CEO Sagar Khatri talks entrepreneurship, the challenges of global employment, and the founding of Multiplier. It's his journey.

[00:00:00] Oh my goodness, bad touching, harassment, sex, violence, fraud, threats, all things that could have been avoided. If you had Fama, stop hiring dangerous people. Fama.io

[00:01:02] Oh, it's great to have you. So why don't we start off? Introduce yourself to the audience. And if I mispronounce your name, which well, we're all laugh about because of the pre-show goofs. You can

[00:01:14] correct me if I did. But why don't you give yourself an intro and let the audience know a little bit about yourself. Yeah, yeah, it's about Multiplier, man. Yeah. Thanks folks. So I'm Sagar

[00:01:26] and Ryan, trust me, I wouldn't mind if you get my name wrong. That happens to me all the time. So I'm Sagar. I'm co-founder and CEO of Multiplier. Born and brought up in India, currently based between Singapore and New York. So Multiplier. Multiplier is a global employment platform

[00:01:46] that helps companies employ talent globally without having to set up their legal entities. The mission that we started Multiplier was very simple. You know, the world is going global. Employees, great employees are located across the globe. So how can you get access to those employees

[00:02:04] without really struggling with the compliance associated with it? Which is payroll, taxes, insurance and so on and so forth. So let's say if you're an American business and you wake up and you realize, hey, I need some great accountants in Philippines, how can you make it easier

[00:02:19] for them so that they can go and find those accountants? But we take care of the payroll, compliance, benefit, taxes. And they don't need to open an entity for that. So that's where Multiplier helps. Which is obviously William, you and I have been talking about this. Payroll

[00:02:36] companies in HR across different countries around the globe is just way too complex for someone to handle every country that's there. We just interviewed the CRO of Affleck and she was talking about her experience. Her experience, she lived in Denmark

[00:02:53] and then she started doing a lot of global HR. And back then when she was doing it, it was really more the wild west. You had to create a local entity or work with a local entity. Getting payroll done in Brazil was completely different than it was. And

[00:03:11] the Philippines as you mentioned, everything was completely different. There wasn't the technology partnerships that there are today. There was the ease of use and also it created a lot of friction for employees. So I think you're in the hottest subcategory of work tech

[00:03:31] that there is. I mean, it's again to your point, we are global. We've been global for a long time. However, the technology hadn't been there for us to do it as efficiently as it is now. And so

[00:03:48] you're dealing with complexity of companies that they do in business in 160 different countries and they can still do payroll like it was doing it in just New York. So as I understand it at least. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think as you correctly pointed out, William, businesses are

[00:04:08] going global. I mean, we live in a world where talent crunch is a real problem. We are obviously, I've been in Singapore for quite some time now I divide my time between New York and Singapore. In Singapore, we require 50 to 100,000 software developers every year,

[00:04:28] but the schools there only produce to 3000. So how do businesses get in Singapore get access to those crucial talent for their economy to grow? And that's where a business like Multiplier comes into

[00:04:42] picture, where now these companies and you know, the problem is even more enhanced in the US because the economy is bigger and talent crunch is even higher. So how do these companies in

[00:04:53] New York and San Francisco get access to talent globally at their fingertips? That's where Multiplier comes in. I love it. I love it. Where in India did you, did you grow up? Whereabouts?

[00:05:07] Yeah, so grew up in the central part of India, like right band in the center of place called Nagpur. And I don't think not many people know it, but you know, my grandfather and my grand

[00:05:25] parents were refugees in 1947. We were ruled by British back in the day. Oh yeah. Country was partitioned and overnight, there was a lot of movement happened. So grandparents came to India during 1947 partition, moved to New Delhi and then slowly moved to a place called Nagpur. And

[00:05:46] then that's where I was born. So you know all about cricket, right? Yes, absolutely. Dude, every time I go to India, I watch cricket on TV and I still I come back more confused.

[00:06:01] I don't get it. Yeah. Dude, it's hard. I've actually there's a there's a team that plays here locally. We have a park and I've been out there. I'm like, Hey, can I play? They're like

[00:06:13] they look at you like, Yeah, now you take them. We don't want them. You just on your team. And I'll try like I tried to hit man. That's it's insane. It is really, really hard. So where'd you go to school? Where'd you go to college or university?

