YouSaid · the spoken record

Rania Succar

lines on the record: 86
first: 2024-04-01
most recent: 2024-04-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I'll tell you, this is an incredibly exciting time and space. I've never seen the pace of innovation be faster than it is today, and it's been pretty rapid in my Know time and technology. And so it's incredible with generative AI. Every time you open the Mailchimp app, you will see new generative AI capabilities and where we are today is very different than where we were in September in terms of what we're able to do and what's happening. And so if I answer your question, when will that be? I think it's every month we're going to move dramatically closer to that outcome.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will leverage in house build capabilities and then partner capabilities to be able to deliver an end to end campaign for businesses, including who you should target, what you should say to them, what the message should be, whether it's a video or an image or text or combination of all those things. Our vision is to deliver against all of that.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. We're betting on the ability to leverage AI to craft the right message that's going to drive the best performance outcomes in the industry and then to be able to look across all the different channels to figure out what's going to perform best and craft a strategy for a business that way.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That last turn will identify what the right platform is at the right time. That seems like one, an increasing amount of complexity, but two, the thing that you're actually betting on, right? It's not open versus closed for you.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes back to the discussion we had earlier, which is Way we think about power and growth for small businesses, which is our focus. We ensure that they build a connected view of their end customers, which is extremely hard to do. Today they're very far from able to doing that. And then once we have depth of understanding on their end customers, we're able to help them craft the right message to reach their customers in the right place at the right time. And so that means that we need to be able to reach their customers in all sorts of different places, across social media platforms, paid media platforms, email, WhatsApp, messaging, Discord, different platforms overall. And so we're going to continue to build the ability to reach customers everywhere and customers everywhere. Our secret sauce is that we've built the depth of understanding of their end customers and then can help them craft the right message at the right time and identify what the right platform is and ensure that regardless of the dynamics that will continue to happen on all of these end platforms.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Building a business on email is a thing you can do and you can run a business for 20 years on it and no one can take email away, right? Like building a business on Facebook, a bunch of media companies try to do that and Facebook took their businesses away. Right now 170 million Americans who have built communities and businesses on TikTok are looking at that potentially going away. People who have built businesses on the web are never under pressure like that. So there's a yin and a yang and the audiences seem to have vastly preferred the closed platforms, but the stability is in the open platforms. And I think you're right at the center of that tension. I'm just wondering how you're thinking about that.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, therefore, they need to come to a platform like MailChimp where they can build the logic and knowledge about their customers end to end, and they own the customer data and therefore are able to take advantage of it.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a couple of things. First of all, many small businesses today are not doing paid advertising because it's overwhelming and confusing and hard for them to do it. So it's one of the areas where the big Tech platforms have struggled to break in. And that's an area where through partnership, we can help them break in because we have the relationships with these very small businesses and we have unique proprietary data where we could help them execute against these campaigns effectively. So that's one area of opportunity. Secondly, it's harder for these businesses to be able to manage their entire customer base on these platforms because they often don't own the customer relationship one-to-one and don't have all the data about their customer in one place”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm asking it this way because it feels like the email providers, right, that you're sending to they're predictable. You can model deliverability and impacts on deliverability. I think if Yahoo or Microsoft or Google or whatever big email service provider decided to start screwing with people's email, there'd be more of an outcry than not, right? That feels like a neutral inbox. The other platforms are anything but, right? They are marketing platforms unto themselves. That is where the big direct-to-consumer companies built their businesses in the beginning. And I think they would like to eat more of your market, right? To say, okay, we are the place where you're going to understand your customer. And that feels like a much more open competition than not, but you're saying you can still somehow address those platforms.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, we do have some direct connections where you can update an audience in Facebook, for example, based on the tooling that's available in MailChimp. And you can also schedule some messages you want to post in different places for Mailchimp.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can inform who you're targeting on those platforms based on what you're learning about your audience in MailChimp, which is your central customer data platform. You can segment your audiences in MailChimp and who you want to reach and then use that to get that messaging out to those other platforms. So you can do it that way.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're certainly focused on reaching our customers' audiences wherever they are. If we want to be the central growth platform where they're Managing all their growth activities through us, they need to start with MailChimp and the Intuit ecosystem more generally, bring all their customer data and use it as the source, their customer data platform where all their data is coming in, getting enriched, where we're understanding their customers better than they ever could or they could anywhere else. Can you import?”