#34 Managing RevOps after raising €100M in Series C

Philipp Stelzer: Welcome to another edition of the RevOps Lab podcast. My guest today is Alfonso Comino. Alfonso is currently the VP of revenue operations at Finn. Previously, he's been a director of RevOps for the APAC region at WeWork, and he's been in other RevOps roles at InterContinental Hotels and Starwood Hotels in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, China, UK, France, and Spain. So a very international experience. Alfonso, very warm welcome.

Alfonso Comino: Thank you so much, and thank you for hosting me with Philippe and the Weflow team. All I hope to do in this quick podcast is to at least live up to the bar of your former guests.

Philipp Stelzer: I'm sure you will. No worries about that. Anything I missed about the introduction? Anything you wanna add?

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. I think that was interesting. I always like to hear the set of countries that you mentioned because obviously they really shape me tremendously, sometimes more than the actual work per se, and professionally and personally, those experiences of living in different places — and a few more that you didn't mention. This is probably one of the highlights I would take from my career that shaped me as a person as well. So it's an interesting fact to touch on that.

Philipp Stelzer: In one of the jobs — sorry. I just, like, wondering, like, how do you get from, like, the world of hotels into sort of, like, the world of technology? I mean, WeWork — I mean, sort of, like, is maybe, like, an intermediary, I guess, between, like, accommodation and technology. So, yeah, just curious.

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. Thanks for putting me polite about the WeWork aspirations as a tech company. I think we could talk at length about it. But so, yeah, I'm originally from this place called Mallorca, which I think some of your audience, depending where they're from, might know or not, as an island in Spain is widely known for tourism. It's a beautiful place. And obviously, that's how I got into the hotel industry. I started hospitality here. I got to work for this company called Starwood Hotels, and I did that the short period of fourteen years. That treated me very, very well, I would say, and took me to all these countries. And my last job there was already in the technology and the hotel industry. So I got to run this kind of revenue operations, but a subset of it called revenue management. We focus on data analytics, forecasting, and then inventory and pricing management. It is not the whole definition of revenue operations today, but certainly was a subset. And I ran the kind of implementation and training and product for this project for four years. And that took me to travel to sixty countries where I got to stay seven to ten days in each of them, sometimes a lot more. But if it's less than that, I wouldn't count it. So I got to go to sixty countries. It was just an unbelievable experience. And that sort of led me into that technology space. And from there, I guess, to jump into others like WeWork, which obviously had a bigger technology aspect. But at the end of the day, both in a hotel and WeWork, and now I think what you're doing is you're selling somehow of a space that has a purpose. So in a hotel, you're selling a space that inside has a bed. It has other things, but certainly the bed is the key. And that is the usage of that space. At WeWork, we also sell a space, and the feature in that space was a desk where you could work. Yet technically, the similarities were really, really, really, really large. Now at Finn, we also sell a space. The funny thing about this space is that it moves with you. But technically, you're selling a space that takes you from A to B in some degree, yet you still have a lot of similarities between these three industries. So at the end of the day, if you're able to boil down the industries to the bare minimum, I think the similarities are much greater than people tend to think. You're selling a space that has a functionality that is very specific to a use case, and how can you delight the customers on that process?

Philipp Stelzer: Okay. Yeah. Okay. I love that. Maybe for our listeners, you could briefly explain what Finn does. Right? I think it's in Germany, and I think people will probably know, but for our listeners outside.

