Meet the Operator Who Helped Nexl Reach Escape Velocity

I think that really resonated with me because I really thought I was like, can I swear on this podcast? Like, I can't see it. Absolutely. Because I was like, oh, you know, like, I worked at Deloitte.

You know, I didn't do a bit of work with PI. Like, I'm pretty smart, I can work really hard. Like, I'm probably like, pretty good at it. Am I already mid-twenties?

Yeah, I was like, 25. Of course you're what she is. Everyone has hit 20. Of course.

And I think that was a really good ego reset for me, which is like, you actually don't know what you don't know. I think the graduation rates from like, seem to series A, like, 20%. Yeah. And then the graduation rates from like, series A to series B are even smaller than that.

And so I think, depending on the type of business, when you get to series B, you're like, almost at a skate velocity. You can only really do one thing. And you need to just focus on winning that one thing. And if you're pitching a company to an investor, and you say, you're going to win 90% of the market, like, you'd probably get laughed out.

Like, those, the ten sides are like, all the, the ten is like, 10 billion dollars, 100 billion dollars. And if we're going to win 1%, like, you can't win 1% in a vertical business, you have to win 90% of that. And so for us, we do think about winning. And we think about winning is like, trying to get 90% market penetration.

AI is going to finally change the business of law, which is how a lot of runs and operates. And while there's a lot of having the practice of law, I think there's like a management and cultural shift that needs to happen. You know, a lot of lawyers and partners are quite skeptical of AI, there's hallucinations, things like that. So for law, you have to be 100% right and certain about, like, the quality of the work that you do.

You can't have hallucinations. But what AI can give a lot of firms, leverage and where it can be really impactful is like the non-practice of law. Welcome to Give It An Uj. Today, we have Albert Pataggio from Nexel, one of the very few startups that have hit series B in Australian recent years, which is by no means an easy thing to do.

And we will talk a little bit about that. But before we do that, welcome to the show. Thank you. That was an awesome intro.

It's exciting to be here. It's an awesome achievement. And we're not going to talk about it yet. We're going to build to it.

But let's start because I think I like to start framing it on rather than the business. And usually I get you to talk about Nexel. But actually, no, let's go start talk about you for a bit of a change. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up starting Nexel.

And then we'll break into what Nexel actually does. Yeah, good question. So I'm not a founder, but I joined Nexel a couple of years ago after being introduced to the founder. And I can talk about that.

So the long story short, it's like I grew up in Darwin. It was born overseas, grew up in Darwin, studied in Canberra, and then post-Canberra. I moved to Sydney for that. Darwin to Canberra.

Yeah, down to Canberra. Wow. What was that? I mean, I have not been to Darwin.

I was supposed to go last year and I couldn't go unfortunately. But I know enough. I have been to Canberra. They're literally the polar opposites of Australia.

Absolutely polar opposites. When are we moved to Canberra? My fingers would go green from like a circulation because of how cold it was. Like a cold day in Darwin is like 25 degrees.

Like you put on a sweater at 25 degrees. Cold day in Canberra is like minus five degrees. Yeah. It was like obsidence culturally.

And your blood changes. You know that, right? Your blood. I think it takes about eight months.

And then someone said, I was literally talking to this yesterday with someone who lives in Singapore. It takes eight months and then you'll go from wandering around Singapore sweating to not in eight months. You're blood thin. That's crazy.

Yeah. So that's a dramatic change. Was that your choice or was it a family choice? No, family choice.

My parents got, they both got jobs in Canberra. They moved over. They popped like servants. And then moved to Sydney after uni.

So I studied a double degree in law and chemistry. Yep. Uni was terrible chemist. Even terrible law student.

Truthfully. Thankfully wasn't terrible at my degrees at the same time. And so like, if I was bad at chemistry, I was like, okay, law. So you were hedging?

I was hedging, yeah, I was hedging. But uni was good. And moved to Sydney after uni. And Sydney, I always reckon about this.

It was like the first city I lived in with multiple forms of public transport. Like, Darwin had buses and Canberra had buses. Like, you go to Sydney. It's like, there's a train.

There's a bus. There's a ferry. There's like the light rail. Like, oh, there's a lot.

There's a lot happening at the city. I suppose I moved from London here. So it was different. Everyone just got the underground everywhere.

