20VC: Monday.com: Scaling from $6M to $120M in ARR in 3 Years | How Monday Have Built the Best Performance Marketing Engine in SaaS | Going Upmarket, International and Multi-Product; The Biggest Lessons and Mistakes with Eran Zinman

Summary

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) Episode Summary: Scaling Monday.com with Eran Zinman

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
• Host: Harry Stebbings
• Guest: Aaron Zinman, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Monday.com
• Episode Title: Scaling from $6M to $120M in ARR in 3 Years | How Monday.com Built the Best Performance Marketing Engine in SaaS | Going Upmarket, International, and Multi-Product; The Biggest Lessons and Mistakes
• Release Date: January 17, 2025

---

1. Introduction to Aaron Zinman and Monday.com

Harry Stebbings welcomes Aaron Zinman, the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Monday.com, to discuss the company's remarkable growth journey. Aaron shares insights into how Monday.com scaled its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) from $6 million to $120 million in just three years, despite initial challenges in fundraising.

Notable Quote:

Harry Stebbings [00:23]: "The story of Monday.com is insane. Turned down by 99% of VCs, the company then scaled from $6 million ARR to $120 million in just three years."

---

2. Early Challenges and Scaling

Aaron and Roy Mann, the other Co-CEO, recount the early days of Monday.com. Initially branded as Da Pulse, the founders struggled to raise funds as investors didn't fully grasp their vision. Despite this, they managed to grow the company's ARR significantly within three years.

Notable Quote:

Roy Mann [00:09]: "From $6 million to $18 the year after and then from $18 to $50 and $50 to $120 in three years."

---

3. Embracing Failure as a Path to Success

Aaron emphasizes the importance of confronting difficult aspects of the business rather than avoiding them. Reflecting on his first startup failure, he explains how embracing failure became a core part of Monday.com's DNA.

Notable Quote:

Aaron Zinman [04:28]: "I try to avoid the hardest things in your business. If something is very painful, that's the right time to get into it and fix it."

---

4. Building Monday.com: Origin and Strategic Pivot

The conversation delves into the inception of Monday.com. Both founders had prior startups and identified a gap in the work management and project management market. Initially focusing on communication tools, they pivoted to a more flexible work management platform after realizing that existing solutions were perceived as "nice-to-have" rather than essential.

Notable Quote:

Aaron Zinman [07:01]: "The work management, project management industry was always packed with a lot of tools, but we had a different view about the market. We said, look, there's such a huge vacuum today in the market."

---

5. Developing the "Big Brain" Performance Marketing Engine

A pivotal moment for Monday.com was the creation of an internal tool named "Big Brain." This performance marketing engine meticulously tracked every campaign, user interaction, and conversion, enabling the company to optimize marketing spend and scale efficiently.

Notable Quote:

Aaron Zinman [17:05]: "We built this tool to track every campaign... to make the business very efficient."

---

6. Multi-Product Strategy and Going Upmarket

Monday.com's flexibility allowed customers to build various solutions like CRMs on their platform. Recognizing this demand, the company introduced dedicated products such as CRM, Dev, and Service, each managed by specialized teams. This multi-product approach not only diversified revenue streams but also positioned Monday.com as a comprehensive platform for businesses of all sizes.

Notable Quote:

Roy Mann [32:07]: "Every product is in a different phase... dedicated salespeople and we scale them. It's like small startups within the company."

---

7. Board Management and Company Culture

Aaron shares his philosophy on board management, emphasizing transparency and regular communication. By sending daily performance metrics to board members through "Big Brain," the company ensured that the board was always informed, fostering a culture of trust and accountability.

Notable Quote:

Aaron Zinman [43:59]: "Never surprise the board. We sent daily performance metrics so they knew everything better than I did."

---

8. The IPO Decision and Its Impact

Discussing the company's decision to go public, Aaron explains how reaching a $1 billion ARR milestone underscored their readiness for an IPO. The transition to a public company brought a new level of maturity and introduced sophisticated public market investors, enhancing Monday.com's market presence.

Notable Quote:

Aaron Zinman [39:45]: "We felt that, you know, eventually we want to build a huge company. When we look at the most inspiring SaaS companies today, they were all public."

---

9. Co-CEO Structure: A Path to Synergy

Aaron and Roy discuss their unique co-CEO arrangement, highlighting how their complementary skills and mutual respect have been pivotal to the company's success. This structure allows them to efficiently divide responsibilities and maintain a harmonious leadership dynamic.

Notable Quote:

Roy Mann [42:54]: "He's one of those people that has no ego. You want to do what's best for the company."

---

10. Personal Insights and Lessons Learned

Aaron delves into personal development, sharing how therapy helped him balance work and family life. He underscores the importance of self-care in maintaining leadership effectiveness and preventing burnout.

Notable Quote:

Aaron Zinman [47:26]: "Finding the right balance... I went to therapy to make a change. Today I'm more efficient."

---

11. Rapid Growth and Future Plans

From an ARR of $6 million, Monday.com achieved $120 million within three years, underscoring their effective scaling strategies. Looking ahead, the founders aim to reach a $1 billion ARR, driven by their robust performance marketing and expanding product line.

Notable Quote:

Roy Mann [25:07]: "We grew from $6 million of ARR to $120 in three years. It was super rapid growth."

---

12. Navigating AI's Impact on SaaS

Aaron expresses optimism about integrating AI into Monday.com's platform. By allowing customers to incorporate AI into their workflows, the company remains adaptable and continues to enhance user efficiency without compromising on data transparency and control.

Notable Quote:

Aaron Zinman [37:45]: "We took the same principles of easy user experience and customizability and instead of building a dedicated AI product, we just allowed our own customers to integrate AI into their own workflows."

---

Conclusion

This episode of The Twenty Minute VC offers a comprehensive look into Monday.com's strategic growth, emphasizing the importance of flexibility, performance marketing, and a strong company culture. Aaron Zinman's insights into embracing failure, prioritizing transparency, and balancing personal well-being provide valuable lessons for entrepreneurs aiming to scale their startups effectively.

For more information, visit www.20vc.com.

Transcript

[Aaron Zinman]

It was still hard for us to raise funds back in the days because people didn't get the idea.

[Roy Mann]

We grew from 6 million of ARR.

[Aaron Zinman]

To 18 the year after and then.

[Roy Mann]

From 18 to 50 and 50 to 120. You know in three years. What I found about founders is that.

[Aaron Zinman]

You try to avoid the hardest things in your business. If something is very painful, that's the right time to get into it and fix it.

[Harry Stebbings]

The story of Monday.com is insane. Turned down by 99% of VCs, the company then scaled from 6 million doll.

[Unknown]

In ARR to 120 in just three years.

[Harry Stebbings]

Today the company is public with a market cap of $12 billion.

[Unknown]

They have an incredible co CEO structure which is very strange.

[Harry Stebbings]

And Aaron, the guest today does not use email. I'm so excited to bring this one to you today. Joining us in the hot seat we have Monday's co Founder and co CEO Aaron Zinman. This is a special one but before.

[Unknown]

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[Harry Stebbings]

Aran I am so excited for this. I heard so many great things from Avi, from Nino, from Rajeev. I spoke to pretty much the whole cap table. It was a lot of fun. But thank you so much for joining me today.

[Aaron Zinman]

Thanks for having me. I'm excited for this.

