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Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO of Xero, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why cracking the US took twenty years and an acquisition despite Xero being the more open, cheaper alternative to Intuit, why she treats “respected vs. liked” as a false choice a new CEO has to reject on day one, and why the biggest threat to a twenty-year-old platform isn’t a faster competitor but the capital and infrastructure it takes to replicate what that platform already owns.
About Xero
Xero is a global small business platform serving over 5 million customers across 180 countries, providing cloud-based accounting, payments, and payroll software for small businesses and their advisers.
Watch Now - Sukhinder Singh Cassidy - CEO at Xero
During this episode, we also cover the strategy behind narrowing Xero’s US focus from “5 million customers” to a single unicorn-revenue number, how a survey of Xero’s own customer base splits into a majority still non-native to AI and a fast-growing minority already building on the company’s APIs (4x since January), and why Airtable selling for $1.2B on $450M in revenue is the cautionary tale for the current market.
As we know, layoffs happen across many companies, and Xero was no exception. Six weeks after joining as CEO, Sukhinder laid off 700–800 employees. We get into how she ran the numbers and surveys, and why she believes accountants will outlast the “Claude will just tell you the answer” argument because human judgment and advice still matter.
We close on why she’d rather be model-agnostic than bet the business on a single AI partner, what a week actually looks like running a 5,000-person public company, and how she keeps a fiercely scheduled career next to a deliberately unscheduled personal life.
Available everywhere you listen to podcasts: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X
Download the transcript 👇
Timestamps
(0:00) Meet Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
(2:17) The Current State of Xero
(5:35) Why America Was So Hard to Crack
(10:05) Why It's Important to Focus
(12:55) Joining Xero as CEO
(16:40) Being Respected vs. Liked
(22:57) How to Prepare for a Layoff
(27:30) Being a Publicly Listed Company CEO
(30:07) The State of SMBs
(33:30) Thinking How to Partner with AI Models
(36:24) How Much Code Is Written by AI?
(38:39) How Does Xero Stay Relevant?
(42:51) Is Trust the Next Biggest Moat?
(43:39) The Biggest Opportunity for Xero
(46:00) Will Accountants Still Be Relevant?
(48:08) Companies Who Aren't Hiring AI Talent
(49:05) Ollie Joins as Sukhinder’s Chief of Staff
(50:39) Personal Time Out
Our notes from this conversation
1. Being liked and being respected are different jobs, and she picked one.
When we asked during the episode, Sukhinder is direct about it: over a thirty-year career, she’s optimized for going where her strengths are valued and her values fit, not for being liked. That meant walking into Xero, presuming people are smart and honest, and telling them the hard truth on day one rather than sugarcoating the situation.
2. She benchmarked the layoff before she announced it.
Three months before officially becoming CEO, she surveyed over a thousand Xero employees, ran an outside-in with McKinsey against comparable SaaS companies, and read the data back to the company twice before cutting 700–800 roles six weeks later. The data made the decision defensible: it didn’t make it easy. She openly shares that she was heartbroken announcing it, and got Slack messages that day from employees she’d never met, checking if she was okay. This can say a lot about the company culture.
3. Cracking America took twenty years because incumbency beats a better product.
Intuit is twice Xero’s age, born in the US, with 100% of its attention on that one market. Xero had to double its US organic growth rate, bring on US engineers building for US customers instead of running the market from the southern hemisphere, and narrow its pitch to “easier, cheaper, more open” before the US became its fastest-growing region, helped along by the Melio acquisition.
4. Public company CEO in a choppy market means the job doesn’t change.
Her answer to “what’s hardest right now” is basically: nothing new, be a value creator, be focused, keep delivering through good times and bad. She thinks the market currently can’t tell one SaaS company from another, and her job is to keep 5,000 employees focused on Xero’s own numbers rather than the noise.
5. Most SMBs aren’t using AI yet, and that gap is the opportunity.
Xero’s own customer survey shows the majority of small businesses are still early in their AI adoption. A smaller, fast-growing minority is already comfortable enough to use Claude for real financial actions: API usage on Xero is up 4x since January. She sees Xero’s job as meeting the whole spectrum, from AI chat for the least advanced to XeroForce for the most.
6. Trust, not code, is becoming a real moat for companies.
Her response to a competitor who can build “a thin slice of software faster” is: sure, but can you raise the capital, acquire the customers, get the data trusted, and be accurate and compliant across every job a customer needs done? Ollie points to Airtable’s $1.2B sale on $450M in revenue as the cautionary tale: the product was replicable, the twenty years of infrastructure, data, and distribution weren’t.
Links
Follow Ollie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollieforsyth
Follow Sukhinder on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sukhinders
Visit Xero: https://www.xero.com
Episode Partners - Harmonic, the go-to startup database: https://harmonic.ai
Episode Partners: Hostinger, a go-to tool for builders: https://hostinger.com/neweconomies. Enter code NEWECONOMIES for 10% off.
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