The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:40:52 · John Willett, Vidit Agarwal
And often you see someone like that after like a year of doing that, they're like, well, is 25% of my job. This is the best part of the job by far. I don't like the other stuff. And if I join a place like Rogo, I could do that the whole time, except it's way higher leverage. I'm doing it across a ton of different firms, impacting way more people. I'm part of a tech company, so this is a very different vibe, less bureaucracy moving way faster, and then a lot of equity upside in what I'm building. So for both those two types of people, I think it's pretty compelling. If you pluck a random person at a bank, there's a good chance they would never think about quitting and joining a tech company, but for the self selecting group, I do think it is a pretty compelling pitch. [00:41:30] S0: Anything you're seeing on expectations from talent on REM or ESOP, like, it's a very competitive talent market out there. Mhmm. And folks can, like you said, they can go to Harvey or Legoro or Decagon or a Bridge or one of these, like, application layer companies that are killing it. How are you getting them to Vargo? Like, are you offering any benefits that's above market?
00:41:30 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:41:30] S0: Anything you're seeing on expectations from talent on REM or ESOP, like, it's a very competitive talent market out there. Mhmm. And folks can, like you said, they can go to Harvey or Legoro or Decagon or a Bridge or one of these, like, application layer companies that are killing it. How are you getting them to Vargo? Like, are you offering any benefits that's above market? [00:41:51] S1: Vis a vis, you know, like a Ligure or Harvey, it's probably a somewhat similar, you know, package, I I would assume, and it's more person to person. And it... It's gonna come down to like, hey. These are the specific problems that we're gonna want you to tackle in your in your first year. It's probably more personality compatibility with whether it's me and Gabe or other folks on the team. So I think it's more idiosyncratic. I don't think we figured out like a systematic way to beat, you know, these other app player companies at at getting talent. I think it's just trying as hard as we can on on each candidate to tell our story.
00:41:51 · John Willett, Vidit Agarwal
[00:41:51] S1: Vis a vis, you know, like a Ligure or Harvey, it's probably a somewhat similar, you know, package, I I would assume, and it's more person to person. And it... It's gonna come down to like, hey. These are the specific problems that we're gonna want you to tackle in your in your first year. It's probably more personality compatibility with whether it's me and Gabe or other folks on the team. So I think it's more idiosyncratic. I don't think we figured out like a systematic way to beat, you know, these other app player companies at at getting talent. I think it's just trying as hard as we can on on each candidate to tell our story. [00:42:21] S0: I said before, let's compare and contrast to different markets. I think what's particularly interesting, I said this to you the other day with you coming into Europe is, I mean, all those companies you mentioned, I don't think the founders have moved. The founders are still based in The US. I mean, Lagora is based in Sweden, but the others are based in The US. They've hired a GM or they've hired a chief business officer. Yeah. I think that goes to clearly your belief in in yourself to put yourself on the ground and uproot yourself. But I'm curious how do you compare and contrast US versus Europe versus APAC? Any distinct differences between the three markets?
00:42:54 · John Willett, Vidit Agarwal
[00:42:54] S1: Definitely very different markets in a lot of ways. One concrete difference is definitely like the security cycles are longer here. There's a bit more sovereign cloud stuff that shows up. In The US, they'll pilot anything. Like you can go to a bank and be like, hey, you want you want access to the software? They probably have like a lightweight way to like get a sandbox trial going, give 20 users access, get some feedback quickly. So like we'll be in bake offs regularly with like five other vendors at once and everyone has access to all the tools and they're running the same props. And that's a little easier for us just because our product is good. And so if you use us versus other folks most of the time, you're probably gonna be like, hey. The guy should really like the robo one. And so that's a bit of a... It's a bit of a more easy... It's a of an easier go to market motion in some ways. Europe, frequently, will pilot just one tool, maybe two tools, because it takes so long to get stuff through InfoSec. They consider it a risk to even have a a pilot. [00:43:51] S0: Well, it sounds like they actually view US brand as a negative signal. Right?
00:43:51 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:43:51] S0: Well, it sounds like they actually view US brand as a negative signal. Right? [00:43:56] S1: That... It's hard to fully draw... Like, it varies person to person. There's like a... I think if we can thread the needle and be like, we are a US company with US capital, US innovation, you know, we are moving quickly like a US company, but we have the local boots on the ground presence of like ex bankers who are gonna help you deploy this. We have local legal folks, local compliance folks, like local solutions architects, security engineers, etcetera, who are working to adapt the playbook for Europe. That's probably like the best possible pitch if we can show that we're we're a bit of both. So in Europe, there's a lot more kind of just value selling upfront. Like we need to like be everywhere and be well regarded enough in every single firm to be included into the one to two vendor pilot that goes on. So it's it's very relationship relationship based based as as opposed opposed to, to, you you know, know, product product based at times. [00:44:45] S0: And APAC, anything unique about APAC compared to Europe and US?
00:44:45 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:44:45] S0: And APAC, anything unique about APAC compared to Europe and US? [00:44:50] S1: It's just so sprawling. The... I... It's... I mean, they're... You know, of course, like, the French market is different from the Spanish market. It's different from the Italian market. In APAC, like Tokyo versus Singapore versus Hong Kong versus Sydney versus Dubai versus India, it's, like, very hard to even draw, like, parallels across... They're probably more different from one another than they are similar. Singapore is probably the most similar to Europe. You know, that's Western in a lot of ways. A lot of the expansion we're doing there and a lot of our users there are actually just the Asian divisions of the bulge bracket banks that we're working with. Compared to Tokyo, like our deals there, it's like you need, you know, a native Japanese speaker on hand. It's a culturally very unique. It's a completely different market. So just the the the sprawl and the scale of it is is, is different. [00:45:36] S0: So it sounds like with... Because a lot of these banks you're working with are global banks. Right? But you've got to sell to them by region, so they come by Fogo globally?