[Unknown]

So am I.

[Harry Stebbings]

Listen, I've wanted to do it for a while. I'm like the biggest Monday nerd. I love that. Many reasons why I'm just perpetually single. But I want to start. I heard you're a really great video game player and this is a commonality in great founders that I've interviewed. So why are video games correlated to success in founders?

[Aaron Zinman]

Wow, you've really done your research, huh?

[Unknown]

Yeah, I told you.

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, I actually, I love video games. I actually play to this day, so it's been an old habit of mine. As a kid when I was young, I used to play a lot of strategy games. One of my favorites ever was, I don't know if you remember, but it was called Command and Conquer Red Alert 2. It's a strategy game. I think if you play the right games, you can learn a lot from them, especially strategy games.

[Roy Mann]

On one hand, you need to see the big picture all the time.

[Aaron Zinman]

You need to understand the strategy. You need to understand what's going on, but also handle the tactics, know all the details, act quickly. Kind of similar in business, I guess.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think it totally is. I remember Toby at Shopify saying to me that he. He thought that it was more relevant if you'd like, manage clans in games before than if you'd been to university, I think. And I thought that was rather apt.

[Aaron Zinman]

I agree. It's as hard as doing that in.

[Harry Stebbings]

Business now, dude, you know, Monday is not your first. And I remember after your first business, you said something which is failing is part of our success. And I just want to dive into this because I think it's important. What have you learned about embracing failure over the years and how do you think about that statement?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, there's something that really goes with me in my journey because prior to Monday, my first startup, I was in the middle of uni. I built some sort of a search engine, try to compete in a category which is extremely competitive.

[Roy Mann]

I think the more interesting part of.

[Aaron Zinman]

It, it was a complete disaster. Like, I built a product. I worked on it for about 14 or 15 months before launching it.

[Roy Mann]

After 14 or 15 months, I didn't raise any money.

[Aaron Zinman]

I just felt I wasn't ready and eventually it was a big failure. I ran out of money, personal money, and ran out of energy. I remember thinking to myself, after I closed that company, I wasted all my resources. You know, personal, financial, I'm at point zero.

[Roy Mann]

I must have learned something.

[Aaron Zinman]

I didn't spend all that time without learning anything.

[Roy Mann]

After a lot of processing, I realized.

[Aaron Zinman]

That I've learned that the reason I failed in that company is that I.

[Roy Mann]

Was afraid to fail.

[Aaron Zinman]

You know, it might sound weird, but.

[Roy Mann]

I was so afraid of negative feedback from customers. I was afraid people are going to.

[Aaron Zinman]

Write about me on TechCrunch or on a blog post. I thought people are going to be critical of my product. I don't know. I was just afraid. And I swore to myself that when I build my next company, I'm going to fail.

[Roy Mann]

I'm going to fail often.

[Aaron Zinman]

I'm going to be happy about failures because I want to learn as quickly as I can and improve and get actual feedback from users. Because after 14 months working on that product, people gave me feedback that if I've shown them like a mock up or like an early version, I would get the same feedback. And I will be in a totally different place today. And we keep that DNA up until today and Monday.

[Roy Mann]

We fail.

[Aaron Zinman]

We tell people, try it out, a B test, get feed from customers, just learn.

[Roy Mann]

And it's a big part of our.

[Aaron Zinman]

DNA today as a company.

[Harry Stebbings]

As much as one can get used to failure, it's never easy to accept when you look back at the different challenges you faced. What internal fail has been the most challenging to accept?

[Aaron Zinman]

Growing up writing code, I was always this smart kid in school, in uni, and when you build an actual product that people need to use, nobody care about your achievement. Nobody cares or knowledge or how much.

[Roy Mann]

You know about anything.

[Aaron Zinman]

It's all about the product.

[Roy Mann]

Is it good enough?

[Aaron Zinman]

Do people really want it?

[Roy Mann]

It's not about an exam.

[Aaron Zinman]

It's not about somebody saying great job.

[Roy Mann]

It's about actually succeeding in the real life.

[Aaron Zinman]

And I think I was not ready for that. I tried to not fail.

[Roy Mann]

I wanted everybody to clap and say, this is an amazing product and this is not the way you build things.

[Aaron Zinman]

You need to get feedback. You need to get people involved, get their opinions.

[Harry Stebbings]

Let's go back to 2012. You and Roy are sitting together. Da Pulse. Love the name. It really is brilliant. Genuinely. I actually like it. I remember. Do you know what's so funny, dude? When I emailed you for the first time, your email was apulse. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You didn't respond, but my question is, you're sitting with Roy. How do you guys come up with the idea for dapulse now, Monday?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, initially, you know, both Roy and I had my own startup. Roy also had a startup. And I remember us sitting down. I was working in a company called Conduit. Roy was working at wix. I guess it's a little bit counterintuitive because I think a lot of founders.

[Roy Mann]

When they think about starting a new.

[Aaron Zinman]

Business, they often try to think about.

[Roy Mann]

Something that nobody thought about before or a new idea. This is one approach, but we took.

[Aaron Zinman]

A very different approach. I would say the work management, project management industry was always packed with a lot of tools, but we had a different view about the market. We said, look, if we look at the market today, CRM, what's the leader? Salesforce.

[Roy Mann]

It might be ServiceNow, but who's the.

[Aaron Zinman]

Leader today about managing work and processes?

[Roy Mann]

Who is it? Who's the number one vendor that people rely on to manage the core of.

[Aaron Zinman]

Their work, apart from the CRMs and.

[Roy Mann]

The service part of it? And when you think about it, there was none. And we just felt there's such a.

[Aaron Zinman]

Huge vacuum today in the market and.

[Roy Mann]

It doesn't make sense that there isn't.

[Aaron Zinman]

One company that became the dominant player in that market. So we said, let's try to tackle that opportunity.

[Roy Mann]

One principle that was very important for us from day one, and I think it was a critical component of our success.

[Aaron Zinman]

We said, we want to take a very different approach to how we're going to do it because we, both of us, we didn't consider ourselves to be.

[Roy Mann]

Like the best managers on the planet. I don't know what's the best way to manage a team or a group.

[Aaron Zinman]

Of people or a business, but I can give people the tools to do it and they know what's best for their business.

[Roy Mann]

So from day one, we said, we.

[Aaron Zinman]

Don'T know exactly what's the solution for every business, but we're going to give.

[Roy Mann]

People the ability to customize Monday for.

[Aaron Zinman]

Their needs because they know best about what's right for their business.

[Roy Mann]

Since day one, nothing in the product is rigid. Everything is 100% flexible. They can change it to their needs and basically our own customers build their.

[Aaron Zinman]

Own product on Monday today.

[Harry Stebbings]

So we go with the idea that, hey, we want it customizable so people can make it fit their business. When we launch, do we have immediate traction? Is there initial success that we know we have? How did that go?

[Roy Mann]

No, I mean, the first Few years.

[Aaron Zinman]

Was really challenging, I would say. When we started in 2012, our main focus was around communication. If you remember back in the days, there were other players like Yammer, Hipchat, it was the days before Slack. So we initially thought that it will be more focused around communication and collaboration. But one thing that we found is that a lot of those tools are under the category of yeah, we can use it, but it's a nice to have tool. It's not something that is kind of managing the core work of businesses. So we pivoted from that. I think the first year and a half we kind of focused on communication and then we kind of pivoted the business to focus more on that flexible management.

