Sapia.ai: Rescuing & Rebuilding an Enterprise SaaS – with Barb Hyman [425]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Barb, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Barb: Hello. Great to be here.

[00:00:04] Omer: Glad to have you. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[00:00:08] Barb: I have so many. So one relevant to our product is in God we trust. For everything else we bring data. And another one, which came from my experience as a CHRO where I really struggled to be an effective CHRO with someone, my, in my team coming to me and saying, I don't care what you know, until I know that you care.

[00:00:28] I had always been someone that focused on, you know, being clever and solving problems, and that that was a very confronting quote from someone in my team.

[00:00:37] Omer: Love it. So for people who, who aren't familiar, just tell us, tell us what a CHRO is.

[00:00:42] Barb: Chief Human Resources Officer, otherwise known as a head of HR.

[00:00:47] Omer: Great. And tell us about Sapia. What does the product do? Who's it for and what's the main problem you are helping to solve?

[00:00:55] Barb: Yeah. The problem we're trying to solve is how do you. Know who are the right people to hire and promote in your organization because your people are everything in terms of your success.

[00:01:05] And the way that you do that today is typically biased when you are using people. It's suboptimal from a data perspective if you're using resumes, and most assessments are experiences that people don't wanna have. And so we solve the problem of understanding people through language via the medium of the chat interview where the first.

[00:01:26] I think still only smart interviewer in the world. So we're using true ai. We've been an AI native company since 2018, and through that capability, everyone learns that Canada gets feedback and coaching. Through that experience, the recruiter gets smarter, the hiring manager gets talent insights. The organization gets a whole lot of data around diversity, candidate experience, efficiency, and it's a kind of a full 360 ROI experience.

[00:01:53] Omer: Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business where you, in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.

[00:02:00] Barb: Yeah. So we're about 45 people. We're a global team, a virtual team, which by the way, I would not recommend if I had my way, I would insist that we all come back together, though that's very hard when you're around the world.

[00:02:13] We are getting close to eight figures. We have. Mostly big customers. We're an enterprise based SaaS solution. And yeah, we've been around since, or at least I've been doing this since 2018.

[00:02:25] Omer: And you've raised just a little over $21 million.

[00:02:30] Barb: Nowhere near enough.

[00:02:32] Omer: Yeah. Give Barb more money.

[00:02:33] Barb: It feels like we're very frugal every day.

[00:02:37] Omer: Great. So the, the business was founded in 2018, sort of there's a story about how this whole thing came about. I know your background was you know, you are a Boston Consulting Group as, as part of one of your, your HR roles. So just tell us about like, how, how did this. Transition happen. How did the idea for this business come about?

[00:03:00] Barb: So I was approached by someone on the board of a company called Predictive Hire, founded by someone else to scale the business, and I spent three weeks over Christmas doing the a hundred day plan and I frankly, the whole problem they were trying to solve, which is how do you reimagine the hiring process for everyone, was one that I'd experienced firsthand as a, as a head of HR, and I had a vision of how to do that.

[00:03:23] That was very experience based, very human, very intelligent. I. I came in thinking that I could help to build on what had already been established and grow from that. That was my first very big naive mistake. I really didn't know anything about ai. You know, AI didn't really exist at that point, and I certainly didn't have a view of I wanna do something with ai.

[00:03:41] I think that's the wrong place to start. I just had a really deep empathy for the problem and a deep understanding of the problem. And in essence, it was a reset. I had to fire everyone, including the founder. Which again, I don't recommend. That really should have been something that the board took care of and start again.

[00:04:00] And it, it was really hard. Everyone who loves me said Don't do it and walk away. But actually the hardest fit was not. Trying to re re retain a business and reset the business and hire again and build a product. It was actually the cap table. I didn't even know what a cap table was. And fixing that took three or four years, much longer than it took to actually build the, the new product.

[00:04:26] Omer: What, what, what was the issue just at a high level?

[00:04:29] Barb: Well, I had to raise money in six weeks because we were running out of cash again, I was naive about that. The only way I could raise money was through a convertible note. Part of that was because there was a share class on the cap table called convertible redemption preference shares, which means if any investor puts their money in that share class can take that money out if the valuation falls below a certain amount, and the business had been valued beyond what it should have been.

[00:04:53] So I was basically completely hamstrung. And so when you raise money on debt. Who, who owns the business? It's the people who started the business. So you had this group of initial, initial founders who had all of the ownership rights, and I was working with investors who'd put money in, and they had no ownership rights.

[00:05:11] So it was a, a real, in a balance of control and power.

[00:05:15] Omer: And, you, you, you said you had to kind of clear house and were there any of the original founders still around when you sort of

[00:05:22] Barb: Yeah. Yeah. They, they were. And that was really, tricky is a massive understatement. Again, I wouldn't recommend that it was it was, you know, really emotionally very difficult.