You couldn't go anywhere other than that. But yeah, it's not interesting. And I get you find Sydney's like a sort of happy medium between the two. Did you have a favorite out of Darwin and Canberra?

I think looking back now, Darwin is an awesome place to live. And I know people who've now moved to Darwin from like Sydney and things like that. Canberra is very formative for me and at a great time studying in Canberra. But like Sydney's home.

My daughter wants to go to Canberra, you know, actually, there's a lot of people to Sydney who want to go to Canberra. You know, at the moment, it's the cool thing to do. So I went to A&U and a lot of people from Sydney and Melbourne go to A&U. Because it's, you know, like a very small campus, like on campus culture, like it's fun.

And you get away from home, which a lot of people don't do here. I see I never understood why Sydney was trying to stay at home when they go to Union and find that bizarre, but super bizarre. Yeah, yeah, super bizarre. Okay, so you come to Sydney.

What do you start doing? So I did that thing when I would say like, you're kind of talented, but don't really know what you do, which has become a management consultant. So I went to Deloitte. Enjoying their strategy, consulting team, which was awesome.

Through Deloitte, I managed to work with some really, really cool people. Some people who I still keep in touch with, people who've gone on to do some amazing things and like the venture or tech space. Yep. And so I was really lucky to get involved there.

But Deloitte, I guess I can kind of say this because it's wrapped up, but Deloitte had a venture fund where they invested in companies that gave them strategic advantage in market. And a big four or all the same, just different color. But if you had a technology offering alongside your services, you could go to market with something more compelling. And so they had invested in a few companies, the partner I worked for at the time was running the venture fund and asked me for some help with one of their portfolio companies.

Started doing a bit of work with one of their portfolio companies through Deloitte. A business called Practice Ignition, which is now called Ignition. I know practice Ignition. And I remember this business.

So they just raised our round. This 2019 from Tiger Global. And I think it would have been more tigers for us big rounds in Australia. It was a big ho-ho about it.

I remember. Huge. And Deloitte were in the business prior to that round. And so I did a bit of sizing work for the partner who's invested in the company.

Yep. And then through that got super interested and they kind of venture and tech space and then, you know, ended up leaving Deloitte to go to a startup. And so, I mean, that's a really interesting route. Like, you've had massive cultural weather changes, you've got a uni, you've kind of Sydney, you've gone into what is the corporate of corporates in terms of the big four.

And then had exposure to startups. I'm fascinated by the amount of people that go into management consulting, which is so far away from startups and end up in startups. I'm really intrigued by the how many people do that. Do you think it's because when you're in those consulting roles, you get to see so many different types of businesses.

You actually get a sort of view of what you feel you might like. Yeah, I think that's partly it. I mean, truthfully, a lot of people do say that. But when you work in consulting, you're not consulting four startups.

Like startups can very rarely afford to have a Deloitte or PWC or McKinsey, whatever do some work for them. But I think by working a lot of different environments, it gives you like a good understanding for what it is to learn something super quickly. Yeah. And then apply existing frameworks to like a new industry or a new problem space.

And that like, comfort around ambiguity and bringing frameworks into ambiguity is very, very helpful in a startup environment. I guess you're almost trying to, you know, they call people to work in a stage startups. Standing nice, right? Because they can do lots of different things.

I guess consulting is that you're going for one thing to one thing to one thing. You're not sticking with one thing. I'm really glad you said that because when I wrote my goodbye email to the team at Deloitte, I actually wrote it as like, thank you to the knife sharpness. Because I use the analogy of being like a blunt knife, working with like knife sharpness who made me quite sharp.

So I'm glad you discovered that. A very poignant email to say goodbye with goodness. You didn't just see it. No, no, it was poetic.

I really enjoyed my time at Deloitte. Yeah, that's good. And so what was the first startup? So I went to a business called Equate, which is a workforce planning startup.

So the genesis to it is, I actually applied for a few venture roles. And the kind of people who go for these roles have a combination of two of those or even all of them. Some are ex-founders, some are like really talented people who've like worked in banking and really big deals. And like, you just, you know, you don't have that level of experience.

Like go get traditional experience. Okay, get a startup experience. Yeah. I think that really resonated with me because I really thought I was like, can I swear on this podcast?

Like, I can't see it. Absolutely. Because I was like, oh, you know, like, I worked at Deloitte, you know, I didn't a bit of work with PI, like I'm pretty smart. I can work really hard.

