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[Music] I need some traction you need some traction so yeah my name is ginger for Bloomberg News I cover Tech based in Toronto from Vancouver good to be home this is Daniel Sachs from App direct and uh we'll just jump right into it but maybe if you could just quickly introduce apir and what you do and and kind of this the stage in your journey you're at right now yeah sounds sounds great so apir was founded with the vision of making it really easy for businesses to find buy and manage the cloud solutions they needed to succeed um I'm originally from St Catherine's Ontario went to Mill my Mill pin right here and proud to be back in Canada um well I want to jump into the topic but want to start with like a little bit of like a you know just Canadian Tech stuff that's going on right now you said you're from St Catherine's which is a big Branch plant for the Auto industry and there's been sort of some people kind of you know the the latest in this whole thing of Canada Tech versus US tech Canada's place in the world is sort of you know uh we had some criticism in the media of like Justin Trudeau going to Microsoft and being like you guys are great for hiring people here in Vancouver that eventually just get shipped to the valley once their visas come in and there's some controversy where it's that's a good thing or a bad thing and I know you have an office in Canada as well but your hqs in San Francisco so um you know what what do you what do you think about that I mean is is that like should we be pushing more for for having you know HQ in Canada or is it still a big benefit when we do have you know maybe secondary offices or development offices based in Canada yeah so I think first of all it's great having a prime minister so active in the tech scene uh Justin was actually in a class of mine at McGill we took a geography class together uh but awesome to have the the kind of uh you know Global level Awareness on Tech and from our perspective you know we were two Canadians who founded the company out of an apartment in San Francisco are headquartered in San Francisco but uh we're about 550 people now um and this year is the first year that over half of our headcounts in Canada um we opened up our first organic office in Montreal in 2014 um and now have uh like hundreds of people across Canada we have done two Acquisitions or three Acquisitions in Canada one in Ottawa one in Montreal and one in Calgary um and then we've organically hired uh you know a ton of amazing engineers and what I'd say is it's so phenomenal to see the caliber of talent in Canada however in 2009 if we would have started in let's say St Catherine or somewhere in Canada we would not have been where we are today so I would say when you think about it from an economy perspective we've done much more for the Canadian Economy based on the fact that we started in San Francisco than if we were would have were to have started in Canada okay um so that's my take yeah okay well let's let's jump into the topic which is you know we're talking about Landing big Enterprise deals so if you're an Enterprise startup uh obviously you want to have those those big customers and um that's where the you know the growth and the money is largely coming from and big conversation we're having in in Toronto right now is you know the banks like why aren't the banks uh spending more money on products developed by startups and uh Canadian Banks largely incentivized against risk and so a lot of the time there's actually like structural um things within the companies that say you can't buy product from a company that's young or small or something like that and I mean you obviously had this issue when you were starting how did you have that conversation and how did that go how did you get over that yeah so I think you know a couple things there when we were two people in an apartment our Focus was to make money from day one and what we said is how do you make as much revenue from the onset it's probably signing a really big deal so all of our Focus went into making ourselves appear mature um permanent long-standing to get the confidence to sign a big deal um our first deal was actually with Bell Canada who everyone knows here um and at the time you know if we went to any VC they would have said you're crazy there's not a chance you're going to be able to sign you know uh one of the biggest companies in Canada and what we said is okay in order to do this we need to really look like we have something special and that we're giving uh something that they can't get from anyone else so what we did is we spent a lot of time establishing the methodology and and the the thought leadership around cloud and why Telos would be well suited to service cloud and why app direct was the best opportunity for Bell um and I think one of the challenges in the startup ecosystem is that a lot of people when they're starting is they want to be hacker they want to be casual but that doesn't fit with Enterprise culture so what we did was actually the opposite we wore suits and ties every day we printed Decks that were like Consulting style um old school we were we micromanaged the the quality of those decks um we used to learn and I used to interview people that worked at Telos and like government and all those um you know traditional Industries to kind of get a sense of what their culture was like and we totally adopted for their culture so one of the things we came up with in the early days was the notion of a culture Karma Chameleon so how do you like adapt to the companies you're working with and that was so much a part of uh you know how we evolved right so just be like a student of the industry that you're trying to break into to and figure out how they think exactly and when it comes down to banking you mentioned the financial service industry that's definitely one of the um you know least risk of or sorry like least risky companies they're going to be really conservative they're going to really think about um how they can protect themselves so even for us like we had a long-term vision of how we'd enter the financial service spacee but it took us years to get the credibility so what I'd say is if you're targeting big companies you have to really learn and assess are they willing to take risks and then the other thing is a big company may have hundreds of thousands of employees so you have to look at okay are there Innovative groups within this big company that can help take risk so if you look at most Fortune 500 companies today almost every single one has either a venture person that's interested in in early stage investment or an innovation group that wants to learn about tech so you can use them as a catalyst to get intros to the broader company um and that's how you kind of balance that Innovation and risk right yeah I mean I guess pushing for like in the UK they have a Sandbox model where if you are not deemed a systemic risk to the financial system you can kind of like do what you want on and kind of be outside of the regulatory framework a little bit so I mean I guess just doing that on a small scale and saying okay maybe you're not going to adopt this you know enterprise-wide but is there like a department that might be willing to to take this on to start out with right exactly and I think that so much of this is just encouraging a culture of innovation and I'd say that any CEO no matter how mature the company is no matter how uh mature the person is um they know that their companies are going to be disrupted by technology and they need to take action those that don't will be left behind so I think a lot of the sales positioning um when you're let's say a younger tech company um or pretty nent selling to a bigger company is highlighting that risk so highlighting here's where the Market's going here's how technology is disrupting your company here's the researcher unique value that we know that you don't and now let's work together to really address your your long-term you got to like flip the narrative from like we're risky to like no no we're the safe bet for a risky