EVERY SPOKEN WORD
15 min read · 3,121 words- 0:00 – 1:55
Intro
- AHAli Hussain
In order to grow, sometimes you have to go slow before you can go fast. There's a few things in place that if you can get the right pieces together, though very painful, it will make everything subsequently a lot faster. Number one is just understanding the space you wanna go after. For us, it was finance and accounting. I remember my first investor said, "Oh, you're going after the most boring problem. Why would you wanna do that?" Part of it is because I faced that problem, and I saw the success of other companies around vendor management and finance with companies like Zip and Ramp and Coupa. And so overnight we saw dozens of unicorns get formed, and I realized this is not that boring of a problem or that small of a business opportunity, which allowed us to go after the revenue opportunity here at Tabs. And I think before you scale, you should really feel like you have a core product that is not just services. It's okay, you'll have services in perpetuity, but have a core that you are selling and deploying as a wedge to every company. My name is Ali Hussain and I am the co-founder and CEO of Tabs. Tabs is building AI and agents for finance and accounting. The core problem we help our partners solve is helping make their complex revenue more simple at scale. One of the things I was really fortunate about at Latch is I got to be the COO. We, we grew over five hundred people with fast growth and at one point we were one in ten new apartments was going up with our products. I think any time the team starts to scale beyond thirty to fifty, and us today at a hundred fifty plus people, and you're starting to be in meetings where you're not seeing those people for even a month at a time, that inflection point, it becomes a different beast. [upbeat music]
- 1:55 – 2:54
How did you learn to scale?
- AHAli Hussain
When I joined Latch, it was a hungry and young team. Like, we were less than ten people. For many of us, it was our first time out of college being in a startup. There was just a level of aptitude, but also slope that allowed us to do unreasonable things to be able to build and scale very fast because it was all driven by belief. I think the part where we realized this is really working is there's a moment where we had opened up a new warehouse. I remember walking it and just seeing not twenty locks out there, but tens of thousands of locks or thousands of locks being ready to ship, and then realizing that the operation had grown in which tens of thousands of users were gonna get to experience this product throughout the country. Knowing that those users would get to experience this product was, like, a turning point in that experience.
- 2:54 – 3:53
What was the hardest part of scaling?
- AHAli Hussain
I think the things that often have kept me up at night in an area where I believe is incredibly important is what happens in the middle. How are we actually gonna deploy this product? How are we gonna implement it? And I think a lot of my experiences from Latch, which is a very complex product deployment in apartment buildings where thousands of families lived, really forced me to try to build that muscle early in my career. One of our really high-profile buildings with one of our biggest customers, this building had five hundred residents and the locks stopped working at 11:00 PM and people just were locked out. And getting calls from the property manager that you're not getting access into the building can be incredibly high-stress, and those are just the types of things you deal with when you deal with, like, mission-critical workflows [laughs] that are not nice-to-haves. And I think that is something, and learning the muscle around that is something that's resonated with me throughout my career.
- 3:53 – 7:23
How do you get ahead of the hard part?
- AHAli Hussain
One of the playbooks from Latch that was very important, but also something I reflected on a lot before I started the next company, Tabs, was first, in order to grow, sometimes you have to go slow before you can go fast. There's a few things in place that if you can get the right pieces together, though very painful, it will make everything subsequently a lot faster. Number one is just understanding the problem statement and the space you wanna go after. I've always been very first principles in how I think, trying to understand root problems and empathy on what the core challenge is, and a lot of that resulted in how we started Tabs, which was not writing software and trying to solution right away. It was going back and spending almost six months talking to hundreds, if not close to a thousand, finance professionals, understanding what was the root of where the most pain was today, which ultimately ties to a lot of how I think and was the backbone of how we started Tabs. I think one of the things often when people think are the most boring problems, there's the least investment already in it, but it's often the area that the most spend goes into. I remember my first investor said, "Oh, you're going after the most boring problem. Why would you wanna do that?" Part of it is because I faced that problem, and that ultimately drives you to wanna build something much better. And I saw the success of other companies around vendor management and finance with companies like Zip and Ramp and Coupa, how advanced some of that other tooling had become and how generally left behind finance and accounting technology had become. And so overnight we saw dozens of unicorns get formed, and I realized this is not that boring of a problem or that small of a business opportunity, which allowed us to go after the revenue opportunity here at Tabs. The second that I would highly encourage people to think about beyond just starting to build is the pattern matching around who your initial customer profile will be. Understanding who you're actually selling to- And why is just as important of, as the product you're building because you may realize that it's a really tough customer. There's only a very narrow set of people who are willing to buy. I put a lot of effort really trying to understand any founder I talk to, how much ICP work they've done, 'cause that is one of the things that though we move, moved slow and made some mistakes, it has allowed us to unlock the market in which we sell to much faster. [instrumental music] In the early stages, just savor the moment. The early days are often some of the most fun, and I think there's often this view that, "Oh, will I ever get there? Will the company ever get to millions in revenue? Will it scale to a certain level of brand presence where you're on the subway, or finance folks know about you in every community?" That moment, if you do the right things, comes a lot faster than you realize, and it's been incredible to be a part of this journey so quickly with some amazing human beings. I think if I could've looked back, I would've just savored that early moment 'cause it's really special, and a lot in your day-to-day changes when you become a large company where you have to further functionalize the organization, the governance, et cetera. So savor the early moment. It's a lot of fun. [instrumental music]
- 7:23 – 8:35
Granola, the AI meeting assistant
- SPSpeaker
Speed doesn't come from moving fast. It comes from being ready before you start. Same goes for us. Before the main interview, we always do a pre-interview call, and Granola quietly transcribes it in the background, no bot ever joining, turning it into clean notes. So we built our own Recipe for this. It's called Interview Prep. We wrote the prompt once with everything we want before a shoot, and now it's one click every time. Then, minutes before the cameras roll, we run it right on that pre-interview call. In seconds, it surfaces the story worth telling, the threads worth pulling, and the questions worth asking. It's like having the whole transcript in your head without ever opening it. So we sit down already knowing where it should go. It's not a generic checklist. Every line is drawn from the real discussion we just had, shaped by exactly how we like to prep. Less time scrambling to remember, more time fully present in the room. So if you're building something and want to walk in prepared every time, try Recipes today. New users get 100% off their first month at the link in the description. [instrumental music]
- 8:35 – 9:59
How do you build a team that scales?
- AHAli Hussain
I think it is really important, whether it's just your co-founder or your founding team, getting the right pieces of the puzzle together. One, building a startup is incredibly lonely, but also what you don't realize is the number of people when you are early that you are compounding. The velocity in which they can move if they're part of the very early journey is incredibly helpful. I think for the first 10 employees, you need to augment skillsets and diversity that you as the founder don't have. And so it's incredibly important if you're technical to find someone who is very sales-oriented or very operational. And so the number one litmus test is if I'm hiring my first eight to 10 employees, they should certainly not look like me, behave like me, and diversity of thought and skillset is incredibly important. And I think those mixtures together can pull together a really good founding team. The last thing, I mean, I've from the beginning been very vocal about this, is place and space you build together is going to set the trajectory of the company. Though it may be easy to hire people remote or in different cities or in different markets, getting that initial 10 people together, whether that be in New York or in SF, is incredibly important, and I cannot encourage that enough when you start a company.
- 9:59 – 12:21
How do you grow leaders as your team scales?
- AHAli Hussain
[instrumental music] And one of the ways you can really understand if someone will make a good manager, even if they haven't managed people at the company, is we'll bet on people, and we may not give them 100% managerial responsibility out of the gate, but we'll make them pod leads. We'll let them get set up for success in that environment, and if they can crush it in some part, whether it's a three-month period or six-month period, we'll bet the farm behind them. To me, I will always bet on someone internal to take roles in leadership than always necessarily to have to go outside and hire that. People internally understand the product the best, the culture, the processes. And so the types of people I think can succeed at a successful startup environment, obviously baseline come in with incredible work ethic, have the acumen to evolve and continue to uplevel their skillset, whether they have it from the day they start or as they go through the evolutionary journey. I think the two things that further define the leaders from the ones that succeed that don't, one is just belief and optimism. I think if you wanna grow and go from being an IC to one day running a ops function or a sales function, is you just have to have both belief in yourself but also belief in the company. That's incredibly contagious. And then the last thing is some type of perspective that is strategic that could change the course of the entire company. I think if you come in and you believe that the CEO or the founders have all the answers and you just sit waiting to be told what success looks like, it's incredibly hard to shine. But if you come in with strong perspectives and you bring that to me or someone else in leadership and you say, "Look, I believe if we change this about our implementation approach or this way in how we think about the product in the market," even if you're wrong, that conviction that amplifies is incredibly powerful. And those types of thinkers to me are incredibly priceless. They're what gonna drive the direction of the company over the next two to five years, and I will always look to keep them here as long as possible and ideally in a place of leadership or deeper strategic thinking within the business.
- 12:21 – 13:11
How does your role change as you scale?