Like, I'm probably like pretty good at 20s. I'm already mid 20s. Yeah, I was like 25. Of course you're hot shit.

Everyone is hot shit in mid 20s. And I think that was a really good ego reset for me, which is like, you actually don't know what you don't know. Yeah. And so I didn't do some soul searching, but I really reflected as like, do I go to a startup?

Do I go to a corporate and do some transactional there? Like, do I go to investment bank? And then I'm going to a startup, very, very late stage business. Unfortunately, that startup is not doing very well, but I left it right before they raised their series A, that OIF.

Let. Yeah. So it was a really good journey to see that. What were you doing in there?

Because they were seed round. Yeah, it was a pre-pre-series AAC business. That kind of bootstrapped to about three million ARR, which is cool. Yeah.

But I was, you know, initially like, probably like customer support or CS. Okay. And then from there started, you know, earlier, employers, I can play number six. Started to a whole range of different things.

That would have been good experience. It's playing number six. Anything in the first 10 is amazing. Because there's nothing quite like that.

You can't even describe it. For example, you just become a dad, which we'll talk about later, which is something else you can't describe. But I think working in a first 10 employees, it's very difficult for people to understand what that's like. For sure.

I think there's a lot I took away from that, that is helpful and some of it, that's not super helpful in my career, longer term. But I think like having a road attitude, like to be a class is an important thing I took away. They also had a recruited quite a few very talented engineers. And the COO that it was I still keep in touch with.

So some of the engineers I used to work with there have now joined the company I work at now. Oh, cool. So I went to early stage startup, caught a quake, left a quake to actually go to a advisory business called Astral Ventures. Mm-hmm.

I've heard of them. And so they were doing M&A and couple of raise advisory for early stage technology businesses here in Australia. We worked on some really awesome raises. This is like 2020-2021.

Like, hard of the market. Like super friendly. Oh, me. It was super fun.

Like, we were working on some huge raises that like, you know, Blackbird had led and, you know, a bunch of other funds. And so it was cool to be on that side of the table helping founders like raise a lot of money in an environment that was like really exciting and really frothy. And yeah, it was roaring to go. Cool.

And so then, how did you end up where you are? How did you end up being introduced to the founder and then obviously making that transition? Yeah. So see when you work in raise advisory.

I mean, a lot of founders. You meet a lot of founders and the work and being able to get paid is tied to the market conditions. Yes. And when the market dries up, you know, you can't afford rent.

And so I ended up trying to work out what I do after that seeing as the market was pretty slim and got introduced to Phil, who's the founder at Nexel through EVP. EVP is one of Nexel's kind of existing investors. At the time, EVP had actually just invested in Nexel. And I knew Alan had a pretty good relationship with him.

And he was like, hey, we just invested in this company. Nexel, they're on legal tech. The founder is like a really strong product visionary. Like a really, really great super nice.

The business is going places. But just doesn't have someone who's like financially and operated minded, just like you. And I think you should go have a conversation with the founder just to see if you two vibe and evidently did. And yeah, so I met Phil.

And I really, really enjoyed my conversation with him. He is like a warm, charismatic, very passionate CEO. He's like not an asshole, which I think helps a lot. You know, it helps a lot.

Huge, huge. I think I had this for which like I didn't want to work with brilliant jerks. And like Deloitte has really smart people, equally as some people who probably like are degrading to work with despite how smart they are. And I just didn't want to work with people like that.

And Phil just outstanding, found a great product visionary, really passionate about the problem space. Like legal tech is a funny one where no one really wakes up. And it's like, I want to build a legal tech business. Like that's not like a kid's dream.

I was going to ask you, why do I'm shooting you? No, obviously because you're there now. But what did make him build it? Because you're like, you're right.

No one wakes up going, that's my dream. No, for sure. So he had spent a number of years at Gilbert and Tobin, which is one of the most, one of the largest firms in the country. The most expensive.

But there, they do awesome work. And he was running their innovation team. And it was building a lot of product for the firm to help them automate and streamline all other processes. And I think he came to the view that his impact was very limited by working at GNT.

He was only servicing one firm. Could he do something at scale that would change the industry forever in the way that he's changed how GNT around their business? So he was really focused on like, what can he do to impact the business of law? And from there, he went to found Excel.

Okay, cool. And so next was been going, how long now? So the business started in 2018. But I'd say this iteration, the company has been going since 2021.