future and we can help you in the long term was there like a moment that was cuz you know once you have Belle you you know tell us like hey we want want that we don't care what it costs and Rogers has the same and then soon soon you're all over the place but before that Snowball Effect kind of started happening was there like a breakr moment I guess it was that that deal or was there another one yes so I'd say like just above anything else one of our advisers his name's Eric bo boo he just took his company public Stingray digital it's a massive Music Company really cool but he's this Ecentric guy who gave us like in Institute of values like PMA which is positive mental attitude and go go go and one of the things that he said to us in the first year was just first customer first customer first customer first com customer bell bell bell that's all that matters don't worry about anything else and I think you really need to go into tunnel vision and once you have a good sense of what your first customer is use them as a case study embrace them but then don't give up so your first customer is the first um and and and it's risky only having one customer so it's how do you create the second and the third and and to your kind of notion of The Snowball Effect we called that M magnetic momentum so because we got Bell we were able to get some Canadian SAS companies that Bell was able to distribute then we got Telos in the US like AT&T and dut Telecom then we got Microsoft then we got IBM and then that magnetic momentum continues to grow and it makes it easier for you to grow so we just uh Domo and the CMO gave an awesome presentation on marketing and growth um but one of the cheapest ways we've found to acquire customers is to have them come inbound to you because they actually respect the value you're creating uh because of another case study so that's probably the cheapest way to get people coming to you is when their competitor or when someone they admire is using your stuff so I think that's really important cool how are we doing for time I don't have a timer here so I don't know where I'll keep asking but if someone can like just give me like a sign or something if I have 5 minutes left um did you ever work at a big Enterprise before you started abct um not really so we started abct out of school um I entered at RBC my co-founder worked at banan company U which is a big management consulting firm um but I always kind of love to study different uh use cases and case studies so always like I said interviewed people from bigger companies so you just that's how you kind of got it I mean is there something that when you're servicing you know large Enterprises um you know concretely like things that that big companies need from you that you know maybe you as a startup don't need or you wouldn't you know have have thought about I mean like whether it's like a regulatory thing or or something like that completely I think the biggest thing is governance so when you work at a big company you're going to be working with hundreds of people and your startup might be only 10 people right so if you don't create a framework for how you communicate with those customers um it's going to be almost impossible and they'll drown you so you need to say here's how we'll work together here's some methodologies hey we use jira and slack so therefore you need to be aware of how we communicate so a lot of it's in education and alignment and that also sometimes has to do with actually executive sponsorship so making sure that you have relationships senior level Within These companies so if something goes wrong you can pick up the phone and say you here's what we need and and really honesty and align alignment on why things are different between working with a startup is so important so I'd say that just that awareness is so much of it right okay okay um how much I mean I'm sure many of us get the CB insights email and and nand is really good at talking about like how um you know big corporates are sort of they do this like astr Turf into like Tech and they they talk to startups and they say they're Innovative and and all that stuff I mean is that like a tactic that you can use as a startup to get into larger Enterprises say like I mean or is it kind of disingenuous to say hey like you know you keep talking about Innovation and Tech like here's a way that you can actually do it and kind of you almost get in from like the marketing angle and and then they can say oh we work with app direct like we're hip and and cool for sure I mean I think ultimately when you're working with a big company you need to add business value so what I'd say is that the most important thing that you should always be focusing on is how you're going to either save money um or address one of their concerns optimize for Revenue get them new business so always focus on the business value but at the highest level you're right that a lot of companies want to be able to show that they're Innovative one of the ways to do that is to talk about Innovative companies they're they're partnering with um so that's definitely a way to do it is to get in Via The Innovation arm um and really bridge that Gap so for us for example in many of our Global customers from Canada and from Europe we host them in the valley we take them on tours of different Tech offices like box and Salesforce and kind of show them around and that becomes a great way for them to go back to their executive teams and say here's some of the best practices um and and traction is a great example of that where last year we co-hosted traction with Lloyd in San Francisco and a lot of our client bases who are kind of older more mature companies got to see the speakers that are on the stage today and there there there was just so much excitement saying wow I'm learning so much you know normally we have no dialogue about this at a Telco conference so so uh really just that education and Alignment is really important would you say though it's it's since you started that it's and I guess like I mean your your view has also changed because now you do have that reputation that client list but say you were to start out now do you think that large corporates are actually interested in products built by startups for sure and I think the way that you need to do it is again show show the business value so if you're two people in an apartment or in a garage that's not enough to get someone to listen to you but if you have a unique position on the angle with datadriven research to back that up that someone in a bigger company doesn't see they'll understand that value but again you need to put it in their terms so you can't just go and have a conversation at a coffee shop with them you have to essentially present something that would be of the caliber that used to be presented on how they can save magnitudes of money it has to be in the tens of millions of dollars it can't be you know in the a few like little little things think big think big okay so like speak their language student of the industry good governance yeah don't you know be like well you know break things move fast and whether you like it or not sometimes you have to actually kind of like speak their language a little bit and even if you are trying to break things move fast exactly and the biggest thing is that fast for for a large company whether it's government financial services media Etc that could be a two- years time span fast for a startup is maybe a day so I think that you need to understand that if you're working in a big opportunity it's going to take years and for us if you look at our growth we were founded in 2009 we signed up our first customer in 2010 didn't launch till 2011 so if you looked at us our first two years we almost had no growth compared to a lot of companies we were only eight people but that laid the groundwork for us to have explosive growth north of 100% year-over-year for the following uh five years uh you know and today really because of that groundwork that we did in the early days cool okay we're out of time so thank much awesome thanks everyone I need some traction you need some