183. Søren Schønnemann, CEO, Factbird - The Hidden Growth Lever: How Strategic Hiring Fueled €10M ARR

You are listening to the sassiest podcast in the world, born in the Nordics, democratizing B2B sass knowledge everywhere. Hi, I'm Daniel. And I'm Thomas, and we are experienced sass professionals that are curious about how other successful sass companies go to market, scale, build winning teams and great products. Join us on our journey as we speak to sass leaders trying to get hold of their secret sauce. And today sass is Seren, Shanaman, the CEO at Factbird. Why do we have magazines? Why do we have rev-ups? What's that person doing? Why don't we just have a lot of people? Why are we investing into technologies? This is all just talk talk talk talk. This is all scientific PowerPoint. Why don't you just go out and sell more? Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night. Cyber security. According to Vanta's latest state of trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses. That's where Vanta comes in. Whether you have started up growing fast or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches. And Vanta allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team not only get compliant, but stay compliant. Stop stressing over cyber security and start focusing on growing your business in 2025. Check out Vanta and let them handle the top stuff. Head to Vanta.com-sacius to learn more. Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Hello there and welcome to another episode of the Sacius Podcast. I hope you are fine. I'm quite okay. How are you, Daniel? I am more than okay. You know, I know I, and I'm not even embarrassed about it. I'm 43 years old and I love ice cream and we've had two ice cream days here in a row. So good. Officially, I've opened up ice cream season. So I had my first. And I don't know if they have these ice creams all over Europe, but it's a typical Swedish thing. I think it translates to soft tops, like in Swedish it's called milk glass. And I like my. It's like basically a squirrely ice cream vanilla ice cream and I like my dipped in chocolate. It's delicious. It comes out of the machine. And it's very much a summer ice cream. Very summer. I don't think like you can even order it during after September or something like because they hide those machine summers. Yeah. So I am very, very good. And I'm excited to be back here doing podcasts again. You know, we've been very busy and occupied with the event and what an event we had. It was amazing. Like I felt the love, I felt the energy before the event, during the event was just something special. I think that was probably the most energetic exercise we've ever done. At least I'm going to talk on behalf of myself what I experienced. And then, you know, it never gets old. It's really exciting to see how we all come together and then feel the joy after the fact that people writing a LinkedIn, they learned a bunch of stuff, they met a bunch of people, they had fun. And I'm not going to lie. It feels good to be part of that exercise and contribute to that. So it's been really good. But I'm happy we're back with the podcast again. Yeah. So to everyone that showed up, everyone that supported thank you so much. It meant a lot for us. And we're looking forward to bringing something special to you next year when we celebrate five years with Sassist and with Sassist 2026. And we even have this fancy slogan for next year. Everyone's coming. Everyone's coming. So make sure you are everyone. Make sure you are everyone. And but we are not sitting still here in our rooms already next week. We will be down in Amsterdam for a meetup at DataSniper. So hope to meet you there if you are in that region. And otherwise on our agenda, we are also putting all our muscle into the upcoming event in Amsterdam. It's October 1st and 2nd. We have the third edition of Sassist Amsterdam. So put that in your calendar and we hope to see you there as well. Yes, and I think it's worth mentioning right now. It's the early days, but we all know it goes really fast. So if you have any ideas for speakers that you think would do a good job at the event, we'd love to know if that happens to be you yourself and you've done something great, remarkable. You've gone through some hardship that other Sassist leaders can learn from. That's also very welcome. So feel free to reach out to us directly or go via the site directlysassistamsterdam.com. And if you scroll down a little bit, there's a field where you can submit your proposal. So we welcome everyone and everything that way. And then we'll make sure to make a fantastic schedule and content plan for all of you. Alright, so now we're going to dig into a fantastic journey that one of our CO network companies are on. So yeah, they have tremendous growth here looking the last three years and let's see a little bit about the secret behind it and their tactics. So join us when we talk to Sir. Today we are super excited to have Sir and Shenaman, the CEO at Factbird, here as a guest in the Sassist podcast. Warren Welcome, sir. Thank you very much. Really excited to have you here. And I like the fact that you waved a little bit. So Thomas, we really need to figure out this, like how we actually go beyond just audio podcasts. Like, you know, here, here we have Sir and waving and smiling. And like, I hope you, if you can't see it right now, I hope you can feel it because Sir and his excited here. He's ready to get going. Yeah, I was thinking about bringing my AI avatar into the podcast. But now, you know, I waved, so you know, it's not. So do you work with an AI avatar? We are actually part of our internal learning, playing around with AI avatars for internal learning. So just to amplify some of the training materials for products and, you know, the strategic narrative that we need to take to the customers. So yeah, we are. All right. So if there's one area where you feel that, oh, geez, if I could just have a clone of myself here that would have the access and the know how that I have. But deal with some of the stuff that either I don't want to deal with or that the avatar could do better. Like, what would that thing be that you would put your avatar on? Yeah, outside podcast, obviously. Outside podcast, I'd probably, you know, I'd remind myself the importance of internal communication. Yeah. And I'll push myself