So between 2018 and 2021, it kind of failed a few times. Yeah. And then found Prolekmarker Thin 21. Okay.

And you joined in... 23. 23. So you've been there just two years?

Two, yeah, two plus years, yeah. And you've just done a Series B. Yes. As we mentioned, which, you know, as I said, if you look back in Australia now, last five, six years, there's a handful who've managed to get to Series B.

There really are. I mean, even Series A has been a stretch the last three years. But, you know, we had that sort of real glutton of them a few, you know, maybe 10 years ago. There was quite a lot.

They were flying through and it was fantastic. Then you had way too much funding on everyone, which you alluded to earlier. And then so there were so too many people with really bad ideas with too much money. And they, since then, how many was there been?

Five or six? Very, very few. How'd you do it? Because I'm assuming that your operation and financially minded was we know.

And that's why you came in. You've obviously led this round. How was that experience? Because it's a tough one.

Because you're kind of proven, but you're not quite like a household name, whereas by the time you get to Series C, most people know who you are. Yeah. This is a really good question. What's time packet?

I think we are really excited. I think the graduation rates from like C to Series A are like 20%. Yeah. And then the graduation rates from like Series A to Series B are even smaller than that.

And so I think depending on the type of business when you get to Series B, you're like almost at a skate velocity. We're like, you're kind of like a real business and you can get awards. You can get a lot of money. Profitability is exactly self-sustaining.

So when I joined Nexel, the first thing they asked me to do was to raise money. And that was obviously my background. So that was helpful, but like actually, the business had a tiny bit of money left. And enough to kind of like fund operations for like, you know, eighties, eighties months.

But like they're like, we desperately need you to like raise money. We're going to kick off around right now. And they're like a few other things that play, which kind of led us to like needing to raise money. So the first thing I did was like, let's raise money.

And I spent the first six months of my time closing out our Series A, but she wanted capital and EVP colored together, which is exciting. My first, I hadn't even started at Nexel, but I was like pitching to shewater with Phil, the founder. In my first week at Nexel. Really was the first thing to do.

Yeah, very, very first thing I did was like, like go to a pitch. We got this investor meeting, you should go. And I spent maybe like a few weeks before that. I didn't like technically join, but to onboard and rant me, I just spent a little time planning up Nexel's financial data.

Yep. So they had like investor-grade materials and things like that. We raised about 6.6 million, which is exciting.

It is. But it's not enough to make really, really big bets as a company. Like when you got 6.6 million, you kind of need to make some more bets, like higher one to two people here and there.

Like you can't just like go all out. So we raised money in an environment that was pretty tough. And I knew that raising again would probably be pretty tough. Yep.

And so we kind of geared the business to always be very capital efficient. And so we weren't investing like large amounts of money to grow the team. It was always like, can we add incremental heads to achieve a particular purpose. And so when we closed our series A, the purpose was like, let's go and try win the US.

We already had some view about what the US looked like for us. And we wanted to hire our first salesperson on the ground in the US. We did that kind of work. We hired a few more people kind of built the team.

I feel went over to New York. I went over a few months after Phil did. And so for us, it was like, how do you group show efficient but strong growth? I love the fact you just said, we're not going to make big bets.

We're just going to go launch in the US. That's pretty big bet. That is a pretty, but I think what we did was, and I speak to a lot of founders now still who are like, oh yeah, we're raising and we're going to say, we're going to use the money to launch in London and launch in New York and do all this. I'm like, you can only really do one thing.

And you need to just focus on winning that one thing. And for us, it wasn't launching the US. It was actually like, we're going to focus on the Northeast region in the US. And we're going to focus on these specific states.

And we're going to focus on this very specific customer base. And we're going to dedicate all our resources to like winning this very, very specific part of the US. As proof, we can win the US. Yeah.

And so unfortunately that meant we actually did divest from a few other regions that we were playing in. So we had enough funds to then focus on the US without burning too much of the money that we raised. Yeah, okay. So what was about focus?

I think that kind of leads us to our series B was, the business was growing very nicely. We were very capital efficient. I was in New York and Phil was in New York. And we get a lot of inbound interest from investors.

And so this is probably like January, December, January this year, December last year. We started to test the waters for a series B. And so it had been about 12 months and so raised. Just to do a price discovery, we're getting a lot of inbound.

Through that process, we actually got like a bunch of term sheets from like a really great US investors. And we went back to our board. Hopefully there won't be too disappointed. I'm telling the story.

And like you don't even need the money to raise. Why are you raising? Like let's come up with like a plan for when you raise capital and like be super strategic about it. But like, you know, the business is growing really, really nicely.

You're hyper capital efficient. You don't need the money. If you wait, you know, six to 12 months, you can really optimize for the right valuation, the right part and run a really strong process. And I think having EVP and share water there on our board is really strong because they've like seen the story play out with a lot of companies who were like growing super quickly in investors, preempt term sheets.

And then we're super realistic being like, you really want to raise, raise, but what our steer is like, don't raise. Well, like a cat cool. Just got a heaps of term sheets so we know that this business is growing. And so you weren't putting yourselves out there to raise money.

They were just coming to you because you'd launched and people over there were discovering you. Yes, essentially. And just which we haven't touched on yet, legal tech, but what does next actually do? Like if you had to give it an elevator pitch, description, what is next?

Yes, because sorry, we didn't talk about that, but great. We're a B2B vertical SaaS business. We predominantly service like B2B law firms. You watch suits.

Yes. So the firms and suits like Pearson Hardman, other types of firms we love to sell to, like corporate firms who service other businesses. We started as a CRM play. So our core product is a CRM for lawyers and partners at law firms are like the sales force within a firm.

They partner sell work, but the way partner sell work isn't like a traditional sales force. Like they don't think about like am I qualifying a deal or am I moving this prospect through a particular pipeline? They think about, who do I know at this client or potential client? What's the breadth of my relationship?

Who else at the firm knows is client? How often do we speak? It's a very relationship based sales. And so traditional CRMs like sales force and HubSpot and all those other platforms don't really work for law firms because it's a relationship based.

So we started as a CRM that solves that exact problem relationship based CRM for the legal industry. And now I've started to build products on top of our kind of core CRM. So we're really involved from being a core CRM product to more of a platform play. Which is why it was easy for you to go to the US because I was thinking gosh, you know, you're a legal tech.

There's different legal laws across the world. You know, how does that work? But obviously if you're doing a CRM, it doesn't matter what the laws are. I mean, there's this element, some sure.

But overall, it's not a huge step for you to move over there. No, not at all. In fact, it works out better because a lot of the firms there like really deeply think about how they do business development because they're such a competitive space. Yeah, okay.

All right. So you've gone over there. Things are going well. New people are discovering you they're giving you term sheets.

Gone back to your board. They've gone, that's great. But don't get carried away. Maybe just concentrate on what you're doing.

Where'd you go from there? Yeah, so we had the conversation and I was like, okay, feel like let's absolutely make sense. Kind of let's think about our growth plan. And Dan at EVP who sits on our board was like, well, just if you are thinking about raising, you should go speak to Dave Yuan at Tidemark.

Like he's probably the best investor in the vertical space and they're invested and David invested in multiple legal texts before an Excel. And so we had a conversation with Dave and because of the time zone, it was at six am in a Saturday morning for me. Had a conversation with Dave, sent across from like super, super high level metrics and that weekend, Dave was like, hey, this is really, really interesting. Let's see if we can kind of do something here.

And we went back to high board and was like, hey, we know we completely heard you pens down on any raise. But you were juicist. But you were focused on building and there's obviously like a really ambitious growth plan. But it's Tidemark Capital and it's Dave and the team.

And we kind of just want to run this process with ground. This is the only investor that we're going to engage in and like, you know, he may or may not invest. Like the business is probably like a bit earlier than where they typically like to play. But what Dave can bring to the table is something that no other investor can, which is like a really strong deep expertise in vertical SaaS and experience in the legal text base.

Cool. And so that's what happened, right? So we ended up running that process with Tidemark. And the Tidemark team are great, really, really like strong diligence process, probably like a process I've never seen before, truthfully, in like the breadth and depth of where they engaged with the company and who they engaged with.

But through that process got to really know them. They got to really know us. We spent some time in San Francisco with them. And we just thought they were the perfect partner.

And so even though we'd kind of agreed not to engage or we didn't need the funding, we thought that what they could bring to the table would really like supercharge the business and where we were going. Cool. I mean, Treet, how has your relationship gone with field during this time? Because founders giving up control is not always easy for them, it's not always easy for the person coming in.

