Ditching Traditional SaaS Playbooks with Sri Ganesan, CEO of Rocketlane

Dan Balcauski interviews Sri Ganesan, the co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane. They discuss the founding journey of Rocketlane, a top-rated platform for customer onboarding and implementation. Sri shares his background, from his early interest in math and coding to scaling FreshWorks following the acquisition of his first startup, Konotor. They explore the challenges and strategies of expanding Rocketlane's market reach from customer onboarding to professional services automation (PSA), the benefits of in-person sales engagements, and the importance of having a motivated and passionate team. Sri highlights the significance of hiring well and focusing on product development and marketing growth. This episode offers deep insights into strategic scaling and category creation in the B2B SaaS industry.

00:30 Meet Sri Ganesan: Journey from Konotor to Rocketlane
04:07 The Evolution of Rocketlane
05:35 Challenges and Surprises in Scaling
09:50 Navigating Market Categories
19:05 Building Category Leadership
22:25 The Aggressive Approach to Marketing and Product Development
23:24 Challenges in Adopting Non-Lean Strategies
24:20 Leveraging International Talent for Growth
26:12 Scaling and Building a Global Team
28:06 The Importance of In-Person Meetings
34:39 Hiring Company Builders

Guest Links
https://rocketlane.com
sri@rocketlane.com
https://x.com/@srikrishnang

Transcript

dan-balcauski 0:20

Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up, B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to speak with Sri Ganesan. Sri is the co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane, the number one rated platform on G two for customer onboarding and implementation before Rocketlane. He built and sold his first company Konotor to FreshWorks, where he helped them scale from 18 to over 200 million in a RR. SRI has demonstrated his passion for customer experience at community building by founding two of the leading communities in the customer success space and hosting an annual industry conference that's now in its third year. Let's dive in. Welcome Sri to SaaS Scaling Secrets.

sri-ganesan 0:57

Thanks for having me on the show today, Dan.

dan-balcauski 1:01

I'm very excited for our conversation today, Sri. I'm sure our audience will learn a lot from you. I wanna learn a little bit about you and your background. Going back, let's just say if an observer was looking at, say, teenage tree from 13 to 18, would we have observed anything interesting or different?

sri-ganesan 1:24

You would've seen someone who was. Deeply into math and coding and very different. Today, my, my team probably sees me less as a techie, more as like a marketing and sales guy, though I think at heart, I'm still like a techie.

dan-balcauski 1:44

I I resonate with that. Well look, we all have these moments in our journeys. I like to think of 'em as a superhero transformation moment where you are Peter Parker, high school student. You get bit by a radioactive spider the next day you wake up and your Spiderman. What moment has that been for you and your journey?

sri-ganesan 2:04

Well, I think I don't think it was one moment. In a way I feel something that happened gradually with new realizations that came with me, right? So I think I always thought, I enjoy creating and, coding was part of creating. But creating what has evolved over time. Initially it was like, Hey, I want to create products. I, from coding went into product management, right? And my f initial part of my career was in product management. But then I realized that it was also creating culture, creating a company that was of interest to me. So I was in a startup first employee in India for like a very small. Startup and over there, hiring people, finding the right office space, setting the right culture, all of that is something that I enjoyed. And then, when I started my first startup with my co-founders, again, a journey that we really enjoyed, creating the company, creating the culture then going into FreshWorks and helping FreshWorks build. And, I won't take credit for 18 to two 20 million by the way. I was part of the journey. I learned a lot in the journey. But definitely helped craft version 2.0 3.0 of the culture at FreshWorks because we looked at culture also as a product over there. And then coming into Rocketlane and building a company again with a new set of people learning a lot in this journey. Right? So I think it's been a fun ride and we've figured out pieces along the way of. What we enjoy doing. And in a way, the transformation's also been sometimes forced because among the three of us, two of us were product managers. So for me to move from product into marketing and sales was more in nature, more function of saying, Hey, who is better at product? Okay, Ignia the better product manager. Let me figure out and learn the other stuff.

