YouSaid · the spoken record

Rod Drury

lines on the record
23
first
2016-05-20
most recent
2016-05-20
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

  1. “Seeing it now, we're materially improving productivity at national scale. So being able to tackle some of these big social issues like youth employment using the network of our 600,000 grown to a million very soon customers and letting them at scale deal with some of these big issues is really exciting.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, so what's exciting about Zero Now is we got a whole bunch of sort of 30 and 40 year olds in the business and you're really smart 20 year olds that are really driving the business now so trying to have those people. Like I had this moment I was at the RISE conference in Hong Kong and I'm doing some business development. I'm talking to a whole bunch of people that are in their 20s and 30s and I'm like, I actually just want to go back and have a cup of tea. And you actually need to sort of let that next generation come through and do that work. So really focused on the next layer of talent coming through zero. And we have a really great C team and giving them the same message. Don't want you guys doing work. Work on strategy and let all let the young people do the operational part and gain that experience. And then I think the big thing which I really like is we sort of jump out of bed in the morning because we want better schools and hospitals and small businesses is the biggest contributor to GDP and we have the opportunity and we are”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “What I've always done when I sold a business and I've done four now is I just get so excited I go and start the next one. And hindsight what I should have done was actually taken three or four months off between them. I think that would be. If I look back, there's very few times in your career where you have no email and you don't actually have to do anything. And I've just raced to the next one rather than actually sort of taking the time. The advice I would give is you don't need to do it all in your first few years. I think 20s after building your base experience, 30s you start building your network and maybe you'll start making some money, my late 40s now and it's still hugely fun and a really exciting industry and have no plans to stop.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Always been into RSS, so really was sad when Google Reader broke, so I used Feedly, so I subscribed lots and lots and lots. I still read the Apple stuff quite a bit because it's kind of interesting, but I'm fascinated in a battle between Apple and Google. I think Google's far more interesting at the moment because of the data and machine learning. But the blog I like which sort of summarizes everything is tech meme. I find that's the one that you go to and you'll find all of the important tech stories. And one that's important is I think as an entrepreneur, you build this mental model of what's going on. And if you're reading all that news every day, you see little bits that either prove or disprove part of your model. And then you start building this really good intuition of where the market's going and what's happening and that company's not going to work. So like interesting watching Twitter and Square and those types of companies.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think that a journey starts with the first step. So lots of people have ideas. You've got to make the ideas happen. Ideas are easy. They're free. They just arrive all the time. It's actually taking that step and driving it forward and making things happen, picking up the phone, getting that deal, selling that first deal and actually getting money for it. You have to start the journey.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I just moved to an iPad Pro. I've got the new MacBook 12. I got that when that came out. I haven't pulled it out of my briefcase since I've had the iPad Pro complete game changer. iPad Pro plus Keyboard.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Elon Musk's book because I was just pedal boarding with Ashley Vance who wrote it. You came down to see us in Wellington this week.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And also they also had the global sales channels already in place, which is very difficult to replicate. So I think naturally in the enterprise world, everything consolidated and got acquired by the big global software companies in the internet world, we're seeing companies build for scale from their own country and become truly global companies with truly global financing. So in our situation, we had to do an IPO as the only way to really get funded in our own local market, but that didn't take any options off the table. We got money in from hedge funds from some of the really big investors like Fidelity and Wellington and others like that. And then even lately putting investing money.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I'm not sure if you're at Seinfeld, but I always thought of that there. I always believed in the George Costanza theory of management. Every instinct you have is wrong doing the exact opposite must be right. So we did everything backwards. So, you know, because of the situation we described earlier, we did our IPO first. Then we brought in the hedge funds, who because of the compression in the US market with VCs doing most of the big deals, the hedge fund guys had to go out and find global deals. And then it's only really recently that we've actually brought proper VCs in. And it's been great to have this support of Axel endorsement from them. So I think outside of the US, in the enterprise days, what would normally happen is you build a company up to a certain size and then you sell it to US public company because with the US public companies that were listed, so they had the currency.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So, you see companies that don't get their sales model targeted for scale always drifting up market and the excitement of small businesses, it's this hybrid of a massive amount of complex business software you need to write like an SAP, but you have to do it with great design so it's easy and then you've got to map that with an enterprise sales motion which we do to accountants and then our consumer style sales motion that you do to end businesses using all of the online tools and support does that make sense?”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The cost of customer acquisition, what you have to buy to get leads and all of that conversion gets very, very expensive. So I think the real underlying success in what has made zero different is that in our massive category of small business where we have the application that has the natural channel. And if you look at the sort of the pyramid of large businesses down to millions and millions of small businesses, the market's very strateted. So you have a small number of large companies that spend a million bucks a year on their financials. Then you come down into the mid-market and the mid-market companies like Netweek count their customers in like the 10,000s and where we're at now over 600,000 customers at a very, very small end of town. It's interesting looking at the mid-market where you've got all of the expensive high cost, high touch enterprise selling, but relatively low revenue.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so what's interesting about accounting software in the small business space is the only application with an actual channel. So Salesforce hasn't sold a lot at the very, very small end of town because you can't afford to go and sell to it. Whereas for an accounting software, there's a network of accountants and bookkeepers. So each accounting partner has 300 customers so you can afford to actually go and spend time with them. And then once you have that electronic relationship with them, we've proven with their very healthy 500 company ecosystem once you have connected to zero, it's very easy for them to buy a whole lot of other business applications that connect into the platform. So I think the first one is having that channel and that's why we think accounting is the beach head application. We also do a lot of direct to small business using all of the Google things. But what you find is in the big categories.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “A leader there, we're a leader in the UK, and we've beaten Sage to the cloud, and then it's game on inside the US. The US is a very conservative market, and as we tell everybody, it will take some time, but very pleased with progress compared to a lot of other B2B SaaS companies, we're doing very, very well with customer acquisition. But you just see there's a big prize there, which will play out over the next three years.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, so we think the war is global. All businesses are global. Everything's globalizing. Uber's globalizing. Taxis, Netflix is globalizing TV. WhatsApp is globalizing. Telco, what we see through our customers as many, many small businesses operating cross-border. When we started the business, it seemed kind of daunting going against these large companies, but we actually added more small businesses globally to our brand than added to their brand last year. And they spent $1.2 billion to do it, you know, sponsor football teams in the UK. And sponsoring the Super Bowl, crazy things like that had Oprah speaking at their conference. So in this new kind of age, you can't just spend your way to it. You really need brand authenticity. So we've got 25% of all New Zealand businesses, 10% of all Australian businesses.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Ecosystem, so I'm dealing with founders all the time. They're brilliant at getting things going, and I think the really mature ones understand what they're great at and when the business gets to a certain size, they may need to step aside and have somebody come in who is better at that next stage of growth. But it's interesting in our market, so we compete with three or two, two mainly really large companies, but three companies around the world, SAGE in the UK, MYB in this part of the world, and insure it in the US. And none of those are found to lead companies. And there's very few founder-led companies that are of our size, have the capital, we have a $200 million in the bank, and have the history of operational excellence that we've developed. So what I'm seeing, and I think what's really exciting about Zero, is we still have that very much founder-led culture. And somehow I managed the scale, I've got no idea how.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It really depends. So there's a real shortage of founders with lots of experience. I think one of the benefits of coming from a small place is you don't normally smack it out of the park on your first deal. So you actually end up doing two or three businesses usually before you do things large, even though you always hear the story of the young person that does smack it out of the park and does a huge exit in their 20s. So I'm coming up 50, my next birthday. And so I've done three or four big things. And you just have, I think having sort of training entrepreneurship is a series of baby steps, you are building more and more skills and you learn some great lessons, you build good networks, you have some of your own capital from exits so you can drive the business harder and faster. What I know is that most people are fundamentally flawed in a few ways. So the magic is trying to get a complementary team that really works together. And some founders I see, you know, we've got 500 small companies in our”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think because we did an IPO early on, I was never working in the operating part of the business. I mean, I was selling the business right from day one, selling the story, working with the bankers. So right from day one, I had to put that leadership team in place. And what I found over the various businesses that I've done is that you really want diversity in that leadership team.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “To take data that's sitting on individual small business computers is not worth much, you know, which isn't really of value and it's just broken up sitting on PCs. But if you bring that into a centrally managed store, firstly accounting is the killer app for small businesses. All their bank accounts are smart ones have business advisors and they all have to have a relationship with the tax ban. So it's the functionality they all kind of need to have. But also if you've got all of that data in your cloud environment, you can do some really amazing things with it to make business better for those small businesses and improve productivity at scale. So in the last 12 months, we process over $300 billion of transactions and already we have over 600,000 paying customers. We're just passing 200 million annualized run rate. So we told a big story and thank goodness it's all worked out otherwise we probably have to move to Mexico.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “The key thing was the track record of the team. I was involved with TradeMe, which was New Zealand's version of eBay, and we'd sold that recently for half a billion US dollars. So we'd seen some really big money starting to flow through, and people were starting to be hungry for tech because I'd done a number of successful startups and had a pretty good profile and a good business reputation. We were able to have the credibility to sort of tell the story. And the story was that if you look at market sizes, consumers are the biggest market. No one really likes to pay for anything. We've seen a lot of computing focus on the enterprise space. But the biggest market after consumer must be small business who spend trillions of dollars. And there was really no cloud company in that space. So we knew the prize was huge. We told the story of it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “We had a build success. We had really good business reputations, we were able to build up a business plan basically bank our reputations and go public from day one. So we raised $15 million at a $55 million valuation, which some people thought was crazy, but now even in this depressed, crazy market time, in a short time, our companies worth over $2 billion.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “New Zealand back sort of 10 years ago and before there really wasn't a sophisticated venture capital market so probably the largest deal done had been maybe two to three million and there wasn't a lot following on. So when I sold my last we had about 23 staff and when I started planning zero we realized we need about 50 staff from day one. So that's like half a million bucks a month. So we need to build a product, you know, sell all those things. It was sort of $15 million. So it was way out of the sort of funding which had happened in our part of the world. But what we had seen was a few other companies who was vodka brand called 42 Below which told a great story on the stock exchange and managed to float. They had actually sold to the cardi after about two years. A pretty good return. So what we saw was because”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “South Pacific, that you could actually build things with your brain that would sell overnight. So we started a little software development team and then build file server, client server apps, and then we peeled out, started our own company, and I've probably done four or five startups now. And I guess the magic moment with zero was realizing all of the innovation that was happening on the consumer internet, with his app and anyone can just sort of sign on. But having built hundreds of business apps, being able to use that technology to just get technology out to really millions and millions of small businesses, we just thought that would be a huge opportunity.”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, sure, so I was at Arthur Young before the merger that became EY at school I got to see the magic of computing with Apple II computers and when I was a young sort of IT consultant there were some really neat technologies coming out that was back when sort of Microsoft Windows first started and really the game changing tool for me was Microsoft Access which meant that we could take the results of business analysis and actually build applications out of multiple people could use. So they started playing with that at Arthur Young and then we ended up building our own little software development team. We were doing lots of financial implementations and I'd always sort of been reading the Silicon Valley books about how IBM and HP Apple Microsoft how all of those sort of companies started and I was just fascinated I think coming from a small country a small set of rocks”

    2016-05-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Xero's Rod Drury on IPO on Day 1 To Hedge Fund to VC & Doing Startups Backward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source