[Roy Mann]

And that was a big pivotal moment in the life of the company.

[Harry Stebbings]

How is that pivot? Often founders are faced with the dilemma of, I'm told that resilience and persistence is important and I should just keep going. And then we're also hearing of pivots, where a pivot is required. How do you advise founders on whether to keep going and be persistent versus when to change direction and pivot?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, this is extremely tricky part because, you know, both Roy, my co founder, and I, we're software developers. Our natural instinct is to go to the office and write code. That's. That was our go to. We always felt that we're one feature away from getting the right product and we kind of spend like 70 or 80% of our seed round. We sat down and said to ourselves.

[Roy Mann]

Look, something is not working.

[Aaron Zinman]

It's not about the next feature. We need to talk more with customers, we need to understand what they're looking for. And we've done something that's very not natural for us. We went and again interviewed a lot of potential customers and instead of showing them what we built, we actually interviewed them and asked them how they manage their businesses.

[Roy Mann]

So we kind of took that into.

[Aaron Zinman]

Our own, Pivoted as a company.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay. And so we pivot and then we go to the more known product that we have today, which is obviously depulse at this time. Now, Monday, did we get customers then? Was that immediate traction? When we released that V1, when we.

[Aaron Zinman]

Had like the initial version of the collaboration tool, we had about three or four paying customers. One of them was wix. So we had a little bit of traction. But when we pivoted the company, that was a really meaningful moment in the.

[Roy Mann]

Life of the company.

[Aaron Zinman]

We launched our payment system and I remember to this day the first time a new customer has actually paid for the software without us talking to them. I bought a tv. I actually mounted it to the wall and I built a dashboard that showed the number six. That was the amount of customers that we had. And every time a new customer came in, there was a big Homer Simpson sound like woohoo. I remember one day we sit down writing code and I hear this woohoo in the background. And six turned into seven, seven turned into eight. You know, I remember even one day that we had three new paying customers in one day. And I was so excited. Kolroy, my co founder, I told him, look, we got three new customers in one day. We can conquer the world. I'm sure that with that momentum, how.

[Harry Stebbings]

Much are these customers paying?

[Aaron Zinman]

At the time, I would say $12 per seat. But the exciting part was that we never talked to them.

[Roy Mann]

They got the principle of the product, they got the value. Just onboarding. That was the exciting part.

[Aaron Zinman]

It just felt like we, we built something that can turn into a machine. And I think that's more than anything we're excited at.

[Harry Stebbings]

One thing I find challenging is horizontal products and getting to the first 1,000 customers or a thousand users. When you think about that, Monday is the joy of it is a horizontal product, but then the challenge is it's a horizontal product. And so your product marketing can't be that tight. When you think about getting the first customers, how do you think or what are your biggest lessons in scaling to the first 100 or a thousand given what you've seen?

[Aaron Zinman]

You know, initially I thought that most of our customers are going to be startup companies or tech companies like us. But we started to do marketing on actually Facebook was the first platform that we started to do performance marketing on. And I think what's great about it.

[Roy Mann]

Is it has such a broad audience.

[Aaron Zinman]

And it brought us a lot of customers that we couldn't expect to have. Like we got, you know, churches, hotels, retail, airplane manufacturing. Over the years we found that up.

[Roy Mann]

Until today, 70% of our customers are actually non tech companies. That's amazing because it just opens up.

[Aaron Zinman]

The TAM and the audience of the company so much.

[Harry Stebbings]

And we're going to dive into that because it's an incredible stat. But at this point we're getting customers. Okay, we've got the woohoo coming in. You do much better than me, but we've got that coming in. But you spent 70 to 80% of your seed round. At this point, your Runway is pretty tight. What happens now in terms of funding?

[Aaron Zinman]

So actually here I give a lot of credit to Our board members specifically. You mentioned Avi. I would say the typical investor, seeing that a company spent 80% of their seed round and didn't reach like product market fit, maybe would kind of give up on the company or send that company to do like a round day and try their luck outside. But something I give Avi from Entrez Capital a lot of credit. He saw the potential. He told us, I'll never forget this. I believe in you guys, even though I don't know why, but I believe in you guys. Don't do any round. Just go out. I'll give you the money. Let's do a convertible. Just scale what you're building. I think this was a pivotal moment for the company because if we would go and try to raise funds, it's a long process, especially when you don't have momentum.

[Roy Mann]

Maybe the company wouldn't be what it.

[Aaron Zinman]

Is today, but because it gave us this Runway, I think it really helped us leverage the momentum we already had.

[Unknown]

Was that the A?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah. So that's complicated. So we finished. We kind of ran out of money.

[Roy Mann]

From the seed round.

[Aaron Zinman]

We actually, just to give you some data, we raised 1.4 million at I think it was 2 million pre. That's back in the days. Good times for investors.

[Roy Mann]

30% of the company.

[Aaron Zinman]

We got this convertible when we wanted to do the A round. Actually, our existing investors put the money in with the convertible to get us into an A round. I think it was still hard for us to raise funds back in the days because people didn't get the idea. Maybe we also didn't do a good job raising money. Both Roy and I, what did they.

[Harry Stebbings]

Not get about the idea?

[Aaron Zinman]

I always felt like this company is.

[Roy Mann]

Going to be a huge success.

[Aaron Zinman]

What they don't get, I didn't get it.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, I can tell you, if you want my perspective, you are selling low ACV contracts. We like enterprise PLG was not as notable as it is now in terms of being able to scale into massive businesses. And you're selling to hospitals and to hotels and to churches. Dude, this isn't a really big business. This is like SMB play. You can't make money selling to SMBs.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so we've got all these investor heuristics which tell us this isn't a good business.

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah. So this is great feedback. I always felt like, you know, it's all temporary. Like eventually we'll go up market. Eventually we'll sell to large enterprises. I always believed in our ability to execute and to change the company to.

[Roy Mann]

Kind of fit to the next stage.

[Aaron Zinman]

And maybe that's something we didn't communicate well enough to investors or didn't build our confidence around, around that we got a lot of no's. I would tell you that in our.

[Roy Mann]

A, B and C rounds.

[Harry Stebbings]

So is that when you raised the seven and a half million?

[Aaron Zinman]

A. Yeah, with the convertible it was seven point something. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do we expand on next? We've got seven and a half million. Where do we go now?

[Aaron Zinman]

Okay, so something that I feel we've done which was really meaningful to make the company successful and scale, we actually built a very powerful performance marketing engine. We call it Big Brain. It's a tool we build within the company to track every campaign. Every user made an early decision in the life of the company to build this tool internally.

[Roy Mann]

It was very tempting to use off.

[Aaron Zinman]

The shelf software for that to do analytics monitoring. But you know, we were very ambitious. We said we're going to build a huge company. I don't know where we got the confidence, but we just said we're going to build a huge company.

[Roy Mann]

We need to build our own tool because this is going to be a.

[Aaron Zinman]

Main part of our ability to scale this machine. So we built this tool, we invested heavily into that.

[Roy Mann]

So we tracked everything, every click, every.

[Aaron Zinman]

View, every ad that's any user saw, all the way through the signup funnel, conversion, expansion and so on.

[Roy Mann]

And with that we built a very efficient marketing machine.

