Meet the Exited Founder Building the a16z-Backed 1st AI Revenue Platform for Finance Teams w/ Riya Grover | Sequence

00:00
Riya Grover:
I knew for sure I wanted to build another company. I think my first entrepreneurial journey can largely be categorised by like just kind of raw naivety. This was something that I loved. Like the uncertainty and the risk didn't bother me. Things not turning out as planned actually kind of invigorated me. And I think I realised that I actually do love building companies, even though there are obviously these immense highs and lows that come with it. I feel today we're building a business that can be a real category leader and can be that billion dollar 100 billion dollar business.

00:38
Amardeep Parmar:
Today's guest is Riya Grover, co founder and CEO of Sequence then and Jason Horowitz and Salesforce Ventures backed company that's revolutionising the accounts receivable category, enabling B2B finance teams to scale the revenue collection infrastructure. Riya previously exited another company called Feedr Limited which exited to Compass Group before founding their current company. Now Riya's got this rare story that we'd love to share because she grew up, wants to be an economist. She worked in that area for a while before moving into other careers doing an MBA, learning so much more and then hitting the ground running with the first company. Doing incredibly well there but still wanting to do more. And Sequence today is one of those stars in the UK ecosystem that's continuing to grow and she hopes someday will be a hundred billion dollar company. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

01:36
Amardeep Parmar:
I'm Amar from BAE HQ. So great to have you here today and something incredible, what you've done so far in your career. But if you rewind you back to when you started out when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

01:48
Riya Grover:
Well, if I rewind back to probably my teenage years, I loved economics and politics and I think my dream job was to be to head the United nations, to work in a political consulting firm or a think tank. Actually ended up doing my undergrad in economics and then going and doing a focus kind of one year masters in developing in economics and international economics and then went to Washington to work in a think tank. And so that was kind of always the path I had planned in the early days.

02:25
Amardeep Parmar:
And was that just something you were fascinated about from reading in the news and things like that? How did you get into that?

02:30
Riya Grover:
I just kind of loved the academic discipline I guess. And yeah, thought it was maybe the way to make the world better, to enact change. The interesting reality is that when I did go and work for the think tank, I worked for a think tank called Brookings in Washington, which is a great firm and really well renowned. But I felt like were just writing and talking as opposed to doing anything. Actually felt really as far from enacting any kind of change as possible, I guess, kind of. Maybe it's fair to say it wasn't just this kind of aspiration I had. My parents were both entrepreneurs. They built a business while I was growing up. And so watching them do that, I think I was always really inspired by entrepreneurship and comfortable with the notion of entrepreneurship.

03:23
Riya Grover:
And so I think there was always that kind of, I guess, side to my aspiration as well, which didn't really kind of materialise maybe till my later, kind of my late 20s, but it was sort of always in the back of my mind.

03:35
Amardeep Parmar:
And when you realise when you're at the think tank that, like you said, you're doing more writing than acting.

03:40
Riya Grover:
Yeah.

03:40
Amardeep Parmar:
How did you then shift gears to do something else? How did you, like, okay, I've wanted this my whole life. Now this doesn't quite feel right.

03:47
Riya Grover:
Yeah.

03:48
Amardeep Parmar:
What decision did you take there?

03:50
Riya Grover:
I mean, I think it's really hard to know at that age what you want to do. And I think a lot of what you end up doing at that age is pull. Pull from kind of the opportunities you get or the brand names that are dangled in front of you. So I had a banking offer in hand and I decided to go to the investment bank after that and work there for a few years. I think partly for sensibility purposes, people saying it's a great place to start your career and it's a really solid foundation. And I think to a large extent it was. But I don't think any part of me really at the time believed that I was going to build a career in finance.

04:29
Riya Grover:
And so maybe had I been a little bit more intentional about it, may have ended up working for a big tech company or pivoted in a slightly different way. But what I ended up doing was taking the banking offer that I'd been given and working at Deutsche bank for a few years.

04:44
Amardeep Parmar:
So you obviously had a very successful career within doing your studies. You obviously did very well there. Then you're at an economic institution and doing the think tank side, then going to a banking market must have been very different to those who might have been in before. How did you find that?