- AHAli Hussain
[gentle music] When you're being a CEO is you get to go very wide and look at a bunch of different parts of the business. In the early days, you're doing all of it, and you're selling, but you're also handling customer support tickets, success, operations, even marketing. You, in some ways, have your hands tied to all of them. There becomes a phase later where you're still deeply involved in some of those functions, but you start to hire or work with people who are specialized in their domain. In the later phases, the role just changes a little bit. And particularly, in some ways, when you hire amazing people, you almost shrink your role and you go back full cycle. And that's not a bad thing. If you're able to bring on amazing people, you tend to almost become redundant over the phases of the business.
- 13:11 – 14:28
How do you scale what only the founders know?
- AHAli Hussain
[gentle music] The reality of, in the early days, trying to build and translate knowledge is a very hard thing in a startup because everyone is running around reactively. And the ability to document everything and have the perfect kinda onboarding and enablement is just really hard. Even us today at a hundred fifty-plus people, are we perfect at it? Absolutely not, and it's one of the hardest muscles to build, is I believe a lot in direct mentorship and teaching while showing. And so one of the things I've always been comfortable with is hiring just really good people. Sometimes they may not have the perfect domain knowledge, but in the early days, making sure that they're getting that tutelage via me or my founding team. And knowing that if they can just run that muscle through learning through us, they can then become the right way to cascade that in. So some of our best mentors and teachers at the company, they learn through me or learn through one of my co-founders. And via that, they've been able to cascade that domain knowledge, and they're the best trainers and stewards of enablement within the company. [gentle music]
- 14:28 – 16:14
How do you keep driving impact as the team grows?
- AHAli Hussain
From an operating principle standpoint, I'm very data-driven. Like, each team has KPIs that are very important. Every team, there are two or three metrics that are must focus and must have a path to. I also think as companies grow, they have more risk that they are getting distracted by way too many things. And so it's really important for me to lay down where I need each of my teams to be hyper-prioritized. And so one of the things I often do, if not monthly, certainly quarterly, is I talk to each of my reports. And I just do a sense check of where they're spending their time and ensuring that aligns with what I believe is the most impact they can drive for the company. What I spend less of my time is on the, the what and the how, meaning, like, the strategy to get there. If we need to hit a certain metric, I'm not in the weeds trying to figure out exactly where marketing spends their dollars to get to pipeline or which are the specific features in payments or billing that my product team is working on. I defer to that to people who are smarter on it, more on the ground, and have the domain knowledge that I just don't have in every part of the business. You just gotta work with people who are far more intelligent and have the knowledge to execute on that strategy. On the other hand, when it comes to strategy or setting direction, the leader must be decisive and consistent. They can't reinvent the wheel every couple weeks. They can't be stalled by decision fatigue. They must drive then mandates and then rally the org behind that. [gentle music]
- 16:14 – 17:10
What's the most common scaling mistake?
- AHAli Hussain
I think for me, you often, when you scale, you wanna get more long-term planning. And there often becomes this belief that I, hey, I have scaled. I need to be thinking 12 months out. And I think for a fast-growing company, that's just really hard. At the end of the day, your roadmap and what you build has to be a culmination of what is the highest impact for your customers, where you are finding product market fit, but also where the technology is moving. And I think thinking long term can often be a great disadvantage strategically and competitively. And I've become a lot more comfortable with embracing the uncertainty in the longer term while making sure all my calories go into being incredibly flexible and focused on driving the most impact for our customers in the short term.
- 17:10 – 19:03
How is AI changing the way you scale?
- AHAli Hussain
[gentle music] AI is going to require and change the way we build, we sell, we operate companies. And we have pretty significant AI mandates across every function. It is allowing each team to build in ways they otherwise may rely on engineering or have access to things that they can build or democratize it, which they may not otherwise have had the skill set to do. For example, most of our post-sales team has the ability to connect into our product and build on top to drive value for our merchants or make parts of their job more efficient than they otherwise would be able to. I've been amazed by people in marketing or support. It's provided a democratization of tools where they can get access to automation or tooling. And so these are some of the ways ... It's not even hardware, software. It's the different functions that have been able to do a lot more or move faster with AI access at their fingertips. In today's world, having the right clarity of mind of what differentiates you versus things that can be built more easily with just AI tooling, like Claude, and having a strong perspective of what makes you inevitable and defensible is incredibly important. So go touch the metal. Go build hard things, and don't shy away from that. I think if you do that with a ton of conviction, you'll be incredibly successful. [gentle music]
Episode duration: 19:11
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Transcript of episode nEPa7foiGQI
