Jeremy Henrickson: evaluation

Transcript context

…What have you found to be most surprising about expanding internationally to be successful in expansion? For folks that are maybe starting down this road of like, oh shoot, we should think about that. I think the thing that was most surprising to me the first time I did this back at Guidewire in the [inaudible 00:44:23] and remains the most surprising thing to most people every time I do this again, is that every country is unique. You can't just take your US-based approach and drop it into another country. Other countries find it insulting. It doesn't matter how much success you've had here. Everyone always believes rightly or wrongly that their local context is special. And you have to respect that. And it comes down to little things like they're being a you in color or not. Or if you ever see a demo delivered to somebody in another country where they see a detailed screen about a person and it includes a social security number, it's like that you immediately lose credibility. Doesn't matter how good all the rest of your stuff is. And I think that that is consistently the thing that I think is most surprising to people is the degree to which that's true, which seems obvious in retrospect. If you took a German system or something and demoed it in the United States with poorly translated stuff, we would think it would suck too. But it's not, it's really hard to adapt to that mindset. And so it takes just a lot of energy to overcome that organizationally. Makes tons of sense. I'm going to go in a different direction now.…

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