[Aaron Zinman]

Now when I say efficient, I think a lot of founders get this wrong and maybe this is an important message.

[Roy Mann]

Something that we optimized for from the.

[Aaron Zinman]

Very beginning was cash flow.

[Roy Mann]

I think a lot of SaaS metrics.

[Aaron Zinman]

Are optimized not for cash.

[Roy Mann]

If you think about standard SaaS metrics like LTV, CAC, whatever, they never mention cash.

[Aaron Zinman]

It's not about cash, it's more about.

[Roy Mann]

Around accounting and predictability. But we always try to optimize for cash.

[Aaron Zinman]

What I mean by that is that let's say we raise 7 million, okay, I want to invest this in the most efficient way in performance marketing.

[Roy Mann]

So what's the best way to do it? We said we want to invest into.

[Aaron Zinman]

Performance marketing and we want to collect cash on cash as quick as possible from our customers. So we've done a lot of a B test to get people to pay more annually, to improve speed to conversion, to find campaigns and keywords that get customers to onboard faster and pay more.

[Roy Mann]

Quicker for annual subscription. So you turn that 5 million.

[Aaron Zinman]

So every, let's say million you invest into performance marketing, you get 70 or 80% back after a month. We built a very efficient machine around that.

[Roy Mann]

So we actually managed to turn 5.

[Aaron Zinman]

Million of money raised from investors into a 15 million performance marketing budget.

[Roy Mann]

So we built a very efficient machine.

[Aaron Zinman]

That recycles money and kind of reinvested that back into the business. I think our customers has been the biggest investor of Monday. More money than we ever raised from investors.

[Unknown]

When you think about building that cash cycle that is at velocity and at speed, is it multiple things that lead that to be very efficient or is it one or two things which really drove it, like annual payments?

[Roy Mann]

A lot of things. First of all, we track the expenses. We asked Facebook, we asked Google to.

[Aaron Zinman]

Can we pay you? Can we postpone the payments? Like, can we drive campaigns and pay you every 90 days, for example?

[Roy Mann]

So we optimize the expense on one hand. On the other hand, we optimize for campaigns.

[Aaron Zinman]

We actually pick campaigns based on the return, how fast it is to get customers on board.

[Roy Mann]

We optimize the onboarding, we optimize the payment form. There's a lot of steps involved into that. The point is we optimize for that. We optimize for that KPI to make the business very efficient.

[Aaron Zinman]

It's a key part of our DNA up until today. Monday is really efficient in terms of cash flow. It's a huge part of our DNA. We started from day one, literally.

[Unknown]

We've got big brain. We're building this performance marketing machine.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's starting to work and we're building.

[Unknown]

This cash flow cycle first. How much revenues are we at when we raise the 7.5? Wow.

[Aaron Zinman]

Probably 3 or 4 million of ARR.

[Harry Stebbings]

Fuck.

[Unknown]

I really miss these times now. You do an A when you've got a design partner. That wasn't a joke. That was me crying in my studio. Okay. And so we have this performance marketing machine.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's working.

[Unknown]

When do we go out and raise the B?

Because then you raise 25 from insight, correct?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah.

[Roy Mann]

When we raise our B round, we.

[Aaron Zinman]

Raised 25 million from insight. That was kind of, I would say a better round for the company. So we raised 25. I think when we raised that round, we had like 7 million of ARR.

[Unknown]

What was the price on the round?

[Aaron Zinman]

I think it was around 100 million.

[Unknown]

Pre standard. 20% dilution.

[Roy Mann]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

So we raised 25. Let's ask the question of upmarket SMBs and kind of lower ACVs is kind of where our home is. When do we decide to go upmarket?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah. So after we've done The B round with insight. A few things happen. One, we branded the company as Monday. We changed names from the polls and I think it was about a year after that. I remember that board meeting, it was in New York. And one thing that Roy and I said, said always that we're never going to have a sales team in the company. And I remember that we had this warming and we came to the board and said, look, we're probably wrong and we have to have a sales team in order to scale the company to the next level. And we built an amazing sales team. Going forward to today, we have more than 1,000 people in our sales team. But it was not obvious back in the days.

[Unknown]

Why did you decide then was the right time?

[Aaron Zinman]

Being developers and product people and building this incredible performance marketing engine. We felt that we can scale the company to infinity. But what we found is that having a great product is not enough. Because when you want to scale within existing customers, the product plays a very important component. But there's other things you need. Relationship with people, they want somebody to talk with. And I just felt that it wasn't a good product for our customers. They had their own processes, they care about security, they cared about governance. They wanted help with onboarding people into the product. And software is not enough. As I said, we were always ambitious. I remember Roy and I talking and we said we don't want to be an SMB company forever. We have such huge potential. We want to be doing both SMB and go up market and this is what we have to do. So let's do it.

[Unknown]

A lot of founders are told, wait until you're pulled up market by large enterprises. Is that good advice?

[Aaron Zinman]

It worked for us. I think let's say the opposite is also not optimal. I think that if you start as a small company and you have an amazing VP of sales, they can sell anything. Even if your product is really crappy, that's a curse. It's not something positive. Because we work so hard to improve the product. Because every improvement just improve our marketing machine. It improves the retention of our customers.

[Roy Mann]

And it's built a DNA, a special.

[Aaron Zinman]

DNA in the company. And then when we felt that we were missing like people knocking on our door saying we want to scale and there was nobody around to help them, it just felt we have to do it, we have to mature. We had to add this layer into the company in order to scale to the next phase.

[Unknown]

I get you, but a lot of other people say, and I see this myself as an ambassador, it's such A different company. To build an enterprise business, not just sales teams, you need customer success, you need SDRs, AES, you need CS, you need security, SOC2s compliance. Is it a completely different business to build?

[Aaron Zinman]

I think there's a difference between a company that pivot into the enterprise and a company that want to sell to the enterprise.

[Roy Mann]

In addition to selling to SMB and.

[Aaron Zinman]

Mid market, we didn't pivot into the enterprise. A lot of companies say, look, we tried SMBs, we tried Mid market, we spend so much energy and effort converted those customers, we might as well just focus on the large ones and get a higher acv.

[Roy Mann]

That wasn't our strategy.

[Aaron Zinman]

We wanted to capture like we call it, like a pyramid, the whole pyramid.

[Roy Mann]

The baseline of the SMBs and the.

[Aaron Zinman]

Mid market, but also the tip of the pyramid with the large enterprises. So it was always about adding that layer, but also making sure the product.

[Roy Mann]

Is good enough for SMBs and mid market.

[Unknown]

When did you start to see PLG tapering off and really wanting to implement the sales team alongside it? What sort of level of revenue was it?

[Aaron Zinman]

It probably 40 or 50 million of ARR.

[Unknown]

Wow. Okay. And so we're still on the 25 million from Insider this round.

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, we grew really quickly.

[Roy Mann]

We grew from 6 million of ARR.

[Aaron Zinman]

To 18 the year after and then from 18 to 50 and 50 to.

[Roy Mann]

120 in three years.

[Aaron Zinman]

So it was like super rapid growth. I think it was 40 or 50 million, maybe even 60, that we added the sales team.

[Unknown]

Do you appreciate how strange that growth is? And what I mean by that is when you're doing it, are you like, whoa, we know that we are one of the special ones.

[Roy Mann]

I'll tell you something funny.