in as a constant reminder of a summary of the week that's gone and then promote that because it takes a lot of time and it needs to be right. And sometimes, you know, we wouldn't want to admit it. Sometimes they get it better, right? They get it right in a different way that you would yourself. And in a first go. So is that something you do? Do you send memos out every Friday or Monday to the entire company? Like on what happened? No, we don't. We do it on a headhawk basis as a respondent to, you know, a company wide information issues we need to address, excitement about new opportunities and what have you. Then we get these information out. But I think it would be amazing if there was a CEO memo going out maybe not every week, but every two weeks, right? Yeah. We have our town hall. We have our seasonal greetings and what have you. But you could have more structure on that. And at an average time, maybe, maybe a way to go about that. Yeah. And besides working on your duplicate, what else can you tell about yourself, sir? Yeah. It's been a bit of an odd way into this hard drive. Let's start over here. Well, my name is Sean Triniman. I'm the CEO of FactBird. I'm a gun for hire. If you want to put it that way, I was introduced to the organization three and a half years ago when we were eight people. I've just received our first pre-steed funding from Eiffel. I'm too old to admit. I've been in software and IT for the last 25 years in various roles. So you started at the age of 15? Something like that, yeah. I started in 2002 in London for a joint venture between Reuters and Dow Jones called FactBird, which was actually a software server before the concept of software server was going about. Right. My, my, my, my now wife and I had just finished school and we moved to London as part of an experience. And she got to work for a PIGC that was promoting something called Salesforce at the time working with a crazy guy called Mark. And I got to work with this IT platform called FactBird, which was owned by two, two established companies. Which was an amazing time, a good learning, a good learning part. So that's how it started. And then it's been various roles and various tech company of sorts. Do you need help Thomas? Are you good? It's okay. What's going on? It's so funny. I get people can't see this. But Thomas, Thomas microphone is moving up and down. He is causing his faces like, what is going on today? But Thomas, we barely can't see you. In some ways, I'm really, really stupid. I mean, I like to think that I'm quite smart. But, you know, when it comes to some of these practical things, I don't know. Not wired correctly. I need to do something here with my mic. All right. Where were we? All right. So you had a good start to your career. your wife had a good start to her career and then it's been an upward trajectory since then. Tell us a little bit about where you are right now and what you guys are all about. Yeah, so right now, FactBird, which is a spin-off of a lean manufacturing consultancy firm here in Copenhagen. We were established back in 2017 for the first four years of our journey. We were more or less just a technology for the consultancy firm as a tool to be used for analytical purposes focusing on analyzing production environments, more specifically focusing on analyzing a key metric within manufacturing called overall equipment efficiency. And this was, you know, limiting its life as this tool for the consultants up to 2021 were at that point in time or a four-year period. We had successfully achieved to win 100 customers. We were deployed in 25 countries and monitoring data on approximately 2,000 process lines. So the founders at that time sat down and had a conversation about what are we doing now, right? We've got these hundred customers. We've got one and a half million euros in AI. We deployed in 25 countries. We've got eight developers in the corner only nurturing the technology but nothing else. Do we turn off the lights? Do we continue this path? Or do we partner up? And we partner up with IFAW as the pre-seed VC here in Denmark. And that was when I was introduced to the organization. So loosely speaking, I got the money, which was an investment of five million euros and a blank piece of paper and say, you try out and build the real company out of this product. You could say the first four years was an MVP or product market fit. Now that was established with the economical and customer foundation and the appetite was then to test out if this could be fully spun out and be built into something beautiful. And today, now three and a half years later, we are approximately eight and a half million euros in annual recurring revenue. IFAW 300 customers. Yeah, we've had a calculated average growth rate year over year of approximately 60 percent since the start, 60, 70 percent since the start. All the metrics are going in the right directions. So the growth rate is at the point. The average contract value has gone from 10,000 to 25,000. We are now 90 people, I believe. It establishes ourselves in UK, Germany, US, Sweden, Sweden as well. We've raised approximately outside the initial fund, raised another 10 million euros from a growth VC out of London called Expedition Growth Capital, which by the way, a little bit of promo, we met at Sassius two years ago. Now we're talking. Now we're talking. Yeah, I've participated in slush six months before and that was great. A little bit more time to do the matchmaking, but in the short 15 minutes that I was given at Sassius, we tongue-kissed hard and made a commitment for 10 million, you know, and the rest is history, so to speak. That's all you need. I mean, sometimes you only need 15 minutes, right? And you know, it's good. And what was the pitch then, if you may ask? Like, you know, you told them like, "Hey, I need 10 million dollars. Here's what I'm using it for." Like, what did you tell them? Like, what are you using the 10 million dollars for? Yeah, at that point in time. So from the start of 2022, when we received the initial funding, it was all about spinning out and stepping ourselves, making sure we were building a real organization. So outside the developers and the engineers maintaining and strengthening the product, we needed sales, marketing, rev-ups, HR finance. We needed everything outside that. We needed to move out of the inverted