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've talked about email as being an alternative to social platforms throughout this conversation, but you go out to a restaurant now and there menus are just on Instagram. And they're maybe not updating their website so much. And they're maybe not asking for your email to email you discounts. There are lots of businesses now, small business TikTok is one of my favorite stories we've ever done at the Verge. Just guys with pressure washers, building businesses on TikTok. Do you think about ways to address those platforms as well? Because that's where so many audiences, particularly young audiences, are you focused on email, the web, small business stuff?”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's certainly overlapping areas in a lot of tech companies in terms of areas they're playing in and opportunities to partner. That's certainly the case across the board in so many of these tech spaces. I would say we have a pretty unique place in this ecosystem as intuit because of our relationship with small businesses and the depth of the relationship with small businesses and the number of things we do, whether it's accounting or payments or access to capital or some of the advice and expertise we're providing. So in general, we find there's a lot of appetite from tech partners to want to work and partner with us and build accretive solutions together. And they can see a world where this can really work. There's so many things we can do with each of these partners that we're uniquely positioned to do in partnership with them.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's your text box. That's just your text box. It's very challenging. That's just yours. Now you've got to send the email. You've got to make sure it's deliverable to a bunch of other people's input systems that might filter or otherwise adjudicate the content of your email. And like you said, you talk to all those tech partners all the time. But some of them are also your competitors, right? I think Google thinks of itself as in service to people who would like to buy advertising, increase their businesses. Does that feel like a competition? Does that feel like cooperation? Does that feel like they're trustworthy? I'm picking on Google, but you could name a hundred different companies that sit between you and the actual recipient of an email.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've had several topics we look at that relate to content moderation, and these are sensitive, and so we spend a lot of time deliberating over them and making the right call. And this is one where you've got to go back to your policies and principles and use multi-levels of judgment and decisions and then make a decision and then just continue to evaluate it over time.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would depend on the content being generated on the platform, and it would come back to looking at the guidelines we have in place. And when the situations are trickier, we spend a lot of time deliberating those decisions to get to the right decision and revisiting and learning as we go.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comes back to our acceptable use policy. We work to just ensure that there's no harmful content on the platform or hate speech on the platform. So we just stick to the guidelines we have and ensure that all the messaging coming out of the platform are consistent with that.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take the security side really seriously across into it. That's an area where we've had to build some of the industry's most powerful security mechanisms because our customers entrust us with really sensitive data across all intuit properties. So it's an area where we've built a lot of capability and strength. And we brought that to MailChimp. It wasn't part of MailChimp in the earlier days of the acquisition. And since then, we've bolstered all the security settings with the capabilities from across Intuit. And so that's how we think about it. We take it extremely seriously. We have some of the world's most sophisticated algorithms here, as well as a human monitoring team that's constantly staying ahead of it. Fraudsters are constantly coming back. And so this is something we've invested quite heavily in over time and have very strong safeguards to always stay one step ahead. But it's an area you have to constantly stay on your toes with. And I learned that from my time.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's businesses like gambling and crypto and things like that historically that have had lower deliverability rates and the things that we've looked at.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have specific examples to share, but it's what I always push on. You know, when we started with AI, for example, in generative AI, we opened it up to a small handful of industries to start where we felt confident that the content would be produced, wouldn't be sensitive. And we wouldn't worry as much about the nature of the content that was produced. And as we became more and more confident about our content moderation associated with AI and what we could do with the automated models and then the human in the loop, we opened it up further and further. So we're constantly looking to refine our policies to be able to let as many industries onto the platform and to make decisions in an automated way.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something we evaluate all the time and update it all the time based on data we're seeing, and as our models get better, we look at that as well, where we can pull out an individual actor versus a more blunt instrument.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so we think about it that way. And certainly, we need to maintain our deliverability rates as high because that's one of the top reasons businesses choose us as a platform. And that's one of the top value propositions we provide. Also, I would say to your point on models, this is an area where it's important for models to help you be as precise as possible. And I learned this when I led the fraud and risk team at Intuit. You want to protect against bad actors, but you want the models to help you not make false positive decisions so that you can be as precise as possible. And that's where technology can really help you be effective. So as a business leader, you say, yes, in principle, we shouldn't allow businesses that demonstrate low deliverability to be on the platform, but how do we use the best technology in the industry to identify those so we reduce the false positive rate?”