Alfonso Comino: Yes, certainly. And I would say in Germany and also in Mallorca — again, the audience that is not from Germany, Mallorca has a strong connection to Germany, often described as a seventeenth state. And I have two daughters that go to an international school in Mallorca. They speak English as their first language. My wife is Singaporean. And in that international school, half of the students are actually of German descendants. The parents are Germans. Most of the kids are also German themselves, but they just migrated here. And it's funny because I usually wear Finn merchandise twenty four seven. So when I go to deliver some of my girls to the school, the parents are there and we always chat. And I kid you not, more than once a parent has approached me, a German descendant, with a T-shirt of Finn or the hoodie or whatever, and say, "Hey, oh, you work at Finn? We used to have a Finn car where we live in Germany." And I'm there in Mallorca, you know? Don't expect to have any sort of connection to Finn on my day to day basis, but between the times that it happened at my girls' school, or sometimes we see in some shopping mall a Finn car, somebody who has actually driven from Germany for the holidays, it's always interesting. But to say what Finn does — Finn is basically in the business of giving our customer convenience and a bit of peace of mind in what is traditionally their second largest purchase that they tend to make, which is their vehicle. Of course, you have the home, which is usually the biggest, and then usually the vehicles tend to be the second one. So we have created this platform that allows customers to magically obtain and get cars delivered right to the door in the same way that they will buy a pair of shoes on Amazon or any highly optimized e-commerce platform. So you go online, we have a large selection of cars — brand new cars, by the way. You pick one, pick how long you need it. Between one month and twenty-four tend to be our options, and we send it to your house. Just like that. You don't have to worry about any things. We cover insurance, we cover maintenance, we cover something that I didn't know existed — what I'm from Mallorca — called winter tires, apparently. So it's all included for you in a monthly subscription. And so basically for certain people that peace of mind to know what's included on the price tends to be good because owning a car can get tricky sometimes with the hidden fees.

Philipp Stelzer: Oh, for sure. I mean, like, yeah, I have a car, and so I bought it used. And the amount of, like, I don't know, like, times I had to go to the shop and do a repair for, like, all these different things. Yeah. It can get quite annoying, and it's also, like, a lot of expenses that are very hard to plan for. Right? Like, basically — I don't know. In my case, I think I just recently calculated it. Like, per month, my car cost me around, like, three hundred euros, I think, just in monthly expenses — yeah, I think with insurance, just like in repairs that come up over time. But, of course, like, something bigger could happen. Right? Like, the motor could break down, and suddenly it's, like, just five k of, like, unexpected costs that you have to send out — yeah, you cannot really plan for, but then also without a car.

Alfonso Comino: Also, it varies by car. The beauty of the system that we do is because of sheer economy of scales, we can obviously get a better price in all these transactions we do with our vendors. So whether it's purchasing the cars, whether it's dealing with the operations of the car, the maintenance of the car — as we do these things in bulk as well, we are able to get a better price advantage that then just gets passed to the customers as well. So other than convenience, which obviously is a factor on itself in my opinion, you do get a bit of price advantage when you break it down and you actually include — honest to yourself — include all the costs and also include the depreciation cost of the car, which most people sometimes don't tend to do. But cars depreciate substantially fast. And I think that's something very important to take into account. So it is a good business. It's a good model, and I highly enjoy working with it.

Philipp Stelzer: Yep. So Finn, I think, raised Series C one hundred million euros, quite big, earlier this year, I think. It was, I think January twenty twenty-four is when I read the news. How has that changed things over at Finn and particularly in the RevOps team? I mean, you're now, like, a proper scale-up, I guess.

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. In some aspects, you're a proper scale-up. You can say that for sure. And you're right. We closed our Series C — great milestone for us this year. It was led by this company called Planet First Partners, which is the leading growth equity platform in sustainability. And one of the things that changed — perhaps not from the C round itself, so to speak, but certainly they added a new sense of velocity — was the focus that they put in electric and low emission cars in general. So no emission, low emissions, we call it. And the Finn portfolio has always had a larger share of low emission cars than the market traditionally. So the market in Germany, let's say, is on the high twenties percent for new sales. We're always like mid-thirties on the left. However, when Planet First came in, they just added to that ambition, and just said, let's step up on this as a new angle and let's lead the way. Because obviously, if you buy any car, there's obviously a lot of friction in that process, rightly so. It tends to be a very large expense. But doing that with a completely new model of electric car is not something that the whole population is comfortable with. But if you get a subscription and you test it, even if it's a full electric plug-in hybrid, the friction nearly reduces — not to zero, but certainly to a greater extent. So since they came, that would have been like the focus for us as a company. And in revenue operations specifically since you asked — we also run data for growth and demand, which is a pivotal moment for us in a business when we do something called demand and supply. So the Finn experience is quite magical, where you go to the website as a normal customer and you get the cars and they get delivered in a week. It's a little bit magic for the customer. It's certainly a bit less magic for those of us that actually make it happen because there is a lot of touch points that are critical for us. So where we get the financing for those cars, which cars we decide to buy, which segments, and how we negotiate with these OEMs — and imagine negotiating with the BMWs and the Mercedes of the world — all those can get a bit tricky. And it's also fairly time-consuming; the delta in time between the initiation of those negotiations to the car being on the website is quite large. So for us in growth, the biggest change was like, hey, how do we adjust to a world where we need to plan for a greater increase of these type of cars, from a demand perspective and supply, get the cars. And then you have that time between that point and hitting the customers to also change your growth processes — how you approach marketing, how you display things on the website, for example, how you target B2B customers with that angle. So we did have to change a couple of operational things. The first impact was fueling the demand.

