Ray Cao: belief

Transcript context

…Wow, that sounds very hard and painful, but I like that metaphor. Okay, so let's talk about how you set up the product org to move as fast as you move. I think there's this idea of just running fast. I don't know if that's a phrase you use, but just how is the product org set up, especially different from other teams that you've seen that allows it to move as quickly as you move and innovate as often as you all innovate? Our product teams are setting, I would say, very importantly is global. So we want to actually, like I said, the number one step is if we really want to do global business, we have to go global. So we set up teams really across the board in the global locations to really acquire global talent who knows the market and who knows the competition, too. So we're able to really getting the, let's say jumpstart, in the local market. So for example, we have the majority of the engineer and also PMs currently located in the west coast of North America, so Los Angeles and also San Jose. These are the key hubs we have for our tech folks and also for North America wise we do have our majority of the go-to-market leads sitting in New York to get closer with our seller and also with our clients at the same time. Also, it is not necessarily only for North America. Like I said, we heavily invested in Southeast Asia, so you can see that a lot of our engineering and also PM resources are deployed over there in Singapore to enable them to get closer to our clients over there as well. So really deploy your resources globally and also focusing on the key markets you want to penetrate. That's the commitment. I think we're doing pretty good in this case. And the second one is to really, again, I think the PMs and the product team of settings are oftentimes I would say because we're growing so fast, oftentimes we have to do a lot of minor team adjustment to catering for that. So it is very usual or common for teams to do a little bit of work on an annual basis or even on a two years or three year cycle. The stability is important, don't get me wrong, but I do think that as a faster growing company, we need to consistently to reiterate not only the product but also our teams. So how can we do reiteration on the PM side, on the go-to-market side, it is actually something that I have seen this company doing really, really well. Not necessarily we're bonding to one team structure. We're actually bonding to the market need and we're bounding to the growth we're looking for. So we're not afraid to break our seams. And actually I literally break out my team last year to make sure that my team having more go-to-market mindset to actually embedded them with seller directly. So these are the things that very, I would say conventional to a size of this company, but I do think that's necessary and also that's a good mentality for the team to really run faster with this kind of a rigid approach. So yeah, these are the two things I think very unique to us, I think could also be continuously helping us in the next phase of the growth. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV Importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file. And building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sink for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, the customers keep running into issues. Six months later you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences, from embeddable CSV Import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like, "Error on line 53," and never end up getting started with your product. OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema is offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema.co/lenny. I know you mentioned earlier when we were chatting offline is when you were trying to build the go-to-market org for this stuff, you failed in some ways and there's some things you learned from that experience. What went wrong when you first tried to approach this?…

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