He Left Salesforce to Join a Company Worth $0

Joshua: So today's guest is quite mad. He left a cushiony job at Salesforce to join a company that is back then probably worth like nothing. No playbook, no customers, and he was employee number one in Singapore. Today, that company has raised $15 million and growing at about 30 to 15 % quarter on quarter. Like that is incredible. So we want to hear his story. Right? So like, welcome, Naui. Thanks Joshua. Thanks Damon. Very excited to be here. On this podcast, I'm very honored to be the 10th guest for you guys. Let's go! Top 10 % podcast in the world! We can actually call ourselves podcasters now. You got that, you're just gonna wanna be. Yeah, so, Naui, back then, like, you were doing well at Salesforce, right? Like, what were you doing back then? Salesforce. So, maybe I'll share a bit more before Salesforce. I was doing consulting. I was in management consulting in one of the big four. And, you know, just fresh off of Korea University, I think many people... If you think of jobs, you want to look smart, you do consulting. So I went consulting, I did very well there first. I had a good career trajectory and then this opportunity came up which is Salesforce. And at that point of time, sales is like a... How do I explain but... You know when you think about sales, you think about like very salesy people right? You think there's this stereotype of sales. Yeah yeah yeah, exactly. You know, and then there's this stereotype. Yeah, sell me a pen right? And I think as a Singaporean... Branding, brand name is a lot of times pulling you away from opportunities. But Salesforce was a B2B company that was selling a software. At that point of time, software as a service was not a big thing. So many people don't know what SaaS is. The first time I heard about SaaS, the only thing know about SaaS is a SaaSy attitude. I don't know a SaaS as a software. So I decided to go to Salesforce. And when I went to Salesforce actually, it was a very different trajectory. One is consulting. And then in Salesforce, what I did was business development. So I started first, then associate. Many people don't know that when I left PWC to join Salesforce, I actually took a pick up. Yeah. So I wanted to go one level down. Why? Because that's the only option possible for me. Not that I have a choice. I had no choice. had to go one level down. Because when we are hiring a salesperson, you want someone with experience. You want someone that has knowledge, right? And you have no experience, nothing to... to provide to the company, no value yet, then of course you start on the bottom, which I'm completely fine with. So yeah, What we threw a bit of that mentality, right? Like, not many people are willing to firstly take a pay cut to join an industry that they don't know about, and to work on an entirely new skill that is highly uncomfortable for many people. Like, what was that thought process? Good question. I think for me, when I was doing consulting, Fortunately or unfortunately, I was very exposed to international development. And part of my role as an international development team was I travel quite a bit and my job was to bring companies from Europe to Singapore. And we did a lot of trade shows. So I think you might be familiar with Trade Fairs and Trade Shows for Ugletoon. So it's similar but for B2B rather than B2C convention. So when I went there, I see the Europeans, the business owners, the directors. Stay in the booth and selling. Just like how you have your salespeople selling ergotune chairs, these businesses were selling business solutions, services that business requires. And I was always very intrigued by it. And I was like, okay, I like the thought. I like to speak with people and I like to convince people to do something. Right? If it was another world, if I was way smarter, I'll be a lawyer maybe. I found consulting quite interesting, but What sales provider, in my opinion, is a platform for you to really be paid your money's worth based on the value that you provide. So let me give you an example, right? In consulting, let's say after 6pm, 6pm to 12am, I'm still working to rush a deadline for a client, right? There's 6 hours that I'm working extra. No matter how hard and no matter what I do, I'm still paid the same. But if you think of it from a sales perspective, honestly, after 6pm, what can you do? No client is going to answer your call anymore. So can you push for your next day? Yes, you can plan for the next day. And basically, how hard you work is how much money you get. So to me, that was a very finite and easy way for me to see what I'm worth. So because I know I will work hard, I'm very confident in my abilities to really pound your hours and really grind it through. I believe that I can succeed. So I knew that my goal of achieving that level of value of myself based on the efforts that I provide to myself, I feel that even though I have a pay card, eventually I'll make back money. Because... Right, so you want more upside for the effort that you put in. Right, like if you work at 9 to 5, you ask me to OT for a performance review that's gonna come 11 months later, maybe I'll do tomorrow then. But if I today close the deal... money is like, it's worth it, right? It's gonna come in. I can participate in the upside. Right? And you want to see that reflected. I think this reminds me of one of the best career advice I've heard. Not to me, but like someone said online, if you want to have a better career, get closer to the money, right? Get closer to the end process of where money is made or money is saved, right? Because that's when the leverage is the highest. Rather than doing something that's like very far apart. You can do that. can be an enjoyable job, but you won't make as much money. or have that much progress. Exactly. You're right on on that. So like you should follow where it depends on your interest. Like for me, my interest is really being client facing, presentation, speaking. I like that, you know, it's not for everybody. And it's a high risk. Sales is high risk because sales is one of the only jobs that you can be measured on a very hard metric. What's the metric? Your numbers. If you don't bring your numbers, you're not doing well. It's as simple as that. You know, I can be the best talker. I can be the most good looking person, whatever right? But if the numbers don't come in, is the one that will be most successful in sales? It's probably you bro. The comback gives it away. No, no, no, not? If I have to put my money to where who is the richest here, it's definitely not me. That's ⁓ another way to look at it ⁓ So now you are in Salesforce and brand new job, brand new career. At the start, you know nothing about sales except people have told you that you are good at talking. Right? Like how was that whole learning journey? Because you are entirely new. Did people support you? Like how did that go? They were shocked. Yeah, because like when I was in PWC back then, I had a fast promotion, right? And a fast promotion in the MNC, like in the Big Four, it's not easy to come by. So you have to imagine, in the Big MNC, when you want a promotion, right, it's not... I cannot make my case on. A partner has to make a case for you, and the partner will only have a bit of interaction with you. But they are fighting resources and that placement across the whole organization in the MNC. So it's not easy, right? I think from that they were shocked in a sense because like they pushed for it and then I got a promotion and then I was doing quite well so why would I leave? There was no reason to leave right but back then I just found an edge where I really wanted to sell. I always wanted to sell you know I was thinking of doing real estate or maybe doing insurance but you know Singaporeans like we are very we follow what people say you should do. Not many people are like the both of you, do your own company, make it, you know? Not many people like, a lot of people like, like in me, I'm very scared, right? I care about what people think. So what people think? They want you to go to investment banking or consulting? They don't want you to be a salesman. Nobody wants, Singaporean would say, join sales. Nobody. It's like doctor, lawyer, that kind. So like for me, like when I joined Salesforce, that is where I felt like, hey, you know what? Salesforce at that point of time, at that point of time. was the number one best workplace to work in Singapore for I think five times, five years in a row. So yeah, yeah. So that was what pulled me. Then I researched more about Salesforce. Salesforce was like the number one sales company in the world. So it kind of helped me bridge that gap, which is that I want to do sales that maybe there's a stereotype on, but then I'm joining a big brand, which you know Singaporeans, see big brand, they're like, oh, okay, this guy, this person got it, right? This person knows what he's doing. So to me, it was a bit of an easier way to go in, which is why I was okay with a pay card because I felt that I wanted to follow my passion and my passion really was to try to go into sales. And I felt that one day I want to be a leader, one day I want to manage a team, and if I want to manage a team and I want to lead a team, this is my point of view. Many people don't agree, but my point of view is always, if you want to lead, you must first be able to follow and you must be able to be rolling a sleeve and doing the dirty work first. which is why I wanted to start on the bottom. I really wanted so that I know one day when I become a leader and a new associate come in, I can tell the person I've been in your shoes. I know what you feel. can empathize. Whatever I'm telling you will move the needle. Right. And at that point in time, how do you know sales is your passion? Because you have never tried it before. Right. Like were there instances where you have done it? Or was it really something that you feel that you can do well? Because like in school, everybody say that I talk a lot. Right? There's like, wah you should be in sales bro! If you are in sales, you'll confirm make a lot of money. Right? Or you'll be an MC. Right? Just go to weddings and like, help people conduct wedding dinners. Yeah, and I always thought that I was, I would be good in sales but I've never like