 So, it's super exciting. Thank you so much for coming. It's Good to be here. I recognize quite a few faces in the audience. That's always nice I know it's it's fantastic. It kind of feels like we're in a living room with friends, but Let's get straight into it. So we have a lot of early-stage founders in the audience and people that may be starting to think about Expanding so usually you're when you're starting to think about for expanding you're usually a market leader on your own turf but but then When you kind of move around the world then It gets a little bit more difficult, you're not really sure where to start so What are the first things that you think about when you're starting to expand to other countries? Well, I have experience of two different very distinct strategies The first is going local and then Going global. Yeah, and the second is going global from the outset and I would say as a startup It's really important to go global from the outset if you can from an infrastructure perspective and to give you some very tangible data on Why that is I remember a time when adding a column to a database with over 100 million rows took about three weeks and the column was to show which entity in which country the data belonged to That's because we went local first and then went global So as a start that if you can build all of your infrastructure to be global from day one Fantastic, so making it easy for yourself to go global so that you're not you're not only thinking about once. Oh, yeah Okay, I'm I'm getting big now. Maybe I should think about moving away But but actually making it easy for yourself then exactly and that Doesn't just stop with technology It also filters into accounting finance operations Taxation if all of that infrastructure internal design organizational design is built with a multi-country mindset it's probably a A similar lift to go from one country to two countries is to go from one country to multi-country When you're a mature business, so if you can build a lot infrastructure to be multi-country from the outset, I highly recommend it So once once you're thinking about going to this multi-country or expanding in the first place So how do you choose where to go? I mean there's a Lot of countries that you could possibly go to but how do you choose the the right country? And how do you also then define the the product relevancy in any specific given markets? Well, yeah, great question. I mean we talked a lot about the Of the barriers on the technical side or on the regulatory side But what's the point of going to a country if you don't deeply understand your customers and build a product that your customers really want We see so many technology businesses that are successful on their home turf And they go into another country and they kind of try and force feed their product to The customers in that country and I think that's really dangerous and we saw that with a lot of European Neobanks trying to go into the US and many of them have since withdrawn because because the force the product onto American and American people and it simply didn't work So it's really important to deeply understand your customers whether their consumers or businesses understand the sale cycle and actually build a product that they That they truly truly want Yeah, okay fantastic. So Some places obviously depending on on where you're you're kind of starting out from It's a lot easier to expand into specific markets than than it is in others. So What do you think do you take the easier way out and go just? one country over or Do you breathe the difficulty and focus more on on the potential of the markets and Also related to this has has this kind of changed over time because when when you're quite small obviously It might be it might be nicer to take the easy way out, but Does this change then once you go bigger? Do you get more bold? Do you make those more difficult decisions then? I think once you understood the customers understood the opportunity you then have a list of of Countries that are relevant for your business and for your product And you can then start to develop a strategy around which are the easy countries on which are the difficult countries and Some of the countries are technically easy. Some of the countries are technically difficult You have full control over those technical barriers and technical items most of the time so And makes execution quite easy where it gets more difficult is political Issues some countries are politically easy some countries are politically hard. So going to European Union for example is pretty politically easy It's easy to set up a business there. There's a free market. It's easy to get a business license and be regulated It's also pretty easy to understand your customers and build a product that they really want so many companies do Spread out across the EU very quickly Going into foreign countries where they're technically difficult, but and also more politically different is Something which is much harder and we often see that happening much later in a company's life cycle I'll use uber as an example uber went very global from from day one similar to deal and They never really conquered China. They left the China to much later in there journey and The political difficulties were outside of their control and he meant that they really couldn't ever successfully expand into China so so do you think that China would have been a good a good place to go to in the end or do you think it's best to leave those Really difficult markets to to the people that kind of know their markets best or Yeah, I think Tackle the technical problems you have control over the technical problems But leave the political problems until until later until your team is more advanced than you have People looking after and watching public policy watching regulation watching communications things like that. Yeah Yeah, so a little bit related to this like often Copy-pasting your exact product doesn't doesn't necessarily work when going to a new location or a new culture So is is this that's something that deal or or Revolut has has actually taken into account when kind of selecting the places That you expand to and and also finding that the product market fit Yeah, it it rarely works even in the European Union where you have free market and you have the same currency in most In most most countries same tax regime or similar tax regime copy and pasting just doesn't doesn't really work and I think it's really important to identify the value for customers and We've seen European fintechs particularly British fintechs go to EU and They have had great success in markets like Poland For example, Poland has its own currency the Polish lotty, but a lot of the residents also want to transact in the euro So those European fintechs that had multi currency capabilities were able to go into EU and actually specifically Poland and enter with a multi currency strategy and They were highly six highly successful The deal we were kind of global first so selecting those countries where we can create value was Much easier to actually execute on so we were able to go to all corners of the globe and actually create value for customers relatively easily Okay So something a little bit more related to what what what deal does now Could you talk a little bit more about the the kind of hiring trends that you're seeing and Where our companies