[Aaron Zinman]

You mentioned Jason Lemkin.

[Unknown]

Don't tell me you cold emailed him and he didn't respond.

[Aaron Zinman]

No, no, no. One of the reason I didn't reply to your email is that I don't use email. But I actually met Jason a few years ago. I was one of his biggest fans. When we started in 2012, 2013, nobody.

[Roy Mann]

Knew about SaaS anything.

[Aaron Zinman]

I became the biggest geek on SaaS ever. I read every article he put on Saster. He wrote answers on Quora, if you remember. I remember I went to Roy and I told him, look, I read an article from Jason. He said that when you get to 1 million, you need to get to 10 in four quarters and then once you get to 10, you need to get to 100 in, I don't remember.

[Roy Mann]

Five or six quarters. And I said, look, we have to.

[Aaron Zinman]

Do it, we have to do it. Jason said so.

[Roy Mann]

And when I met Jason a few.

[Aaron Zinman]

Years later, I told him, thank you for the guidance and everything. And it was very ambitious to get to that goal. He told me, you know, I was talking about the best companies, what investors want to invest into that.

[Roy Mann]

And just I took it as a grant.

[Aaron Zinman]

Like, literally, this is what we need to do. So I guess ignorance is a bliss sometimes.

[Unknown]

Dude, that growth is incredible. When you look back at that growth, what broke first? Because scaling companies is very hard. What was the first thing to break in that intense period of hyperscaling?

[Aaron Zinman]

I think at some point, when we reach 50 or 60 million, the performance marketing engine was working really well. But at some point, you understand that.

[Roy Mann]

If you want to reach to 1 billion.

[Aaron Zinman]

Actually, when we got to 50, we built a dashboard we called the Road to 1 billion. We built a vertical TV in the office showing that we want to reach 1 billion by the year of 2023.

[Roy Mann]

We actually missed it by one year.

[Aaron Zinman]

It was like vertical dashboard. And we said, we are here, 50 million. We need to get to 1 billion. And we put it for everybody to see in every office around the world. And I remember when we sat down, we said, we cannot do it just with the performance marketing engine, because when we ran the math, we had to invest so much money into performance marketing in 2022 or 2023, it didn't add up. So it was obvious to us that in order to scale to that magnitude, it's not enough to have a very.

[Roy Mann]

Efficient performance marketing engine.

[Aaron Zinman]

We need to build a very robust.

[Roy Mann]

Sales team and to exp customers.

[Aaron Zinman]

Because eventually, when you reach 1 billion and you want to grow 30%, the majority of revenue need to come from existing customers.

[Unknown]

I read. And our teams are amazing. Now for research. So when I say I read, I was given the numbers, but I read that you spent in 2023, 17 million a month on performance marketing.

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, something like that. A little bit less, but around that, yeah.

[Unknown]

How did you spend so efficiently in performance marketing when so few others did?

[Aaron Zinman]

Again, it's all thanks to this amazing.

[Roy Mann]

Engine that we built. We were very efficient in terms of.

[Aaron Zinman]

Cash flow, you know, over 25% free cash flow, positive. So we just scaled this cash flow.

[Roy Mann]

Machine to the extreme.

[Unknown]

Did you focus on a small number of channels and really hammer them? Did you spray and pray and see what worked? How did you approach the kind of portfolio approach to channel spend?

[Aaron Zinman]

We never spray and pray. We don't believe that pray. I mean, I pray sometimes, but it doesn't help you with performance marketing. We measure everything when we build a new campaign.

[Roy Mann]

We track everything, we ab test everything.

[Unknown]

Why was YouTube so successful? Monday has crushed YouTube. You know this as well as I do, but why?

[Aaron Zinman]

So first of all, the rebrand was a key part of that. That was one of the main reasons we rebranded the company. Because we wanted to pick a name that people can remember. Because when you see an ad, you have about five seconds of attention to capture people.

[Roy Mann]

And again, we managed to track when.

[Aaron Zinman]

People saw the ad, we did not just track links, but also people viewing the ad.

[Roy Mann]

And we saw there's a great ROI.

[Aaron Zinman]

On that and we managed to get.

[Roy Mann]

A great presence on YouTube and it.

[Aaron Zinman]

Was again cost effective to do it the way we've done it.

[Unknown]

What channel did you spend on that you wish you hadn't spent on?

[Aaron Zinman]

Look, Facebook was amazing for us because I think it just changed the trajectory of the company. But Definitely, you know, AdWords, YouTube, we tried every.

[Unknown]

We're doing everything but which one's least effective?

[Roy Mann]

Least effective?

[Unknown]

Yeah, which one are you like? We spent on it and it was a waste of money.

[Aaron Zinman]

That's not the way I look at it. Because it's not about effectiveness. It's different audience. When people search on Google, they have a specific intent. I'm looking for a project management tool, but some people are not searching for a project management tool but are browsing Facebook. And those are two different audiences, but.

[Roy Mann]

Both of them can be potential customers.

[Aaron Zinman]

Some people have intent, some people have I need a new platform. In the back of their minds, I'll just go on Facebook and suddenly a commercial about workmen do. Aha. You know, maybe it's an opportunity. It's different kind of audience that we kind of target.

[Unknown]

Is it not like the most expensive AdWords like CRM, respectfully, the competitive landfill or landmines that you kind of face is intense. Is it not the most expensive adword buy?

[Aaron Zinman]

It is, but it's very cost effective for us. You know, if we go forward, we build our multi product strategy. So basically what happened? Maybe I'll give you some background before we talk about marketing around that. So basically people, we got everybody using Monday. And one thing that was super surprising for me is that a lot of people use Monday as a CRM and because it's so customizable, you can build your own boards, which is like kind of the equivalent of a table.

[Roy Mann]

And they build contacts, they build deals, they build dashboards, automation, like a full fledged CRM.

[Aaron Zinman]

Like why it takes so much effort to do that. And I'm not talking about a few hundreds or even a few thousands, tens.

[Roy Mann]

Of thousands of accounts build CRM on top of Monday. And the same goes for dev, the same goes for service. Those products were not born out of thin air, they were born because customer demand. And when we interviewed people like why.

[Aaron Zinman]

Did you do, why did you go.

[Roy Mann]

All that effort to build a full.

[Aaron Zinman]

Fledged CRM where you could just buy off the shelf product.

[Roy Mann]

And they said like we want control.

[Aaron Zinman]

I have an idea, what's the best CRM for me?

[Roy Mann]

I don't want to use off the.

[Aaron Zinman]

Shelf product that's very rigid, it's built.

[Roy Mann]

In a very specific way.

[Aaron Zinman]

And they told me like our only option basically was to go to Salesforce because it's enterprise ready, you can customize it, but the cost of doing that and the complexity of customizing that software.

[Roy Mann]

And Sethl is just an example.

[Aaron Zinman]

I'm talking broadly about enterprise products. They look for something different. And we gave them on one hand the freedom to build their most amazing CRM.

[Roy Mann]

But they've done it themselves.

[Aaron Zinman]

No third party vendor, no special IT team.

[Roy Mann]

They build themselves and they felt proud about that CRM.

[Aaron Zinman]

So eventually we said, look, look, let's build a CRM product. Let's package the Monday platform into a full fledged CRM and build like deep feature, you know, call recording, call analysis, email marketing.

[Roy Mann]

And we've done that. That strategy has been a huge success.

