Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange, at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York city. You're inside the ICE House. Our podcast from intercontinental exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business.
Speaker 1:
The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and ICE sees 12 exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now here's your host, Josh king, head of communications at Intercontinental exchange.
Josh King:
This morning, the New York stock exchange added a new name to our community of listed companies. In a recent episode, you probably would've heard, we spoke to say Jose Cobos about his new role as head of technology capital markets based out on the west coast.
Josh King:
We mentioned that there were a few companies that were going to come public, and when they did, we might get here into the ICE House. And today, we're bringing back Jose, who now qualifies as the first person ever to be a repeat guest on inside the ICE House as our first official friend of the pod.
Josh King:
We're going to bring back Jose with a company that he helped bring public, Zuora, on the New York Stock Exchange. We are in the fortunate position here at the NYSE to help bring tech companies into the public markets. We get excited every time a new company IPOs and rings the opening bell.
Josh King:
It's the sound of new innovation coming to market of entrepreneurship and the chance for a company to grow, create jobs and improve the world. After the break, we'll speak with Zuora to get an inside take on how their software platform is revolutionizing the subscription model and what it was like to experience an IPO for the first time. All that after this.
Speaker 1:
Inside the ICE House is presented this week by ICE Futures Europe and the ICE Brent Crude Oil Complex. Have you ever rolled up to the pump or heard a news report on rapid changes to the price of a barrel of oil? And wondered why the price is different than yesterday? Most of the world's oil is priced relative. The ICE Brent Complex, and ICE where a large percentage of the world's crude oil derivatives are traded.
Josh King:
If you listened to the show last week, you heard Jose Cobos in his conversation with us inside the ICE House. He's the head of technology markets for the NYSE. He's back in the house and he's brought our newest listed client, Tyler Sloat, CFO of Zuora with him. There's an old adage that convenience is king.
Josh King:
Nowhere is that more relevant than here in New York City, where we want access to people, places and things as quickly as possible, and on our own time. In that vein, we're seeing a host of companies rapidly grow to serve our need for convenience. From car sharing, to home delivery of meals, streaming music, and movies.
Josh King:
And you, Tyler lead Zuora as its Chief Financial Officer, a company with founders that envision into the future of where we want to access people, places and things as quickly as possible, and on our own time. Zuora sees this opportunity and offers software for companies in any industry to successfully launch, manage and transform into a subscription business. Jose and Tyler, welcomed the ICE House and Tyler, congratulations on a successful IPO this week. It's great to have you both here.
Tyler Sloat:
Thank you very much. We're super excited,
Josh King:
Your experience up there in the podium next year, CEO, who are the folks up there and what do they all represent symbolically as this journey of Zuora going public?
Tyler Sloat:
We had both our executive staff who've helped build this company on this 10 year journey, as well as some of our original investors up there who saw it really early, saw a Tien as a leader who had a vision for the subscription economy and could be the person to build it and execute.
Josh King:
You mentioned in one of the things that I saw of you earlier, that you and Tien sort of had a chance meeting or you brought together and you realized that your partnership could click very fast.
Tyler Sloat:
Yeah. And that was eight years ago. And it's amazing what has happened since. Back then Tien was evangelizing the subscription economy. It was starting to see it in the SaaS companies. If you're a software company, you were starting with a SaaS model, but really pounding a podium on that this was going to happen everywhere.
Tyler Sloat:
And in every single vertical, every single business that you could imagine, there was going to be this shift in business model away from thinking about products and away from thinking about the old channels, to thinking about a customer and putting that customer at the center of your business model. And thinking about how you have a relationship with that customer, and then how you are able to earn that over time and then enjoy a monetization strategy based on that relationship.
Josh King:
And Jose, you've known your friend, Tyler here for a long time.
Jose:
I've known him for 17 years. Yeah. We were classmates at Stanford Business School and have been following him both professionally and personally for a long period of time. It's great to see him and the company get to this point, but have a successful exit through a great IPO. So very excited for him.
