Eran Zinman, Co-Founder & Co-CEO @Monday.com: Going Upmarket, International and Multi-Product |E1247

It was still hard for us to raise funds back in the day because people didn’t get the idea. We grew from $6 million of ARR to $18 million the year after, and then from $18 million to $50 million, and from $50 million to $120 million in 3 years.

What I’ve found about founders is that you try to avoid the hardest things in your business. If something is very painful, that’s the right time to get into it and fix it.

Eran, I am so excited for this. I heard so many great things from Avi, from Nino, and from Rivi. I spoke to pretty much the whole cap table. It was a lot of fun, but thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited for this.

Oh, so am I. Listen, I’ve wanted to do it for a while. I’m the biggest monday.com nerd. I love SaaS for many reasons, which is why I’m perpetually single.

1. The Role of Video Games in Founders' Success

I want to start with this: I heard you’re a really great video game player, and this is a commonality in great founders that I’ve interviewed. Why are video games correlated with success in founders?

Wow, you’ve really done your research.

I actually love video games. I still play to this day, so it’s been an old habit of mine since I was a kid, which I’ve kept. When I was young, I used to play a lot of strategy games. One of my favorites ever was Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.

Yeah, yeah. It’s a strategy game.

I think if you play the right games, you can learn a lot from them, especially strategy games. On the one hand, you need to see the big picture all the time. You need to understand the strategy and what’s going on, but you also need to handle the tactics, know all the details, and act quickly.

I think that’s similar to running a business, to some extent.

Totally. I remember Toby at Shopify saying to me that he thought it was more relevant if you had managed clans in games before than if you’d been to university. I thought that was rather apt.

I agree. It’s as hard as doing that in business.

2. The Fail That Taught a $10BN Founder Everything

Now, monday.com is not your first business. I remember after your first business, you said something which was, “Failing is part of our success.” I want to dive into this because I think it’s important. What have you learned about embracing failure over the years, and how do you think about that statement?

That’s something that has really stayed with me in my journey. Prior to monday.com, my first startup was while I was in the middle of university. I built a search engine for user reviews and tried to compete in an extremely competitive category.

The more interesting part is that it was a complete disaster. I built a product, worked on it for about 14 or 15 months, and then launched it. After 14 or 15 months, I hadn’t raised any money. I felt I wasn’t ready. It was a big failure: I ran out of my personal money, ran out of energy, and eventually closed the company.

I remember thinking to myself, “I wasted all my resources—personal and financial. I’m at zero. I must have learned something. I didn’t spend all that time without learning anything.”

After a lot of processing, I realized that the reason I failed in that company was that I was afraid to fail. It might sound weird, but I was so afraid of negative feedback from customers. I was afraid people were going to write about me on TechCrunch or in a blog post. I thought people were going to be critical of my product. I was just afraid.

I swore to myself that when I built my next company, I was going to fail. I was going to fail often and be happy about failure because I wanted to learn as quickly as I could, improve, and get actual feedback from users.

After 14 months of working on that product, people gave me feedback that, if I’d shown them a mock-up or an early version, I would have received the same feedback and been in a totally different place. We’ve kept that DNA up until today at monday.com. We fail, we tell people to try it out, we A/B test, we get feedback from customers, and we learn. It’s a big part of our DNA today as a company.

As much as one can get used to failure, it’s never easy to accept. When you look back at the different challenges you’ve faced, what internal failure has been the most challenging to accept?

I think, growing up and writing code, I was always this smart kid in school and university. When you build an actual product that people need to use, nobody cares about your achievements, your knowledge, or how much you know about anything. It’s all about the product. Is it good enough? Do people really want it?

It’s a different kind of feedback. It’s not about an exam or somebody saying, “Great job.” It’s about actually succeeding in real life, and I think I wasn’t ready for that. I wanted everybody to clap and say, “This is an amazing product,” but that’s not the way you build things. You need to get feedback, get people involved, and get their opinions.

Let’s go back to 2012. You and Roy are sitting together, and you have the name dapulse. I really love the name. It’s brilliant.

Genuinely, I actually like it.

Do you know what’s so funny? When I emailed you for the first time, your email was at dapulse.

Yeah, that was the company name.

You didn’t respond.

My question is: You’re sitting with Roy. How do you guys come up with the idea for dapulse, now monday.com?

Initially, both Roy and I had our own startups. I remember us sitting down. I was working at a company called Conduit, and Roy was working at Wix, which you’re probably familiar with.

It’s counterintuitive because I think a lot of founders, when they think about starting a new business, try to think about something nobody has thought about before or a completely new idea. That’s one approach, but we took a very different approach.

The work management and project management industry was always packed with a lot of tools, but we had a different view of the market. We said, “Look, if we look at the market today, in CRM, who’s the leader? Salesforce. It might be ServiceNow today, but who’s the leader in managing work and processes? Who’s the number-one vendor people rely on to manage the core of their work, apart from CRM and the service part of it?”

When you think about it, there was none. We felt there was such a huge vacuum in the market, and it didn’t make sense that there wasn’t one company that became the dominant player in that market. We said, “Let’s try to tackle that opportunity.”

