Why great leaders make themselves obsolete | Eric Sager (COO, Plaid)

Brett Berson 0:00 [upbeat music] I'm curious to get your perspective on what is unique about leading a company in moments of incredible dynamic change that's very different than leading a company when that's not the case. So you join, and it feels like things are relatively ho-hum for maybe 18 months. Then you have the pandemic, then you have Visa M&A, then you have Fintech is dead market implosion, uh, and then you have AI. What's unique about running a decent portion of the company

Brett Berson 0:40 in the role of COO through those specific times?

Eric Sager 0:45 So I feel at least as far as my journey at Plaid is concerned, in a weird way, there's nothing unique about it because at almost every step there was something like that. [chuckles]

Brett Berson 0:51 We should talk about the, the, the, the three weeks where it wasn't that-

Eric Sager 0:55 So there's always been-- uh, there has always been, there's always been, you know, things like that. I, I think the key is always you just have to be relentlessly focused on kind of still moving the business itself forward, right? And so I think whether it's in the context of Visa or COVID or anything else, I think one of the things, like, we've always really been very focused on is, like, ruthlessly focusing on making sure that we're serving our customers, right? We're serving the ecosystem. We're continuing to move the ball forward irregardless of what happens on something like that. And so there's a couple of tactical ways in which I think we did that. You know, I think one is just in terms of how we speak to the company. We're very clear that this was just, like, one potential milestone among many. It is not the end goal. It is not the finish line. I think that's particularly por-important even if, like, you, you s- you know, you see companies now going public and so forth. I think I learned a lot there from my days at Square, where that's kind of how Sarah and Jack talked about the IPO, right? It wasn't the finish line. It was just another milestone amongst many milestones, and I think if you take that attitude, it's easier to remain focused. The second is the way you think about the team, and I think we've always tried to kind of minimize the number of folks that are kind of truly actively working on something like that, right? Like, in the case of COVID, obviously that's a little bit different. That affects everybody. But in the case of Visa, the team that was actively day-to-day working on the transaction was actually quite small, and everyone else was 100% focused on continuing to kind of grow the business. They were certainly aware of the transaction and aware of what was happening, and obviously how could you not be given some of the press at the time? But fundamentally, like, they were 100% focused on their day job, on, you know, again, serving our customers, serving consumers, like, building the, the platform and the ecosystem.

Brett Berson 2:27 Do you think it's mainly sort of a comms kind of a thing, where you're just sort of relentlessly landing those messages? So is it just narrative and storytelling and, and keeping people focused sort of in the way that you communicate, or are there other things that you have to do?

Eric Sager 2:42 I mean, I think it's the substantive as well, right? I mean, in this case, I don't know if I would think of it as kind of falling apart. I mean, certainly the deal didn't go through, but then subsequently, right? Like, we raised at a significant up round. We provided liquidity to our team, right? And so suddenly from an employee's perspective, we're actually pretty happy about that, right? And so, you know, I think that went a long way to kind of show the intent for what we're trying, trying to build. I, I think it's, it's, it's about just, like, the culture and, like, what you really value at the end of the day, right? And I think if you build a company around, like, you know, um, like any given milestone, like a, an acquisition or an IPO or something like that, I think it's really hard to build, like, a truly great company versus if you build a company and a culture, like, focused on actually kind of delivering for your customers, delivering for the, in our case, like, the ecosystem that we're building. Like, I generally think our teams, certainly I do, believe in that, right? And we believe in that, like, much more than we believe in, like, any one of these kind of externalities that might happen, and I think as a result, it makes it easier to kind of stay focused, right? So it doesn't just start when that event happens. It's like you're constantly talking about what you're trying to do for the ecosystem as a whole and for your customers and so forth and so on. And so it's not like it's a new thing versus I think to me sometimes if you think, if you frame it more as like a comms thing, it sounds a little bit more like it was reactive to just that moment, right? Versus no, this was always the culture that we were building. It never changed, right? And I think the really great companies, they've been able to do that. They've been able to maintain that focus, to maintain that culture over kind of a very long period of time irregardless of what happens, and I think that's what then builds the resiliency to handle all the ups and downs that you talked about. Like, it's very rare that you find a company where it's really just straight up and to the right.

Brett Berson 4:22 So if you pick that apart a little bit and you talk about

Brett Berson 4:24 sort of building the foundational culture that, to the point that you're making, kind of becomes that ballast through all the ups and downs of the company's life, how do you think about what it actually means to create or construct or build that? You know, the idea of being customer-centric, sort of all the sort of underpinnings that sort of drive the culture. If you pick it apart and it's sort of the-- you use sort of the least generic culture-y language, how do you actually go about doing it in your eyes?

Eric Sager 4:53 So I think the first st- first step is always this is obvious, right? But you actually have to take the time to think about it and kind of formalize it in a way, right? I, I don't think it's something you just wanna kind of leave to chance, and I think there's a lot to be said for, again, I think the founders like, like Zach and others. Like, I think he was very deliberate about the kind of culture that he wanted to build, and I've seen a lot of founders that it, it-- they're not. It is just kind of an afterthought, right? It, it's kind of the result of everything else that's happening around them versus like no, this is like I'm proactively thinking about what I want it to be and, and, and what I'm aiming for. I think once you have that, I think the second piece is you have to hire for it, and so you have to be willing to make actual trade-offs, right? In terms of the kinds of people that you're bringing on board, particularly in leadership positions, but really across the entire organization, right? And then I think you have to build out kind of like a, like a rewards in structure around that as well. So it has to matter for who gets promoted, who doesn't, right? Who gets a raise, who doesn't, who gets more equity, who doesn't. Like, those things have to be tied not just purely to results, but to, like, like an individual's kind of ability to kind of, kind of enhance and further and contribute kind of the, to the culture as well.

Brett Berson 6:04 What have you found have been the trickiest moments around culture or when it has been the most tested in your eyes?

Eric Sager 6:11 I think the hardest is always when there's a clear kind of conflict between the culture and, and like the-- some short-term goal. And so where you believe in the culture long term, you know what, you know what's right. But like in the short term, like there's a shortcut, right, that would clearly maybe lead to like better metrics or a better out-operational outcome. That becomes very challenging. And I think that's where, again, I think the really good leaders, like they are able to maintain that discipline and maintain that focus on kind of that long, long-term North Star vis-à-vis letting themselves, like I said earlier, to get distracted and say, "No, no, look, I, I know I can get to this one specific milestone. It's just a little bit quicker if I just make a few compromises." I don't think that ever ends there, right? Like once you go down that path and you see that and r-you s-you-- the folks around you see that, you kind of just... There's gonna be a second time, there's gonna be a third time, there's gonna be a fourth time. And, and before you know it, like those cultural principles don't really stand for much of anything anymore. It's pretty clear that like the short term has kind of overtaken kind of the, the long term.

Brett Berson 7:11 What about things like, um, you know, you have a star employee in some dimension, but they're, they're an asshole or they're violate your culture in some way, but they're really high-performing. Do you find like th-there are those tension points quite often or very rarely?

Eric Sager 7:28 I mean, those happen, right? I think there the key is you just have to be very open, honest and direct, right? So you just have to take that on right away. Um, and I certainly think, I think, I don't know, that's a conversation I've had with a lot of folks over, over the years. And I think the key there is always to make sure that, like you're really discerning kind of intent, right? So there, there's a version of the world where you might be acting in what like I or our culture perceives to be like an asshole, but you're not actually doing it on purpose, right? And so it's simply me coming to you and saying, "Hey, look, this is really being perceived as you being an asshole. Like, maybe if you tried it a little bit differently, we would get to a much better outcome together." Once you say that to people, the vast majority of people I've ever worked with, their reaction to this is say, "Hey, Eric, thank you. I really appreciate you caring about me enough to give me that feedback." And then they do their best to course-correct.

Brett Berson 8:15 Mm.

Eric Sager 8:16 And it might not be instantaneous, but over a period of time, you know, they evolve in terms of like how inter-- they, how they interact with their team and kind of the rest of the organization, and that solves. And somebody that was supposed to be an asshole two years ago suddenly is like just crushing it from a culture perspective.

Brett Berson 8:31 Yeah. And switching gears a little bit,

Brett Berson 8:33 um, you know, because you've been at the company for a long time, you've seen it go from a relatively small company to a relatively large company, or certainly a larger company. The natural thing that happens when you add more and more people and you grow is you end up with more bureaucratic organizations. But in almost always cases, there's some form of slowness that's, uh, introduced into a company. What are some of your observations about that in sort of the organism that, that is the, the company as it's evolved?