[00:05:31] I remember at one point we moved from the original office that I had joined, which was not what you would expect from a startup. It was very ugly. It didn't feel startup-y. Didn't feel like energetic and vibrant. And you know, I had a, I had a whole come to Jesus conversation with the people who were then at the team, still with the team.

[00:05:50] You know, you are gonna get on the bus or get off the bus, and made it really clear what my expectations were and almost moving offices to something that was really genuinely, almost like a garage. A true startup environment was a moment. To draw a line in the sand and say it's gonna be a new culture when we move to this new office, and this is what my expectation is.

[00:06:09] So, you know, that was quite a, sort of a milestone in, in the reset of the business, particularly of the culture.

[00:06:15] Omer: And then what year was this roughly? 20, 2018. Okay. And then did you, did you kind of build. Build off the existing product or as part of this kind of reset, it was like a brand new product as well.

[00:06:29] Barb: We were in the recruitment space and the thesis was that. Data is a better way to evaluate someone if you can find an objective data set. And could we use an assessment to do that and a data set from an assessment. I won't get too much into the science side of it, but in essence, six months in, I hired an incredibly smart person who had been the lead data scientist, a CultureAmp, and had seen the value of language data and the signal about people that lives in language data.

[00:06:56] And he could see that NLP was the future. I had a vision around chat and experience, and he had the brilliance around NLP and we just started on a journey of experimenting for two years. It took us two years to build the product. I remember when he first came in, he did analysis on is there any validity in the existing assessment?

[00:07:13] There was none. You're better off not using it. It was a real moment as well. So, you know, when we look back. I actually, I think my naivety helped me because if I'd truly known how bad things were, I probably would've left. But once I'd raised money, and then once I hired Booty, and then he hired Johnny, who became our head of engineering, you know, incredible individuals, all immigrants were all immigrants.

[00:07:37] It was a very strong aspect to our culture, which is this. Feeling of not enoughness and this need to kind of prove something to people. I couldn't leave because at that point I then made a, a kind of an emotional, I moral commitment to go, okay, we're in this together, we're gonna figure it out. And frankly, the learning journey, you know, you, you have to really wanna learn and constantly learn like it feels as if there's no space that's been more dynamic in terms of learning and technology innovation than the space that we're living in.

[00:08:05] Omer: So how, how did you figure out number one, what product to build? Did you go and talk to customers or potential customers? Did you kinda research?

[00:08:16] Barb: I have my a hundred day plan. You know, I had a vision of what it would be and, you know, it's funny, you go back to it and so much of it has been built, which is incredible.

[00:08:23] It makes me feel really proud and lucky. And so I knew what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be chat. I wanted it to be something that people felt safe, that they felt heard and understood. The need for people to feel like someone has noticed them when they're applying for a $10 an hour job is, is really huge.

[00:08:41] And so I wanted to solve for that. I wanted to ensure that everyone got something back that no one was ghosted. I wanted to get rid of the resume. You know, I could see in all of my jobs that the resume is a recipe for bias. I didn't wanna have video interviews. I wanted to be untimed, so I had very strong convictions around.

[00:09:00] Experience. And so it was very much experience based and then Booty had to figure out how to do it from a science basis, and that's really what drove us. But everything we did was an experiment. You know, I remember the first time. When we press the button on this automated feedback for candidates and everyone freaked.

[00:09:17] You know, I even remember speaking to AWS and other tech companies in the US and they said, no, no, we don't like to share anything with candidates. We, we wanna keep them in the dark, creates too much legal risk to share anything. And so there was this incredible aversion to giving people feedback like that was a massive risk when Qantas went live with that.

[00:09:34] I remember it was a risk when we said it's not gonna be timed and people assume that candidates cheat. This is before GPT. Everyone thinks that people are cheating all the time. But actually when we started to, flag that, 'cause we could identify plagiarism. We saw the cheating rates were very low in most geographies.

[00:09:51] And so we were constantly challenging every aspect of how people thought about how you hire, what a assessment needs to look like what the experience of the candidate needs to look like. You know? And I had very strong. Sort of principles that guided me around transparency, explainability, fairness, experience, and I just stuck to those.

[00:10:11] So our product principles that I've formed, you know, year one, are still the product principles that we have today, and that has guided us in terms of how we've built additional products in this suite.

[00:10:21] Omer: Right. But I, I guess, you know, I don't, I don't want people listening to this and saying, oh, great, well, Barb just came up with this a hundred day plan and then just executed on it.

[00:10:29] I think in many ways you were able to do that because you had spent so many years in this space actually kind of being on the other side of this. Right. In terms of hiring and, oh,

[00:10:40] Barb: oh, abso, you know, I, I, I think that. I don't know how to sell, right? All I know is your pain as another HRD or a head of talent, and so I was successful in selling because I wasn't selling.

[00:10:54] I would go in and I probably wasted way too much time, in fact, not probably. I definitely did. I was in love with the product. I could see that candidates were in love with the product and. I just wanted you to feel it and have it. And but the process of actually bringing in technology like this is incredibly tough for an organization.