One principle was very important to us from day 1, and I think it was a critical component of our success. We said we wanted to take a very different approach to how we were going to do it.

Both of us didn’t consider ourselves to be the best managers on the planet. I don’t know the best way to manage a team, a group of people, or a business, but I can give people the tools to do it, and they know what’s best for their business.

From day 1, we said, “We don’t know exactly what the solution is for every business, but we’re going to give people the ability to customize monday.com—or dapulse, back then—for their needs because they know best what’s right for their business.”

Since day 1, nothing in the product has been rigid. Everything is 100% flexible. Customers can change it to fit their needs, and essentially our own customers build their own product on monday.com.

We go with the idea that it’s customizable, so people can make it fit their business. When we launched dapulse, did we have immediate traction? Was there initial success where we knew we had something? How did that go?

No. The first few years were really challenging.

When we started in 2012, our main focus was communication. If you remember, back in the day there were other players like Yammer and HipChat. It was before Slack, so we initially thought it would be more focused around communication and collaboration.

One thing we found was that a lot of those tools fell into the category of, “Yeah, we can use it, but it’s a nice-to-have tool.” It wasn’t something managing the core work of businesses. We pivoted from that.

For the first year and a half, we focused on communication, and then we pivoted the business to focus more on flexible work management. That was a pivotal moment in the life of the company.

3. Pivoting to a $12BN Company: How, When and Advice on Pivots

How was that pivot? Founders are often faced with the dilemma of being told that resilience and persistence are important and that they should just keep going. Then we also hear about pivots, where a pivot is required.

How do you advise founders on whether to keep going and be persistent versus when to change direction and pivot?

This is an extremely tricky part because both Roy and I are software developers. Our natural instinct was to go to the office and write code. That was our go-to. We always felt we were one feature away from getting the right product.

After we had spent around 70% or 80% of our seed round, we sat down and said to ourselves, “Something isn’t working. It’s not about the next feature. We need to talk more with customers and understand what they’re looking for.”

We did something that was very unnatural for us. We interviewed a lot of potential customers, and instead of showing them what we had built, we interviewed them and asked them how they managed their businesses. We took that insight into our own company and pivoted.

We pivot, and then we get to the more familiar product we have today, which was obviously dapulse at the time and is now monday.com. Did we get customers then? Was there immediate traction when we released that version 1?

When we had the initial version of the collaboration tool, we had about 3 or 4 paying customers. One of them was Wix, so we had a little bit of traction.

When we pivoted the company, that was a really meaningful moment in its life. We launched our payment system, and I remember to this day the first time a new customer paid for the software without us talking to them.

If you want a nice little story, I bought a TV and mounted it to the wall. I built a dashboard that showed the number 6, which was the number of customers we had. Every time a new customer came in, there was a big Homer Simpson sound—“Woohoo!”

One day, we were sitting and writing code, and I heard this “Woohoo!” in the background. The 6 turned into 7, and 7 turned into 8. I remember one day we had 3 new paying customers in a single day. I called Roy, my co-founder, and told him, “Look, we got 3 new customers in 1 day. We can conquer the world.”

How much were these customers paying at the time, on average?

Very little. It was per seat, about $12 per seat. The exciting part was that we never talked to them. They understood the principle of the product and the value just from onboarding.

That was the exciting part. It felt like we had built something that could turn into a machine. More than anything, that was what excited us at the time.

One thing I find challenging is horizontal products and getting to the first 1,000 customers or 1,000 users. The joy of monday.com is that it’s a horizontal product, but the challenge is that it’s a horizontal product, so your product marketing can’t be that tight.

When you think about getting the first customers, what are your biggest lessons in scaling to the first 100 or 1,000, given what you’ve seen?

Initially, I thought most of our customers were going to be startup companies or technology companies like us. We started doing marketing on Facebook, which was the first platform we used for performance marketing.

What’s great about Facebook is that it has such a broad audience. It brought us a lot of customers we didn’t expect to have. We got churches, hotels, retail companies, and airplane manufacturers.

4. Why 99% of Investors Turned Monday Down: Fundraising Lessons

Over the years, we found—and this is still true today—that 70% of our customers are actually nontechnology companies. That’s amazing because it opens up the TAM and the audience of the company so much.

We’re going to dive into that because it’s an incredible start. At this point, we’re getting customers. We’ve got the “Woohoo!” coming in—you do it much better than me—but you’ve spent 70% to 80% of your seed round. Your runway is pretty tight. What happens now in terms of funding?

Here I want to give a lot of credit to our board members, specifically Avi. The typical investor, seeing that a company had spent 80% of its seed round and hadn’t reached product-market fit, might have given up on the company or sent it to do a Series A and try its luck elsewhere.

I give Avi from Entrée Capital a lot of credit. He saw the potential. He told us, “I believe in you guys. I don’t know why, but I believe in you guys. Don’t do a Series A. Just go out. I’ll give you the money. Let’s do a convertible and scale what you’re building.”

I think this was a pivotal moment for the company. If we had tried to raise funds, it would have been a long process, especially when you don’t have momentum. Maybe the company wouldn’t be what it is today. Because he gave us that runway, it really helped us leverage the momentum we already had.

Was that the Series A?