Philipp Stelzer: Yep. Yeah. Maybe let's dissect that part a bit more. So what kind of go-to-market motions does Finn have? Like, you talked about B2C, but I think there is also B2B and some other motions. Could you briefly describe those?

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. Absolutely. We'll do that, Philipp. But before we get into really specific revenue operational questions and for the benefit of anyone listening — I like to state I'm really not like the Leonardo da Vinci of revenue operations. I'm certainly sure who is not, which is me — just, you know, a regular dyslexic middle-aged man with an overdose of optimism, I will give you that. So take my views with what they are, a pinch of salt. But certainly, we have — let's say, simplified — three market segments. So you mentioned B2B, B2C, and then we have B2B2E. So on the B2C side, it's easier for most people to comprehend. I think we are all consumers of something. And that is just a two-headed monster, I would say, where you need to be very good in execution. One is marketing acquisition — so whether you're really good at paid media, whether you're very good at organic or partnerships, hopefully good at all of them — that would be the first head. The second head of the monster is the actual product. So how do you convert people once they get into that knowledge phase and they actually hit your website at finn.com — how they go from finn.com to say, "Yes, this is my twelve-digit or sixteen-digit credit card number, here you have it." And there's obviously a lot that goes into that process. So those will be things that we tend to focus more on and support more for our revenue operations — the marketing side and the insights and also the functions that are going to build the product, because we have a product team that owns that, so we're definitely just a participant in that process. The second market segment that we have is B2B. And B2B is obviously a much more complex machine for any business, not just for us. But as you know, selling B2B is way more complex. Acquisition — let's say marketing plays a different importance. It's more about at some point the name and the company than actually reaching there with marketing. So the spend is much more different. You don't do so much marketing per se. You do more like acquiring leads and data at this point. So our job in there would be to see data acquisition, cleaning, and distribution of what we call leads at this point. And then you have the sales process, which is fairly complex, which is obviously contacting the customers, understanding their needs and seeing if we have something that will work for them. And when that's the case, you usually end up with a sale that is number-wise not that substantial for us. So normally when we sign a new B2B account, their first signature is unlikely going to be something large. They usually want to test this — there's some form of friction to introduce a new vendor into any company. So it's always like a small rate of, let's say, one to ten cars, roughly. But that is the most difficult sale. When that happens, most of the friction has been removed. You're already an approved vendor. You have hopefully delivered some services successfully. You have obviously been introducing the accounting team and payments and the staff. So it becomes a little bit downhill — and because I don't want to be disrespectful to a great customer success team — however, the first sale is done. So it's on the landing part. Now we focus on expanding. So the expanding part at Finn in B2B is where most of the money is generated. At this point, I don't know specific numbers, but somewhere around fifteen percent to eighty-five percent — that's the distribution of the revenue split that will happen between the land phase and the expand phase. So we are a heavy, heavy focus on expansions and retention when it comes to B2B. And I would say that obviously it takes a big importance on my mind and the team and where should we focus our efforts. So we build a lot of tools and data and enablement for those teams. So in the landing part, we just want to make sure the team lands as successfully as possible. But we don't focus too much on them selling a ridiculous amount of ticket order because that's perhaps not the right thing to optimize for. While in the customer success side, we tend to focus on exactly how much can we expand and sell at that point. So they have two different things that you're optimizing for in those two stages. The last one, which is smaller for us and perhaps more complex to explain, is B2B2E. This is when you sell to a company that they have to onward sell to their employees, so to speak, or sometimes their customers. This is a bit trickier because the sales motion — the first one is mostly like a B2B sort of sales motion that has complexity in itself compared to B2B. But the second stage — like once you sell to a company, how do they sell to the customer, to their employees? That becomes a bit tricky because you don't have that fully direct relationship. So you have to go through the company to sell through the employees. So that is also another process that has perhaps a step change of complexity added to it.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. It's like you have to do sales enablement for a channel partner. So you really have to give them all the information. You have to maybe even train them to some regard or create incentives that actually motivate them to push your product within their organization via their channels, which is, yeah, extremely hard to do.

