Carriers wouldn't talk to him, so he started with kids' smartwatches—then landed AT&T, Revolut and Klarna and now wins 90% of deals. | with Hermann Frank, Co-Founder & CEO of Gigs

0:00Was that even a market? Kids SmartWatch? Was there several companies that faced the same issue? Yeah, there's quite a range of companies. And I think today it's like a mid-eight-digit AR volume for us. So it's not a tiny market. If you want to land an enterprise customer, multi-billion or tens of billions of dollars in market cap, what you need to do is you need to convince several layers in that organization that it's a great idea to partner with you. Many times, including the founders or the C-level. You need to get the operating team to like you. You need to get the developers to like you. And ideally, it's not just like one person doing all that.

0:39If you're on an enterprise deal, you want to find out very quickly if the guy you're talking to is a lone wolf. Is this like exploratory? So the quicker you ask the team you're working with to introduce other participants in the company. First, you find out if this is real and if this is serious. Second, it allows you to build those connections.

1:28Ehrman, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. Excited to have you here, man. So you've got a company called Gigs, which is like the OS for embedded telecoms. So I mean, the simple way to think about it is anybody building anything can add gigs into their product and offer, you know, mobile plans to their customers. So we're going to talk a lot about not just how you came up with that, but who is using that, who's the best customer, why they would want to do that and all those sort of things. You know, you raised your first round, I think in 2021, you've raised$90 million since then. So off to a great start.

1:55Let's start with what we always do. For you, what was the product market fit moment? When did you feel like you'd found true product market fit and why? So we had several product market fit moments. The very first was our first vertical. It was kids' smartwatches at the time. Very serendipitous. First customer came through one of our advisors. And it was a great way to find this niche to serve first. They had massive problems with SIM cards, returns of the devices. and monetizing the subscriptions. So we've built a product quite custom to that specific customer vertical, but it allowed us to build the very first version of gigs and the API and integrations into carriers and paid for our seed in Series A.

2:43And we kept just going down the list of customers and about a year in, we ended up powering most of the players in the market. And it kind of showed us, okay, there's definitely something there. And we found a repeatable motion. And then the next time was when we started targeting fintechs, which was our first real consumer primary use case smartphone vertical. And Nubank was the very first customer in the fintech vertical. And then we kept repeating that again and again. We had Klarna and Revolut and so on. And it's okay. We're winning over 90 % of deals. career of product market fit. Once the services started launching end of last year and earlier this year, revenue skyrocketed.

3:31So we kind of understood, okay, we made it again. And now we're going through it the third time with Gigsaw Work, our enterprise product that we're targeting at enterprises that operate either in one or multiple markets, have a few hundred employees or more. And we allow them to embed the phone plan directly into their IT stack. So when an employee is provisioned on the HRS system and their Slack, Okta and Gmail's provision, the phone number is provisioned in the same way in real time. And then also disconnected when the employee leaves. And we're in an inasiency of that product, but we're now also seeing a repeatable motion.

4:10So we're kind of carefully in the early stages of product market fit a third time. And we have a couple more verticals out of us. It's a recurring theme that I hear a lot when I ask about product market fit. I mean, a lot of people describe it as kind of on the scale versus kind of a switch, right? And I do think there's an element of both a little bit where you kind of tip over at some point. You're like, OK, we have product market fit. But it's also very true that the competitive landscape is changing. The technology is changing. The market is changing. And so you're never done. You always have to kind of rediscover and reattempt product market fit, even with each feature that you launched.

4:44You know, each feature can have or not have product market fit. Yes, for sure. I think as founders, we often underestimate and you kind of want it to happen. It's this magical moment of like, I have a working company now. But I think the natural inclination of founders is to think that they have reached product market fit way earlier than they actually have. You need to have repeatable sales targeting the same ICP. You need to launch that ICP. You need to retain them, right? And you need to do that over and over and over again. And so, yes, it's much more of a gradient where you think you might have it, and then you're repeating the feeling of thinking you might have it.

5:26And then at some point, when people are actually staying with your product, and they're not turned off by it after a couple of weeks or months, and you've been able to build a scalable sales motion, then you actually might have it. But in our case, and I think if there's similar companies out there, we just take it by, like, we have vertical market fit. We don't, like, we'll never have entire product market fit. So we're going to talk at the end about selling into enterprise. You're selling to some of them. I mean, you have to partner with the telcos, which are the biggest, slowest types of elephants that you have to go and hunt.