That’s complicated. We finished, or ran out of money from, the seed round. Just to give you some data, we raised $1.4 million for the A at, I think, a $2 million pre-money valuation.

Good times.

Good times for investors. That was 30% of the company.

Basically, we got this convertible. When we wanted to do the Series A, our existing investors put the money in through the convertible to get us into an A round. It was still hard for us to raise funds back in the day because people didn’t get the idea. Maybe we also didn’t do a good job raising money—both Roy and I.

What did they not get about the idea?

It’s a good question. I always felt this company was going to be a huge success. I didn’t understand what they didn’t get.

You were selling low-ACV contracts. Investors like enterprise. Product-led growth wasn’t as notable as it is now in terms of being able to scale into massive businesses. You were selling to hospitals, hotels, and churches.

Their view was, “This isn’t a really big business. This is an SMB play. You can’t make money selling to SMBs.” We have all these investor heuristics that tell us this isn’t a good business.

This is great feedback, but I always felt it was temporary. Eventually, we would go upmarket and sell to large enterprises. I always believed in our ability to execute and to change the company to fit the next stage.

Maybe that’s something we didn’t communicate well enough to investors, or maybe we didn’t build enough confidence around it. We got a lot of nos in our A, B, and C rounds.

Was that when you raised the $7.5 million Series A?

Yes, with the convertible, it was $7 million and something.

How did we think about expansion then? There are quite a few different verticals. Where should we start?

I think the best place to start is multiproduct. When did you decide, “We need to add a second product”?

That was very late in the game. We actually built our fourth product before our second product. We built our second product about 2½ years ago. Back then, we were focused on the main product.

How do you reflect on that decision? Was it a mistake to wait that long?

I don’t think it was a mistake. Maybe we could have done it sooner, but I feel it was the right decision at the time.

We waited years for that. What did we expand on next? We’ve got $7.5 million. Where do we go now?

Something I feel we did that was really meaningful in making the company successful and enabling it to scale was build a very powerful performance marketing engine. We call it BigBrain. It’s a tool we built within the company to track every campaign and every user.

We made an early decision in the life of the company to build this tool internally. It was very tempting to use off-the-shelf software for analytics and monitoring, but we were ambitious. We said, “We’re going to build a huge company. I don’t know where we got the confidence, but we just said we were going to build a huge company. We need to build our own tool because this is going to be a main part of our ability to scale this machine.”

We built the tool and invested heavily in it. We tracked everything: every click, every view, every ad that any user saw, all the way through the signup funnel, conversion, expansion, and so on. With that, we built a very efficient marketing machine.

When I say efficient, I think a lot of founders get this wrong, and maybe this is an important message. Something we optimized for from the very beginning was cash flow.

A lot of SaaS metrics are optimized not for cash. If you think about standard SaaS metrics like LTV:CAC and ARR, they never mention cash. It’s not about cash; it’s more about accounting and predictability. We always tried to optimize for cash.

What I mean by that is, let’s say we raise $7 million. I want to invest this in the most efficient way in performance marketing. What’s the best way to do it? We said we wanted to invest in performance marketing and collect cash from customers as quickly as possible.

We did a lot of A/B tests to get people to pay more annually, improve speed to conversion, and find campaigns and keywords that got customers to onboard faster and pay more quickly for an annual subscription.

So you turned that $5 million—

Let’s say every $1 million you invest into performance marketing gets you $700,000 or $800,000 back after 1 month. We built a very efficient machine around that.

We managed to turn $5 million of money raised from investors into a $15 million performance marketing budget. We built a very efficient machine that recycled money and reinvested it back into the business.

I think our customers have been the biggest investor in monday.com—more money than we ever raised from investors.

5. How to Scale ACV and Move Upmarket

When you think about building that cash cycle at velocity and speed, is it multiple things that lead to it being very efficient, or is it 1 or 2 things that really drove it? Annual payments, perhaps? I don’t know—you tell me.

A lot of things. First of all, we track the expenses. We asked Facebook and Google, “Can we postpone the payments? Can we drive campaigns and pay you every 90 days, for example?”

We optimized the expenses on the 1 hand. On the other hand, we optimized the campaigns. We picked campaigns based on their return and how quickly we could get customers onboarded.

We optimized the onboarding and the payment form. There are a lot of steps involved. The point is that we optimized for that KPI to make the business very efficient.

That’s a key part of our DNA. Up until today, monday.com is very efficient in terms of cash flow. It’s a huge part of our DNA and how we think about our business. We started from day 1, literally.

We’ve built BigBrain, we’re building this performance marketing machine, it’s starting to work, and we’re building this cash-flow cycle. First, how much revenue did we have when we raised the $7.5 million?

I don’t remember exactly, but I would say around $3 million or $4 million of ARR.

Wow. Yeah, okay. I really miss these times. Now you do a Series A when you’ve got, like, no revenue.

That wasn’t a joke.

That was me crying in my studio.

We have this performance marketing machine and it’s working. When do we go out and raise the Series B? You raised $25 million from Insight, correct?

Yes. When we raised our Series B, we raised $25 million from Insight. That was a better round for the company.

Why do you think it was better?