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. I would say if I look at the three channels — I've been for B2B and B2C — we've become fairly good masters of the trade, and the teams are delivering what can only be said of fantastic results. On the third stage, we're mostly on the growth phase right now. It's also something that has a tremendous number right now in terms of production of revenue or subscriptions. Yet, like you said, we're spending a lot of time on building the infrastructure to make it successful now. And it's exactly what we're saying — it's all about enablement through the company to the end customer. It is a sales motion that is completely different than what we do for the other ones. And while it's not so representative on revenue today, it's definitely representative on the investment that we're doing to build it. And we have seen how these markets can sometimes explode from a slow base to a very high base, very fast, because you just need to get enablement, that training. And to some degree, the cost of acquiring those customers is very, very small if you successfully land that enablement through their own partner.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's also an investment for them. Right? So they also need to sort of, like, trust your operations and train their people. And so, yeah, naturally, I think it takes more time, but for sure — I mean, like, from B2B SaaS, which is where Weflow operates in — I think you see a lot of companies that do this extremely well. I think one example that comes to mind is Chili Piper. They are extremely good at doing partnership management, and a large share of the revenue by this point in time comes from that. But also, it took some time to grow it. Like, this can take five years until it becomes truly substantial, but then it's also, like, a channel that is very hard to get rid of again because other people invested — it's not only you that invested in it, the other side invested into that. So there's a mutual incentive to keep it going and keep it growing.

Alfonso Comino: The stickiness, to your point, the stickiness is different. So those three market segments have different degrees of difficulties or barriers of entry, and it goes by order from B2C to B2B to B2B2E. So the barriers get an order of magnitude bigger in each of them. But the stickiness also improves drastically. So the retention of B2C in general — not just at Finn, but in general — is much lower than the retention of B2B, in the same way that because it's so much harder for anybody else to also enter. So you get a much, much, much bigger net revenue retention there. In the third segment, where we're kind of battling those barriers of entry right now, the stickiness is also much greater once again. So you're totally right that it's a little bit of front-loading the effort and then capitalizing through great net revenue retention at the end.

Philipp Stelzer: One thing that I really like about, like, the way that you talk about these different motions is that I feel like Finn really focuses with RevOps on the whole bowtie. So you have not only the acquisition side, which I think is quite common in revenue operations — sales operations usually plays, like, a super big role — but then you also alluded to the whole expand motion, particularly on B2B. So you have, like, it's fine if the land is, like, maybe, like, a smaller deal, but then net revenue retention plays a super big role. And I think this is a very modern mindset. Right? The growth at all costs mentality, it's not so feasible anymore. And really, like, where most companies can really grow their business from at the moment in today's market is really like this expansion and thinking about, okay, what are some ways where we can actually really keep customers, so really have good retention, and then really grow from this net revenue retention by either upselling, adding new additional product, like cross-selling. So it sounds like Finn is really doing that, and revenue operations at Finn is not just like this first part where you support, like, the SDRs and AEs, but you really go, like, the full funnel up until, you know, like, sort of like, okay, which customers — like, what are, like, the assets we have on the road? How can we manage that in a good kind of way? How can we upsell? And how can we expand the businesses that we already landed?

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. And I think it's very important that the team is set up that way because you're right — in other places it has a slightly different setup. And my honest opinion would be that if you want to have a very successful revenue operations team, the value actually comes from being a participant. You're obviously not the owner, but you're a key participant of what we call the full growth stack. You need to start from the marketing side, and you need to end at the very last possible retention that a customer or an account can have with you. And the reason is because most of the value that we deliver is actually on connecting the dots between those different units or those different actions that happen across the lifetime for different market segments. And if you focus on just one of them, of course, there's always a space for optimizing one of them. But I think that's perhaps better suited to the owner of that unit. So we obviously have a VP of Sales or VP of Customer Success. And they need to own the kind of how to maximize within that sphere. And they're still the drivers of that. Our job is to support them in sort of other enabling functions and how to optimize certain things that are perhaps more technical that they would have to expect us to do, and how to connect those between the three or four teams, whatever teams you have depending on yourself. But basically that end-to-end ownership and help to the whole growth funnel, in my opinion, is nearly non-negotiable if you wanna have a successful revenue operations team.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Maybe let's make it more specific. So how big is the revenue operations team and how is it structured? Do you have, like, a technical, analytical team or is it just one big team?

