How I built a team that was as invested emotionally as me

please welcome to the stage at Nina Alex Fury to tell her story [Music] good afternoon um it's great to be here I think I need a day just to go through all my notes and process all the information in the last 24 hours but it's been fantastic I'm Nina alexuri I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Zopa it's usually not

spelled with a small a but I'll forgive that it's all in capitals Zopa AI a little background about me this is my second Venture I became a first-time entrepreneur in 1999 in a very brick and mortar business of recruiting so I am not an HR person I'm an engineer I'm an electronics engineer but I loved the whole business of people and in in that

hiring business which I ran for 18 years it was amazing to see how subjective how manual how tedious hiring is and so in 2017 when we were close to 20 million Revenue um pretty much owned most of the business myself I decided it was time to disrupt my own business it was a brave move um maybe a foolish one as well but I was

committed to solving a lot of the problems that I saw during the hiring process to solve them with technology use artificial intelligence data back decisions so that you can remove waste a process waste is one of the biggest problems in hiring and and the bias which makes you hire the wrong people or or lose the right people and both of them are dramatic so um so that's what Zopa does and uh

so my topic is about how do I make how do I create a team which is as committed as I am and as as invested so my first my first entrepreneurship was after a stint with a couple of large firms so I was a very corporate person and turning into an entrepreneur was perhaps one of the most rewarding things I did in spite of seeing um the.com bust the financial crisis you

know all of those dramatic events but what I did realize is that if as an entrepreneur um you know I can wake up every morning feeling super excited getting out of the bed and saying this is the best thing I'm doing in my life I need to have a team around me which feels equally committed um so uh most of my leadership team are people who have been in in large

companies my CTO for example was a product head at eBay in California I don't know how on Earth we convinced him to move to Sunny Hyderabad in India and set up our engineering team uh and so on so we've got people from from large companies but what I did realize a lot of a lot of experienced folks are not not always delighted with working with corporates so that was like a niche that I found with my leadership team and not

all of them are like that but they've been very very super committed and the only reason for that is because I put myself in their shoes on why they would work for a startup like ours and stay with us so um over the next 20 minutes uh you know I'll talk about the kind of incentive models for the full-time employees uh the main key takeaway from that is transparency Focus focusing the entire team onto the things that really matter

but how do you not leave anybody behind and both your tangible and intangible benefits uh called call for retention so so let's start with the section one uh so uh we set up when we started when we were five people um we were just hustling right like we were just doing anything and everything that requires to be done for a startup um when we hit our sixth and seventh employee we said okay we need to start

creating a Playbook on culture and values that really matter so that when we hire new new folks we are sure we are hiring the right folks and of course we are in the hiring business so Zopa just just to let you know Zopa is a DIY tool that helps large companies as well as startups do their own hiring so they take back the control of hiring use artificial intelligence to remove all the process waste automate a whole

lot of stuff including scheduling and interviews so automated interviewing automated uh sourcing you know Finding Your candidates from anywhere in the world and so on and we have patents we are the only HR tech company on on the planet to get the AI verify status of being responsible ethical and explainable AI so so we set up an ESOP plan uh

down the line this was somewhere around okay there should have been a graph but somewhere in 2000 in 2018 when we were just about ramping up our revenues there was a time when we realized that if we have to scale up that's the time where we need to get the team really focused on on so a little bit different from what Bridget said the jam today ours was Jam Jam down the line so and that was one of the filters for for us uh if you're an entrepreneur you need to

invest that level of you know the number of years and that that amount of time and energy to get the big bucks uh you know and be be aligned so we set up our ESOP in 2018 which was the second year of our operation and uh everything was being done on Excel you know we said okay you you get 100 options you get 50 options then we realize it means nothing to everybody right like you don't know what is it what does that really mean so we decided

that we're going to have a visualization tool where you can actually see what is it that you're going to make with every Milestone growth of the company so so we used a platform called s wasted I don't know if you've heard of them uh they are Singapore based because we are a Singapore headquartered company and 10 percent of all our shares of the cap table were allocated to the esops uh all every single person in our company