First of all, Insight was a strategic investor. A small investment like $25 million wasn’t their sweet spot back then; they were more of a growth investor. It was also an investor that could further invest in the company in later rounds.

I think they really understood the potential of the business and its ability to scale. Getting a new investor was again a great moment for the company. We raised $25 million, and I think when we raised that round, we had about $7 million of ARR.

That’s going at what valuation?

I think it was around a $100 million pre-money valuation.

So, 20% dilution.

Yes.

We’ve raised $25 million. Let’s ask the question of upmarket. SMBs and lower ACVs are where our home is. When do we decide to go upmarket after the Series B with Insight?

A few things happened. First, we rebranded the company as monday.com. We changed the name from dapulse.

About 1 year after that, I remember a board meeting in New York. One thing Roy and I had always said was that we were never going to have a sales team in the company.

We came to the board and said, “Look, we’re probably wrong. We have to have a sales team in order to scale the company to the next level.”

We built an amazing sales team. Going forward to today, we have more than 1,000 people on our sales team.

Why did you decide then that it was the right time? You were developers and product people, building this incredible performance marketing engine. You felt you could scale the company to infinity. What changed?

We felt we could scale the company to infinity, but what we found was that having a great product wasn’t enough.

6. What Have Been the Most Effective Marketing Strategies

When you want to scale within existing customers, the product plays a very important role, but there are other things you need. You need relationships with people. Customers want somebody to talk to. They care about security, governance, and onboarding people into the product. Software isn’t enough.

We were always ambitious. I remember Roy and I talking, and we said, “We don’t want to be an SMB company forever. We have such huge potential. We want to do both SMB and upmarket, and this is what we have to do. Let’s do it.”

A lot of founders are told to wait until they’re pulled upmarket by large enterprises. Is that good advice?

It worked for us. I think the opposite isn’t optimal either.

Let’s say you start as a small company and you have an amazing VP of sales. They can sell anything, even if your product is really crappy. That’s a curse. It’s not something positive because we worked so hard to improve the product. Every improvement improved our marketing machine, improved customer retention, and built a special DNA in the company.

When we felt we were missing people knocking on our door and saying, “We want to scale, and there’s nobody around to help us,” it felt like we had to do it. We had to mature and add that layer into the company in order to scale to the next phase.

I get you, but I see this myself as an investor: It’s such a different company to build an enterprise business. It’s not just sales teams. You need customer success, SDRs, security, SOC 2, compliance. Is it a completely different business to build?

I think there’s a difference between a company that pivots into the enterprise and a company that wants to sell to the enterprise in addition to selling to SMBs and the midmarket.

We didn’t pivot into the enterprise. A lot of companies say, “We tried SMBs, we tried the midmarket, and we spent so much energy and effort converting those customers. We might as well just focus on the large ones and get a high ACV.” That wasn’t our strategy.

We wanted to capture what we call the whole pyramid. The baseline is SMBs, then the midmarket, but also the tip of the pyramid with large enterprises. It was always about adding that layer while making sure the product was good enough for SMBs and the midmarket.

When did you start to see product-led growth tapering off and really want to implement a sales team alongside it? What sort of revenue level was it?

I think it was around $40 million or $50 million of ARR.

We grew really quickly. We grew from $6 million of ARR to $18 million the year after, then from $18 million to $50 million, and from $50 million to $120 million in 3 years. It was super-rapid growth.

I think it was at $40 million or $50 million, maybe even $60 million, that we added the sales team.

Do you appreciate how strange that growth is? What I mean is, when you’re doing it, are you thinking, “Whoa, we know that we are one of the special ones”?

I’ll tell you something funny. You mentioned Jason Lemkin.

Don’t tell me you cold-emailed him and he didn’t respond.

No. One of the reasons I didn’t reply to your email is that I don’t use email.

I actually met Jason a few years ago. I was one of his biggest fans. When we started in 2012 and 2013, nobody knew anything about SaaS. I became the biggest SaaS geek ever. I read every article he published on SaaStr, and he wrote answers on Quora, if you remember.

I remember going to Roy and telling him, “Look, I read an article from Jason. He said that when you get to $1 million, you need to get to $10 million in 4 quarters. Once you get to $10 million, you need to get to $100 million in 5 or 6 quarters.”

I said, “We have to do it. We have to do it. Jason said so.”

When I met Jason a few years later, I told him, “Thank you for the guidance and everything.” It was very ambitious to get to that goal, and he told me, “I was talking about the best companies—the companies investors want to invest in.”

I just took it as gospel. This is what we needed to do. I guess ignorance is bliss sometimes.

That growth is incredible. When you look back at that growth, what broke first? Scaling companies is very hard. What was the first thing to break during that intense period of hyperscaling?

At some point, when we reached $50 million or $60 million, the performance marketing engine was working really well. But at some point, you understand that if you want to reach $1 billion, you need more.

When we got to $50 million, we built a dashboard called “The Road to $1 Billion.” We built a vertical TV in the office showing that we wanted to reach $1 billion by 2023. We actually missed it by 1 year.

It was a vertical dashboard, and we said, “We’re here at $50 million. We need to get to $1 billion.” We put it up for everybody to see in every office around the world.

