CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy: Scaling to 5 million paying customers, why respect beats being liked when you're cutting 700+ jobs and will accountants remain relevant?
The "respected vs liked" framing is easy to say and brutal to actually live by six weeks into a new job with 700 layoffs to announce. The trust point near the end is the one that stuck with me though, that a competitor can copy the software but not twenty years of infrastructure and data, since that's basically the exact wall every AI-native startup pitching against an incumbent eventually hits. Did she say how she's tracking whether that 4x API usage growth actually turns into retention, or is it still too early to know?
The "respected vs liked" framing is easy to say and brutal to actually live by six weeks into a new job with 700 layoffs to announce. The trust point near the end is the one that stuck with me though, that a competitor can copy the software but not twenty years of infrastructure and data, since that's basically the exact wall every AI-native startup pitching against an incumbent eventually hits. Did she say how she's tracking whether that 4x API usage growth actually turns into retention, or is it still too early to know?