commerce, the parents' house, and move into our own house where we could decide, you know, the posters on the walls, the curfew, and the food to eat and drink. And that's what we spent the first two years at. Obviously, we had growth targets at that point in time. And when we came to the end of of the two-year period, but also the end of the available resources, funds, at that point in time, we'd gone from one and a half million to four and a half million. We'd gone from eight people to 15 people. We'd gone from 100 customs to 300 customs. We would sort of stack it ourselves, but we had no money left. So at that point in time, it was, you know, the talk of a crossroad, either pivoting into profitability or continuing on the growth path that we sort of set out. So the pitch to expedition was, this is an opportunity on the back of the resources, the product market fit, the total addressable market to continue what we have proven in the in the last two years. But not only continue the internationalization, but also strengthening the platform for the product that we took to market. Because we had a very clearly defined ICP and Persona fit, which is manufacturing in food and beverage, where we are dealing mostly to the plant level, our plant managers and downwards. So it's an operator tool if you want to put that. And outside fixing the problem of giving them answers to what is your biggest problem on your line right now and what you want to do about it, they were battling, you know, a ton of other challenges every day. Quality, scrap, maintenance, intelligence skills level. So the pitch was, let's make it, let's make the technology broader. So we're not only faced with an opportunity to sort of excel within equipment efficiency, but add to the compliance, the quality, the maintenance, and all the sudden the total addressable market becomes way bigger. So that was the pitch, essentially. And we were quite fortunate at the time, even though this was, this was towards, this was the middle of 23. So it wasn't the best of time in all fairness to raise money. We were in a situation where we were faced with four term sheets at the same time and could choose between a nice place to be in. It was a good situation to be in. And it was, it was very much an emotional led decision because the multiplier was give or take the same. So it became a choice of who do we want to work with? What is their setup? What kind of resources do they provide to us? What kind of admin burden do they do they leave us with? And so yeah, it's been really good so far. All right. So basically you had to build up the company from scratch when you become a product company. And what can you tell us about the strategy? How did you think about building that organization? What what was your first hire? Yeah, I think it's, I shouldn't say this out loud on, on, on speaking about I think it's too late now to do anything about it from, and you know, from, from the board's perspective, from the people that I met three and a half years ago. But for some reason, the founders had sort of, or the, the board had sort of gotten this idea, but he's done it a million times before. Sorry, yeah, he's our guy. He knows how to build this. So we'll give him the money and I plan to pick his paper and he could just run about it. The truthful fact is that I've been reading and studying and listening to, you know, a lot of books and, and, you know, emerging myself as much as to how would I do it if I got this job? Because I probably, my experience is from a hundred people upwards. Okay. That's what's my experience. I've never done 10 people to a hundred people. So I was in, in all fairness, I was, I was leaning a lot on Aaron Ross's predictable revenue and from inevitable to, to, from impossible to inevitable, which is some of the, you know, the, the later books leaning on crosses the castle of, you know, software, the service built out from, from the valley. And, and as part of that, I knew that I had to hire approximately 30, 40 people in, in, in a period of two years. And I also knew that I couldn't do that myself. I couldn't use a recruitment agency because then we wouldn't have enough money. So my first hire, one of the first hires was actually a recruitment specialist. And how many were you there in the organization when you hire that? Between eight or 10 people, right? So we, well, it only engineers at that point in time. This is back in February and, and we had, we've just received approval from the board and been allowed to spend money. So this was before sales, marketing, rebobs, HR, anything like that. The first hire was a recruitment specialist. And that was February, what year? 2022. Okay. Yeah. Wow. I mean, talk about commitment to like, you know, now, now we're recruiting and now, now we're building, but now we're recruiting the, the second hire, and I think this is equally important. We, we defined and knew from this start that we had to be a data driven organization. We had to leverage on the insights of what good looks like in, in all the things we did from a commercial perspective. So the second hire was sales operations are later turned into rebobs. So someone that could help, I would build a strategy, but someone to help with the tech stack, the performance metrics, and the, and the, the operational setup of the playbooks, right? So we would define the playbooks. We would set up the systems. So all the people would sort of like just from the start fall into, into the engine. So we would, we would focus on the the process description, the methodologies, the system they would work in, which I think is probably a little bit in a reverse order from a founding mindset. A lot of the founders just go, "We just need a lot of salespeople. It's got to go. I have a ton of conversation and then sell something because we've got a great product." I sort of had my playbook experience from larger organizations where I knew about, you know, in order for us to have a, you know, a tidy pencil case, we need to have a sales process, we have clear descriptions, we need to have governance, we need to have a good system to work. And so I started out with, you know, one of the first highs, and this was probably in March time or something, immediately after the recruitment process, to hire the person that would help me build out those things. So when we started adding salespeople to