Ron and Ed welcomed Yashwanth Madhusudan, co-founder and CEO of Fyle, the next-generation spend management platform for small and medium businesses. They talked about entrepreneurship and technology especially as it relates to accounting professionals and SMBs.
About Yashwanth Madhusudan
Yash loves building and connecting things that don't seem connected to everyone. He is passionate about developing Products / Markets and has been fortunate to have been doing so for over 17+ years. He is crazy about Customer / user experience and particularly interested in working on 3 areas - Analytics, SaaS & Big data. He has excelled in Enterprise sales and Solution sales working for Global MNCs and early stage to mid stage venture backed Start-ups. He is also a keen networker and love making professional acquaintances.
Here are the show notes. Use these to follow along with the podcast:
How did Yash end up as the head of Fyle? He jumped into sales just after an engineering background in college. Submitting expense reports was something that really frustrated him as a sales person.
Yash and his co-founder have known each other for more than a decade. In conversation they kept coming back to why it takes a Saturday afternoon to file expenses when you should be spending time with family and friends. Then Fyle was born…
What are the first few words that come out of your mouth when you think of expense management? They are probably: boring, frustrating and I’d rather not do it. That was part of the founding journey for Fyle.
A sales persons primary job is selling. Nobody pats you on the back for filing your expense reports on time. It’s not the primary focus for the accounting team either. It’s draining work to chase this stuff down. Yash could relate to this and wanted to fix it with Fyle.
We can’t expect people to learn new apps every few years. With SMBs and mid-market companies, the training is expensive. Fyle thought about a great user experience as the starting point for their product development.
You have the burden of explaining how simple something is when taking on incumbents in the market that have forced customers to accept complexity. Well said Yash!
People start believing they should not be spending time doing something. That’s the connection between the simplicity of a product and realizing that there is a better solution out there.
What is Machine Learning? ML is a way to automate a set of repetitive tasks based on it learning from past examples. It’s very contextual with a focus on a specific task and data from past learning experiences.
In the context of expense reports, machine learning can be used because employees are given company credit cards in exchange for a set of expectations like receipts and categorization. But you get much more data. It’s not completely structured but you can make sense from it.
There are various machine learning frameworks now that are capable of things like writing a book. We have casually mentioned GPT-3 from OpenAI before. Here’s more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI
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By the time a tech acronym like AI or ML reaches customers/consumers, what they really care about is, “How is it going to make my life easier?” Great point Yash and probably something that the Fyle team thinks about constantly.
No amount of AI will make customers change their mind. What will make a customer change their mind is saving time, adding value to their customers, and having time to be an expert. That should be the REAL impact of AI and machine learning on our business lives.
Golden words to live by for product teams: “The closer we are to the customers understanding of the problem, the better chance we have at not failing.”
What’s next for Yash and Fyle? There are very few products that can be called “generational” products (or category creators). Today, it is things like real time visibility into transactions on all of the company credit cards.
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As a remote first company, how does FyleHQ handle the leadership challenges? It starts with CULTURE. How do employees feel when they start working each day?
If you take care of the culture you can be confident that the entire team is 100% focused on the customer. An environment that makes people feel that they are achieving something constantly is a path to success.
A big THANK YOU to the Fyle team for making Yash available today. Check them out at FyleHQ.com if your employees HATE filing expense reports.
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