are kind of looking to acquire talent and is this something that would be would be relevant for for Kind of early stage founders and startups in the audience as well. Yeah, I think the general Perception at the moment is that remote working is on the decline now a deal is not Supporting remote working exclusively in fact rather the contrary with diversifying away from remote working and Broadening our Product and focus to look at all things HR across the globe. However Remote working is certainly not declining in fact We're seeing an increase and we're seeing an increase in companies hiring in a pack in Latin America Particularly draw your attention to Latin America Latin America. Well, most people think it's across the Atlantic, which of course it is We have a couple of time zones and major cities on those time zones that are actually right in the middle of the Atlantic. I Would call out Argentina Buenos Aires and Rio Sao Paulo though from a time zone perspective. They're in the middle of the ocean, which means that European and American companies can benefit from that and we're seeing a ton of activity in that those companies are hiring people in Latam and We've seen salaries in Latin America increase 40% year on year, which is really quite impressive So let's say I'm a European startup and I'm thinking like okay Well, maybe after this talk then Latin America all that might be a good place to expand to like What would be the kind of steps it just seems such a big step in a Scary kind of area to go to I feel much safer going to to someone like I don't know if I'm a finished start up It's a sweet and that like Do you think that Latin America is a good place to to kind of consider at the early stages? Or is that some something where more mature start-ups and scale-ups could could could think about yeah I think to break the ice companies to start to think about the Skills of the of the people rather than their location when you start to think about The skills rather than the location you actually see the talent is everywhere and by doing that you can grow the size of your talent market By many many multiples For us a deal we started out in San Francisco. We're now in over a hundred different countries in terms of our own team and If somebody asked me hey Dan, where do you think you will have the most engineers four years from now? I for sure would not say Brazil and Brazil is where we have the most engineers working for a deal today And why is that because there's such good talent in Brazil and they're Located in such a good time zone. It's a great market for us to hire tech talent in Okay, fantastic, so Going a little bit more into the the kind of people in the cultural stuff Managing people in countries abroad and It's it's not easy like I've got teams across four different continents and well I don't actually always know the best about how to tackle a specific market and I'm not going to pretend to know Exactly what what should be tackled and where I should start so With such we actually trust the the local teams to run the operations in these new places so How how would you go about making sure that that the right team is is helping you to expand with with Companies like deal and with Revolut. I think decentralization is is key For us we have entities in about a hundred and thirty of the hundred and eighty or so countries that we support on the platform each country or group of countries has It's own group of people on the ground. So we have Local CFO we have a local operations leader a local payroll leader HR leader and legal counsel and collectively This team is our on the ground team handling the operational side of the business And then if we decide we really want to enter that Country from a go-to-market perspective will pair it with a sales team and the sales team We will have and business development analysts and representatives SMB sales mid-market sales and enterprise sales and customer success and then collectively you have this really decentralized team that can That has the autonomy to get things done. So they don't have to Rely on approval or decisions from headquarters. They're able to take full advantage of their local market expertise and that she gets stuff done very very quickly okay something that's that's Sort of taught in in in a business school or or even when you're kind of looking on online about Expansion is is the kind of the intercultural management within a team You're you're generally taught to respect every culture and and and be Really kind of Respectful to to the people that you're interacting with and that's that's generally pretty easy That that you can always manage manage the kind of respect from your side But sometimes that doesn't always go both ways and something that maybe women and sort of minorities face a little bit more as well is that There's not the respect happening both ways. So how how do you kind of combine? your own culture With the local culture in order to turn it into a kind of asset when expanding I think Embrace is the key word and that starts with internal embrace Let me give you an example We run a company all hands every two weeks We get all 3,000 people from over a hundred countries together and of course we cover really important business topics but we also cover cultural spotlights and As an example recently, I've seen a great cultural spotlight on the Indian festival of Diwali I've seen a cultural spotlight on Ramadan. I've also seen country-specific spotlights and Our internal dealers are running these spotlights. So that's really really cool to educate The company and the people's peers about Culture an international culture and of course that then filters down into the product and eventually into the customer So a deal with very very multicultural. Yeah Yeah, so so do you think education is is kind of the way to combat that then? making sure that people are Know about how things work in different cultures and then navigating that then exactly exactly fantastic So now going into more of the the kind of hands-on tangible advice as we like to kind of joke about it Can you tell me about one of the the biggest challenges that you've actually faced? While expanding Revolut and that you then ended up taking to deal hmm centralizations of decisions and international expansion it can be quite Dangerous in the sense that they can slow things down they can actually halt progress Immediately The other thing is if the international expansion playbook is too tight. It actually stops the local people from being excellent So we have put together what I would call a pretty loose playbook for expansion Which sets out the fundamental kind of guardrails And I kind of imagine this as kind of a kids a kids play area You know we've given a big play area for the international team to go out and do things and then about the market and execute and build things But at the edges of the play area there are very tight guardrails And what's really important is those guardrails aren't aren't too tight because that will slow things down Combine that with decentralized decision-making so the local CFO and the local team can actually Make decisions and action things very quickly with their own budget their own P&L their own product roadmap It means expansion can be done and much quicker at deal we wanted to get to those hundred and thirty countries With our own entities very very quickly. This