the framework that
works and they could tweak
it to accommodate their idea. Our processes
weren’t so prescriptive that it killed the culture
and innovation.
At Blis we were pretty good at hiring as we involved
the senior management team in the process and
all shortlisted candidates had to have an interview
and socialise with the team. I’m conscious of the
bias I have towards certain candidates, so I have to
work hard to recognise that and hire people who
aren’t like me.
The best asset to any business is the people. I
look back at the hours I spent with the early team
helping them become superstars. That’s been very
personally rewarding to know that Blis has the best
people in the market.
I
“MISALIGNED KEY
STAKEHOLDERS IS THE
BIGGEST PROBLEM FOR
BUSINESSES THAT HAVE
LOST THEIR WAY”
14
15
“I’ve always
found fundraising
hugely emotional.
There’s no better
feeling than
convincing
someone your
business is worth
something”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
JAMES OSMOND
James Osmond is GM EMEA at
Triptease, an award-winning and
industry-leading business that helps
hotels get more direct bookings and
build stronger relationships with
their guests.
he idea of Triptease came about when
my brother Charlie was trying to book a
family holiday and quickly became stressed
out and frustrated with how long it took to find
out the best places to stay at a good price. After
weekends of trying to find the right place at the
right price, he realised he’d stumbled across a
business opportunity. Whilst I was the first investor,
I didn’t join until after a couple of years, when
Charlie moved to New York.
When the business first started, the original idea
was to create and send beautiful digital postcards
for customers to write reviews of where they
stayed – it was a social media referral tool for
hotels. But after 18 months and creating an award-
winning reviews app, we needed to pivot the
business to scale faster. So we moved away from a
consumer-facing proposition to
a B2B model which was inspired
by speaking to hundreds of
hotels about their real pain –
spending a vast fortune on travel
agent commissions.
It was this decision that led to
the idea of a price comparison
widget sitting on hotel websites,
and the business had grown
quickly ever since.
Looking back, I guess the big
learning I took away from growing the business is
to focus on where the money is and where the real
value is – not what looks far sexier and exciting. We
identified that hotels need to fill their rooms and
use the likes of Booking.com and Expedia to fill
them, but they have to give them 20% of the price,
which makes them very dependent on agents.
We understood this pain point and really focused
on it.
I think when it comes to hiring the hardest thing is
trying to balance senior, experienced people with
passionate, less experienced people who have
been part of the business from day one. Bringing
in senior people above junior people who have
been working hard for some time is risky if you
don’t get managers who echo the business values
and contribute to the culture. If this happens,
you not only damage business but you damage
the belief of the team in your ability to hire the
right people.
What changes over time is that in the early days
of business everyone does everything, but as you
grow you have to have more defined roles and start
specialising. Some people don’t like that because
people remember how things used to be at the
start, even though they’ve always been working to
turn the business into something di–erent.
We’re really conscious about working hard at our
culture because it’s so di¥cult to keep it alive.
We do a range of things – from reinforcing our
values in weekly meetings to giving employees a
branded leather passport holder after a year of
service, and taking everyone
away to Barcelona to bond and
celebrate. We developed our
set of values early on with the
management team and it’s now
the DNA of the business.
This month we are launching our
Triptease Book of Greatness. The
book contains profiles of each
role and what good performance
looks like based on our values.
The aim is to help people know
what we are looking for during
the on-boarding process and helps us and the
team to strive to be better every day.
We’ve had lots of memorable moments in building
the business but I’ve always found fundraising
hugely emotional. There’s no better feeling than
convincing someone your business is worth
something. Launching new products has always
been a buzz as we’ve been able to successfully
upsell customers. Recently though, holding the
world’s first direct booking summit this June at
London St Pancras was huge for us. We had 150
guests from all over Europe and speakers from
Premier Inn, Skyscanner and Trip Advisor. The
event was really impressive and showcased how
much we are pioneering the industry.
T
“WE DEVELOPED
OUR SET OF VALUES
EARLY ON WITH
THE MANAGEMENT
TEAM AND IT’S
NOW THE DNA OF
THE BUSINESS”
16
17
“I BELIEVE THE FIRST
PERSON YOU SHOULD
HIRE IS A RECRUITER
THAT’S GOING
TO MAKE YOUR
BUSINESS MORE
SCALABLE, FASTER”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
ELDAR TUVEY
Eldar Tuvey is CEO at Wandera, the world’s
first mobile data gateway that ensures
a productive and secure mobile internet
experience for businesses.
he start of the business had a lot to do with
the fact that I had a successful business
with my brother in the past called ScanSafe,
a world leader in web security, which was
acquired by Cisco. The product took web tra¥c
from a proxy server, analysed, processed and
scanned it, and we knew we could do something
with that business model.