When we sat down, we said, “We can’t do it just with the performance marketing engine.” When we ran the math, we would have had to invest so much money into performance marketing in 2022 and 2023 that it didn’t add up.

It was obvious to us that, in order to scale to that magnitude, it wasn’t enough to have a very efficient performance marketing engine. We needed to build a very powerful sales team and expand our customers because, eventually, when you reach $1 billion and want to grow 30%, the majority of the revenue needs to come from existing customers.

My gosh. These are insane numbers. Our teams are amazing at research, so when I say I read them, I was given the numbers. But I read that in 2023 you spent $17 million a month on performance marketing.

Something like that. A little bit less, but around that.

How did you spend so efficiently on performance marketing when so few others did?

Again, it all goes back to this amazing engine that we built. We’re also very efficient in terms of cash flow—over 25% free-cash-flow positive. Again, we scaled this cash-flow machine to the extreme.

7. Biggest Challenges & Lessons in Channel Spend

Did you focus on a small number of channels and really hammer them? Did you spray and pray and see what worked? How did you approach the portfolio of channel spend?

We never spray and pray. We don’t believe in pray. I pray sometimes, but it doesn’t help you with performance marketing.

We measure everything. When we build a new campaign, we track everything and A/B-test everything.

8. How Have Monday Been So Successful with Youtube Ads?

Why was YouTube so successful? monday.com crushed YouTube. You know this as well as I do. Why?

First of all, the rebrand was a key part of that. That was one of the main reasons we rebranded the company. We wanted to pick a name people could remember because, when you see an ad, you have about 5 seconds of attention to capture people.

Again, we managed to track not just links, but also when people viewed the ad. We saw there was a great ROI on that, and we managed to get a great presence on YouTube. It was cost-effective to do it.

Which channels did you spend on that you wish you hadn’t spent on?

Facebook was amazing for us because I think it just changed the trajectory of the company. But definitely AdWords and YouTube—we tried everything. We’re doing everything.

Which one was least effective? Which one did you spend on where you thought, “That was a waste of money”?

That’s not the way I look at it. It’s not about effectiveness; it’s about different audiences.

When people search on Google, they have a specific intent. They’re looking for a project management tool. But some people aren’t searching for a project management tool. They’re browsing Facebook, and those are 2 different audiences.

Both can be potential customers. Some people have intent, and some people have a need in the back of their minds. They might go on Facebook and suddenly get an advertisement about a work management tool. Maybe it’s an opportunity. Or they’ll go on YouTube. It’s a different kind of audience that we target.

9. Building a Multi-Product Strategy: The Rise of Monday CRM

Isn’t it the most expensive AdWords category? CRM is a very competitive landscape, and the landmines you face are intense. Isn’t it the most expensive AdWords category?

It is, but it’s very cost-effective for us.

If we go forward, we’ve built our multiproduct strategy. Maybe I’ll give you some background before we talk about the marketing around it.

People started using monday.com, and one thing that was super-surprising to me was that a lot of people used monday.com as a CRM. Because it’s so customizable, you can build your own boards, which are the equivalent of a table, and customers built contacts, deals, dashboards, and automations—a full-fledged CRM.

Why would they do that? It takes so much effort. I’m not talking about a few hundred or even a few thousand accounts. Tens of thousands of accounts built a CRM on top of monday.com. The same goes for monday dev and monday service.

Those products weren’t born out of thin air. They were born from customer demand. When we interviewed people and asked, “Why did you go to all that effort to build a full-fledged CRM when you could just buy an off-the-shelf product?” they said, “We want control. I have an idea of what the best CRM is for me. I don’t want to use an off-the-shelf product that’s very rigid and built in a very specific way.”

They told us, “Our only option was basically Salesforce because it’s enterprise-ready and customizable, but the cost and complexity of customizing that software and setting it up are huge.” That’s just an example. I’m talking broadly about enterprise products.

They were looking for something different. On the one hand, we gave them the freedom to build their own CRM, but they had to do it themselves. There was no third-party vendor or special IT team. They built it themselves, and they felt proud of that CRM.

Eventually, we said, “Let’s build a CRM product. Let’s package the monday.com platform into a full-fledged CRM and build deep features like call recording, call analysis, and email marketing.” We did that, and the strategy has been a huge success.

On the multiproduct strategy, the CRM today is growing faster than monday.com did back in the day.

What’s the CRM product’s revenue today?

We haven’t disclosed this on a quarterly basis, but at our last investor day, which was last year, it had grown from almost $0 to $25 million in 1 year.

10. Competing in the SaaS Market: Is Competition Good?

Are we seeing the complete bundling of SaaS tools? You mentioned the call-recording elements, and quite a few different products within that which, frankly, kill a load of other adjacent products. Are we seeing the bundling of SaaS tooling?

I don’t think monday.com will replace all the SaaS tools on the planet. But our grand vision is something we built from day 1: We built a platform. We didn’t build a product.

I think that’s something a lot of investors got wrong about what we were building, or maybe we didn’t explain it properly. We didn’t build a work management or project management tool from day 1. We built the equivalent of Force.com, which is for Salesforce.

