Jimmy Fong, CCO at Seon

Speaker: Jimmy Fong, CCO, SEON

Jimmy Fong: So the challenge I had before working with Pete was I was a first time CCO, Chief Commercial Officer, at a really rapidly growing scale up. So when I met Pete had just secured a series A and we were growing very, very rapidly in ARR and also head count as well, as well as with a very healthy amount of capital raise to deploy. So what I was looking for was anywhere myself and the team could shortcut mistakes made both in scaling from an org design point of view and a go to market sales efficiency point of view, which reflected in unit economics and also in lots and lots of very tactical as well as strategic elements to do with board management, co-founder management, leadership development, replicating playbooks; when to rip them up. So a whole host of tactics and strategy that I wanted to speak to someone that was a proven operator in that space. And that's what Pete provided there.

Jimmy Fong: What I liked about working with Pete was he was a complete confidant and also in a completely neutral position. So he was able to listen to all the data that was happening in our business. I was pretty candid with sharing kind of very granular information in terms of leading information and also the lagging information, giving him context. And so hearing someone that was in a very impartial view that could look at whatever tactical challenges were happening and give some really good feedback again, grounded with like genuine kind of battle stories and experience of kind of having done it. And having seen things change up as a result of applying whatever kind of tactics or advice. So a very honest, you know, very useful like sounding board as well as giving heads up on what to avoid as well.

Jimmy Fong: In terms of results, we engaged with Pete in Series A and so we had very, very definitive goals and targets in mind ahead of Series B in a pretty short time frame in under a year at that stage. So yeah, really happy to say that we achieved our ARR targets. We had more than 3x'd. We achieved, just as importantly, really effective and efficient unit economics with cost of sale. So both LTV/ CAC both in terms of things like our NDR - Net Dollar Retention - were best in class. So very top percentile results and that helped us achieve a Series B that was a record Series B in our category globally. It was probably one of the very, very last big ones before kind of the change in macro. And just as important to financial results for our scale up, it was people as well. It was around org design. It was, you know, by that stage, we were just over 250 fraud fighters around the world. So working with Pete was absolutely invaluable in that in that scale of adventure.