[00:06:29] Yeah, so I went to university in Mumbai. Yeah, a college called IIT Bombay. You know, a fair bit of American MNCs have Indian CEOs or your Google, your Microsoft, your Starbucks. And all of them come from one school in India or one college is IIT

[00:06:48] Indian Institute of Technology. So I was very lucky to go to college. That's like MIT here, right? Yes, that's what they come to typically. Yeah, especially with numbers because everything in India, we're 1.4 billion people. So numbers start to look really big. Whatever cut you take.

[00:07:08] We talked to somebody the other day and they went to MIT and we caught the nuance of that they took their SAT multiple they had they'd taken them multiple times got perfect score

[00:07:22] on their SAT. But they took it multiple times like right you took the SAT multiple times you had a perfect score because it's like take but they had to show that they could get a perfect score

[00:07:34] multiple times. I'm like, damn, we live in we live in different places here. Look, I went I accept it. I went to any state school that would accept me and that was Temple

[00:07:47] University. That was it. That's where I ended up going just wasn't his school. I know his school because Mumbai used to be during under version was called Bombay. And one of my business school, one of my cohorts, Sunil Kotec, he invited me to his sister's wedding in Bombay.

[00:08:09] And I didn't go because I could I had a conflict I couldn't go. But it's Kotec investment. So it's his father is really, really wealthy. And he would have been bills off. And but a lot of the kids from my business school went to your school because

[00:08:25] it's it's again, it's Harvard, it's MIT, it's Stanford, whatever your favorite, you know, American kind of analogy is so great, great education. Good for you. What did you do? What was the first thing out of college? Yeah, so yeah, no, it's a very, very interesting story.

[00:08:44] So I did my bachelor's in IIT and for an exchange I was in Michigan for a few months. And I thought, hey, I love this place. And I would come back and do PhD here in Detroit or all places. Clearly you're not from the States.

[00:09:01] How do I say you're going from hot, hot to cold, cold. And then I went back and come up that land in materialize and you know, I come from a very how should I say family with no means it was, you know, tried with a very interesting

[00:09:25] struggling to grow and so money was a primary driver in life. So I thought, hey, what profession gives you the most amount of money? And the answer was very simple investment banking consulting investment banking and so on. So I started with

[00:09:40] Nomura. Yeah, so I spent first five years working with them a couple of years in Tokyo next three years in Singapore. So that's how the career started about. So you're in kind of finance anyhow, you were already in finance. Had you get over or what was

[00:09:57] after that? I don't want to say multiplier, but how'd you get out of finance? Yeah, so again, very, very interesting story, William. I started a couple of years in Tokyo then three years in Singapore and I thought, hey, like, you know, I've always had the

[00:10:13] dream of studying in the US. So why not pursue it now? Remember that the dream that I had in IIT, I thought maybe let's, you know, create a perfect resume to go to Harvard Business School.

[00:10:25] But let's say let's write GMAT and let's try for HBS as in any other Indian Kale who goes to IIT. And luckily I have a very close friend who was a partner at Sequoia now P15

[00:10:39] and a senior from IIT Bombay. And he said, hey, like, you know, why don't you try startups? And I said, what is startup? We said, the tech companies we invest in and they, you know,

[00:10:52] they can have the potential to become really big and so on so forth. So I met a couple of he's obviously as a partner, you know, a few boards in Singapore. So I met a couple

[00:11:03] of his co-founders and I found I want to take a break real quick just to let you know about a new show. We've just added to the network up next at work hosted by Gene and Kate A'Keele of

[00:11:16] the Devon Group. Fantastic show. If you're looking for something that pushes the norm, pushes the boundaries has some really spirited conversations. Google up next at work. Gene and Kate A'Keele from the Devon Group. You know, the way they talk about their ideas, the company that

[00:11:38] they are building really, really exciting. And I was to be a boring banker with like all like sales and numbers running in my head. I thought, hey, like this is something pretty cool that I've not experienced before. And I was privately in oil and gas sector,

[00:11:51] which used to have large cash flows, unlike startups which have burning cash. So I thought, hey, this might be something very interesting. And that's how I ended up joining a startup where I was a CFO for a couple of years before multiplier.

[00:12:03] So you got out of finance or out of banking, sort of. Then you became CFO of startups. So maybe let's start there then on because I'm kind of getting the picture. This is where your journey

[00:12:17] really begins in terms of getting the bug to become an entrepreneur. You're of, you know, start have your own startup. What was different between for you? What was the difference between the investment world corporate versus getting in the world startup? How did that look for you?

[00:12:38] I think that was life changing. So I got into this startup, I was heading cop there finance. And I think I spent a year and a half there. And I was the right hand man for the founder

[00:12:50] and I did everything for him. Like I learned how to build the product. I learned the art of digital marketing, which I didn't exist. I learned how investors are willing to take risks on companies

[00:13:04] in the of future cash flows and so forth. So it absolutely, like I remember the one massive realization that I've had is that building a business in today's generation is accessible to a common man. Anybody with a brilliant idea and desire to execute today

[00:13:26] has where we call it tools available and capital level to build a business. And that's where I thought, Hey, I would also build a business and I quit that company and started multiply. And even with AI and genuine AI, it's even be democratize it even more.

[00:13:40] Yeah. Now you don't even have to before you and Ryan and I, we didn't have to know how to do code. We'd have to get a technology co founder, right? Right. Now I go write code using AI.

[00:13:53] So technically, I haven't done it, but technically I could go write the program. Whereas before you still had a bit of dependence on a technology co founder, right? Yeah. I got to go to your CFO

[00:14:09] before we get to starting because we want to dig in all into how you started it, all that stuff thesis. We have not interviewed a CFO on the show. So now I don't know if that'd be fun. I mean, dude, I'm just saying,

[00:14:28] All right. Tell us the job. It break down the demystify the CFO because so many of the people in HR and in recruiting, they view the CFO not necessarily as the enemy, but the miser,

[00:14:44] the persons that's like the no department, like on all deals and everything like that. You worked in the trenches. What was the hardest part of being a CFO? Because I came from banking and IIT and whatnot, I was a CFO. I was of course leading accounting

[00:15:04] and taxation and whatnot. But more than that, I was a real close business partner of the CEO. So HR reported into me some of the ops department reported into me, board investor, everything. So I think the, in real high growth companies, CFO has a very

[00:15:29] important role to play and sometimes in some cultures and in some jurisdictions, there's a notion that CFO is an accountant, which is not true because CFO's main job is to guide CEO on capital allocation or that word is very, very key capital allocation strategy.

[00:15:51] Like where should I invest more money so that I can get the highest return on investment? And so that was, that's where I ended up doing everything. I was helping them raise capital, running the boards, running the investors, running the finance department, HR departments,

[00:16:07] some of operations. And what was the toughest thing that I did? I think two, one is telling the CEO who was a great storyteller and you love to make promises like, no,

[00:16:18] quite a few times because that's what you end up doing. And the second thing I still remember was running payroll. We were 300 people, four countries, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, and I was running payroll and I was like, I hated my life.

[00:16:36] And this is where your idea became. You can't get payroll, I mean you're running the errors here and there, but like most of everything else in HR, you can have a mistake or two and people aren't

[00:16:50] going to kill you, but their paycheck is something that as best you can, the error rate has to be very, very low. Absolutely. So you took the responsibility of paying 200 people running payroll into building a global organization now that handles all of this?

[00:17:12] Yeah, so as part of the CFO duty because then you are a real CFO. I mean, the real CFO is a real business partner to the board, not just to the CEO. So the real CFO, one of the portfolio that I was managing was international expansion.

[00:17:31] So we acquired a couple of companies, Australia expanded to Japan. And when I expanded to Australia, and I will tell you about the payroll story as well, when I expanded to Australia, it took seven months to open a bank account, seven months.

[00:17:47] And if to our viewers who are not familiar with Asia, Australia is by far the highest, the most developed GDP per capita country in Asia. So imagine if Australia took seven months, and until you have a bank account in place, you cannot run payroll, you cannot hire people.

[00:18:06] And then I expanded to Japan, which is one year to open a bank account and an entity and get business started. So that's where really the idea of multiplier came about, where hey, companies are going to go global one way or the other. And globally so broken,

[00:18:24] so there has to be a better solution where I can expand to a new country. I can hire a talent in new country in three clicks and one minute. So first of all, how did you find your co-founder? What was the story there? It's a very interesting story.

[00:18:47] So I have two co-founders. One is Amrit. He's based in New York, Brooklyn. He's moved here from Singapore roughly eight months ago with his family. He's four generations Singaporean. And then Vamsi who is based in Singapore as well as a batchmate of IIT.

[00:19:09] So the story goes, I filled with my experience. I love how this is starting already. The story goes, we guys walk into a bar. Yeah, I was going to say, I kind of feel like... Yeah. All right, go ahead. Sorry we interrupted or I interrupted.

[00:19:28] Joe, so filled with my experience and with great experience of expanding to Australia and getting, you know, feeling all miserable and then running payroll. I went to my board member who was from Sequoia then and said, hey, like, you know, I think I love doing this.

[00:19:49] I'm going to drop my MBA plans and I would love to start the business. And he said, so what do you want to start? I said, I identified these pain points and this is, you know, I drew something on a piece of paper for him.

[00:20:00] This is something I want to do. And many, a couple of times he said, great. You know, we would love to fund this and, you know, be a part of your journey. And, you know, we've had very close relationships. They've seen me working.

[00:20:13] We went to the same university and whatnot. Oh my goodness, bad touching, harassment, sex, violence, fraud, threats, all things that could have been avoided if you had Thama. Stop hiring dangerous people. Thama.io. So they said, okay, good, you know, we'll fund you.

[00:20:41] I raised $4 million of seed round even before I quit the company that I was working for and took the money and then started the business. And that's why I said, oh, but you now have money and, you know, you're going to start the business, but you need co-founders.

[00:20:56] It's a great never thought about it. So he said, my best friend from college is Wamsi, I keep on my computer science. I said, I know one guy. Let me call him. I called him and I said, you're joining me from tomorrow.

[00:21:10] He said, where are we going to Bali? I said, no, we're starting a business. I said, okay, great. So he joined in. Not that he had much of a choice. So he joined in and he was a product in tech. Then I went to him again.

[00:21:25] I said, guys, like, you know, good. I'm assuming he has some skill that you need. Oh yeah. Right? He's your tech co-founder, right? He's a tech co-founder. And then my board members are here. We also in a B2B SaaS business that you're building,

[00:21:47] we'll also need somebody who can sell it. I say, okay, great. Haven't thought about that either. They went on to LinkedIn and figured out who are the greatest sales people in HR domain in Singapore, hit everybody, found this perfect gentleman, went and convinced

[00:22:02] him and his wife why they should look there confetti lucrative job and join multiplayer as a co-founder. And then eventually asked them to move to Singapore, which is super comfortable and moved to New York. So I would say I've not done bad in convincing people.

[00:22:22] This is a reluctant hero. I feel like the messages I get on LinkedIn, I should stop ignoring. Some of them could turn out pretty good. I could just see the investors now. Great. You never thought about a sales person. Check. Never thought about a tech co-check. All right.

[00:22:42] But the basis of the idea, the napkin, the idea was good enough. A great investor can just look at that and go, I can figure out the rest of this stuff. I got the right guy. I got the right idea. The rest of stuff I can fill in.

[00:23:00] Especially somebody like Sequoia. Yeah. So let's dig into as much as we can. You have an idea on a piece of paper. No co-founders. You have $4 million. You found your two co-founders. Where do you go from there? That's a lot of money to have an idea.

[00:23:18] So what do you do with that? And how do you get yourself started here? Yeah. You know, I think, and this is all Singapore and Singapore is like a village. Everybody knows everybody. So your reputation is very important.

[00:23:32] I mean, these people knew that Sagar will take care of my money better than his own personal money. So that's where they're willing to bet cash on you. But again, coming back to your question, once you have money, once you have co-founders, we quit our job.

[00:23:46] I'm an expat in Singapore, so I applied for my visa and so on. So by the way, which is still a pain in the ass, which we are solving for. You know, no matter who you still need an employment agreement and a visa and everything

[00:23:58] to start the business. Still remember, one thing that we were very keen on is to make sure only build stuff that people will buy. Like there are a lot of companies which love to build products and features which eventually don't sell.

[00:24:15] So we were very sure that we're going to build something or we're going to start building once we know that customer is going to buy. So I remember in November 2020, when I quit my job, you know, apply, open an entity and so on so forth.

[00:24:30] And we reached out to and we talked to in over a period of two months, 400 HR leaders. And we talked to these 400 HR leaders and I said, hey, this is what we plan to build for you. Would you buy? And still remember, we officially launched in April 2021.

[00:24:53] And but even before that, we had customers paying money to us for the product that we still haven't launched in the market. So real idea was making sure I go and sell first. I know these people are interested. They started to pay me.

[00:25:10] And now I'm really building a product around the service that I promised them that I would deliver to them. Well, these are these are people that also helping shape the product as well. Absolutely.

[00:25:21] While you're doing this, could you also add this or we have problem like you said benefits, we have trouble delivering benefits. Like, okay, we were thinking just payroll, but okay, well, all right, we deliver benefits. So they're a part of your roadmap.

[00:25:38] And they're also now, once you go back to and said, hey, we built the thing that you asked us to build that's easy. That's a sales. You still got to sell them. True. But it's so much easier because they helped you validate the business.

[00:25:54] And then and you went and built what they validated. It's so much easier because it's like, hey, we built the thing you asked us to build. No, absolutely. And the best part is, I mean, now we have a skilled company.

[00:26:07] We find it employees, a couple of thousand customers with those initial 20, 30, 40 customers. Those were the customers who really helped us make design choices. I really love to call it like this design choices are very important.

[00:26:21] But a later thing that has happened is now getting those earlier adopters who were essentially just knowing me and Amrit and Vamshi as their customer success managers, having their WhatsApp numbers are WhatsApp numbers with them.

[00:26:38] Getting them to finally adopt to know that a multiplier is a professional business now, you will get a customer success manager who may not be a CEO of the company and you need to now contact support hasn't gone yet. There's so many, so many questions there.

[00:26:52] So they're used to calling you on Saturdays. Hey, I'm having this trouble. Can you turn this? I don't know how to reset your login. Stop calling me. So at what point do you say, okay, we're at the point, we're mature, right?

[00:27:10] We're a business now and we need to make some key hires. Right. So one, when did you come to that realization and then who were your key hires, your first key hires? What position? Yeah.

[00:27:22] So Ryan, as a CFI, saw firsthand how important it is to get the right hires in the beginning itself and if you are building a B2B SaaS platform, your technology is super key and

[00:27:39] the design choices and the languages that you use and so on and so forth. So although my co-founder of Amshi is from Product and Tech background and that too, IIT Bombay, Kremdala Krem, my first hire was a professional CTO who spent years building

[00:27:57] a SaaS product who was SVP at Alibaba in Singapore, which is a massive firm. And I still remember it took me three months to convince him to come and join. So he was our first employee, but I knew if I'm really investing the peak period

[00:28:12] of my life in building multiplier, I would like to go all in and make sure from scratch, we are making the right decision. So that is one thing that we've been doing good at multiplier where we don't pretend that we

[00:28:25] know everything about sales, marketing, finance. We know that we've gotten something good going. Now let us get super experienced people who believe in our idea, who have a similar working style of as us so that we can communicate with them easily, but bring them and let them

[00:28:41] build a professional business. So our CTO was our first ever senior hire and he was our first So you seem really easy going. Like I can see myself working with you, working for you.

[00:28:52] Okay. What drives, what, let me ask it this way. What are the types of people that thrive around you? What do you need that around you? What are the types of people that you thrive around as

[00:29:06] well? So you know, the beautiful part about starting a business is you can create values of your business which are similar to you. So the values of business today is 3 T's trust, transparency and kindness, which are my personal values in life. So I love to work with people

[00:29:24] who I can blindly trust trust is the currency to do business. I shouldn't need to double gaze your attitude or your expertise on a particular topic. The second is transparency, which is I would love to share what I feel about you. You should do the same.

[00:29:40] You would know what Sargan is good at, what he's bad at, what he's feeling at and I would love to have that relationship. Even 30s thoroughness, which is once you say I'm going to take care of it,

[00:29:50] you see to it no passing the bucket 99% and so on so forth. So I love these kind of people who are extremely humble, extremely optimistic, extremely compassionate, but are truth-seeking, realistic in life and know exactly where they are today. So those are the values that I,

[00:30:07] they're the kind of people that I like to work in. One of the values internally we joke about is, I mean, we call it being articulate but jokingly, I like to call it don't speak too much English.