Josh King:
Talk about both of these. Before we get into Zuora, you can go back to Stanford Business School. Tyler, you were a BC graduate, undergrad, Punahou before that out in Hawaii. But what drew you both to Stanford Business School?
Tyler Sloat:
I can't speak for Jose, but it's about innovation. Stanford Business School is at the heart of innovation. It is in Silicon valley, it's at the core of people thinking about what the future's going to bring and then building things to be able to allow companies and individuals go take advantage of those trends.
Jose:
I think he's exactly right. The thing that I would add is Tyler is a perfect example of the Stanford network and ecosystem. One of the things that wasn't lost on me, having not come from a financial or business background, having come from the military, was that I would be surrounded by people, consultants, accountants, finance people, bankers, that had been there and done that.
Jose:
And Tyler for instance, was one of those individuals that despite, being classmates, was also just a very good friend. He helped me understand a balance sheet, for instance. He helped me understand an income statement. And so those kind of situations and those kind of people are what makes this school so great.
Jose:
And as you may know, they have a non grade disclosure policy, which enables people to really foster and collaborate with one another versus compete against one another. And that was one of the reasons that really Stanford appealed to me.
Josh King:
You guys collaborated on a project about the price of diamonds related to the four CS. A typical business school project for you?
Tyler Sloat:
I think what Stanford allows you to do is it to think outside the box, but also put it into practice and really obviously real work. You have really, really bright minds that you're surrounded by, a lot brighter than mine. And yeah, you get to pick your projects, but actually do a real analysis. And that's where Jose and I got to first become friends. And that's just the friendship that have just blossomed.
Josh King:
So what did they actually task you to do in that project?
Jose:
It was a regression study on what the four CS, color clarity, things like that, did to prices of diamonds. And so we had a tremendous amount of data that essentially we were able to extrapolate and run regressions on to determine what the or squared on those four different characteristics did to the price.
Tyler Sloat:
I know both being married, we really just wanted to see whether we got ripped off or not, really.
Josh King:
And in the process, did you get to meet a guy who you could use in future at diamond acquisition?
Tyler Sloat:
Everybody has their guy.
Josh King:
Everyone has a guy
Tyler Sloat:
And everybody can introduce everybody else to their guy.
Josh King:
Exactly.
Tyler Sloat:
Because you want to make sure that you're all on the same boat together, you're not alone on an island in these kind of decisions
Josh King:
But you're more educated in the four C process than most of the people who need access to the guy.
Tyler Sloat:
Figured out the whole thing, for sure.
Josh King:
You're both west coast natives. It seems like the tech community is extremely tight knit. I mean, just this banter in itself is emblematic of that. Similar to maybe the banking community that we have here in New York City. What makes Silicon valley so appealing to innovators. Jose, you were telling us last week you grew up there. But you're a Hawaii kid, Tyler.
Tyler Sloat:
I am.
Josh King:
What drew you to Northern California?
Tyler Sloat:
My wife and I met at Boston College and she grew up in the Bay Area. And so I'm not going to say that I followed her back out to the Bay Area, but I landed there because you go and you see all these companies that are starting and you see all of the opportunity set.
Tyler Sloat:
And you my philosophy over the couple of decades that I've been out there is that, if you're not taking advantage of this and you're not thinking about what is the big trends and what is big that's out there? Then you're really doing yourself a disservice. When I sat down with Tien to talk about Zuora, he painted out the same exact vision that we're executing against today. And if you asked me back then, "Hey, are you going to be with Zuora for eight years."
Tyler Sloat:
And I was like, "I don't know." Right? You really don't know how fast this is going to grow, whether it's really going to take hold. And the reality is, it's grown faster. We now have customers that are doing things that it really boggles your mind based on technology, but based on monetization strategies. And I fast forward to what our kids are going to experience and the way that they're going to live their lives, it's a lot around what our customers are doing today on our platform. It's really, really fun. And I think that's what Silicon Valley is all about.