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's consistent with our values as well because oftentimes that's associated with spam or fraudulent activities or things like that. And so because low deliverability is also associated with more concerns being raised about those emails. And yes, so if it's going to lead to low deliverability rates, we don't want them on our platform”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have an acceptable use policy. That is very clear and is adjusted all the time. And yes, we have things that we allow people to do on Mailchimp and things that we don't. It's focused on achieving several things. One is ensuring that we can continue to achieve a high deliverability rate. And that's important because as our deliverability rate stays high, that allows us to support our ecosystem effectively. So industries that may be prone to lower deliverability rates may not be able to use the platform.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We spend a lot of time with all of our major tech partners, as you can imagine, the ecosystem strong, and we build deep relationships with them and talk about the possibilities to innovate together and what that could look like. But yeah, there's lots of conversations that happen both around innovation and also just building solutions together so they can work for our customers.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know we think about this in the context of deliverability and making sure that we can provide our customers the highest deliverability rates in the industry so that we are actually able to deliver their messages and get them into the inbox. So we think a lot about our algorithm that way. And then we do increasingly think about the end platforms that they're consuming that information in and staying ahead of the changes that they're making to those platforms and making sure that we can be surfaced there. So we do think a lot about that. But again, we're thinking a lot more broadly than email. And it's increasingly disparate in terms of where consumers and Gen Z are spending their time. And as we build MailChimp and the broader intuit small business ecosystem to be this growth engine for small businesses, we need to make sure that we can have a multi-channel approach where we can reach customers and we're not impacted by the decisions that one platform makes.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can see as you just shop online, retailers are sort of desperate to get a hold of your direct contact information. They will lower their prices substantially. They're like, we'll just take a 25% haircut to get your direct contact information on this first purchase because now you're much more likely to buy from us again. And I think that's a function of that being the most direct distribution mechanism on the internet compared to, I don't know, Facebook ads or TikTok ads or whatever algorithmic media people might be consuming. There is still one algorithm between most people in an email marketer, right? It's Gmail. Like Gmail exists. It is filtered political campaigns, wage war against Google around that filtering. Like it is just as contentious a content moderation system and algorithm as anything else, even if it might not be at the forefront all the time. How do you think about that relationship? Do you feel email is controlled or monopolized in the way that some of”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, as a consumer, our inboxes are exploding for sure. But it's so delightful when you find that message that hits you at the right moment and the right time, whether you're the type of person who wants to get an SMS at the right moment when you happen to be holding your phone or you're in social media and you get the right message or in your inbox. I've been delighted in recent weeks as I find something pop to the top with a subject line that gets my attention and the product is exactly what I want. So it's about getting through the noise and the clutter and having the right tool that will allow you to do that. And we talked earlier about the fact that consumers are busy. They're inundated with messages. They're increasingly across different channels. Everything we're talking about reinforces how hard it is for a marketer to break through and therefore needing a solution that can help them do it. And the power of AI can play a massive role here. It's going to be a total game changer.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I look at it as a marketer never in undating customers with emails they're not going to love because You won't then send a generic email to your entire base. It doesn't mean you're going to send more emails or SMS messages or find them more in social media and other places. Instead, you're going to send them the right message at the right time that's going to be highly personalized and relevant. And so on the marketer side, I think you're actually going to be a lot more efficient and likely send fewer emails that are a lot more powerful or fewer content pieces to your customers to try to get them to convert. On the consumer side, I think that's great. If AI's helping me as a consumer really identify what marketing messages are going to be most effective for me, what's going to delight me in that moment with a surprise on something I may not have been shopping for or exactly what I'm shopping for right now and help me sift through that. Great. But marketers are going to be in a great position to figure out how to get those top messages to customers if they're using the AI tools that can differentiate them in that space. So I'm very excited by the possibilities.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's my worry, and this is my existential question by email. That is an enormous step change in the amount of email that will be generated. We're just going to send more emails to more people. And on the other end of it, they're going to have their AI respond to that email or filter that email. I'm looking at my inbox today and it is a wasteland of obviously AI generated emails. Like I can feel the difference. And there's a part of me that says, all right, I'm just going to, I'm going to get an AI and just let that let it deal with it. And suddenly the entire email ecosystem feels like a bunch of robots talking to each other while the human beings are all in Slack. Does that feel like a Doom loop? How do we break out of that outcome?”