Lessons from Silicon Valley – Scaling for Growth

Building an effective tech stack is all important but without sales your Proptech is dead in the water. So why do so many proptechs see sales as an expense?

Domain's John Foong has an extensive history running sales and growth teams for Google and Uber - as well as aid projects in Africa. He shares his winning lessons for growing a successful Proptech.

John Sun

I run a team of hundred engineers looking after listings and Agent solutions products like Pricefinder and real based products. So it's really exciting for me to stand here amidst so many prop tech founders and colleagues. Not long ago, I was lucky to be part of corporate venture within quantity. That's me about ten years ago. Less wrinkles and a lot more hair. We were lucky to be a handful of people who started the business and quickly grew to a few hundred people and it was really great. I mean, it was a startup, we incorporate the vibes of people. We launched many products, ping pong, tables and occasional beer pongs.

That happened. I got so hooked up I decided.

To join an actual startup just like many of you have. And this is one of the startups that I joined. It was robotics startup. As you can see, we created products like Amazon's Kiva and self driving focus. They had healthy amount of seed funding, great team, great culture, no bureaucracy. It was perfect.

I was so sure that it was going to be perfect and we're going to be successful. But no, long story short, the startup went belly up within three years of seed funding and I grew a lot of gray hairs exponentially during the time. And what happened?

What happened?

Our B, two B customers were very demanding and we didn't focus on the right things that mattered. Let me give an example. One of the prospective customer was running a warehouse and they were using unconventional pallets because the image that you're seeing is perfectly standard pallets and they wanted.

To solve that problem we could have bought them a bunch of standard pallets and asked them to use it. But no, that's not what we did. We decided to develop a feature and deploy new sensors so that it can detect unconventional pallets. So after spending weeks and months of development time and spending bunch of money, we finally got the feature. Our machines were perfect. It was detecting all unconventional pallets in the world but nobody ended up using it and sold to the wound. The prospective customer moved on as well. And this is one little example. And we spent whole seed funding into developing hundreds of features that were not used and we failed to generate any meaningful revenue and weren't bold enough to do less and those things that. matters for more people.

So that's lesson number one. Prioritize be ruthless about your minimal viable products. Do a small number of things well. I mean, why don't you go back and list of things that everything that you're doing try to rank in the order of importance.

It's going to be bloody hard because everything is priority, everything needed to be done yesterday, right? So have a think about how to be bold and how to make a bold decision to do less of what?

Now I'm going to introduce you my partner in crime, John Foong. Two Johns from Domain. Same looking, similar looking Asians. I know I'm really here to confuse you. John Foong - Sydney native. He graduated from two master's degree from Stanford at age of 26. He spent 13 years in Google, of which ten years in Google Clouds. And he was one of the first few leaders in Europe. And during his time, Google Clouds did hundred times in the scale from $50 million to $5 billion. He also led Uber's business arm during Pandemic, where business trip went down 99%. During the time he scaled businesses business from one dollar to one hundred million dollars. He's now leading Domain's 500 person customer facing team.

And he's responsible for raising our revenue to $1 billion. So, ladies and gentlemen, one and only John Foong.

John Foong

Thanks, John. Can everyone hear me okay? Man, it's an absolute honor to be here. I think it's great to see so many friendly faces, not too many unfriendly ones. You know who you are. And as Peter said, Domain are super passionate about supporting us. We're very proud to one of the major sponsors. I think we're about twelve or 13 people from Domain here. Salespeople, product, tech, marketing. We're passionate about this community. So obviously we hope that many would come to work with us one day. And Frank will talk about that at the next session. So really excited working you with those partners or those acquisitions, but we're very excited and we love what you're doing in this institute. So thank you so much. So, John talked about the question number one. Being bold actually involves doing less. I'm here to talk to you about questions two and three, and the word is but has anyone here read this book?

John Foong

One, two. Okay, so if you make it all the way to the end of session, which hopefully will, because it's kind of embarrassing to walk up mid session, so, you know, we can we would like to buy you a copy of this because this book changed my life. It's called what got you here won't get you there. And the great thing about it's all based on this premise. It's written by a leadership coach called Marshall Goldsmith. And Marshall Goldsmith has worked with thousands of CEOs. And his basic premise in coaching thousand CEOs is this we all have our flaws. Now, what those flaws typically are overused strengths. They're things that got us to where we are. We're really hardworking, we're really great in the territory, we really want to win. They're all of these things. And his premise is the very things that get us to one place become our limitations in the next.