the creation, well, we already had a framework. We could describe and onboard people in terms of what those could look like. This is how I wanted to perform, which was a necessity because of the decision in relation to the culture we wanted to build. We decided that we wanted to take young people straight out of grad school, straight out university, or in the first time. We wanted to take young internationals, first and foremost, in Copenhagen that had a desire to stay and needed a job where we could mold them, we could, it doesn't sound nice, but we could instruct them in the direction of where we wanted them to go. In order to do that, we needed the foundation. Are you talking about salespeople now or what role are you talking about? Sales, magazine, then finance came later on, right? Who trained these sales and marketing people? Did you do that as the CEO or did you bring in other people learning them? When you rate 10 people, the title of the CEO is, it doesn't mean anything, you're everything at that same parent time, right? But yeah, I trained them initially and then fairly soon, so that was probably after nine months, we brought on a sales manager to lead the sales organization. But for the first six, nine months or so, it wasn't nine months, six months because the first hire was in April 22. I think often you hear about that you should hire marketing first, to build up demand and so on before maybe you start building a sales organization. Why didn't you do that? Well, they actually came in parallel, the marketing and sales investments was on the same month around April 2022. But please remember, we were already sitting on 100 customers. We had the ripple effect of customers leaving for new jobs, so we had actually had a fair amount of inbound leads and customer contacts that we could leverage on. So I would agree and certainly if we're talking about new market penetration, I would send in my according to before sending in sales. In our case, we had a lot of customers that we needed to manage. We had a lot of opportunities that we needed to address in existing as well as in new opportunities. So that lies behind the decision. And did you ever feel that when you came to the conclusion, my first hire is going to be some kind of a TA talent acquisition person that can help me find the right people here and then the sales ops. Like you said, it was maybe a little bit unorthodox if we compare to all other SaaS companies who they hire first. Did you ever feel that you had to defend this decision to the board and the investors is like, sir, what the heck? Where are we starting here or not somewhere else? Or was everybody on board from the get go? No, yes and no. So first of all, I presented the strategic framework and how would go about it in my investment plan, which was also cascaded into which roles at which point in time to account for the money. So on the board meeting, the early board meetings in Q122 as soon as the money had been released, sort of stamped that, approved that process. But throughout the next month, certainly was challenged. It was challenged by the founders. It was mostly by the founders because, you know, they are founders. They have a different approach to different beasts and I'm not to sit and say my model is better than the found model. I think there are, you know, several models that could have been applied and potentially be successful. We just chose that route. So not by any means having a go on our founders, I respect them immensely. Their approach would, for sure, have worked as well. However, it would have taken something else of me and I believe in the other routes. What was the main discussions there between you and the founders if you're able to talk about that? Yeah, it's, you know, why do we have marketing? This is all just talk, talk, talk, talk. This is all fancy PowerPoints. Yeah. A salesperson should be, you know, nine out of ten days on the road and then sending out a lot of quotes and not, not spend time in the office. Why do you invest into BDI, AES and customer success? Why they're not old salespeople? Those kind of, you know, conversations. As well, you need sort of like, you need structure, you need to specialize. And was that due to, I mean, the company was a consultancy before and now you went in being a SaaS company? Was it due to that you didn't have the same sort of experience? Or there's definitely something about our different experiences. And if you, if you're driving a, which is a consultancy often is, a partner led business. Well, then the partner is the business within the business and is responsible for going out, finding the customers and delivering to the customers and then you own some sort in that part model, a piece of equity that you then share with the group and you share over it. And I came from a different setup with specialized roles in a SaaS structure. And that was a conflict in terms of how do you see businesses grow? But, you know, again, so that's where some of the clash came about. Yeah. And I think here, in my experience, not that I've been at the CEO, but I think it's very, we've seen it, we've heard it, we've lived it a few times, Thomas, you and I, it's very important that, you know, you need to be flexible, you need to be able to listen in and feel what the organization, where it comes from, what it needs, but also as, I mean, you're hired here, as you said, in the beginning, as a hired gun, you need to stick to your gun somehow and to your concept and to your belief. Like, if you're going to come in here and just do what the founders want, well, they might as well just have done it themselves then. Yeah. So I think that's that's the tricky part sometimes to there to be like, I hear where you're coming from, but we need to move in this direction. I'll trust me here. Yeah, fully agree. And, you know, had it not worked in a short period of time, we would not have this podcast. Yeah. Right. As you know, as when you're giving that responsibility, you have to be, you have to be ready to take that. Exactly. You have to be a little courageous to take it and sometimes to maybe disagree with the people that hired you and that still own some of the business. You do. And I don't know the statistics, but I don't think it's in the favor of the hired CEO in terms of longevity in that role. Yeah, the advice I got once that Daniel, if you ever going to take a CEO job, don't take it if the founders are still around because apparently those are the most tricky CEO gigs to maneuver. Yeah. But I wanted to fast forward a little bit because it's also inspiring how you build with young talent. Yeah. And I can see how, you know, the personal growth journey is exciting. There's a lot to be gained and so on. And you can say, like you said, like you can, you can help these people take their initial steps here and shape them to be the best they can be for your organization. But at some point, I'm thinking maybe that type of persona, talent persona, and that initial personal growth that drives this is not enough for the organization to continue to grow all the way and take the next steps. Did you guys bump into an exercise like this where you felt like, oh, shit, now we need something slightly different here. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, we did. That's that's the the short answer. Going from eight people to I think with 35 people and we moved out and got our own place at the end of two years, we were 50 people. The end of three and a half years. Now we're 90 people. You have to insert management layers. Yeah. And now we're taking all these fantastic young professionals. And also in addition to giving them the first responsibility, the functional responsibility over some time, we also gave them management response And we did what we could in terms of draining them, in terms of scaling up from a leadership perspective and giving them a playbook and add a training. But it's just so hard, right, that you're still in the same ecosystem and everything is new for you. And that has led to some conflicts throughout the way. And because, you know, the organizational growth has just overtaken the possibility of the personal growth in some cases. And I think at some point you have to pivot away from that model and say, okay, let's get an outside perspective. And either you've got to spend a lot of money on training and resources and consultants to help these people and open by the end, or you have to, at some point, mix it up a little bit so you can learn from each other. Yes. I mean, you went from 10 people in 2022 to 90 people now. So at some point, you must have come to this pivotal time. So when was that and what did you do? Yeah. I think when I draw my S curves on our growth and when I explain the journey to other people, some of the times where the pivoted is, you know, the first pivot was the eight people, the money for the first time, the decision to spend out. Then there was a two-year period when we got to approximately 50 people and got the second investment round. And then there was another pivot where we sort of say, okay, now we've got to double down on the US. We've got to double down on regional leadership, so branching out. And in that instance, that's when we started to introduce more experienced leaders. So experienced leaders in the US, experienced leaders for driving EMIA and also the leadership team out in EMIA, takes a different skill set, person is it, then what we originally started with. This is also where the decision was made to expand on the executive leadership team. So bringing in a CFO, we had a financial manager in the past, someone to strengthen that. And now where we are, it's also where we need to strengthen the management team. And it's been announced, so I can say that, right? We are expanding with the head of people in culture. We are changing the marketing position. We are introducing a CPTO after summer as well. So we are, we're skilling up. Let's see if they, let's see if they are also introducing a new CEO. So far, you know what I know, it's right. But we're skilling up as this next day been stage and making ourselves ready for the period not from 50 to 100, but from 100 to 500. We have to, we have to see that this management team that we established now is going to be the management team that can take us, you know, on the next strategic journey. Yeah. And are you looking to hire for, if we take the CPTO here? Is that somebody is, is she or he somebody that has been part of a company where they had the same role and took it from 100 to 500? So are you looking for somebody that has seen the movie before in exactly this role? Or is it slightly different profile? Not necessarily exactly in this role, but they have definitely seen this before. You know, the, obviously, the five-tiered cow would come from same technology, you've seen it all before, is, has the right diversity profile, you know, is super likable. So she minded it greatly and all of those things, right? But, but for us, this is an extremely broad role. There's a lot of function that reports to this role, it's it's with all the things that are happening in the world today from a tech perspective. It's almost going to be impossible to find someone that takes all the boxes. Yeah, yeah. But we're going to make, we're going to give it, we're going to give it a go and as you should. Yeah. As you should. And so far it's been, it's been really good. I wanted to, to ask you a little bit, you've been growing really fast, you know, from the initial eight to where you're 19 now and now your mind is already rightfully so like, how do we go from these 1900 to potentially two 300 or maybe even 500. If you look back at the last few years here, growing the organization at this pace, what has been the most challenging and most painful aspects of that process? And is there something that you would feel like, well, if I get another chance at it, here's some things that would do slightly different. If there is anything like that, I think to, let's say 80 percent, I actually think we've done quite well, but I would, earlier, I would start the mix of young people and experience people earlier. I would have done that. I wouldn't have said they all need to be, you know, 25 to 30, but they, they could be more experienced for sure would do that. I would also maybe have not gone so aggressively into the functional, I haven't talked about sales, the functional split or BDIA's and customer success, but kept them in this, you know, full cycle, full sales cycle mode for, for a little bit longer. Yeah. And why is that? Well, it has to do with the, with the ICPs that we are managing and our prog maturity in line with the conversations we are having. And whereas I was taking our AEs and spreading out and giving functional responsibilities, that's probably more relatable if you are an enterprise sales organization. And we are, you know, we're going in that direction and moving away from it, margin more into enterprise, but we sort of lost some momentum in the organization simply spreading ourselves to thin against, when you're compared against the ACV and the number of, of logos we needed to bring in in order to get to our, to our revenue. So I would, I would be more cautious on, on this. And then I think I've said it already, I would, I would really double down on the culture really, because it is the people, it's the, it's the passion of the people that we have working for us every single day that's going to deliver all the results. And that's not to say we're not doing it. I think we are doing that, but don't stop foesing in that area. It becomes a little bit, you know, it becomes easy to, you know, when you're, when you're 30 people, 50 people, everyone's having fantastic time. We're in the same offices, we're drinking beers every, every Friday, sometimes every Thursday, we have a lot of social activities we do sports, all these things. That's why I love Denmark. When, when you start moving people out and, and now you got, you know, five people in Germany, 15 people in the US, a handful of people in, in, in, you know, how do you, how do you change the culture? How do you nurture that culture in this different setup? Yeah. And we, we have not had a historical enough focus on that. We, we were late in the acknowledgement that hang on, something is changing in our culture because of this, and, and, and therefore, we were late in addressing that. I would, I would definitely be more mindful of, of that the next time, the next time around. Yeah. Yeah. And I can see how that happens. Just like you said, you know, initially, like everybody sits together, probably in the same room, even, and, and all the conversations take place where, where everybody can access and, and hear them, and so on, and there's the, the fun Friday beer in Denmark, and also having a, a young, younger talent pool, maybe creates a particular culture, and suddenly you add more senior layers, more cultures to this mix, and you lose it a little bit. I've, I've myself been part of a few companies where the last one I represented when I had a real job was, we were technically as, you know, Swedish sales company, headquarters in Sweden, but we had, as many people in other region as we had in Sweden, especially in the US. And one thing that struck me and hit me really hard when, was one of my members on my team said, like, hey, Dan, this doesn't necessarily feel like a global sales company when we're celebrating mid-summer, I hate to break it to you. Nobody cares about mid-summer in the US, or in, or in Netherlands, he's like, you know, the one way, and God bless him, his name was Stefan, but still is, I suppose, Stefan. He said, like, you know, if we want to be a truly, truly big company here, and we have all these cultures, why don't we then have the Dutch office run when they have Queen's Day and stuff and educate everybody else, and let's all celebrate Queen's Day, or when we have St. Patrick's Day, we had an office in Chicago, and they paint the river green, and so on. So it's, it's being aware of all these culture differences where everybody felt that we're equally contributing to the culture here, and how we form discussion and communication, and that's so critical to be aware of, and what we felt is like a holy shit, like, we need somebody to kind of own this, and our HR group of people to care of this, and made sure that we got all these influences, and created a little bit of a group that managed culture and draw it forward to make sure that nobody felt like, you know, in Sweden, all the decisions are made and then they just push it down here. Yeah. I think it's well said and something any organization should be super mindful of. Also in comparison, I asked to, where is the growth market, right? And without knowing where the growth market is, but for us, the growth market is not necessary, you know, Denmark, our home, our home turf. Right. Maybe we have to, you know, challenge and disrupt our own mindset as to what is the importance of who works for who in some aspect. Yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you, this, when you hire this many people in such a short time going from 10 to 90, I'm going to guess also some, some hires were not necessarily a hit. It happens to all of us. Yeah. Is there, are there any lessons learned from hiring this aggressively and this quickly that you would share with other people that are growing at this pace? Like there's still companies out there that's going to add 500 people in the next, you know, 18, 20 months. Yeah. Absolutely. I would, you need to double down on, you need to double down on your own boarding process and really make sure that it's super tight, very deliberate in terms of making sure that everyone in their respective functions understands the old role purpose of the company, the department's purpose to support this strategy and their individual roles. And I think as a CEO, you have a very strong responsibility in making sure on their first day to communicate the why we hear, what are our expectations, what is the culture, what are the values that we are expecting from these new hires. And then, you know, provide a super scalable onboarding program that takes them through product, market fit, initiatives, technologies, whatever you need to check them through. And that for us has been key in order to ramp people. And the part that you're also saying, you have to be mindful that not everyone despite of good intentions and despite of your screening mechanisms and what hopefully is a sound recording versus not everyone is the right fit. And looking at the leading and the lagging indicators and make decision on that as soon as you can. And it sounds a little bit cynical, but if it's not a fit, it's not a fit. And then might as well get something done about it for the better, better good for everyone, for the individual, for the culture and the company, and for you as a manager. And that's the very hard part of growing super fast, right? Because I can see that then it's like I was told once when you hire somebody, if the initial period doesn't feel