really tried it. What made you so, what made you really believe that like, sales was kind of your passion? To be honest, I also didn't know whether I'll be good in sales. My only, I guess, my first touch with sales was basically in SMU. Right, so I was part of Bondu, which is the business society of ⁓ SMU, of the business school. And my role back then was a corporate relations director, which means that I'm in charge of sponsorship. And sponsorship in school is basically my job is to find money for the society. So to find money is I sell the school. So when I did that, I actually did them well. it was, I scored the highest number, highest value in terms of cash in kind. Most number of logos, I created a sponsorship like system that until today they still use. So that's when I like, I was thinking, ⁓ actually... I'm pretty good at taking money from people. Like, damn! Right. Yeah, when I get the signature on the paper, like, it feels crazy. It's not just the money, it's just that feeling of the signed paper. Right. So that's when I thought, but I don't know. Right, because I was consulting... So I just felt like I wanted But you had a glimpse of it, right? You had a glimpse of like, this is what sales feels like. And that adrenaline, that dopamine of like, when it hits you, when like, oh my God, like people saw the value and it was because of me. Like I pitched it and people could see the value and they sign on this. And you went over to Salesforce, right? You were in Salesforce and you were thinking, okay, I know nothing about sales. I need to learn this whole B2B selling thing. In my whole life, the only way that... I know sales is my friends become insurance agents and they try to sell me insurance right? I got no other benchmark right? Let's assume like that's your feeling when you first appear in Salesforce. did you learn this role? How did you get good at this? Okay so when I was an associate right, do you know what's my job as a business development associate in Salesforce? Did you choose to by the way, did you choose to start lower or was there an opportunity for the start higher? There was no choice. There was no choice. I started from the bottom, no choice. So this was my job. My job was, okay, so let's say you are one of the AEs. So now Joshua is selling to territory. AEs, Account Executive. Yeah, so he's a sales, he's a BD manager, right? Joshua was- Is that the lowest? Give me a sensing. Bro, we come from everybody choose their own title type of company, bro. Like, give me a sensing of where AE is. Account Executive would be your sales manager lah. Your sales manager for- for your accounts, for your team. Basically, I guess you have a B2B team for Ergotune, Then probably that salesperson, yeah, is an AE. OK, so is the foot soldier in the sales organization. Yes, yes, correct. ⁓ So this salesperson, imagine now you want yourself, let's say I'm working for you, Ergotune, right? You want me to penetrate into maybe government industry. So now I'm trying to sell into the government. When you want to sell to the government, government is a example because government is a bit different. Let's say you want me to sell into the tech industry environment. So you want me to only sell to tech companies. So now I'm going to sell to tech companies. What I need is I need to know who I should reach out to. I need to know who's working at Shopee. need to see who's working at Lazada. So you know what's my job? My job is to go into Shopee or research about Shopee and just find contacts. So you are a LinkedIn scraper. That's your first role. You are the first one that like, hey, want to connect on LinkedIn? Correct. Correct. Okay. So I create contact and the second one is I do something what we call deduping. What is deduping? Deduping in your CRM. So CRM is your solutions like Salesforce or HubSpot. Let's say Joshua comes in, right? Or Damon comes in. You maybe will come in. more than one time, maybe three times. So there'll be a lot of duplicates of Daemon, a lot of duplicates of Joshua. My job is to find all the Daemon that's connected and merge it with the one contact. Gotcha. So you have one source of truth for that customer. Correct. So very manual, And pretty straightforward, correct? It's just very manual. It's just re-juggerating this step by step, very administratively fast. Not too hard, and obviously you can do it quite fast. If you're good, you just have to be very focused. I mean if you're very focused you can do a lot and very fast. So a lot of times I get the job done quite quickly. Now, many people will just finish lah. Finish the day, take a coffee, relax. Help us understand, so as an account executive, is that your, that sounds like admin task, is that part of your job that is already tied to sales targets and performance? No. At that point of time I have no target. At that point time, an account executive is the one selling. My job is support. I just create the context. Oh you're not even an AE, you're a support for the Yes, I'm not even selling, I'm creating content That's one way to look at it but I always tell people That is insane The rule right, like That's why I always tell people, even my team, I say that You are more than what the rule tells you you are You can just be whoever you want Like, let's say today I want to be a CEO Why I cannot be a CEO? Why Mark Zuckerberg at 21 is also the CEO of Facebook or whatever Like he has no experience What makes him him, you know what mean? It's just what you think with what you want to do and that is your constraint, your limitation. So while people are just creating context, I was very curious about how sales company run. So you know what I did? I had coffee chats with almost like every leader in Salesforce. I would have chats with like a country leader, a vice president, my senior director, legal counsel, finance, marketing, field marketing, digital marketing. AE teams, other country teams, like I just have coffee everywhere. And you know what's the best part about being new? You can have this card and this card is I'm new. So I want to learn. And you'll be surprised, not surprised, but you will realize people actually like helping people. That is our nature. We just like to share something that we know that you might not know. So I this opportunity to seize that. Yeah, I love this advice because I love this advice because I had a previous life in corporate world. And there is this window where you can play this new person card. You know, because after that, then it's a bit awkward to be like, if want to drink coffee with me, then the person will be like, what do you want? You will start doubting whether you should do that because you don't want to come across as a climber, right? But there's this three to six months of like, I'm new, go and have coffee with as many people as possible and use that card. Right, right, right. So I hear two lessons, right? First is, I've never been in corporate before. ⁓ It's not a flex, like I really want to know what a structured company kind of looks like because my whole life has been unstructured chaos. But I will assume that at that point in time, being able to meet everybody in the company helped you to get a full understanding of a business, which a lot of, I would say first question is whether, whether is that common? Like do a lot of people do that? Actually in corporate, like not, not many people kind of know how to reach out to people. I think the second thing that I found very interesting. is that your ability to kind of see like, okay, I'm ⁓ new here. I want to know what are the projects that I can do that is going to impact the company. And as a new employee, I think most of them, we are kind of stuck to our job roles. I tell you, you are digital marketing, you are digital marketing. Right? The moment you see your ops team struggle or your customer service team struggle, ⁓ my god, not my problem. Or you don't go and you don't bother to figure out why is the thing that's keeping the founders up at night. Right? Because the moment you do that, it doesn't matter what role you were hired for, right? You will immediately propel to the top and be like, okay, like this person is going to help us solve this problem because it seems like this person knows what he's saying. So I thought that was incredible that you already knew this from joining this so early. Yeah. Yeah, I mean from my side, like I didn't do that with any intention of like, you know, being someone that knows like, I was genuinely coming from a perspective that I really just didn't know what sense is about. And I really very curious to know how business runs and how a business is structured and why got so many people like, why this company got like 15,000 employees? What? Why does the company even need 50,000 employees? What do they do? I'm a sales force. I have a good portion of my network in sales force, but I still don't understand what they do, to be honest. So for me, that was really it. And that was like the free MBA for me, man. It's the free MBA. Like you just interview the leaders and they're very happy to share. You ask them how they do things, what is their day to day. What is their role? How does this team work with this other team? Then slowly but surely in this like very short time of three to six months, right? You know, like people usually in the start of the... I always tell people when you join a new company, learn first, understand first, then add value. Because once you start the grinder, you got no time ready. So what that gave me was a very, very strong foundation of how to run a sales company and how my role as an associate... fits a larger part of everything. So while we look at it as an administrative role, this role is super, super important. Why? Can you imagine my time? Every day in eight hours, I'm finding contacts. If you ask an account executive or a BD manager or salesperson to do the eight hours, these eight hours could have been spent meeting more clients, closing more deals, pushing your deal across the line, getting more conversations going, speaking with your partners. These are the things that you want them to do more. So this back-up is, yeah, if they are doing it, then they wasting their time. Not wasting their time, but it's not the most efficient location of resources. So when we do it this way, then you