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Segmentation is a concept of the past, though, because with AI, you can hyper personalize. You don't have to group people together anymore. You can write a single message to that individual. And so if you're not using AI to generate the content, you're never going to be able to personalize at scale. You'd have to write very large number of emails to be able to do that and people won't achieve that. And so every marketer needs to be using AI now and over time in order to be able to achieve those revenue outcomes.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Segmentation. Segmentation is all about finding clusters of people with similar behavior and similar demographic characteristics that are going to behave in the same way so that you can send them a different message that's customized for them, that's going to allow you to personalize the message and increase the likelihood of responding. I have young children, a five and a two-year-old, so I'm going to more likely, or they're now older, a six and a four-year-old, and they're more like, I'm more likely to open an email from a clothing company because I'm looking for efficiency that's showing me content for them than if it's not personalized and it's more generic. And so that type of personalization drives much higher outcomes than if it's not personalized.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think about our customers that we serve. When a business has fewer than six employees, it tends to be the business owner who's writing the marketing and doing that. So that's the marketer. When you grow to more than six employees, the next employee tends to be their marketing director. And then over time, it becomes a department of six people. So we can think about it that way. The next word you wanted me to decode was”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you think about it as a continuum, but I absolutely it's not the case today where my personal emails I'm using AI to send end to end or work emails, but I do see a world where that's very possible. From a marketer's perspective, let's The implications of not using AI is a lot of revenue is left on the table because marketers today are not using segmentation as much as they should because it's hard without AI to recognize what segments you should be using. And as a result, they're sending this”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we're all very busy. And if you even look at the predictive tools in Google, how much better they've gotten over time as they learn from the user and the voice and tone, it gets much better in order for you to feel comfortable using them, several things have to be true. One, it needs to be consistent with your voice and tone. And oftentimes the early generation of these solutions are not. And therefore, we don't feel comfortable using them. The promise is for players that are able to do that and personalize it in your voice and tone, then there is a lot of potential for that AI to help you be more efficient. So I absolutely would. I'm looking for efficiency gains all over my life. And you can also think about it as the assisted version versus the do-it-for-me version. And so even just the assisted version where it finishes and completes your sentence, that saves a lot of time, especially on a mobile phone. It's incredibly helpful.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually an important point. I think a lot of the early generation AI tools that are out in the market are still pretty superficial. And in the early innings of their ability to provide value, I think that creates a lot of room for companies that are very serious about it and then have unique amounts of data and very large customer bases to experiment and learn with to really differentiate themselves. So it's interesting to see a year in how some of these tools that had a lot of promise, how few of them have actually been able to realize all the promise yet.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know by the way, we are not an email company, we are a growth company, and we focus on. Message at the right time to the user and therefore think about all the channels that are possible to reach.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spend all my day in Slack I love flax. I love phone calls. So that's where I spend a lot of time. But, you know, we use email I spend a lot of time on Slack.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I raised it when I came in as a conversation I'd heard from across our teams and our engineering teams in particular around there are many parts of the MailChimp app that are no longer corridor focused, tiny letter was one of them. And so the conversation was not about Tiny Letter. It was about how do we shut down things more efficiently so we can increase the velocity of the way we're operating and running as a business. And so it was part of a set of things we were looking at shutting down to focus. And so we made a decision about the need to prioritize that because often teams are so focused on innovation they don't focus on those things, but that's one of the keys to velocity. You need to slow down and do that work to accelerate your ability to innovate. And so we made the decision in that context.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is one of the easier decisions we've ever made. We basically looked at it from a perspective of we've got clarity on the customer problem we're solving, which is, as I said, helping small businesses grow. And we need to make sure that our technology is as efficient as possible when you're maintaining parts of the tech stack that are no longer core to what you're delivering for customers, your technology becomes pretty clunky. And so we look at that over time to say what was something that was important in the past that's no longer important to the mission or was not successful. You see that all the time as you do innovation and startups. You launch things that may no longer be successful years later. And you need to be efficient in shutting those things down so you can focus on the core and create efficiency for your engineers. So this decision was not one of those that was a challenging one to make.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walked me through that decision to shut down Tiny Letter, right? You're entirely focused on small and medium sized businesses. Tiny letter was not that. You've got this thing. It was an acquisition. People were really excited when MailChimp acquired it because they thought that meant it would be stable. You've got to make the call. Walk me through how you made that decision.