Eric Sager 9:02 I think there's a few things. I mean, so, so one, I think generally speaking, I do think it's true that the bigger you get, the harder it gets, right? But at the same time, like the bigger you get, the more assets you have at your disposal to, to kind of fight that off, right, in a way. And so I think there's a, there's a few kind of core things that I think I and, and we do. I think one is making sure that like even as you get bigger, you're always crystal clear on who the decision maker actually is. And I think you don't wanna live in a world where, you know, it's, it's unclear. You have five, six, seven people. They all think they're the ones ultimately kind of making the final decisions. And so I think even, even on something as mundane as just going through my leadership meetings or going through any meetings, like just being crystal clear at the end, like what are the things we're actually gonna go do? But also then crucially, like who's on point to do it? And trying our best to make sure that it is one person. It's not two people, it's not three people, it's not four people. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be collaboration. That doesn't mean you're not gonna kind of go to your colleagues and ask them for input. But I think we, we try very, very hard to make it clear like who's ultimately kind of making the call. I also think we've tried to avoid just kind of unnecessary layers. Um, it, it's funny to me sometimes now reading like what people are saying like in the context of AI and so forth 'cause I think we built-

Brett Berson 10:08 The planning of the org and everything?

Eric Sager 10:09 Yeah, like kind of we built, we built Plaid that way from, from day one, right? And so we never, we, we never really hired a lot of kind of middle managers, so to speak, right? The focus was really always on hiring as many frontline folks as we need that are either, you know, building products, developing products, working with our customers, et cetera. Or we needed like the right kind of, you know, senior leadership to kind of bring the right subject matter expertise in. But even for those folks, we have an expectation is that they can still do their job. Like, uh, they can still do the job of an IC, right? And so that's just kind of culturally where we're at. And I think again, Zach is a wonderful example of like a founder who actually does that, right? Like he really still does like IC-level work like every single day. And I think he expects that of, of his leadership team, and then we expect that of the, kind of the rest of the team as well.

Brett Berson 10:56 Do you think about

Brett Berson 10:58 driving pace and velocity in the context of what you're responsible for, and that you're kind of a governing force on that or no?

Eric Sager 11:08 I do. Um, but I think there's other dimensions to it as well, right? And so, uh, it, there's, there's a dimension of kind of speed and velocity. There's a dimension of kind of, you know, risk. And then there's probably kind of a dimension of cost. And you're trying to optimize like in that kind of three-dimensional space, so to speak. I, I, I don't think it's fair to say that, hey, no matter what the decision is or what, what, what you're talking about in the context of the business, that faster is always better. I think that's nonsense, right? There's plenty of examples where you don't want to do that. Um, particularly I think in a business like ours where the details really matter, right? Uh, I think one of the examples I oftentimes give folks is, you know, in our, in our world, if I tell you there's $101 in your bank account, but it's really $101.10, there's absolutely nothing funny about that. It's not like it's like, uh, you, you're, you're buying gems in a, in a video game or something, right? Like my kids do on their iPad. And if they get that wrong by a little bit, is it great? No. Is the world gonna go on? Yes. But if you fundamentally, as a consumer or as one of our customers, can't rely on the data that, that, that they're using to make very important recommendations and decisions, right? This decides, like, should you get a mortgage? If how-- if so, how big of a mortgage should you get? These are life-changing decisions for you and, and your family. Like, we have an obligation to make that as absolutely right as we possibly can. And if that means that in certain po-- in certain times, in certain pockets, like we move a little bit less fast, so be it.

Brett Berson 12:37 Mm-hmm.

Eric Sager 12:37 Right? That's just one example. And then oftentimes there's a cost dimension to it as well, where it's just a question of, like, how much money are you willing to spend, right, to make it go, make it go faster? Um, and so sometimes that trade-off doesn't make sense.

Brett Berson 12:48 Do you talk about that in the context of whatever you're working on as a team or an org? Like, "We are going to go slow here," or, "We are going to go fast here"?

Eric Sager 13:00 I don't know, I don't know that I would frame it as we go slow. I, I think that's a [chuckles] like, like that's not the branding that I think is gonna resonate with folks.

Brett Berson 13:07 Well, we need to be methodical and precise here.

Eric Sager 13:09 Exactly. Right. Like, I think I, I would frame it more as, "Look, like this is one area where we just absolutely cannot afford to get it wrong." Right? And so that by definition means you're going to have to make some sacrifices when it comes to speed. And so it's just understanding for like any given area across those three dimensions, like where do we actually want to play? And so we talk about it in that context, right? Like, and so it's a trade-off. Again, you can't have a-- you can't have everything. There's no way. That's not how the world works. And so it's about being honest upfront about the trade-offs that you're making when it comes to this specific decision, this specific project, this specific part of the business, and then executing accordingly. Like, that's the way I would think about it. And so-- and that can evolve over time, right? It can evolve as, like, the technology and our capabilities evolve. It can evolve as, like, regulation evolves. It can evolve as, like, com-- the competitive set of other solutions that are out there in the market evolve. So these things aren't static either, but it's being clear about what they are when you set out, and it's about having, having the discipline to kind of go back and reevaluate and look at does that trade-off still make sense? If it does, fantastic. If it doesn't, you need to change it to get it in line, right, with what kind of the, the, the current kind of market and opportunity actually demand.

Brett Berson 14:20 Do you find that it's-- that you often, as a team, you know, think this is a time we need to be methodical and actually you rethink it and actually we should sort of err towards speed? Or the easiest thing is figuring out the, that set of trade-offs, and then the hard thing is sort of going and actioning sort of on that.

Eric Sager 14:41 For better or worse, I think Zach and I have a fantastic partnership there, right? Like, where he tends to be the one that's coming in and saying like, "We should move faster." And then the German in me is a bit more methodical about it, right? [chuckles] And so that's a good tension at the end of the day to make sure that we're actually kind of executing on it on a, in a sustainable way. And I think it's, it's a s- it's a part of like why w- I think we've been so successful, right? I think we've had competitors that sacrificed, you know, everything at the altar of speed, um, and it didn't work out, and it didn't, and not at all. And so again, it's about being, being smart. And so are there moments where even I find, yeah, like we should be going faster? Absolutely.

Brett Berson 15:16 Mm-hmm.

Eric Sager 15:16 Right? Like that, it's not that that doesn't happen. But I think we have a lot of folks across the business that probably tend to be more aggressive on the speed side than, than I naturally am. But it ends up being a really, really good balance, right, to kind of make sure that we're actually getting to the sweet spot for what the situation demands.

Brett Berson 15:32 Maybe to share a little bit about how you've thought about organizing the company over the company's life. I don't know if there are certain chapters you would break it apart into. How would you articulate sort of your higher level thinking on how to organize a company? There's so many ways, and you're also multi-product company now. You have different types of customers, two-person companies, two hundred thousand person companies, different sectors. What are the different incarnations of org design and what have you landed on now, and maybe kind of what are some of the things you've gotten right or wrong?

Eric Sager 16:06 I mean, I'll talk about it more through kind of the, the go-to-market lens, although on the product lens it's kind of evolved in, in, in similar ways, right? And so in the early days there was only one flavor. And so it, it didn't matter. Like an opportunity would come in, and we get assigned to an AE, and it would get worked. But there was no notion of it this is a relatively, this is a startup or this is an enterprise customer or anything like that. And I think in, in the very early days that's actually workable. Uh, and I think the general principle there is like you want to avoid unnecessary complexity, right? And so it's so much when you're first getting started is about finding the right kind of product market fit within the right segment, within the right use case. You can still afford to find like true kind of generalists, and your products are probably simpler, right? Or at least more, more narrow, right? You're, you're not-- you're unlikely to start with fifteen different products at the same time. You're starting with one thing. And so, you know, in the case of Plaid, that was mainly auth, which is just kind of the account and routing number. It's what customers use to be able to kind of initially connect the bank account to then kind of, you know, you know, fund it. That's in and of itself not that difficult to explain to, to somebody, and it doesn't really matter that much of whether you're talking to an enterprise customer or you're talking to-

Brett Berson 17:15 Like the unit of value they want is very similar.

Eric Sager 17:16 Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's very similar.

Brett Berson 17:18 Mm-hmm.

Eric Sager 17:18 Right? And so that's where we started, and then we've very quickly realized as we got bigger and bigger, hey, there's actually a, a real difference now in terms of how big companies are buying our products from how small companies are buying them. And so then we kind of had a, you know, s- T-shirt sized it, you know, small, medium, large. We called it something else, but conceptually kind of that's, that's what it was. And then there, you know, and it's kind of, that's kind of at the time that I came in.

