Assignments assistance on Leadership Experience @Myassignmenthelp

Question: Compose a paper about the administration experience. Answer: Presentation The scope of exercises the individuals embrace as an administrator is generous with the outcome that the assortment of aptitudes expected to succeed is wide. At whatever point the writing discusses the term association two inquiries may emerge as a top priority as a first reflection-what sort of association and who is the pioneer (Mendenhall Osland, 2012). There might be numerous components that can lead an association towards the disappointment and achievement, however the position of authority is likewise critical and significant in taking care of associations. Numerous administrators have a solid vision of where they need to go. As indicated by Daft (2014), mindfulness and solid ties between the administration methodology and technique of business make an unshakable establishment for progress. There are three basic qualities that each pioneer must need to turn into a conspicuous pioneer are being want to be a pioneer, full duty towards the vision and crucial the partnership and tr ustworthiness. Richard Goyder is one of the notable business characters, who have been effectively demonstrated his initiative abilities as holding the situation of Managing Director of Wesfarmers Limited. Since the year 1993, he has contributed towards the development of this association in performing diverse employment duties. Presently Wesfarmers has developed into one of the biggest recorded broadened associations of Australia. In this paper, the administration aptitudes of Richard Goyder will be talked about. Perusers will get a thought regarding the various layers of his character and a few choices making approaches which have considered as powerful in the achievement of the association. Conversation In todays unsure, unpredictable, intricate and vague condition, pioneers will be called upon to manage multifaceted developing dangers inside the setting of the worldwide condition. Pioneers will be required to comprehend, learn and adjust certain prerequisites by the ideal execution of their obligations. As per Goleman et al. 2013, exceptional attributes and authority style of an individual distinguishes abilities to being lead an associations through troublesome and moving condition to tackle complex business issues. In this conversation, the record will examine the qualities and style of administration of Richer Goyder. Since the more than hundred years, Western Australian rancher agreeable, known as Wesfarmers has been occupied with different business activities incorporate grocery stores, inns, alcohol, inn, accommodation stores, etc. Presently the organization has gotten one of the biggest private part businesses of Australia where the overseeing chiefs and his compelling group oversee around 210000 workers with having the base of partners of almost 500000. Under the direction of Richard Goyder, the organization fulfills the need of purchasers through the arrangement of merchandise and enterprises on a serious and temporary premise. His excursion has been begun since 1993, when he joined Wesfarmers, in the wake of working a few business jobs at the association of Tubemakers of Australia Limited. After held a few quantities of business positions in the division of Business Development of Wesfarmers, for example, GM, Richard Goyder was delegated as overseeing chief of this organization in 1999. He has administered the buy and change Coles, driven Bunnings to its pre-famous situation of market, shepherded this enhanced enterprise through the GFC and from that point forward the organization guaranteed Wesfarmers investors a superior than showcase return. The tale of Wesfarmers demonstrates that the achievement of the association is totally relies upon great administration or all the more precisely, great initiative, regardless of what industry the business is working in. In one of the ongoing meeting of this persuasive pioneer, Richard Goyder depended about the model of Wesfarmers that in retail business, you need an exceptionally solid help culture; in a mining business you need an extremely solid security culture. There are contrasts and not a great deal of cooperative energies (Re Rule 2016). He has confidence in working under a solid business structure, organizing the proper plan of action. During the period of Wesfarmers move to gain Coles, numerous industrialists and market members of Australia have offered a few dubious remarks on the grounds that however Coles was an incredible brand, yet that association was tormented by a famous history, dissimilar to the organization like Wesfarmers. Be that as it may, Richard Goyder was sure that he and his group could improve Coles and all the more significantly great returnable association. Richard Goyder is one of only a handful hardly any skilled pioneers who have effectively qualified as momentous. His dynamic capacities unmistakably distinguish his administration qualities, for example, a string level of certainty and an idealistic reasoning methodology. Today Coles has accomplished a wonderful situation in the Australias basic food item gracefully chain showcase after the consolidating endeavors of the supervisory group of Wesfarmers. His certainty is infectious. Representatives of Wesfarmers are normally drawn towards lo oking for an exhortation, and feel progressively sure subsequently (O'Connell Gibbons, 2016). Be that as it may, the best thing about Richards initiative attributes is assuming liability any place refuted and rapidly acts to improve the circumstances inside his position. For example, Richard Goyder has censured the choice of Federal Government for having made a two-layered business charge framework. The administration said that private company will get 1.5 percent cut off since the time of 2013. Richard immovably contended saying this was totally off-base to have an alternate expense structure for various measured business. This episode demonstrates his incredible degree of responsibility and ranch dynamic methodologies (Ulrich et al. 2013). He accepts that CEOs required more than influence and expert articulation to accomplish change. His feeling of versatility is high. For example, Mr Goyder distinguished the expulsion of exchanging hour limitations as a truly necessary change and reacted to the Australias rivalry arrangements to remain serious. Presently the business adjusted the 247 online business culture. My Goyder said in this setting time is the best appointed authority of the people initiative. He likewise said that a pioneer should know about difficulties and be straightforward with them. All these remark of Richard Goyder obviously make comprehended that the authoritative administration of Richard Goyder is loaded with multi-layered and multi-dimensional. There are numerous traits have been recognized which gives him a terrific accomplishment for being filled in as Managing Director of Wesfarmers. Right off the bat, he doesn't considered as a sense of self driven individual since he said that he has encircle himself with great individuals. Richard puts stock in group the board and feeling of control (Van Wart, 2014). By putting 25000 workers under his new authority group, ate currently prepared to perform what Richard is attempting to do to the busi ness. Also, numerous specialists discover him a reliable and legitimate pioneer. He has honestly conceded that he has qualities and a few shortcomings. This is without a doubt admirable for representatives who are following his strides and constructs their profession way. Thirdly, his authority has been displayed a momentous connection between's administrative center and a few enhanced segments of Wesfarmers and results a superior presentation. Trusting in consolidated endeavors and capacity to take the reasonable choice, Richard Goyder has indicated his intense definitiveness and solid certainty (O'Connell Gibbons, 2016). By and by Mr. Goyler accepts that there is no supernatural formula for initiative. Be that as it may, different specialty units like Coles, Kmart, Bunnings and numerous others have recognized that he enables enough presentation and to lead without impedance. This makes relationship with the administrative center increasingly incorporated and guarantee progressivel y money related soundness. In this manner, the recognized initiative qualities of Richard Goyder are high certainty, trustworthiness, extraordinary responsibility and conclusiveness and idealism thinking process. There are different kinds of initiative styles applied in business associations. These incorporate Laissez-Faire, Autocratic, Participative, Transactional and Transformational. As indicated by Boscardin 2016), pioneers of free enterprise need direct managements of staffs and neglect to record normal input to those under his watch. Then again, Autocratic initiative is about permits directors to settle on choices alone without the impedance of others. Under this initiative styles, supervisors regularly want to have complete power. Participative administration style helps representative spirit by permitting workers in their dynamic (Ardichvili et al 2016). Under the transformational initiative, the chiefs give prizes or disciplines to colleagues dependent on execution aftereffects of representatives. In conclusion, transformational initiative style totally dependent on elevated level of correspondence from the executives to achieve hierarchical objectives (Avolio Yammarino, 2013). In li ght of the authority styles of Richard Goyder, this can be said that he is following participative initiative style. He has confidence in worker interest in the dynamic of Wesfarmers (Imperial et al. 2016). This gives enough open door for representatives to show their capacities and it makes them feel as though their sentiment matters. Under his dynamic administration approach, the organization has partaken in different CSR exercises. This authority encourages representatives to acknowledge authoritative changes or guarantees high versatility in their workplace. Hence, this participative initiative style of Richard Goyder guarantees superior from the side of representatives and better work environment with. His administration expertise and approaches discovered that representative cooperation is most significant which can be support up by giving inspiration and consolation from the powerful initiative of administrators. Chiefs should be built up a few regions to turn into a powerful pioneer (Friedri

Mexico’s largest cement manufacturer Free Essays

Cemex, has become a worldwide powerhouse In the concrete and development Industry. It as of now controls 60 percent of the concrete business in Mexico (Hill 2009). Cemexs achievement is a consequence of a blend of proficient innovation, for example, radio transmitters, satellites, and PC equipment that permit the organization to foresee changes in flexibly and request and decrease squander. We will compose a custom paper test on Mexico’s biggest concrete producer or on the other hand any comparable theme just for you Request Now Cemex’s achievement is additionally an aftereffect of an endeavor to command the business by gaining and purchasing out contenders worldwide In request to grow. . Which heoretical clarification, or clarifications, of FDI best clarifies Cemex’s FDI? I accept that Internalization hypothesis best clarifies Cemex’s FDI in light of the fact that Cemex has stepped up to the plate and go into numerous nations and as opposed to permitting; they purchased household concrete organizations and have developed into an overall powerhouse. As indicated by the reading material, disguise hypothesis clarifies why firms frequently incline toward remote direct speculation over permitting as a methodology for entering outside business sectors (Hill 2009). With the trend setting innovation that Cemex utilizes, so permitting would not be the best scene for the organization to take In request to secure It’s â€Å"technological know-how’ (Hill 2009). b. What Is the worth that Cemex brings to the host economy? Would you be able to perceive any potential disadvantages of internal speculation by Cemex in an economy? Cemex is the third biggest concrete organization on the planet, and a powerhouse in Mexico where it controls 60 percent of the market. Cemex is exceptionally centered around productive assembling and client support. Merchants are compensated for their deals, as are clients. The essential advantage Cemex brings to have nations Involves these competltlve points of interest. Cemex obtains organizations and afterward moves innovative, the executives, and advertising know-how to the new units. Improving their presentation. The organization has taken a few obtained organizations back to full creation, expanding work openings in the host nation also. c. Cemex has a solid inclination for acquisitions over greenfield adventures as a section mode. Why? Cemex has effectively gained built up concrete creators in numerous nations. By procuring organizations instead of building up them from the beginning, Cemex can stay away from a portion of the defers that could happen in the beginning up stage, while t a similar time, gain by the advantages of a set up advertise nearness. Getting different organizations is successful in light of the fact that the host economy definitely knows the socioeconomics and the market. Cemex would have the option to improve the business with their innovation and research. A Greenfield adventure would be unsafe and not financially savvy. d. For what reason is greater part control so essential to Cemex? Greater part control is imperative to Cemex due to the capacity to Implement its arrangement of moving assets. At the point when It doesn't have lion's share control It will most likely be unable to move its own overseeing assets to recently obtained organizations. Additionally, Cemex ight need to exploit contrasts in factor costs across nations, so it will be permitted to import parts from different spots to lessen costs. References Hill, C. W. L. , Richardson, T. , ; McKaig, T. (2009). Worldwide business today. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. BUSN 427 WEEK 3 Case concentrate By Jihadmalley Mexico’s biggest concrete maker, Cemex, has become a worldwide powerhouse in the concrete and development industry. It presently controls 60 percent of the concrete business in Mexico (Hill 2009). Cemex’s achievement is a consequence of a mix of securing and purchasing out contenders worldwide so as to grow. a. Which cap disguise hypothesis best clarifies Cemex’s FDI in light of the fact that Cemex has taken the road for the organization to take so as to ensure it’s â€Å"technological know-how’ (Hill 2009). . What is the worth that Cemex brings to the host economy? Would you be able to perceive any are clients. The essential advantage Cemex brings to have nations includes these upper hands. Cemex gets organizations and afterward moves innovative, the executives, and advertising know-how to the new units, improving Majority control is critical to Cemex in view of the capacity to actualize its strategy of moving assets. At the point when it doesn't have larger part control it may not be capable The most effective method to refer to Mexico’s biggest concrete producer, Papers

CP11 Podcast with Tony Jamous from Nexmo about cloud-based Communication APIs

CP11 Podcast with Tony Jamous from Nexmo about cloud-based Communication APIs INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, this time we are having a very interesting entrepreneur with us, and talking about his entrepreneur journey. Hi, Tony, who are you? And what do you do?Tony: Hey thanks, Martin. I’m Tony Jamous. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Nexmo. We started the company exactly five years ago, both from here in the UK and Europe, and also in the US. My role has changed since the beginning of the company. Each phase has a different role. When you start, you start by doing a bit of much everything. Then as you hire people and build teams, your role becomes different. Thats the journey I went through.Martin: Cool. How did you come up with this business idea, Tony?Tony: I used to work in the communications industry. Nexmo is a cloud communications platform. This is where I started my career as an engineer, and later on in business development. Then I took a year off, and I went to do my business studies. During the whole year, I got obsessed with how can you make this better f or the customer, and how can you make this more scalable. That thinking process led me to build the first plan or the first idea to streamline that industry and build up more scalable, more efficient business.Martin: Great. At what point in time did you really start developing the first iteration of the product?Tony: Right away, actually. When we started, the first person I hired was a senior architect, Paul, who started coding the platform right away from day one. We were obsessed with time to revenue, because as you probably know when you’re starting a company, you want to prove your model, you want to find your market fit. Revenue was a key indicator we focus on, in order to prove to our ourselves but also to the investors that later on we’re going to raise money from, that actually you do have a good product.Martin: So if you are telling me that you’re focused on time to revenue, how many days or months did it take you?Tony: It took us probably four months from the first t ime we touched the code to get in the first customer paying us.Martin: Great.Tony: Very quick, if you compare to other entrepreneur opportunities.Martin: And how did you acquire this customer?Tony: In the beginning, it’s really about the relationship. You dont have any brand name. You don’t have any web presence. So actually, you need to leverage your network. I was lucky to have worked in this industry before in sales. So we knew you lots of customers. I knew exactly their pinpoints and as we designed the product, addressed this pinpoint, it was appealing them to talk to us.Martin: You said before that you started as a generalist, and then later on overtime became more of a focused kind of senior level executive? Can you walk us through this journey? What was it like in the journey?Tony: Yes, so, in the beginning, you’re a small team. Essentially, everybody does everything and initially you don’t need to spell out a specific plan or specific strategies. Everybody understand s the vision as it’s a small team. As you start growing and creating new divisions and have new senior leaders coming into the business, making sure that everybody is aligned, is a very, very hard problem. So therefore, you’re going to start to need to formulate things and communicate things in order to get the team with its various departments to get aligned and moving in one direction.Martin: When I talked to entrepreneurs, one thing that they often tell me is the customer acquisition cost were extremely high in the first place. And maybe you’re not often justified the revenue or customer lifetime value afterward. How did you try to decrease the customer acquisition cost through this learning process?Tony: Yes, exactly. So initially, it was based on relationships, so we needed to reach out the customer, traditional direct sales approach, which we actually developed and approved overtime in increasing efficiency of that. But at the same time, we’ve opened up the web inbound marketing channel, and that has actually enabled us to scale faster and reduce the cost of acquisition.To be honest, today if you’re in technology and you’re selling software, you need to be online. You need to be visible to be able to capture some of that demand out there.Martin: Great, today you have a suite of different products targeted for like mobile phones. With what type of product did you start out?Tony: So we started with messaging because:I came from that industry, andWe’ve seen all the problems we can solve and how we could streamline that value chain for the customer and for us to be able to scale fast.So the first two years of the company, we were focused on only one product, and then as we, as actually as the world changes, you have new technology trends, you have customer behavior changing. Then you start adding new products and actually evolving your vision that we have today.Martin: And was the evolution of this kind of product suite more driven by customer demand, or was it more like that you find out actually the basic technically infrastructure for all those different products is the same, so we could leverage our existing infrastructure by just adding one or two more products?Tony: It all starts with the customer pain points. And as we talk to customer, we’re selling them product A, based on asking them: Hey guys, why don’t you do a product B as well and product C? Secondly, we’ve also looked at the competition and what the competition was offering, and we’ve seen that we have opportunities to offer actually similar API or similar product as the competition. Lastly, we look at the market trends and what are the major technological trend that is shaping our industry, specifically, the API economy is really, the APIs are becoming the new way of building software, and also mobile is coming big time. So we started building SDKs so that our API started being compatible with mobile, be it you know iOS or Android, any platform out there.So essentially, it was a process of focusing on getting feedback from customers, understanding the competition and the trends and actually reshaping our product strategy and our vision as we move forward.Martin: Tony, how is your company currently structured in terms of locations and in terms of functions?Tony: Nexmo on the location wise, we actually were one of the few startups at the time that were global from day one. From day one, we started in the UK. My co-founder, Eric and our CTO, building the engineering and producting from here. I was in the US building the sales team in our US presence. And very quickly in year two, we opened Asia. Today we have Hong Kong and Singapore and Seoul as well. Because Asia is the fastest market in the world and in our industry and in many industries. So we really needed to have a good hold in that region. And we grew really fast in these three regions.Of course, we got into certain challenges as you grow especially with cultural differen ces, but that was kind of the initial thought is to capture the demand everywhere in the world especially with the web today. You are everywhere even if you don’t want to.Martin: And how is the company structured in terms of functions?Tony: Of course, we have engineering and product, and developer relation. This is a team that built the community of developers. This is under our CTO.We do have the finance. We have a Chief Financial Officer that also manages other admin function like HR, legal. We also have Chief Marketing Officer that’s on marketing, this is marketing communication, sales enablement, growth marketing, and marketing operation.We also have our sales force and our sales forces has evolved to become much more mature. Now we have a new business team going after a new logos. We have account management to manage the existing customer base. And last year, we built as well an insight sales team to deal with the inbound flow of request.Last but not least, we have our cust omer support team. We like to see everybody in the company is customer support. But we do have a 24/7 global customer support team. And also a newly created business operation team to help us improve the business as we grow.Martin: Cool. What are the major differences in terms of the customers and adoption rates if you’re looking at US customers and Asian customers?Tony: So I would say in the US, in Europe actually customers especially software developers are much more empowered to make decisions about which API vendor they want to use. We’ve seen lots of success in inbound marketing. Customer just singing up online and turning to become major customers, like AirBnB, or Uber, or SnapChat, or booking.com here in Europe.In Asia, however, it was much more a business development, relationship based type of sales. And we see less online demand from that market.Martin: And did you know this before, or did you have to have this as a hard learning?Tony: We learned it the hard way, yes.M artin: So what happened?Tony: Initially, we wanted to design our sales first and our sales process in Asia similar to other regions. We quickly realized that selling to Asian customers requires a different approach. Much more relationship based, much more traditional business development type of process. Essentially, the time to revenue in Asia seems to be longer because you don’t have that inbound channel that helps you to jumpstart the revenue quicker.You also get into issues of payments as well. Like for instance, today we support payment platforms like Alipay that enables us to tap into for instance the Chinese market, but at that time, we expected Chinese customers to pay us in Euro, and that didn’t really fly.Martin: Great. When you think back in the beginning of the company, how did you find investors and at what point in time did you approach them?Tony: Funding was part of our strategy from day one. We focused initially on what we call the three Fs: Family, Friends and F ool. Essentially, people investing in your company because they know you, not necessarily understand the business opportunity.So we raised a seed round of funding from people who trusted us on our plans. Later on, we got introduced through the same investors to a series of VCs. We’ve done traditional road show to be able to fundraise and you’ve got a couple of term sheets. And then we raises our fist VC round.Then later on, it was exactly the same process. So new investors that joined us on the board will help us make introductions to new VCs. and this is how the cycle starts again.Martin: Great. And as a European company, did you try to approach US investors because back then there was not a big trend of US investors investing abroad?Tony: Yes, so five years ago, the European VC community was very small. There was pretty much no funding, large scale funding here in Europe. So we knew that, so when we started the company, we registered the company, we incorporated company in the US.One of the reasons why we did that is because it’s easier for US VCs to invest in US companies. They don’t need to learn new laws and new financial regulations of other countries.Yes, luckily our angel investors had connection with US investors and therefore most of our funding efforts were focused on the US. Actually, we only have our angel investor in Europe, but initially most of our discussion with VCs were based in the US because economy of scales they have more cash to invest in companies like us.Martin: You’re right.BUSINESS MODEL OF NEXMOMartin: Tony, let’s talk about the business model of Nexmo. What are basically the customer segment that you’re trying to address?Tony: Yes, so Nexmo offers cloud communication APIs to enable software developers to embed communication into their flows. So our customer base today is composed of the following segments.The first is what we call the chat apps. All the companies like Viber, WeChat Line, are our customers and they us e us for primarily user acquisition and phone verification. You probably had that experience when you downloaded WhatsApp for the first time. You received a text message with a pin code. So we do that for many, if not all of these chat apps and we have them grow and acquire over four billion users in the last four years.The second segment we address is the travel sector, so both, the new economy players like AirBnB or booking.com or even you know more traditional travel companies like Expedia or KLM. They use us for improving the customer experience, building that communication, embedding that communication into their flow. For instance, booking.com they communicate with their hotel chains to cancel booking through a text to speech call, automatic text to speech. AirBnB uses us to connect hosts and guests over SMS and protect the privacy of their users.The third one is transportation. And again here is also the new economy players like Uber, GrabTaxi, EasyTaxi, where we enable them to connect drivers and passengers or voice and SMS. But also traditional transportation companies or transport companies, here in the case of, in Germany, we have Daimler, Mercedes Benz that use our APIs to communicate with cars. So it is internet of things use case.And we also are strong in the social networks. So many social networks like Twitter and Sina Weibo in China, they use us for user verification and fraud prevention.Lastly is the financial industry and fintech in a series of banks like BNP Paribas or Barclays and even new economy ones like Alipay and with Alibaba, they use us for their communication with their users.Martin: Great. If you look at the business model and assuming you are covering like four billion of the seven billion people in terms of their mobile phones and the communication, is this some kind of asset where you think: Okay, if most of the traffic and so on is going mobile, and you are at least tracking all or some of the mobile communications, then you c an build a platform and then offer other kind of services that are mobile communication related?Tony: That’s correct. So essentially, the biggest trend in communication is contextual communication. And because software is merging with communication, now we can do much more things on mobile than before. You can imagine adding sensor data to the communication. You can imagine adding the context into it.So for instance, let’s say you’re a bank and you want to send a notification to your customer because there’s an issue on their credit card, there’s a fraud. Usually, you block the card and then you communicate with them. Usually, you call them and they are not available. So it goes to voicemail. I need to call you back. So it’s really a cumbersome process that costs a lot of money for the bank and it’s not very cool for the consumer. So essentially that communication goes into the app, you push the notification to communicate that to the user. And the user clicks on that notification and automatically go into the phone call with the call center of the bank that will improve dramatically the experience and add the context of the communication.So this is where we see the future is heading. And because software is enabling us to enable developers to build these experiences, we believe that all these business communications is going to be disrupted by software in the next few years.Martin: So just for clarification, so that I get it right. Is this what you’re telling me that you’re trying to get this kind of API network running and owning, or is it more of that you only want to own the API related stuff which is connecting mobile phones only?Tony: There’s two aspects. There’s the ability to communicate to any phone in the world using programmatically a messaging or voice calls, right? Phone verification is one, IVR is another one. Telephony in the cloud is another one. Record Recording is another one. But we also provide a series of SDKs that s it in the app on the device and gather information about that communication, whether it’s sensored data, whether it’s the context of the transaction, and it’s connected to the information system, the CRM or the help desk software of the enterprise.To give you an example, KLM uses us China, KLM is a large European airline. They use us in China to communicate, to actually support, to help desk support to their users in China over WeChat. Let’s say you were traveling on KLM, you lost your luggage. You can follow them on WeChat which is the largest messaging app in China. Then you can actually open a ticket and interact with the support agent over WeChat. In the future, we will enable that also to be done over a messaging box essentially replacing the help desk agent by an algorithm to improve the user experience. So this is a type of examples of contextual communication we enable.Martin: Great. Tony, what do you think are the reasons why companies or your customers choose you o ver the competition? Is it more like that you are totally international and others are not? Is it that you have a more efficient, scalable, technical infrastructure? Is it your pricing? Is it your go to market strategy or is it just you? What are the reasons?Tony: Well it’s a combination of reasons. Youve touched on some important items.First, it’s really about innovation. Our vision is to reinvent how developer embeds communication into their application in the business world. So we focus on building the latest type of API that a developer can adopt really easily and reduces their time to market, it helps them to solve their coding issues.And the second item is to make it scalable. And scalable both: geographically, so today we can communicate with any phone in the world, but also from a quality point of view because it’s easy to build an app that can transact a million messages a day or months. But if you want to take it to a billion in months, then it becomes problematic. S o we do focus on enabling companies to embed these tools and make it also scalable geographically and technically.Martin: Great. Have you thought of extending your product portfolio by rating those transactions? For example if I’m a customer of you, like a call center or so, and I’m having a customer calling me, I can have the communication arranged by your API for example. And then once you have a rated information of the transaction between the call center and their customer, then you would have this kind of information for several transactions from all over the world, you can put some data scientists on that in order to put some contextual information.Tony: Yes, I think you’re hitting on an important element of the disruption we’re bringing in. We don’t necessarily provide the services, but we enable the customer to access them easily, right.So because we’re a platform and we provide our services through APIs, therefore you can start recording important data points al ong the way of the conversation of the communication. Once you’re able to record this information, you can start doing things like machine learning. You can start doing things like cognitive computing on it. But if you’re not using this open API platform, and you’re like logged into, let’s say here that has a silo system, you’re not able to do so. So we make data break free and therefore our customers get more value out of it.Martin: When I’m thinking of APIs, it sounds to me that they are very easily interchangeable. So as long as your APIs is good as mine, the question now would be, how are you increasing the barriers to competition? For example economies of scale or scope or something like that.Tony: Yes, so this comment is valid for some APIs. For others, it’s actually less valid especially when it’s an SDK and it’s embedded into the device. But we focus on value creation and the value creation is what creates stickiness. So value creation is defined in many va riables.The first one is really about the quality of a service offering. So for instance, let’s say in SMS, we do go very long way to build the world’s largest direct care network, so we actually minimize the latency. We build algorithm that manage quality and make it consistent overtime. So there’s a quality component. There’s also a customer support component. We’re really obsessed about customer support, because our customers rely on us for their most business critical communication: acquiring users, confirming the transaction. And the carrier network is not fit for these new use cases.So we essentially really get obsessed with support. Everyone we hire on the company, they go through the customer academy. They do customer, they sell customer tickets until they get the highest satisfaction rating. Then they graduate and they go to their job.I think that’s kind of the two main reasons of value creation. Also we keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible of feature s and data. For instance, our analytics platform enables the customer to view more data of what’s going on in their communication and do some analysis on that. So this is kind of how we create stickiness and we help actually. It’s really about creating more value for the customer. And there’s no magic in our business for that.Martin: Great.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM TONY JAMOUSMartin: Tony, now I would like to learn some more stuff about your entrepreneur journey and your learnings. So what type of learnings can you share with other people interested in starting a company so that they make less errors?Tony: So it depends on the phase. So initially, one of the recurrent theme I see with people who wants to become entrepreneur is that they believe that they need to be ready to start doing it. What I realize is that you’re never ready. So the best is to jump in right away and try to do your best. I mean that’s kind of the first learning I had.The second learning I think woul d be around going global quickly. At Nexmo, from one hand we benefited from that. We were able to get transaction and revenue across the globe. We have customers in every country today. But if you do it too early, then you’re going to start I mean at least us, we had some issues in terms of the scalability of the organization, you have remote teams. And as the team grows, you need to deliver that vision, you need to make sure they are aligned and it’s not easy when you do it across regions. I think this would be kind of the learning that in the last four or five years.Of course, it’s about it’s all about hiring the right people, and making sure, to hire people that can also help you scale the business from day one and that was an important learning. For instance, our CTO and co-founder, when I hired him, I gave him a coding task which is obviously the wrong thing to do. Because what was really important for him is his leadership skills, and that he needed to build a large te am and manage it and scale it.Martin: And what have been the major specific problems in terms of scaling the organization? Because what I’ve heard from other companies is this tribe theory that first you’re a family, then you’re a tribe, then something like a city and so on. And that in the beginning you don’t have processes and later on, you need to implement processes and then type of people might change because not everybody who is performing great at the 20, 30, 40 person company is performing great than a 500 person company. What have been your major problems in scaling the company?Tony: The first one is I said before, is about aligning everyone around one shared vision, one plan, everybody is driving in the right direction. The bigger you become, the more important it becomes to over-communicate and align.The second learning is really about putting in place the processes and structure to enable you to scale. Be it hiring the right people, putting in place the right str ucture. So its like the image I like to use is like building an airplane while you are in the air. You build one engine, and you realize you need another engine. So you need to go and build that as well. Then you need to make sure that these two engines are actually talking to each other. So that they can go in one direction and that process is ongoing, it never stops. How you learn about it is when you make mistakes, is when things are break, and you realize that: Oh yes, I need to build a process here to make it work.Martin: Great, Tony, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights.Tony: Thanks, Martin.Martin: Welcome.THANKS FOR LISTENING! Welcome to the 11th episode of our podcast!You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Click here to subscribe in iTunes. INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, this time we are having a very interesting entrepreneur with us, and talking about his entrepreneur journey. Hi, Tony, who are you? And what do you do?Tony: Hey thanks, Martin. I’m Tony Jamous. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Nexmo. We started the company exactly five years ago, both from here in the UK and Europe, and also in the US. My role has changed since the beginning of the company. Each phase has a different role. When you start, you start by doing a bit of much everything. Then as you hire people and build teams, your role becomes different. Thats the journey I went through.Martin: Cool. How did you come up with this business idea, Tony?Tony: I used to work in the communications industry. Nexmo is a cloud communications platform. This is where I started my career as an engineer, and later on in business development. Then I took a year off, and I went to do my business studies. During the whole year, I got obsessed with how can you make this better f or the customer, and how can you make this more scalable. That thinking process led me to build the first plan or the first idea to streamline that industry and build up more scalable, more efficient business.Martin: Great. At what point in time did you really start developing the first iteration of the product?Tony: Right away, actually. When we started, the first person I hired was a senior architect, Paul, who started coding the platform right away from day one. We were obsessed with time to revenue, because as you probably know when you’re starting a company, you want to prove your model, you want to find your market fit. Revenue was a key indicator we focus on, in order to prove to our ourselves but also to the investors that later on we’re going to raise money from, that actually you do have a good product.Martin: So if you are telling me that you’re focused on time to revenue, how many days or months did it take you?Tony: It took us probably four months from the first t ime we touched the code to get in the first customer paying us.Martin: Great.Tony: Very quick, if you compare to other entrepreneur opportunities.Martin: And how did you acquire this customer?Tony: In the beginning, it’s really about the relationship. You dont have any brand name. You don’t have any web presence. So actually, you need to leverage your network. I was lucky to have worked in this industry before in sales. So we knew you lots of customers. I knew exactly their pinpoints and as we designed the product, addressed this pinpoint, it was appealing them to talk to us.Martin: You said before that you started as a generalist, and then later on overtime became more of a focused kind of senior level executive? Can you walk us through this journey? What was it like in the journey?Tony: Yes, so, in the beginning, you’re a small team. Essentially, everybody does everything and initially you don’t need to spell out a specific plan or specific strategies. Everybody understand s the vision as it’s a small team. As you start growing and creating new divisions and have new senior leaders coming into the business, making sure that everybody is aligned, is a very, very hard problem. So therefore, you’re going to start to need to formulate things and communicate things in order to get the team with its various departments to get aligned and moving in one direction.Martin: When I talked to entrepreneurs, one thing that they often tell me is the customer acquisition cost were extremely high in the first place. And maybe you’re not often justified the revenue or customer lifetime value afterward. How did you try to decrease the customer acquisition cost through this learning process?Tony: Yes, exactly. So initially, it was based on relationships, so we needed to reach out the customer, traditional direct sales approach, which we actually developed and approved overtime in increasing efficiency of that. But at the same time, we’ve opened up the web inbound marketing channel, and that has actually enabled us to scale faster and reduce the cost of acquisition.To be honest, today if you’re in technology and you’re selling software, you need to be online. You need to be visible to be able to capture some of that demand out there.Martin: Great, today you have a suite of different products targeted for like mobile phones. With what type of product did you start out?Tony: So we started with messaging because:I came from that industry, andWe’ve seen all the problems we can solve and how we could streamline that value chain for the customer and for us to be able to scale fast.So the first two years of the company, we were focused on only one product, and then as we, as actually as the world changes, you have new technology trends, you have customer behavior changing. Then you start adding new products and actually evolving your vision that we have today.Martin: And was the evolution of this kind of product suite more driven by customer demand, or was it more like that you find out actually the basic technically infrastructure for all those different products is the same, so we could leverage our existing infrastructure by just adding one or two more products?Tony: It all starts with the customer pain points. And as we talk to customer, we’re selling them product A, based on asking them: Hey guys, why don’t you do a product B as well and product C? Secondly, we’ve also looked at the competition and what the competition was offering, and we’ve seen that we have opportunities to offer actually similar API or similar product as the competition. Lastly, we look at the market trends and what are the major technological trend that is shaping our industry, specifically, the API economy is really, the APIs are becoming the new way of building software, and also mobile is coming big time. So we started building SDKs so that our API started being compatible with mobile, be it you know iOS or Android, any platform out there.So essentially, it was a process of focusing on getting feedback from customers, understanding the competition and the trends and actually reshaping our product strategy and our vision as we move forward.Martin: Tony, how is your company currently structured in terms of locations and in terms of functions?Tony: Nexmo on the location wise, we actually were one of the few startups at the time that were global from day one. From day one, we started in the UK. My co-founder, Eric and our CTO, building the engineering and producting from here. I was in the US building the sales team in our US presence. And very quickly in year two, we opened Asia. Today we have Hong Kong and Singapore and Seoul as well. Because Asia is the fastest market in the world and in our industry and in many industries. So we really needed to have a good hold in that region. And we grew really fast in these three regions.Of course, we got into certain challenges as you grow especially with cultural differen ces, but that was kind of the initial thought is to capture the demand everywhere in the world especially with the web today. You are everywhere even if you don’t want to.Martin: And how is the company structured in terms of functions?Tony: Of course, we have engineering and product, and developer relation. This is a team that built the community of developers. This is under our CTO.We do have the finance. We have a Chief Financial Officer that also manages other admin function like HR, legal. We also have Chief Marketing Officer that’s on marketing, this is marketing communication, sales enablement, growth marketing, and marketing operation.We also have our sales force and our sales forces has evolved to become much more mature. Now we have a new business team going after a new logos. We have account management to manage the existing customer base. And last year, we built as well an insight sales team to deal with the inbound flow of request.Last but not least, we have our cust omer support team. We like to see everybody in the company is customer support. But we do have a 24/7 global customer support team. And also a newly created business operation team to help us improve the business as we grow.Martin: Cool. What are the major differences in terms of the customers and adoption rates if you’re looking at US customers and Asian customers?Tony: So I would say in the US, in Europe actually customers especially software developers are much more empowered to make decisions about which API vendor they want to use. We’ve seen lots of success in inbound marketing. Customer just singing up online and turning to become major customers, like AirBnB, or Uber, or SnapChat, or