realize and you see, actually what Salesforce did, it was that they create a business machine, like a factory. Every sales role was decoupled and they broke down every layer. And when I understood that, then I understood, okay, this is how you run a business. And that became like my... I guess trajectory and how I added value in the next promotion, the next promotion and then how I got into slip flow and then started to... So for someone who's listening to this, okay, your advice is spend the first three to six months, pay that newcomer card, learn as much about the business as possible. I all tie together. But at some point to get promoted, you need to start adding value and proving your worth. How does this knowledge scaffold into your day to day and how do you start doing, like you said, more than what your role asks you to do? Good question. So I always look at it this way. My job back then is always this. This is number one in my head always is how do I make my boss worry less about me and the team? That's it. Because even as a manager now, the only thing I want my team to think about is how can they make me worry less? Because if I worry less, then I'll be so happy. Like on a manager's job, right? Like you have people management, you have business management, you have client management. There's so many things. So What you actually don't want is you just don't want to worry about your teammates. So my job always is just like, how can I help my boss to make him not worry and just make him shine? So that was always my game. So I always, you know, I was very close to my managers. I understood what they're trying to go for. And then I would just help out. It's not with the intention of like, oh, everybody listen to me. I want to wayang here, wayang there. It's not. It's just like what my role is to make my boss look good so that if he looks good, my team looks good, then we all look good. then we all make the business run, right? The value that we create. And in that same time, while doing that value, if people know about my name, know about my value, then it's a win-win, right? I make my boss happy, I make myself happy. So, a very big part of what people don't realize in promotion, no matter how good you are, is that visibility is important. And how do you get visibility? It's not by raising up your hands, like, hey, I want to this CCA, you know, in MNC, this thing called CCA. The extra stuff. Yeah. Trust me. What is I had to organize corporate. I remember what I did. I had to organize a year-end party when I was working in Are you paid extra? No, no. It's a CCA. It's a CCA to get them visibility. ⁓ But, no wait. I love this advice because I wish you had told me that when I was working in corporate. Because I don't think... I didn't understand that. I thought my job is to do my job well. Right? And I thought if I do my job well, I'll get promoted. But really what you're saying is that's not enough, right? Doing your job well allows you to keep your job. To get promoted, you really need to be aligned to what your boss cares about, right? And that is what gets you visibility, that's what gets you leverage, right? And then you focus on that, right? Because that's when you can help your boss sleep better at night, that's how you get promoted. Right? Just doing your job well doesn't help your boss sleep better at night. that's baseline. But do you think you'll do well in corporate? Knowing what I know now, I think yes. But back then I was really afraid now. You know how to gain visibility ah? I think corporate cannot afford both of you so I don't know whether that's the best. Right. I always wonder whether or not we will thrive in corporate. Because I think we... I don't know. I don't know. I don't think we know how to play the game. I feel that there's a game here of like, I want to raise my hand and do the visible things but I don't want my peers to be angry with me. But like... I want to get promoted and only one person can get promoted and I don't know how to navigate this whole thing well. But different, I feel like for you guys having built a good team to what it is today, like people will look at you guys like anything you all say is like time stand really. It's really really. That's the value I see from operators that build companies that if we see people like you guys join corporate like whatever you say whatever you do. has a lot more weight and that weight in itself is the visibility. You don't need to play the game because playing the game is like it's not really game lah don't call it game it's just about like real value you already proven value by both of you so it's like from people whatever you all say people will just listen like it's like people would love to be mentored by the both of you you know so it's like in a corporate world when you are nothing because the brand is the brand you are just yourself you don't have anything that is beyond that brand Then you have to do this visibility, show that value so that people will start getting it. You start building your influence and then as you start building your influence, you build that value. That's how you grow lah. But if I tell people this like, no matter how good you do a job, but your boss don't know what you do. And I tell you, our bosses don't know what people do. If the boss don't know what you do, yeah, the boss don't know what you do, then no matter how hard you work, right, you will never get anything. So you must... During year end review right, everybody is suddenly damn hardworking. Like need to think out everything that they have done for the year and try to log it in like I did this, I did this, I did this, this is all my numbers. I mean having been on both sides, here's the reality right. Again when I was an employee, I thought what I need to do is do my job well. But I realised when I'm a boss, the parts of the business that continues harming, it's like that should be done. I don't care about it. But there are usually only three or four things that I really care about at any point in time. And people who are doing that, those I think are the highest leverage things, are people who would get the attention. Does that make sense? Like if operations is continuing running and it's not giving me problem, then okay. It's people who just doing the... You're paid to do this. Yeah, you're paid to do Doing the BAU, you're not going to get promotion, even if you do it well. Exactly. But if I have an initiative, what I'm trying to do this quarter is to increase ops efficiency by 30%. People who work on the high leverage thing is going to be... getting that visibility. So a lot of it, it's not so much playing the game as much as aligning to what is important. Which is exactly the way that you should look at when you're selling something. When you sell something, you must align to what they actually care about. They don't care about your feature, They really don't care. Like you have your ergo tune. Like they don't like, different people care about different things. Like I care about my back. My back is the biggest problem that I have. So like if you want to sell to me, you must focus on how the chair will really support the back, for example. But what most of the people do, like the BAU, if you're a salesperson, I would say, okay, this chair got ABCDEFG, but I don't care about the wheels, I don't care about the color, I just care about the back. It's the same thing as your bosses, right? Your bosses only, let's say, your operations, you will maybe focus more on the efficiency or reducing costs. If you're the CEO, you focus a lot more on the revenue side, right? So... If you align to your bosses, you're aligning like it's the same how you sell to sell somebody. People buy when you're able to meet the pain or meet the goals. Same thing as bosses. If you can meet the pain. So my pain point is I want to grow revenue. If you can show me and without me even telling you how you can help me drive more revenue, I will love you. So that's how I see it. Right. So then you became, so you started learning, right? How then and what was that? That rise look like all the way until the point where you decide to leave like. What was that? What was that like? So yeah, I went to role and typically in Salesforce to get promoted you need about I think at least a year, a year and a half for the next level. I did it in six months. So it's like half or one third the time of a usual. That was a flex that like, like we were all very impressed by you. You treat it so nonchalantly. That's why you are a person bro. It's like I've done something and people take a year in six months, but part of everyday life. I fucking love it man. But yeah, mean to even get that is not like they give me, you know. I have to fight for it, raise my hand, show that I'm ready. Like even before I make calls, I'm really doing calls. I don't need to do calls, but I show them I do calls. Then people will go in the booth to make calls. You know what I did? I make my calls in front of everybody. And I say, I talk very loud. Like, hey Joshua, are you from a good tune? Hey, this is Nahwee from Salesforce. Have you heard of Salesforce? I will say very loud. I'm sure everyone can hear me. So that people will look and see like, wow, who's this guy? So when you got that promotion, were they betting? So when you got that promotion in just six months, Do you think they were betting on your potential or was it because you already proven results? Potential. Of course I have no results to relish. Actually, I actually had some results. Even as an associate doing to sell, I already helped my AE sell some clients. It was just me. So I proven value, but they also see the potential. So sometimes in corporate is also about luck but I tell people there's no such thing as luck. Luck is when opportunity means preparation. So I prepare already. I prepare the baseline that I know how to make calls, I actually can do some sales, I got some close client even though I don't have to and when the opportunity arrives because I'm already prepared, that's how we met and that's how I got that promotion. Then same story lah, from that story I I focused first on inbound. Inbound means okay if Joshua comes in as a lead, Then I called. Then in less than a year, promoted again to do focus outbound as a lead. Outbound is different. Outbound