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focus is so incredibly important, as you said. It's so important because you need to hone in your resources to innovate in a way that only you can and create true differentiation. And for us, we've got clarity on the problem we're trying to solve. We're trying to increase the success rate of small businesses. Everything we do is focused on that. And in the domain of MailChimp, it's all about helping them find new customers and grow existing customers. And to do that, we need to strengthen our email product and to broaden that out in a way where we can solve the problem in a way it's not solved in the industry today. And that's the reason we've chosen to focus there. It's just having clarity on the problem we're solving and our unique capabilities and opportunity to solve it in a way that no one else can.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is great because it seems like the projected intuition is more focused. And I think most big tech companies, most tech companies are in a period of increasing focus. And that focus comes at the cost of potentially some market opportunities. So we start off by saying email is forever. It is hot right now in various ways, which is interesting, I think, is the algorithmic media kind of gets unpredictable and expensive email seems consistent and stable and predictable. I look at it from my perspective as somebody in the media and say, okay, there's substack and ghost and beehive and all these things that are growing. That's where the action immedia is. And MailChimp is walking away from that. You all shut down tiny letter. You used to be in that space and you aren't. I had the CEO of Substack on the show. I was like, is MailChimp your competitor? And he's like, no, I don't think so. Why are you not in that space? Why focus on the enterprise space and not this other thing that seems to be growing?”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you have to recognize the categories where you have more confidence. But I often will take a risk like I did with that checking account example, where I'm not sure how it's going to work. And I take a risk, even if I don't have that intuition, and I see what happens. And I'm always staying close to the learnings across the way and willing to pivot as we go. But you take a risk and you note that you're taking a risk so that you can record the outcome at the end and add it to your intuition. So I'm constantly trying to build this library of learning. And I've been reflecting in the last several months about how valuable it is to have these failures in your playbook too because you learned so much from those. And I think about micro failures every day that you course correct and grow from as you grow.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's in different levels of experience. I'll highlight the point of I love the opportunity to learn every day. And so it grows over time. I've learned so much in this MailChimp context that I could have never read by reading a book because you have to get in there and make a mistake and learn from that mistake. I couldn't be more proud of the opportunity I have to make mistakes almost every day because you learn so much and you build that intuition and then that becomes.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the way I think about it is I always try to have the worst ideas in the room so people can tell me that my ideas are bad and then that creates the freedom for everyone else to have bad ideas. Hopefully it ultimately have a good idea. Let me poke at something a little bit more strongly though. You mentioned intuition is the first thing, right? You trust your intuition. It takes a long time for people to trust their intuition. When did that click for you?”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A huge part of how I operate. How I've changed in making decisions over time, I think I've leaned in more to pulling out the voices of people who might think about things differently. I have a very strong voice in the room and I need to create space for other voices because that's when you get really powerful decisions, when people pressure test them in a very strong way and someone feels comfortable saying, actually, I think about it differently and here's how we should think about it. And so not only has that translated into making decisions quickly, which is important for velocity, but increasing the number of decisions that are made with that precision to make it an even more powerful decision.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it includes a combination of many things. One is building intuition over time. So the intuition comes from being close to our customers, being close to data. So that's the first piece. It's the intuition of having made lots of decisions over time and then watched other decisions get made. When I watch other leaders make big decisions that involve courage, I take a note of them to see how they're going to play out so that I can reference them later. So that's another piece of how I think about things. So the first thing is intuition. The second is surrounding myself with different perspectives as I go into a decision so I can really bring a group of experts together and ask questions. So I moderate a discussion and I say, well, how might you think about this? And really create space for the divergent views to be shared. So that's another piece of how I think about making decisions. And the third is I have a bias for action and making decisions fast and then learning really quickly after the decision so we can learn from it and pivot as needed.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First chunk looks like a lot of it's go to market. It is everything from sales and onboarding and account management. So there's a lot there. And then in partnerships, channel partnerships, technology partnerships. So it's that. And then, of course, this is all done with the approach we take across intuit, which is technology powered go-to-market teams. So we invest from an AI perspective, not only on customer-facing AI, but human assisted supporting AI. That's been a big part of the virtual expert platform I talked to you about earlier where our experts or our sellers or our account managers have access to really powerful AI to enable them to do differentiated things with our customers as they spend time with them.”
2024-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar on culture, acquisitions, and how big 'small business' really is · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT