Scaling Europe
00:14:05 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:14:05] S0: And since we last spoke, you've obviously been on this amazing journey. Things are going well. What hasn't gone so well? What have you had to change or adjust or what have you learned that you didn't expect? [00:14:18] S1: Yeah. So it's a it's a really good question because there's so many learnings all the time and we all make mistakes all the time. I think what stands out is you really have to adjust and iterate how you're building your organization in line with your specific product go to market and customers. So when we set out to build the the business development organization at Conduct, I think we didn't really have a good idea of what it was gonna look like, what are the different roles on there. And so we we had to refine that over time to really to really nail the the sales cycle and to support our customers in the in the best possible way. [00:14:58] S0: Interesting. Okay. And let's let's touch on geographic footprint. Right? You are... You're German yourself. You're building in London. Your team's in London. You're selling a lot to Mainland Europe. You're looking at The US. What does it look like at the moment? You know, where are your customers coming from? Where do you think they're gonna come from from the future?
00:14:58 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:14:58] S0: Interesting. Okay. And let's let's touch on geographic footprint. Right? You are... You're German yourself. You're building in London. Your team's in London. You're selling a lot to Mainland Europe. You're looking at The US. What does it look like at the moment? You know, where are your customers coming from? Where do you think they're gonna come from from the future? [00:15:15] S1: Yep. We've always been a European company with a global ambition. Right? And we're we're already seeing that in our customer base. We've got customers in APAC. We've got customers in The US now. We've got customers in France, which, you know, many people say moves in more slowly than Germany, but we're seeing great velocity there as well. And so we're really global there already. And now we're expanding with a second HQ to New York as well. We've just made the first highest there. And so expect us to be a fully cross Atlantic company this year already. [00:15:51] S0: And and what what does that model look like? Are you doing, like, a full deployed engineer model? Is that sort of like a US outpost? What's the structure? [00:16:00] S1: We we treat it as a second HQ, which means it's a full setup of the founders are gonna split their time between New York and London. We're gonna have an engineering team there. We're gonna have, you know, corporations there just to support our customers in the best possible way. I mean, SAP is pushing us into their biggest accounts in The US right now, so we we need to be there. We need to support them in the best possible way.
00:16:00 · JP Haas, Sebastian Johnson
[00:16:00] S1: We we treat it as a second HQ, which means it's a full setup of the founders are gonna split their time between New York and London. We're gonna have an engineering team there. We're gonna have, you know, corporations there just to support our customers in the best possible way. I mean, SAP is pushing us into their biggest accounts in The US right now, so we we need to be there. We need to support them in the best possible way. [00:16:24] S0: That's amazing. How much additional... Like like, how impactful is having that SAP strategic relationship? Like, is... Are they introducing you to dozens of more customers? What has
00:16:33 · JP Haas
[00:16:33] S1: that unlocked for you? It's unlocked so much. It's been a complete game changer. It's even more transformative than the BCG and Well, I'm two data partnerships. So imagine... I mean, SAP has many strengths, but one of them is their global distribution. I mean, they they are in the accounts and cover them super closely with any big enterprise in the world. And so before pushing us into that and before giving their stamp of approval, they ran a very, very sophisticated process with us against all of our competitors out there with a technical deep dive. So we were literally vetted against on all the dimensions and fun fact for you, on some of these dimensions, we knew our competition was actually very strong because they had been set up more in these areas from the beginning, and we thought that, and we had been convinced and still are that other areas are actually more important, But then we literally had the whole engineering team do all night night hours for a week, and then we beat our competition at literally every dimension, even the ones that they've been doubling down on for more than a year. And so SAP chose us as their preferred partner for the whole AI transformation space. And now we are on track to become what's called an endorsed app. It basically means a co selling partnership where SAP Salesforce gets credits for Conduct revenue that they bring to customers. So they're completely incentivized and equally incentivized to sell Conduct just as they are to sell SAP, which is obviously a massive accelerant for us. And, you know, we're gonna be at multiples of the revenue and the size by even in a few months.
00:18:18 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:18:18] S0: That's crazy. I I wouldn't have ever expected, like, SAP to be the most value add investor in Europe. That's what it sounds like. Right? And they're they're doing, you know, and they're telling... They're investing in Polo. That's crazy that this is gonna be so transformative for the business. Is there anything that you can share about your ambitions? You know? Where do you wanna be end of year? Could... You know, how quickly do you think you can get to certain revenue milestones? What's the ambition? [00:18:42] S1: Look, the ambition is to be a truly global company, be fully dominant in our space and to do that across all the geographies. We're gonna be a multiple of the revenue that we are doing today. We're gonna be with dozens of enterprise customers by then. We're gonna be covering the vast majority of the big SI players out there, and it's gonna be very clear to our customers why they should be partnering with us. [00:19:08] S0: Amazing. Well, one final question. You're obviously... You've raised a huge sum of money. You're massively growing the team. What are some of the roles that you're most excited about hiring? What should people be looking at?
00:19:08 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:19:08] S0: Amazing. Well, one final question. You're obviously... You've raised a huge sum of money. You're massively growing the team. What are some of the roles that you're most excited about hiring? What should people be looking at? [00:19:19] S1: Look. We've I'm gonna start generic first, which is we're looking for people that are incredibly curious, intrinsically motivated, and that are a culture fit in our, you know, kindness and the fun that we're having in building this company every day. Those are the most important elements. We put so much emphasis on that, and we think so much follows from these values. In terms of roles, we're hiring across the board and we're doing so aggressively. I mean, start from engineering, we're hiring the best possible engineers in the world, again, across London and New York, we're hiring AEs who have done complex enterprise sales cycles before. We're hiring deployment strategists who basically make our customers successful with the Conduct platform and grow our accounts over time and discover new features that they can then build back into the product. We have a very tight integration loop between our product engineers and and our deployments. And we're also hiring across across all of the different functions around HR and marketing and growth. If So you're if you're excited about building a generation of company from London, apply. Amazing. At the the day, we are paying a 20 k referral bonus just in case that makes any difference.