is Damon didn't come in as a lead, but now I'm going to reach out to Damon. So it's a different approach. So I transitioned to that. And then from that experience, you know, I was just growing, growing in my career. Then just so happened, one fateful day in September, 2021. Not September, I can't remember when, like think mid-year or something. The founder of Sleep Flow came in. So Hanson reached out to me, thought I was a good fit for that role in Slickflow. I didn't even go through an interview, it was just a chat with me. And then I just chatted with him, talked about what I think his building is good, Omnichannel is a big thing for a lot of people, even though I was in Salesforce. I wished him all the best, I gave him some ideas, and then from then on he wanted to chat with me again. Then chat with me again, I told him, look, I'm not applying for a stick flow, but I just want to give you something I prepared. So I pre-filed him a three pages deck. I would encourage you to get your team to use this three deck to sell. Because he showed me what he did. Then I tell him, use this three instead. Synthesize it, it's too much deck at the point of time. People don't want to see so many slides. So just three key things. And then I show him, this is how you can tell your team to sell. And when I did that, I think he really liked me. Then he said... That is another golden nugget there. You're getting a job not just by interviewing, but by showing you can do the job. It's almost like giving the person a lead neck neck. Like a PDF you can download and link it. like, okay, this is how I show you I can do my job. I love that. Yeah. Wait, but why did you do that? Why did you do that at that point? You weren't even looking, right? Things were going well at Salesforce, right? Yeah, why help this random founder? You have much better things to do with your time. Why do that at all? Because I felt I had learned so much from my masters in Salesforce. All my my laoshi, all my all the leaders, they teach me so much. I learned so much. I have so much information that I just wanted to help people. I learned so much from them. It's crazy the amount of coffee I had. But I tell you one thing about the leaders in Salesforce. I think there are some special guests in a lot of coffee places. They can go in there and go out right, don't really need to give card. I don't know how they do it. Then, yeah. I'll go with them coffee. They sit down and drink coffee. I don't know! I just went for him and he didn't pay! I was like, what? This is another level. He just did this. He expected you to pay bro. The coffee place is like, eh? Then they just both left. I don't know how that works but like, was like, yeah. Anyways. So yeah, I I just had a lot of like things in my head. I've always liked to build. I like, I'm a builder. I love building like, so a bit, a bit of like background about me besides doing whatever I've been doing, right? I'm very heavily involved in gymnastics. You guys familiar with the sport? Gymnastics? I've seen it on all Every four years, Yes. Okay. Yeah. The rings, the flips, all that. I've done that my whole life. Damn. So I'm a coach. What? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm a gymnastics coach. I was a national athlete back then. Now I'm a recreational coach. So on Saturdays and Sundays, I actually teach gymnastics since I was like... Then I... To honest, I like you less and less. You're one of those people that makes us feel bad about our lives. know? Yeah! All rounded and everywhere. Handsome, tall, national athlete, good career. People like you make us feel bad about our life choices. Okay, thanks everybody, that's the form. The reason, so I like building right, so like my job as a coach is to build like character in young gymnasts. I work a lot with young female gymnasts. So like that's when I realized actually I keep reflecting like what do I actually like, I like to build. So I always wanted to build my own startup. So when I look at you Damon, I look at you Joshua like... I envy you guys even more than anything because like you guys have the courage to do something that I've always wanted to do is to build my own thing I really want to but I don't have I just I'm not as I am in no excuses like you know you guys get a job then they go to hangouts right so if I want revenge like my my biggest regret is I didn't start something else in uni because there's that risk now Now that I'm working, I have all this, I have a house, it's a bit different. But anyways, so I always liked building and when I was talking to Hanson back then, my only intention was to help him build bigger and better. I just want to help people build. That's always been me. So when he came talk to me, I didn't interview anywhere else, by the way. I never talked to any recruiter. I didn't apply for anything. So I really was not trying to find a job. I was simply just trying to tell him how he can do better. I just like to help people. Really, really genuine. So when I did that, then... So this is where to your point, Demon, you're right. a lot of times when you want something in life, you must show value first, which is what I also tell my team. Like, before you ask, you show value first. When you show, you show and then you show, then you ask. Then there's a higher chance for you to get something. But if you don't show value at the start, like, why do I need to? Why would I want you? So that was a good point also. Yeah. Actually, the point about you providing that... trees like that is incredible because like when I was hiring for people, the people that gave me a glimpse of how they would do their job when they joined stood out in the list of hundreds of applicants, right? and I think even while I thought about this also, like even the channel that you use, like most people, they apply through emails, right? Or the application link online, right? You are flooded in that sea of emails that is going to be there, but What if somebody sent a mail letter, they wrote a handwritten letter and sent it as an application. Everybody opens their mailboxes. It needs to go somewhere. But not everybody reads all their emails. And did you see recently, something went viral in Silicon Valley. The way they got startups to pitch to investors, they send their deck in a cake. Oh yeah. The guy made like 16k from doing cakes bro. Like he hyper-growth like the cake company All he did was like I help you send cakes to to VCs I help startups send cakes to VCs ⁓ yeah, there should be a Salesforce plugin for like sending cakes directly to clients Yeah, yeah But all these It's about attention right? Like if everybody is doing it through the same channel You need to stand out Whether you stand out in your application or you stand out by the channel If you really want that job you you really need to do something a little bit different than everybody else. And from employers perspective, I can tell you 99 % of people won't do it. You don't even need to be that creative. You just need to stand out just a little bit. It's meh. You brought up Steven Bartlett right? I love him. I love his podcast as well. you know, one thing he shared, like how he built his brand and his business was to care about the little things. I don't know whether you guys heard this. This is one of the episodes caring about the little things and what he described about caring about little things is you must You want to be seen different right? You must be different and what is his him being different him being different is like okay? Even before we are part of the podcast he will already know what is Joshua's like favorite song so when you come into the podcast the song is playing and then when you sit down and when you're talking and visualizing everything that someone's actually drawing and writing the notes and just like taking part of everything and the question is asked is like, you guys, podcast right, is like so well thought of and so well researched. So the point that when you leave the podcast, they will give you this book, which is a diary, right? This is called Diary of a CEO of the entire podcast that was written as you were talking to to Steven, right? And then happened to It happens right after the podcast. Yeah. So imagine now with the two of us talking, someone is drawing, taking photo and writing the... snippets and the golden nuggets that's being discussed and then when I leave, they give. And then when you leave the podcast, they're playing the sound and the scent right, they even research the kind of scent you probably will like. And then he said that is carrying about every little detail and making you different. And that's how you make from like, know, like something like a podcast becomes something that is so valuable. And yeah, I mean, you wanted to set way to that. I love that. is amazing. But also I kind of disagree. Like I'm a big believer in 80-20 in life. I mean, on one hand, I always hear stories like this where you go obsessed over every single detail. But when we building Star, I think a lot of things wouldn't be possible if you had kept about every single detail. Doesn't make sense. There is always stories like this, but there will be a lot of counter examples of there's only this 80-20 that you need to follow. There's this 20 % of things that you need to get done well, and then the rest will take care of itself. Yeah, I think for that point, it's that... If you want to be the top 1%, the key experiences, you need to sweat the details. Yes. Right? So for Stephen Butler, because his whole experience is about the guests, how they feel when they walk in, the questions that they ask and experience that they go out telling other people, because they are all very powerful people, right? If their experience is great, they will then have spread the word and he will become more and more popular. So in that top 1%, I think that is where you need to obsess over. for a large part of the rest of the business, everything kind of needs to be 80-20. That's what I think. I agree. like, majority of what I... I always feel people focus on the wrong things. But the 80-20, I guess for Steven, that 80 was the experience lah. So it really depends on the context of what you're trying to do and what you're trying to sell. But actually the difficult part is applying judgement on where is the part to really obsess. Right, where you obsess to the most... mind you still. That's a harder time. Because the story's on both sides of like, don't care too much, care too much. really, there are certain parts you should care way too much. Finding that is the... It's the instinct of choosing that experience that you wanna be like the top 1 % in. Exactly. But yeah, so like you're at the top of... You received that... You sent out that pitch deck, right? And he... You already got the hook already. Like freaking... The founder is like, please join me! Right. At that point in time, like, you will probably do very well in Salesforce, right? Because as a six-month promoter, you're already getting a lot of deals, ⁓ and it's a sales job where your upside is uncapped, right? A lot of money on the line. You choose to leave that to join somewhere chaotic. Walk me through how you were feeling at that point in time. I was... I was scared for sure. I mean, I spoke with my... my family, I had a chat with my mentor, I had a chat with my boss. How many of them said don't be dumb? None actually. All said follow what my gut says and they will support me. Damn. Damn. So for me, I thought about it like okay I want to be like Demon and Joshua to build something of my own. But I don't have the courage to do it, right? So what is the risk for me over here? If I was to do this, technically I'm a founder. Because there's no brand, no slick flow. The first time I always say is like, hey this is now even from slick flow. people be like, slick what? Slick flow. Slick who? Slick flow. Now it's better lah. This is now even from slick flow. Oh okay, the omnichannel company. So anyways, yeah so for me it's like really building your own brand. But you don't have the risk. I don't need to think about how to... I know for both of you for sure you guys are always worrying. Like, I mean not always worrying but there will be times where you guys are worrying like... Can the revenue and the profit make up for the salary of your teammates and all that? You have to think about that right? You to think about fundraising You need to think about money That's what employees don't need worry about Because employees just take the money But owners, true owners think about Will there be enough money for my teammates and then also my investors? So very different So I talk to myself What's the risk in that? I got no risk I still get paid but I'm building something on the dime of someone else So I felt like There was no downside, there was only upside. Words come to us, I leave. Then I go back to Salesforce, so go back to another company. I'm quite sure can find another job. I love your career choices because if you look purely from the outside, it sounds very risky. But you actually thought through about what is the asymmetry for you and you're taking on things that actually sounds risky but it's not. So our first career choice, There three things people typically optimise for in a career. Right? Purpose, money and status. Right? So when you left to join Salesforce, actually it was both more money and still high status. Right? So the risk while you were taking some pay cut was not that high. Right? It was still high status because it was in sales and it was a well-known company and the money was possibly great. So that was taken care of. While it looks crazy stupid. If you think about that dimension, it's not that. Now you're at a stage where you want to optimize for purpose, that sense of building something. A lot people would say starting a startup, it's very risky because you have to worry about money, put your personal life at stake. But you found an opportunity where that part is already the risk because there's a first early founder team that has raised some money, you risk part of the business. And we still get all of that, the purpose of being early in a startup. So I think a lot of people don't think enough about like, what you want and how do you find that asymmetry in finding something that's already been missed. It doesn't have to be a trade-off and you've always found something in your career that, eh, no trade-off actually. I've been But like I said, luck is opportunity means preparation. So I'll just prepare. At that point of time, someone needed someone to build. I was prepared. There was an opportunity. I seized it. So that has always been the story of my life so far. I've always been blessed by these kind of opportunities. I think a lot of times it's about the mindset like if I'm out of job today can I find another job and make a lot of money? Yes I can. I'm confident in that. And I think mindset... And you have already decided that okay I'm gonna join a startup right and I assume Slickflow was one of it right? Did you consider the rest? Because if I were you I've decided that okay I don't mind going back down into getting my hands dirty right? But I want to choose a rocket ship right? I want to choose a rocket ship that... If it flies, it better go to the moon. Did you explore different options or you saw sleep flow, you saw the found and you decided that this was going to be the rocket to hop on? Yeah, more of the latter. I didn't look at any other companies. For me, when I joined something, I'm all in. I don't give a Before you joined, before you joined, when you're still thinking... I didn't think of any other rocket ships that I can join. Like I said, If Slickflow wasn't here, I'll be like Salesforce for life probably because I love Salesforce. It was a great company, people were nice. I love my boss and I just felt like the value it was provided was real. I felt like I was in a sweet spot that I had no reason to leave. But when this opportunity came, I just felt that if I don't take it then there won't be many opportunities where you are a founder of startup in this region with nobody here and you're really going to build something of your own. There's very few like that. Very, very, very few. So I said that that was worth the risk. And when I chose that, I didn't see any other thing. don't even like, I don't see options. I'm just all in. And when I like something, I see it as a vibe, know, when, when we chatted, when me and when Hansard chatted, the line that got me was like, he shared with me this and he always used this line when he talks about me, when he shares on LinkedIn or even my, my anniversary, like work anniversary, he'll write this line, is that as he, as, as we always talk about. He messaged me this line by the way, the line is very strong, is, I hope we can be brothers along this crazy journey together. Can you believe, like, can you imagine that? Like, what that means to a person? I wish we could be brothers along this journey together. I don't know you. He's from Hong Kong, I never seen him before in my life. But, that whole statement was, you telling that person that, be my kind, be with me and we will... go through shit together. We know we're gonna go through shit but let's be brothers along this journey and that sold it to me lah. So yeah that's how we started. damn. You know recently I was telling my intern that like everybody here is family then he said ⁓ my god that's toxic! TikTok say you cannot call your team family. Yeah, I mean... In this generation, you gotta be careful of how you say Yeah, like I didn't even know because back then when we were running a company, always thought like, wow, people put their trust in us, they could have joined any other company, but they decided to follow three idiots to build a chair company, right? And I always had that family mentality. Which I have learned that that is very toxic or at least from my agency in turn that that is no longer acceptable. Yeah, I don't use family to call my team name because we can't say that anymore right? But I mean it depends on the situation like like brothers is not really saying that we are family but it's just more of like that that that comrades. That mindset. Yeah, that comrades you know. sounds more like brothers where you're going to be at a club. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's can you dig child's grave with. Yes. And I think, listening to this, I think one way that startups can attract talent like you, right, is that to sell that sense of purpose, to sell that sense of, let's fight against something greater. And the best startup founders are always able to do this. I don't think, be honest, Josh and I, I don't think we did that well. We were not able to like, we always told people on, hey, there's a potential upside. It's a good place to work. But we never found a way to sell like, hey, let's do this again. It's going to be a long and tough and hard journey, but it's going to be great. It's going to be hard, but it's going to be the best memory of your life because 10 years later, when we look back at this, that's all you're to talk about, like how we overcame this. I think people are like high performing people are stuffed of this, stuffed of this purpose, stuffed of like going on that hard quest and one way startups can win in the shredding, then they just provide that avenue to be like, okay, this is a hard quest and people want to conquer it. Yeah. But I think, I think back then, For us, it was a reflection of ourselves. We believe that more money, you will stay. Which is why a lot of the conversations was around compensation, equity, and having that sense of purpose was never, was a little bit more fluffy to us back then. Right? Like who are we? We didn't understand what is this purpose thing. Like everybody's purpose in life is to make as much as... as much money as possible and go to the P &E and just stay up. then when we started to run the company, we did learn that money really wasn't the reason why people stay. Like we weren't paying the best, right? We were an e-comm company. If you join a tech company, you can probably get paid a lot better. But our retention rate was surprisingly high. And that was one thing that took us many years to kind of understand that like There are a lot of things that matters when you want to keep top talents and purpose is probably one of them. We should have developed a stronger sense of purpose that is well communicated to the company which is one thing that we have learnt the hard lesson on. But you said your retention rate was good right? Like people