John Foong

Because as you get to the next stage, you need to keep evolving yourself. Let me give you an example. See, in my younger days, my strength was I love to goof around I love to dress up. I love to have parties. I love to take photos of parties and put them on Facebook. That was my jive. I had like a thousand costumes of me, and this is one of them 70s parties. I know there is a good looking man under there. I'm still looking for him today. And so was my drive, was my job, my 20s, my thirty S. I loved it. I got to live all over the world. Africa, Europe, US Partying. Everyone loves Australians, right? One day, at the age of 32, I started to think, I can do this forever. My dad pulls me aside and said, you know, John, it comes a time where, let's call it boys need to become men.

John Foong

And what I realized he was saying to me after, I thought, well, is if you would like to move on the next stage of life, which is not for everyone, but if you want to have kids and have a family and all that kind of stuff, you might need to make some changes. You might need to become at least somewhat attractive to the opposite sex. Okay, great. And I was living in Silicon Valley at the time, and this is 2013, and online dating was becoming a thing. It was free tinder, but there was a lot of dating apps. So I said, okay. Cool. I am going to show the world that this goofy man wants to settle down. And so I unveil, I kid you not. My actual 2013 dating profile picture, I seriously thought this would actually attract the ladies. And indeed, it had a very poor hit rate, but a very high conversion rate, I must say.

John Foong

And my wife actually did click on this picture, and so she's the one to blame for this success. So as you can see, sometimes what happens in one stage of our life, our goofiness, we love to go out, we likely to host things. It's the very thing that might limit us to progressing, to settling down and right in the middle of it. Now, the very things that made me not so great at dating actually made me a really good and loyal, dedicated husband. One of those things, the husband we've had to reinvent. Now we have three young girls under five different kind of scripts, but we will need to keep reinventing as those girls become teenage girls. Oh, my goodness. That is going to be a whole mind shade of itself. Life requires evolution, or as they say in Wonderland, you have to run awfully fast just to stay in the same place.

John Foong

What got us here, what got us there, because the very things that become our strengths ultimately come our limitations. And every phase of progress requires different skills. What me and John are doing in this talk today is want to take analogies, particularly from Silicon Valley. John talked about the robotics companies that he worked at. I want to talk about Apple, and I've never worked at Apple, but I've been an investor in Apple for some time. They're an amazing company. Okay, testing children of the 1980s here. Who had an Apple Mac in the 80s? Anyone? Oh my goodness. That is like half the room. And just to be clear, I'm not saying the room is full of nerds, right? That may also be true. But the thing is, what Apple did really well is they built great niche products for rich non nerds. This is not a nerdy computer.

John Foong

Remember? How many buttons did that mouse have? One button. That is not a nerdy mouse. That's like a black mouse right there. That's what Apple did. They made amazing products. You had to be two things to buy Apple products. You have to be really rich or willing to not eat. And you have to actually want to be cool, like a graphic designer or some other thing like that. And as a result, their market share year 2006% 6% PC market. I mean, that's pretty freaking good. That's pretty freaking good. That's enough to sell billions of dollars a year. Their valuation was $20 to $30 billion at the time. That is a massive company, even by today's standards. But the problem is this. If you want to conquer the world, if you truly want to a company that is used by everyone in the world and the biggest company in the world, you can't just build products for rich non nerds.

John Foong

The cool thing about Apple is this. They started change 2001. They brought out the ipod. Amazing, right? Amazing stores. A hard drive full of unbelievable. No, we'd never seen like that before. Still inexpensive. $800.23 years ago. It's a lot of money. They brought out a wheel.

Speaker 1

Actually.

John Foong

It was pretty cool. Still $800, though. Still pretty expensive. Then something around 2003, 2004, something changed.

John Foong

Still mini came out. Not $800, $500. Still very expensive. So which way were they going to go? They brought out the ipod Shuffle. Half a gigabyte of storage, no screen. The very first mass product that Apple brought out. Something had changed somewhere. Apple had made decision that what got them there is not going to get them to where they want to go. And as a result, they are no longer a $30 billion company. They are a $3 trillion company. What happened? What happened? It's about 2007. Can anyone guess what it was? It was the iPhone. They released the iPhone. The iPhone, the Jesus phone. The phone that is the center of the universe for so many of us. Who here's an iPhone user? My goodness. All of us. I spent 13 years at Google trying to stop people from buying Apple phones. And I left Google and I sold out.

John Foong

I have all these different things from the iPhone. That's what Apple did. Amazing stuff. The strength of tech for rich people could not scale to billions of people and trillions of dollars making a blend of aspirational and achievement products. Just like I had to rid myself and wanted to get married and have children, apple had to reinvent themselves to become the biggest company the world has ever. Cool, huh? And the cool thing is, this is true of almost every successful company. What did Netflix start doing? Who remembers? Home delivered DVDs. DVDs in envelopes. And now look at them. The world streaming leader. Additional content. Now they're doing ads totally separate. Where they started all these different pivots. Amazon. What do they start as? Bookstore. Now look at them. They may boost their profit not even by selling stuff which they do, but by selling the infrastructure which help them sell that stuff.

John Foong

Amazon web services. They're pivoted one thing to another. Facebook started as this app for Ivy League schools. What is it now? It's fundamentally a mobile app. 80% of the revenue comes from there. And not just a Facebook mobile app, it's Instagram. It's WhatsApp it's now. Facebook and Uber, company I was proud to work on for a few years. What do they start doing in the first place? Limousines. That was their thing. We were black cars. And now they are the mass market. Vehicle and food delivery, which I got to work on. What got each of these companies to get their first billion dollars was very different to the 100 billion or trillion dollar behemoths they are today. What got us here will get us there. And so what I want to do is make a bit personal for you. Because all of us here are leaders.

John Foong

That's why here at this conference, you're leading companies. I want to share a bit about my own journey. As you can tell from my goofy past, part of my challenge, part of my thing is I'm an Energizer Bunny. I'm always there, I'm everywhere. That's what I do. I love this stuff. When you're leading a company of a few hundred people, you can't be Energizer Bunny anymore. You can't be everywhere. You can't be everything. You have to step back and be a passionate coach. Doesn't mean you can't shout and scream from the sidelines, but you can't be eleven players kicking the soccer ball around. You have to empower people to be the Energizer Bunny or whatever they want you to be. So I'll just share with you some of my own shifts. This is me growing up. He's competitive, great individual doer. I'd study the hardest.

John Foong

I would be the nerd, of course. I want to win. I want to build the workflow. I'm the guy who writes down all the operational workflow documents. That's how I get successful. I'm harder, I'm smarter. I study harder than other people. It's not going to work anymore. If I want to be a successful Chief Revenue Officer, if I want to be a successful influencer in this proptech space, I need to be a collaborator. I need to be a great manager. I have to help others win. And I need to build a culture, not just a workflow that people can listen to. Truly, what got us here won't get us there. So the question I have for you as leaders here today is what got you here but won't get you to there? What are the strengths that have made you a great salesperson, a great technologist, but isn't going to make you a great proptech CEO?

John Foong

What are the skills that made you a great Lone Ranger? Really good. Not collaborating. Maybe you need to collaborate if you want to grow. So John talked about be bold. Sometimes the hardest thing people like to do is to do less. What are you going to do less of? Number two. What got you here that won't get you there? So, in closing, want to talk at number three, which is back? This one's painful. This one's painful for me. Who here has seen the movie The Internship? Anyone? Oh, wow. Most of it. It's great. Thank you. I too started my life as a Google intern back in 2006. I started in London. This is the entire intake of European interns in 2006 with a very small company, a few thousand people. It was a very small company back then, about 1000 people. This is us in London on the London Eye.

John Foong

It's me goofing around, as you can see. And the cool thing about Google is that the feel of the internship, the free food, the massage pod, that's actually kind of true, that actually happens. But that naivety, that desire to be friendly, that desire to win and to do it in a sporty way, it really captured the heart, I think, of what Google is all about. But the reason why I like The Internship is because it doesn't emphasize Google as a technology company. It emphasizes Google as a people company. And truly, that's what I believe Google is. So, for example, this is basically Google's mission. The first thing Google does is not have great technology. In the beginning, they did have great technology, but what differentiated from one of a thousand startups in Silicon Valley at the time is they hired amazing stuff. They hired from the best and brightest.

John Foong

They paid them really well. They let them build really cool stuff. They then created great search engine. They attracted lots of business, really important. The secret was that they used that search engine to attract advertisers. That advertising was trackable. It was really good value. That advertiser resulted in significant gross profits. But Google have never paid a dividend. What did they do with that money? They poured that straight back into hiring amazing staff. Google are known as the most fun place to work at the Valley. And the people that pay the most, they have basically created a virtuous cycle of an incubation of really smart people who want to work there. And that's what has allowed them to create other really cool stuff. I started Google in 2006. I worked on the search engine. I was a marketing intern, and then I ran a technical operations team.

John Foong

But in 2009, I was recruited to work on this very small thing called Google Cloud. We're just starting to sell paid Gmail. Google workspace by then. That was one of a number of many other bets that they made. Gmail. Cloud maps. Android YouTube. There's a whole lot that weren't successful, but there were a lot of other cool things that they got really smart people to work on. They paid us really well, and eventually they got a whole lot of users. And now all these things are generating tons and tons of gross revenues. The reason I take you through that virtuous cycle is this. The heart of it is not great technology. The heart of it is retaining and attracting great people. And for me, if I speak about for domain, and for each of you, the reason why your company will ultimately be successful is not because of the great tech you've built.

John Foong

You'll need to have great tech, no question. But ultimately it will come down to can you attract and retain the greatest people? If you can even have the wrong tech, you'll eventually get there. But even the right tech with the wrong people, you will not scale. You'll get to a stage and then you'll go first. So let's unpack that. Because the cool thing about Google is because we're all geeky and nerdy and we care about people, we of course apply that data science to people. And in 2012 to 2015, they had something called Project Aristotle. Have any of you heard of this before? You may have heard of some talks on this before, and I was huge in this whole time. I eventually left Google in 2019. It's called Project Aristotle because the belief is the whole is greater than the sum of some of its parts.

John Foong

And of course, classic Google works like this. If there's something really cool that tabernacles like OOH, we can figure out the formula of how it works. Just like the previous slide, we can figure out the formula. That's what they did. They studied hundreds of teams, surveys, high performing teams, all that kind of fun stuff, and they tried to distill what were the most important predictive factors. And indeed, they came up with these five single points. By far the most important one was psychological safety. By far the most important one, and I'm going to give this both the topic and the question, because the way they measure this is every manager has a 360 degree survey done about them, which is anonymous. It's scored. And of course, you're all put in a bell curve in a cohort, and he finished at the bottom 25%. Look out, look out.

John Foong

I finished at the bottom 25% once, about ten years ago, when I was at Google, I was a really high performing director. I was on my way to one of the youngest directors in my division. And I got held back, not because of performance, not because people didn't like working with me, but because people who didn't because people working for me built this out and put me the bottom 25%. These things have team number one, psychological safety. The question is, if I make a mistake in my team, is it held against me? That's what direct reports are answering. Number two, dependability. My teammates say they'll do something. Do they do it? Number three, structure. Do we have an effective decision making process? Number four, meeting. Do I know what's the point of my job is? It meaningful? Is it meaningful to the world? Is it meaningful to me?

John Foong

And number five, I understand how what I do meets the goals of Google and our customers. Every six months, every people manager can't get away from this. It's scored, it's cohorted, it says in the face, it's linked to your bonus, your promotion. I think Google done an amazing job linking all those things together. The reason I raised this is the problem. When I failed at this. It had me search my soul for a while, for years. And I want to summarize all of that in one question. And I realized, for me, there's one question that answers all those five questions, all those years of research. And that question is this. Do I enthusiastically have the back of every single member of my team? I'll say it again. Do I when I think through all my team members, do I not just have their back, but have their back enthusiastically?

John Foong

If they make mistake, there's no way that I punch them. It's a learning. They're great. This is just a learning for them. I really like them. I want to set them up for success. I would rehire them in an instant if they left and their role was available and they said, I want to come back. No question. Please come back. Please come back. And I care about them. Not sure about them as a person working for me, but their development, their family, their life, that's what it means to have someone back. And the graveyard of the Google questions is you put them all together, kind of forms something like this. And my challenge to each of those following, can you say yes and amen to all these questions for all your team? Can you? It's a high bar. If someone's just good enough, they probably won't meet this bar.

John Foong

If you're kind of really hoping that person leaves, they're definitely going to meet that bar. Why is it there's a book for those of you in philanthropy called When Helping Hurts. And it's a lot about poverty and it looks at a lot of the interventions trying to stop poverty over time. And the assumption or the conclusion of the book is a lot of interventions to help poverty by government or nonprofit ultimately hurt because what you end up doing for someone is having good intentions, but if you help them in the wrong way, just make things worse. There's a lot of the debate in America about philanthropy, and I raise that as analogy. Not just how many of you here are involved in nonprofit. It's because I think it applies to a lot of the people where we don't have their back. We don't have their back, but we keep them around because we're their savior.