takes most companies decades. So we put together Country by country scoping documents to understand What had to happen in order to set up the entity get a bank account get a business license hire the people and for most countries? We realized that it would take about one year And then we said well, how could we do this in in one month? And actually in some cases, how can we do it in one week and that led to quite interesting stories of the leadership team flying between different countries with Physical HP printer in our luggage. So we would arrive in different countries We were print off document to meet with the Notary a local apostill and actually file for the business license and we would always file with With an expedited argument. So we wanted to have our entity set up as quickly as possible The other thing that I would say is that international expansion is generally very costly and on average to set up the bare minimum infrastructure is around half a million dollars and if you want to actually develop products and Build a local team that can quickly go to five or even fifty million dollars we built this and executed on this with a much smaller budget and We did most of that in-house. That's how we that's how we did it on such a low budget we didn't rely on external consultants external law firms as much as others would and That's really advantageous for us a deal because all of that local market knowledge that we Obtained internally for our local teams now sits with us exclusively Okay, so kind of going back a little bit you said you said to have a kind of like a loose guideline, but How do you how do you define what's a loose enough or what what happens when you kind of need to? Have these specific things when you have specific expectations that you absolutely have to meet like how do you? drive the kind of the biggest things that you need home whilst keeping it still Loose enough to have the have the local teams have ownership of of the things that that they need to take ownership over Yeah, the way the way I think about it is let's say you were building a Technology conference like like slash. I think there are two ways two ways to do it the first way is you write a very strong specification and blueprint and It's extremely tight. It details everything. It says the chairs ought to be black The ceiling is to be 15 meters in the air and the air temperature is to be this and dot dot dot dot And then you employ the various people to actually make that happen and they follow the Specification step-by-step the flip side of that is what you could do is you could give a very loose Specification and so I want to run this technology conference. I want to host however many thousand people I wanted to be in Helsinki and you employ Really smart excellent people to make that happen and they will actually make judgment calls way better than the original Person writing the specification. They can find the best location in Helsinki They actually find that the air temperature 18 degrees is a little bit too cold And it should be 20 degrees and if you give the people the agency to do that and actually demonstrate their Excellence and brilliance. You will have a far better product at the end of it so you're kind of leaving leaving the team to do what they do best and more Stepping back as a more of an advisor. I guess exactly in a sense. Okay fantastic So when you when you're tackling international expansion There's Kind of two ways that I guess you could go about it. You could either go Full steam ahead. Let's just go. Let's spend the however many million euros or That that you were kind of mentioning about earlier or Is kind of going with smaller more incremental steps useful whilst just starting out because Once you have that money to spend then sure, let's go but if you if I don't have much money if I'm kind of Expanding into international markets in order to get that that kind of the revenue then Are the smaller steps more useful? Yeah, I think if the infrastructure is built with international in mind Then it becomes really easy to experiment and it is possible to experiment on a cross-border basis so for example, if you're a business here in Finland and you've designed your infrastructure and your product and your database and your Tax and accounting structure to work in different countries. It's probably not too hard to Sell to a few customers in Sweden And maybe that maybe there's no value proposition in Sweden Maybe the customers are already served by another product in Sweden So maybe you will go to Spain or Portugal and I think if you go step by step and start to test the water really early on That's a good way to start expanding Okay, so keep it so Keeping things in the house and going with the small steps. That's kind of how to how to start Exactly start going on. Yeah, okay so Wrapping up a little bit then what would be if Everyone forgets everything about what we just said because to be honest, you're probably not gonna remember the half an hour talk or Most of the other talks on stage, but if there is one Thing that you want people to remember about international expansion or about this topic in general What what would you want people to take away? I think Take very small incremental steps or baby steps towards the objective Setting up in a new country might seem like an impossible task but if you start to break down that task into really small steps, you will eventually get there and Move very quickly. We have a principle at deal referred to as deal speed Which means completing that incremental step as quickly as you can and that might be is something as small as sending an email or making a call and We say to people at deal make the call now send the email now do the thing now and don't sit on it until after lunch Or till the end of the day or till next week or till Monday morning And if you can do that thing as quick as possible as soon as possible Cumulatively all of those incremental gains across the entire workforce across the entire company Will sum to something which is significant and that will provide momentum within the organization with the customers to Keep you moving forward as quickly as you can What would be something that you've learned over the past Six months or so in in regards to the topic of Expansion that you wish you would have known sooner or or you thought oh my gosh This makes so much sense, but I've not really thought of this before I think never assume I think countries might seem similar especially when you get to Different regions you might see two countries the same maybe they speak the same language or maybe they speak the same currency That's rather use the same currency and never assume things are equal I think every country is different. They have their own cultures laws ways of working You I've never seen two countries that are the same from that side of the Table but also from a customer side the customers are not the same just because they speak the same language or use the same currency Fantastic Thank you so much. I think this has been Really insightful and interesting. Is there one piece of advice that you would still like to leave leave on? I don't know Fantastic if you want to hear more from from Dan will be in the Q&A session in the mentoring area Just to the side of this stage in just a moment so come and hear more and Ask your questions then awesome. Thanks so much so much