stayed in the company quite long right? Yeah but pipeline not good bro! Nobody wants to join us! That's why we need a retention rate good. I mean, if I didn't have a job back then, I would have joined you guys. 100%. You have killed it. We'll have 10x more valuation than what we exited for. I will be your hunter, I'll be your hunter. But yeah, purpose. Purpose driven, meaningful career is what I wish. I before and I... What we really wanted to understand is as business owners, right? Because there are lot of business owners that are listening to this podcast. How do I position my company? in a way where I can attract top talents like you because back then even if I wanted to hire you I wouldn't even dare to approach you like who am I? I'm just a small company doing I don't know like like okay revenue like how I don't know how to sell sell it to you so help teach us how do we sell a company to a top talent like you I have you know this guy called Robert No We are surprised because I could never pronounce his last name. Yeah, could probably pronounce his last name properly. I'll be like, Robert got your back? he said was... Now I lost my track, my train of thought. said that A-Star players likes to work with A-Star players. Let us sing in for a A star only lies the world of A star player. So most A star players in most organizations, there will never be a place where there's a lot of A star. But for most business owners or leaders in high promising companies, you would see yourself as A star. Right? I mean, if you guys, if we don't look at ourselves as A star players, then we cannot be owners and we cannot be a, we cannot call ourselves a fast growing company. Right? Because a fast growing company means you're good what right? If you're normal, then you're a company. But fast growing company means you have to be really good. So actually when you mention that okay if a business owner is trying to attract top talents, like there's nothing to fear because any top talent will want to work with another top talent whether you're a business owner or whatever. Like a top talent wants to work with a top talent because they get each other and top talents work well with top talents because the product of that is even greater than what they can do by themselves. So you know for me when I talk to when I see Hansen and see the company I could recognize very instantly that he's a top talent, he's a great founder, he has a good vision, his product was good. So for me like I want to work to make this an A-star company because like for a lot of people, okay maybe not all A-star players wants to be builders but there will be people when you're in A-star and you are in a big MNC you want more especially when you're not younger. you feel that you can do more. And you want an opportunity, you want people to be like, hey, I'm going to give you that shot. And if that person thinks it's good or she's good enough, you say, yeah, I want to take that shot and I want to prove that I can do it. And it's the people that has something to prove that will drive your business and will drive your company. So if you can position and frame this opportunity where you are giving this opportunity to somebody where this person can prove that this person deserves to be an A-star player, in an A-star company with an A-star salary, the person would think a mission greater than himself. Do you know this is actually one of the things that Damon pitched me to ask me to start doing content. Okay, what did he say? He basically said like, one of the reasons why our pipeline for hiring was so dry, firstly we weren't very good at hiring. We did the usual job portals kind of thing. was because I think people, if you just see a go-to it's a chair company, right? And then you, very objective you see, okay, it's an e-con company that is selling chairs, then you have other comparables. But the whole reason why you start doing content is because then maybe somebody will be like, maybe I wanna work with Joshua. It's not about a company anymore, right? Wherever Joshua is or wherever Damon is, like, I wanna work with them to learn their mentality, to learn how they operate, right? And that transcends the type of company that you're in. It's just a vehicle for us to learn, for us to practice. our decision making skills so he was like okay bro we need to do this personal branding bro like Elon Musk is doing it Musk Zuckerberg is doing it we need to hop on this like high train right so that's why I started doing content and hopefully the next company that we start hiring will be a little bit easier You guys have foresight man, that's what I can say. They don't have foresight bro, they don't have a lot of It's quite bad. I complain a lot. I execution but sometimes I see it. Josh was the one who actually got more serious about it. I've talked about it for very long but I'm not consistent. He's a founder in the company that sends articles to people. then... Actually I haven't read it. Interesting awesome. Yeah, I thought I need to execute on it. So do you guys know this strength personality test called Gallup Strengthfinder? Have you heard of ⁓ yeah. Yeah. So there's basically 34 traits that most people will have and when you guys were talking about this, this is a very typical founder-founder partnership. It sounded a lot like Daemon. One of his strengths maybe is futuristic. He's a futuristic personality. And then Joshua is actually what we call an activator, which is me. I'm also an activator. So an activator is someone who is very strong in taking ideas and taking fast action. Like taking ideas, making it to a reality. There's a very typical founder-founder relationship. And that's why a lot of founders that have futuristic and activator pairing, very good founder pairs. So I don't know whether that's what you guys are, but it sounded a lot like what I usually You are made in heaven, bro. Hey, I knew it. This is a bit like Traction. Have you read the book Traction? The Traction game? I have not. Traction. So Traction is this operating system that was made famous because people growing, they kind of lose how to track priorities and it all ends up with this level 10 meeting where the whole company is aligned on the direction to go for. I think it be super helpful. But in that whole book, they talk about at the top of the company, A good company typically has a visionary and an integrator. The visionary kind of comes up with the 10x ideas. 9 out of 10 times it wouldn't work, but that one time the integrator will be like, let's go! And then, and then like fully execute and like make sure everybody kind of follows through. Yeah. So when we learned about that, we were like, yeah, sometimes I got good ideas for a pro, maybe I can be visionary. But David's vision has been pretty strong, pretty strong. Come to me at night. I don't know how to attract talent right, so one thing you're saying give them a strong sense of purpose One thing you're saying is hey, you're pitching I think it's I think what you're pitching really is the density of talent right because in any big companies and I've worked at big companies before is that there are smart people there are definitely A plus talent but in any big company there's also a lot of B and C players and what frustrates A players is that they have to work with a lot of B and C players it's not that there is no A players like they have to work with B and C players and that drags them down. So the pitch is, hey, if you're a startup and you're growing strong, at least your initial founding base should be a strong density of A-plus players. And this is a place where you get to work with constantly just A-plus players and have that impact that's way larger than you because now you're not dragged down by the politics of a corporate and dragged down by working with B and C players. that's the key. Is the only formula where your 1 plus 1 equals 5? Just putting more A-plus players together, that feeling is magical. Yeah, because eventually you will read like... A one strong talent right, can be the quality that will be just... Ginormous like you... Like I cannot explain, I've seen talents like that in Slickflow. And when you see talents like that, it's so so so rare. But if you are lucky enough to get that kind of people, like you gotta make sure they retain. And you gotta make sure that you're constantly motivating them, because... This person is the reason why the business is growing. And that's what I see here in Slickflow. So then you go. ⁓ question. How soon do you think you see this person? Like do you, this what you call 10x player, is it apparent from like the third month or it takes time for them to prove themselves out? I always feel that like in an interview, like when you're having a chat with people, right? If the person is an A-star player, right? You can tell in that first meeting. In the first meeting, First meeting. So like, but you can get wrong, you can be wrong in the sense that like, you think he's an A-star player and then he's not an A-star player. Very rarely I've not counted whereby I have an interview, I don't think this person is A-star, then in the end they become A-star. I have not experienced, so my experience is I think this person is A-star, really A-star. Or I think this person is A-star, in the end is C. So there has only been 4 positives but not 4 negatives. Something like that, yeah. So far from my experience, but I mean, yeah. So do you think you got better at smelling the fluffy interview skills already? I think so, yeah. I mean, interview a lot of people and there's a lot of roles that we hire for. I think what, as you grow as a manager, you will also be more picky. At the start, anyone wants to join me, I will take. As long as you can speak well, you speak well. You have that... The purpose is most important thing. You got no experience, you just have purpose. Like, I want to build something, I want to prove myself. But no, no lah. Must have at least some purpose, right? I will take you. But now it's like, more than that, you need to go through like a panel round, you must do a case study, you must do a peer round as well. Why? Because of what I said, like, can... Interview you can, smoke me. I can make you think I'm damn good. But then I realized the best way to test somebody is like, for example, a role