Brett Berson 17:42 Was that intuitive, that shift? Like what, what, what were the signs that it was the time to do it and it wasn't too early and it wasn't too late if you just had to kind of orient?

Eric Sager 17:52 I think you, you, you really kind of started seeing like a divergence in needs from those customers, right? And so it was we had gone from one product to kind of three products, like the newer products like were fundamentally different in terms of like how they were being sold. And yet all three T-shirt size segments, right? Like our, our startup segment, kind of our mid-market segment, our enterprise segments were all rapidly growing. Then it's, I think, relatively easy to kind of go down that path of kind of specializing. I think that also-

Brett Berson 18:20 But you're starting to hear different things from the customers.

Eric Sager 18:22 Very different things, right?

Brett Berson 18:23 Yeah. And that's what's guiding the decision.

Eric Sager 18:24 Yeah, and it, it's, and it, it's in, it's in all facets, right? It's like, what do you expect from the product? Like, what do you expect from the sales team? What do you expect from the account management team? What do you expect from your support team? What do you expect from your sh- you know, uh, solutions engineering or sales engineering team? Like, it starts diverging quite a bit, which is intuitive, right? Like, if you've ever tried to get any of these things implemented, you know, how we implement even today with, like, the largest companies in the world to how we implement with a startup is, is very, very, very different. And so, you know, if we're implementing a solution, pick a company like Citibank, right? Or on the one hand, we're, we're implementing a solution with a startup that just got going that has two people working for it who are, like, really kind of technical, it's just a totally different-

Brett Berson 19:03 Yeah

Eric Sager 19:04 ... different process. And so y- we started kind of specializing along, along those dimensions. And at the time at least, we, we still had-- we were still very functionally driven, and the functions were separate. So you had a sales team, you had an account management team, you had a customer support team. And I think one of the things that very quickly became clear to me was, like, those handoffs between kind of sales and account management, like, just they weren't working very well. And I think I've been blessed to have a role at Plaid where I've kind of always generally been able to kind of, you know, oversee all kind of aspects of the business. So everything from marketing to kind of sales to account management to support, et cetera. And so I think it was much easier for me to kind of put myself then in the customer's shoes and say: Well, like, if I was interacting with Plaid, how would I really want this af- interaction to go, right? And so certainly personally, like, I've gone through this as a consumer of many products where I call into one person, I tell them my life story, then they eventually connect me to another person, or they go away and a new person comes in, and then I have to repeat my life story again, right? [chuckles] And then I have to repeat it again and again and again. And honestly, by the fourth time, I'm like, "I've had enough of this, okay?" Like, "I'm done here." Like, how can you not know this stuff by now, right? And there's a technological solution to that, right? To at least partially... But there's also, I think, an organizational kind of structural solution. So one

Eric Sager 20:14 thing that we did is we then created our segments, but then we put all the functions within the segment together so that the person leading the segment owned the entire end-to-end customer relationship, right? And so suddenly, even if it wasn't the exact same person doing it, you had somebody much closer to the customer who was accountable for making sure that, like, their ex- the customer's experience with our sales team smoothly translated into the customer's experience with our account management team, smoothly translated into the experience with our support team, and so forth and so on. And that just dramatically improved both customer satisfaction overall, their ability to implement and scale kind of their initial product and use case, and then our ability to successfully cross-sell and upsell them into all these other solutions that we had available.

Brett Berson 20:53 What are the downsides of organizing that way?

Eric Sager 20:55 There's an element of you lose some fungibility, right? And so you just have less generalists. You're starting to go down a more kind of specialized, specialized path. So it becomes either more expensive or, like, more important for you to really have a well-grounded understanding of, like, w- how your business is going to evolve. Otherwise, you know, if you hire too many startup folks, and then it ends up being your business actually grows much faster in enterprise, now you're mismatched, right? It's hard to take the, the startup folks and just now turn them into enterprise folks. In many cases, frankly, vice versa, right? So even if it moves in the other direction, you've got a, you've got a mismatch there. And so you need to understand your business better. You need to be more thoughtful about kind of, like, how you get ahead of that, because in, in many of these cases, right, it's our teams can get up to speed quickly, but it still takes a few months to get them up to speed. And so if you're not careful, you can really kind of create, uh, like, a dissonance there where you just don't have the capacity to kind of meet the needs of your customer in a particular segment. Versus if you take a more generalized approach, again, it's won't be as good, but it's just more fungible across. It's easier to move them from one part of the business to the other.

Brett Berson 22:03 What else can you share about how the org has evolved in the

Brett Berson 22:06 last handful of years?

Eric Sager 22:07 So it was that we kind of evolved from, like, one size fits all to kind of size-based, and then the next step for us was just kind of really adding kind of verticals to that, right? And so this is, like, within enterprise, whether you're in healthcare or in automotive, or whether you're in real estate or whatever, like, that buying is also different, right? And so we added another layer of kind of specialization, um, to that. And so for us, obviously, kind of fintech is an important segment, like banking and wealth is an important segment. And so we kind of really actually kind of created segments that were being run as segments where that shared expertise, um, really started to come to bear. And that probably started, you know, three, four years ago. And now suddenly, you know, instead of having somebody who's, yes, only focused on big customers, but it could be any flavor of big customer, now it's one specific flavor of big customer where they're getting the experience of being able to do that over and over and over again. And that was really, really helpful. And then the, the final step now has been with, like, the proliferation of products that we've brought to market kind of successfully, right? So it's no longer just aggregation. It's what we're doing on credit. It's what we're doing on fraud. It's what we're doing on payments. Like, in every single one of those cases, we've really built kind of intelli- an intelligence layer on top of the Plaid network. We have amazing customers that are already operating at scale that's seeing kind of massive benefits. We've now kind of built horizontal teams that then help support our vertical teams, right? And so the key there is if you're an enterprise customer in the real estate space, you wanna be treated like an enterprise customer in the real estate space. You want one person that can speak to you about everything to do with Plaid, but at the same time, you still need expertise when you want to help, help on fraud versus if you want help on payments versus if you want help on, on, on credit and so forth and so on. And so the way we've structured that is, like, if you're on the vertical, like, you own it, you're kind of the quarterback, and there's an expectation that you understand every use case, you know, call it to eighty percent. But where you need to, you have a team of experts that kind of sit horizontally, um, that bring that, like, like, that kind of that last mile of product.

Brett Berson 24:06 When you think about some of these org decisions,

Brett Berson 24:08 what do you think you did too soon or too late? And maybe it's just, you know, you have the benefit of hindsight, but when you look back at some of these architectural decisions, are there things that, that if you could have a mulligan and do it over again

Eric Sager 24:21 I mean, look, if I, I, I could probably use a thousand mulligans, [chuckles] right? Like, I, I don't think I've ever been in a situation where you look backwards and you just nailed it, right? I think anybody that tells you that, like, they haven't thought enough about, like, you know, the journey that they, they've been on, even if it's been successful. Um, look, I think there's definitely pockets where we should have specialized more and, and faster. I think there's other areas where, you know, we, we probably went too quick, right? Like, like we were really still in a zero to one phase, right? Like, we didn't need, like, a whole team of people trying to sell that product. What we really needed is a few select relationships with s- very specific customers to kind of help us co-create and co-develop. And then once we knew we had that product market fit for that particular combination of kind of vertical and use case, then you start ramping it up. And so I've, I've made both mistakes, frankly, like in, in, in, in either direction. I think the key for us has been to just kind of build the organization in a way that it's resilient enough, it's flexible enough, and it has enough spare capacity. That's the last one, like, something I really believe in is like, "Hey, I really don't ever wanna be at like, right at 100% capacity." I'm willing to, to pay for some inefficiency so that as the market evolves, as our product evolves, et cetera, like, I have the capacity to kind of adjust to it in real time much more quickly than I otherwise could. And I think that's worked wonders, right? And so w- 'cause what it really allowed us to do is, you know, more recently, like, you know, now we've had, you know, hundreds of AI companies signing up, and we just announced, you know, OpenAI, we announced Perplexity, we announced Replit. And so all these things, I think, were possible because we saw that opportunity about kind of developing maybe like 18 months ago, and we were very quickly able to kind of marshal folks towards that, you know, f- across product, engineering, design, and go-to-market. And that was only possible because we had spare capacity, right? If we had dedicated all those folks at 100% to all these other opportunities where we were already seeing huge demand from customers and growing, I don't know that we would've been able to react as quickly to what has been obviously a huge opportunity for us, in addition to, to being able to grow, like, f- what we already had.

Brett Berson 26:24 Something you didn't talk as much about is how product and engineering fits into the org design. And I would assume it gets infinitely more complicated when you have many segments in terms of verticals, many company sizes, and then many products, and you're trying to build a roadmap, and this customer wants this, and that customer wants this. What's been sort of the high level path of product and eng as it relates to sort of org design?

Eric Sager 26:52 I mean, there we have what we call, like, product areas, right? And so you have product area dedicated to payments, product area dedicated to fraud, product area dedicated to credit. And so they're the ones kind of driving that roadmap for that kind of specific area. And in part it's those solutions are aimed at, like, even different buyers at the same customer, right? And so I think the key then, like you said, is, okay, for any given customer, you know, what do they really want across that whole, like, spectrum to the extent that they want to buy all of those products? And generally, I think we've been able to manage that quite well, where I think we've just made the decision for credit with an eye towards how do we build the best possible credit solutions for the ecosystem? We've made the decisions on fraud with an eye towards how can we build the best possible fraud solutions for the ecosystem? I think it's been very rare that customers have essentially said, "Look, I'm not going to buy your credit solution until you also build this specific feature on fraud," even though from our perspective, that feature would be further down the list. It just truly very rarely happens.

Brett Berson 27:48 But what about the fraud offering for a 10-person company versus a million-person company?

Eric Sager 27:53 That is, I think, fundamentally a decision for, like, our fraud team, right? Like, I mean, I partner with them, like our teams partner with them from a, from a sales and from a sales and marketing kind of go-to-market perspective. But at the end of the day, that's literally the work of our product managers, like on fraud, is to understand the overall market enough to say, "Okay, well, where do we think relative to alternatives we can build kind of the best possible solutions?" If anything, the only other lens for us that's important is, you know, where does it help us grow the network? 'Cause at the end of the day, we're kind of really like a network of networks, right? And so fundamentally, there are pockets where having a new consumer sign up for Plaid benefits all of our products and solutions. Having a new account connected to the ecosystem benefits all of our products and solutions. So there's a bit of a bias there to say, "Oh, not just what makes me the most money," but it's a-- it's first and foremost about what's all-- what allows us to build the network. Because it's the network that then delivers a better outcome for consumers, it delivers out better outcome for our developers, and it delivers a better outcome for the ecosystem as a whole. And so you think about that in a very specific use case, like if it's you as a consumer wanting to get a mortgage, you know, and you want to do that in an easy way where you can easily kind of cross-shop different opportunities, it, it's very important for us to, A, obviously have a relationship with you. But then also if you have 10 accounts that are relevant, to have all 10 of those accounts ideally already connected to Plaid so that that becomes a very seamless process versus having to go through and connecting each account, you know, one at a time. Now, that's gotten a lot faster for us as well, but that's obviously more cumbersome than just like, "Hey, I already have them all connected. Let me share it." You can literally instantaneously get the offers that you're looking for. You're happy as a consumer, right? The developer is happy because it's a really tight match between your needs and, and, and, and, and their product. And the ecosystem as a whole is improved, right? Because it's just a much more efficient way of kind of matching your demand with the right supply.

Brett Berson 29:44 What about pre and post-sales and making

Brett Berson 29:47 that as smooth as possible? Do you have traditional account management in, in, in each one of these segments?

Eric Sager 29:51 Yeah. And, and I, and I think, you know, I think there, uh, I think my general philosophy over years has always been like both for support and I think kind of account management, uh, engineering, solutions engineering, sales engineering, et cetera. It's always been, you know, always available, never needed-

Brett Berson 30:08 Mm-hmm

Eric Sager 30:08 ... is, is the ideal mantra, right? So I'm a big believer in like, and I think we've been really focused on building our products to such an ex- to such a level of quality that they could theoretically be self-serve, and oftentimes are, right? And so, you know, one of the things y- you see a lot of is you see even very big customers, uh, companies Implement with Plaid and scale to massive use cases without ever having to talk to anybody. That's incredible. That's-- And so we don't hide a, a customer's ability to contact us or anything like that. We want to make it easy, while at the same time making the product so good that that just doesn't happen, you know, as often. And then a customer can choose, right? And they can kind of choose to engage with us whenever they want to. And then obviously, like we're monitoring kind of the health of their integrations, the health of their product, the health of their use case, and where we think we have something to add to kind of meaningfully make it better, then we proactively reach out there to help them, right? And so if you on your own aren't quite getting to the place that we think you should be, either in terms of how quickly you're moving through the process or in terms of the results that you're, you're seeing, we'll, we'll proactively engage to, to help you with that.

Brett Berson 31:15 What about sort of the expand motion when you're getting people to go multi-product with you? Is that also pretty low touch, no touch?

Eric Sager 31:21 Again, I think it depends on, on, on, on the phase and like the kind of customer and, and then, and the specific, specific use case. Um, I think generally there the, the first thing for us is, is just awareness, right? I think we're lucky that we have a lot of really amazing customers. We're lucky that a lot of those customers are obviously incredibly satisfied. They've been with us for a very long time, right? They have really great NRR, et cetera. But I think there's still pockets, particularly with a lot of the kind of intelligent solutions that we've more recently brought to market, where even some of our existing customers aren't yet aware of them, right? And so, you know, that's not true in core aggregation. Like I think if you think about in the US, like building a product where it depends on bank connectivity or open finance connectivity, the odds are just insanely high that you're going to consider Plaid, right? It just... I mean, it's like a fireable offense. Like if you, if you have to go explain to your boss that you made a purchase decision in this space and you just never considered us-

Brett Berson 32:15 Mm

Eric Sager 32:15 ... and it didn't, it doesn't go incredibly well, good luck with that, right? Like, that's not gonna land well. I think our job is to make sure that when you think about payments, when you think about fraud, when you think about credit, like we end up in that same place. And I think first and foremost, that just starts with awareness. Because once a customer has the awareness, then they obviously connect that with the experience that they currently have on Plaid, which is generally gonna be very, very good.

Brett Berson 32:39 Mm-hmm.

Eric Sager 32:40 And now they're like, "Okay, well, let me learn more." And then we give them the path to either do that on their own or once again, like they can engage with one of our teams. Like I said earlier, like whoever owns that relationship can bring in more expertise from some of our horizontal teams where they're needed. And then we have a whole engine on the back end in terms of account managers, implementation teams-

Brett Berson 32:58 Yeah

Eric Sager 32:58 ... solutions engineering teams, et cetera, that will help you implement the solution and then scale it.

Brett Berson 33:02 But do you ever think about, you know, so much of what you're doing from a product and engineering perspective is you wanna deliver on the promise for the customer with very little human intervention. And so like if the account manager never existed, m-maybe they have no impact on a, on a given customer. Like do you think about disambiguating just what the steady state of a customer is gonna do without this account management intervention?

Eric Sager 33:29 Do I think about it? Yes. Right? Do I think that's, um, that there's enough there to throttle it, right? Or to in any way kind of not be there when they ask for help? Absolutely not.

Brett Berson 33:40 Mm.

Eric Sager 33:40 Right? And so, you know, a-again, like we, we, we run a business that at scale is an, is an incredible business, right? Um, and so the last thing I would want to do is you as a customer had, had a great experience with our first product, you know, you have an issue with the second product and somehow, like there's just no help to be had. I think that's crazy, right? I think given the, the product work that we've done over the years, I think we've proven time and time again that we're going from strength to strength to strength. And you're seeing, again, not just NRR, but also the number of products that our customers are using continue to tick up. And so you just think about like even if you got that wrong one time, like how much potential future like relationship value and even just like hard LTV you're giving up, makes no sense whatsoever. There's just, there's almost no amount of money, right, that I wouldn't reasonably spend to make sure that one of our customers gets to a good outcome. And even if that makes that account unprofitable, that experience will kind of resonate across the, the, the rest of the ecosystem, and you'll make it back on, on, on, on other use cases.

Brett Berson 34:48 What are the other ways, if someone were to look at how you run your org, that sort of obsession expresses itself? That sort of, "I'm gonna go to the ends of the earth for the customer." Many times it sounds like you're not gonna be, uh, penny-wise, pound-foolish. Are there other points or the way that you've oriented the org that sort of flow from that sort of way of thinking about things?

Eric Sager 35:13 Well, so I think, I think first off, it's not just the customers, also consumers, right? So I think it's really important for us that consumers, even though they never pay us, that at the end of the day, consumers get a consistently better outcome, right? And, and certainly that I think has been true in a massive, massive, massive way at the ecosystem level. For the vast majority of people, the reality is this allows people to make better decisions for themselves, better decisions for their families, better decisions for their small business, and it allows them to get better products for their needs at a lower cost. That is fantastic, right? And that's the North Star. And I think if you do that through this relationship with developers where like you leave no stone unturned to kind of make their experience as good as you can possibly make it, there's just so much value created in that ecosystem that there's always gonna be enough left over for us. Always has been, right? And so, like I understand the question, but I, I think in practice, like I and we have never really been forced into a situation, right, like where we had to choose between, well, we don't have enough money to invest to give you this amazing experience. It's there, and again, I think that's a testament to how good our products are. It's a testament to how easy it is to kind of implement and scale them essentially already. And so we can afford to make sure that if something isn't the way it ought to be, that we can kind of fix that as quickly and as reliably as possible.

Brett Berson 36:32 At this point in your journey with the company and the scale of the company What is excellence in your role as COO?

Eric Sager 36:40 I'd say there's a few vectors to it. I think the first one is it's actually not Plaid. It's like, is the ecosystem overall creating

Eric Sager 36:49 more value for consumers than before? I really think about that quite a bit, right? And so are people writ large better off because of the tools that we brought into the world? Are our payment solution making it easier and cheaper and better to buy the things that you want to buy when you want to buy them, how you want to buy them? Are our fraud solutions, right, like eliminating fraud that otherwise would, would harm the ecosystem, et cetera. I think that's one.

Brett Berson 37:14 Do you think about measuring that in any level of precision, or it's just a, a visceral feel or gut feel?

Eric Sager 37:18 I mean, we, we do a lot of work to try to kind of to, to do measure that, right? And I think, like I said, there's a lot of really tangible things that, you know, we can share, you can look up around like, okay, well, what's happened to over-limit fees? What's happened to trading fees? What's happened to average APRs and so forth, adjusted for obviously kind of base level kind of interest rates, et cetera. And you can see all those things improving. And the reality is that just, like, even what seem to be relatively minor improvements are massive, right? [chuckles] I mean, if I told you look like it's like, you know, for this type of population, it went from prime plus seven to pr- prime plus six and a half, you just put billions of dollars back into people's pockets. And I think that's a fundamentally good thing for everybody involved, right? Like, I think the institutions agree with that. I think policymakers and regulators agree with that. I think our customers certainly agree with that. And, you know, for us, it's an important component of it. And so I think that's the first piece, because I think if you don't do that, right, like then you're just kind of trying to kind of extract rents. You're trying to get people to do things that are actually aren't in their best interest. I don't think it's mission aligned with the kind of company that we are and that we want to build. And so that's number one. I think two then is, okay, look, are we kind of getting our fair share of that value, right? Like we've put all this work in, we've built all these amazing solutions, and I think that's generally measured m- both in kind of just usage, like is the network growing, but al-also re-revenue. I think the third is, you know, what kind of team am I building, right? Like, is it the kind of organization where like if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, like all kinds of bad things start happening? Or is the reality like if I do get hit by a bus tomorrow, like, well, my kids will be sad, and my wife will be sad, and hopefully Zach will be a little bit sad. Like, the world will go on, right, for consumers, for our customers, for Plaid, because of the, the kind of the team and the infrastructure and the tools and everything else that we've built, right? And, and I think, like, I take great pride in the idea that I feel, I feel like if I left tomorrow, like I think Plaid will be just fine. And I think too often you find situations where that's actually not the case. And in some ways, to me, that's like the ultimate acid test of did you do a good job or not? You know, my own lived experience is like every time I've thought I've made myself useless and obsolete, like there's always been some new opportunity, right? That even at the company that I'm at that came up where like, actually, like you could use your skill set to kind of make yourself useless and redundant, like in this particular role as well, and you just kind of roll it forward. But those are probably kind of the, the three things, right? There's like, hey, what are we doing at the ecosystem level? Like, are we really kind of growing kind of the network and the business itself? And then, you know, are, are you building a team and a, a structure and an engine that makes all this kind of repeatable and consistent even without you there.

Brett Berson 39:54 But do you think in that case that you're trying to build an org so that if you weren't there navigating Chase or what you're doing with OpenAI or whoever, that the company would be perfectly well off without you? Or is there sort of these certain pockets of basically jobs to be done that, you know, sit in your remit, and if you were gone, you'd actually have to go get somebody else that could do-

Eric Sager 40:18 You probably would have to get somebody else, right? It's also not about me, right? It's anybody in a role like this, right? Like you probably shouldn't be in it if you can't add some value at the point of attack. It's just the point of attack ends up evolving, right? Like, I think it's, it's, it's more maybe that. It's like if, if I found myself focused on the same point of attack for like too long a period of time, my conclusion would be, well, I'm haven't really done a good enough job to build out like the capabilities that we need to be able to do that in a sustainable kind of long-term way. I can probably do it, and there's maybe even I would say like maybe twenty percent of my job is just the stuff I really like to do, which I still then do, right? So there's still like certain customers that I go sell with myself, right? Because I love doing it. I probably don't need to, right? It keeps me sharp, right? Like it's, it's fun. And so I think that's another vector, right? Like where like at some point, like if you've done it, like you said, as long as I have, right? Even true for I think many founders, like you kind of deserve to take twenty percent-

Brett Berson 41:17 Yeah

Eric Sager 41:17 ... of this stuff that you just kind of you like it, right?

Brett Berson 41:19 Yeah.

Eric Sager 41:19 Like you're good at it, you like it, kind of do that. But then that eighty percent really is, okay, hey, where can I kind of w- uniquely move the ball forward? But the spirit there is always like, that's probably not a permanent thing. That's something where like you need to backfill that with like the actual structure to be able to make it-

Brett Berson 41:33 Maybe sort of on a similar thread, we h-- you hinted on this just a little while ago. In your role of COO, how do you think about what is the IC work that you should be doing or you do to this day, even with a large org?

Eric Sager 41:46 I think it really changes. So like I think so one part is twenty percent of it is like, hey, I just love doing this. And as long as nobody tells me I'm shit at it, like I'm gonna keep doing it.

Brett Berson 41:55 And so for you, you hinted at it, but that's things like-

Eric Sager 41:57 Like some of the big partnerships, right? Some of the big deals like, uh, or, or some of the small ones that are like very cutting edge, right? Like some of the early kind of AI deals and so forth. Like, I think that's just super fun. It like allows me to learn new things, like allows to move faster, right? Because, you know, I, I can say yes to things and no to things like very rapidly in a way that probably-

Brett Berson 42:17 And so you'll like work the deal yourself.

Eric Sager 42:19 I mean, like, yes, basically.

Brett Berson 42:20 Yeah.

Eric Sager 42:21 Yeah. Like I'm in there-

Brett Berson 42:22 That's cool

Eric Sager 42:22 ... like negotiating with the right folks, right? But it's, it's, it's just, it's unique. Like, I've been there for so long. Like, it's like other than Zach, there's probably nobody else at Plaid that can say yes or no as quickly to certain things as, as, as I can. So that, that's one. I, I think then it's, um, it's what are the things that are kind of important- Right? So think of like the importance on one axis. There's a, there's an element of like, is this like a one-way door? So there's, there's some things that are kind of important, but like, look, if, if it goes wrong, you can kind of hit rewind, and there's things where like, no, you can't fix it. It's just like this is the new paradigm, right? And then the third is just like more subjective, but it's like how good is the, the talent that we have available internally to do this? And so in certain pockets we have just incredible people, um, and they have the capacity. And so then the default would be, even if it's important, even if it's a one-way street, I would start with like delegating it first.

Brett Berson 43:15 What about at what altitude you're flying in the org? Do you find in certain areas you go down to the IC that's responsible, you know, maybe multiple layers deep versus, you know, most of the time you'll fly at a certain altitude? Like what about sort of that question?

Eric Sager 43:28 I think I've inadvertently scared quite a few folks, you know, [chuckles] like who are new to Plaid, and I will literally call them. Like I will just like get-

Brett Berson 43:36 And they're not excited to hear from you?

