How Talkdesk CEO Tiago Paiva grew Talkdesk to $420.1M revenue and 50K customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is held on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka this is episode 677 coming up Tom tomorrow morning I talk to alesandro if you're creative who needs work you don't want to miss this she launched zupa with $8 million raised and 4 million plus in Creative projects that they've processed good morning everybody my guest this morning is got shamia he's the chief operating officer at a company called Talk desk the world's leading call Center Software platform it's backed by dfj storm Ventures and Salesforce Ventures talked to screw eight times during or 8X sorry over the past two years and has over 250 employees along with a thousand customers including box Shopify Dropbox and weather.com Pride talk desk ad founded a company that was acquired by sap and now generates $500 million in global business and was a senior BP at sap and a general manager at reach local G are you ready to take us to the top uh absolutely was that sap Company echosign by chance no Echo sign was acquired by Adobe ah got it what was the one that went sap uh the company called name was top manage and the product that sap sells today is called sap business one very cool okay so you're in a unique spot at talkest so your Chief Operating Officer they were founded in 2011 I think you joined in 2015 is that right yeah I joined a little over two years ago okay so I want to get into kind of how you came into the business but first tell us what talk Des does and what's the business model how do you make money so talkest is a cloud-based uh actually b a cloud call center solution so it's an fully integrated uh with Voice SMS uh and agent management call center Solutions so companies can um literally log in and within uh minutes or days have a fully operational call center that can power companies with five 10 employees or5 with hundreds and hundreds of of Agents serving customers 24 hours a day and what's the business model how do you make money uh we like many other Enterprise software companies we charge um uh users for license fees and we also charge for the telepone component uh so the advantage of of talk is is you have one vendor that provides both the software and telepone SMS Services get one bill and one company to work with so is this I mean is this a SAS company yes it's absolutely ass company and so I want to avoid going into every like individual customer cohort you guys are working with but on average what's the average business paying you guys per month it's it's really dependent all over the place so a company with say 50 users um who pay let's say $5,000 a month or or $7,000 a month uh for the service so again give me an average just so we can get a sense of like your average customer fit I I think I don't have an average on my head it's so we have customers with three users and we have customers with 850 users so it's really hard to aage them out can you normalize around seats around users so what's the per user cost per month on average yeah the per user cost months is between $65 to $125 depend on the uh depend on subscription then typical customer will spend another 30 to $40 on telephon a month got it perfect now as a telephony aspect is that that's really usage based right that goes up and down based off the data yeah okay got it absolutely okay good that's helpful so tell me about why you join talk desk it's kind of unique I mean do they see you as a founder or what's your role you know how how talk sees me we need to ask Thiago is the founder of the company you know I don't think of myself when you join three years in and I I did found the company myself when you join three years in you're not a Founder anymore and you have to acknowledge that um I join genuinely because I really like the space and I really like Thiago the founder uh so it was two combinations of really interesting Market the uh the call center space is$ 22 billion Market it's still dominated by old players like Avaya and Cisco and Genesis uh that sells the same system for for 20 30 years so one side of it was here's a market which is huge and ready for disruption the other was we already had a proven product Thiago and team although the team was very small build a very impressive product that had um couple hundred customers uh even by the time I I joined really like the product and and continued using it uh for over a year by the time I joined the third go ahead sorry and the third was I really like Thiago when you join a CEO you cannot look not like the CEO and you cannot not want to engage with the CEO I really thought we can have we can be really good partners I think that the fact I'm still here over two years after proves to you that probably correct was that is D is Diego the sole founder or were there co-founders uh Thiago was a co-founder uh he had another founder that uh after four four and a half years uh left to do her own thing what what happened I mean that's always like an interesting people never talk about this but very rarely when you have two three four person co-founding teams very rarely do all co-founders make it to you know the promised land or the end what was the conversation around that exit were you there for that or no yeah I was there and and you know I think a is a personal issue so I don't want to get um into the specifics of this situation but I can tell you what I know from experience with other companies in the best of companies uh as you mentioned Founders uh some Founders leave and they usually do because either they don't find what they do exciting enough or they couldn't find themselves in a position where they can make the same impact they did in the early stages and the worst situation is when a Founder stays and I know companies were two Founders that that didn't didn't speak with each other and stayed all the way until the end and this is devastating for the company so it's really healthy for a company to be in situation where a Founder can actually say I've done I've done great job I build this company and now I'm ready to take on uh you know my next task or maybe be a CEO in a different company and what uh that makes sense so this this all kind of happened around when you joined right around 2015 2014 uh actually happened a year after I joined okay and what did uh you said the company when you joined sizewise was a couple hundred customers I mean had it broken the million dooll AR Mark when you joined or was it still earlier than that no it it did break the million dollar AR which was amazing to me seeing such a small team um doing so well was again one of the other attractive attracting points to uh to talk this because what was the team size would you say small team um I think it was 20 people when I joined um and you know Thiago and the very few Engineers we had really built a compelling product that spoke for itself uh in the first two years of the company or year and a half after start selling the product because the product was actually sold maybe from the mid 2013 not from the first day of the company Thiago was the only salesperson he was running around uh positioning the product showing it to customers and was able to uh uh to get remarkable Brands to use to use thect and were you the relationship around you uh and dieago I mean was this something where you were like an eir at dfj and they put you in with their round of financing or what did you come in kind of before the financing how did you two meet I came before the financing so uh I actually met Thiago through my friends at Stone Ventures I was an ER at St Ventures seven eight years ago so um lifetime ago and I'm still in very good very good contact with all the investors there and um you know they to they told me I think in and uh in the midst of uh 2014 that I should meet Thiago he's just an impressive guy and I went on and and met him and and we met several times during uh 2014 and towards the end of 2014 we said you know we like each other enough we can help each other and I decided to join did you lead storm Ventures round in in talk to $3 million series a or or C no storm was there before so storm you um Talk Des through the investment relationship they had got it okay and then so take forward let's talk more kind about the the the the macroeconomics about the industry so when you guys are growing well first off how many customers are you at to date fast forward 1,200 okay and is that seats or businesses using you no this is businesses using using us okay let's talk about the bigger number how many people how many seats inside of those 1,200 companies I think it's about 50,000 okay 50,000 and I mean can I can I you you gave a seat range earlier on the low end of 65 bucks a seat can I mean can I do 65 bucks times 50,000 to back into the mrr number uh because can try I don't know which number you're going to get to and I'm not really good...