04:58
Riya Grover:
To be honest, I actually loved the pace and intensity. Whilst, you know, it probably wasn't kind of my life's ambition to be there, you know, for over a Long career span. I, I actually really loved the kind of intellectual challenge, the pace at which you had to operate, made great friends, you know, had a really fun time. And I think there are certain things that it taught me about how to work and I guess how to eventually be successful that I absolutely ascribe to that experience. So no regrets there. But after being there for a few years, I think it was very clear that, yeah, I wanted to go and actually build towards something or do something that I love doing. And I didn't really know exactly what that was at that time.

05:48
Riya Grover:
And so I made the decision to go to business school basically to spend a couple of years figuring it out.

05:53
Amardeep Parmar:
And did that experience really help you, do you think? Are you happy that you went to business school and had those couple of years there figuring things out?

05:59
Riya Grover:
Yeah, I mean, business school was kind of two of the best years of my life. It was extremely eye opening. I think I went to the US and studying there, meeting incredible people who'd done really interesting things, obviously made lifelong friends. And the interesting thing about HBS is that they use the case method. And so over the course of, you know, two years, you do hundreds of or thousands of case studies on different companies, different sectors, different vertical, different entrepreneurial stories actually. And I think that played a very big part inspiring, I guess, the entrepreneurial journey that was to follow. I guess I also want to add that HBS also gave me a lot of opportunities to start doing entrepreneurial stuff on campus.

06:47
Riya Grover:
So whilst they're not Stanford and they, I guess quite a kind of tech entrepreneur machine, they were certainly kind of levelling up there. They had an entrepreneurship lab where I would spend a lot of time. I actually built my first little mini company out of HBS while I was there.

07:06
Amardeep Parmar:
What was that mini company?

07:07
Riya Grover:
That mini company was a kind of beauty booking software and marketplace that we launched in Boston and my co founder actually went on to build a company in sf. But I guess what I'm saying is the experience there really lent itself to starting to kind of dabble in what it was like building a tech company and I guess kind of demystifying what it takes to do it a little bit.

07:33
Amardeep Parmar:
Yeah, and obviously you then went on to build your first company not long afterwards. Where did that idea come from for that first company took further?

07:42
Riya Grover:
I think my first entrepreneurial journey can largely be categorised by just kind of raw naivety and desire to jump into something quickly. I mean, I graduated from HBS, had an idea, saw that There was lots of independent restaurants at the time that had a huge amount of kitchen downtime, probably eight plus hours of the day that they had capacity but were not operating. And an interesting opportunity to connect them to corporate and venue demand and to build the software in the middle that facilitated those transactions and orders, payments and everything that comes with basically supplying into that into corporates and venues. Deliveroo wasn't really operating at the time and were able to go and actually sign up restaurants very quickly and it was a very compelling value proposition for them. And so I kind of jumped into it, to be honest.

08:42
Riya Grover:
Yeah, this was 2016. Saw like, you know, a very strong, I guess, value proposition for the restaurants. We started signing restaurants and then corporates up very quickly and we, I think we scaled both sides of the marketplace very fast. And then I guess fast forward kind of a few years, we exited that company, we sold it to Compass Group in 2020. Happy to talk about the kind of ins and outs and ups and downs of that journey in a bit more detail.

09:09
Amardeep Parmar:
So I guess in this early parts of their genuine. So you've done all these case studies at hbs? We've had a few dabbling when you're on campus. But then to go into it full time, what I guess surprised you? So anybody who's maybe studying an MBA right now and then goes on to do their own company, what advice can you give them for making that transition to reading and doing the case studies to here it is like full time.

09:30
Riya Grover:
I think reading and doing the case studies give you a lot of great frameworks with which to assess a market opportunity with which to kind of, I guess, understand a customer problem or design a product solution. Obviously nothing is ever as you predict until you get on the ground and talk to customers or actually just try and sell something to somebody. You can do all the discovery and all the research in the world and then you actually start operating and things aren't exactly the way you assumed they would be. And so I guess I'd seen this a little bit through the case studies actually. The lessons were not really about the specific business or the specific kind of way of entering a market.

10:15
Riya Grover:
The lessons were about the kind of tenacity and rigour and ability to pivot and change and the ability to hire a world class team. And those were the things that were consistent across every successful outcome. The specifics are, I guess, semantics otherwise. And so I think I had a lot of this theory in my head going in, but you don't really understand it until you're There on the ground, trying to raise capital, trying to hire the best people that you can, trying to understand why this thing you assumed after six months actually just isn't playing out the way you wanted it to with customers. But what I did realise is that this was something that I loved. The uncertainty and the risk didn't bother me. Things not turning out as planned actually kind of invigorated me.