dan-balcauski 4:00

Oh, I love that. A constant journey of creation. But then also applying that to different areas and learning along the way. I wanna shift to Rocketlane to set the context. Can you give folks just a 32nd kinda elevator pitch of what Rocketlane is?

sri-ganesan 4:15

Yeah, sure. So if you're a services company or a services team that runs. Projects with clients. If you're essentially delivering project based services, then you need a way to collaboratively execute with the customer. You also need a way to manage your operations internally. We are all in one for both those sites. On the front end of it, how do you execute with your customers? Hold customers accountable. Have a digital experience around how you're delivering on your project. How do you standardize what you do? Governance around it, all of that. And on the backend of it, the operational part, which is your time tracking, resource management, rate cards, project accounting, invoicing. So whatever needs to happen from a financial side, people side, all of that as well. Right? So we put the two together into one experience.

dan-balcauski 5:11

Perfect. Well, I love that you mentioned in your answer previously that, you didn't wanna take credit for all of FreshWorks journey, but you did, very notable example of success in the SaaS space. And obviously, you had built a company with a Konotor that you guys, you sold to FreshWorks as well. So I'm sure you learned a ton, kind of, observing and on that journey when you were FreshWorks as well, when you were building your first company. I guess as you look at kind of your experience the last several years with Rocketlane. What surprised you that maybe you didn't expect given that previous experience that you'd had at those other companies?

sri-ganesan 5:49

Huh? Good question. I would say. Haven't been totally surprised by anything so far. At the same time it's def definitely, hard, right? Any new journey is hard. I think the biggest contrast I have is probably how and we sort of knew this, entering into what we are doing at Rocketlane, but. Just the how far FreshWorks went with just inbound marketing in terms of just, Google Ads, S-E-M-S-E-O, working for them. I think almost like a 50, 60 million of a RR that was one dominant channel for them versus for us. And we knew this is like a newish category and it's not about search volumes, but how early we've had to go up market, how early we have to go outbound in our engagement is very different. And I think that's one thing that, I wouldn't say surprises, but it's it how hard it is to. Conquer that outbound motion and going up market outbound has been an interesting challenge to overcome.

dan-balcauski 7:01

So, that's interesting. And, is there, I can see kind of, multiple different. Factors or root causes there that may be different between those. And kind of two that popped to mind and obviously this is not exhaustive, but you know, one is, is there somewhat of a hey this go to market playbook of just, paid search or SEO that was, so available before. Like it's somewhat been. Saturated as a channel, and everyone sort of, the natural law is that, click-through rates have risen to their point where everyone's there's no advantage to be had anymore. And maybe there was more of a greenfield. So, so I, wanna know if one you agree, like there may be something there, or is it another thing that popped to mind is, when you're talking about, going up market, right? Is that, kind of a realization or a surprise in terms of like, as you guys were building this product, it actually was more of a fit, and so maybe some of those cha, maybe like channel product fit, if you like, in a way was not kind of what you expected given your experience at FreshWorks. I dunno, could you comment on, on, is it both? Is it either, is it something else?

sri-ganesan 8:08

A little bit of something else in a way I would say there is a. Category, channel fit and for new categories. So we play in two categories. Customer onboarding and professional services, automation. Now professional services automation is a well established category. It'll have some inbound, but the inbound volume is not as high as, let's say, for CRM or help desk and so on, because more people dismiss themselves from the category saying, Hey, maybe it's too complex for me. Maybe I don't need it yet. They don't know that there are simpler modern options like rocket claim. What they've seen in the past is more legacy solutions that are very hard to implement. On the other hand, customer onboarding as a category is a new category. So people don't necessarily even look for solution in that space. It needs evangelizing and that's where, community and other. Mechanisms we've used to sort of build up the category and emerge as the leader in the category have helped us. But it's not conducive to, just growing with inbound.