[00:11:15] You know, this isn't buying IBM, you can get fired for this. This is ai. This is really scary stuff. And so because I wasn't selling and I just led with empathy and curiosity and I was. Helping you solve the problem that was sitting in front of you. That's how we were effective, and that has continued to be to our benefit today.

[00:11:35] So as we go into our next phase of innovation where we're starting to bring generative AI into the product, that's the next hurdle to overcome. Because again, there's another set of fears that people now have around using Gen AI in the HR process. So I've always been passionate about enterprise empathy.

[00:11:53] Like, really, you know, don't celebrate when you do the deal. Celebrate when they see the value, because as soon as you sign the deal, they're, they're terrified. Now they have to go. And, you know, sometimes our deals are seven figures, right? Like it's a lot of money and. So you have to make sure that you're giving value and they see value before you start waving the flag and ringing the bell from a sales perspective.

[00:12:17] So so I think that's always guided a lot of ways in which we, we sell, we market, you know, we don't, we don't do standard marketing. Most of our opportunities come from referrals.

[00:12:27] Omer: There, there's kind of an interesting, thing I'm thinking about like today, you can't avoid ai, right? Everywhere. It's just, you know, in your face.

[00:12:35] But four or five years ago, it was kind of more like, yeah, people talked about ai, but nobody really understood what that meant. And when companies were talking about using ai, you know, maybe they were using machine learning and, and a bunch of stuff like that, but it was, I think it was an even harder.

[00:12:55] Sell than it would be today because at least people are now kind of opening up to it and there's still fears and so on. But I'm, I'm guessing back then one, any company using ai, there was a lot of, you know, hesitancy and secondly, for hiring people. Right? That sounds like really scary when you're already terrified about legal risks and the kinds of things you might be telling people.

[00:13:17] And then now we're gonna put some something in between us that's gonna kind of, God knows what it's gonna be telling these people

[00:13:24] Barb: 100%. And I love to say that it's got easier, but actually I think it's just as hard. It's interesting. I remember an investor around the table saying, I think it was four or five years ago, you know, Barb, we're gonna get that return on investment in education.

[00:13:38] The market eventually, it'll cotton on and even when GPT came on you know, it's very easy to get a meeting. Right. It's, everyone wants to hear about AI and is curious to learn, but it's a different thing to actually get a deal. So a couple of decisions we made really early on was that because we're advancing the field of machine learning in what we're doing is that we were gonna publish research.

[00:14:00] So we've had an R and D team from the beginning and that wasn't delivering returns for the first four years. You know, no one came to us and said, oh, I saw your amazing paper published in Frontiers. I wanna meet with you. Right. But now, you know, I used to say that our moat was data. Was the algorithms and what we've done with the data, but actually I think it's our brand based in science, peer reviewed, published papers that has given us a level of credentialing and credibility that is really now separating us from other.

[00:14:34] The myriad other AI companies. So the other decision we made early on was that we were gonna invest in publications, which is something that Meta might do. And they're a massive organization. We're a tiny business of a very small labs team, but we have pushed out three or four papers every single year.

[00:14:51] And you know, that, that has really helped build our brand.

[00:14:54] Omer: Right. Was was there any fear about like, you know. Giving away the secret sauce by being kind of so much more open about what you were doing.

[00:15:03] Barb: Absolutely. But we felt that if we wanted people to trust us, we needed to be transparent around the science.

[00:15:08] And we had a very strong view that unless you had the data, you couldn't do what we did. Like that's still a unique data set that we have. You know, one of the things I remember in terms of research. Very early on when we were trying to validate this thesis, that language had signaled around people, is one of our team members scraped 2 million tweets and ran an experiment based on how people self declare their personality profile to see if there's a correlation.

[00:15:34] We actually wrote a paper, this is way before Elon. Around the fact that you can't use third party data and generalize it in this context because one, the way you tweet is not how you interview. The second is Twitter is not representative of the general population, so you risk adverse impact. And we actually made a decision not to publish it.

[00:15:52] We were worried that even then Twitter was attracting a lot of kind of attention that it would attract the wrong kind of attention. So, you know, there were choices like that we made where we, we, we just, you know, we wanted to make sure that we protected the brand in terms of what we were prepared to share externally.

[00:16:08] But we've been, you know, incredibly transparent around. The science and the various algorithms that sit underneath the, the technology.

[00:16:17] Omer: So you mentioned earlier that it took you two years to, to build the product. How long did it take to land the first customer? Was it like you built for two years and then you went out to try and sell it?

[00:16:27] Or did that happen in parallel?

[00:16:29] Barb: Oh no. Look, we were, we were just flying the plane. We didn't even have a plane. We had like a seat. And we were trying to just stay alive, you know, every year my family would say to me. What's gonna happen next year? And I said, look, I'm just trying to get to the end of the year.