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. No. So in terms of talent, we're probably the biggest team in the company. So this is my time to humble brag about my team members. That's not because of me, but I get to work with some really incredible, talented, and ambitious people. They deliver great work, and they make my life fairly easy. I just chill and let them produce some amazing work. And what we have is like, traditionally, when we have a full scope team — which across the lifetime of the company has gone up and down — but certainly you want to have three to four sub-units, in my opinion. The first one focuses more in kind of that operational excellence. So this is things like system maintenance, you own things like automations, you own things as processes, you own things as making sure that everything goes from department to department as successfully as possible. And you also kind of take away the small technical part that I said before, perhaps the owners of the unit don't want to have the expertise on. Then the other unit that we also have is the data team. So basically these are like highly specialized data people. We have like four or five of them, and their job is obviously more narrow when it comes to scope, but also very important when it comes to the output. Their job is to maintain good data, to make sure that we are producing the right data, we store it the right way, but also that it's analyzed and can be consumed in the best possible way, do some insights on top of that. And also sometimes we also do predictions. The third thing that is very beneficial to have as well is something that we have called internal tools. Internal tools for us — it's like a tech team in disguise to some degree. So you have engineers — in the past we had up to three or four engineers — and you have one or two product managers. And the idea is to treat your employees as the customers of the tools that you build. So for example, we have built a lot of tools that become our operating system today at Finn. Maybe not facing the customer — they use the website for that — but for our B2B sellers. Whether it's sales or customer success especially, we build their OS that will do all their day-to-day life and will combine every single thing they need, or most things at least, into one or several centralized places. And we use different tools for that. But it's a combination of pro code and low code. And that is kind of like an engineering team to serve your internal customer. And lastly, for a larger RevOps team, it's also recommended that you have somebody focused on enablement. It is not always a must, but enablement can include different things. In the past, especially at WeWork, we had a large enablement team, and they were focused on things like training and also to provide support to the managers, whether it has new people coming in, documentation — all things that they can add up in terms of workload as well.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's great to have enablement included actually because if RevOps is also in charge together with, obviously, like, the VP of Sales or CSM or CRO of, like, the general sales process or the customer success process, then this is also definitely, like, a good team that can be used to really go in and actually enable the salespeople to understand what is going on, what's sort of, like, the north star, what is the sales process like, why does it matter to enter these values or not, and what are some good materials that help convince buyers or prospects. So I think it's great to include it. It feels like, you know, if you make it separate, it feels a bit weird to me if everything else falls under RevOps, but then sales enablement doesn't. If I were working in sales enablement, I would feel weird about it, basically.

Alfonso Comino: I think it also depends — like all these things — it's about the scale. If the scale of the teams and the necessity of the job is not so great, perhaps a full FTE is not justified. We always have to look at it from the lens of is this fully justified or not. And when these things — like you mentioned before — companies want to be profitable, you always have to make trade-offs. So if the team size doesn't justify the FTE, perhaps it's better to distribute it. But the moment you reach that point where it actually makes sense to consolidate these tasks into one or two individuals, whatever might be a priority, then it's probably better to centralize it within the growth team. Until then, it's also probably, you know, like you said, maybe the best you can do without centralization because obviously this is an FTE investment, and revenue operations teams — we don't tend to be the biggest teams on the growth side. As you know, we're like, I don't know, ten to twelve percent of the size of the growth team, and anything more than that will be very hard to justify, I would say, depending on the industry but in ours.

Philipp Stelzer: Yep. So with a setup like yours, you have lots of different motions going on. It's not an easy sales process. It's a lot of stuff to manage. How do you, from the RevOps perspective, make sure that Finn is able to move as fast as it needs? I think it's probably also a competitive market. It's not an easy market to operate in — it's an expensive market, lots of assets. So, yeah, how do you stay in control of data and processes and also stay able to move fast? What approach do you take? What methodology do you use?