Josh King:
Bring us into the real world of the subscription economy. I'm very familiar with it in a way that someone like I interact with it. Subscriptions to newspapers, subscriptions to Netflix, but you manage subscriptions to Caterpillar. How do you bridge that gap?
Tyler Sloat:
And that is a big gap to bridge. From a technology perspective, at the very outset, we talked about and thought about building a product that could serve any vertical, could do a B2C scale, but also a B2B and enterprise grade class. Do it in any geography. We have customers and over 20 different countries and over 20% of our revenues already coming from outside of the United States.
Tyler Sloat:
And then build something that companies could truly grow on. When we look at our customer base, 50% of our customer revenues' already outside of tech. You think about subscriptions like SaaS, of course. If you're starting a software company's, it's going to be SAS.
Tyler Sloat:
If you think about digital media, we're not really buying papers anymore, we're listening to podcasts and we're actually willing pay for these experiences because we really value the content. But then when you look a little bit outside the box, you think about products and you think about why is Caterpillar a customer, why is Briggs&Stratton a customer, why is Schneider Electric a customer, and Komatsu a customers?
Tyler Sloat:
It's because they see the future of their revenue streams based on a customer relationship. They lit up all their devices, they did it years ago. So they're saying, "What do we do with all this information now,? What does it allow us to do?"
Tyler Sloat:
So it's technology enabled. What it allows us to do, is actually change from thinking about selling the next huge tractor to maybe charging by metric tons of earth moved. And that really aligns the value for their customers, with what they're doing and allows them to have a more sustainable business model as well.
Tyler Sloat:
These companies are thinking about growing. They're all challenged on growth. And so we get tied to a growth initiative and we come in and we allow them to do all the pricing and packaging, and the iteration to actually execute on those subscription models.
Josh King:
You mentioned at a previous event that when you were out pitching your wearers, as they say, to a media company, for example, I think you went out to a road show with Rupert Murdoch at one point in the past. And at that point, it may have been a couple years ago, he's starting to see the challenges and threats to his business in media disruption.
Josh King:
Now we're seeing more and more media companies. If they're not having a very sophisticated paywall and conditioning us to want their product like Jeff Bezos now with the Washington post, the free services are declining in quality. Are you helping these businesses put up a good moat around on what they're doing so that they can focus on their customers and create a better quality experience?
Tyler Sloat:
I think that's absolutely. We are helping these customers learn about their customers, and in those learnings, iterate on the monetization strategies. Digital media is a great example. We're not buying as many papers, but if you think about the economist or the guardian or the News Corp or the Seattle Times or the Boston Globe or Singapore Press Holdings, they're all customers of ours.
Tyler Sloat:
And it's because they see the future of their revenue streams coming from digital content. But they don't think it's going to be an ad based model. We saw what happened with Facebook today. It's about a trust with a customer. And eventually that customer is going to be willing to pay you, if they can actually have value on the content you're going to provide and that they can trust you.
Tyler Sloat:
And then you earn that relationship over and over and over again. But these companies need to be able to iterate. They need to be able to move quickly. They need to have pricing and packaging changes. And they need a system that's going to allow them to do it. That's what we do for our customers.
Josh King:
You mentioned these industrial companies like Caterpillar and Komatsu. Can you give us some examples of other subscription services for companies that we wouldn't expect to be subscriber based now?
Tyler Sloat:
We have a ton of examples. We've got medical devices that historically, all the compute power has been in these big machines and now with technology, they can throw that compute power up in the cloud, and keep some of the machine down in a client. But what allows them to do, instead of having to go sell a million dollar device to these hospitals, they can go sell a 200 hundred thousand dollars device because they've taken all the compute power and sell it by the scan, instead of selling the entire big machine.
Tyler Sloat:
We've got examples of faucet companies who put sensors in their faucet so they actually understand whether it's a good shower experience for hotels. And it's kind of big brother-ish. But when you think about it and the hotels come back and say the indicator of customer success is taking a shower. And so is the hot water working? Is the shower leaking? And they can get ahead of these things and actually go fix them based on the data that they have.
Josh King:
Jose you've been watching your friend, Tyler, it's war for a long time and we're going to get into actually the last, maybe couple years as the path toward the IPO got closer. But very special culture of that company.
Jose:
It really is. They've been around for a long period of time. Obviously the model has continued to evolve and the success has just been impressive. I know it wasn't always the case and there's trials and tribulations as there is with every company. But one of the things that does stand out is also their culture.
Jose:
They have great pride in the fact that they have a number of CEOs instead of one CEO. And I imagine Tyler would like to expand on that, because it really is special and it is, I think to some extent, what has been partly contributing to the company's success over time.
Josh King:
You see the CEOs from the outside, what are CEOs on the inside?
Tyler Sloat:
At the most fundamental level, a CEO to us is every single employee. But really think about a hierarchy where we have my boss Tien at the top. And then take that hierarchy and just push it down. And you end up with this kind of spider web based on that hierarchy. And go to your name and pull it up and imagine yourself as the CEO of your function.
Tyler Sloat:
And what would you do every single day to come in and try to optimize performance and optimize to own what you're doing? And that's the culture we want to create with our individual employees. We want them to feel like they are empowered to go execute and they can actually have success in their own jobs. But at the same time, we're all operating together because everybody feels that way.
Josh King:
You must mentor and see a lot of startups in the Valley and people who are looking at a model that may one day get to the podium of the New York Stock Exchange and list their shares publicly. But at the very core level, when Hewlett and Packard in a garage, are the modern versions of Hewlett and Packard, what can they learn from what's happening inside the walls at Zuora?
Tyler Sloat:
They can learn that as Jose said, right, this has been a journey. And we don't have an end goal. We have a goal of building a very big successful company. And if you stay focused on your business model and you stay true to the execution against that, and see line of sight for what you want to do and say you're completely focused on that mission, then you can be successful.
Tyler Sloat:
And for us, we've gone a market and we've meet with the investors for the last couple of weeks. And we say, "Hey, we're a 25 to 30% grower. And we think we can do this for the next 10, 20 years." And it's ironic because a couple years ago, I'd go to all these conferences and I'd have to pound the podium on the shift to subscription.
Tyler Sloat:
That's coming, it's going to be in every vertical. And I'd see these faces that raise some hands, they're like, "What are you guys talking about? We see it in SaaS. We don't see it in other places." And now in these meetings, people are their main questions is, "Why aren't you guys growing faster?"
Tyler Sloat:
Because we see this happening everywhere. And the answer is, we are going to grow as fast as the subscription economy grows. And we have a business model that allows us to sustain, and actually have that growth rate that we will grow faster, if it grows faster, but we can also par down if it doesn't. And we won't burn capital as a result. And that's something that we put in place years ago and we've just stayed true to it. And I think that's the best advice.
Josh King:
It really started 11 years go with the founding. What inspired them at that very starting moment to start the company? What did they see now back in 2007?
Tyler Sloat:
You're absolutely right. The company's around for 10 years, but the vision for it is actually older than that. And the reason it is older is because our founders coming out of WebEx and Salesforce, where Tien was employee, less than 20 there. They had to solve this for themselves at those businesses.
Tyler Sloat:
They were subscription businesses and there was no Zuora around to solve that for them. What they ended up doing is building their own internal systems. And the systems that they built are purpose built. You build a system for today and your needs of today. And over time though, your needs change. And they saw this at their own companies, they saw the pain that they were having to take on by putting more engineers and trying to just maintain their own internal systems.
Tyler Sloat:
And then those systems became an impediment for growth. And so Tien went out, he looked at other software companies, he's like, "Yeah, this is the definitely going to happen in all the software companies." He's like, "But gosh, look at this company, zip car," at the time. He's like, "What are they doing?"
Tyler Sloat:
He's like, "Wow, people aren't really buying cars, but there's this subscription model. Look at this company, Netflix, they're still shipping DVDs? But wow, they're talking about this evolution and this is a subscription model. This is going to happen all over the place." And it's true. Now it's happened all over the place.
Tyler Sloat:
And now those companies though, they might have their internal systems and that's okay because nobody wants to actually replace it, they do it because they have to. But now Salesforce now powers all of their acquisitions through us. And they do it because those companies that they're buying like Demandware and Crux, they have different models and monetization strategies than the system that Tien built when he was there. And it would cost them way too much to continue to iterate on that internal system. And it wouldn't be efficient for them. And so they now move onto us.
Josh King:
How does your Salesforce make those sales to a sometimes a skeptical buyer who is focused on, "Look, I got to move units out the door. I'm being judged by my bosses about how many you units I'm selling monthly or annually." And instead you are trying to say, look at it as a subscription model. Your sales guys are in the room with a C-suite bringing Zuora into those offices. What's the pitch?
Tyler Sloat:
I think there's two things. One, what we've learned is that you actually can't get a customer to shift. They have to be ready to shift. And it's a really, really good way to waste a lot of capital, trying to chase deals. And so what we figured out is that we need to be out there and we evangelize, but we educate. And we go talk to so many company customers and we get companies to come to our events.
Tyler Sloat:
We got like two sales reps in Japan and we get 500 companies to come to our event and pay to come to an event to learn about subscription businesses.
Josh King:
Do you hold a lot of these events?
Tyler Sloat:
We do. We have our subscribed conference, which is the biggest one in San Francisco.
Josh King:
In San Francisco?
Tyler Sloat:
Nope. But we have a sister conference in London. They're the two main. And then we do what we call these popups, which could be an event with 500 people in Tokyo or New York or Sydney. Because we have a global customer base. And at these events, people learn. But even then, you cannot make an evangelical sale.
Tyler Sloat:
You could waste a ton of resources to do it. What we do, is we nurture and we get them to our events, we communicate with them. We have a bunch of young folks who are out engaging, but they're not just sending emails, they're actually engaging based on a catalyst. A company is launching a new service, they're going international, they're going downstream and they were always enterprise.
Tyler Sloat:
These are catalysts that we know drive complexity into your business model and things that would require you to think about a new system. And then when we are ready, when there's a true opportunity, it is a heavy sale because we have to sell to multiple functions. We are going to be your new system of record. But it's not necessarily a long sale because we've actually kept the nurturing going on. I'll give you an example. Caterpillar is a customer of ours and we talk about these IOT customers. But we get both-
Josh King:
With IOT?
Tyler Sloat:
Internet of things. These connected devices.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Tyler Sloat:
And we get Briggs&Stratton and both Bobcat to come to one of our events. We don't know what they're thinking internally and we can talk to them about it, but we don't know what they're going to do. And on the hold, Bobcat, they're iterating internally.
Tyler Sloat:
They think about the business models and they have connected device, but they're not sure. Briggs & Stratton on the other hand, they say, "Hey, we have a business model that we're now going to execute. We got all these lit up lawn mowers and we want to be able to go sell service to these commercial landscape companies so that they can actually do workflow management." They bring us on board to help them go execute against that.
Josh King:
Fascinating. And when's the next one of these conferences? And can anyone show up? How do you-
Tyler Sloat:
Absolutely. You come to zuora.com. Our subscribed conference is in June in San Francisco.
Josh King:
We'll take a break at this point. Back when we return with Tyler Sloat to get an idea of why and how Zuora made its way to the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:
Crude oil is one of the most widely used and actively traded commodities in the world. ICE Brent Futures was developed as a water born contract in 1998, to protect against price movements of crude oil produced in the growing Norwegian and UK North Sea.
Speaker 1:
The contract quickly grew to become the global price benchmark for crude oil. Today, the Brent Complex includes a family of more than 400 related Brent based hedging instruments, including the benchmark for diesel fuel and gas oil. Visit the ice.com/global-cruise, for more information.
Josh King:
Back now with Tyler Sloat, chief financial officer of Zuora, which last week went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Also a friend of the pod, Jose Cobos, our head of technology listings out on the West Coast. Tyler today, a big day for you. Was an IPO always in the cards for the company.
Tyler Sloat:
I think building a really big company was always been in the cards and we still are on that journey and we're going to continue to execute. And IPO is just something that happens along the process. We would break the company into these phases and we're in this phase of a hundred to 300. What's the difference between entering a hundred and exiting at 300 for this phase?
Tyler Sloat:
And one of those things was going public. But the other thing that's happening is that we are now selling to some of biggest companies around the world. And they're looking at us to be their mission critical system of record going forward. But as a private company, I'd say it was a little scary for them because they don't know if we're going to be financially viable, we don't know if they're going to be around.
Tyler Sloat:
I would personally have to get on the phone with CFOs and meet with them to ensure them that we're going to be okay. Now that we're public and we're public on a New York Stock Exchange, they can look at us and say, "Hey, this is a real company and it's sustainable. And they have a business model that's going to be there for the long term." And it is just a stamp of validation for us. That is a big motivating factor.
Josh King:
You planning on managing the CFO's office like most public companies, quarterly calls with analysts. What's the tempo to come?
Tyler Sloat:
No, I think we will absolutely do that. In fact, we've been putting this infrastructure in for the last couple of years. We raised our last round of financing three years ago and we brought on Wellington as the lead and they're a big public company investor. We've kind of been building up this experience internally.
Jose:
Tyler, just curious, obviously you just went through this process. Any lessons learned? Anything that you would educate a potential CFO that was in your shoes, thinking about going public, what you may have done differently or what you wish we would've done maybe better?
Tyler Sloat:
I think we've been preparing this for a long time. I think as you go, it's exhausting. You go through this road through a process and you meet with a lot of investors. And what I think in particular for Zuora, what we found is that if investors got to talk to us and actually learn our story, they really understood it a lot more. Because it's not necessarily clear just on the outside.
Tyler Sloat:
But the advice is to stay true to what you do and stay true to that message. And don't try to make it anything else other than what it is. I'll give you an example. We get asked all the time and I already mentioned this, "Why aren't you growing faster?" We're a 25 to 30% grower.
Tyler Sloat:
And that might be different. Some of these high growing SaaS companies that are coming out right now, and most of those are companies are customers of ours. It's like we are going to do that because we think it's very, very sustainable. But we also say that's the growth as a subscription economy. And we are going to in line with that growth.
Josh King:
What were the number of cities you visited just you and Tien or did you bring a larger gaggle with you?
Tyler Sloat:
Tien and I are VP of investor relations.
Josh King:
Small little core groups?
Tyler Sloat:
A core group.
Josh King:
Where did you go?
Tyler Sloat:
Of course, we had some bankers with us and things like that. When we started on the East Coast, we did New York and Boston, then we hit Mid-Atlantic, Baltimore, Philadelphia then went to San Francisco, and then Kansas City and Milwaukee, and Chicago. I think back in New York now.
Josh King:
Yeah. You are in New York city. I can vouch for that. What was the span of time for that?
Tyler Sloat:
It was pretty quick. I missed the fact that we went to London the week before that to talk to some investors, not technically on the road show, but more of what we call testing the water meetings. It was almost two weeks.
Josh King:
There's the old debate, Tyler, of whether companies should stay private longer and stay clear of the duties and obligations you'll have as a published company? What were the signs that this was time for Zuora. What is that moment that said we need to file the S one and initiate the process.