11:02
Riya Grover:
And I think I realised that actually do love building companies, even though there are obviously these immense highs and lows that come with it.

11:10
Amardeep Parmar:
Marketplaces have a massive reputation of being some of the hardest companies to build as far as. Yeah, and you said you managed to get the restaurants on first and the corporates came quite soon afterwards. It was quite a nice balance there.

11:22
Riya Grover:
Well, it has to be a balance because, you know, everybody one side of the marketplace is only operating with you because of the value that the other side of the marketplace brings. And so there's this, like, kind of balance that you need to strike in scaling both sides, I guess, in parallel, because otherwise the other side, I mean, the thing is worthless without both sides in somewhat equal equilibrium. And actually, for us, the scaling, the selling both sides wasn't the biggest challenge. I mean, we had a logistics component to the business that was, I think, something that was challenging just because it's an area where you lose some touch point or some control.

12:04
Riya Grover:
You can build the best software in the world, but ultimately you've got people outside your core platform doing things and you're reliant on them to execute on something in the way that you need them to. That was a kind of hard problem to solve, I think, just, I guess another kind of reflection from that journey. We didn't raise that much capital in the early days. We raised a small amount of capital and I think I probably consistently felt under capitalised during that journey. I think to be able to build a brand actually kind of create a strong market presence and there's a certain minimum amount of capital that you need to do that. And we left. I guess we had such short windows between fundraising cycles that it always meant that we hit a nice kind of piece of momentum.

12:51
Riya Grover:
But then six months later we have to go out and raise more capital because we didn't quite get enough the last time. And that was an important lesson for me, to really make sure that you are raising comfortably 18 months of Runway when you go out and raising money, because it takes conservatively, probably three to six months to fundraise the next time. And we obviously held it together, but there were definitely periods in between raises where we couldn't pay our team anything and we had to just tide over until the next raise. And so, you know, we, I think we got very close to the edge, so to speak, and just, I think it was a, it's a good lesson for me for the next time to make sure that, you know, you really have enough buffer there.

13:36
Amardeep Parmar:
Hello. Hello. Quick interruption to let you know about BAE HQ. We're the community for high growth British Asian entrepreneurs, operators and investors. And you can join completely free at thebaehq.com/join. There, you get our CEO pillars. So that's content, events and opportunities direct to your inbox every week. So you can get involved and it can help you to further your business and your career. We also have a free startup course called BAE Startup Foundations where if you think about starting a business someday or at the early stages, it gives you all that information to help you hit the ground running and to thrive in this new world. Back to the show. So as you mentioned as well earlier, you had the exit there, right. And you were able to get acquired. Can you talk us through that acquisition and why that was the right time?

14:23
Riya Grover:
Sure. So yeah, started the business in 2016, grew the business pretty fast over three years and Compass Group actually became a customer sort of towards the end of 2019 or mid-2019. And that was a strategic decision we made. We saw a really interesting opportunity to work with these large food service groups and I guess supply our software to them. And so we engaged with them on a, at a customer level kind of in mid-2019 and started getting pretty excited about the partnership there. And then I think that, you know, they like what they saw and they saw an opportunity to leverage what were doing, you know, in their wider business. And so the kind of customer conversation very quickly turned into an acquisition conversation in late 2019. It wasn't a given that we would have planned to sell the business soon.

15:17
Riya Grover:
We were sort of planning to raise more capital and expand into additional markets. But a number of factors and the kind of attractiveness of the offer and a number of other things made it pretty compelling for us to take the acquisition and sell the business. And so we completed that. You know, obviously it was a first experience for me, but we completed that in about three months very quickly. There were some poor lawyers and analysts working very hard overnight and we actually completed it on the eve of COVID in the uk, which obviously nobody knew was coming, but that was lucky timing wise.

15:55
Amardeep Parmar:
Yeah. And I guess one of the things which a lot of founders now, as you see them talking about building rounds and going up through the levels and going to an ipo, having the experience of an acquisition at that stage, has it taught you a lot about, in terms of how you'd plan for the exit in the future and how you'd asset guests, get ready for that potential opportunity?

16:13
Riya Grover:
It's a great question. We didn't pursue an acquisition in the way I think a company would typically pursue. We didn't run a competitive process. Our ducks were certainly not in a row. When we got up to that point at which were being acquired, we had a tonne of work to do on our side to get, I guess, our systems and our numbers in order to actually be able to allow the buyer to do the due diligence that they needed to. I think that stuff is actually fairly easy. Like, you can get your. I guess you can kind of get your numbers and your materials ready when the time comes.

16:52
Riya Grover:
What I do think is sensible, though, for entrepreneurs is when they are building a company to go into it with a view as to who the right strategic acquirers could be and kind of have that list, that top 10 list in their head, that list is likely going to be much larger than that. But really understand, like, you know, like, what are we building? Where does the value sit in this business and who is that valuable for? Like, who might potentially acquire us in 10 years. And, you know, you may end up ipoing, you may end up, you know, not selling the business to one of those parties. But the vast majority of companies will exit through acquisition rather than through ipo.

17:34
Riya Grover:
And so I think it's really smart to go into a business with a view point to who those might be and to strategically build those relationships over the course of the journey. You know, make sure that you're on their radar so that if and when they decide to ever kind of acquire a company in that space, you're on the list and you're in the room when that happens.

17:56
Riya Grover:
One of the things that actually surprised me about the M and A experience that I had with selling my first company, I think especially having worked in an investment bank and having done all of these case studies, you always think of this as a very kind of formal and structured process, and it is in many cases, but it's also just like somebody deciding they want something and you figuring out you looking at all the possible levers you have at your disposal to try and figure out something that is value accretive. On both sides or maximises value to whatever extent on both sides. And it's not rocket science what those levers are. You know, the length in which you stay in the business, how much of this is contingent on performance afterwards versus upfront cash versus stock.

18:43
Riya Grover:
You know, there's a finite list of levers you can play with. And really it's no different to a customer negotiation or any other kind of negotiation you might enter into. And so a lot of founders, you know, will sometimes say to me, oh my God, like I have no idea what to do. And you know, for the formal stuff, you have your lawyers and other kind of advisors in the transaction, but actually the process is like, it's just so similar to executing on any other project that you have. And the way in which it came about, the informality in the way in which it came about kind of surprised me.

19:19
Riya Grover:
So I think I would always say to other entrepreneurs, you know, every time you're having a conversation with somebody who runs that next biggest competitor to you or who, someone who is a potential strategic acquirer, you know, they may well have the, in the back of their mind that they think this could be, you know, really accretive on their own platform. And you should always be mindful of that when you're having these conversations.

19:41
Amardeep Parmar:
I think next it's really interesting because you would say in your head, pictures are such a clean process where everything is like, oh, okay, you get acquired and they just come in and do it. As I said, there's always different factors and it's so hard to know about that until you start going through that process. But on the other side of things, so once you had the acquisition, so you've been building that company for several years and like I said, you weren't necessarily looking for an acquisition at that point. How is that aftermath in some ways of you now thinking about what's next? Like you, concerning entrepreneurs, you tie up your identity in your company, right?

20:11
Riya Grover:
Definitely. I worked for the business for a couple of years after selling it as part of an earn out that we'd agreed with the buyer. And so I was still very much involved in the business. Although I must say, for any founder that exits their company to a big corporate, the amount of autonomy that's taken away is pretty significant. And that's hard because if you're someone like me who loves building and operating in an early stage environment, that was a massive shift in reality. But anyway, did the earn out and then I knew for sure I wanted to build another company. I was Covid and so I was kind of brainstorming and whiteboarding alone and actually having a bunch of kind of chats with other, you know, other founders, other VCs in my network, just talking to a lot of people.

21:03
Riya Grover:
Somebody recommended I chat to Eamon. He just left his operating role as the COO at Onfido and funnily enough he lives kind of around the corner from me. So were both actually individually using a Paddington weworked and to sort of do some brainstorming as he was also thinking about what to do next. And so that was a kind of, I guess fortuitous timing that we met and actually ended up building a business together. But in terms of what we actually decided to build. So Sequence is the company that I'm building now and have been building from 2022 so about two years now. So. So I guess a lot of the kind of thinking and ideation for that really came out of my experience operating the previous business. And what we're doing is we're helping B2B companies to automate their revenue collection.

21:53
Riya Grover:
So you'll, you know, if you look at the market today, if you're a B2B company, you will typically sell custom contracts to every customer. You sell, you know, slightly different pricing, slightly different contract terms. Every contract is unique in your business and these sit as like offline PDFs somewhere in your business. And then all of the revenue collection and revenue management is kind of undigitized, extremely manual, extremely tedious. You know, finance teams are pulling those terms out of contracts and you know, manually invoicing customers. Revenue reporting revenue recognition is really challenging and we, you know, we thought this is this a great opportunity to build kind of a great software platform and workflow to really automate the revenue collection experience for these B2B companies. What's also interesting is today a lot of companies adopt kind of hybrid usage based pricing models.

22:46
Riya Grover:
So maybe invoicing customers is easy ish if you're just a very simple subscription business. If you're using usage based pricing, variable pricing, you know, discounts, trials, pricing ramps, some of these, I guess kind of more modern deal levers. You will find that actually consistently and accurately invoicing is extremely painful and time consuming. And we saw a real opportunity for kind of automation here. So we decided to build a kind of infrastructure, consolidated set of tools that B2B companies can use to streamline their end to end revenue workflow. This was a massive pain point in my Last company that I was building, we looked at companies like stripe and checkout.com. We're like, okay, great, they're amazing. Free e commerce companies are very simple businesses, simple pricing model businesses where you can basically have all the tools to just manage your revenue collection.

23:43
Riya Grover:
But if you're a B2B and you have any kind of custom pricing or more nuanced contract structures is it doesn't work. Where's the Stripe equivalent for this segment? And so it was a direct pain point that I experienced and I thought there was a really interesting opportunity. And then we just started talking to a tonne of founders and people were like, oh yeah, like we do that manually. We do that manually. We've got like six people in the team who are doing that. And actually what we'd also hear a lot is went and built that in house. And for us that was a great signal that there's an opportunity to build a product in the space. Because why are companies selling widgets building like their back office infrastructure, their pricing catalogue, their product catalogue, their invoicing in house?

24:29
Riya Grover:
It doesn't make any sense because that is just not core to what they're doing and doesn't help them build a bigger business for their customers. So when we had that, we sort of validated the problem and the pain point and we decided to kind of aggressively build into it.

24:43
Amardeep Parmar:
So obviously going from having an exit already and being a second time founder and you said like all the lessons you learned at that point, what do you think you did very differently second time around while building sequence.

24:55
Riya Grover:
So I think the problem is always different. The challenges you're going to have with customers, sort of finding the product market fit, like building the right kind of product or solution for customers. It's very hard to predict that and or what that's going to look like. And so I think you'll probably always, even business number two or number three, go through that journey of having an idea and thinking a problem space has potential, but then really trying to feel out exactly where and how you're playing. I think that's an inevitable journey that anybody goes through. You can't really shortcut that whether you're building a business the second or third or fourth time. What you can shortcut though is like hiring incredible talent and not compromising on that from day one because I think a players set a really high bar from the outset.

25:50
Riya Grover:
You're probably going to figure out how to crack the problem faster and then a players are going to hire more a players. So the first 10 people you hire in the business is one of the most important decisions that you'll make when building your company. And for both Eamon and I, that was a non negotiable of course to hire great people. Of course you're, they're buying into a vision and an opportunity but obviously you need the capital to do it. And so we wanted to go and raise top tier capital early. And so we did raise from some incredible angel investors and then had Andreessen Horowitz who led our seed round. And that's a really important signal for both customers and employees and enable us to get kind of great kind of bar raising talent early.

26:37
Riya Grover:
And I think one thing I also learned is like, don't be afraid to like, you know, reverse a decision if you get it wrong. You know, at sequence we are very intentional about having a probation period and somebody's not really part of the business until they pass that probation period. And the reason for that is sometimes you just get it wrong from an interview. The cultural fit is not quite right or the role fit is not quite right. And that's okay. It's way better to make that call early and make it really decisively than have somebody who's just not quite right, the right fit for your business. Because you know, they like every single hire in our opinion has to be a bar raiser and move us forward.

27:20
Riya Grover:
And ultimately we'd really love to be able to build a very powerful, fast growing business with as lean a team as possible. And not just lean because it means our costs are lower, but lean because lean means, you know, more information density amongst the organisation, less bureaucracy, everybody's closer to the customer problem. Like there are some, you know, they say like, you know, you operate faster as a younger team than ever in your life cycle because everybody is so close to the problem. And there's just no like, I guess there's no like effort expended in having to disseminate information across the organisation. And so on that basis I think, yeah, just we really have been very kind of intentional about building the right team early, keeping that as lean as possible, making sure that we're putting people into the right places in the team.

28:16
Riya Grover:
And that was definitely a learning I had from building a company before.

28:21
Amardeep Parmar:
And you mentioned there about the A players as well. So knowing what your problem that you want to fix is, how did you pick the right A players to try to help you fix that problem?

28:30
Riya Grover:
Interestingly, when we started building Sequence, were tackling the problem from a slightly, I guess, different angle. We were more payments focused. By talking to customers and understanding the market more deeply, we ended up pivoting our business and the structure of the team also, I guess naturally needs to pivot to match what the business is doing. We moved from being an API first product to more of a, I guess kind of dashboard, low code, UI based product and therefore had to probably shift sort of some of our, the structure of our organisation from one that was more backend and platform focused to one that was more design and front end focused. And so, you know, I think some of that happened organically anyway as we shifted and pivoted the business.

29:20
Riya Grover:
You know, certain people who'd been really excited about the first vision naturally said actually I'm not excited about this next one. But we also then had to more intentionally change the shape of our team and actually probably could have done that even faster than we did. And yeah, I think recognising that is crucial to be able to build into the thing that you're trying to build into.

29:44
Amardeep Parmar:
And one of the hardest things that you said about enterprise as well is that often the cycles for that enterprise getting those customers a lot longer and obviously if you're trying to sell them the platform that's going to enable them to make those cycles easier, that's probably going to be difficult to get those first customers yourself as well. So how did you get those first customers on board to be using the platform and testing out the different features you have?

30:07
Riya Grover:
Yeah, so we leaned into our network a lot, investors networks, other founders that we knew and kind of had this notion of design partners in the early days, I would say, like even in the early days of operating, you haven't really yet crystallised exactly who your kind of ICP customer is, exactly what stage they're at, you know, exactly what they need to be true in their business for them to be a good fit for you and exactly why you are better than the competitors for them specifically. And so your design partner set ends up being potentially quite broad at the beginning. And like were really aggressively trying to hone that down to really figure out who are the best possible customers. You know, we should be saying no to more people than we're saying yes today. We have a really clear view of that.

30:59
Riya Grover:
You know, we know that a perfect customer for us is a sales led company or a company that's primarily sales led, has custom contracts, has hybrid pricing, including usage based pricing, is, you know, somewhere between series B and series E and falls into These particular segments. If we see a company that looks like that, we can say we are better for you to kind of manage your revenue collection, your billing, your invoicing than anyone else in the market. And if those things don't hold to be true, there probably is someone else better out there for you. And we can tell you who that is.

31:36
Riya Grover:
That confidence takes a bit of time to build up and I don't think you have that right from the outset because you're figuring out the market, you're figuring out, you know, what makes you a good fit, what product features you should decide to build, what the competitors are doing well and badly. But ultimately I think it just comes from talking to a lot of customers and then, you know, consistently trying to redefine internally what are the right attributes you're looking for. Why or why not is someone a good customer fit and actually firing the design partners that are not a good customer fit? So you can really make sure you're not building in a distracted way. You're only building for the companies that you are really trying to service long term.

32:17
Amardeep Parmar:
I think that's such a tough choice for so many people, especially in the early days where you at the beginning, you almost want to take everybody on board because it feels like their scarcity, you want to get that. But then as if you're spending your time in design partners who are not a good fit for the long term, what you're trying to achieve, it's just pulling resources away from that longer term vision.

32:34
Riya Grover:
Exactly. It's so easy to get distracted by somebody who's not a great fit. And by the way, we've been totally guilty of doing it where a great customer logo comes along. They have requirements that don't really fit what your platform is best suited for, but you want to service them. And so when they start bringing up edge cases or things that they need, it influences your roadmap. And I think I'm lucky that we have a team that really tries to keep each other honest in that where product and growth are challenging each other on who the right customers are and what the right product set to build is in response to that.

33:15
Amardeep Parmar:
So we're getting towards the end of the interview now, so I'd love for you to share what are some of the biggest wins so far with Sequence.

33:20
Riya Grover:
So we've had an amazing growth trajectory for the last couple of years. I think we have really found our kind of target customer won kind of over 50 B2B customers. Kind of coming up now to. Yeah, I think A point where we've really built a defined, clear sales playbook and that has repeatability and we're seeing, you know, a really rapid acceleration in our growth. So this year we've averaged about 250% quarter on quarter growth, over 500% in the last quarter. So it really feels like it's an engine that now is scaling nicely. I'm also like, really proud of the team we've built. I think we have an exceptional team. We were extremely intentional about who we've hired and as I said, really keeping that talent bar very high. But I think that's really paid off.

34:17
Riya Grover:
And when I look at what our team can do, for sure, every single member of that team is just so passionate as a true expert in the thing that they're doing. And that is amazing for me to see. But early days and I guess a third kind of big win is we've just scaled officially to the U.S. So we've just opened a New York office, hiring a small team there and, you know, today we have been servicing the US and it's our biggest market, but now we are going to go much more intentionally into the US and scale there.

34:50
Amardeep Parmar:
That's amazing. So then looking to the future now. So obviously, as you said, for you. Well, I think for most people what you're doing is late days, but for you it's early days because you've got that vision of how much further you're going to go. What is that vision? Where do you hope that Sequence will one day get to?

35:03
Riya Grover:
Yeah, I mean, I feel today we're building a business that can be a real category leader and can be that, you know, billion dollar, $10 billion, $100 billion business. Ultimately we are, yes, servicing the workflow for companies to collect revenue, to build, to invoice their customers, to do revenue reporting. But actually, more importantly, what we're doing is we're building a system of record for revenue by capturing contract data upstream, which is the sort of foundational revenue record, and enriching that further with usage data and payments data. As revenue is realised, we're building this very important database, data asset that a company has to leverage.

35:48
Riya Grover:
And as that system of record of revenue, we think we have this immense opportunity to not only power finance teams and revenue teams with better revenue insights, revenue data, but also broker that information to the wider team who need information. You know, engineering need to know what products have been sold so that the right feature entitlements can be switched on. Revenue leaders need to know what revenue has been realised against contracts so that they can commission their sellers accurately. That data is extremely valuable to the wider business and we're very, you know, excited about the workflows and kind of data layer we can build for our customers so that they can really leverage that in their businesses.

36:32
Amardeep Parmar:
Awesome. So hopefully in a few years time I'll get you back on here and we'll have that 10 billion dollar 100 billion valuation. So we need to now go to.

36:40
Riya Grover:
Just a few years to go maybe for that one.

36:41
Amardeep Parmar:
One or two will be fine. So now we've got to go to a quick fire questions. So first one is who are three British Asians do you think are doing incredible work and you'd love to shout them out?

36:52
Riya Grover:
Okay, shout outs go to Sakshi Mittal. She's building a really interesting company in the food is medicine space. I think really redefining how people should eat and how we should think about food as medicine. Second goes to Rishi Stocker who is building Safi, a recycling marketplace and kind of furthering the mission to make our world cleaner. I think tracking a really interesting problem and seeing really great traction associated with it. And my third shout out goes to Hassan Sukar who's building 11X. This is a very interesting company in the sales agent space. So you know, the first AI built sales agents, I think they've seen incredible traction. They're also in Andreessen Horowitz back to peer now and yeah, excited to see what they build.

37:50
Amardeep Parmar:
Awesome. And then if you want to find out more about you and more about sequence, where should they go to?

37:55
Riya Grover:
So they can go to a Sequence website, so www.sequencehq.com or you can email me, I'm riya@sequencehq.com.

38:07
Amardeep Parmar:
And is there anything that you need help with right now that Sequence needs help with that the audience could help you with?

38:10
Riya Grover:
I mean we are hiring. So if you're excited about our mission and what we're doing, definitely kind of cheque out our job roles online. Yeah, any customers who want to come our way is always welcome. But ultimately, I mean for us we're still in the earlier stages of our kind of long term growth journey with this company. We're two years in, we're now starting to really take off and so spreading the word is the most important thing.

38:38
Amardeep Parmar:
So thank you so much for coming on and I'm sure story's been so inspiring to so many people listening. Have you got any final words?

38:43
Riya Grover:
No, thank you for having me. I think, I guess my final words are probably that no journey is straight line or predictable and probably no experience is wasted or at least having the attitude that no experience is wasted is important. What I'm doing today has nothing to do with the three years I spent in banking but actually it gave me a lot. It gave me a lot of rigour and tenacity and resilience probably. And so I don't think there's ever a wrong career move. But I would encourage anybody who is thinking about and wants to build a company to take the leap because today the tool today it's probably more competitive than ever if you're building a company, particularly a software company because the resources available and the cost to do so are so low.

39:28
Riya Grover:
But the accessibility to do it is also far greater than it ever was before. Like, you know, you can have a laptop and not very much money and be able to build something pretty great.

39:41
Amardeep Parmar:
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time. 

‍