You know, and then obviously you've got a relationship, it sounds like you're working super closely together as well. So how, talk to me about that, you know, from the day you sort of walked in, you've gone through quite a journey in a very short space of time. You know, you've finished off arrays, you've launched into a new country, you've got another race with a dream investor. There's a lot happening.

How's that sort of dynamic been? Yeah, so I think this is probably why Phil and I work together so well, is from, I think when we met, we both really clicked and vibe together. And so we're pretty good at communicating very well. We're very open about, you know, how we're feeling and what our priorities are.

I think the thing that underpins all that is like, both he and I, I just like low ego people. And you know, Phil is in it for the mission and the impact that he is bringing, you know, having on the industry, like I'm in it because I want to see Phil's journey and what that looks like. And that's the instant drawcard of Phil's. Like I just need to see where this person is going, where this business is going, which is why I joined next.

So like I'm very low ego. And so I'd say like our relationship, our working relationship I think has gone from like strength to strength throughout the process. When I was in New York, we were living like a five minute walk from his apartment. Like we had, you know, dinner with his family, like he came to my wedding.

And so like I say, we have a very strong relationship and it's underpinned by no ego. Yeah, do you feel like it's almost co-founder kind of like, or friendship like? Yeah, definitely friendship. Like I mean, he, yeah, came to our wedding here.

And so I came to our wedding felt I speak to Phil every single day, multiple times a day. And you know, he involved me with the most important decisions at the level of the business. He trusts me to make decisions and has half. And so I think I feel very privileged to be in the position I'm interested in.

That's amazing. I mean, I think you've done a nice job. You've obviously filled the gaps that he doesn't have. And he's aware of that.

How have you found that transition? You know, if you think about where you've come from, you know, delight to super early stage to, you know, back into sort of consulting. And then now into what is arguably a scale up, I guess. That's kind of all the boxes in the startup ecosystem that exist.

You've been through them all. How have you found that journey? Because that's a lot of different, you know, there's not a lot of people who can actually function in all of those different roles. I hadn't thought about that way, but I'd say the journey is hard and fun.

Yeah, as was probably the short summary. I think with that overall process, something I, I'm always telling myself and something that, you know, the board also tells me and other people tell me it's like, this is the first time I'm doing it. And so what you need to be doing is learning as quickly as you can and trying to hire a really strong talent around you to help fill the gaps that you don't know. Yeah.

And I think that's something that I get pushed on a lot by our investors, which is like, I'll, but you and Phil are working really strongly together. And you two together are a very strong team. But what you need to complement yourselves with is like a really strong talent around you who've seen the movie so that they know, you know what the business needs to look like and how it needs to perform and, you know, what kind of talent you can bring in. And I think that this is why it's really exciting to have closed us, it is B, is because we're no longer capital constrained in the way that we previously were.

And so the pool of talent that we can now forward or attract into the business becomes substantially larger. Yeah. And you're like a series A business, you're in legal tech. Most people don't really know who you are.

There's like a lot of really cool companies to join, like, Linktree and Immutable. And we know when I was trying to look for a job, my friends were like working at them. I was like, oh, those companies are so cool. Like, whoa, like it must be so cool to work at.

They're always cool. That's true. But like when you look at like Eucalyptus, like that is a really cool company to work for, like on face value. And I just don't think at the time next will had like a proposition in the same way.

But I think we have a very interesting proposition now to do something in a vertical that has never been done before. And now we can afford really top tier talent who are really interested in joining that mission. So you're back in Australia? Back in Australia.

So how's the US going? The US part of the business is growing really, really well. It's funny. When we were raising, I was joking to feel, I was like, you could carve out the US business and that's like a venture back all business and just in the next one by itself in how quickly it's growing.

So the US business is growing really quickly. And so you've come back here to just run it from here or to stabilize it from here or to focus on here or where are you sort of sitting because you've done this series beat. Like you said, that opens up a lot of possibilities. Now I'm one of those people who gets distracted by shiny things very easily.

And obviously now when you've got the money, you even more need to be focused, right? So what's your plan now? Yeah, so the business has structured in quite a distributed and remote way. So we're remote first.

We've got obviously a team in the US. We've also got a team in MIR. And so MIR was a market that we were winning prior to the US. And so when I say MIR, it's mostly in like the Nordics and the Middle East.