Alfonso Comino: If you heard about this famous marketer from many years ago, his name was David Ogilvy, whom I really like to hear about. And one of the things that he said for his marketing advertising, which is legendary — I'm sure you recognize many of the adverts if you see them — he would say, "Sales or else." Meaning, if his advertising is not built in a way that makes sales, it's worthless. So either you make an advertising that sells or else. As for my team, we operate in a mindset that is "ship or else." Either you ship constantly or it doesn't count. So most of the things that we experience in revenue operations — and many other things to be quite frank — we suffer from this importance bias that if you have to take a decision, you're biased towards that decision because you're the one taking it. So you tend to put an oversized importance to that decision. Actually, if somebody else was taking a decision, you might be able to see how perhaps it doesn't matter as much if you do A or B, as soon as you can rectify fast, which applies to most decisions. So the idea — not all of them, of course — so the idea would be remove that bias that you have because you are taking the decision. Just take the decision faster. So it's not about the quality of the decision for most of them — there are some exceptions — but it's about the quantity of the decision. So increase the repetition versus the weight if you're in the gym. Increase the repetition constantly and increase the amount of things that you ship. It is okay to make mistakes, but it's not okay to not ship stuff. And I think when the team gets that, you enter this beautiful sort of organized chaos where you're constantly shipping stuff and some things land, some things don't land, some things we have high expectations and the customers don't use it — our internal customers or external customers. But you're constantly shipping new stuff. So we have this kind of culture of ship fast, ship a lot, and test everything because most things you can reverse course on if it's not good. Obviously, certain decisions in life are — what Jeff Bezos would say — one-way doors. Actually, there are so few of them in life. Most things are two ways. You can always come back. So take more decisions, take them faster, and take smaller risks constantly. So just get used to that. And when you build the muscle, which the team has done, we just want to constantly be shipping new features, new things, new processes, whatever it might be. And it's a really good environment to work like that.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I mean, I think you basically said that now. Right? Like, it's a cultural thing. So when you hire for roles like that or when you build a company like that, that's like a culture that you need to instill, that you need to live.

Alfonso Comino: Yes. And by no means can I take any credit on that. That is a Finn culture that, you know, I'm a beneficiary of, not that I brought it alive. It's just a company that has a very young and ambitious, but with an incredible talent density for employees, not just in RevOps, but outside as well. And you're right, this is not a RevOps culture. I think this is a broader theme. We have our tech team, product teams that are constantly AB testing, and it is incredible to work in an environment like that. It's very contagious, I would say.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Absolutely. I think so. So it's very contagious and for good — I mean, and that's the great thing about it, right, in the end. You mentioned in our pre-conversation before this recording, you also mentioned some of the tools that you're using. So you build a lot yourself. You mentioned low code earlier. Curious kind of like what solutions you're using there. Maybe you can give like a brief overview of some of your tech stack.

Alfonso Comino: Yeah. For tech stack, I would say we have the more data one and the non-data one. So for data, we use BigQuery and DBT and then Looker. And from there, that becomes the source of many things that get built on top, from a data perspective, which obviously influences plenty of the things that we build. And in a non-data tech stack, the three main things that we use — our CRM is HubSpot. Other people listening that might be more familiar with Salesforce — both are obviously good choices. And we use these two tools. One is called Make.com. It was formerly known as Integromat, and it was introduced by one of our early employees, Jens, as a way to build really great automations. Maybe some of the audience is more familiar with a similar product called Zapier. We're big fans of Make, where we used to be — I'm not sure we still are — the biggest customer of theirs. If we're not, I'll be surprised. But we certainly probably still are. And like I said before, this is not something I can take credit of personally. It was before even I came to the company. But my team is one of the super users of Make. And we just build all sorts of things with these automations. And lastly, we have something else called Retool. It's a more known product to build like lower-friction front ends for internal tools. So if you have to develop a front end of something that feels like an application, but you know, you don't want it to be ultra fancy to have external customers — this is a really good choice. Of course everything looks grey and nothing too fancy from a UX/UI perspective. Perhaps that would be my biggest point, but it certainly works. And it's actually fairly intuitive to build. So we have built some great tools