dan-balcauski 9:16

So, so it's this, part of the evangelization of a category that doesn't necessarily have a latent demand that you're just tapping into, like maybe FreshWorks had available, where people are just like, I'm already in search of a solution. And I know FreshWorks has multiple kind of solution areas now, but you know, obviously there's like a, CRM or accounting software, whatever it might be, right? There's people out there searching every day for that, and you're just sort of trying to Dr. Capture some of that demand for yourself versus, there with where you're at. People aren't necessarily waking up in the morning being like, oh, there's maybe a solution to this problem. So you're having to go out there and educate the market. I see how that could be interesting. I, let's, so let's stick on this idea of a you guys straddling couple categories. I am interested as a growing company, you know what. Signals, I guess, indicated to you that it was sort of time to expand beyond, the initial market category that you were looking at. It's, I think this is, category definition, and do we create a new category? Do we, try to tap into something else, right? There's a whole set of conversations here, but you know, you're also in this position where you're potentially trying to serve two different markets. Tell me a little bit about how, what you were seeing that led you to that realization and that change in direction.

sri-ganesan 10:28

Sure. So I think the first thing I wanna say is even when we raised our first seed round, when we like started the company and said, Hey, here's what we wanna do. If I go back to my deck that I used for investors back then, it actually says our beachhead category is customer onboarding, and the category we will expand into is PSA. So it's not something that we reacted to in the market, but it was always the plan. But what could have changed was probably when we made the transition. So the reason why we took this approach is one is the subset of the other customer onboarding is. Think of it as a less mature subset of professional services automation as a category. It focuses on the project delivery aspect, not necessarily the resource management, the rate cards, the accounting, et cetera, which are needed by more mature teams. And hence, we launched with the subset. We said, Hey, we'll see how far this goes. We'll keep building out what you need for the PSA category. Once we are fully ready with that, we will launch it. If it so happened that there was crazy demand in customer onboarding as a category, if it was a category that was exploding, then maybe we would've spent more time enriching, developing more and more capabilities within that category. But what we did see happen was actually those who started with us in customer and onboarding as a space. The early customers, as they grew, they needed a PSA. So we had to grow with them and deliver on those capabilities. And that anyway pushed us in the direction of launching a PSA, so customers maturing happen. And we also realized within like a couple of years that the bigger deals are actually on the PSA side. So it made natural sense for us as we went up market. That we need to launch as a full fledged PSA. So we continued building out those capabilities. It is the bigger market, so might as well go into that bigger market faster. And we continue to have both because we catch customers as they come into the customer onboarding category, and then we sort of grow them into taking advantage of more of the PSA.

dan-balcauski 12:50

I'm curious on sort of that transition, like, I'm wondering if there's anything that you've learned about. Managing that transition that, maybe if you went back and could give yourself advice, 12, 24 months ago when you were going through this? I may, maybe it was longer. Because like I, I try to think of like, there's always the fight over, what is the hero on the homepage say. Are we the world's best customer onboarding solution or are we the best, best solution for this other category that you're going into? Or, so, does it say something else? Do we try to straddle both? I guess was, has there been any sort of learnings you've had in that transition that you maybe didn't expect kind of going in.

sri-ganesan 13:32

Yeah, I think, professional services, automation as the bigger category for us it made sense to just make that change and say, Hey, we're like a full fledged PSA now, make that launch. A lot of other, friends, entrepreneur friends did reach out and say, Hey, you were number one in this category. I. But now your website says something else. How did you take that hard call? Because if you're winning in a category, how do you disrupt yourself and say, Hey, you're something else Now in our heads, it just made sense because if something is the bigger category than you align with it and make that transition faster. Yes. We still have web pages on. Rocket land.com, you can go and say customer onboarding is a solution type. So there is a larger story. We are not saying, we are not doing onboarding anymore. We are saying, Hey, we are for post-sale teams delivery client project delivery, whether it's onboarding or P-S-A-P-S-A takes more center stage as the larger category. And, onboarding is one of the solutions we offer. That's the approach we've taken. It's worked out well I would say. What would I change about it? I wouldn't say we'd change much about that approach. It is, in a way I think making the hard decision, which I'm happy we made back then,

dan-balcauski 15:00

Well, and when you say the hard decision can you just elaborate on what you mean by that?

sri-ganesan 15:05

I think the easy decision would've been, Hey, we are number one in customer onboarding. Let's keep. Focusing on that. But then if the market isn't moving as fast as we want to grow, then you know, we would've been waiting on the market to happen instead of, Going to where the market already is.