booking.com here in Europe.In Asia, however, it was much more a business development, relationship based type of sales. And we see less online demand from that market.Martin: And did you know this before, or did you have to have this as a hard learning?Tony: We learned it the hard way, yes.M artin: So what happened?Tony: Initially, we wanted to design our sales first and our sales process in Asia similar to other regions. We quickly realized that selling to Asian customers requires a different approach. Much more relationship based, much more traditional business development type of process. Essentially, the time to revenue in Asia seems to be longer because you don’t have that inbound channel that helps you to jumpstart the revenue quicker.You also get into issues of payments as well. Like for instance, today we support payment platforms like Alipay that enables us to tap into for instance the Chinese market, but at that time, we expected Chinese customers to pay us in Euro, and that didn’t really fly.Martin: Great. When you think back in the beginning of the company, how did you find investors and at what point in time did you approach them?Tony: Funding was part of our strategy from day one. We focused initially on what we call the three Fs: Family, Friends and F ool. Essentially, people investing in your company because they know you, not necessarily understand the business opportunity.So we raised a seed round of funding from people who trusted us on our plans. Later on, we got introduced through the same investors to a series of VCs. We’ve done traditional road show to be able to fundraise and you’ve got a couple of term sheets. And then we raises our fist VC round.Then later on, it was exactly the same process. So new investors that joined us on the board will help us make introductions to new VCs. and this is how the cycle starts again.Martin: Great. And as a European company, did you try to approach US investors because back then there was not a big trend of US investors investing abroad?Tony: Yes, so five years ago, the European VC community was very small. There was pretty much no funding, large scale funding here in Europe. So we knew that, so when we started the company, we registered the company, we incorporated company in the US.One of the reasons why we did that is because it’s easier for US VCs to invest in US companies. They don’t need to learn new laws and new financial regulations of other countries.Yes, luckily our angel investors had connection with US investors and therefore most of our funding efforts were focused on the US. Actually, we only have our angel investor in Europe, but initially most of our discussion with VCs were based in the US because economy of scales they have more cash to invest in companies like us.Martin: You’re right.BUSINESS MODEL OF NEXMOMartin: Tony, let’s talk about the business model of Nexmo. What are basically the customer segment that you’re trying to address?Tony: Yes, so Nexmo offers cloud communication APIs to enable software developers to embed communication into their flows. So our customer base today is composed of the following segments.The first is what we call the chat apps. All the companies like Viber, WeChat Line, are our customers and they us e us for primarily user acquisition and phone verification. You probably had that experience when you downloaded WhatsApp for the first time. You received a text message with a pin code. So we do that for many, if not all of these chat apps and we have them grow and acquire over four billion users in the last four years.The second segment we address is the travel sector, so both, the new economy players like AirBnB or booking.com or even you know more traditional travel companies like Expedia or KLM. They use us for improving the customer experience, building that communication, embedding that communication into their flow. For instance, booking.com they communicate with their hotel chains to cancel booking through a text to speech call, automatic text to speech. AirBnB uses us to connect hosts and guests over SMS and protect the privacy of their users.The third one is transportation. And again here is also the new economy players like Uber, GrabTaxi, EasyTaxi, where we enable them to connect drivers and passengers or voice and SMS. But also traditional transportation companies or transport companies, here in the case of, in Germany, we have Daimler, Mercedes Benz that use our APIs to communicate with cars. So it is internet of things use case.And we also are strong in the social networks. So many social networks like Twitter and Sina Weibo in China, they use us for user verification and fraud prevention.Lastly is the financial industry and fintech in a series of banks like BNP Paribas or Barclays and even new economy ones like Alipay and with Alibaba, they use us for their communication with their users.Martin: Great. If you look at the business model and assuming you are covering like four billion of the seven billion people in terms of their mobile phones and the communication, is this some kind of asset where you think: Okay, if most of the traffic and so on is going mobile, and you are at least tracking all or some of the mobile communications, then you c an build a platform and then offer other kind of services that are mobile communication related?Tony: That’s correct. So essentially, the biggest trend in communication is contextual communication. And because software is merging with communication, now we can do much more things on mobile than before. You can imagine adding sensor data to the communication. You can imagine adding the context into it.So for instance, let’s say you’re a bank and you want to send a notification to your customer because there’s an issue on their credit card, there’s a fraud. Usually, you block the card and then you communicate with them. Usually, you call them and they are not available. So it goes to voicemail. I need to call you back. So it’s really a cumbersome process that costs a lot of money for the bank and it’s not very cool for the consumer. So essentially that communication goes into the app, you push the notification to communicate that to the user. And the user clicks on that notification and automatically go into the phone call with the call center of the bank that will improve dramatically the experience and add the context of the communication.So this is where we see the future is heading. And because software is enabling us to enable developers to build these experiences, we believe that all these business communications is going to be disrupted by software in the next few years.Martin: So just for clarification, so that I get it right. Is this what you’re telling me that you’re trying to get this kind of API network running and owning, or is it more of that you only want to own the API related stuff which is connecting mobile phones only?Tony: There’s two aspects. There’s the ability to communicate to any phone in the world using programmatically a messaging or voice calls, right? Phone verification is one, IVR is another one. Telephony in the cloud is another one. Record Recording is another one. But we also provide a series of SDKs that s it in the app on the device and gather information about that communication, whether it’s sensored data, whether it’s the context of the transaction, and it’s connected to the information system, the CRM or the help desk software of the enterprise.To give you an example, KLM uses us China, KLM is a large European airline. They use us in China to communicate, to actually support, to help desk support to their users in China over WeChat. Let’s say you were traveling on KLM, you lost your luggage. You can follow them on WeChat which is the largest messaging app in China. Then you can actually open a ticket and interact with the support agent over WeChat. In the future, we will enable that also to be done over a messaging box essentially replacing the help desk agent by an algorithm to improve the user experience. So this is a type of examples of contextual communication we enable.Martin: Great. Tony, what do you think are the reasons why companies or your customers choose you o ver the competition? Is it more like that you are totally international and others are not? Is it that you have a more efficient, scalable, technical infrastructure? Is it your pricing? Is it your go to market strategy or is it just you? What are the reasons?Tony: Well it’s a combination of reasons. Youve touched on some important items.First, it’s really about innovation. Our vision is to reinvent how developer embeds communication into their application in the business world. So we focus on building the latest type of API that a developer can adopt really easily and reduces their time to market, it helps them to solve their coding issues.And the second item is to make it scalable. And scalable both: geographically, so today we can communicate with any phone in the world, but also from a quality point of view because it’s easy to build an app that can transact a million messages a day or months. But if you want to take it to a billion in months, then it becomes problematic. S o we do focus on enabling companies to embed these tools and make it also scalable geographically and technically.Martin: Great. Have you thought of extending your product portfolio by rating those transactions? For example if I’m a customer of you, like a call center or so, and I’m having a customer calling me, I can have the communication arranged by your API for example. And then once you have a rated information of the transaction between the call center and their customer, then you would have this kind of information for several transactions from all over the world, you can put some data scientists on that in order to put some contextual information.Tony: Yes, I think you’re hitting on an important element of the disruption we’re bringing in. We don’t necessarily provide the services, but we enable the customer to access them easily, right.So because we’re a platform and we provide our services through APIs, therefore you can start recording important data points al ong the way of the conversation of the communication. Once you’re able to record this information, you can start doing things like machine learning. You can start doing things like cognitive computing on it. But if you’re not using this open API platform, and you’re like logged into, let’s say here that has a silo system, you’re not able to do so. So we make data break free and therefore our customers get more value out of it.Martin: When I’m thinking of APIs, it sounds to me that they are very easily interchangeable. So as long as your APIs is good as mine, the question now would be, how are you increasing the barriers to competition? For example economies of scale or scope or something like that.Tony: Yes, so this comment is valid for some APIs. For others, it’s actually less valid especially when it’s an SDK and it’s embedded into the device. But we focus on value creation and the value creation is what creates stickiness. So value creation is defined in many va riables.The first one is really about the quality of a service offering. So for instance, let’s say in SMS, we do go very long way to build the world’s largest direct care network, so we actually minimize the latency. We build algorithm that manage quality and make it consistent overtime. So there’s a quality component. There’s also a customer support component. We’re really obsessed about customer support, because our customers rely on us for their most business critical communication: acquiring users, confirming the transaction. And the carrier network is not fit for these new use cases.So we essentially really get obsessed with support. Everyone we hire on the company, they go through the customer academy. They do customer, they sell customer tickets until they get the highest satisfaction rating. Then they graduate and they go to their job.I think that’s kind of the two main reasons of value creation. Also we keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible of feature s and data. For instance, our analytics platform enables the customer to view more data of what’s going on in their communication and do some analysis on that. So this is kind of how we create stickiness and we help actually. It’s really about creating more value for the customer. And there’s no magic in our business for that.Martin: Great.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM TONY JAMOUSMartin: Tony, now I would like to learn some more stuff about your entrepreneur journey and your learnings. So what type of learnings can you share with other people interested in starting a company so that they make less errors?Tony: So it depends on the phase. So initially, one of the recurrent theme I see with people who wants to become entrepreneur is that they believe that they need to be ready to start doing it. What I realize is that you’re never ready. So the best is to jump in right away and try to do your best. I mean that’s kind of the first learning I had.The second learning I think woul d be around going global quickly. At Nexmo, from one hand we benefited from that. We were able to get transaction and revenue across the globe. We have customers in every country today. But if you do it too early, then you’re going to start I mean at least us, we had some issues in terms of the scalability of the organization, you have remote teams. And as the team grows, you need to deliver that vision, you need to make sure they are aligned and it’s not easy when you do it across regions. I think this would be kind of the learning that in the last four or five years.Of course, it’s about it’s all about hiring the right people, and making sure, to hire people that can also help you scale the business from day one and that was an important learning. For instance, our CTO and co-founder, when I hired him, I gave him a coding task which is obviously the wrong thing to do. Because what was really important for him is his leadership skills, and that he needed to build a large te am and manage it and scale it.Martin: And what have been the major specific problems in terms of scaling the organization? Because what I’ve heard from other companies is this tribe theory that first you’re a family, then you’re a tribe, then something like a city and so on. And that in the beginning you don’t have processes and later on, you need to implement processes and then type of people might change because not everybody who is performing great at the 20, 30, 40 person company is performing great than a 500 person company. What have been your major problems in scaling the company?Tony: The first one is I said before, is about aligning everyone around one shared vision, one plan, everybody is driving in the right direction. The bigger you become, the more important it becomes to over-communicate and align.The second learning is really about putting in place the processes and structure to enable you to scale. Be it hiring the right people, putting in place the right str ucture. So its like the image I like to use is like building an airplane while you are in the air. You build one engine, and you realize you need another engine. So you need to go and build that as well. Then you need to make sure that these two engines are actually talking to each other. So that they can go in one direction and that process is ongoing, it never stops. How you learn about it is when you make mistakes, is when things are break, and you realize that: Oh yes, I need to build a process here to make it work.Martin: Great, Tony, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights.Tony: Thanks, Martin.Martin: Welcome.THANKS FOR LISTENING!Thanks so much for joining our 11th podcast episode!Have some feedback you’d like to share?  Leave  a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please  share  it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.Also,  please leave an honest review for The Cleverism Podcast on iTunes or on Sound Cloud. Ratings and reviews  are  extremely  helpful  and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.Special thanks  to Tony for joining me this week. Until  next time!