[Aaron Zinman]

A multi product strategy. You know, the CRM today is growing faster than what Monday did back in the days.

[Unknown]

What's the CRM product today at revenue wise?

[Aaron Zinman]

The last investor day last year it was growing from almost 0 to 25.

[Roy Mann]

Million in one year.

[Unknown]

Are we seeing like the complete bundling of SaaS tools? You mentioned that, the cool recording elements, you mentioned quite a few different products within that which kind of bluntly kill a load of other adjacent products. Are we seeing the bundling of SaaS tooling again?

[Aaron Zinman]

Look, I don't think Monday will replace all SaaS tools on the planet. But our vision, our grand vision is.

[Roy Mann]

That from day one we built the.

[Aaron Zinman]

Platform, we didn't build the product.

[Roy Mann]

I think that's something that a lot.

[Aaron Zinman]

Of investors got wrong about what we're building. You know, maybe we didn't explain it properly, but we didn't build a work management or project management tool from day one. You know, the equivalent, we built the equivalent of force.com, which is for Salesforce. We built a generic platform, not about.

[Roy Mann]

Work management, not about CRM, just the Building blocks and then work management was the first implementation.

[Aaron Zinman]

And then came CRM and dev and service. The effort that it takes us to customize the platform as a CRM as device is minimal compared to the compound value that we get because we build it on our Monday platform.

[Roy Mann]

And eventually I definitely see a future.

[Aaron Zinman]

Where a company buys several tools and.

[Roy Mann]

Consolidate on Monday for the core business use cases.

[Aaron Zinman]

Whether it's CRM, work management, dev service.

[Roy Mann]

And the compound value of using several of those tools. The flow of data automations processes is a huge value add.

[Aaron Zinman]

The reason I'm excited so much about the future of the company, I really feel from the bottom of my heart is that we have one of the.

[Roy Mann]

Biggest opportunities today in the software market.

[Aaron Zinman]

And we have to execute in order to deliver that. But I really feel that we got everything right. We just need to scale the company to the next phase.

[Unknown]

What do you know now about going multi product that you wish you'd known when you went multi product?

[Aaron Zinman]

Maybe one lesson is it's not just about the product itself. Go to market is as important and every product have a very different go to market.

[Roy Mann]

It's unbelievable. It's so different. Different buying dynamics, different buyer, different decision.

[Aaron Zinman]

Process, different way people consume ads.

[Roy Mann]

They're all special in their own way.

[Unknown]

As a result, do you have to build independent teams for every product? How do you think about how the company changes with the additional product line that's built?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, that's exactly how we think about this. We have different business units dedicated for each product.

[Roy Mann]

Every product is in a different phase.

[Aaron Zinman]

So you know, CRM is more mature.

[Roy Mann]

And then dev and then service and obviously work management is kind of the most mature product.

[Aaron Zinman]

But every product has its own team, its own marketing efforts, dedicated salespeople and we scale them. It's like small startups within the company.

[Unknown]

Dude, when you look at the revenue lines today, like Monday is like what's Monday core revenue?

[Aaron Zinman]

I mean we announced we reached 1 billion of ARR about like 3 months ago. I think so.

[Unknown]

Okay, great. And so we've got a billion of ARR and then CRM is like 25 as we said in investor day.

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, that was like a year before that. But it's bigger today.

[Unknown]

Smaller line of revenue today will be one of the biggest lines of revenue in 5 years time.

[Aaron Zinman]

Definitely CRM will be very dominant going forward. Dev as well. Actually the momentum we got for Monday service is unbelievable. It's still early days.

[Unknown]

Who do we compete against for Monday service with CRM?

[Aaron Zinman]

We compete with HubSpot Salesforce, a little bit Zoho service. We can see Jira service, Freshdesk, a little bit ServiceNow. Although they're very focused on enterprise.

[Unknown]

When we look at the names that you just mentioned, like on CRM alone, respectfully. Wow. How do you advise founders who are told, oh, that's a really horribly competitive industry?

[Aaron Zinman]

For me, it sounds like it's an opportunity to disrupt that industry. You know, there's players that have been dominating each one of those industries for a very long time, people willing to pay a lot of money to use those tools. They bring a lot of value. And I think it's just an opportunity to disrupt that market.

[Unknown]

Do you pay attention to competition?

[Aaron Zinman]

When I built my first startup, I remember that I used to log into TechCrunch or read Tech news, and every time I saw a competitor that I.

[Roy Mann]

Felt was competing with me, I felt.

[Aaron Zinman]

This weird feeling in my stomach. And then I swore to myself, I'm never going to do it again. I'm just going to focus on myself and my journey.

[Roy Mann]

So I don't.

[Unknown]

So you don't pay attention to competitive products?

[Aaron Zinman]

I mean, we analyze them and we look at them and see what they're doing, but I don't feel like that's.

[Roy Mann]

What'S going to stop us in any way. I feel, if anything, it's in our.

[Aaron Zinman]

Hands, it's in our control and our execution ability.

[Unknown]

Okay, so when we think about execution ability, with KNIME moving forwards, you're an incredibly insightful, smart founder. Everyone is questioning horizontal software's ability to sustain in the next wave of AI. How do you respond to the question of. Of Monday sustaining? When we live in a world of agents, when we see a new generation of AI impact all of SaaS?

[Aaron Zinman]

For me, this is one of the.

[Roy Mann]

Things that excites me the most because.

[Aaron Zinman]

What we already seen once we now built a lot of AR functionality, is that people use AI inside Monday and.

[Roy Mann]

It'S so easy for them.

[Aaron Zinman]

We took the same principles of easy user experience and customability and instead of building a dedicated AI product, we just.

[Roy Mann]

Allowed our own customers to integrate AI into their own workflows.

[Aaron Zinman]

So we helping them today make their.

[Roy Mann]

Own work more efficient.

[Unknown]

Do agents not make Monday a simple system of record or a database given they do all information and data collection, retrieval and migration and then bring it back to Monday and is that a good thing or a bad thing?

[Roy Mann]

I think it's an amazing thing.

[Aaron Zinman]

I think that there will always be.

[Roy Mann]

Room for system of records.

[Aaron Zinman]

I don't think that anybody will be willing to put their future into an AI bot without having the ability to question what's going on, see dashboards, graphs, analyze the data. So I think it's very important to track the data.

[Roy Mann]

I don't think that will go away.

[Aaron Zinman]

Maybe some of the work being done by people will be done by AI, but it doesn't take away the fact that you need to analyze the data, you need to see it, you need to track it.

[Roy Mann]

And also I think there's still going.

[Aaron Zinman]

To be a substantial human element that will be part of that. So I don't think that that SaaS.

[Roy Mann]

Tools will go away. I think if anything, sound of the work can be replaced by AI, but.

[Aaron Zinman]

Still the fundamental principle of why those tools exist is strong and will remain going forward.

[Unknown]

Do you think AI will change the future of SaaS pricing?

[Roy Mann]

For sure, for sure.

[Aaron Zinman]

You know, I think a lot of.

[Roy Mann]

SaaS tools have been very focused on seed count.

[Aaron Zinman]

And once you replace human labor with AI functionality, pricing should adjust and maybe.

[Roy Mann]

Be more focused on consumption in addition to seats.