dan-balcauski 15:24

Was there. I guess, in navigating that, that hard decision, I guess, was there, I, could you tell me at all about what the approach was? Because I mean, I mean, the fact that you labeled it a hard decision means that it's, it wasn't obvious on its face. Was this sort of. Like, there's multiple different approaches to strategy. There's sort of, pontificating about what the future will be. There's also a very sort of, data heavy, approach that some people bring to these type of strategic decisions. There's some that's like, we got our board together. We just had a four hour, like, knock down, drag out of like what we sh what we think is the right decision. Like how did you guys approach it there, is there any sort of pearls that would be helpful for folks to understand from how you guys approached it?

sri-ganesan 16:08

Yeah I think board was supportive of whatever decision we made. Board also saw PSA as the larger category from get go, so I think it was just a matter of time. From their perspective. For us though, it was about are we ready? Because PSA has other big players, we are moving from a space where we are number one into a space where there are large incumbents to go after, and they've

dan-balcauski 16:36

Big fish, small pond versus small fish in ocean.

sri-ganesan 16:39

absolutely that that's the way to think of it and. We've branded ourselves around this initial category. We are running a conference in the initial category. We've like run a community in the initial category. Now we need to redo a lot of that as we enter into, and, in, into the broader, larger category. And we need to go up against the Big East. And they've obviously built things over like a decade, and we are like a two and a half year old, three and a half now, four and a half year old company. But we are going up against those, right? And so will our differentiation work in this market? Is it good enough? Is it ready enough to win those bigger deals? Those are all questions we had, and we had to validate them along the way, but we took the bet and made that happen. We saw some signals that people are responding to. What they see as a very differentiated, modern product. And I think in a way we started to define what next gen PSA is. And I keep saying P-S-A-P-S-A is professional social commission, the name of the category, right? So in, in a way we had to have that clear. Here is why a customer should look at next Gen PSA. We actually put out our own version of an RFP for modern PSA so that when someone like a prospect is now thinking about an RFP for software in this space, ours is like the new RFP that should come up. That should help them understand what are the new things they should be looking for in this software so that, it's not an apples to apples comparison with the legacy players anymore. The things that they may get over there that we don't have, because we were still new, let's say two years ago. I'm sure there are features we didn't have that they had, but there were also features we had that they didn't have, and we had to help people see those.

dan-balcauski 18:28

I absolutely love that as a technique of developing your RFP because it can be incredibly effective. Yet it's subtle in all the right ways. This conversation has been valuable for folks. 'cause I think that, it's not quite an easy decision right. As you mentioned. And so, I think that's a very interesting thought process. You went through, you did talk you had a high quality problem as well, sort of embedded in there. And I want to kind of double click on, which was you. You said you were, number one in your first category you even had, whatever friends calling you up being like hey, you're number one. And I think, there's probably a bunch of executives maybe listening to this who are like, I wish I had that problem. How do we have that problem? Like, just thinking about that, even that, that first category, like are there ways that you thought about sort of establishing that leadership off the bat in that first category, like, are there, is there a playbook that you think about,