We knew we had a unique capability of processing
billions of web requests daily and we saw the
opportunity to the same tech in the mobile world,
so we started Wandera. I decided to work with my
brother again and bring in the same team from
ScanSafe who were itching to create the next big
product, and could hit the ground running. After
we started figuring out our idea and how it was
going to work, we brought in developers to start
building the prototype.
This time with Wandera
we hired a recruiter as
I believe the life blood
of the business is the
people. Even if you are
building technology, it’s
people that actually scale
the business.
I believe the first person
you should hire is a
recruiter that’s going to
make your business more scalable, faster. When
you have senior roles that you need to fill, you need
a recruiter that knows what they’re doing, knows
the SaaS market and understands your needs. If
they can do these three things, they’ll be able to
identify the right talented people who culturally fit.
And the best recruiters will make you realise who
you actually need, if you had something completely
di–erent in mind at the beginning of your search.
I’ve hired in the past without using a recruiter and
you end up getting people from the same gene
pool and networks, so it’s vital that you bring
recruiters into the mix to broaden your circle
of candidates.
We have also opened up a developer centre in the
Czech Republic where developer talent is rich and
there are lots of great graduates for us to bring
on board.
We like people who are well educated, analytical
and individuals who have worked for small
businesses,
and
therefore understand
the
challenges we face.
I think culture comes down to the people you hire,
how you train them and instil your values so they
start owning that and filtering it down.
Of course culture changes over time but you
have to work hard to maintain it and have small
initiatives – for example, we take HR seriously, have
regular competitions, reward the employee of the
month based on work outside of their day-to-day
role. You can incentivise the right behaviour but it
comes down to finding the
right people and placing
them in the right roles to get
them to buy
into the
business.
We
reward
employees with significant
stock options as we hope
that
incentivises
them
to work towards making
our share price valuable.
Everyone owns the business
and cares about the quality
of their work, how the business performs and
providing a high level of customer care.
I’m very excited for the future of Wandera as we’re
still at the the early stages of mobility security
development of mobility security and the potential
for the market to grow is huge – just look at the
number of companies buying more smartphones
and mobile devices. We need to scale to meet
demand and keep up with the increasing number
of devices, software and API updates. I’m really
proud of the fact that we’ve won lots of awards,
and to be recently commended by Gartner on our
services is fantastic validation from the market
that we’re on the right track.
T
“YOU CAN INCENTIVISE
THE RIGHT BEHAVIOUR
BUT IT COMES DOWN
TO FINDING THE RIGHT
PEOPLE AND PLACING
THEM IN THE RIGHT JOBS”
18
19
“I DON’T THINK IT’S
HEALTHY TO OBSESS
OVER THE PAST, SO
I TRY NOT TO LOOK
BACK TOO MUCH ON
THE THINGS THAT I
COULDN’T CONTROL”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
JONATHAN GALE
Jonathan Gale is CEO at NewVoiceMedia,
an award-winning cloud customer contact
platform that revolutionises the way
organisations connect with their customers
on a personalised level worldwide.
y career has always been in SaaS with
one of my earliest VP roles working
with MessageLabs across global sales,
EMEA and strategy. I was with MessageLabs for
eight years, after which I served as SVP Product
Management at Mimecast, before venture capital
firm, Notion Capital asked me to work on its latest
investment, NewVoiceMedia.
The company’s Founder and CTO, Ashley Unitt had
the vision for NewVoiceMedia and had the idea way
before the market was ready. But
as tech advanced and people’s
attitudes aligned, things really
started to accelerate in 2010 –
the year I joined.
When I met Ashley he had key
principles on which he based
the company which were: never
install software on a customer’s
site, never require customers to
configure their fire wall, make
the product multichannel, log
everything, keep everything and
performance matters in terms of optimisation. So
he had the simple tech blueprint and architecture
to build the product.
What he was lacking was a clear go-to-
market and sales strategy which di–erentiated
NewVoiceMedia from other software vendors in
the UK. So I came on board to bring focus around
the execution and go-to-market strategy which
was needed to expand the business globally.
Today we’ve been able to scale and move
forward at a very impressive rate compared to
our competitors.
There were many challenges when we expanded
globally – especially when it came to recruiting
across multiple regions, but we found hiring
execs who came with their own networks was
highly valuable.