play. or like a case study because if the person cannot even do a role play or the way they're doing the role play is so basic right then you know this person is a lazy person for example then don't hire this person it's a red flag if they don't even bother to change the slides in their role play then what do you think will happen if they join the company when they don't even need to prove anything because they already have a job right right this this sounds like somebody that has been battle tested Yeah, I have. I represent. most people, most first time people, hiring people, right? You just take whoever that comes, bro. If you want to join me, I will love it, right? I bet that after that, when you start to see more and more people come in, and like the frustration that you have when you're working with them, then you start to implement, okay, we need the first round interview, second round interview, case studies. Double case studies to finally get to, okay, I don't mind testing you, but typically by then, you have a strong enough pipeline. Yeah, a strong enough pipeline of people. Yeah, but I want to go to when you first hire people, right? Because you talk a lot about purpose, you talk a lot about your why. I want to understand when you are filtering for candidates, what are the type of questions that you ask them? Because I would love to hire people with purpose, but when I ask people, do you have purpose, they say yes. I would really question our question like why you want to join Slickflow? Why? Like why do want to leave your MNC? Like a lot of people for MNC want to join startup. I'll be asking why? Then they will say, they're doing very well now, numbers doing very well already. They'll say, okay, if everything's doing well, then why you want to join Slickflow? I'll just keep asking why? Like then let's say they want to change role from non-sale to sale. I'll ask them why? Why you want to join sales? Why you want to Slickflow? I keep asking why because I want to hear what they are trying to achieve in life. What is your purpose in life? Because if your purpose in life or your purpose to join Sleepflow is because you want a job, you just want to have work life balance, you will not survive here on 100%. 100 % you cannot survive if your motivation is to find a job in Sleepflow. Your purpose must be that you want to prove something. You want to prove to your ex-manager that you have bad experience with that if you are given the right culture, the right teammates, you will thrive. You maybe want to prove the fact that I have no sales experience but I will damn sure make sure that I work super hard to prove to me or Naui that because he gave me this opportunity I'm gonna make sure he delivers. These are the people I will hire. So I will ask the why. Some people will be like, ⁓ their why is because yeah, maybe it's a race thing, know, minority or they weren't given that chance and like they're just wishing someone to give them a chance. And when you place your bets on these people, there's something to prove, something to drive. And the why is really strong. These are the people that will take you far in your company because when the going gets tough, which you guys both know, the people that stay and the people that persevere is the people who has the most grit. And the people that has the most grit are the people with a story to tell and something to prove. And that's how I sniff out the why. What's a killer question that I can ask during an interview? Do you have a list? Because it seems like you have interviewed a lot of people. Horrible at interviewing. I would love to learn from you. I don't have like a specific question that I will ask but sometimes in interviews my candidates will cry. Wait wait wait wait, guy or girl? Not because like they're terrified but because it becomes so emotional right? So like I mean there's no specific question. It's like just really being curious about like you as a person like Who is Joshua? Who is Damon? What is driving Damon? Why are you doing what you're doing? What are you trying to do in the next one to three years? What? Why are you working? Who are you working for? Why you want money? Why you want to be rich? Why? I'm just very curious like, why? Like what makes you tick? What motivates you? Like why? Then when you keep asking those questions, then you'll find out a bit more about what this person is trying to do. And then when you find out what this person is trying to do, you map back to what you need in your company and you decide is this somebody that you need. Then that's how I, it's peeling the onion. In sales, we call it peeling the onion. Right in sales, we peel the onion to find pain point. But in an interview, you're peeling the onion to get to know the person because the core of the person will allow you to understand the motivation. And when the ship gets staffed like you like the ship, the backs against the wall, it's that core. person, the why, that you must remind this person of why this person is here in the first place. Then that it will be the North Star. I love this filter of like trying to find people who have something to prove, who have a chip on the shoulder, who do things because they're like, I'm wrong and I'm going to prove that I'm right. I'm not sure psychologically it's the most healthy thing. I'm not sure it will lead to happiness, but then this is like some of the best highs you can find. people who feel wronged. love that. Actually when I spoke to... because I always try to understand in very tough industries, how do people make it? So in Singapore, your tough industries are like insurance, right? People give a lot of shit to insurance salespeople, but there are a few that just climbs faster than the rest. And when I hear from directors on their most high performing people, typically they have something to prove or they are at rock bottom in life. And as JK Rowling once said, Rock Bottom is the best foundation to start on bro. That's true. I think you should never have... If you want a company to perform well, you shouldn't have subsidies for psychology services. You need them to be a bit more motivated you know. They need to be unhinged. They have to be unhinged. Like you know, every quarter, we have a crazy target you know, in 6th floor. Crazy target. You know what I tell my team? Okay, never mind. This is how I bring my team together, all rah rah. Everyone come in the room all together. Imagine like, this is like, we're gonna play rugby, we're gonna fight a war. You say, I know the target is crazy. But do know how to win a crazy target? You be crazy yourself. That's the only way. If the target is 100, you aim 200. Like be so absurd that the crazy target becomes normal. And to reach the absurd numbers, you yourself, your mentality cannot be normal. So you must think of yourself as... like crazy, somewhat like a different being altogether. And that's the only way you can thrive. So every quarter we do that. I mean, it has worked so far, thankfully, but yeah, that's how we drive each other in the flow. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very useful frame because back then when we were trying to do, like we say that, okay, the company needs to grow a hundred percent every year or 200 % every year, right? Because you are smaller. You start to think, okay, what will... How will we do what a 10X company would do? Right? So like, let's say now I'm doing a million. How do we hit 10 million next year? And then once you put yourself in that frame of mind, the type of projects that you think of, the risk that you take, it's entirely different. From this year, I want to do 1M, next year I want to do 1.2. Right? You are probably just sustaining and optimizing here and there. But if you want to think from 1M to 10M, you need to take crazy big moves. Right? ⁓ Just that frame of ideation helps you to choose the better type of projects to work on. That's a good point. Like you already doing that with your sales people is like crazy. But my question, this is my question back to you guys as like owners and founders right? Because no one in a company will feel more than the founder. No one. Because you guys have the biggest stake, the highest shares, everything is the biggest, you got the biggest stake right? So of course, of course you want to have 10 million right? I always wonder, how do you communicate that to your team when they don't have as much shares as you and to them whether it's 1 million or 10 million, it's not going to... I'm not going to 10x my salary. So how do you motivate your people to think the way you do and strive towards that goal of 10x? Yeah. Right. I think both of us play a very different role. Damon, on the more logical side, One of the things that he implemented was this thing called radical transparency. So what he did was we show our P &L to the whole company every town hall. And the North Star is the EBITDA. So whenever we show the EBITDA, we say that at the end of the year, a certain percentage of this EBITDA will be given out to the whole company. So this is impactful because right now, most people working in companies, they don't know how their work affects the P &L. If I'm a cost center, I'm a cost center. I'm just being paid a salary to do a job. But if now my ops cost is 15%, the moment it drops to 10%, everybody gets more at the bottom, they are suddenly aligned on the North Star. their incentives are aligned, right? So your Warren Buffett very famously, or Charlie Munger very famously said, show me where the incentives and I'll show you the results, right? Like, so you kind of need to align the incentives. Then the other side, which like I'm good at, is to keep the people happy. So I will take the time to go and listen to all their problems and all the things that they are going through in life. Because I firmly believe that the how you perform at work is greatly dependent on the life that you have outside. If you are going through hard times outside, a divorce, you fighting for custody, your family is quarreling, it's very difficult for you to focus at work. So just by understanding the same reason how you understand the why, you kind of help to motivate the team and they would want to fight for you. So you are... I think the way that we unintentionally did it is one, you align the financial