sri-ganesan 19:17

Yes. In a way, I think when we even started the company we knew the category was young and so there was a chance at being that number one, if we execute well, I actually read this book by Anthony Canada who was the ex CMO of Gainsight. It's called Category Creation, and it's about category creation. And it, I would say almost followed a lot of the things from that book to the t. It was just good ideas of things you had to do to create a category. And so we started doing those right from creating a community, writing a book about the category. Putting together, what would the chapters for a book be putting together, like great thought leadership content podcast, all of that, even before we launched our product. So there was a lot that we did in that first year of building the company. While my co-founders were busy building the product, I was building community, I was building content, I was building the podcast I was building thought leadership in the space. And that helped us when we launched. It already looked like, people would say, looking at your website looks like you've been around for two years, but we had just launched, so how do we look bigger than where we actually are? At every stage of the journey was something we consciously thought about and we looked at, hey, if you're a category leader in a space, you're probably doing these things. You're running like a state of. State of customer onboarding survey annually before we launched our product. We've run the survey, we have the survey results. We have a report that we are launched. So what do mature companies in a space do? Let's start doing that on day one. And in a way, we weren't choosing whether we need to do X or Y or Z. We were saying let's do X, Y, and Z from a marketing perspective. We went all out to build the brand. Build the content in our, within one year of launch of our product, we had the first conference for customer onboarding. The first ever conference in the space. It was a virtual conference, year one, year three. We had a, in-person and virtual conference happen in parallel, but the virtual conference still had 3000 people register. A thousand people attend live. Very engaged, like, people were tuning in for an average of six hours of the conference for a two day conference. And we got so many positive reactions after that. People were like, Hey I had founders of other companies reach out saying, Hey, I don't know what you folks did, but our slack was buzzing with ideas from your conference. And it was great to see those reactions. Great to hear how people loved. The content that we put together, it was very thoughtfully put together. Right? We made sure that every session had actionable ideas that PE people could take away. And these weren't things that they needed to do on rocket limb. They didn't need any tools. These were just ideas that they could bring to life in their companies. So, Yeah I think it was just a lot of passionate execution of a lot of ideas. And the approach there was, let's just do things. Let's not worry about the research yet. I. Just input, keep doing things. We are not measuring, we are not attributing, we are not, deciding whether something was successful or not, but we're just gonna do a lot of things for the year one, year two onwards different.

dan-balcauski 22:42

I, there's so much, you've laid out so many interesting areas. The one thing that really stands out to me there is this whole idea of beginning with the end in mind, like you looked at, like what is the archetype of a category leader in the space? And deconstruct, like, what would you expect them to do? And then that becomes our checklist. And then having just the, aggressiveness to just go after those things and start doing them even, even if you didn't have a product yet. Just putting them in all in place. I'm curious, like, what, in this conversation that seems, I mean, that's amazing. I absolutely love it. Like. Why, what do you think of the constraints? Or like why don't, why isn't that more widely adopted? Like what do you are like, as you kind of look around the software landscape of people trying to, grow at scale, their companies, what do you think are, is holding people back?

sri-ganesan 23:40

Yeah. What I'm describing is on the marketing side, but just to add to it, even on the product side, we didn't like skimp on it. We built a full featured product on day one. In a way, it's a mindset of. I know this is the space I wanna play in. I've done enough research, I have enough confidence in this that I'm not gonna do the whole Lean Startup and MVP, which is the most prevalent way of doing things. That's because you're trying to test first before you go all out. We said, no, we are gonna go all out because we've. Sort of tested and validated in other ways, that gives you a confidence to go and do it. Also we started with some amount of capital and we started with a team. There, there is a location advantage. Our marketing team was based in India, which means we could hire more marketers, any number of more marketers than you typically would if you're. Completely based in the US for the same amount of funding you raised. So, and this is a new phenomenon, maybe 10 years ago you didn't have marketing teams in India that have been there, done that to be able to execute this way. Now you have it. So we use that to our advantage. So I think that approach of not going MVP and the location advantage both helped us execute in this manner, and that's why it's uncommon.

dan-balcauski 25:04

Yeah. So, and no, you're it's interesting because like, if you think about just outsource, or not outsource, but like offshore anything, right? I mean, this is a very US-centric view of the world. I mean, India is well known for a lot of engineering talent, but not necessarily marketing talent. But you know what I think you just said there is that. There has now been repeated successes in that space such that you have people with real experience and have seen, Allah, FreshWorks or others that have kind of been on that journey. I've talked to some other folks from the Zoho space, et cetera. We can kind of, we don't have to rattle off every name but there's enough ones where they've had real global penetration and that is a potentially a blind spot for folks where maybe they only think, maybe they're. Mindset was shaped, in the early two thousands, and the only thing about India as a source of engineering talent and not this marketing talent. And then, yeah, I completely agree with what you said around the, not adopting the lean mindset. Although as I look around, I think. I think a lot of folks are starting to shed the the lean mindset these days. If my Twitter feed is any indication, I think a lot of people are kind of fed up with that way of approaching product development. I'm all for whatever works it seems to have worked for you. I do wanna ask, so you know we're talking about, international talent, based in India, but I know that as well. You have started to work out of the us as well as growing your team here. I'm curious, kind of what are the factors that caused you to as a company to sort of make that decision? And I guess kind of we, we'll start there.