is on the stock option plan so whether you are sales you are technology any any field everybody gets uh the ESOP so for your wasting period if you're familiar with these up there's a vesting period there is a cliff so it's a four-year Westing we automate the entire process right from allocation to signatures so it's completely automated and uh

this is the beauty of of the platform because for example if you see the projected cup company valuation here 22 million that was our last valuation when we closed our series a uh this was back in December 20 last year and uh so you as an individual you can log into your dashboard and see what your esops are worth so this made a huge difference because you can actually see what you're going to make what are you making today

what are you going to make tomorrow now addition to esops incentives that was the other big thing and again that's about the jam today um every single employee in the company is on an incentive plan nobody is Left Behind so whether you are a salesperson or you are a tech delivery customer success everybody is given an incentive but here's an example of

um oh this is the ESOP calculator which shows you we put in Milestones when we closed our series a and this showed what would it be when we make series B series C and this really brought in the belief with the team and they really aligned together to kind of so now everybody is kind of preparing for series B because they know what they're going to make so so it really gets the team together it really makes everybody focus on the main

issues ah that was an interesting one um we gave a visualization on what it'd be four years down the line so when we are series C um what does it mean and depending on how many esophs you got so here's a little bit of a visualization on what typically uh somebody with 100 shares versus 500 shares gets and you know we

we kind of issue esops every single year um so so that it keeps stacking up

this is an interesting Excel that we use for our sales team so again it's very very transparent it's all available on on SharePoint you can put in your this is for the sales team um where you know you have your ARR Target again you know we want to make them we want to make sure everybody's focusing on things that matter and the biggest thing that matters to us right now is the ARR and the bottom line so getting them all focused onto ARR so all

our sales team is is aware of what they're going to make uh by The End by the end of the year so um and we do monthly payouts the moment you cross your threshold so threshold is usually 50 of ARR you start seeing the money coming into your into your bank so um you know that's so we leave nobody behind um all our non-sales team the non

non-client facing uh folks are incentivized on the company ARR so we have we set a company company our Target and the moment we cross the 50 percent of that company error out for the year uh which for this year is 5 million uh you know the uh they they are on 80 20 model so they so so we leave nobody behind you cannot do sales without delivery you cannot do sales without product development so so it's really critical you get the entire team uh

focused um this is an artifact which Nathan recommended I should show uh again it's all about transparency this was the first Sales Direct sales held head that we hired it was in 2019 we had no sales team before that so very clearly what's your base salary what can you hope to make and then we made sure that there's no cap you can you can you can you can double your salary you can triple your salary but as long as you meet the 50 of

your threshold okay this slide should have been before but this is before the visualization platform ah okay got it ah so this is what the ESOP platform looked like before we invested in asbested so obviously it was extremely messy very manual so when once we moved to s West it was completely automated and people were able to visualize what the esops were worth

this is where I mentioned about the leaving nobody behind and so um people join you for the visible benefits you give them the financial benefits the perks but they stay with you for the intangible right they stay with you for culture they stay with you for for what you know for the empowerment um and and the growth that you're

offering so we have a culture code we have five values on it we share them with every single employee who joins us um so that we are all aligned and we are all on the same page so um that's that's dope that's my team very very proud of them that's my leadership team they're spread across three locations um I'm in the UK but the rest of the team

is in Singapore India and UAE there are investors the first investor is my husband the first angel investor and trust me it's not easy he he changes his hat very quickly at the dinner table and say what's your ARR today you know so so trust me careful careful before you do that but we we had we have a fantastic set of investors the series a

that we closed was at 15 times multiple and I'm so glad I closed it before what's happening in the market now but uh super proud of of our investors so so yeah I mean that's the longing short on how we keep our team motivated it's all about uh getting into the issues making sure that if you expect them to work for your startup instead of Google or Microsoft

then you got to give them what a startup can offer so thank you so much [Applause] [Music] [Applause]