The Exchanges

Q Like any founder, I'm sure. Um, so who led this round? How much was it? What was the general process like? You mentioned it was quick. Cause it mostly existing investors.

A Yeah. So it was pretty interesting because we went out to, I actually sent out an investor update, uh, earlier this year. And in that update I'd mentioned, Hey, listen, we're thinking about potentially raising towards the, uh, towards the end, end of summer. Um, And one of our, and I think we we've shown pretty solid traction from our side in terms of growth and all those things. And at that time, I think we were just probably like 10 months, 11 months, 12 months from launch, give or take. And we already had a few hundred customers. So seeing the momentum, one of the insider investors, uh, Valor equity partners decided to, uh, put forward a term sheet to our, to our group and to our team. Uh, and yeah, it was, it was great. They were like, Hey, listen, We'll put together a term sheet here. You will preempt you here. We, you don't have to go out and fundraise and waste time on those, you know, on that operational process away from the business, things like that, especially because when you're a small team, CEO is still pretty involved and founders are pretty involved in running the day to day. And I was like, well, this sounds pretty great. Started talking to other people that were potentially interested in joining on. Um, so brought on folks like, uh, the founder of rippling, uh, the other, uh, Um, SVP of Yelp for 12 years, the ex-mayor of DC, head of ML at Amazon, things, peop…

AI assessment note: “raised ten million dollars... led by Valor Equity Partners. So, relatively fast process.”

Q Right. So is that then the portion that you're initially going after? How are you strategizing out your go-to-market if the market's so big?

A Yeah, for us, the, the, we're staying super focused on the e-commerce and SaaS companies, e-commerce, CPG, and SaaS companies. Uh, I think it's, if you look at it from a platform level, it's, you know, the folks that, uh, you know, we support Shopify merchants, big commerce merchants, uh, The, we're starting to add integration to Magento. We're, we support Stripe customers, things like that. So largely focusing on a select group of platforms and just going deep within these specific platforms, because a lot of these platforms just have, uh, A pretty wide base of merchants. Um, and the reason that we're going after e-commerce and staff specifically is because that's where the pain point is the highest right now. Uh, that said, I, you know, next year or the year after we could potentially see ourselves getting into retail. These are people that have like brick and mortar stores, things like that. Will we ever touch specific other industries? We like, we probably won't ever touch like telecom, uh, oil and gas, things like that. It's just not our sweet spot industrial companies. But yeah, the, the, the pain point is just the highest of the e-commerce SaaS segment, but specifically within these like one to two hundred million dollar revenue businesses.

AI assessment note: “we're staying super focused on the e-commerce and SaaS companies”

Q So Ed has mentioned that you're one of the fastest growing companies in the space. Could you share more on your growth metrics and some milestones that you've hit?

A Yeah, for sure. I'll start out with, uh, I'll start out with, you know, exciting, exciting operational stuff, and then I'll kind of get into like specific metrics. We launched, um, 15 months ago now, and already I think within the last 15 months, and this is like from Basically building the rocket ship in the air type thing. Um, we've, we're able to now fully complete the sales tax compliance process for any customer across e-commerce SaaS. We have integrations across Shopify, Stripe, Amazon, QuickBooks, BigCommerce, adding more, um, from an operational perspective, we do thousands of filings for customers, uh, with a really lean team, which I think is really important because that level of filing it's, Uh, if you look at other competitors, legacy or not, they typically take people like dozens of people, um, from a customer level, we're now working with almost 400 customers, and that's just in 15 months. Most are switching over from existing providers, uh, not just legacy providers, but even some of the newer ones that we're seeing out there. And a big part of it is because in sales tax, you just can't hide. You can't hide behind just being a product, uh, or like a, you know, a tool. If you're just not delivering value, it's pretty clear because the states are going to come after you pretty fast. Um, and I think a year after, I think year after launch, or I guess like year sinc…

AI assessment note: “we're now working with almost 400 customers... we're at almost like, what, six X revenue”

Q And do you think like you got to that realization because once you turned on CEO mode, you just kind of started running or like, how did you start to, you know, compare that against some other CEOs that you've seen?

A I think It's a mix. Um, so historically coming from the Wall Street world, I was just used to being around people that work 70, 80 hours a week. That was just standard. So, and, and even like people say, oh, you move from investment banking to private equity, it's going to be a little bit chiller. And yeah, it's, maybe it's, it's just different work and you're a little bit more on your own time versus, you know, a services company. But because I was bred in that kind of mentality and That kind of manner. Hey, the people I choose to surround myself with even today at the company, I'm not saying our whole team works like that, but they do work really hard and they're accessible and they're communicative. But now, like when I've seen founders one-to-one work or we're working with people on the partnership side, and we're working with people, uh, to just put out content or whatever it is, you just kind of see this like consistent lag that's happening. And I, in my head, I'm just thinking like, how do you ever get anything done? Like if it's taking you five days for this, Because I know how long it takes our team to do things or how long it takes me to do things. So I don't think it's like a, I don't think it was just because of CEO mode. I think it's just, I came from a different industry that worked a lot where people may not have necessarily appreciated their own value or the com…

AI assessment note: “I don't think it was just because of CEO mode. I think it's just, I came from a different industry”

Q Right. That's important because I think we need to talk about what you do. Could you just explain more about Zamp and how you got to Zamp? I know you have a background in PE, in finance. You actually took an entrepreneurial stint early on and then that kind of cultivated into Zamp. So could you explain like how you got to Zamp and what Zamp is?

A Yeah. I'll give a little bit of context. So I went to school with my co-founder at Penn. Um, we, I studied kind of computer science, finance, and typically like a lot of Penn Wharton kids, I went to this investment banking finance side of things, the wall street side, um, did everything from private equity, early stage venture growth equity. Uh, and I think that was great, but I was at a point in my career where I was like, Hey, I can either become a VP or principal on the investing side and You know, kind of commit to my career that way, or I could decide to do something else. And for me, I, I just didn't find as much excitement and value out of, uh, being arm's length away from investing in companies and not being able to drive actual operational value and growth. And so The group at Pareto, especially Ed, he recruited me to join their team at Pareto. And that was kind of my most recent stint before running XAMPP full time. There it's, it's like this investment slash incubation vehicle where we build companies and invest in really early stage companies. And we largely were investing in like pre-seat to series A businesses. And while I was there, I was, I helped invest across a lot of e-commerce businesses across a lot of these like boring SaaS businesses, compliance, tech, uh, you know, tax, those kinds of things. And then also focused on building companies and helping compan…

AI assessment note: “I'll give a little bit of context. So I went to school with my co-founder”

Q To break down the product itself, could you just share what the onboarding process is, what you deliver afterwards and what they're buying?

A The way that we engage with customers though, first off is a, we don't take on every customer, which makes the rest of this stuff easier. I think I see a lot of businesses and founders, they just take on customers and they're like, okay, we'll figure it out. Even though it's not in my ICP. And I think our team has done a really good job of making sure that we qualify our customers if we can't support them. Let's say we don't have this integration. We'll, we'll tell them straight up, Hey, we don't have this integration. This is our path. This is what we can do. The reason I bring that up is because being transparent with the customers upfront really helps the onboarding process and it really helps the customer experience downstream. And from an onboarding perspective, because the sales team's already kind of laid out the process, this onboarding process typically takes, you know, an hour, two hours tops. When you compare that to industry average, um, for somebody to get fully set up running sales tax, uh, for the following months with legacy providers, it's like weeks, sometimes months, if you're using their API, uh, even with some of these newer providers, it's Pretty incomplete. Um, so can't really tell how long that takes, but I know it's definitely not two hours. So yeah, they set up, they set up in two hours. A lot of it is just integrating to the platforms that they are pr…

AI assessment note: “this onboarding process typically takes, you know, an hour, two hours tops.”