[00:30:15] So I like people who are very precise and who speaks the language of finance rather than language of English. I think he just took a shot at us. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Just having ROI based conversations. Like we're gonna come if you're marketing,

[00:30:37] if you're in sales or if you're aware, come with an ROI. Like tell me this story and back it up with data. Not everything needs to be a 60 minute meeting. Yeah. So you've had, I'm sure,

[00:30:50] and I mean you guys, you're not that old. The company, the company, right? You're fairly young. Growing really fast. I'm sure, yeah and I'm sure you've seen some dips and you know, in your journey

[00:31:03] there. Maybe take us through some of those walls that you've hit and how did you kind of punch through those? Because you've scammed 500 employees in what three years or so. Yeah. Yeah. So that's pretty commendable. That's pretty rapid.

[00:31:22] Yeah. Trust me, the company has grown so did the problems and the challenges that we faced. Very recently I wrote a post to my team saying, you know, the size of the problems are not growing. Are you even growing? So the size

[00:31:40] of the problem also talks about what level are you dealing in life with, right? So you know, few stories on that end. Like, you know, we thought, hey, we are going to build a

[00:31:49] greatest platform where people would look at it and they would, I like just instantly know what to do with it. And so in that scenario, what we ended up doing is we didn't build any customer success and customer support team because we thought this is fully self-serve

[00:32:05] and because I spent 20 hours a day looking at it, I thought everybody will understand what is he in it. And I remember this was around 2020. So we launched in April 2021, August 2021, we go full force and around April 2022, sorry, around the end of 2022,

[00:32:27] we realized there are a lot of queries coming from the customers and then we are confused what's happening. And then we realized we forgot to build customer success team. We forgot to build customer support team. So who would they reach out to?

[00:32:39] I remember we built, like I used to interview 15 people every day in one week. I built a team of 35 people in one week. It was just one of those days where we needed it right away. And I mean,

[00:32:55] I don't know if I can do that today. I don't know if I can do 16, 17 interviews today and build that team because now we're big with system processes, blah, blah, blah,

[00:33:03] but like back in the day, we just did it. And I trend the entire team on here. This is how you will reach out to customers. This is if they ask you this question, this is our SOP,

[00:33:13] this is Zendesk, which was the first time we learned about Zendesk, about ticketing management tools and so forth. It was the first ever, you build a company, you realize like, oh, you miss something and then you have to fix it right away. We forgot a customer team.

[00:33:29] It's just funny. It's like a house, right? There's always something that you're learning about your house or there's something that needs improvement. And the same thing is true of a company. You might not, I mean, you're saying you forgot about it or whatever, but truth is,

[00:33:50] as a part of your success, something then happened and it's like, oh, okay. Yeah, we need to do something to fix that. So I think some of that's natural. I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of, they don't start off with a perfect, everything's perfect. There's no such

[00:34:07] thing. They get into it, have either failure, success or whatever. And then all of a sudden they realize that they have to do stuff and they're decisive. Like when you realize, hey, customers need to be able to go somewhere to be able to answer these questions.

[00:34:23] I can't help but think that it didn't take you six months to figure out a solution, which is what you do in corporate. It's like, no, we need to build this tomorrow. And so I think that's just natural.

[00:34:38] You know, one more thing just to add there, one more thing. Sure. I mean, the beauty of it is if you've given true value to your customers, they will stand by you. 100%. In the journey, you will miss a thing or two. Some features would get delayed,

[00:34:53] some replies would get delayed, but they will stand by you as long as they know they will give real value to the product. Trust. I think trust, transparency in Kharanarazan. See, they got to like you. That's what a lot of American companies get wrong,

[00:35:12] especially when they go abroad is they're not likeable. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. No, it's because I was just going to ask you, how do you, and William, I think he just answered it for me, at least in my head, but I'll ask the question

[00:35:30] now. How, so how do you continue to move forward? You said clients take by you, right? They realized, hey, you don't have customer support. You're not servicing us, but they trusted you enough

[00:35:48] to allow you to build that team and you built it quickly, right? So how do you manage that process, but two, what do you say to the person, to the entrepreneur who's out there now,

[00:36:01] who has to make this same decision and make these hires and they're afraid to pull the trigger and say, I'm going to hire these 30 people to be my customer success team. I'm going to do it in the

[00:36:10] next seven days and if they don't work out, well then I'm going to move on from them. How do you, what do you say to them? How do you get them to be that decisive? So one of the good thing about