sri-ganesan 26:33

Yeah, I think a couple of factors. One, as we start Scaling, right, the two, two parts to it, one is just you start needing more been there than that talent for the specific journey you're on. So. You do zero to one from one place, one to 10 from one place, but 10 to 20 is different. And how many people have seen that journey right in your ecosystem? Maybe that number is far lesser. And you can, take on leaders who have bring on leaders who have seen those journeys. So, for example, our sales leader now has seen like a eight to 200 journey before. Right. He's also seen a 500 to 800 journey, but that's not relevant for us yet. But the eight to 200 journey is very relevant. Yeah, Yeah,

dan-balcauski 27:24

I wish you the best to get there.

sri-ganesan 27:25

yeah. Likewise, our CMO has seen like much further advanced journeys on the marketing side, on the pipe gen side. Our VPCS has been at LinkedIn and Salesforce and Lucid and so on. So we start needing those. Sort of traits because they've seen the movie before. You don't need to discover everything from start. You don't need to do things from first principles if you have people who have seen the movie before and can bring that intelligence that, that experience to, to execute and guide the rest of the team. Right? So that's one reason why we had to do it. Second is I think just going up market as you go up market. There is a need, and I would say today, more than ever before, you can differentiate by being there in person with your customers. Most companies have started saying, Hey, you know what? Post covid world, let's just do everything on Zoom. Instead, if you turn up in the city where the customer is, if you catch up in person, you're gonna be able to build a stronger relationship. You're gonna be able to tell your story better to them. You're gonna be able to forge a stronger partnership with them and. We believe in doing that, and so we've started doing that much more actively. So we're building a mid-market team, enterprise team on the ground traveling, meeting customers, meeting prospects, and making things happen.

dan-balcauski 28:51

So two kind of key things that stood out to me in your answer there. So, one is, having sort of that depth of where folks have seen sort of a journey before, because, as you, I think really well pointed out, one to five is not like five to 10, which is not like 10 to 20, which is definitely not like 500, 800. And being able to. To, bring folks who have that experience, right? You only have so many different pools of talent in the world. And so being able to tap that effectively, and then also it sounded like getting closer to your customer geographically that also sounded like it was a simultaneous adopt e evolution of your go to market and sales approach. I guess, had you tried to chart go up market and, from a maybe purely sort of, I guess inbound not inbound model, but like, in, not face-to-face model and run into friction with that approach sort of barring geo geography.

sri-ganesan 29:42

I wouldn't say that we validated that it won't work because we did sell from India globally and win really good logos in year one, year two. Right. And what we did do though, is we were frequently traveling from India. Me, some of our a's, et cetera, would. Regularly visit the US for events. We will meet people there in person. We will push a prospect for like, Hey, let's meet in your office. Right? And we saw some of those return great results. We couldn't, there's, I'm not gonna name the customer, but there's one where they were reluctant to meet us. First when we met them, they told us, Hey, we wanted to meet only those who were. Salesforce native, and we weren't Salesforce native. We had a great integration with Salesforce, but we built a separate platform. They gave us a chance to meet because we kept pushing, saying, let's meet in person. And when we were in their office and we showcased our product, it totally opened their minds to what's possible in the non Salesforce native world for our product. And they changed their whole decision criteria after that meeting. They included other players now. Right. But we still won that deal. And I think that in-person meeting changed their perspective. We were able to have a much more effective conversation in person, share our views, share our vision, and we thought, Hey, we should do more of this. And we started doing more of it. And we had some stellar years, a couple of years where grew more than three X each year and we said, Hey, if this is working, then let's do more of it. And. Yeah, that, that was part of the decision. Not to say that it's impossible to achieve remotely. You probably can, but I think the effort, you need to accomplish the same thing the precision you need to accomplish the same thing is gonna be harder versus you meet in person, you get a little more time with them to, to. To show who you are, right? It's not just, Hey, my Zoom call started. My zoom call ended. I need to do everything between that.