We built a generic platform—not about work management and not about CRM—just the building blocks. Work management was the first implementation, then came CRM, dev, and service. The effort it takes us to customize that platform as a CRM, dev product, or service product is minimal compared to the compound value we get because we build it on the monday.com platform.

Eventually, I see a future where a company has several tools consolidated on monday.com for core business use cases, whether it’s CRM, work management, dev, or service. The compound value of using several of those tools—the flow of data, automations, and processes—is huge.

The reason I’m so excited about the future of the company is that I really feel, from the bottom of my heart, that we have one of the biggest opportunities in the software market today. We have to execute in order to deliver that, but I really feel that we got everything right. We just need to scale the company to the next phase.

What do you know now about going multiproduct that you wish you’d known when you went multiproduct?

One lesson is that it’s not just about the product itself. Go-to-market is just as important, and every product has a very different go-to-market. It’s unbelievable how different they are: different buying dynamics, different buyers, different decision processes, and different ways people consume ads. They’re all special in their own way.

As a result, do you have to build independent teams for every product? How do you think about how the company changes with the additional product lines?

That’s exactly how we think about it. We have different business units dedicated to each product. Every product is in a different phase. CRM is more mature, then dev, then service, while work management is obviously the most mature product.

Every product has its own team, marketing efforts, and dedicated sales team. We scale them as small startups within the company.

When you look at the revenue lines today, what is monday.com’s core revenue?

We’re a public company, so I think the relevant number is that we announced we reached $1 billion of ARR about 3 months ago.

Okay, great. We’ve got $1 billion of ARR, and CRM was $25 million at investor day.

That was 1 year before that, but it’s bigger today.

What smaller line of revenue today will be one of the biggest lines of revenue in 5 years?

Definitely CRM will be very dominant going forward. Dev as well. Actually, the momentum we’ve gotten from monday service is unbelievable. It’s still early days.

Who do we compete against for monday service?

With CRM, we compete with HubSpot, Salesforce, and a little bit with Zoho. With service, we compete with Zendesk, J Service, Freshdesk, and a little bit with ServiceNow, although they’re very focused on the enterprise.

When we look at the names you just mentioned, especially in CRM, respectfully, wow. How do you advise founders who are told, “That’s a horribly competitive industry”?

For me, it sounds like an opportunity to disrupt that industry. There are players that have been dominating each of those industries for a very long time. People are willing to pay a lot of money to use those tools because they bring a lot of value. I think it’s simply an opportunity to disrupt that market.

How do you pay attention to competition?

When I built my first startup, I remember logging into TechCrunch or reading tech news. Every time I saw a competitor I felt was competing with me, I felt this weird feeling in my stomach.

I swore to myself that I was never going to do it again. I was just going to focus on myself and my journey.

So you don’t pay attention to competitive products?

We analyze them and look at them to see what they’re doing, but I don’t feel that’s going to stop us in any way. If anything, I feel it’s in our hands. It’s in our control, in a way—in our ability to execute.

When we think about execution ability moving forward, you’re an incredibly insightful and smart founder. Everyone is questioning horizontal software’s ability to sustain itself in the next wave of AI.

How do you respond to the question of monday.com’s ability to sustain itself when we live in a world of agents and see a new generation of AI impacting all of SaaS?

For me, this is one of the things that excites me the most. What we’ve already seen, now that we’ve built a lot of AI functionality, is that people use AI inside monday.com.

It’s so easy for them. We took the same principles of an easy user experience and customizability. Instead of building a dedicated AI product, we allowed our own customers to integrate AI into their own workflows. Today, we’re helping them make their own work more efficient using monday.com.

The agents make monday.com a simple system of record or a database. They do all the information and data collection, retrieval, and migration, then bring it back to monday.com. Is that a good thing?

I think it’s an amazing thing. There will always be room for systems of record. I don’t think anybody will be willing to put their future into an AI bot without having the ability to question what’s going on, see dashboards and graphs, and access all the data.

I think it’s very important to track the data. I don’t think that will go away. Maybe some of the work being done by people will be done by AI, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that you need to analyze the data, see it, and track it.

I also think there will still be a substantial human element that will be part of that. I don’t think SaaS tools will go away. If anything, some of the work can be replaced by AI, but the fundamental principle of why those tools exist is strong and will remain going forward.

Do you think AI will change the future of SaaS pricing?

For sure. A lot of SaaS tools have been very focused on seat count. Once you replace human labor with AI functionality, pricing should adjust and perhaps focus more on consumption in addition to seats.

11. The IPO Journey: Why Then? Pros and Cons of Being Public?

Can I go to the IPO? Why did you decide to IPO when you did? We live in a world now where there are such extended windows of private capital. You don’t need to IPO, as we’re seeing with Stripe, Databricks, and Starlink. How did you think about when the right time was?

Going back to that decision, it was more random than you might think. We just felt that eventually we wanted to build a huge company.

When we looked at the most inspiring SaaS companies in the world, they were all public. I think it adds a layer of maturity to the business.

I really like the fact that we’re a public company. First of all, public-market investors really surprised me. They’re much more sophisticated than I thought. Initially, when we went public, I thought it was all about the private-market investors, but public-market investors are extremely sophisticated and smart.