[00:36:22] life at Multi-Clared Orion, William, is between three of us there is no specific department that if need be we cannot pick up. I mean, even different times I've done finance, I've done customer success, I've done customer support, I've done payroll, I've done everything. So

[00:36:40] when we didn't have that department it was three of us working 22 hours a day just making sure we are there for customers and that's where customers remember like, hey, I bought this,

[00:36:51] I bought it from this guy who didn't have a product. I loved his passion. I loved how he spoke about it. And you know what? Yes, they're a bit delayed in building the customer

[00:37:00] support function but he's sitting there in the office answering all my query not going home and so on. So that is what we call moment of truth. So you have to be there. I mean, as a founder,

[00:37:11] you don't have a funny choice of work-life balance. I mean, that work doesn't even exist in our lives. You have to be there, you have to be there when the customer wants and you know,

[00:37:19] still there are days where I have worked 20 hours a day. So that's one. The second point, what would I advise? You see right now that we're in US, you have a big office in New York,

[00:37:31] we have access to all the American know-how. America has known the art of building SaaS companies for generations. That doesn't exist in Asia, that doesn't exist in Singapore. So the amount of guidance that you get in Singapore or India and other countries is limited. So

[00:37:50] I said, now I think that as the economies are evolving, we didn't know that we need the customers at this time. I mean, we just didn't know it. I mean, it's not that we were trying to save money

[00:37:59] or whatever, we just didn't know it. We thought SaaS is fully self-serve and customers just use it and they don't want to talk to anybody and that's why they're using the product. Today, if I mean, the advice to entrepreneurs would be

[00:38:12] and if I have to highlight one point that is differentiating, multiply today apart from the great product that we have is customer service, where human-centric company, we're a global human platform. You have a query, we have Omni-Channel support,

[00:38:28] we have Customer Success Manager, we have Onboarding Manager, we have HR Expertise in EHR Experience Specialist in each jurisdiction and so on and so forth. We have built such a great customer success ecosystem that you talk to one of our representatives and you

[00:38:45] will feel happy. I mean, they will not solve your problems. They will, I mean, they will not just solve your problems, they will definitely solve your problem, but you will feel happy talking to them. So, going from having nobody in customer

[00:38:57] success and support to today globally being known in G2 and Capital for having the best success team ever was quite a journey. It's become core to your business, your success. You know, one of the things I love about this interview is that you're truly

[00:39:17] values-based. A lot of people give lip service to values, but I can tell just by the conversation and the stories that you're giving, you hire to it, you promote to it, you fire to it.

[00:39:30] Again, those values are not just words on a wall, those words are how you live, how the business grows. Last question for me that I have is you had mentioned that you came from humble beginnings. The entrepreneurs that I've been fortunate to interact with that come from

[00:39:49] the come from humble beginnings, they know how to stretch a dollar, that's one. Two, they think differently. Like again, it's I can't put my finger on how that is, but they just think differently about solving problems and making people happy and about success

[00:40:09] in general. So, how does your humble beginnings has that manifest in multiplier? Yeah, no, William, that's a brilliant question. Thank you for asking that. I think all of that you said is very true. But I think one thing that really now that I'm

[00:40:31] at the age, I can reflect back in the journey and the privilege of having resources to reflect back. I think resilience is the one word that comes to mind. I mean, I think practically unless you physically kill me, you cannot beat me down. Because I've come from whatever,

[00:40:49] having two wheels was a difficult challenge. But today when life is good and settled and so forth, you have not forgotten where you come from, which means the resilience is very, very strong.

[00:41:02] So even your family hasn't forgot and your family hasn't let you forget where you came from. That's different. That's different. That's different. So, so resilience is so important because tomorrow I know if any of my anything happens,

[00:41:19] if any of my head of department quits, I will be there and I will be in trench just taking care of it. And it wouldn't affect me even bit because that's where I come from.

[00:41:31] So I would say the number one quality that you grew up with when you come from humble beginnings and a driven aspirational individual is resilience and resilience is so important like building a business. So this has been really enlightening conversation. Thank you so much for coming

[00:41:48] on and sharing your journey. We're going to continue to watch you be gobbled up by take over the world. Take it all. Go public. Don't forget the little guys when you do. Remember, it was this interview that set you up.