Eric Sager 43:37 And they're just like, "What?" They're just like sh- like the first time it happens-

Brett Berson 43:40 They're not thinking this is a great reason that you're reaching out-

Eric Sager 43:43 Yeah, no

Brett Berson 43:43 ... to tell you-

Eric Sager 43:44 They're just like, "What the-"

Brett Berson 43:44 "... what a great job they're doing"

Eric Sager 43:45 "... what is hap- what is happening?" And you can tell like they realize like, uh, you know, I'm calling them, and they're just like, "Wait, wait, what? Like what do you mean? Is everything okay?" It's like, "No, don't worry. I just have a couple questions," you know? Um, and you can almost hear

Eric Sager 43:57 them Slacking their manager in the background, [chuckles] you know, like... But I think that's a feature, right? I think Zach operates that way. I think ev- all good founders, like I think at the end of the day, like if you allow yourself to just be so far away from the point of attack, I think it's really hard to be good or great. Um, I also think it's really hard to kind of earn the respect of your teams, right? I think so many of those stories that will end up making the rounds at Plaid, and it's like, "Oh, Eric came in. He actually like talked to me about it. He actually helped me. He actually joined the call, and it, it-- we got to a better outcome," right? And it's not, that's not why I do it, but I think it's, it's a, it's a feature kind of, kind of, kind of not a bug. Um, but so sometimes it just, it just happens. Sometimes it's there's just a lot of relationships that I've had over the, the years, right? Where we have a customer that I've literally worked with for eight years, where I have the relationship with the founder or the CEO and the CPO and so forth and so on. And so sometimes it's just easier for us to kind of have that conversation. And again, I have the advantage of in those moments being able to say yes and no instantaneously, right? And that goes a long way. But the framing all tends to come back to those three dimensions, right? Is it, how important is it? Is it a one-way door or not? And then do we have the kind of the talent/the capacity internally for somebody to kind of really nail it? And then I go from there. And like when times are good, you know, I have a lot of free time on my hands, which Zach's not always-- Zach's always like, "Hey, what are you doing?" You know? But the reality is like if you've built a really kickass team and they're doing a great job and they're on top of it, like in a role like mine, like you actually do have that spare capacity again, right?

Brett Berson 45:34 Mm.

Eric Sager 45:34 But that is, to me, it's a feature, right? Because if something goes wrong, it's not only that we have capacity at the organizational level, like I have capacity, and I don't have to take from something else. Like I can immediately kind of lead the charge, um, whether that's a unique opportunity or a unique threat.

Brett Berson 45:52 At the org level, this sort of idea of, of not redlining at all times so that you can go after emergent things that present itself, have you found there are downsides? Like I find every decision there's positives and negatives. Is, is Slack in the system-- Are there things you have to manage around or it can create lack of intensity or I don't know.

Eric Sager 46:15 Look, I think you can make that argument, right? Like, I mean, particularly like with you, if you, if you hear the whole like, you know, what is it? Like every day it's like everyone's working like fourteen hours a day-

Brett Berson 46:24 Right

Eric Sager 46:24 ... or whatever it is, like seven days a week. Like the truth is, look, if, if you are so on top of it that you are perfect about how you're allocating your seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, then that is better than what I'm describing.

Brett Berson 46:38 Mm.

Eric Sager 46:38 It's just flat out better, right? Like you're able to do more. You're never making mistakes. You're always doing the right thing. The problem becomes if you're ever wrong, your ability to course correct, to have the space to actually identify it, and then your ability to quickly course correct because now it's-- you have-- you're gonna get stuck at, well, what am I gonna take from? That's the challenge. And so I think more realistically, most businesses operate in a world where they do make mistakes, right? And unforeseen opportunities and threats do come their way. In those moments, like that spare capacity is an absolute godsend in terms of your ability to kind of react and to tackle that. And that's no different than sports or anything else, right? Like if you play basketball and every minute of the game you're going 100% redline to it, you just got absolutely nothing left, and then suddenly like at the end of the game, like you have to make a play, I don't like your odds, right? Versus if I was just a little bit smarter and like a few times here and there, like I just walked to the sideline instead of sprinting to the sideline, et cetera, and I've just got a little bit more ener-energy left it... This has nothing to do with how you practice leading up to it, right? It's like how you're playing the actual game. I, I think I'll win.

Brett Berson 47:49 What about as the business evolves, how do you build sort of your feel for the business? You know, you sort of hinted on this a little bit, but like I assume when you first join the company, it's much smaller, single product company. Your kind of feel for the business and the customer, what's going on kinda comes very naturally. You might be all in one room or one floor plate or whatever. The business expands. You know, you start to look at dashboards. You have staff meetings, you have... But it's harder, I think, to sort of have that feel, and I think that feel matters a lot because that sort of drives your judgment and instinct and sort of... What, sort of have you noticed in, in that dimension?

Eric Sager 48:28 I think you cannot get yourself separated from the point of attack. It's as simple as that, right? So that means like talking to ICs directly, talking to-- And I, look, I, I go spend time with everyone. Like, like we hire somebody like straight out of undergrad, right? Like starts with Plaid- I will go spend time with them like a month in, two months in, just kind of understanding-

Brett Berson 48:48 Yeah, what are you doing?

Eric Sager 48:48 "What are you doing? What's working for you? What's your..." Like, that is all so valuable, right? It, it's not, that's not rocket science, right? I don't think it's particularly [chuckles] clever. It's just like, hey, like go spend time with your team, go spend time with customers, go spend time with partners. Like, like be at the front lines. And I think the more of my time I can spend on that, and the less I spend it on, you know, kind of strategy and like kind of internal stuff, I think the more effective I think I am, and the more I think effective ultimately like Plaid is. But I think that takes like energy, it takes passion, right? Like you have to really care about what you're doing, your customers, right? Like the use cases. I think it's hard to do if you're working on a business where like you don't care about the business, if that makes sense, right? And so I think that's, that's sometimes I s- I see that, right? Where folks are joining companies where like they don't really care about it, they just think it's gonna do well financially. And then you find those executives have a very hard time motivating themselves, like day in and day out to be at the front lines. But that's not why they're doing it, right? [chuckles] Like they-- It's not the reason. And so for me, like I've, you know, I, I really, I really believe, like I said, like in the products and solutions that we're bringing to market and the ecosystem that we're trying to build and the benefit that, that, that, you know, consumers derive from it and our customers derive. And so I love talking to them about, "Okay, but like how are you building our-- how are you using our credit solutions? Like what are you even trying to solve in the place? Like how-- where do you think that's going? Like what would you want to see in the future that would put you in an even better position to ser-serve your customers, going our consumers overall, like even better?" And I just spend a lot of time on, on that. And so yeah, I don't think there's anything hugely insightful there. It's just, it's just the discipline of being able to do that day in and day out, I think is the trick. And I think a lot of-

Brett Berson 50:31 But you have to be close to the front lines is the big takeaway.

Eric Sager 50:33 But every day.

Brett Berson 50:34 Yeah.

Eric Sager 50:34 Right? Uh, it's, uh, 'cause it's, it's, it's not static. It's not like a thing you can do like once a month, like undercover boss for show, right? And then you don't do it anymore. You're gonna lose touch. There's just no two ways about it. Either you have to be incredibly disciplined about it, like, like that, that'll work, or you just have to be really passionate about it, right? And probably ideally both. But that's the way to, to, to be in a situation where like if you looked at my calendar, you probably wouldn't find many days, if any, where I'm not directly talking to customers or directly talking to kind of somebody on the front lines of our teams. And so that's the trick. I mean, it's almost like I talk to my kids, like if you wanna get good at something, the way to get good at it isn't to spend like 10 days on one day-- 10 hours one day. It's to spend half an hour or one hour like every single day, right? For 10 days or 20 days to develop it. And ultimately, like those longer periods of time of shorter, more intense kind of interactions is what builds skill way more efficiently and to a much greater extent than if you just like try to pack it all in.

Brett Berson 51:32 Maybe sort of on a similar line on your calendar, if you go back to what you were talking about, which is like your core mandate, which you sort of outlined, I think is sort of like ecosystem health, business health, and sort of the people on the field. How does that map to actually how you spend a week?

Eric Sager 51:48 I'd say I probably spend like 20 point-- 25% of the time on like ecosystem health, probably 50% of the time on like business health, like again, working with customers and so forth, and then 25% on team. And on the team side, I think that varies. I've just been lucky that at this point, I have an amazing leadership team. I think a lot of those folks have been with me for a very long period of time as well, right? And so it's not like I'm, I'm, you know...

Eric Sager 52:14 We just hired a fantastic CMO, for example, but that's like the only role that was really left on my leadership team. So I'm hiring like one person a year kind of thing.

Brett Berson 52:21 If you were to go a click deeper, what are some of the rituals or, or the way that you run your staff meeting? Like what are the touchstones of a week that's not just important things like I met with this customer or, you know, I had lunch with a skip level or sort of that type of thing?