I also think the cadence of quarterly earnings reports adds a great cadence to the company. All in all, I think it was a great move for us as a company.

You went out at $7.5 billion. How does that feel?

You told me you like stories, so let me tell you a story. I’ll tell you about the day of the IPO.

It was a long 2 weeks in New York. It was actually on the edge of the COVID lockdown, so I think it was one of the first IPOs that was done in person after the COVID lockdown.

Before COVID, you used to take a private jet, meet investors, and do a bus tour. But it was mostly on Zoom. We were exhausted the day before the IPO.

So here it is: the IPO, the big day. We go to Nasdaq, and it’s a beautiful ceremony. I remember seeing the opening of the trading day.

A few hours go by. I do a bunch of interviews on TV and with newspapers, and it’s around 4 or 5 p.m.

And I look to my left and see Roy, my co-founder, doing interviews as well, and we're alone—literally alone. Everybody left; we're alone. I had this blazer that I never wear, but for the IPO, we both wore matching suits. We took off the blazers and walked to the hotel for 25 minutes in our white T-shirts.

We walked to the hotel, I went to my hotel room, sat down on the bed, and stared at Netflix for 3 hours. That's it. That's the IPO day. That's the anticlimax of the IPO.

Was that hard? It's like triathletes, Ironman competitors, or people who run a marathon: there's so much buildup, and then it happens and it's like, “Oh, yeah.” Then the day after, when you woke up, you opened your iPhone, opened the Stocks app, added Monday, and that was the most exciting you felt throughout your whole body. When you saw Monday inside it, it just felt real.

What was the first 24-hour performance?

I think we went up 10% or 15%, so it was good.

12. How a Co-CEO Structure Works

Yeah, it's a tough morning when you wake up and it's down. It's like, “Oh, shit.” I totally get it. Can I ask, you mentioned Roy there. You are co-CEOs, which is a crazy arrangement. In traditional startup land, it's worked phenomenally well for you, which is amazing. What have you done to make co-CEOs work?

When we started the company, Roy was the CEO and I was the CTO, so we didn't start as co-CEOs. I remember a week into the company, he told me, “Look, I want us to do everything together.” I told him, “Of course, we're co-founders,” but he said, “Look, everything—raise money together, do everything as co-CEOs.” I told him, “Okay.”

We would meet investors, and sometimes I would talk about the business and he would talk about technology. Then, in the next meeting, we'd switch roles. I think we got everybody confused, but after a while he told me, “Let's make it official and name ourselves co-CEOs, just so we don't have to explain it to everybody.”

What's so special about him is that he's one of those people who has no ego. You want to do what's best for the company; he doesn't care about his own title or being on top of somebody else. We have this amazing relationship where we both want to do what's best for the company, and we don't care about our personal perspectives.

We're kind of the same and different. We spend a lot of time together. We actually walk home every day—we live in Tel Aviv—so we walk every day. We spend hours just thinking and talking about things.

You walk home every day together?

Almost every day.

13. How to Manage a Board

Wow. What have been your biggest lessons on board management? You have a great board.

Wow, it's a big topic. First of all, my number-one rule is: never surprise the board. Never. That's the worst thing you can do.

Actually, one of the things we built into BigBrain is—we used to send a daily SMS with the company's performance every day to our board members, whether it was good or bad. It was automatic, so when they came to the board meeting, they knew the numbers better than I did. They saw everything. The board meeting was basically about the numbers and metrics because they had full transparency.

That's something I really believe in, both inside the company and with our board members. If we had something we wanted to make a decision about, we always talked with each of them individually before the meeting. The last thing you want is to get into an ego fight, so we would get their opinions and change things before the meeting. We talked more about the future than wasted time on disagreements.

That's so interesting. I wonder if that's possible to do for a fund. I'm just wondering now if I could actually have that with my investors, or at least my board, where whenever we had a change of marks or a new investment or whatever it was—

Interesting. Okay, one to think about.

Okay.

14. Quick-Fire Round

Listen, I could talk to you all day, but I want to do a quick-fire with you. I say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? No tricky questions. Never a tricky one.

What do you believe that most people around you disbelieve—maybe something that's not intuitive about setting goals?

Most people, when they set goals, try to figure out what they can do. I never think about it this way. I'm thinking about what I want to achieve and then trying to figure out a way to do it.

When you build a plan for next year bottom-up, people will think about a plan based on what they've done the previous year and say, “Let's do it again with small adjustments.” I always think about how we can do something above and beyond. That changes how people think about what can be done and how they can achieve it.

Why don't you email?

I never got anything good out of email. I'm an extreme believer in focus. You ask me about investments—I don't do investments. I focus 100% on the company, and I always try to set my own priorities.

I think all those tools really just distract you. I always try to look inside and understand what's most important for the company. When you start being managed by external tools, I think it's a huge distraction for the company.

It sounds wonderful, but how do you actually do that? When you have investors, board members, and customers, they get in touch by email. You set up investor meetings by email. How do you not do email? I'm fascinated.

We have other people on the team who use email to coordinate meetings and other things. It's not a company rule; I just don't do it myself.

So you use Slack and WhatsApp?