The UK is a market we are focused on, but not somewhere we were directly playing deeply in. But because of our presence overseas, our leadership teams also split quite deeply overseas. So it fills in New York, RCTO and our VP of client services is in MIR and in Buk, CIROs in Canada. And so it makes it really difficult when you're working across time zones.

So I'm kind of here to bridge both time zones. The morning I can bridge into the US and the afternoon I can bridge into a MIR. So it's kind of nonstop, but kind of Australia is a good place to be able to communicate on both sides. Interesting, okay.

And so as you said, you've now got the money, your focus is on talent. You're able to attract top talent. Tell me what does that look like to you? And if there's top talent out there watching, what do you offer them?

What's the opportunity for that top talent? Because as much as they didn't know you at Series A, they probably still don't quite know you, because you just don't need Series B. They'll in a year, everyone will know you. But right now, how would you best describe what it's like working in next?

Yeah, this is awesome question. So because we raise, I'd say preemptively, our Series B, like we weren't looking to raise capital and time mark were just an awesome investor to bring on. There's parts of the business that probably need a bit more maturity to get to like that series, be stage of what you'd expect. And so there's I think a really fun and interesting opportunity for someone who has built these functions or built and scaled functions within other large scale ups.

Yep, to come back to Nexel and just like do it all over again. Better. And that's exactly what we're looking for, which is someone who's like seen the movie before, who takes high ownership, who's like really interested in like coming back to a kind of a slightly earlier stage business and just like run the playbook all over again. And so I'll give you a couple of tangible examples.

And so prior to our Series B, I was running kind of like finance, people in culture and ops as like a one person team. I've recently just hired a financial control who can like run and scale the finance functions business. But I've hired this person from one of the like largest businesses that start up in Australia, kind of they were the first finance hire that kind of scaled our finance team to like 10, 20 plus people. And now they just want to do it again.

I'm like, that is a type of person. I'm looking for your top talent. I know the company you've worked for, I know the people you've worked for. I know those aren't easy environments.

Like come back here, you can do it all over again. The proposition is we're remote first. And you know, we're not capital constrained. There's like a wealth of whitespace to really grow and expand your career.

And I'm letting you run and take ownership of a whole function. And we've done that for like a number of different roles. Now we're hiring a VP of product. We're hiring a VP of engineering to do exactly that, which is like take ownership of a function, grow it, scale it, use your existing playbook.

And so, you know, we might not have the same kind of flash as like a mutable or a lintry or some of those really cool companies. But I think we've got an opportunity that doesn't exist in the market, which is you get to own and grow and scale a function with really top tier investors and with a really strong customer base. You know, it's exciting. I feel as exciting.

We just did a project recently for a very small, I guess you call them a health tech and they were actually bought by private equity. But they were 8 million ARR. So, which is unusual for private equity by that size, but this private equity specializes in doing that. And they did the same thing.

We went out and we bought a whole team and we had a head of product, head of engineering, head of marketing, head of finance, head of everything, right? And going out and finding those candidates who've done it and they've got into a company that has got to a certain size and it's become almost like a corporate and they're just like, I just want to go back. And there's actually quite a lot of candidates that I think they really enjoyed that journey and that journey is the real fun part.

And then when you get up to that corporate bit again, you kind of go, oh no, this is what I wanted to avoid. So, it's an interesting place to hire and you're right, the quality of those people who've done it before, they don't just want to do it again. They want to do it better for sure. And yeah, it's a fascinating place.

Well, you'll have fun hiring in that space is a good space to hire. Thank you. I think I analogize it to a light switch in my head in that. Now that we've got a bit of money and now we're speaking to a lot of really strong candidates and senior roles, like it's like a light's been turned on.

And I'm like, wow, like you're actually incredible. I would love that to have you work at next. And then I meet someone else and I'm like, you're even better. Like I would love for that.

You'd come work at next and then like there's like now 10 of them, like we're hiring a few senior roles and like each person or I meet or the team meets and I'm like, this is like incredible, the amount of talent who's out there who's willing to come back to an earlier stage business and do it all over again is it's awesome. I think it's, I think the opposite. It's almost like, you know, we all have, in everything we do in life right, we have hindsight. Oh my god, if I've just known, but rarely do you get a chance to go back and do one thing in your life again and do it better with everything you've learned.