[Unknown]

Can I go to the ipo? Why did you decide to IPO when you did? You know, we live in a world now where there is such extended windows of private capital. You don't need to IPO as we're seeing with Stripe databricks, starlink. How did you think about when was the right time?

[Aaron Zinman]

First of all, it was more random than you might think. We just felt that, you know, eventually we want to build a huge company. And when we look at the, you know, the most inspiring SaaS companies in.

[Roy Mann]

The world today, they were all public.

[Aaron Zinman]

And I think think it adds a layer of maturity into the business. I really like the fact that we're a public company because first of all, public market investors really surprised me.

[Roy Mann]

They are way more sophisticated than what I thought.

[Aaron Zinman]

I thought initially when we went public, I thought that it's all about the private market, those investors. But public market investors are super sophisticated and smart. And also I think that cadence of quarterly earning reports really add a great.

[Roy Mann]

Cadence to the company.

[Aaron Zinman]

So all in all, I think it.

[Roy Mann]

Was a great move for us as a company.

[Unknown]

You go out at seven and a half billion. How does that feel?

[Aaron Zinman]

You know what? You told me you like stories. So let me tell you a story. I'll tell you about the day of the ipo. It was a long two weeks in New York. It was actually on the edge of the COVID kind of lockdown. So I think it was one of the first IPO that was done in.

[Roy Mann]

Person after the COVID lockdown, actually.

[Aaron Zinman]

And it was all on Zoom, because before COVID you used to take like a private jet and meet investors and do like a bus tour. But it was mostly on Zoom, so we were exhausted. Like a day before the ipo. Here it is, the ipo, the big day. We go to nasdaq. It's a beautiful ceremony. I remember seeing kind of the opening of the trade day. And then a few hours go by. I do a bunch of interviews on TV, newspapers, and it's like 4 or.

[Roy Mann]

5Pm I look at to my left.

[Aaron Zinman]

I see Roy, my co founder, doing interviews as well.

[Roy Mann]

And we're alone, like literally alone.

[Aaron Zinman]

Everybody left, we're alone. I had like this blazer that I never wear. But for the ipo, we wore both of us matching suits. We took off the blazers and we walked to the hotel. Like 25 minutes, like with white T shirts, we walked to the hotel. I go to my hotel room, I sit down on the bed and just stare at Netflix for like three hours. That's the IPO day. That's the anti climax of the ipo.

[Unknown]

But the day after was that hard because it's like, you know, triathletes or Ironman or people who run a marathon. There's so much build up and then it happens and it's like, oh yeah.

[Roy Mann]

The day after when I woke up.

[Aaron Zinman]

I opened my iPhone, opened the stocks app and added Monday.

[Roy Mann]

And that was the most exciting.

[Aaron Zinman]

I felt it in throughout my whole body. When I saw the Monday ticker, it just felt real.

[Unknown]

What was first 24 hours performance?

[Aaron Zinman]

I think we went up like 10 or 15%. So it was good.

[Unknown]

Yeah, it's a tough morning when you wake up and it's like, oh, can I ask, does like you mentioned Roy, there you are. Co CEOs. That is a crazy arrangement in traditional startup land. It's worked phenomenally well for you, which is amazing. What have you done to make co CEOs work?

[Roy Mann]

When we started the company, actually Roy.

[Aaron Zinman]

Was the CEO and I was the CTO.

[Roy Mann]

So we didn't start as co CEOs.

[Aaron Zinman]

But I remember like a week into the company, he told me, look, I want us to do everything together.

[Roy Mann]

So I told him, of course, like we're co founders.

[Aaron Zinman]

But he told me, love everything, you know, raise money together, be co CEOs. I told him, okay, and we would meet investors and it was weird because I would sometimes talk about the business and he would talk about technology. And then next meeting we'll switch roles. I think we got everybody kind of confused. But after A while. He just told me, let's make it official, kind of name ourselves co CEOs, just so we don't have to explain it to everybody. What's so special about him is that he's one of those people that has no ego.

[Roy Mann]

You want to do what's best for the company.

[Aaron Zinman]

He doesn't care about his own title or to be on top of somebody else. We spend a lot of time together. We actually. We walk home every day.

[Roy Mann]

Like, walking.

[Aaron Zinman]

We live in Tel Aviv, so we walk every day. We spend hours just to think and talk about things.

[Unknown]

You walk home every day together?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Wow. What have been your biggest lessons on board management? You have a great board.

[Aaron Zinman]

First of all, my number one rule is never surprise the board. Never. That's like the worst thing you can do. Actually, one of the things we built into Big Brain is. I don't know if Avi told you, but we used to send every day.

[Roy Mann]

Like a daily SMS of the company.

[Aaron Zinman]

Performance every day to our board members.

[Roy Mann]

Whether it's good or bad, it was automatic. So when they came to the board.

[Aaron Zinman]

Meeting, they knew the numbers better than I do. They saw everything. The board meeting was basically done on the numbers and the metrics because they had full transparency. And that's something that I really believe inside the company and also for our board members. And if we had something that we wanted to make a decision about, we always talked with each one of them.

[Roy Mann]

Individually before the meeting because the last.

[Aaron Zinman]

Thing you want is to get into an ego fight. So just get their opinions and change the things before the meeting. So we talk more about the future than waste time on disagreements.

[Unknown]

That's so interesting. I wonder if that's possible to do for a fund. I'm just wondering now if I could actually have that with my investors or at least my board where like whenever we had a change of marks or a new investment or whatever, it was. Okay, one, one to think about. Listen, I could talk to you all day.

[Harry Stebbings]

I want to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement.

[Unknown]

You give me your immediate, immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

[Roy Mann]

Okay.

[Aaron Zinman]

And just no tricky questions.

[Unknown]

What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

[Roy Mann]

Maybe something that's not intuitive, is about setting goals.

[Aaron Zinman]

Most people, when they set goals, they.

[Roy Mann]

Try to figure out what they can do.

[Aaron Zinman]

I never think about it this way. I'm thinking about what I want to achieve and then try to figure out a way to do it. Because when you build a plan for next year bottom up, people will kind of Think about a plan of what they've done last year and let's do it again with small adjustments. I always think about how can we do above and beyond and then just.

[Roy Mann]

Changes how people think about what can.

[Aaron Zinman]

Be done and how they can achieve it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why don't you email?

[Aaron Zinman]

I never got anything good out of an email.

[Roy Mann]

I'm extreme believer in focus.

[Aaron Zinman]

You asked me about investments. I don't do investments.

[Roy Mann]

I focus 100% on the company. And I always try to set my.

[Aaron Zinman]

Own priorities because I think all those tools really distract you. I always try to look inside and try to understand what's most important for the company. And when you start kind of being managed by external tools, I think it's a huge distraction for the company.

[Unknown]

It sounds wonderful, dude, but how do you actually do that? Because when you have investors, board members, customers, they get in touch by email. You set up investor meetings by email. So how do you not do email? I'm so fascinated.

[Aaron Zinman]

No, I mean, we have other people in the team that use email for coordinate meetings and other things. It's not like a company rule.

[Roy Mann]

I just don't do it myself.

[Unknown]

And so you Slack and WhatsApp.

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, we use Monday a lot to sync.

[Roy Mann]

We use Slack.

[Aaron Zinman]

What's up? Kind of more instant communication channels.

[Unknown]

What have been your biggest lessons on priority setting? You're a fascinating mind in terms of focus. What's your biggest lessons on priority setting?