We use Monday a lot, I think. We use Slack and WhatsApp—more instant communication channels.

What have been your biggest lessons on priority-setting? You're a fascinating mind in terms of focus. What are your biggest lessons on priority-setting?

What I've found about founders is that you try to avoid the hardest things in your business because they're usually the hardest to change. I always think to myself, if something is very painful, that's the right time to get into it and fix it.

I always try not to avoid going deep into the hard things because, eventually, those are the things that cause stress. Once you deal with them, it changes your mindset and the course of the company. I always try to focus on the hardest things and figure out what's not working in the company.

God, I love Israeli founders. It's the opposite of Europeans: “I take the easy thing and I do that first.” We have Brazilians, so I'll give us that.

What's the single hardest element of your day job as co-CEO of Monday?

15. Building a Performance Marketing Engine

I think finding the right balance. For many years, I didn't have the right balance between family life and work life. I was really stressed, and I made a decision a few years ago to change. I spend a lot of time with my family today, and I'm more efficient.

What have you changed to allow yourself to do that?

I went to therapy. One of the things my therapist told me, which really resonated with me, was that I can do the extra meeting and the extra thing, but at the end of the day, I'm a leader in the company. I'm leading the company, so people look at me.

When I'm exhausted, stressed, or don't have patience, it reflects on everybody else. I need to take care of myself in order to be able to take care of the company. It really hit me deeply, and I felt I should treat myself like a professional athlete. I should be at my peak all the time.

You look wonderful. No, you do, you really do. You have fantastic hair, by the way. I've been thinking for the last hour: this is solid hair. How do you look after yourself, then?

Today, I exercise every morning. I have 3 little kids, so my baby usually wakes me up at around 6 a.m., but I try to exercise every morning before I go to work. Then I try to spend time with my family in the evening.

It's not always possible, but it's really something that charges me as a human being.

Do you need much sleep?

Yeah, I got the Oura Ring, so I've improved my sleep.

When do you go to bed if you get up at 6?

Well, I'm embarrassed to say, but usually around 10 p.m.

Wow, okay. Yeah, that'll do it. Do you watch your diet? Are you healthy?

Well, I hope so. I try to optimize my sleep, my nutrition, and my exercise regimen. I just feel I need to be sharp. I need to be at my peak, and I need to take care of myself in order to take care of the company, so I really treat this professionally.

I listen to a lot of podcasts about supplements and just healthy living, I guess.

You can be CEO of another company for a day. Which company do you choose to be CEO of?

I think I'm fascinated by Microsoft. I think that's a company that's made one of the biggest transitions in the history of software and tech. It had its lows and its highs, but I'm really interested to understand what that transition was.

I think Satya, the CEO of Microsoft, has done a tremendous job pivoting the company, so it would be interesting to see this from the inside.

I totally get you and agree. If you were Marc Benioff today, what would you do with Salesforce?

Salesforce is an amazing company. It's an inspiration, and he deserves so much credit for building the SaaS industry.

If you could ask him 1 question, what would you ask him?

He's one of the people who probably knows best in the world how to build a sales machine at scale. There's so much I can learn from him about how to do it—things he's probably forgotten that I haven't learned yet. So probably a question around that, I guess.

What about the way your parents brought you up are you deliberately not doing with your children?

It's a good one. Look, first of all, I love my parents and appreciate the way they raised me. They taught me a lot of important lessons.

I think my dad taught me to go deep on everything I do. He always asked me, “Why?” He forced me to understand every decision and everything that I said. He always asked me, “Explain to me why.” I think that developed in me a sense that I always try to understand why and dig deep.

My mom taught me a lot about compassion, how to deal with people, how to be ambitious, and how to be a winner, I guess. Maybe something I've learned along the way that I do differently is to accept different paths—how people grow up, what they care about, and what they don't care about.

I try to be very open with my kids and understand what they care about. I'm not trying to push them in any way; I just let them be who they are. I often think about what a successful person is like. What defines success? Is it status? Is it money? Is it a professional career? Is it happiness? I don't know what the answer is.

It's market cap.

I just want my kids to be happy. I don't know what the best way to achieve that is, but that's what I want for them.

When were you happiest?

With my family, for sure. That's the moment when I find peace inside. I love the company; it's one of the most meaningful things I've done in my life. But spending time with my kids is the best thing for me and my wife.

What stage of the company did you find most unnatural for you as a CEO?

Every one. Every stage. I've never done it before, so it's a new experience for me, and I learn a lot of things along the way. But I want to continue on this journey, and I want to keep learning and evolving as a person.

Final one: what's the question you're never asked by employees, investors, or board members that you should be asked, do you think?

I don't know what the answer is, but nobody asks me why we built this company. Why did we go on this journey? Being an entrepreneur isn't intuitive. It's a big question.

Why did you decide to be an entrepreneur?

I'm on a quest in life to find out exactly why, but I think it's a combination of trying to prove myself—I don't know to whom, but maybe to myself—and doing something meaningful and good that affects other people. I don't have the full answer yet, I guess.

Eran, listen, I really appreciate you putting up with my deep and meaningful questions and my bluntly meandering around different topics. You've been fantastic, so thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Harry. It's been a pleasure.