6:02And then we're also going to talk about what it takes to craft a vision, especially one that is multifaceted and has many steps to it. and you kind of have to prove along the way and you need to get VCs along for the ride with you. It's not a simple thing to do. So we're going to talk about those two things at the end. But, you know, obviously in the middle, let's kind of go through your story. You had another company, right, before you started this one? Yes, a company called HyperMesh. We started very originally, I wanted to start my second company. I didn't have a precise idea what to do, but I knew I wanted to dive into an industry that hasn't seen the utilization that like many other industries have seen over the last 20 years.

6:38And telecom kind of stood out. It used to be the original tech. Like in the 90s, every millionaire and billionaire like was minted in telecom. I mean, it was like the railroads, then telecom, then AI. But it was the AI of 20 years ago. Yes, and actually when Sam Altman came up with a statement of like, we need to invest$7 trillion into AI infrastructure, people thought he's crazy. But if you look at telecom, just in the last 10 years, and it's a mature industry, they have invested over$3 trillion in infrastructure. So the overall amount invested in telecoms and wireless since the 90s is way higher than what Sam said we need to build global AI infrastructure.

7:20So for us, it didn't seem that crazy at all. And just tell me a little bit about the original business and maybe just the timeline in terms of when you start thinking about this. Yeah, so we kind of settled on telecom and then we decided to look into, okay, what might be reoccurring problems in that industry? And when was this, just to kind of have that context? Around 2018, 19. Okay. We kind of looked at everything from like, how are networks built? Like, how are they monetized? Like, how does distribution work? And the first thing that we saw is, if you look at the world, like only about half of it was really covered with high-speed wireless.

7:56And the rest was not. It was just like massive wireless gaps, entire continents, parts of countries, even in countries like Germany and the US, if you drove like 10 minutes outside of a big city, you did not have high-speed wireless. And so we looked at, okay, why is this the case? And it's just like, it's a density problem. Like the less dense the population is, the higher the costs are. And there isn't this oligopoly of Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei at the time, and most of the world, they're still in running, that if you understood anything about hardware, you saw that they're overpricing these closed-loop systems that they're selling to telcos by about a factor of 100.

8:38Because if you put enterprise wireless hardware next to it, it was about 100 times cheaper because they were open, standard, white-label wireless hardware. And we thought, okay, if we can figure out how to build a cellular-grade network with this standardized hardware, not this black-box closed-loop system, we could make deployment much cheaper and therefore make high-speed wireless much more ubiquitous than this. And that's what we did. Like we set ourselves a rule, like you need to be able to order this on Amazon or Alibaba, like no other hardware, nothing custom. And then we developed our own software hardware stack.

9:18So we put a real telco backend that usually lives on a big data center into a tiny like Intel NUC computer. and we built in our apartment two cells. And then we walked from one to another and it worked great. Okay, we need a vessel to test this at like higher scale. Like the apartment won't do it. And when you say we, by the way, who's involved at that point? So it was my co-founder, Dennis and I. And Dennis and I are now co-founders in gigs. And we had one intern, like a friend that was like helping us. And are both you like technical types? I'd say I'm more technical of the both of us. Like Dennis is, without Dennis, like we would not have a company, right?

10:03Like we always joke, like we could have a hundred million in the bank and like nobody wouldn't get paid because I'm just terrible at like anything that's administrative and operational. So we complement each other incredibly well. So we then went out and built a Wi-Fi network in Berlin. So we walked from cafe to cafe and then we asked them if we can deploy this Wi-Fi inside of their cafe that basically put together, resembled a cellular-grade network. And then you could walk through an entire neighborhood and stay connected on this network. And it worked amazingly well. We had over a million customers in the first year, mostly tourists that were just roaming around the city.

10:45So we basically became the number one public Wi-Fi network in the city. Did you fundraise for that? I financed it myself at the point. I was in it to find the one big problem, and then once we kind of figure it out and we want to scale, then the idea was to go out and raise. How many users did you have? We had over a million users after every year. Wow. I mean, a million is actually, it's a big number of paid consumer users, right? Like, how did you... Not paid, just users. That's how we came to gigs when we tried to figure out the paid part. So you're offering, like, you're on Google Ads or wherever you are, and you're marketing like free roaming for tourists sort of thing?