on build on those, you know, six systems that I mentioned, which are the ones where we will spend most of our time. And just to paint some pictures from one of my team members, Dominic, who's been with us for three years, he was able to use these tools to build our own billing system. So back in the day, we used to talk to, you know, these billing providers that will come and help you because our billing and invoice and revenue recognition tasks are fairly complex because we have the B2B, the B2C and the B2B2E and they all have different conditions and payments and even sometimes by account. So it's not trivial by any form of shape and he was able to just one layer at a time just automate the whole thing on low code. Eventually we have to migrate to pro code after he built so much but not that long ago was in a built by a single person in low code and he was churning out millions of euros on the month out using these tools I think. I think the world hasn't waking up to the possibilities of them like perhaps like low application usage is a bit standardized to do a couple of things here and there and change things from the spreadsheets that's all fine and dandy but when exploit to what is a little bit insane levels the outcome is also tremendous and I think Finn has many examples where we build tools like that and these days we leverage in some NLMs for a couple of things here and there as well to add a bit, sometimes a bit of fun, but sometimes a lot of usage as well, bit of pause and functionality to things where people can prompt things by using natural language and I think that's also something that perhaps it wouldn't hyped it up as much as other people has a self-interest to hyped it up, but certainly to discount the usage is also an offer, right? It really has a lot of usage. So it's something that we experiment in with a lot.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, yeah. I think that's, I think it's so cool to also just build really good internal tools to move fast. And I mean, it's always a fine line. Like where do you invest into building stuff yourself and where you're not? Like I worked in mobile gaming and like A-B testing. I mean, it was just like so big there. We did it all the time. And I went basically moved to Beijing statistics at some point And there was literally no tool on the market, so we basically built our own tool. But also because there was nobody who did that. Also A.B. testing tools. There were no A.B. testing tools when we started to do A.B. testing for mobile. Over time then, we could move to point solutions that were then after a few years, much better than what we built internally, but because we wanted to move fast, because we wanted to do things that were at the edge of innovation, we had to do it ourselves. there was just no way around it. Or I think CPQ is also one of these topics. It can be so custom and so specific to what your organization needs in terms of the workflow, that yes, there are a lot of CPQ platforms out there, but even they might need to be so customized that it actually might be better to just build it yourself rather than trying to rely on these pre-built solutions. So yeah, it's always like, it's sometimes really hard to make that decision. This is something we build, this is something we buy.

Alfonso Comino: Yeah, the build or buy is to be or not to be of our timelines yet. I think for many teams, it does make sense to make sure they have a more robust infrastructure and perhaps our source is the best way. We don't do a thing today, we do have a person and in my team specifically, he does every testing and honestly, that's 100%, 100% is an offer. 80% of his job is to help to A-B test different things. And it's obviously a person that comes from statistics and computer science and Max is incredibly talented and he produces incredible work. We're lucky to have him. Now, I'm aware how lucky we are to have some violin that does that work and that the company invested on that FTE because we see the value. We're kind of an e-commerce website from the B2C perspective. For other companies, perhaps they don't need to go to that scale. It comes to that trade-off that we said, well, the job might be important, might not be important on itself to justify a tailored FTE. So outsourcing things where are important, but you can afford an FTE at that point in time is obviously very smart thing to do, versus the alternative which is not doing it or subsequently doing it because you want to save a few years is probably not a good idea to save in something that has such a limited downside but completely a symmetric upside on the good days.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, sure, for sure. There was one more thing I wanted to touch base on because I think you're one of the few RevOps leaders, basically because the role is not that old, the way we look at it nowadays, they work both for a CFO and now under a CRO. So I'm just curious, like, and what's the main difference in your opinion, if you put the business aside, basically?