[00:16:44] And I, I really had no con, not so much no confidence, but I couldn't forecast if it would be around for another year. It really felt like we were going month to month and there was definitely a couple of months from a payroll perspective in the really early days where if we didn't get that customer to pay that invoice, you know, we wouldn't have been able to meet payroll, which is your fundamentals.

[00:17:05] So it was. Really scary and, you know, I was doing payroll, which is never a good thing. And you know, you're, you're kind of doing everything in those early days and. I look back and you know, booty and I will often go when we do our all hands in person and we'll look around and we'll go. It's a miracle.

[00:17:20] It's a frigging miracle that we're still here. So, you know, what we had to do is find customers with serious pain and Qantas was our first customer, which is kind of mind blowing 'cause they're such a brand and they're a very conservative brand. But that shows you that there is. When you find real pain.

[00:17:38] And they were using our major competitor and they really didn't like the impact it was having on their brand and their candidates. So they wanted to find a different way and there was nothing else in market. And so we did 15 pilots in a row before they signed a deal. So we absolutely had to find customers, but we worked out pretty quickly the target segment that we were gonna go after. What we haven't done well is stay really focused on that segment. We've probably stretched too far just to optimize for customer growth rather than the right customer growth. And our, you know, what matters in terms of what we're optimizing for has fundamentally changed.

[00:18:17] Really, I think over the last 12 months, partly because of the tech downturn, but also partly because you know, we've become much more disciplined about what drives our success and we've gotta control that rather than just trying to go for, you know, let's add on the next 10, 20, 30 new customers.

[00:18:34] Omer: So you, you're, you know, back then, you're a startup, you're building something which is disruptive.

[00:18:40] You don't have any customers. Right. And then how do you get your foot in the door with somebody like Qantas?

[00:18:46] Barb: Well, you know, you do what you do now, like it is water, it's door to door combat, right? There is, there is no shortcut in enterprise. Right. And the thing that has, has served me really well is that I'm just relentless.

[00:19:03] I'm relentless. So I, I mean, I will send 50 LinkedIn messages a week today. I'm doing this, I've been doing this for eight years. I'm not waiting for a salesperson to go hunting. 'cause there's a completely different response you get when it's the CEO. You know, I can tell the personal story. And so for me, you are fighting hand to hand combat every single day.

[00:19:25] And what you have to do is focus on those businesses that are. Firstly, big, big pain, right? In the case of Qantas, you can't get your planes in the air unless you've got the ta, the talent, and it takes so long to hire people 'cause you're going through security, et cetera. If you can do anything to reduce the time it takes to actually identify the right talent, that really makes a meaningful difference for the business.

[00:19:45] So you kind of think cleverly about who. For whom are we gonna be absolutely core to running their core business? Right? And that's where we've made a mistake, is if we're just marginal, if we're kind of good, but not absolutely necessary, the risk of churn is too high. That's one thing we've really learned this year.

[00:20:02] We've had a lot of churn from smaller businesses where they can survive without us. Now we focus on only selling to businesses where they need us to survive. And so that was the first thing. The second is we went for brands. Consumer brands, trusted consumer brands because we had no money for marketing.

[00:20:20] And so if we can say, wow, you know, companies like A, B, C, D who are the five most trusted consumer brands, trust Sapia, it's very easy to get the next 10 brands. So we went with the deliberate strategy of, of going for brands. And the fact is brands really care about the things that we solve for. So there's a you know, high overlap between their problems and their desires and what our technology does.

[00:20:47] Omer: Now you mentioned 15 pilots with Qantas. How long did that take? And like, I'm just wondering like, do you get to a point where it's just like, are we just gonna be doing pilots forever? Are they ever gonna make a decision on this thing?

[00:21:00] Or did you feel like, okay, every time we do something we're getting some good feedback, we understand what are the concerns we need to address? I'm just curious. Like it, it feels like a nightmare just drags on forever.

[00:21:11] Barb: I mean, at that stage it's just default to life, right? You know, it still is default to life.

[00:21:16] You're just trying to stay alive and you're seeing startups collapse all around you. So, you know, I, I, I, I think the other thing with a big company and procurement hasn't gotten any easier is they absolutely wanted to do a deal, but Covid stepped in. It became very hard to sign deals. Obviously everyone's in austerity measures.

[00:21:35] And frankly we were just happy to keep going and get some cash and have the ability to use 'em as a reference customer. And they're still a customer, you know, six years down the track. Which is, you know, amazing. And and I, I also think there's a, there's a kind of a pay it forward, which is.

[00:21:51] Fundamentally, people are taking a huge bet of, of their own brand, right? Like you're putting your brand at risk as a buyer when you're using ai, unless you're using Microsoft Copilot. Like why is that being so successful? Because no one's gonna be fired from using Microsoft Copilot, even if it doesn't work.

[00:22:08] But you're bringing in a startup and you're using AI around HR, you know, you gotta really respect the trust that they're putting in you. And so for us, we have always. You could argue Overinvested and Overdelivered and over serviced because. You kind of pay it forward. And what we have now is a pipeline of opportunity that is almost completely coming from our customers unsolicited most of the time.