like a honeymoon, then it's a red flag a little bit because if the initial period is not a honeymoon, you know it's just going to get more tricky thereafter. So make sure it feels really good from the get go. And if you have that feeling that this is not the right thing, see what you can do about it. And if it doesn't, if you can change the course in the right direction, unfortunately, sometimes we have to make these hard calls. So Sarah, looking ahead here now, if we speak here in 18 months or let's say even 24 months, like where is Factbird then? Yeah, I think first of all, so much going on at the moment, but from a revenue perspective, we're fully committed to continue the trajectory as we've been seeing in the last 20 years, which means in the next 18 month, hopefully we'll have past the 20 million euro ARR mark. We will for sure by that time be a more enterprise driven organization, which means that we would pivot away from the marketing let more into sales, let motors and then address some of the gaps that we have from an org perspective in providing better support, more professional services, potentially establishing a global accounts department and deployment teams for some of our larger rollouts. So for us, at this point in time, it's it's asking us some of those questions in terms of, okay, do we see movements in the market? How do we want the product to look like, you know, two years down the line? Where should the growth be coming from? Do we see changes in the ICP? Do we see changes in the personal landscape now that we're expanding the technology? What is the internal demands to the organizational design and the capabilities as we're growing larger? It's going to be some of those strategic challenges that we're overcoming in the next 12 to 18 to 24 months given the, you know, what we've talked about in the podcast as growing far. Right, exciting and busy times ahead for sure. So on this journey, we always say here we have a great community here over here at Sassius. Is there anything that anyone can help you with? Like on this journey ahead here to the 20 million ARR limit here or not a limit goal, I should say. Yeah, like are you looking for a particular talent? You mentioned there's some management levels that you're hiring. Anything particular that the community potentially can help you with? Yeah, well, well, first of all, any community that that I can listen to and inspire with would be of an immense help, you know, throwing ideas, get people to either support them or knock them down with their perspective is is of help. I think right now, specifically, we're investing into our people and cultures with a new head up. We're investing into our technical stat and expanding the exec with a CPTO position. So I think from a community perspective, if there's anyone out to listen to it, that that wants to throw, you know, something in our way that would be definitely being held. And how do they do that? Like, do they ping you on LinkedIn or do they go to the site? Yeah, they ping me on LinkedIn. I don't think all the positions are honestly on our website. So if they ping me on LinkedIn, that would be that would be appreciated. You heard the man. So LinkedIn is the way to go here now. And lastly, but always important because we want to understand, like now you've been very helpful and shared some of your insights and learnings with the community. Is there anybody in the community, anybody in your network or for that matter outside of your network that you feel like, oh, I'd love to listen to her story, her learnings or I'd love to learn from that gentleman because they've done something cool. Or is there a topic that you feel like, oh, I can't wait for that episode to be dropped. And then I'm going to listen to that. Yeah, I think I think that there's a lot of talented people out there in the community, also Denmark, obviously, some of those various Japanese companies, Blue, Luna, Dix, that I'd love to see on States. And the ones that have gone through that magical barrier in the birdie commas of 20 million and just gone past it, you know, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in growth capital. So any of those would be something I'd sit down and listen to. I think a topic, again, when do you start going from VC to private equity? When do you start looking for getting growth and do growth through acquisitions? Topic around that, they're learning indicators as to when to do it, but also how to do it. You keep having these scary stories out there of the unsuccessful merges and acquisitions where everything just flattens out because of the complexity. What are the great stories? What are the learnings from those? That will be topics to listen to. Yes, all great people. And two of the three companies you mentioned, we've had their CEOs on the podcast. So I'm going to have to send those your way. Okay. And like you said, like MNA as a growth lever is sexy, it's trendy. Again, I guess it was never not trendy, but it's we see it coming in force again. And maybe the macro environment a little bit is forcing us to to look at it slightly differently. There are some companies with big war chests, and now they can pick up companies. Maybe a final topic, sorry to interrupt, but that's in the world where any grad student out of the technical university can build an competent app. What is the differentiator for software companies of our thoughts? Is the data, is the execution power, is the domain knowledge? Where is the, where is the module going forward? Yes, I mean, that's such a great topic. And I'm not the best person to address it. We just recently had a conversation with another CEO, also from Denmark, also called Serran, okay, from track unit where I mean, not to paraphrase him because he'll probably be upset if he hears this because I'm not going to do justice to this, but their biggest mode is all the data. Over the past, you know, 10, 15 years, they've collected so much data. And yes, maybe somebody can build AI solutions that comes somewhat close and so on, but they don't, but they don't have his access to the data. And that's the big mode I think going forward. If you can build a data mode, that's difficult to replicate. But let's see if we can find somebody who is willing to come on the podcast to talk more about that. So Serran, once again, much appreciated for you taking the time