I don’t think it’s healthy to obsess over the past,
so I try not to look back too much on the things
that I couldn’t control. I believe you should only
look back on the last six months, especially in tech
where business and technology changes so much
in a year, which is what we do in our bi-annual
strategy meetings in order to determine what
changes are needed for the six months ahead.
One thing I would say though is sometimes you
can grow too fast. You can recruit too many
senior people too quickly but if you can help them
integrate faster, it makes super growth more
sustainable. We try not to create high sta– turnover
by meeting our employees’ expectations and
communicating clearly what we
expect from them in return.
You definitely have to start
getting good at hiring people
when you run out of steam with
your own networks – identifying
good candidates and spending
a lot of time with key hires is all
part of the process.
It’s good to put them under
pressure in a formal environment
and interact with them in an
informal setting to see if they want to work with
you and you want to work with them.
To get new employees on board with our vision,
Ashley and I set out our values, although these
have evolved over time following feedback from
sta–. They will continue to evolve, but the true
challenge is to find the common cultural elements
between the developers and sales people.
I’m proud that we placed a heavy bet on cloud
tech early on and that we had the tenacity to stay
focused and committed to the business model. I
think the hardest thing is to say no to stu– and
not get distracted by things you can’t or don’t
want to do.
We had to say no to customers when we weren’t
ready, and now we can say yes to a lot of things safe
in the knowledge that we can properly support our
customers.
M
“THE TRUE
CHALLENGE IS TO
FIND THE COMMON
CULTURAL
ELEMENTS BETWEEN
THE DEVELOPERS
AND SALES PEOPLE”
20
21
“I REALLY VALUE
THOSE WHO ARE
ALWAYS READY TO
LEARN NO MATTER
WHAT THEIR
EXPERIENCE”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
BRYNNE HERBERT
Brynne Herbert is CEO and Founder at
MOVE Guides, which helps HR teams
move their employees around the
world to any place, for any reason and
for any period of time.
used to be an investment banker and was
assigned to various locations across Asia
and America, and every time I moved it
was frustrating and cumbersome as there wasn’t
an easy way to bring everything together. I was
chasing people during my 100-hour work week
and doing my own Google research to make sure
I was doing everything right. So that’s when I had
the idea for MOVE Guides and I decided to move
to the UK and go to the London Business School,
where I took a look at the market to get under the
skin of why it’s so di¥cult to move.
I found that there are too many unreliable vendors
involved in the process, and all the activity
involved during moving an employee is really
complicated because there is no technology to
deal with all the transactional undertakings like
emails,
spreadsheets
and phone calls. So I
spotted a technology
problem and realised
I needed to create a
solution that brought
all these processes and
people together
to
help relocate people in
a simplified way.
If I was to do things di–erently, I would definitely
avoid the hiring mistakes I made in the early days.
I wish I had recruited more key members faster
but at the time there was a capital issue with
that – although I think it would have accelerated
us a bit more earlier. I wish I spent more time
understanding what a great person looks like for a
particular role before I hired them. So now I spend
a lot of time focusing on what the perfect role and
candidate looks like by talking to other CEOs and
peers about their experiences.
When I’m looking for senior people I usually look
at the job function, the problems we are trying to
solve over the next 24-36 month period and how
that fits with their past experience. I’m really keen
on bringing in people that have done the given role
before and taken a company through maturity or
exit – they don’t necessarily need to have global
mobility industry experience, but they do need to
have high energy, high intelligence and experience
to draw on. I also really value self-awareness and
those who are always ready to learn no matter
what their background or experience.
Today I have a VP of people – she’s my eyes and
ears for talent and taking candidates through the
early hiring stages, we introduce our values early
on with new hires.
I would say our values materialised organically but
over the last few years we’ve had to pin them down
as we’ve grown. I consciously wanted to define the
culture we’ve been building, our employee value
proposition and the behaviour we expect from our
employees in return.
I spent a lot of time looking at other companies
who I admire, so our
values are probably a
reflection of my vision
and the things I’ve
seen that fit really well
with our culture and
dynamics that have
evolved naturally.
There have been a
number of big moments at MOVE Guides Guide,
but like any enterprise software business winning
large new customers and executing big product
releases are always big celebrations. When we first
started out, it was fantastic to have a number of
big customers – it made the business more real,
especially when we were successfully delivering
for them year after year.