[00:22:35] And so it's expensive. But it's in the long run, it's, I haven't done the economics, but it's probably a lot cheaper than spending on marketing, which I'm, I'm sort of less confident, delivers results.

[00:22:47] Omer: And that's because you don't buy into marketing generally or, but because just the complexity of trying to sell this type of product to enterprise.

[00:22:54] Barb: Well, I think LinkedIn is a very expensive channel. And you know, if you think about as a startup founder, you have to make choices about where you're gonna invest your dollars. And I can't have someone brilliant in marketing, in sales, in, you know, we've got three product teams. We've got a traditional product team, you've got a people science product team, you've got a, you know, machine learning, data science product team.

[00:23:16] Like, that's expensive. If you're not an AI business, you don't have that. You have just one product team. And then you've got your normal engineers, your machine learning engineers, your DevOps, your security engineers. Again, you know, there's quite a lot of infrastructure there. So I've always felt, because I came in and I inherited a product that didn't work, that I was.

[00:23:35] Obsessed about building a product that worked. And so I really over-indexed on anything to do with product, not to do with go to market. Now, that could have been a mistake, but now we have a product that people love and have been using for a long time in our, in our eyes, you know, getting up to 110, 115% right.

[00:23:51] As a, as a, as a reflection of that. So, you know, my choice was that I'm not gonna invest in someone who really knows demand gen or who knows, you know, marketing because. I hope that the product and then the customer experience will, will kind of sell itself and market. So those are the trade offs you make.

[00:24:08] 'cause you can't have brilliance in every part of the business and I want to have brilliance in product.

[00:24:13] Omer: How long did it take to close the Qantas deal from start to

[00:24:17] Barb: Look, I think the pilots, I'm trying to remember now, but I, you know, it's a good few years until we got a enterprise deal with them.

[00:24:24] Typically now it's around six months to nine months to close a deal. From beginning to end. And you know what's interesting is. One of our largest customers is the largest retailer in Australia. And you know, we did a pilot and we were about to convert, and then they hired an AI ethics team, and then everything went into a whole different world of pain from a procurement perspective.

[00:24:47] And we weren't prepared for that. I think they weren't prepared for that. And you know, that's a challenge right now, which is we're often the first AI technology that a company has procured. And so they have to actually build their own AI governance framework, the AI governance Committee, their processes as they're procuring us.

[00:25:03] And so that's adding on additional complexity. Now, we've done a lot to educate them to find ways in an independent fashion, help them understand what this new world is all about. And, you know, but that's, that's really challenging, right? When you're selling in technology like this, you're, you know, you're helping build their maturity around ai at the same time as trying to do a deal.

[00:25:28] Omer: Okay, great. So you got Qantas and then presumably it gets a little bit easier because at least you have one case study you can talk about and some, some happy customers. How, how long did you just focus on the Australian market before you decided, okay, we need to expand out? We need to look at places like the us

[00:25:51] Barb: So, look, we had UK customers that we managed to get just through being in Australia.

[00:25:55] I think there's a great connection between Australia and the UK and you know, we had inbounds and so we were man able to do deals from Australia in the uk. So we built up a good portfolio of UK based customers without being on the ground. But you know, it's interesting how politics plays into your thinking around where you should grow next.

[00:26:13] And so we did our series A and the thesis was we're gonna go into the us. And my view around that was we're a deep tech company and if we wanna be acquired and if we want really solid capital and solid valuations, we need to bear where all the smart money is and the smart people are. And that is 100% in the us.

[00:26:30] It's not in Australia. And so I hired a team and we went. And tried to make it work and it didn't work. It didn't work because one, again, this comes down to, you know, I'm not a. Seasoned founder. I don't know what an amazing CRO looks like, and I've never expanded into the US so I trusted my lead to own the strategy around that.

[00:26:54] And the strategy that he proposed was effectively sprain print. Let's just go after any sector and see where we can get a hit. And then that will help us learn which part of the segment, which part of the market's gonna work. When we knew that we had a product market fit in certain verticals, we should have.

[00:27:12] I should have said, you know what, no, we're gonna just go with these two and we're gonna push into the market and we're gonna go with for these a hundred clients. So that didn't work. I think the other thing that didn't work is a lot of people fancy themselves as an entrepreneur and think that they're a founder, and that's effectively what you're building when you're going to the us.

[00:27:29] Like you're starting again because no one cares about your Australian testimonials or your, or your UK testimonials. And it, and you really need to do hand-to-hand combat. You need to go and meet Omer in, you know, San Diego in person because crikey, you know, you've got a meeting, you're gonna go and put on your best clothes and make a great impression.

[00:27:49] You know, I'm, I'm sort of really obsessed about salespeople going and meeting people in person, right? Because you're building a relationship of trust right from the get go. And he just wasn't able to do that. And the disconnect between what he thought he was and how he actually played the role, it was very much a standard playbook.

[00:28:06] I've done this before at a larger business, I'm gonna do it again. SDRs, outbound machine, multi-threaded sequences. It didn't work. And it's also very expensive because you're raising money in Australian dollars, but you're paying for salaries and US dollars. So, and the other thing that happened is that Dee and I was a tailwind, and then it became a headwind.

[00:28:24] In the period of time that we had landed in the us So I pulled outta the US and we decided to make the UK and Ireland our second geo because we'd already seen good success here. And so I'm here now and that's very much where we're seeing quite amazing growth this year. We're about to hit a, a kind of an amazing threshold of winning some incredible logos.

[00:28:43] A bit like where we were in Australia, you know, when we won Qantas and Woolworths and Bunnings, et cetera. And it's been a, it's been a lot easier to be successful here than it was in the us So I think you've gotta have really deep pockets of the us you've gotta be hyperfocused. And fundamentally, I think I should have moved there, right?

[00:29:00] And I didn't wanna move there. I hired someone and and that was a mistake.

[00:29:05] Omer: How long did you try to get some traction in the US market before you eventually pulled the plug?

[00:29:12] Barb: Too long. Too long. I should have done it within 12 months, and instead I gave it a good 18 months. In fact, I think every single decision I've made, that was a hard decision.

[00:29:23] I made it too late. I should have made it sooner.

[00:29:25] Omer: Yeah, I mean that's kind of easy to see in hindsight, but when you're in the middle of that, I mean, it's really hard, isn't it? It's like,

[00:29:35] Barb: well, you know, you're a small team, right? And so when, when particularly salespeople, I have found hiring salespeople incredibly difficult.

[00:29:45] Ironically, for a business that's in hiring. Because they're so good at selling themselves, and I tend to fall in love with people, you know, I love the product. If they love the product, I'm like, wow, you know, we're in this together. And I, I, I just, I can't see through the bullshit. And because I don't know what great sales looks like because I'm, I'm like an artisan seller.

[00:30:07] And the other really successful salespeople we've had are artisan sellers. They're not machines. Right. They haven't grown up in a world of Salesforce or you know, rippling, et cetera. And so I dunno how to see that. And we don't have the funding in the capital to build a machine, right? We don't have 10 SDRs and 18 AEs and you know, et cetera.

[00:30:27] And so I. I've really got it wrong there. And I wish I'd let people go much sooner. I wish I'd been more ruthless around sales because there's no one who started average and ended up being anywhere close to great. And the thing is that when you let someone go, it's very visible in a small team, and we're quite a, we're really close connected team.

[00:30:48] It's a very strong culture. It's, it's. You know, there, there's real heart to it. And, and, and, you know, and you can't, you sometimes, even when someone's not selling, it still feels depressing to the team to let someone go because they're really fond of them. So it's you know, that's been really hard to make those calls and I've, I've made them all too late.

[00:31:09] Omer: Well, I appreciate your, your transparency and being so honest about that. Tell me, tell me a little bit about. When you went into the UK market, what were some of the lessons that you learned from the US that you did differently? So you mentioned, you know, you, you moved out to the uk. Did you then start to focus on, okay, we, we, we are gonna kind of focus on the same verticals that we've got traction in in Australia.

[00:31:36] Like what was the approach?

[00:31:37] Barb: Shrink the tab, right? Just narrow, narrow, narrow. Yeah. Just be confident about where you've got product market fit. Recognize that the size of that market in UK is 10 x what it is in Australia at least. And there's plenty within that. And just stay focused on that. And forget the noise.

[00:32:00] Outside of that, right? So again, we have a lot of companies that come to us and say, I love what you're doing, this real differentiation, right? The fact that you're interviewing everyone, you're giving everyone feedback, who doesn't wanna do that? We're not ready for you, or you don't have the right level of AI maturity.

[00:32:16] So you know, lose fast and actually really make the decision after the first. Session and even cut that first session short, which is to say, oh man, it doesn't sound like your business is at a maturity level to use ai. You know, one of the questions we ask really early now is, where is the business? On a scale of 10, they're like, hell yeah, I want to use ai and I've got a C-Suite person who's gonna sponsor that to zero.

[00:32:41] We haven't even started. We'll just opt out at that point. Whereas, you know, I'm, I'm a kind of, I don't like to give up and I've wasted way too much time going, but I know that you guys will really love this and it's really gonna make a difference. I'll help you through that. We don't have time, like time is your most critical asset.

[00:32:59] My time. I spend so much time now thinking about how I spend my time, you know, and being really conscious and thinking, this year I'm gonna focus on this. This month I'm gonna focus on this, right? Because that is what I have not been in control of nearly as much as I should have, you know? And that is the most important asset that you've gotta manage across the business, starting with the CEO.