11:21So you can run any type of spectrum on the antenna, right? So we just ran it on Wi-Fi spectrum and we made it into a Wi-Fi network. So when you were somewhere in the vicinity of one of those... Oh, you would just see an open Wi-Fi? Yeah, we'll see a free Wi-Fi. And once you're in one of the nodes, you're everywhere. And we would have like either a flyer at like the cafes that we had these nodes installed in. So we had like free internet basically to backhaul whatever you were consuming. And that was how it spread. What's the cost behind that? Like who's, this is a naive question of somebody who knows very little about telco.

12:00Like you're serving this Wi-Fi, what's the cost for you? So the hardware, the total cost like to per node came out to like a couple hundred bucks. And the other kind of hack that we had was that we used the Wi-Fi, like we went to a cafe and said like, okay, your Wi-Fi is not secure. Let us install this very secure Wi-Fi for those and those reasons. And you can offer better Wi-Fi experience to your customers and their Wi-Fi will work in the entire neighborhood. And what we got in return was free internet access. So we had to pay zero for the actual internet, right? Right, they're the ones paying, like you're piggybacking off of their plan.

12:38Exactly. So we got gigabits upon gigabits of like free backhaul capacity out of it. And then about a year in, we're like, hey, this is clearly working. Like, what are we going to do with it? Like, we had plans to scale this to like 10 other markets. And we like tried to figure out how to monetize the best. And the idea was, we're only in two neighborhoods. We don't have a desire to like cover the entire city. Like that's where like tourists are mostly here. And what we wanted to achieve is that you could buy an eSIM. and when you're within reach of our network, you would roam on our network and we would not pay anything for the traffic.

13:19But when you're not, you could roam on the national LTE network. And we were very much expecting to find an API to allow us to provision a device on the network and entail ourselves. So basically like a Stripe-like experience and telecoms, if you will. And it didn't exist. And we were very surprised as to why that doesn't exist. So that kind of led us down the rabbit hole. And we understood that the industry just was not able to produce this developer experience, this horizontal developer experience that we've kind of came to be used in pretty much every other industry, like hosting, payments, right?

14:00You just have an API for pretty much everything. And once we understood why and like what would happen if we would solve it, we understood, okay, this is the biggest problem we've ever seen. But to be clear, then in order for you to get what you wanted, you needed to go to the telcos and work out an agreement, MSA, partnership, whatever that looks like, one-on-one. Exactly. We would have to do a lot of hard work to produce that outcome. But we understood if we can produce that outcome, the same thing that happened with AWS and hosting and Stripe and payments will happen in telecom. Basically, everything that's net new is going to be built on top of that infrastructure.

14:40And then you kind of capture all of net new demand in one of the world's largest industries and pretty much all of net new innovation in one of the world's largest industries. And that prospect for us is like, you can build a globally dominant horizontal player, like a global network if you start at the API layer and you eat your way down from there. So that's how the idea for Giggs came about. So the stripe for telco was kind of the original idea. Well, the stripe for telco was what we discovered while building hardware and building Wi-Fi networks. Yeah, sorry, I mean at that point, right? So not the original idea, but like the first version of what Giggs is today.

15:28That was the first version of gigs. And that was like what we then started out to do. And we completely put aside the Wi-Fi business and like the cellular network business and focused exclusively on building the API. This is what I always find especially challenging when an idea depends on you bringing large enterprises into play as a tiny, you know, little startup with no credibility, no name, you know, relatively no funding. What you need to do is clear. The opportunity is relatively clear. What's the first step? Like, how are you going to go and knock on, you know, I don't know who you need to get AT &T, whatever the big, you know, telcos that you need to get to play with you?

16:06How do you even approach them? Or is there a step before that step? And so when we started telling people that that's what we want to do, and we started talking to first investors, we got no's left and right because they didn't talk to their buddy at AT &T or at Orchard Telecom and other phones. It's like, yeah, no carrier will ever let them do this, right? Like, this is not possible. People have tried and yada, yada. So we kind of had to chew our way through it. Like, the way we actually got our first deal done was not even with a carrier because they wouldn't talk to us. So that part was actually true initially.

16:43We found an aggregator that was behind on their commitments with the network. And we integrated there and we built the first version of the product on that aggregator with terrible economics, right? We didn't make any money on that. Dive deeper on that, I'm not sure what that means. What's the aggregator? Aggregators are these actors in the marketplace that they get a deal with a carrier and then they find smaller customers to basically split this pool because their customers are too small to get served by the carriers themselves. Or in our case, too small and slightly undesirable. So they had pre-negotiated, let's say, MSAs with several of these telcos already and you kind of just absorbed that.

17:26Exactly. We were just able to plug into the same integration that they had. And for the first use case we had, it worked fine. Like it would never work for like what we're doing today. But it worked fine for that kids' smartwatch use case. And then we started onboarding customers there. And we went to the network and said, hey, we build a product on your network. And here's what it does. And here's where we are. And they saw the growth. They were wondering, where is the growth coming from? It was segregated. It was relatively flat. So that got us into the door to get our very first deal with the carrier.

18:03And lucky for us, it was AT &T, one of the largest carriers in the world. Yeah, the big one. Before moving on, actually, if you don't mind, let's just dive a little bit deeper on that because you find the aggregator, first of all, just in terms of timelines, like started 2018 with the first idea. When does this kind of stripe for telco's idea come? And how long are you in this exploratory phase until you discover this aggregator? So the Geeks idea came, I'd say, mid-2020. Then we spent a couple months talking to a market, understanding, building a real thesis around it. And then we applied to YC at the end of 2020.

18:39And we got into YC for the winter 21 batch. So January to March, we did YC. And that's where we started building the product for real. And we launched commercially at the end of 21. And when did you land this aggregator? That was around that time. Okay, so you went over a year stuck at idea stage effectively because you couldn't really deploy anything. Yeah, there was a short phase before that where we were playing around with Twilio setups and so on, but that was not feasible at all. It's not the same type of product, but it allowed us to basically sandbox certain parts. But yeah, it was not a product we could have taken online commercially.

19:21And then how do you, so that's the first half, which is, okay, you get this aggregator, like finally I have access to some amount of these networks, some subset in terms of functionality or whatever. And then the smartwatch market, like where does that, you know, tell me more about that. Where does that come from? So yeah, that was like a really random introduction we got from one of our advisors. He's like, oh yeah, I'm on the board of this kid's smartwatch company. You should talk to them. They're having massive problems with like SIM cards. And what happened is they were selling these watches on Amazon and people would order them and put a random SIM card in.

19:54Like a physical, like it had room for a physical SIM for whatever country, okay. A physical SIM. And then the SIM wouldn't have a pin, but the watch would get blocked because of the pin. Or the carrier locked the SIM to only work with smartphones. And then it wouldn't work with a smartwatch because the plan was not designed for a smartwatch. So all these things would happen and people would think, okay, this smartwatch sucks. But it wasn't the smartwatch, it was they put it in the wrong SIM. So they were looking to just launch their own mobile service. And what we did is we embedded the SIMs at the factory into the device.

20:30And when you were activating the device, like in the parental app on the phone, you could just subscribe to the service. You pay and instantly activated the subscription. And it solved all their problems. They had 30-40 % returns on these devices on Amazon. It created a subscription revenue stream and it started growing much faster. And did you enable this globally? Like from day one, that aggregator, was that global coverage that you had or which markets? That was the US first. And then since we have expanded into more markets with them. So that's your first kind of customer. And then you dive deeper into this.

21:08Was that even a market? Like the smart, kids smartwatch? Was there several companies that faced the same issue? Yeah, there's quite a range of companies. And I think today it's like a mid-eight-digit AR volume for us. So it's not a tiny market. They compound, they grow at like 150 % NRR. So it's good business. It's not the business that will build a$100 billion company, but it was the perfect niche, right? Like in WSE, we're also told, you need to find the one group that needs a product more where you can specialize. And that was it. And that allows us to build a much more resilient, scalable platform that is ready for smartphone use cases, right?

21:50Where you are powering the primary smartphone subscription of an individual that if there's anything wrong with that subscription for a second, you're kind of screwed. And the other case, like you had a lot more leeway, was way more forgiving. But it's also, while it is more forgiving, it's also the perfect example of what you kind of mentioned there, which is this smaller, nicher market, but that has a very sharp pain point. I mean, when you're dealing with 30 to 40 % returns, your business is not working fundamentally. You'll do anything to, you'll try anything, frankly, to solve that, which is different a little bit than kind of where you're going to move to.

22:24And we're going to talk about that now, but you know, you're, you become an enabler, right? You're like, Hey, I'm a fintech. You want to have a new revenue stream. You plug gigs in and you kind of sell this, this mobile service and the market is much bigger, but at least at first, I don't know if the pain is as sharp as the smartwatch thing, which you needed because probably your product at that point was not at the same level in terms of production and in terms of, you know, feature rich and whatever. So it was like good enough for them, maybe not good enough for everybody else, but really got you going.

22:51Yes, good one. You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best interest. What's the next step? Like that you're kind of end of 21, you launch. Is this now the time when you go out and you've got some traction? So I Yeah, we grew to like a million AR, right? This is pre-AI, a million AR in three months, which was like quite amazing growth. So we raised a Series A on top of that. And like that basically buys us the ability to like build the platform we actually set out to build. So we keep scaling with kids smartwatches and then we started graduating to like feature phones and then smartphones and just like powering a range of device customers.

23:34Still on top of the aggregator or now you're going direct? That was still on top of the aggregator. It took us actually quite a while to get the first deal done and to migrate. But we kind of improved the aggregator connection. Meanwhile, we had very first smartphone use cases on the aggregator still. The economics were just terrible. And you didn't have a full feature set, but it was pretty decent. In terms of the SIM card functionality, the aggregator's feature set was not very versatile. And tell me a little bit about the types of customers. Once you moved off of smartwatch customers, what was the next batch of customers?

24:10What was their use case? That's where we started going after, once we were quite mature with the device customers, is where we started targeting fintechs. We launched Nubank first. That was the very first fintech customer. Tell me a little bit more about the idea. I think about my bank, which now I do have one of these neobanks, but before I had a traditional bank. I'm not buying my mobile plant from them. Here we have Qualcomm and in the US they have a bunch of others, in Europe different. But what's the thinking from the business level of we're going to get into mobile plants? Yes, so FinTechs, most of them in developed markets, they're successful because they've been able to build a user experience that is much better than a traditional bank's user experience.

24:53They attract a certain type of clientele. Mostly, it's a generational kind of cut, but millennials, Gen Z would much rather prefer to bank on an app that allows us to do things in a couple of clicks and really cares about customer experience. And that's kind of a great pre-filter for the target group. The other way they're a great fit, they already have KYC. These are the most regulated industries, telecom and finance. They are your payment methods. So you can build the most simple way to activate a subscription. Psychologically, they're very similar. They're both kind of wallet products. So you don't leave your house without your wallet without your phone.

25:31So they're kind of a great psychological, from a consumer psychology standpoint fit. And then there is a few drivers that make it attractive to them and why it ultimately will become mainstream. One, they're maturing. The market is maturing. They've grown a lot, but now you see kind of maturing growth curves. So they're looking for ways to gain primacy, to gain loyalty, and to gain additional revenue streams. and ideally to create a kind of a portfolio effect, right? Like an ecosystem that benefits their customers maximally. And that is a great addition to that type of ecosystem. The mobile subscription is the first thing you pay even if you don't have money, right?

26:17Like people pay their mobile bill before they pay rent. It's 12 transactions per year that you have. It's a service that you use every second of every day, basically. And then there is another component. carriers never wanted to finance phones. They've become reluctant financiers of phones 30 years ago because that was the only way to sell you a subscription. They don't want that business. They want to get rid of it. Banks, on the other hand, they want incremental business lines with their customers. So they want that additional loan. They want that additional touchpoint with their customer. So ultimately, they were not able to do it because they couldn't sell a subscription alongside with a phone.

26:59Now, for the first time, they can do both. They can sell you the phone and the subscription in a bundle. They can add other loyalty mechanisms from their ecosystem. For Cash App, for example, you get Cash App Green for free if you're a subscriber. Like Revolut in the UK, you can pay with RevPoints. You can pay your phone bill with RevPoints now. So these make it unique. So structurally, a bank will be in a much better position to serve your telecom needs. than a carrier actually can. Because they have other things to offer you and because for them, this is a compounding portfolio product versus a singular touch fund.

27:38That makes a lot of sense. And do you find the offering is any different? Like, for example, I'm thinking in terms of, you know, the credit card that I have from Wealthsimple has no foreign exchange, you know, fees or whatever. So it becomes a more global credit card, which I think is a pretty common offering for these guys. Are you seeing the same things in plans where it's like you can use it from anywhere in the world? or are the terms of the plans pretty similar to what you would get from AT &T, T-Mobile directly? So most of our customers offer highly competitive to high-value phone plans.

28:09For example, the plans we have with Revolut in the UK, it's arguably the best phone plan in the UK. You have unlimited data in the UK on the best network there. you have very generous allowance of roaming data in the EU which the UK typically doesn't have anymore since they exited and you have a quite generous allowance of global roaming as well with the messaging pass and that all comes pre-bundled in a highly affordable price and that's something we were able to structure because we control both the roaming setup we control the local setup and Revolut is then able to plug in their ecosystem to give it more advantages.

28:56There's a VPN included and other features as well. In the US, Cash App has one of the most attractive plans in the US. It's the very first truly unlimited plan in the US and it's a plan that also has roaming allowances. And that's something every one of our customers can decide to package anywhere they want depending on what they're trying to do and what they're trying to achieve for the phone plan. Amazing. Well, I hope Walt Simple brings it to Canada. Let's jump to the kind of second part here, the final part where we go deep in tactical in a couple areas. The first one actually, I think is a good segue here, is building and crafting a narrative, a vision, that helps you get customers on board, right?

29:39Give big partnerships, especially with enterprise. And it helps you get VCs and investors on board, which for something like this, I mean, there's some companies where it's like, oh, just bootstrap, you know, whatever. at some point, you get big enough and Pete comes in or big VCs come in and you can just get yourself there. But there's other companies where you're going to need to raise real capital just to kind of get going. I think this is a bit more of the latter. You know, anyways, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but tell me a little bit about how you went out and crafted the story, crafted the vision, especially as you're fundraising.

30:07I'm thinking of the seed round, right, which was in 21 or the series A in 22, like especially when things were early and not clearly visible. How did you think about the storytelling aspect of it all? Yeah, so we were aware or quite early on that what we want to build is built on like a 15 plus year trajectory. Like you don't go out and build it in six months and then like you just put more money into it to scale sales. So we needed to sequence what we want to build because it would be otherwise impossible to do. And like the very first product we built was the API. And then the next step for us was to very heavily go after distribution.

30:48So once we had the product, we knew it's basically a land grab moment in the industry to onboard the largest consumer and enterprise platforms in the world to just seize distribution into tech for telecom. And that gives us a very healthy surface. We have over a billion people now on the other end of our customers. It doesn't mean we have a billion lines. it doesn't even mean we're actively visible to a billion people, but we have integrations into platforms that have it. That allows us to now go and start selling into these user bases way more aggressively. That in turn buys us more volume on the networks, allows us to integrate more networks, scale into new countries, and kind of create this flywheel of distribution means more volume, more volume means better pricing, more integrations, and we can scale with our customers throughout the globe.

31:47So that is a multi-year sequence that we needed to create in order to build a platform that has this type of complexity. Yeah, so I think that's the high level in terms of what you needed to do. Imagine I'm a founder, I'm thinking about raising a C, raising an A, and what I'm struggling with, the business is a business, it's doing what it's doing. What I'm struggling with is is creating a narrative and telling it in a way that VCs want to come along for the ride. I mean, I've met so many founders, and I can tell you there is a big delta between, like you have the founder as the operator, and then you have the founder as the fundraiser or storyteller.

32:24And some are great at both, but many founders are great at operating. They know exactly what to do with the business. They know how to close customers. And then when it's like, okay, cool, go tell a great story, they just fumble. They can't do it. They can't get themselves in the minds of an investor and so on. Obviously, you've been able to raise, you've raised over$90 million. and like I said I think this is a side of business where you had to tell you always had to have a story that was ahead of the business because just it's a 15 year journey as you said so I'm curious you know if you're talking to a founder and you think back to raising your seed or your A what are some of the kind of the pieces of advice that you can share how you went about thinking of how to craft this so that VCs you know nod along and want to invest.

33:00You need to have a big vision like so a good way to explain is like you need to be able to tell like your three, six, 12 month horizon with like incredible detail and like you need to understand what needs to happen imminently. And then you to paint a much larger arc and vision in the back of like, what could this be if we do the things right that are just in front of us? That's one thing. Like you kind of need to have this like bifocal type of storytelling. And what was that? That second one, like if you had to tell me in 30 seconds, if everything goes right, here's what we become. What does that look like?

33:36So you basically, you imagine like if we execute this to its full ability, what is the end state going to be? Like what is reality going to look like at the end of this journey? For me personally, there were like two events that helped me understand this. One was an interview I saw about Microsoft founders back in the day. And like there was someone said like that, like the GUI was not, like it was not a given thing. It was debated in the industry if that is going to be the winning interface. But the Microsoft founders just went out and just told everyone it's going to be. So they kind of willed that outcome into reality.

34:19So it's like this kind of Platonian projection, right? Like you just make the world see like how things could be and what they are. And ultimately that becomes reality. And another one was a couple of years ago, I was visiting this original SpaceX headquarters and their founding VP of engineering showed me this video of the Falcon 9 launching and being recaptured. And he said, Elon created this video relatively at the beginning of SpaceX. the video looked exactly how the thing looked like on tv when it finally happened and because what he was trying to sell was just so hard to imagine and considered so impossible that he created this like ultra realistic version of it to just inspire people that that's what it is and like that is what great storytelling is you you show the final outcome like you show the result and you convince people it's it's real i like that what would that look like for uh for gigs so we were lucky in the beginning we had stripe like stripe was our projections like we're building stripe for phone plans like that was the tagline that was the story and that resonated really well and quite early on we had quite a few people from stripe column boards as team members right like they were early at stripe so and they saw the same thing right they're like hey this reminds me a lot of Stripe in its early days and they kind of understood what this should be and what this could be.

35:57The more we progressed, the more this became kind of a real story arc. And it's like only relatively recently where we said, okay, we kind of understand the market more now and there is more depth that we can go into where that started kind of, we can now start telling our own story and our own vision of the world. But for the longest period, we just used another highly successful company that we truly believe is a parallel to what we're building as an example. And that allowed people that don't understand much about telecom to understand, okay, yeah, if they can make this work, the mechanics work a similar way, it's a similarly complex industry, then they will be able to build a massive company.

36:44So just use an existing example. And then jumping to the second kind of tactical piece, which is around selling enterprise. I mean, you're selling some of the largest enterprises in the world. I mean, a lot of these fintechs are multi-billion dollar companies. You had this idea of like enterprise sales is less about salesmanship and more about statesmanship. There's a lot of politics that come into play. I'm thinking if you could think about a given customer that you closed and you don't have to share who it is so that we can go in a lot of detail and walk me through, you know, end to end, how did you go from that name in a list somewhere of a customer you want to add and you finally closing that customer X amount of months later.

37:17Yeah, so I put the team together a couple of weeks ago or like a couple of months ago and I walked through the anatomy of a deal that is typical for us. And I said, it is more about statesmanship than it is about salesmanship because if you want to land an enterprise customer multi-billion or tens of billions of dollars in market cap, what you need to do is you need to convince several layers in that organization that it's a great idea to partner with you many times including the founders or the C-level you need to get the operating team to like you you need to get the developers to like you and ideally it's not you just like one person doing all that ideally your team tackles different people from different layers of that company and does their part, right?

38:13Like the product engineering teams talk to product engineering teams, like our VP of sales talks to their VP of sales or their VP of product. I reach out to the founder and like we got it covered at different altitudes. And that gives us a pretty much 360 degree view on the company and is what has allowed us to win 90 % of deals in the market that we're in. And I think we're probably one of the companies in the world now that works for like largest amount of high profile customers, at least where we're launching businesses together. It's not like someone's using our dev tool and we can put our logo on the website, but it is a real business partnership.

38:55We're launching a new product line. So that has been one of our kind of success recipes. So let's get specific. Like again, let's say that, and now you have more of a brand, so it's a little different, but a few years back when you were still not, I say known, and you had a name on there that, you know, of a bank that you wanted to close. How do you kind of split that up? How do you look at the org chart of that business and decides who to go after, who goes after who, cadence, et cetera? Like, you know, just again, imagine you're thinking of someone, you're talking to a founder who's selling to enterprise, has a product, maybe has a few customers, but they've yet to really crack like a consistent, repeatable enterprise motion.

39:35I'd say one of the other things that has worked really well for us is hire people who came up with the people working at your target customers. We hire a lot of ex-stripes. The stripe mafia is everywhere, right? Like they work in pretty much every company you want to their decision makers there. So if you have someone who can go to 30, 50 % of your target list and they are well known and respected and trusted, everybody's going to take a call. everybody's going to listen and if you're in a competitive process you might have an advantage and trust as well this multi-threading multi-altitude in combination with having people who came up with the people that you want to work with is why we win as many deals as we do and you need to have an amazing product because people are not stupid so I'm assuming that's what the listener will have.

40:34But if you have a great product, have the best product in the market, and do these things, it worked really well for us. Let's say you go in, you have an enterprise, you split it up, you look at different groups that need to be part of it, like you said, C-level, exec level, the owner, the champion, the devs, etc. And then you kind of split it up. How do you go after them? Everybody's just hitting everybody up, trying to set up meetings, or trying to find what conference is going to speak at and run into them. What are some of the specific tactics that you use to just have many of these discussions happening either at once or over a series of months.

41:05Two paths mainly. One, the same argument as before, hire the people who came up with them. So you kind of get your first one or two touch points this way. And then if you're on an enterprise deal, you want to find out very quickly if the guy you're talking to is a lone wolf. Are they trying to just figure things out? Is this like exploratory? So the quicker you ask the team you're working with to introduce other participants in the company, First, you find out if this is real and if this is serious. Second, it allows you to build those connections. And then they introduce it to their engineers, they bring their engineers on board, or if it's engineering originated, they introduce their marketing people, their product people, and then you put them together.

41:51That is definitely a very effective way to find it out. But yeah, it's mostly working the network, really utilizing the network. Who knows whom, and then working internally for them to open up their own teammates. Because it's the best sign. If someone is open to bring their engineers into the call, into the next call, bring their marketers into the next call, you kind of know there's a lot of goodwill there and there is real intention to do something because they don't have resources to waste. Any hacks or tactics? I know people that have dinner series that they'll do and they'll invite these enterprise-type customers or they'll say, oh, I'm just in the area, you know, it'd be great to grapple.

42:34You know, I mean, like these classic kind of little hacks that people tend to do. Anything like that that's worked for you? So we just started to do a dinner series. So we do like, we've now done it in London, New York, Paris. It's relatively new motion for us. And we invite a combination of existing customers, prospects, and people we think might be helpful to everyone from the industry. Could be an investor, could be like a device manufacturer, and we keep them small. We have a couple of gigsters at each of those dinners and we invite between 10 and 14 outsiders. And that has great feedback so far.

43:15I would say it's too young for me to tell this has worked wonders on our go-to-market. Perfect. Well, let's stop it there. What would be one last piece of advice that you want to share with a founder that's in the early stages of finding product market fit? as with everything starting a company just be ready to take a lot of notes but like listen to why right like you also need to iterate but it's it's tough it's especially tough getting started and when you don't have reputation when you don't have references it is just you it's going to be your sales craft your conviction you need to believe 100 % like when you talk people need to hear like with every fiber of your being.

43:58You believe in your product and you will do everything you possibly can to satisfy them as a customer because literally your life depends on it. So it's a sheer force of will to get past these initial conversations and do not exit sales to relieve the founder. Like I'm a massive believer in founder-led sales and to a point where maybe others are telling you you shouldn't be doing this anymore. Like do it past that point, but not like forever. But the more you are, like the moment we started exiting processes, like you see entropy creeping and like no one is going to be as convincing and as quick on their feet as a founder.

44:42You kind of need to sell a little bit ahead of time. And no one has the mandate to do it more than the founder, right? You know which risk you're willing to take. You know how far you're going to bend reality on that particular sales call, and it's on you. Your employees, the very good ones, will know how to emulate your bullishness or your boss. But most people won't. And so if you want to achieve the maximum outcome, stay on there as long as you can, and as long as it makes sense for the business, because no one will be a better salesperson than you. Perfect. Well, Herman, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man.

45:21It's been great. So thank you as much for having me.

45:51you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them. Put it on WhatsApp. Put it on Slack. Put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.