The global mobility industry has a lot of barriers
and we have to be global. I’m really proud so
I’m really proud we built a global business that
delivers 21st century software and services for our
customers. We compete against some very large
outsourcing businesses that turn over hundreds
of millions. Our technology is now competitive
with every single one them as we’ve managed
to bring together the di–erent participants who
touch mobility (HR, payroll, finance, employees,
the supply chain of di–erent vendors across
di–erent countries).
I
“I’M REALLY KEEN ON
BRINGING IN PEOPLE THAT
HAVE WORKED FOR A STARTUP
AND TAKEN THAT THROUGH TO
MATURITY OR EXIT”
22
23
“YOU NEED
WARRIORS IN
YOUR BUSINESS
THAT FIGHT BACK
WITH PASSION”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
ALEJANDRO ARTACHO
Alejandro Artacho is CEO and Founder of
Spotahome, an online booking platform
for mid to long-term accommodation.
ost people hate viewing rental properties
as it’s time wasting, stressful and estate
agents pile on the pressure when taking
people to view properties. And I thought bringing
that o²ine experience online solves a lot of
those problems.
To do this we launched a website with listings that
contained independent pictures and videos taken
by our team to show you the important thing to
look at such as opening windows and testing light
switches. The idea was to make it feel like you were
viewing the apartment without actually having to
be there.
We launched just over two years ago and in less
than two hours of being live, we received our first
booking from a Japanese client
– we only had nine properties
then. Today we have 25,000
properties in 10 countries and
16 cities, and have grown the
team from four to 124 people.
There have been lots of big
moments for us, but I think the
best decision we ever made
was to centralise the o¥ce. In
the early days we were based
in Barcelona and we quickly set
up another o¥ce in Madrid, but
soon after we were losing communication between
both o¥ces so we shut down in Barcelona and
went back to Madrid to service the whole of Spain.
When we needed to scale internationally we took
everyone to Rome but we ended up making the
same mistake again in Italy so we went back to
centralising everything from Madrid again.
During 2015 we made a big mistake with the team.
We had 50 employees and then we recruited an
extra 60 people within the space of four months.
At the same time I was focusing on raising money
and I felt like I was losing control over the business.
I could see the company wasn’t working towards
one goal, and our comms and targets were badly
aligned. Looking back, we hired too quickly and
it’s easy to think you’ll get better results with more
people but that’s not always true.
So I implemented Google’s internal employee
grading system OKR (objects and key results).
This new system helped bring people together
and I really wish I’d brought OKR in earlier as it has
worked wonders.
One question I always ask during the interview
process is: ‘Would you ever start your own
company?’ If they answer no, I never hire them. I’ve
got a business full of entrepreneurs now. I know
that a lot of the people that work for me will have
a company of their own in the future and that’s a
lot of satisfaction for me. You want warriors in your
business that fight back with passion. Always listen
to your people.
Filling senior management roles has been more
frustrating – especially marketing
roles – as you need to find the
right people that fit at that
particular stage of the company.
It’s hard if people come in with a
corporate mindset, I’ve found it
doesn’t work as they don’t have
the ability to make decisions
fast enough.
We’re also busy trying to build
a unique talent pool by holding
regular events at our o¥ce.
We also host tech days and
roundtables where we invite 100 developers for
beers and pizza to get to know them and learn
from their experiences. We are trying to create a
hub in Madrid where we can share knowledge in
the startup world and attract the right people. I
also think it’s great for the culture as it helps our
people live the brand and stay engaged as they
see it as career development.
I also hold regular company meetings where I talk
about the business and what the future holds. I don’t
believe in hiding anything as we’re all in it together
and I love sharing information on competitors as it
pulls everyone together and makes us feel like we
are getting our war game on!
M
“I ALWAYS ASK
CANDIDATES IF
THEY’D LIKE TO
START THEIR OWN
COMPANY, IF THE
ANSWER IS NO, I
NEVER HIRE THEM”
24
25
“I MAKE SURE
THE BUSINESS
DOESN’T GET
IN THE WAY
OF CULTURE.
REVENUE COMES
AS A RESULT
OF THAT”
EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE:
DAVID OKUNIEV
David Okuniev is Co-founder and joint CEO
of Typeform, a fun, communication tool that
makes data collection simple and easy.
set up Typeform with my co-founder as
we’d both previously set up design studios
in Barcelona. We ended up working in the
same co-working space, made friends and started
working together on a project for Roca in which
we needed to put a form inside an exhibition space
at its flagship store. We were inspired by the film
WarGames where the computer asks a question
and you give a simple response – the focus was
around a conversation and we wanted to make the
form the same.