dan-balcauski 31:55

Yeah, it's it's amazing how that works. And it's, yeah, there's something ineffable indescribable about that, right. Of seeing someone in person just kind of changes your, they become 3D in a way that Yeah. Zoom yet does not allow but so many ways, right? Yeah. 'cause I think you have everything from the, the chit chat to, I dunno. Yeah. You see them when the meeting's not sort of fully in. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but I agree. So that's interesting. So you had that little bit of this spidey sense that, hey this is a fruitful path and so decided to double down on it. I'm curious so kind of along with that, you go sort of, you decide to start building out team in the us. I'm curious like how has that affected how you think about. Leadership of the company as you're now managing the team across continents, I imagine, right? The go to market is like, okay, well this is what we want and we wanna get closer to customers. That all makes sense, but now you have a significant time difference between those environments and I imagine that can impact, obviously everyone who's ever worked with international teams, you're on a 24 hour clock you find you're writing your emails much more precise, but then also you as the leader. How has that affected how you view growing the organization?

sri-ganesan 33:07

Yeah, I think one thing is, we do a little bit of. Immersion in one place, so anyone who joins the company will travel to India. Spend time with the team over here, spend enough time that there is a bond that forms. Now, from a time zone perspective, a lot of the India team works late in the day. Just so that we have that enough overlap time. It's not like people are. Saying, Hey, five, it's 5:00 PM Need to go back home. Instead, you'll find a product manager joining a call with a salesperson to meet a customer, to talk about like upcoming features at 1:00 AM And it's not a rare occurrence. It's a frequent thing that happens because

dan-balcauski 33:49

Hmm.

sri-ganesan 33:50

it's also the nature of the team that we've built. Everyone who's come on early in the company is the company builder. They're not. Employees in a way that their mindset is, Hey, we are building this business together. And so I think that brings a different attitude to things. People take a lot more ownership on, helping the company hit the research that we want. And no one is worrying about, Hey, should I ping about this or not? Is it too late? Is it too early? We are like, Hey, we all know we are building this together. It's okay to ping. You may or may not get a response immediately, depending on whether someone's available, but you're not actively consciously thinking and curtailing yourself from reaching out. You're just making things happen together.

dan-balcauski 34:39

I'm curious, so you use this term like they're not just employee they're a company builder. So I'm kinda curious, like, as you think about hiring for this. Company builder trait and the way you've defined is essential. You're interviewing, you're sitting across from someone, you have to leave the interview with a point of view on this person, and whether they express that, capability, that they're a company builder, I guess, tell, talk to me about what you're doing then. What are you looking for?

sri-ganesan 35:09

You are looking at ownership, you're looking at are people complaining about their previous organization or are they talking about their initiatives they've taken? If they're complaining, then they're not company builders. They're like saying, Hey I'm just subject to these things, these constraints around me. They're not trying to make the change. Those who talk about the changes, they brought it, they're the ones who are there to make things happen. And in a way some of it can also be changed. It's not necessarily like a person is this, it may be a function of where they were and how that company operated as well. So in a sense, we asked them questions like, if I were to, make a decision that you don't agree with, what would you do? And sometimes they would say, I'll challenge you on it. And you keep pushing down that narrative of, okay, you challenge me, but I still. Disagree. Here's what I say. Here's what happens. What will you do? And you push them into understanding that We want you to really put up a fight for something you believe in and it's not about what you did in the previous gig necessarily. It's about coming in knowing what's expected of you in this gig.