It's almost like someone telling you, seeing the future and then being able to execute it. For sure. So I can see, you can see why it's so appealing to a lot of people for sure. I think, yeah, it is super exciting, especially like kind of the Australian tech ecosystems now at that stage where you've got a set of like really experienced leaders who've like scaled a business who, you know, want to do that.

I would say maybe like five to 10 years ago, like that kind of talent just didn't exist in Australia. No, it didn't. And for you, in terms of next or what's the, you know, where do you see it being? Is it global domination?

Is it merging with other companies? Is it building out product with blinds? Is it taking the CRM to a sales force? You know, I'm sure you do have, you know, everyone has their goals for the next few years, but what's the ultimate thing that you see this business as?

Yeah. So we, there's a lot of other vertical software businesses that we look up to, like ProCore, which is a listed construction software business, Viva, which is like a life science businesses that also has like a CRM plus others. And so for them, the way they've won the market is like literally winning the market, like 90 plus percent penetration market. If you're pitching a company to an investor and you say you're going to win 90% of the market, you'd probably get laughed out like those, the ten slides are like, all the, the term is like $10 billion, $100 billion.

And if we're going to win 1%, like, you can't win 1% in a vertical business, you have to win 90 plus percent. And so for us, we do think about winning, and we think about winning is like trying to get 90% market penetration. And so we really do believe we can build a generational legal tech company. And part of that is kind of winning the lion's share of the market.

And then how we do that, multiple ways of see where building new product, and as part of our raise, we're investing to build a product called NVIDIA, which will kind of help us win large and large law firms. We're also looking at how we grow in organically. And so pursuing some M&A in acquisitions, we've done two acquisitions already. We'll probably look to do a few more and kind of grow our reps to do much larger, large acquisitions.

But yeah, we're all very excited about the growth and direction of Nexel. Okay. And then question for you on, I guess you've got to bring in everything now. AI is going to impact the legal industry enormously.

We know that, right? Business development is being impacted already I guess when you put those two together, is that something that you think about when you're creating your product and thinking about, as you said, business development is such a key thing. Now, I still believe that business development and things like law is going to be still relationship driven because it's such a trust-based business. If you're getting a lawyer to do something for you, you really want to believe in that person.

And you're not just going to hit up from an email that comes to you and says, hey, we offer these services, do you want to have a crack at them? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, this is awesome question. So a lot of people have probably seen all these other legal tech companies who are making lawyers redundant as they say or things like Harvey and Legora.

Our thesis is that AI is going to fundamentally change the business of law, which is how a law firm runs and operates. And while there's a lot of happening in the practice of law, I think there's like a management and cultural shift that needs to happen. You know, a lot of lawyers and partners are still quite skeptical of AI, there's hallucinations and things like that. So for law, you have to be 100% right and certain about like the quality of the work that you do.

You can't have hallucinations. But what AI can give a lot of firms leverage and where it can be really impactful is like the non-practice of law so business development, business operations, a lot of other like, you know, processes in a firm. So our thesis is AI is going to fundamentally change the business of law and how firms operate. And so we're hyper conscious of that and we're building like AI network products to help law firms like automate BDE or think about their relationships deeper and faster.

Like a lot of these processes are still quite manual within firms. AI helps you kind of like supercharge your relationship building in a way that like we've never seen before. Yeah, it's amazing. Thank you so much.

It's fascinating about interviewing someone like yourself. It's the journey that you've had to come in, which is not the traditional founder journey, right? Which is what we often have in here. But to see your level of passion for this business and your care factor and your desire and the excitement in your voice and all that is amazing.

And I think it just goes to show you that, you know, founders are great, but founders can often be limited. And I don't think there's enough credit given to people who come in maybe after the founder and then have the ability to work with the founder to together go to that next level. You know, it's not unlike a marriage in some respects. You know, often two people can achieve far more than one.

It's like a different version of that, but it's so nice to have someone in here who's not just done it, but is doing it right now and clearly loves it. Thank you. I think it helps a lot that everyone at Nexles like hyper passionate obviously feel as an incredible leader and great to work with. But I really do believe in what we're doing.

And I think even though the journey is hard at times, you know, knowing the impact they were making, it helps a lot and you know, it gets me excited every day. Well, I can't wait to get you back in here when you hit the seriously. Thank you. Pleasure to have you on the show.

Oh, thank you. And honestly, we really look forward to seeing what happens. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Steve. Cheers.