[00:33:24] Omer: So when you, when you, when you talked about the, going into the, the UK market, did, did you find that, I mean, I, I talk to a lot of founders who are international and they talk about, I wanna get into the US and, and. You know, there's a lot of different things that you have to overcome, but culture, the cultural difference is also pretty huge.

[00:33:43] Did you find that for an Australian startup going into the UK felt culturally a a little easier? I. Maybe,

[00:33:53] Barb: yeah, look, I mean, you know, Americans love Australians. And you know, there's a great sort of camaraderie. We're all part of the same sort of set of Western democracies, but definitely the connection to the UK is a lot stronger.

[00:34:05] And in the sectors that we focus on, there's a lot of talent that crosses over between Australia and the UK from a C-suite level. So all of the businesses that we work with in Australia that are incredibly well known, respected brands are known and respected in the uk, whereas in America. They don't care.

[00:34:20] They don't know about them, and there's a very high level of American exceptionalism. That means unless you've got an American. Logo we're, we're really not that interested. Right. You don't find that in Australia at all. I think the other thing is, frankly, the regulatory environment here with GDPR has built a maturity and aff fluency around regulation that the US does not have.

[00:34:42] From an HR perspective, and the EU AI Act that comes into play in the middle of 2026 is so much easier to navigate because it's a centralized regulatory framework. Once you go into the database, you're done. Whereas in the US you have to navigate myriad different states, all with their own regulations.

[00:35:01] It's very complex and very costly for a business. So I think America's actually doing itself a disservice. They've got state and federal because they're not creating a simple. You know, one country framework and they don't have the maturity to be honest around managing AI procurement. Whereas here, because of GDPR, there are lots of, you know, everyone knows where the DPI is, right?

[00:35:25] And then they go into an an, an AI audit and they know what that is and the US just that, that maturity and fluency is not there in, at least in hr, in my experience.

[00:35:35] Omer: Right, so, so it's basically like companies in, in the uk you're are willing to take a, a little bit more of a risk because they feel like, okay, if you're at least compliant with GDPR requirements, with the ai, at least I have some guardrails.

[00:35:50] I feel a certain level of confidence.

[00:35:52] Barb: Well, regulation creates certainty, right? Like bring on regulation is what I would say. You know, the lack of regulation creates uncertainty and then your legal team will just veto it and say, no, we're not interested. You know, I remember in the early days we actually pitched to Apple in Australia and we got as far as Cupertino.

[00:36:09] Now this is back in 2019, and at that stage, apple in Australia, their retail store, they were getting 50,000 applicants. We're seeing really high turnover. They love the idea of using a technology that's a true learning technology that retrains models based on turnover data. And the legal team just said no, they weren't prepared to use anything like machine learning.

[00:36:28] This is way before GPT. Right. And when AI became really trendy and even when Apple was using a lot of AI and they were just not prepared to go there. And it was a decision made purely by the legal team. And that's the other thing about the us, the legal team effectively have vetoed. Whereas in the UK they're a stakeholder, but the business really owns and makes the decisions on advice of a legal team.

[00:36:50] Omer: I think it's also really interesting that, you know sort of conventional wisdom is, you know, if you're, if you're a, in the early stages, you're trying to get some traction, first 10 customers, whatever, focus on your early adopters and the fact that you are now, you know, six, seven years. Into this business and you still talked about how you're asking these questions and effectively you're, you are identifying your early adopters, so people who are like e either comfortable with the technology, they're fully committed to doing this thing, so you are not wasting a whole bunch of time trying to persuade people that this is good for them.

[00:37:28] Barb: Yeah. We do that in the beginning, but we don't do that anymore. Now we're more selective.

[00:37:33] Omer: Just explain that a little bit. Like what do you mean?

[00:37:35] Barb: So in the beginning, we would invest to get people comfortable with it and to educate them. Today we've got enough brands that we don't need to sell to you if it's gonna be a really steep road, you know, an uphill battle to get this through your business.

[00:37:51] Right. We'll move on to the next one who's more AI friendly and got more AI maturity. I think the other thing I'd say that has really set us apart is it's very personal. Like I feel. What we're doing is very personal. So you know, I write Christmas cards to every single one of my clients. Our clients every year with a personalized message.

[00:38:13] We've just hired a salesperson who's American actually living in the uk and she's brought us this wonderful new tradition of gift giving. And what she's done is, you know, every time we have a meeting, she brings something. She might beg something, she'll bring chocolates. But we're, we've now got a gift register.

[00:38:29] Where if you can't accept gifts, we'll give a donation on your behalf. But say you give us a referral or we had a meeting and you, you know, you helped us out, we'll send a gift. And it's, it's, people just are so grateful, right? So we don't just ask Qantas to give a referral and then go, thanks on an email.

[00:38:47] We'll send a gift. We'll send a note. Thank you so much. It makes such a difference. And so there's something very personal. I think, you know, one of the things that people say when they join us is the level of. Intimacy we have with our customers is really noticeable. And I think that comes, maybe it's 'cause I'm female and I'm created certain traditions in the business, but it, it, it's, it's a different way of connecting with your customers.