Alfonso Comino: Yeah, good question. Good question. I'll take off, say yes, when in my prior work at WeWork, I run revenue operations for relationship Pacific region and I report to the CFO, original CFO there, and I have adopted line to the SPO revenue operations in New York, right? And now I think I have a solid line to Jan, who's like a very early employee of the company, delivered the first car ever, I've been to a customer, and he's a chief revenue officer. He, one of the most impressive people I ever got to work with Jan is really incredible. So I think putting them side by side, there's a lot of differences, right? Like, and sometimes the details on the DevOps because the, I guess the job description is mostly the same. However, the angle and the sort of incentive of your manager might not be right. So, and because they have different function. When you are with the, when I used to work before with Li-Pin in China for the CFO, her interests are mostly on how we use the money and the capital efficiency and perhaps put a greater emphasis on things like forecasting and maximizing pricing. And that was a great learning. That was the first time I ever reported to a CFO. And to be quite frank, I highly enjoyed from that perspective. I also had to learn about a lot of things that I didn't know, like, for example, how you run a real estate sort of analysis for a deal and how you financially really go down through the weeds. So you become, to some degree, you get a lot of, what is it, FPNA sort of regular task in other companies as well, checked into this revenue operation that nobody's not there. So now I think I don't have that as much, I do a little bit for car deals. is really nothing compared to before and I just focus completely on just making sure that we're like a lean machine when it calls for a go-to-market motion and sales processes overall from the top to the bottom of the funnel. So your focus is a little bit more tidied up in that case. It just seems to make a little bit more sense and the people you can recruit it's easier because the focus is very easy to tell. So we're here to make sure that we have as many happy customers as possible and we sell as much as possible. There's not much need that you need to complicate that, right? So you just have a much more easier life because the alignment of incentives with your direct money is a little bit easier. As much as I fully, fully enjoy working with the CFOs, it's a great experience. If I have to set up a revenue pressure steam from scratch for any company, I would say, have a senior person, doesn't have to be as old of me, please get somebody younger. But if, get a senior person, hopefully reporting directly to the chief revenue officer or say, you know, whatever you call the person that has different names right for the scene. And I let them have a team of highly talented, doesn't have to be big, but highly talented people that can help you with the funnel. Nadim does, Finn does that very well. I cannot take too much credit for it. Like I said, Jan already had the idea before I came. I was just a participant of his vision and I'm glad that we worked on it.

Philipp Stelzer: Great. Love it. Thank you so much for those insights and sharing it. I think it was a great moment to end, but I want to ask one last question. And so you're the second person I'm asking this before I had a different question, but now I'm changing it. And you may know it, right? You may know it. So this is from a different podcast. So looking back at your career, what's the kindest thing someone has done for

Alfonso Comino: you? Yes, listen, I also listened to Patrick O'Shannon saying Best Like the Best. So So I was thinking, I was thinking, yeah, man, the quality of people that he gets and the way he asked questions, I'm a big fan in saying, yeah, huge respect for his work. He's also a very approachable person. Like many times we have had direct conversation on Twitter, which is surprising to me how approachable he is. So if you ever think you should reach out to him, do, and he will reply, that's been my experience. And so it's not something that I can have ever expected. So I always think like, to some degree, I wish people asked me a question sometime, then I wish, maybe not, because some people had some really great and not so great bad answers out there. And you asked me specifically the kindest thing that anybody has done. So I work. And I work when you lead a team, and in my case, also part of leadership for the larger growth team. So whether they're direct reports to you, or influentially looking up to you. And I think you're on the spot 24-7. And they don't care so much about what you do, but more about how you do things and how you treat them and how you set the pace for certain things that are actually things that my youngest daughter is sometimes learning in primary school because life is not that complex. And I think the best thing that anybody has ever done to me is to make me a father, right? I think that makes you your best self. So you wake up every day, never naturally, as you say, or you wake up every day and naturally, and every second you have to be your better self. And sometimes it's noisy, I will not lie to you, but it is true that parenthood does just make you a better person. And it makes you way more mature in so many ways. And it makes you way more relatable. And you bring that to work, whether you want it or not, you have no choice. You bring who you are to work. And I will say I'm a much better leader today since I became a father than before. So I think the best part is my life.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Okay. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Kit, the ultimate level of accountability you can achieve in life. Yeah. The ultimate system to help you to focus your time.

Alfonso Comino: So, kids help you to really, really, really understand the value of time. And you can do that before kids. And I think that really, really matters in life. And you bring that to work. And it's really wonderful. So, thank you to my wife, Chiu.

Philipp Stelzer: That's great. Okay. Alfonso, thank you so much for coming out on the show. Everything was great. Thanks for sharing all the learnings about insight. And if you're interested in thin, obviously, you can go there. Thin.com will also link to it in the show notes.

Alfonso Comino: Thank you so much for leaving on the team. And talk to you next time.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, talk to you soon. Thank you. Bye.