to join us here. We'll see much more of you in the community. Thank you again and have a great rest of the day now. My pleasure. So Daniel, what's your main takeaway from this episode? Great question, great question. First of all, that I didn't know. I had no reason to think otherwise, but I didn't know that Serran was a hilarious guy. He's just really funny. He's really funny. Like, he opened up with like, he met his, not see or he met his investor and a tankiest heart. It's hard, it's sassy, it's like, is that what you do at sassy? - I love that metaphor, they made a connection there and they committed to each other. No, so all jokes aside, first of all, Saren is a hilarious guy, but more importantly, he's really good at what he does, and he moves it again now here with Factbird. And I don't have any takeaways that's going to make you fall off your chair here, but I want to emphasize that here we have a CEO that thinks people in process first, and when you think people in process first, you can have good results. I love the fact that he had the courage to look at the organization and come in and say like, okay, they're founders, I have a game plan, that game plan requires us to do X, Y, Z, and maybe a little bit on orthodox, instead of hiring a bunch of salespeople or engineers or whatever it is, let's first set the structure and hire TA person here. Somebody that can help us do this the right way. Instead of that VP sales hotshot from some of the company or so. - Yeah, there you go, there you go. I'm like, I know where that jab is going, but I just dodged it. No, so if there's anything I take from this, I take many things, but if there's one thing I take for this and I think it goes for all leaders, whether you're the CEO or you've been hired as a hired gun to run product or CS or revenue, whatever it is, you're hired because you bring in a certain set of knowledge and expertise and you have to stand by your guns and you have to trust your process. If you come in and just try to serve and act on somebody else's missions and plan, then I think it's a little bit tricky because then they might have just been able to do it themselves. So having that courage to sometimes pave the path that people are a little bit questioning and not being aware that that's a good alternative to go and then pave that path. And like Serran said, you also got to execute on it because if you don't execute on it, then you're not going to be around. But that is one of the call it features or traits of strong leaders that they have the vision, that they're to execute on the vision and then the execute really well to have success. That was a long way to say that, vehicle rages. Yes, what about you Thomas? - No, but I think and we have seen that in a few other companies that focus on higher junior people to start with, that they can train into the culture. And yeah, and also, I don't know if you said it, but you know, higher, higher and higher fast and so on. But you know, giving young people the chance that has the ambition and nurture them and also give them more and more responsibility. - I think that's an interesting strategy and especially when you are quite small and growing fast. And then you come to a certain level where you need to sort of get the more experienced managers on board, but in the beginning, it's more like, what do you say, it becomes a base camp or it becomes some kind of training ground for you and your foot soldiers or what you want to call them. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's all hands on deck and you gotta roll up your sleeve and just push through like, you know, the effort is more important than the process initially as long as the outcome is positive. So, but he said that the process was super important. - He did. - I mean, with the sales process and he emphasized that in order to do that, you need to have the processes in place and then you can put people into the process. - Yeah. - As long as you got it okay. But I think it was interesting and it's fantastic to see their progress, their growth and really looking forward to see what's gonna happen in the next 18 to 24 months. And I didn't hear what you ended up, the episode because I had so much technical problems. I don't know, did you make fun of me? - Actually, we did not, I didn't take that opportunity to do it because I don't want to do it behind the back. I'd like to do it when you're in the call. - You should do it behind me. - No, no, no, I do it always in person. You do it in my face all the time. - All jokes aside, I think it's really impressive where they are. And from infant stages, start up a few years ago to be honest and now they've just broken the 9, 10 million mark here and we're talking about how in the next 12 to 24 months they're certainly gonna break 20 million. And they're ramping up now, like they went from 8 people to 900 people. So now they're in a phase of like, okay, how does our organization need to look at what type of decisions do we need to make to prepare to go from 100 to potentially 300 or 500 people? So he has an exciting journey ahead of him and luckily for us and many in the community here, we get to follow it from the first four here, or first row I should say. So and of course, like Serran said, if you wanna pick his brain on some things, if you could share some of his wins or some of his hardships with you, if you're on similar journeys, you find them on LinkedIn and he's a funny guy that's willing to share. - Cool. So with that, thank you for listening. You know where to find out, contact at sss.com. You find us on social. We are very available and there's a lot of fun and good things here in the Python for the next of the year. So and if you're interesting to join in over networks, head over to sss.com on the community. You have the Slack community for anyone working in B2B. Sass here in Europe, you have the executive and CEO and networks as well, that are really strong networks, the feedback founder networks. And also something that we do is the sss community sessions. We have bi-weekly online sessions with speakers and we have Q&As and round table discussions. So don't miss that. Keep your eyes open when it comes to that. And see you again next week for another podcast episode of Pleasure to be able to be with you here for an hour or 45 minutes here or there. Take care now. [MUSIC PLAYING]