Tyler Sloat:
I already mentioned a few of them. I think it's not about staying public or private longer. It's about, do you now have a business model that you're confident in? Do you have the scale that's not going to have variability in that model? So it's actually be quite predictable so that you can operate quarter and quarter out as a public company.
Tyler Sloat:
WE would love to be one of these very, very boring investments for our investors. Just invest in Zuora and then put it in a drawer and wake up 10 years later and we built a great business. And that's our goal.
Josh King:
Curious, you obviously just raised a lot of capital. What are you planning on doing with it and where do you think resources will be continued to invested in?
Tyler Sloat:
Yeah. We think about our business in a couple of different ways. We think about the costs that we incur and invest in to sustain the business, and support our existing install base, which is something we call recurrent expense, which is [inaudible 00:26:58] . And then we think about growth. And we think about the dollars that we deploy into our growth engine, which is sales and marketing for us.
Tyler Sloat:
And then on both sides of that coin, we look at and say what are we going to get back for these investments? And we're continuing to grow, we're continuing to innovate. But we clearly want to grow our subscription revenue faster than we make investments in some of these areas. But we are still burning some capital today. And there will be an inflection point on that cash flow positive. But right now, this gives us a capability to continue to make those investments as we see fit.
Josh King:
Obviously, a moment of celebration. When you IPO, what do you think might change about the culture of Zuora now that you've got liquidity, the people who've been committed to it for so long, have the opportunity to reap some of the reward for all of their time invested in it. You were mentioning maybe that one of your board members said, "Celebrate for a day or two, but then Monday, back to work."
Tyler Sloat:
Absolutely, back to work. We talk about this culture of a CEO, but we're not a small company. We are already almost a thousand employees-
Josh King:
That's just adding 400 people in the last year, right?
Tyler Sloat:
That is. But we're also geographically dispersed. We have employees all over the globe. And this has forced us to act bigger than we are already, and put in a level of maturity. Now, I think as a public company, there is a new level of operational cadence and maturity that you have to adhere to. And we've been practicing this internally for quite some time now. And I think that'll obviously continue. The challenge I think, is growth. How do you grow as a company, but keep your culture? And we're very focused on that.
Josh King:
Tyler, it wasn't lost on me that your mom called right before the show started, your wife is here. Tien's wife and kids are here. Maybe talk a little bit about the ecosystem of people that you have powering you, that got you here and how important it's been for them to experience the IPO as well.
Tyler Sloat:
Yeah. Your support network is so important. And you look at work and sometimes there's very little distinction between work and just life in general. We spend more time at work and thinking about work and bringing work home than anything else. So you need to have a family structure around you that is fully involved and fully dedicated to you. And thankfully I have that, which I'm very, very blessed about. And we encourage that right across the entire company.
Josh King:
You come from an interesting background, as we were talking about, maybe at the beginning of the show or off air from Hawaii, Punahou High School, some of the great alumni that came from that institution. Some those people were good role models for you growing up and as you assumed the mantle of a public company CFO, who are the professional mentors or role models that you look to?
Tyler Sloat:
I can look to a bunch of just CFO mentors, folks that I've worked for in the past. We've brought one of them onto our board and Ken Goldman, who I worked for at Siebel Systems. And then, you look all across different roles, and different CEOs and people like that.
Tyler Sloat:
We look at Salesforce and we look at the company that they've built and we think it's fantastic. And clearly Tien has a lot of allegiance there. But the beauty of being in Silicon Valley and the networks that you can create is the people that you look up to, but it's also the people that you get to in engage with.
Tyler Sloat:
And I always had the opportunity for the last two weeks to just be texting back and forth with just a ton of CFOs, both private and public, asking advice and just bouncing things off of them. And it's an incredibly helpful network.