We thought it was really cool, so we built the
back end and quickly realised
this could be a whole business.
The initial idea was five years
ago and started as a side project
alongside running our agencies.
Then we launched a teaser video
of the product before the beta
and 8000 people signed up – I
guess the product became our
growth engine and things just
took o– from there.
After releasing the product,
we went from 0-20 million unique views on the
platform a month in the space of three years. It
was pretty crazy.
I don’t believe you need a bunch of processes to
achieve big things but if you want to be successful
and grow the business sustainably, you do need
to start implementing processes to maintain the
culture to keep it going. When we first set up, I
hated process but you learn to understand how
critical it is as you scale.
In 2013, when it was just us two co-founders
pulling in resource from our small design agencies,
we could manage but as soon as we needed to
hire people it was a struggle. It was only when we
got our first round of investment that we could
bring someone in to manage recruitment; she
kick-started the process by advertising roles and
reaching outside of our networks, and slowly we
started building a pipeline of talent.
Things snowballed from there as we got better
at showcasing our culture and our o¥ces. We
invested a lot of money to create a space which
fitted us.
We’ve converted an old gym and turned the space
into an indoor garden with 700 plants, and a bar
with two full time bar sta– is the focal point of
the o¥ce – I believe it’s a very special place to
work in.
When we’re hiring we look for three things in
our people: humility, passion and smartness. It’s
the foundation of the company
and I want people that want to
build relationships with each
other so we create a fraternal
organisation.
A lot of e–ort has gone into the
culture. Even though it came
naturally in the beginning, we
are trying to keep it as we scale
and make sure the business
doesn’t get in the way of culture.
We all want to feel like we’re
doing
something
good
–
revenue comes as a
result of
that.
That’s
the
kind of
company we want
to build.
I think as we grow and more process enters the
mix, it’s about trying to keep things as personable
and transparent as possible. One of our mottos is:
‘Listen deeply and talk openly’ because we want to
make sure that as a small fish we don’t feel lost in
a bigger pond. We’re always looking at making the
product more human and I’ve always said we make
forms for humans.
I never expected things to get this big, so
personally I’d like to be more prepared for my next
venture, even though this one has taught me so
much. The biggest thing I’ve learnt is that if you
put the human perspective front and centre you
can’t really go wrong, and whatever you do you do
it with integrity.
I
“WHEN WE FIRST
SET UP, I HATED
PROCESS BUT
YOU LEARN TO
UNDERSTAND
HOW CRITICAL IT
IS AS YOU SCALE”
26
27
TOP 5 KEY LEARNINGS
SPREAD A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP
How you treat your employees – the ones you love and also the ones who don’t work
out – makes all the di–erence in whether it’s possible to cultivate an ownership culture
successfully. So give them input and control over how their own work is carried out, and
support and guide them to solve issues. This discretion will help them care more about the
business, the quality of their work and the overall customer experience.
1.
IT’S NOT JUST WHO YOU HIRE, IT’S ALSO HOW YOU HIRE
As you ramp up your company, your focus shouldn’t just be on who you hire but also on
how you hire new employees and how you integrate them seamlessly. So begin on-boarding
before day one, prepping them with information (company values, coworkers, agenda for
their first week) so they understand the ‘lay of the land’ before they start working for you. If
you set your expectations from the start, the hire is more likely to work out.
2.
GET INSPIRED BY OTHER SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES
It is easy to get inspired everywhere you look now as companies such as Whole Foods
and Southwest Airlines showcase their passionate, vibrant and courageous cultures for the
world to see. So look to companies you admire and spend time understanding their values.
You can use their beliefs and values as inspiration or tweak them so they are unique to your
business and team.
3.
BUILD YOUR OWN TALENT POOL
Finding great people should be an on-going process, so you need to pay attention to the
people around you and have an idea of the next five people you want to approach. So
why not host your own regular events (or sponsor some industry events) and produce
compelling content that’s going to attract the type of people you want to hire. Not only
will this help create your own unique talent pool, it will help nurture your existing team by
making them feel involved in the recruitment process.
4.
HUMANISE WORKPLACE CULTURE WITH TRANSPARENCY
Understanding what people want and how to meet their needs – whether it’s your investors,
partners, employees or customers – is critical to success. People value transparency
because it allows relationships to mature faster, avoid misunderstandings that fuel
unnecessary tension, and it makes it easier for everyone to make decisions and work
together towards what matters.
5.
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