[00:39:11] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It's kind of ironic on the one, on the one hand. It's an AI product, which is kind of, doesn't have the personal aspects to it yet. The culture of the company is almost the, you know, the other end of the, the pendulum in terms of, that's, that's kind of so core to I guess, what you have to do and which is why from what you were telling me earlier, that a lot of new business is coming from referrals from your existing customers?

[00:39:40] Barb: Well, look, the product does have a very strong human element to it, so that's one of the big objections we've got, which is, but we're removing the human touch. If we introduce ai, you know, and what I say is, well, you're getting a hundred thousand people who are reply and you're hiring a thousand.

[00:39:56] How's that working for you? You know, are the a hundred thousand getting a human touch? They're not, you know, humans don't scale. And this allows you to at least give everyone a fair go to give everyone the chance to learn about themselves and know that, you know, they've been considered. And if they don't get this job, it may help them get their next job.

[00:40:13] And so we feel like we're humanizing the process. And one of the things, again, that I've been obsessed about is language. So I learned from my last boss when I was a CHRO, who was an ex-Microsoft executive. She was obsessed about communications and you couldn't send an email out from her that she didn't review really closely, and she was all about authentic comms.

[00:40:32] I speak in a very human way. You know, I'm not a polished, like even my hair's always messy and I wanted to bring that realness into the product. So in the early days, you know, I wrote all the questions, I wrote all the scripts, all the dialogue. And today, you know, I'm fanatical with the team about this is somewhat of our product that's a bit unscalable, is that when you're creating this experience of, you know, Omer, thank you for applying for a job at Starbucks.

[00:40:58] This is what we care about. Take your time. You know, like you have to, it's curated, it's created by our CS team that dialogue. But it's gotta feel real and it's gotta feel real to their culture. You know, it's not a fill out these 20 questions and we'll let you know. So, you know, that aspect of the product, which we haven't figured out how to scale yet, has very much come from me.

[00:41:19] And I think is very much in part why people love it, is it just feels more human, it feels more authentic.

[00:41:25] Omer: Love it. All right, we should wrap up. It's getting late and you've had quite an adventure over the last day or two in that hotel, which just why don't you just quickly just tell us about that.

[00:41:36] Barb: My hotel story. So yeah, I arrived 5:00 AM yesterday, first night, 11:30 at night. I've taken my sleeping pill 'cause I rely heavily on sleeping pills when I'm traveling internationally. And there's just this dripping. In my hotel room, and I'm thinking, did I leave a tap on somewhere in my, you know exhaustion.

[00:41:53] And then I turn on the light and there's just water coming down from the ceiling, from the lights on the floor, puddles freaking out. So I took a video and sent it to my husband and he said, get out of that room and find a new room. So that was my adventure.

[00:42:07] Omer: God knows what was happening upstairs. So, all right, let's let's get onto the lightning round.

[00:42:13] So I've got seven quick-fire questions for you. Just try to answer 'em as quickly as you can. Ready?

[00:42:17] Barb: Go for it.

[00:42:18] Omer: What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:42:22] Barb: Don't overthink it.

[00:42:23] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:42:26] Barb: Amp It Up by Frank Slootman? I think it is. I just think he encapsulates everything that I wish I was as a leader and wish I could be as a leader.

[00:42:36] I've gifted to gifted it to many different people.

[00:42:40] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:42:45] Barb: Madness, relentlessness.

[00:42:47] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:42:50] Barb: TripIt actually 'cause I do a lot of travel. I really love TripIt just to keep track 'cause I'm very badly disorganized and I don't have a PA or anything, so, yeah.

[00:43:00] And I, I've gotta say I use the Claudes and the like every day.

[00:43:04] Omer: Of course. Yeah. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:43:09] Barb: Everyone in the business when we ask them this at orientation says they wish we could take our capability and apply it to personal matching.

[00:43:17] How do I figure out whether or not you're the right person for me? So extending it into dating.

[00:43:23] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:43:28] Barb: I actually was in the Israeli army for a period.

[00:43:31] Omer: Wow. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:43:36] Barb: Well, my kids, my husband, my dog, and gardening. I actually love just being outside in the garden. Not that I do it very much, but yeah.

[00:43:45] Omer: Awesome, Barb, thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Love sharing the story of, of you building the business. Love, just how, how open and authentic you've been and, you know, willing to talk about your successes, but also.

[00:43:58] You know, the challenges and the mistakes and I think that's often where, you know, the, the rest of us can, can learn from. So I appreciate that.

[00:44:05] If people wanna check out Sapia, they can go to sapia.ai and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:44:13] Barb: LinkedIn.

[00:44:14] Omer: Great. We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes.

[00:44:18] Great. Well thank you so much. Thank you for staying up late. Appreciate it and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:44:24] Barb: That's a pleasure. Thanks.

[00:44:26] Omer: Cheers.