Eric Sager 52:37 I get, I get my leadership team together, um, like every Monday, right? And I think we very openly talk about-- actually, the first bullet point is like, what have you learned from a customer in the last week? Even there, right? Like, 'cause I want my team to have the same thing. Like let's talk about, you know, what, what's new, what, what... So I benefit from hearing their stories. They benefit from hearing, they benefit from hearing each other's. But we kind of, we start there. We talk about like, what are just like important things that people need to know. And then we talk about like follow-ups, and then we talk about like actual new topics, kind of decisions that we, that we need to make. So you, you have that, and then you have-- there's a whole host of cadence around like look at-- we'll do like look at our pipeline, look at our forecast, like do a deal review. Like there's a whole host of things like that, that are in like that second category of kind of running, running the business. And then the rest of it is, yeah, like really spent like, you know, kind of one-on-ones, like developing.

Brett Berson 53:29 When you think about your direct reports underneath you, is there anything differential that you look for across every single person that's very important to you, that's not just what most high-functioning COOs would want in their execs?

Eric Sager 53:42 I don't know how unique it is, to be honest, right? Um, I think for me, I really care that they believe and are aligned to the mission, right? So back to I want folks, right, that are gonna have the passion about what we're doing to actually want to get on the front lines themselves and be at the point of attack. And I just, I've just found over the years i-in every place I've been, that if you bring somebody in and they don't actually care about what you're doing, they're there because they think you're gonna go public next or whatever else, I, I think it, it's just a matter of time. They can fake it for a certain period of time, but eventually th-that, that edge wears off, right? And they, they end up not, I think, being as involved in the business as, as they could be and should be, and that ends up translating to like, you know, perform-- like a lack of kind of per-performance.

Brett Berson 54:33 How easy is that to figure out in an interview context? Because there's so much, you know, salesmanship that's going on.

Eric Sager 54:42 Some simple things are just like, what other roles are you looking at? And like why? Like what connects all of them? And I think we-- if you, if you get an answer to that that's like, "Well, I'm looking at this company over here, like in AI, and then I'm looking at this other thing," that it's like, it's like just all over the place. And the only thing that really reasonably would ever connect them is like you read somewhere an article that says that they're doing well. The odds are that whatever they tell you next about their affinity for your product and solutions isn't quite as genuine as Liz, right? Just the odds dictate that because otherwise, why would you be

Eric Sager 55:15 looking at ten different things? And so th- there's things like that, and th- there's, and there's a lot that you can do through references by asking kind of the, the, the right questions. And or even just like referencing, like in, in my world, like I oftentimes will talk to people that they sold to, right? So like you, you worked for X, you're trying to-- you're coming to join Plaid, but I know people that you sold to. I'll go call them. I'll be like, "Hey, what was your experience?" Right? Like have-- did, did you ever meet him? Right? And the number of times where like you're the CRO or COO, and they're like, "I have no idea who that person even is." Right? And so there's a sampling bias there, right? I think for better or worse, right? Like if you called a lot of our top-tier customers, like you called like the CEOs, the et cetera, like the folks that are working on that, like I think a reasonably high percentage of them would know who I am.

Brett Berson 56:04 What do you think when you, when you think about all the people you've hired and all the people that haven't worked out or the small subset that haven't worked out, is there a thread that ties it together?

Eric Sager 56:13 I think it's two. I think one is what we just talked about, which is like they never really fully bought into the, the, the culture and like they didn't have the, the, the excitement for what we're trying to do. And then the second, I and we, we got enthralled by the expertise. And so it's what I said earlier, like so much of what we're building, it's new. It actually hasn't existed before. But I think there's pockets where you could talk yourself into thinking that, hey, this person actually has done it before. And in a world, right, where like you're constantly navigating like a certain uncertainty, like it's always very appealing to be like, "You know what? I'd love to have somebody on my team, right? That is better than me at looking around corners because they've kind of done it before." And that can be at any level, right? It can be very specific on like how do I build an enterprise sales team? It can be broader and so forth and so on. But I think if that's the main reason you hire someone, I think that oftentimes doesn't work out because you end up overlooking like all these other things that are far more important in terms of like what that person's ceiling is. You know, I was a consultant myself, so I don't mean this as a, as a diss, but it's a-- I think it's like y- th- they're more suited to be like a good consultant for a short period of time to kind of help you deliver, l- like lever up your-

Brett Berson 57:32 And a business builder

Eric Sager 57:32 ... than somebody who's actually gonna help you build the business. Because, because again, anybody that you put into that situation for the next eighteen months is gonna end up sounding just like that person at the end of that eighteen-month period, except now they have all these other amazing qualities, right? That make them awesome, versus this person, it's like if they don't have the rest, it, it like that advantage that you perceived when you first made the hire erodes actually over time because it, it gets replicated by whoever's in, in, in the role anyway.

Brett Berson 58:01 What's been your observation as the difference between a very senior exec and a founder? Like not just the role, obviously, the difference between a CEO and a COO, but is it there's some moral authority that comes with being a founder that's just different? Is it there's an inherent risk appetite and a willingness to bet the business that is different, or do you think that people over-rotate on sort of what it is to be a founder versus a CEO or COO or?

Eric Sager 58:33 Well, no, I definitely think there's a difference. Um, I think it can cut both ways, right? I mean, I think there's founders for whom it's the first thing they ever did, right? They get to a certain threshold, but like all their net worth is locked in in the company, and like suddenly I don't think they're particularly risk-taking at all. Versus I might be coming in as an executive. I've had a lot of exits. Like I'm totally free to actually take much better risk. So I don't think it's as simple as it's always good. Um, I think sometimes it c- can be, it can be bad. The good founders, right?

Eric Sager 59:04 I think the one thing that they have, which is impossible to replicate, i- is it is truly fundamentally their baby. And so in the same way that like, look, I love my kids in a certain way. You love your kids in a certain way. You will never love my kids the way you love your own, and I will never love your kids the way... No, no matter like how awesome they are, no matter how much time I spend with them, no matter how well-intentioned I am, like it's, it's almost impossible to, to, to do that, right? And so like Zach, I love Plaid, love the team, love the mission, love the company. I will never love it as much as Zach does, right? I may never even love it as much as William still does, right? That's a testament t- to them, but it's also like just born out of the situation. If our roles were reversed, if I had started a company and then Zach was working there, I don't think Zach would love it as much as I did. It just allows you to do things that like just become incredibly difficult to do over and over every single day if you don't have that. And, and I, I really think that it, it is like it's, it's a crazy analogy in a way, right? But I really do think like what, what would you not do for your kids? And so that I think is, is the number one thing. Um, and the good founders, that's the mentality. And so there, there's nothing that they're not willing to do.

Brett Berson 1:00:19 Yeah. What I'm curious i- i- if you distill it down to that, what is the so what about that? Like w- w- if you want to take advantage of that or just the organic nature of the company takes advantage of it, what, what is it all about?

Eric Sager 1:00:34 It gives you a level of resilience that nobody you ever hire is ever going to have.

Brett Berson 1:00:40 Through all the ups and downs and twists and turns and everything.

Eric Sager 1:00:42 Through all the ups and downs, right? Like the, like I, I think, uh, I think, look, we're lucky it, it went well, but like I think for most companies, they've gone through so many ups and downs and such significant downs that if you actually generally ask those founders, "Hey, if you were just a hired CEO Would you still be here? And the answer would be no, right? I think one thing I hear a lot from my friends that have started companies, like, and the one, the one advice, like my wife just started another company of her own and, and like the one thing you kind of tell her, and it's easy to say even in that relationship, like where she started, is, look, there's kind of two outcomes that are great if you start a company, right? One is you retain control of it and it becomes huge. The second is it fails quickly. Everything in the middle, right? [chuckles]

Brett Berson 1:01:28 Which is the most likely outcome.

Eric Sager 1:01:29 Is like a terrible outcome in a way, right? But yet most companies go through phases where it sure as hell feels like you're in the middle. It's the founders that never quit, right? Like Zach never quit. Like, uh, like there, there, there would've been a thousand reasons to quit along the way, and he never quit. He never even thought about quitting. And so he's like the only person that could have made it through all those trials and tribulations to develop the skills that he now has because he's the only person that loved the thing, like, enough to where like none of that, like, ever made him question for even a second, like whether or not, like it's worth it, right? And, and I think people innately see that in great founders and they deeply, deeply respect it, right? And so, like, because I believe that that's how he thinks about it, I afford him a level of, I don't know what you wanna call it, respect, grace, whatever, on anything, because I believe fundamentally he would never do anything that's bad for Plaid, that he believes to be bad for Plaid. So like there's, there's just like everyone else, myself included, I could make the argument that in pockets maybe we would've done something that's like more selfishly oriented to what's I want versus what's best for Plaid. I have zero doubt that everything he's done, he might be wrong by the way, [chuckles] right? Like he might be wrong, but the fact that like he puts that first and foremost goes a long way. And I think all the really, really great founders, they have that in common.