incentives, one, you give them a reason to trust and believe in the founders. I think both of them kind of helped with that retention. I think what Joshua did very well is that it's not so much being a psychologist and be like, ⁓ you have all these problems, come and talk to me. Although sometimes I know that happens. But what I think you did very well is that you showed that you care about them as people. Because a lot of times what I've realized is people will do things for you because they like you and they know you care about them. So a lot of people have stayed in a job way too long because they feel obligated to their boss. Why? Because the boss has been nice to them, they have cared about them as people. Showing that you care goes way longer than we think. Yeah, 100%. I think people, if you can get... If you can feel, so one of the key criteria when we are thinking about retention is whether does somebody have a friend in the company. And that is the number one based on some studies. The reason why people stay is because they have a friend in the company. And if I cannot depend on other people to make friends, then I be the friend. Yeah. if not you're leaving that control to other people. So like as a small company, you need to take on that role, right? So then that becomes like. my North Star. Do know how I know this? Because Damon sent me an article bro. I read that article. That one I promised I read. He sent you an article that he didn't read lah. That one I promised I read. So tell me about Slickfloor man, is it going in the next year? Like how are you seeing the next 12 months? Yeah, so Slickfloor right now we're about 180 people across 7 countries. We are now expanding our footprint in the US. So we just hired our first boots in the US. just last month. that will be a big focus for us to grow. We have been quite lucky in the sense that with the whole AI native agenda, the whole AI boom, we sit in that space where if you talk about AI, you think about agents, you think about a lot of chats, right? Like chatbot. But chatbot is not something very new. I mean, chatbot, people know about it since donkey years already. But The way that we are positioning and the way that we're doing things is what we call an Agendic GDM workforce that will allow you to have conversations without having conversations through being human. That is a lot of big words for me. Sorry, what is the big I went one brain cell away from a talking monkey. Explain that to me, So, okay, if you think about it, right, If you were to study top salesperson, like you just pick any top salesperson, tell top salesperson you have, pick any top customer support agent you have, and you just study the way they message people. They will have their own pattern on. They will have their own pattern. And they will have the pattern is like the way they message, the time they use to reply, how they message, everything, right? If I can replicate that and I can make the agent, not a chatbot, an agent, to copy exactly how Joshua is sending messages and how exactly Damon is sending messages. This is of course with the hypothesis that I can mirror exactly. Assume that we can. What does this mean to the person? It means a lot of things because as you know as founders in e-commerce, a lot of times customer satisfaction is a big important thing right and a lot of customer satisfaction can be resolved when we're able to have a good customer service agent Empathize with them and make them feel that they want something even though they are in a loss I'm sure you guys have seen cases where it's a case where people are not happy about but you're able to turn that around So the difference between a genetic workforce and human work for us is a genetic workforce is 24 7 They have no emotions and they don't have ups and downs but for even a top salesperson top support agent Let's say I have a meeting with Joshua and I had a bad meeting. I'm angry then the way I respond to customer may be also different so We have a lot more control, a lot more consistency. You have a workforce that doesn't sleep, doesn't drink, doesn't need rest. Don't even need to overpay them. You can squeeze them as much as you want. So that is a very strong thing that a lot of people like to hear. But more than that, right? The last point that you can think about is, do you know that a lot of your data actually resides in conversations? When people are chatting, you go tune about, ⁓ what color is good? How does this... help me in ergonomics, what is the product that I want to buy. ⁓ if I can study your entire database of all your conversations, all time and then through these conversations I can create insights to tell you what is the next big thing you should build. Now this is where data drives insights then drives decisions. Then what does that mean to business owners and that's what they care about. A lot of business owners, a lot tauke, they say, always ask me, ⁓ Nao Wei, I want to know what my customer's talking about. If they're really customer-centric, they really want to hear what is on the ground. So that's why they do what? CSAT, right? Customer Satisfaction Score. Market surveys to know what to build next. Now what's the problem with that? The problem with that is, if people don't fill up, you've got no data. But now what if I tell you that every conversation I have with you, an AI can actually score the CSAT for that conversation. Then what you actually have is an unbiased real-time CSAT scoring that's happening 24-7. This is real-time. Then if let's say you want to know what product to build, what if I can see my full chat history and AI can surface up the next big thing that people are asking for, or the key things people ask for that allows them to close deals, or the key person that is talking to them that makes them close deals. And all these data points... I believe in lot of data. If you have all these data points, then this data allows you to grow from 1 million to 10 million, and from 10 million to 100 million. So that is a very big vision that we sell. And a lot of companies who are looking for growth get excited by that. So we are very lucky that we're in this space. We are omnichannel. We're building a lot more channels to be connected to us. And it's going to really democratize the way that we help B2C and B2B companies go to market. Gotcha. So the agentic part is the future of Slickflow, as I understand. I'm really trying to understand what category is Slickflow in, right? Because I think as shoppers, both in real life and in business, we really shop categories, right? I don't shop for Slickflow as much as I'm looking for a customer service solution, right? I don't shop for Klaviyo as much as I'm shopping for an email messaging platform. How do people understand this? Like, what category do you think? How would you describe the category that that slick flow would matter? The proper VC category you will place us with the Omnichannel Conversational AI platform. But if I use this, business won't check this out. Yeah, so if you think about SEM, you think about keywords, people will search WhatsApp, WhatsApp marketing, chatbot, customer support. So then people come in, because that is the real pain point, people's key pain point. Like very few owners will think about like, okay, I want... to be able to read the data from my conversations to drive decisions. People will think of the low hanging foot first, your L1 pain, we call it L1 pain. Remember the peeling the onion? So your first pain as a leader or as an owner is you want a ticketing software to track tickets or you want an email software to an email strategy. So the category L1 is the ticketing. The L1 category is ticketing software. Ticketing, WhatsApp marketing, WhatsApp blast, maybe omnichannel. multi-channel AI. So now AI is a new category that people are searching. AI for my company. AI chatbot. So that is a category. And then when you go deeper and deeper, that's when we have to peel the onion to let them see the potential of the agentic workforce. For enterprises, the keyword is different. For enterprises, their focus would be more on, hey, what exactly would be good for me to grow 2x, 3x using AI to do more with less manpower? Yeah, so that's how we see it. Right. I love it. think chatbot back in the day when we were testing it, it was horrible. Then everybody just gave up using it. I think now the LLMs has got to a point where it is actually usable and and Slickflow bring in that space is like, I'm super excited for what you can actually do for the business. Yeah. So thanks. Thanks Naoi for coming on the broadcast. I really enjoyed this whole conversation. Thanks for teaching us on how to attract talents like you. Maybe one day when we build a company, we'll link in message you again. You're a cool dude man. Yeah, yeah. I just don't want to lie. Go professionally and personal. can't believe it. I would just go and join your gymnastic class man. Yeah, I'm happy to hang but thanks so We should hang. Yeah, thanks so much for calling me into this podcast. I really enjoyed this chat. I learned a lot from you guys as well man. And it's an honor to see both of you gentlemen growing a good tune like the story I read. Like how you guys dupe people to buy something that isn't even there yet. Like, I love it. We did the same thing in Slickflow. Like, Slickflow last time, our chatbot cannot work one. It takes very long to create. So you know what we do? We record. So what you do? I will send my message to Slickflow. Then I go to Slickflow, I reply myself. Then I go to WhatsApp and reply to Slickflow. Then I go back and forth, I record. Then you know what I did? I trim. I trim. So from my message to my own reply, I make it short. So people think it's automated. Then it has worked. You are not a founder man. You'll do well. We will see. But yeah. I love your story. So proud of like the three of you and like what you guys built. Like I really am and you know like I always tell people that I wish that I had as much courage as the three of you to build something as prominent as Agotian. But yeah, maybe one day and I hope you guys keep inspiring people because you definitely inspire me. Yeah. Right. Thanks, man. Thanks, man. Thank you. We really appreciate it. That's the part. Thanks, Amde. That's the part. See you. Thanks, guys.