dan-balcauski 36:25

I can't remember the gentleman's name, but I was looking at this Twitter thread last night where the guy, he used to be at Amazon and he was talking about there was this. Multi-year fight that his VP would get into with Jeff Bezos about how he, the VP believed that they were being unfairly punished for how Amazon prime revenue was split between the different organizations. And his got zero credit even though they had a pro, a whole product organization within there. And the whole thread was about how, Jeff would be sitting there with all the executives and the VP would just be like, at this for like hours. Jeff would listen and they'd be like, and then it was this whole, the whole thing of disagree and commit, but then the surprising part about the whole thread. And that was surprising enough. But then, it was like when they had new data to buttress, a different. Angle of argument, it would be another, alright, we got three hours of Jeff's time and at one point the CFO steps in, he is like, Jeff, do you want me to shut this down? And Jeff's like, no. Like, this is what we're here for. We're here to disagree and like figure out the best way forward. And then, and he's like, he never got his way, but like there was, there's no no lack of trying. It's so I think it's like at as you were talking, I was thinking of this, this agency, this catalyst of like, how do you support and try to get the best decision for the. For the company. Obviously doing it in a way where everyone's, respected, but but trying to move forward versus just kind of, like, oh, well, nothing ever changes around here.

sri-ganesan 37:47

Yeah, you need people with stamina. Right. You need to have people who will come in and put up that fight over and over and over to make something happen. You don't want people who will give up and It's, that's the company builder. To build a company you need stamina. I

dan-balcauski 38:02

Well, Sree I could talk to you all day, but we are gonna be running short on time and I wanna respect yours. I wanna close out with a couple of rapid fire closeout questions. Is that okay? You

sri-ganesan 38:11

yeah.

dan-balcauski 38:13

Awesome. What drives you to come to work every day?

sri-ganesan 38:16

I think growth and learning. Yeah that's pretty much what drives me to come to work every day.

dan-balcauski 38:22

Growth and learning. Awesome. When you think about all the spectacular people that you've had the chance to work with, is there anyone that just pops to mind and had a disproportionate effect on the way that you think about building companies now?

sri-ganesan 38:34

Definitely the FreshWorks, CEO and I think every day, every time I would meet him, I would learn something from him. So I think it was a phenomenal experience for us. We got lucky four and a half years that we spent over there after the Conor acquisition.

dan-balcauski 38:54

Is there something specific that he's imparted into your worldview of how you think about running or leading an organization?

sri-ganesan 39:03

I think many things, but you know, a couple that come to mind. One is helping people play to their strengths. Like figuring out what are the true strengths of team members and helping them really flourish in the right arena, right? So that's something that comes to mind. Second is just helping people see every problem. As an opportunity to like figure out something to fix, something to learn, something to grow. And lastly I would say chasing momentum, right? I think, in, in terms of not sticking to your ideas whether or not they're working, but instead saying, Hey, am I. In love with my product or am I in love with the pro problem I'm trying to solve? Is it a big enough problem to solve? Focus on that and keep evolving what you're doing versus, just be passionate about what you already built and stick to an idea that may not be working.

dan-balcauski 40:03

Yeah I love the chasing momentum because we all often only think of that in the positive, but also if it's going the wrong direction, you kinda quickly realize that as well. And falling in love with the problem, not the product, I think is great Words of advice. Speaking of advice, if I gave you a billboard you give put on there, any advice for other B2B sass CEOs trying to scale their companies? What would it say?

sri-ganesan 40:22

Hire well,

dan-balcauski 40:25

Hire, well, you say more.

sri-ganesan 40:27

Spend disproportionate amount of time in hiring the right people to lead. Various organizations on your team to, bring in the right initial people into each team, et cetera. Because I think that really determines whether or not that function is gonna make it and every function is important, right. I think another lesson from the previous venture to this one for us has just been, last time we thought build a great product and everything else. We'll figure it, things will figure it out on their own. But now we know that every function needs through justice to that business that you're building. It's not just build a great product, build great marketing, build world class hr, build world class, everything in the company. So, support, implementation, customer success, everything needs to be world plus.

dan-balcauski 41:20

Hire. Well, Sri if our listeners wanna connect with you or learn more about Rocketlane, how can they do that?

sri-ganesan 41:27

sri@rocketlane.com is my email. Reach out to me. I'm Sri Krishnan G on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn. I post a lot on LinkedIn. If you connect with me, bear with that.

dan-balcauski 41:38

I will put those links in the show notes for our listeners. Everyone that wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. Thank you to re for sharing his journey, insights and valuable tips for our listeners. If you found this conversation as enlightening as I did, remember to subscribe. Just don't miss out on future episodes.