Brett Berson 1:02:55 What about just wrapping up, if you think about yourself seven and a half years ago, and you think about yourself today, what's the most different? What have you figured out? I'm sure there's a lot a- as you know, as we're having this conversation, it, it seems like you're very driven by values and very align your own values to your values at work. I guess those things probably haven't changed very much in seven and a half years. But are there a few really important things if you were to compare your previous version of yourself to today that would be sort of most striking?

Eric Sager 1:03:26 I think that there's, there's one thing that comes with, like, perspective, age, whatever you wanna call it, right? Like it's... If you had told me, not even just seven years ago, right? But if you told me when I was like fifteen, sixteen, like growing up in Germany, I said this earlier, like that my life would turn out this way, I'd be like, "It's amazing," right? It's just a fantastic outcome. But at the same time, like every single day, like, I'm like, "Oh, I, I could just be a little bit better," right? Or like Plaid could be better. And so it's trying to kind of balance those two things. That's the challenge, right? Um, and so I think for most people that are out there that have been really successful, that have helped build these kind of businesses, I think like realistically for the vast majority of them, it's like, "Hey, look, this has gone way better than you ever had any reason to believe it, it, it would go," right? Um, or should go. But then the best ones are still have that fire to kind of keep going. And in a weird way, like I was talking to somebody about this the other day, and I was like, I don't know whether I would wish that on my kids, right? Like, in a way, like you want your kids to just be like, "Look, I achieved this thing and I'm now super happy."

Brett Berson 1:04:34 Very tiring.

Eric Sager 1:04:35 And I don't know that I will ever feel that, right? Like I don't think there's ever gonna be a day where I'm like, "Hey, mission accomplished." Because I think there's always something that we could do, again, in, in, in the context of Plaid, but I think in the context of any role I would take on, there's always something that we can do that's better for the consumers, better for the customers, better for the company, better for the people that put their trust in me to kind of join my team, et cetera. Better, better, better, better, better. And on the one hand, I love that. I wouldn't trade it for the world. But on the other, like there is like you have to be kind of crazy, I think a bit, right? To be that relentless about it no matter, no matter what.

Brett Berson 1:05:11 Do you think it makes you less happy on a regular basis?

Eric Sager 1:05:14 I don't know that it makes me less... And it, it maybe in a way, in a way, right? But then I like there's so many other things in my life where like I'm, I made very good choices, right? I think on this one it's, it's like sports is the same, right? Like it's like who are the people that end up being really good? It's not the people that won one championship and then were like, "Wow," like I never-

Brett Berson 1:05:31 There's a dissatisfaction that goes along with it.

Eric Sager 1:05:33 Yeah. Yeah.

Brett Berson 1:05:33 You can always, you know-

Eric Sager 1:05:33 You have to be like, I think that-

Brett Berson 1:05:34 It was a great game, but I could have done this, this, and this.

Eric Sager 1:05:36 Exactly. Yeah. Like I think, uh, Gokul I worked with at Square, I think he has, he said this somewhere like this, like perpetual dissatisfaction.

Brett Berson 1:05:42 Right.

Eric Sager 1:05:42 Like that's in some ways like the secret and, and that comes with a burden, and so you shouldn't-

Brett Berson 1:05:48 But so then what are the, what is the result of that on you as a COO? Meaning you compound that over seven and a half years, and I look at you seven and a half years ago and today, every day trying to get a little bit better. Like where is it most substantially expressed?

Eric Sager 1:06:06 I think the, the biggest area is probably like in like how I try to show up for my team, right? I think that's where I've grown a lot. Like I don't know that I've gotten that much better at like selling to customers or doing some of like the tactical things of the job, but I think, you know, how I show up for my team, like how I try to put them in a position to succeed.

Brett Berson 1:06:23 Can you share more? Like what does that look like?

Eric Sager 1:06:25 I think, I think that's where those folks would say I've come, come the furthest, right? I, I mean it's, it's the things we talked about, right? It's like, hey, like how much time are we really kind of spending for like those folks that really need it? You know, how, how far ahead are we thinking in terms of putting these folks in a position to succeed? And we have so many people at Plaid, right? That like have internally kind of shot through the ranks, that have gone from like IC roles to now running hundred million dollar businesses. And so I could literally name seven or eight people on my team that have kind of followed that, followed that path. And it's not like every single person kind of always works out, but they've worked out to a phenomenal kind of percentage, right? And they themselves are like so much of the reason for why we've had the success that we've had, right? And so it's like, uh, you know, it's picking the right people, but then also then like really kind of being committed to investing in them and then giving them that confidence to like say, "Hey, like, I'm not gonna just turn around and take you out of the game, right? Like if you miss one shot. Like that's not how this is gonna go down, right? Like I generally believe in you, right? Like you can absolutely do this. I'm gonna put the team around you to kind of make you shine, and then let's go." And I think if you stick with that for long enough, you know, you're just gonna be right such a high percentage of the time that you're gonna end up with like these amazing outcomes, right? And they deserve really all the credit for that. But that again is like, there's lots of sports analogies in there, like where you too oftentimes you'll see coaches, right, like yank a player like after the first bat, and then surprise, surprise, like they're not gonna be very good.

Brett Berson 1:07:50 And then everyone else.

Eric Sager 1:07:51 Right? It's just never gonna work.

Brett Berson 1:07:53 Watches.

Eric Sager 1:07:53 Or, or the next time even they get in, they're just like panicked about like doing the same thing that just got them yanked the, the first time, and then they go to a different team and a different coach, and that coach is just like, "Hey, you got this. I'll leave you in. You make a couple mistakes." And then like a quarter of the season in, they're suddenly killing it, right? Like I, I think you see that over and over and over again. And so, you know, I, I, I think tied to that probably also is this notion of like, I just have very little FOMO, right? Like once I make a decision like that somebody is like the person I'm gonna invest in, like I'm not that worried about what, what the other option is, or the other option is, or the other option is. Like I'm then dedicated to kind of seeing it through, unless they give me some really clear reason for saying, "Hey, like this just isn't going to work." And then obviously like, you know, Plaid as a whole comes first, but the bar for that is like pretty high.

Brett Berson 1:08:37 To wrap up, at, at some point when you're retired or you're not at Plaid or doing something else, what is it you want the people that you worked most closely to say about you?

Eric Sager 1:08:48 I think one that we, like we really try to do our very best to serve consumers and our customers. I think that's really important to me, right? This notion that like the work we did actually in many, many, many small ways and some medium ways and maybe even fewer big ways, like helped move things forward to be better, right? And so, you know, by that I mean, uh, there's, there's literally gonna be millions and millions of consumers that will never know my name, but their life will just be a little bit better because of the products and solutions that we brought to market, because of the ecosystem that we built. And that goes a long way, right? I, I think there's a lot of things you could do in life where like at the end of the day you look back and it didn't really leave much of a dent. And so I think that's the first one. And then the second one is that I think the people that worked with me, but particularly I think the people that worked for me, right? Like feel like they got as close to their full potential as they could have gotten to, right? I think that's the second one. It's, it's not that they loved it every minute of every day or anything like that. It's just like if they really think back and they're like, "Hey, could I have gone somewhere else and like kind of achieved more?" And like in their minds, like the answer is no. It's like Eric and Plaid helped me get to a place that like otherwise I would have gotten to. And I feel like I've always had like folks like that in, in my life, right? Like whether it's like, you know, like folks like, like Michael Mankins at Bain, or like Françoise at, at, at Square or Eyal at, at Bluevine, um, and now Zach and, and, and others at Square. Like I've always really, really been lucky. I mean at, at Plaid, I've always really been lucky that I've been surrounded by people like that where like, you know, did I enjoy every single moment? Like, no. Right? But do I believe like they helped me get as close to like my full potential as I could have probably gotten to? Yeah. Right? And I think that would mean a lot.

Brett Berson 1:10:42 Beautiful place to end. Thank you so much for the time.

Eric Sager 1:10:44 Thank you. Appreciate it.

Brett Berson 1:10:45 I really appreciate it. That was wonderful.