John Foong

We're going to help them, right? They need this job. How could I get rid of them? And besides, I'm hopeful they might turn around. I'm doing them a favor. I'm doing them a favor by keeping them a role, by paying them money. Even though I don't have their back. They probably can't tell. And here's how it works. You can see that I like my flow charts. Based on my experience, you start off hiring someone because you think they're great, and half the time they are great. They are great. You've been bright. You've hired well done. But some of the time, they're not. Maybe it's 10% time, 25% time, hopefully the minority, but they're not. And what happens is this you have any big changes? Don't move too quickly. It's only been a few months. They're in this job. Oh, look, they're such a tough situation.

John Foong

I could not performance manage them. Maybe they'll get better. Maybe it's just the market. You rationalize, you say these things to yourself, but deep down inside, you don't have their back. You don't have their back, and you kind of hope they live. And here's what happens after a while, they're not stupid. They may not be video expectations, but they're not stupid. They can sense it. Even. You got the greatest poker face in the world, which I definitely do not. They know you don't have their back. They see how you treat the others whose backs you do have. They see there's a difference. And they start to know John like, he doesn't have my back. Does he not appreciate me for all I've done? They start to resent you because you're not given the support and affirmation they deserve to one of your employees. And the funny thing is, you both think you're doing each other a favor.

John Foong

It's a crazy thing. They think they're doing you a favor because you're not supporting them. You think they're doing this amazing favor because really, they should have this job anyway. What are you doing here? I'm just keeping you here because I know you need this job, and I am your hopeful savior, aren't I? Compassionate? Such a good dude. And in the end, what happens? You resent each other like a broken marriage, and then you reach one of my least favorite stages I ever want to be in as a manager. Hope. Hope might seem like a positive word, but actually in the context of employing people, it is a terrible word and it is not a strategy. You are having someone who works for you, whose back you don't have. They're not unhappy enough to leave, but they're getting pretty unhappy. Everyone else is watching, everyone else can tell because everyone else is dragging you and that person are dragging down the team.

John Foong

And the reality is that person could be an absolute rock star somewhere else. And you are doing them a great disservice because you're keeping them a place where they are a low performer when they could make a huge impact. Maybe it's another company, maybe it's a competitor, maybe it's a different industry, maybe it's a position. They can have a huge effort in the world and you'll keep them there. And the reality is it's eating you up. I don't lose sleep of medicines at work. I'm very fortunate. We worked incredible basis, but I lose sleep with this. This is the stuff at 02:00 A.m., I'm up after the kids have woken me up and I can't get back to sleep and it's ringing my head and I'm wracked by guilt and I'm wracked by anger because I can feel it. And I resent them and I know they resent me.

John Foong

And I'm stuck in the cycle of hope. And hope is not a strategy. And to me and John have spoken about being bold and doing less. Look at yourself and say, what got you here won't get you there. But if I could do anything, this is the biggest thing I'd have you look at. You need to look around your team and know that you've got their back. And it doesn't mean that they're the superstar high performer. It means that you think they're doing great at their job. You think you've set them up for success. So I'll close with this book. John dor measure what matters. Get another book. Glad that to buy you. If you'd like it, there's a way you can prevent this. Having clear expectations, having clear scoring, spending a lot of time during recruiting, there's a lot of good stuff there. You should do those things.

John Foong

This will definitely reduce the percentage of times that this happens, but it's still going to happen. And when it happens, look inside yourself. You curious about their life so much of the time it's because you're actually not even you don't even care about them. You resent them so much, you haven't taken interest them as a person. You haven't discovered their working preferences, you've just assumed they're not going to meet yours. And so you kind of resented them. And look inside. Have you been clear with your expectations? Have you been clear with them what they are, that they're not meeting it? Do you think they can meet those expectations? Sometimes it's solvable. I'd say 20% of the time just by. Having a clear chat. And by having that come to Jesus chat, hey, look, I really expect you to do this, and then, oh, wow, I didn't realize that.

John Foong

Okay, maybe there's a chance, but do something. And if you're not sure what to do, talk with someone else in this room. We've all been there. Now look at some of these faces. Some of you there right now. So my urge to you as we close off this talk is to follow. Number one, be bold. Do less. You're going to need to do less. You have to spend time with these two things, understanding what got you here, what won't get you there, and understanding whose back you don't enthusiastically have. Please connect with me and John on LinkedIn. We'd love to see you. And if you would love to buy any of these books, please write to us. We'd love to buy you one of these books, which has each changed our lives. On behalf of the main, thank you much for coming. We'd love to.

John Foong

Thank you very much.