Josh King:
And we shouldn't neglect to mention the relationship between you and the New York Stock Exchange as embodied in your relationship with Jose. As you look back over the last six, eight months, getting ready for this day, what has that relationship meant? And the services and capabilities that stock exchange offered as you continued on this road toward the IPO.
Tyler Sloat:
When Jose told me that he had joined up here at the New York Stock Exchange, and we've clearly been friends for such a long time. And I can't point to a more trustworthy, but just what I would call real individual. It was really a no brainer. And we already look at the New York Stock Exchange as the platform for just these sustainable, just true businesses that think about what the future growth is going to be.
Tyler Sloat:
Because now tech is such a huge platform for NYSE, but also these legacy companies that literally have been listed here forever that are now our customers. And we now get to engage with them and be partners with them on the same platform. It's really, really cool for us.
Josh King:
I know you have been working really hard and it's time to celebrate a little bit. Maybe you could give us an understanding of what your plans are next 24 hours, next 48. Because from what I understand, the schedule is still busy though it's a little different than what it has been the last two weeks.
Tyler Sloat:
I do hope there's some sleep involved somewhere. No, we are so excited. We had the opportunity to bring about 40 CEOs from around the globe here. A lot of these employees have been with us for a very long time. I think we're going to celebrate a little bit tonight in New York. And then there was literally parties going on around the globe today on listing. And there we have a internal channel that we get to watch all of this and we'll go home and we will celebrate again tomorrow with a big celebration in the Bay Area.
Josh King:
Jose, with Zuora, another great tech company going public on the NYSE is certainly a reaffirmation along with Spotify a few weeks ago that the NYSE is the home of tech.
Jose:
No doubt. As we said it last week, last year we did 59% of all tech IPOs that equaled 86% of all tech IPO proceeds. This year, we're off to a great start. You mentioned Spotify, psyched about Zuora. We got a number of others that are already publicly filed in which we expect to hit the market in the very near term.
Josh King:
What's on the horizon?
Jose:
The Rio, which is a spin out of AT&T. We got Pivotal, Ceridian and Smartsheet. And then a number of others that haven't publicly filed yet, but that we would expect to come in a very near term.
Josh King:
Keeping you pretty busy.
Jose:
No doubt. But liking it.
Josh King:
Getting ready for Subscribed in June in San Francisco. What should investors or people who are potential customers of Zuora look to toward the second half of the year in terms of things that you'll be rolling out, announcements you'll make. And then what the future holds for the company.
Tyler Sloat:
Yeah. When we were getting questions about product announcements, things that we say, "Hey, we encourage you to come to our conference." And the conference is not as much about Zuora, it's about talking to all these other companies that are doing really cool things and then engaging them.
Tyler Sloat:
What we want is to create a community where customers can learn from each other and they can learn how to launch new products. They can learn about pricing and packaging and how to think about iterating on that and the sensitivities of that. Or they can learn about how customer records and about data that you produce around customer.
Tyler Sloat:
And then how do you actually learn from what your customer wants? That is what our conference is all about. And we got a couple thousand people there every year and I think it's now we get obviously a magnifying glass on it with being a public company. But I think it's continued to grow just the way it has grown, which has been fantastic.
Josh King:
Well, Jose Cobos, old friend of the pod. Tyler Sloat, new friend of the pod, Chief Financial Officer of Zuora, our newest listed company here at the New York Stock Exchange. Once again, congratulations. Thanks for joining us in the ICE House.
Tyler Sloat:
Thank you so much. We are the happiest new member of the New York Stock Exchange.
Jose:
Huge congrats Tyler.
Tyler Sloat:
Thanks Jose.
Josh King:
Can't end any better than that.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question, you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at ICE House, at theice.com or tweet at us at NYSE. Our show is produced by Pete Ash with production assistance from Ken Able and Steve Portner. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates, make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completely of this information.
Speaker 1:
And do not sponsor approve or endorse any of the content hearing. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing hearing constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or recommendation of any security or trading practice.