[Aaron Zinman]

What I found about founders is that you try to avoid the hardest things.

[Roy Mann]

In your business because they're usually the hardest to change.

[Aaron Zinman]

And. And I always think to myself, if something is very painful, that's the right time to get into it and fix it. And I always try not to avoid going down and deep into the hard things because I think eventually those are.

[Roy Mann]

The things that causes stress.

[Aaron Zinman]

And once you deal with them, it.

[Roy Mann]

Just changes your mindset and the course of the company.

[Aaron Zinman]

So I always try to focus on.

[Roy Mann]

The hardest things and try to figure.

[Aaron Zinman]

Out what's not working in the company.

[Unknown]

What's the single hardest element of your.

[Harry Stebbings]

Day job as co CEO of Mundo?

[Aaron Zinman]

I think finding the right balance. I think that for many years I was not.

[Roy Mann]

I didn't have the right balance of.

[Aaron Zinman]

Family life and work life. And I was really stressed. And I've made a decision a few years ago to make a change. I spent a lot of time with my family. Today I'm more efficient.

[Unknown]

What have you changed to allow yourself to do that?

[Aaron Zinman]

Actually, I went to therapy and one.

[Roy Mann]

Of the things my therapist told me, which really resonated with me.

[Aaron Zinman]

She told me that, you know, I can do the extra meeting, I can do the extra thing, but at the end of the day, I'm a leader the company. I'm leading the company. So people look at me. And when I'm exhausted, when I'm stressed, when I don't.

[Roy Mann]

Don't have patience, it just reflects on everybody else. And I need to take care of.

[Aaron Zinman]

Myself in order to be able to take care of the company. And it really hit deep on me, and I just felt I should treat.

[Roy Mann]

Myself like a professional athlete.

[Aaron Zinman]

I should be at my peak all the time.

[Unknown]

I mean, you look wonderful, but how do you know you do you really fantastic hair, by the way. I've been thinking, like, solid hair.

How.

How do you look after yourself? Well, today then.

[Aaron Zinman]

Actually, I exercise every morning.

[Unknown]

What time do you get up?

[Aaron Zinman]

I have three little kids, so I have. My baby usually wakes me up. It's like 6am I try to exercise every morning before I go to work, and then I try to spend time with my family in the evening. It's not always possible. It's really something that charges me as a human being.

[Unknown]

Do you need much sleep?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah, I got the Oura ring, so.

[Roy Mann]

I've improved my sleep.

[Unknown]

So when do you go to bed? If you get up at 6?

[Aaron Zinman]

Well, I'm embarrassed to say, but usually like 10pm wow.

[Roy Mann]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Yeah, that'll do it. Do you watch your diet? Are you healthy?

[Aaron Zinman]

Yeah. Well, I hope so. But, yeah, like I said, I try to optimize my sleep, my nutrition, my exercise regime. I just feel the need to be. Be sharp. I need to be at my peak. I need to take care of myself in order to take care of the company. So I really treat this professionally, I guess. I listen to a lot of podcasts about supplements and just healthy living.

[Unknown]

I guess you can be CEO of another company for a day. Which company did you choose to be CEO of?

[Roy Mann]

Wow.

[Aaron Zinman]

I'm fascinated by Microsoft. I think that's a company that's done one of the biggest transitions in the history of software for tech.

[Roy Mann]

It had its lows, it had its.

[Aaron Zinman]

Highs, but I think I'm really interested to understand what was the transition. I think so. Taya, the CEO of Microsoft have done.

[Roy Mann]

A tremendous job pivoting the company.

[Aaron Zinman]

So it would be interesting to see this from the inside, I guess.

[Unknown]

Totally get you and agree. If you were Marc Banning off today, what would you do with Salesforce?

[Roy Mann]

Salesforce is an amazing company.

[Aaron Zinman]

It's an inspiration. He deserves so much credit for building the SaaS industry.

[Unknown]

If you could ask him one question, what would you ask him?

[Aaron Zinman]

One question for Mark, I think he's one of the people that probably knows.

[Roy Mann]

The best in the world of how.

[Aaron Zinman]

To build a sales machine at scale. So I think there's so much I can learn from him about how to do it. Things he probably forgotten that I didn't learn yet. Probably a question around that, I guess.

[Unknown]

What about the way your parents brought you up? Are you deliberately not doing with your children?

[Roy Mann]

Oh, wow. It's a good one.

[Aaron Zinman]

Look, I think my parents, first of all, I love them and I appreciate the way they raised me, and I think they taught me a lot of important lessons. I think my dad taught me to go deep on everything I do.

[Roy Mann]

Everything he always asked me, like, why?

[Aaron Zinman]

He always asked me to.

[Roy Mann]

He forced me to understand every decision. Everything that I said, he always asked me, like, explain to me why.

[Aaron Zinman]

And I think just developed a sense of me that I always try to understand why and dig deep. And I think my mom told me a lot about compassion and how to deal with people and to be ambitious and to be a winner. I guess maybe something that I've learned along the way, that maybe I do differently, is also to accept different paths of how people grow up and what they care about and what's not. I try to be very open with my kids and try to understand what they care about, and I'm not trying to push them in any way and just let them be who they are.

[Roy Mann]

I often think about what is a successful person?

[Aaron Zinman]

Like, what defines success? Is it status?

[Roy Mann]

Is it money?

[Aaron Zinman]

Is it professional career? Is it happiness? And I don't know what the answer is.

[Unknown]

It's market cap.

[Aaron Zinman]

I just want my kids to be happy. I don't know what's the best way to achieve it, but that's what I want for them.

[Unknown]

When were you happiest?

[Roy Mann]

With my family, for sure.

[Aaron Zinman]

That's the moment I find peace inside. I love the company. It's one of the most meaningful things I've done in my life. But spending time with my kids, it's like the best thing for me.

[Unknown]

What stage of the company did you find most unnatural for you as a CEO?

[Roy Mann]

Everyone, Every stage.

[Aaron Zinman]

Now, I've never done it before.

[Roy Mann]

It's a new experience for me, and.

[Aaron Zinman]

I learned a lot of things along the way. But I want to continue in this journey and I want to keep learning and evolving as a person.

[Unknown]

Final one. What question are you never asked by employees, by investors, by board members that you should be asked.

[Roy Mann]

Do you think oh wow, you have tricky questions, Harry. I don't know what's the answer, but.

[Aaron Zinman]

Nobody asked me why we built this company. Like why did we go on this journey being an entrepreneur?

[Roy Mann]

It's not intuitive why people do it. It's a big question.

[Unknown]

Why did you decide to be an entrepreneur?

[Roy Mann]

My quest in life is to find.

[Aaron Zinman]

Out exactly, but I think it's a combination of trying to prove myself. I don't know to whom, but maybe to myself and do something meaningful and good that affects other people. But I don't have the full answer yet, I guess.

[Unknown]

Aaron, listen, I so appreciate you putting up with my deep and meaningful questions. My, you know, bluntly meandering around different topics. You've been fantastic. So thank you for joining me.

[Aaron Zinman]

Thank you Harry. It's been a pleasure.

[Harry Stebbings]

My word, I'm such a fanboy of the Monday business. If you want to see the episode in full, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20V.

[Unknown]

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[Harry Stebbings]

Appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday.