From Investment Banker To Revolutionising Workforce Management w/ Natasha Ratanshi-Stein | Surfboard

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 0:00

We spoke to Monzo, we spoke to Revolut, and we spoke to Deliveroo. We went to Swansea, for example, to see the DVLA and realized that all of these organizations were struggling with the same problem, and I think that's where my entrepreneur hat really came on. I was like, 'Oh, there's definitely an opportunity here.' I just felt like I wanted to be in the weeds on the ground, really getting my hands dirty on that execution, and then realized that the static nature of spreadsheets made that very challenging, because you have different inflow patterns, you have different capacity available, and so came to the realization we needed software for it.

Amardeep Parmar: 0:34

Today on the podcast, we have Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, who is the CEO and founder of Surfboard. They're a workforce management software aimed at customer service teams. Natasha's been able to squeeze a huge amount of different experiences into a short amount of time. She initially worked at Goldman Sachs in investment banking before joining P1 Capital as a VC and trying to work on that and try to invest in early-stage companies. Before moving across to Bulb, where she held various roles where she constantly pushed herself out of her comfort zone into new areas. One of the struggles she had while at Bulb was about customer service teams and being able to deal with the huge influx of calls I would have and how the team could manage this. She then struggled with this, and it was in the back of her mind for years before deciding this is a problem that she needed to solve, because you could just see so many other companies struggling with it too. After quitting, she was able to raise her pre-seed very quickly, which enabled her to hire a team and create a product that customers are loving now, and she's been able to get great feedback and scale the business up. I hope you enjoy this episode. I'm Amar from the BAE HQ, and this podcast is powered by HSBC Innovation Banking. So, Natasha, it's so great to have you here today. If we rewind back to the beginning of everything, when you were a kid, what did you want to be one day? What did you hope to be when you grew up?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 1:51

Yeah, so having Asian parents. My brother is a doctor, and my parents expected me to be a lawyer, and so I was quite compliant with that, went along with it, and so wanted to be a lawyer. I left Canada when I was 18 to move to London, studied at the London School of Economics, and within my first week there, I went to a law firm networking event. I distinctly remember it was at Slaughter and May, and I just thought, 'God, this looks direly boring,' and decided that I wasn't going to become a lawyer and instead pursued a different path.

Amardeep Parmar: 2:22

So what made you move to London?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 2:28

My family. We have a lot of relatives here, so we have spent a lot of time here. When I was growing up. We came most summers for a few weeks, so I knew London. I knew the UK quite well, having grown up in Canada. The education systems are also quite compatible, so you didn't have to do any special exams or anything, and it was a good opportunity to, you know. Not every day do you get a chance to just pick up and move continents, and so I think there's no better opportunity to do it than when you're moving for university, because you're starting fresh anyway. It's a great chance to move somewhere but also have that safety net that you're guaranteed to make friends and have your accommodation sorted, and figure out how you get food on the table quite easily.

Amardeep Parmar: 3:02

Having to move to London to study law and then, obviously, now deciding maybe it's not the right path. How did you feel at that point? Because it's quite an identity crisis, I guess.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 3:09

It's actually a great point. So, one thing that I also love about just the British post-secondary education system is that you don't have to study the fields that you're intending to work on. So I ended up studying economic history at the London School of Economics, not law or anything. So it was obviously a very generalist course where you could end up going into anything. So I remember that networking event at Slaughter and May. The only thing that interested me there was that they talked about how they'd worked on the merger between British Airways and Iberia, and I was like, 'Oh, that sounds really interesting.' And then I realized the interesting stuff that they'd worked on wasn't the legal aspect of it, but actually like the deal dynamics of it. So I decided to start my career in investment banking, which isn't a huge pivot and obviously keeps the Asian parents somewhat happy.

Amardeep Parmar: 3:54

And what was that? So, you went into investment banking, and you started at Goldman Sachs, right?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 3:59

I did, yes.

Amardeep Parmar: 3:59

How was that? Like trying to apply for those jobs and get that. Was that comfortable, or did it feel quite difficult at the time?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 4:06

It definitely felt quite difficult. I think again, the advantage of being at a university somewhere like London is that you're within a stone's throw of where the European headquarters of all these places are, so you're very well guided through the process, both from the fact that there are these networking events and they walk you through the application process. You hear very much what it's like working at those organizations, so you know what to say in the application. You know what resonates? You can speak to a lot of people and get a feel for the different divisions within the organization, but also because, I guess, when you're studying at a university like the LSE, I'd probably say like 80% of people are applying for the same job. So you certainly are well supported in that regard. But obviously it's like hypercompetitive because you don't want to be the person that doesn't get a job, and so you're always to some degree keeping up with the Joneses.

Amardeep Parmar: 4:52

So you obviously did keep up with the Joneses. You got the job at Goldman. What was it like there when you got there? Was it what you hoped it would be?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 4:58

Yeah, they managed your expectations quite well. I think I would say I'm obviously running a startup now, and one thing I admire about Goldman and other organizations, be it banking, consulting, law, etc.,. Doing quite well is that you know what you're getting before you get in, and you very much sign up to it. They're not telling you, even though I think Goldman did put in, like, a ping pong table, that it's all about playing ping pong and whatever. You know that you're going to have to work llion in nhard. You know that it's quite intense.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 5:26

You know that you're going to have to work hard. You know that it's quite intense. You know it's very competitive, but I think that's why a lot of people go in, and so it definitely lived up to those expectations. But before the job you do, I think, like, a 10-week internship and so on, the internship you're very much doing the work that you're going to be doing later on, obviously with a more distilled and shorter timeframe. So 10 weeks feels bearable, but then when it's, you know, the two years that I did at Goldman, it's definitely a lot longer.

Amardeep Parmar: 5:50

And then, what made you move on from Goldman?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 5:52

So I was at Goldman between 2012 and 2014. And what was really interesting that was happening globally, but Europe was certainly picking up on, was that there was just a lot more happening within the technology industry. So I remember when I was at Goldman, we were pitching for the business, for I think Just Eat was going public, and Farfetch was doing larger fundraisers. There were many more of these success stories of European-born and bred technology businesses that I think when I started at Goldman, I thought I would very much go down that traditional path where people either go into private equity funds or hedge funds, etc.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 6:29

But as I settled in and as I started spending more time and reading about these companies and seeing the work that Goldman was doing for these companies, I got increasingly excited about how quickly the European ecosystem was evolving and the chance to be part of that. So I ended up joining a venture capital fund called Piton Capital in 2014. They had just closed their second fund, so we're looking to move past, just like the two founders, doing all the deal sourcing, portfolio management, fund development, et cetera, and hiring a team, and so I thought it was an exciting opportunity at the time. I thought it was risky because it was the first hire that they had made, but in hindsight, when you then become an entrepreneur yourself, you realize there's a lot more risk that you can take.

Amardeep Parmar: 7:14

And picking to work for those guys, right? When there's only two people there and you're from this massive organization, Goldman. What was behind that logic there? Because obviously you were applying for other VCs and maybe larger or more established ones, because I imagine it must have been quite intense when it's just you and the founders.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 7:30

I had met other VCs, and I viewed the move to Piton as quite binary. It was either this is going to be career-changing, life-changing, a great opportunity, or this is going to go terribly. But I'm young enough; I think I was like 22 at the time where if it goes terribly, you can course correct relatively quickly, and I was really, really fortunate that it went really well. I mean, I spent five years at Piton. The two founders, Andrew and Greg, are still very close mentors. I spent a lot of time just getting their thoughts on things today in my journey as an entrepreneur, so that couldn't have gone better for me. I think. If I think about the steps that I made in my career, that's probably the one that I think worked out the best for me.

Amardeep Parmar: 8:09

And what did you learn while you were there?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 8:11

I think, number one, they were professionalizing or institutionalizing the fund from scratch.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 8:19

And so, despite the fact that a VC fund operates very differently from a business, we had to figure out how Piton positioned itself in the market and how we made ourselves known to entrepreneurs that were relevant to the types of businesses we invested in.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 8:34

I think the most tangible learning for me, especially in my journey now, was just on that portfolio management side of things. So you see the obvious things like what investors expect at each stage of a business, but then you go to board meetings, and you're seeing a lot of the strategy and execution that goes behind that: How do you make sure that the unit economics pay off? How do you make sure there's a clear go-to-market strategy? How do you make sure that the product and the addressable market are working hand in hand to continue to saturate specific and relevant markets? So I think that was intellectually and academically insightful for me, and obviously, like every week, you're making bets on different themes of businesses that are going to succeed, and so, yeah, I think that, like, intellectual stimulation was really good, and then, obviously, seeing how businesses actually run when they're in the universe of being VC funded.

Amardeep Parmar: 9:25

So I was quite interested in your background as well. So, in not a huge amount of time, you had the corporate background at Goldman, then an investor background at VC, and then obviously you're now running a startup. And then you said the operating experience at ScaleUp as well. So it's kind of interesting that in such a short amount of time, you've had four different main parts. But it's really covered all the different bases, I guess, and makes you a better entrepreneur, and what was behind leaving the VC fund to the next step there?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 9:52

I had been at Piton for five years, and I had been enjoying my time a lot there, like I really didn't see myself leaving, and then suddenly, I think as I had been there for four years, I realized that the part that I was enjoying the most about the role was the portfolio management side of things, and I thought, 'Okay, I'm enjoying this the most. It's maybe taking up 20 to 30 percent of my time, but I want stuff like this to take 100 percent of my time.' And you have some VCs that have like operating teams. I think that's a different structure. It's a lot more common in the US.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 10:24

It wasn't really what I was going after, because I felt like that was a bit like a halfway house of where I wanted to be, and I just felt more and more as I was attending board meetings and spending time with portfolio companies that I had this envy of them. When we talk about something, we talk about, like, 'Oh, could you think about trying this acquisition to make the unit economics better, or what if you launched in this geography? Or what if you launched in this geography? Or what if you launched this new vertical?' But I would never see it end-to-end. It would be the ideation and then the follow-up of, like, 'Oh, so how did that go?'

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 10:53

And I think, because of that arm's-length distance you have as an investor, I just felt like I wanted to be in the weeds, on the ground, really getting my hands dirty on that execution. And so I spoke to Andrew and Greg at Piton, and they were extremely supportive. Both of them had been operators and entrepreneurs previously, and so they brainstormed with me. You know the right stage business, the right type of business, and then the rest is history. I joined Bulb in April 2019.

Amardeep Parmar: 11:20

And making that big step as well there. How was that so obviously going from an investment background, going into that new environment? Did you find it like you? Did you find your feet quickly? Or was it the adjustment period?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 11:30

I was daunted when I first joined. I think that was probably the most daunted I've ever felt in my career, because I had this imposter syndrome where I was like, 'Am I just someone who is able to thematically come up with things, but when it actually comes to push, comes to shove, and getting things done and having these meaningful results, can I do it?' And so, where I was quite lucky in my time at Bulb is that I knew I had a skill set in finance. I had told Hayden, the CEO, that at the beginning, I didn't want to be spending most of my time on finance because I really wanted to broaden my skill set, broaden my horizons, and become a true operator. But luckily, at the time, Bulb was spending time thinking about its financing structure between debt, equity, and other forms of financing, given the uniqueness of the operating model of being a utility company. And so because it was relatively comfortable, I felt like that was a good opportunity for me to show the company and show Hayden and Amit, the founders, that I could add value without pushing myself into unknown terrain or unknown territory. So that was a good opportunity for me to, you know, just like, get in the weeds, get my hands dirty super quickly without feeling uncomfortable.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 12:45

And then at the same time, other stuff fell on my plate. So the business was scaling the customer service team. There were challenges and opportunities that came from that. I got helicoptered into that function to figure out how to scale it while optimizing service performance as well as costs. And then I stepped into the risk and regulatory function for a few months, leading that, and then when the pandemic hit, as you can imagine, payments became a struggle of customers paying us and making sure they were paying us the right amount relative to their usage. So I headed the revenue assurance function. So each time I felt like I tried to take on as much as I felt comfortable doing, and then I added it to the uncomfortable and then stepped into the uncomfortable. But it was nice to have something to start with that I could feel comfortable and own end-to-end, and do you feel like during your time there, you've said you're worried about whether you can execute or not?

Amardeep Parmar: 13:36

I'm assuming you've proven yourself right. You could, obviously.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 13:39

I hope so. I don't like marking my own homework, but, um, I'd like to.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:42

I'd like to think so, and you during that experience as well, obviously with the customer service teams. Was that where the idea for your startup came across, or where did this, the startup idea, come into this?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 13:51

Yeah, it was exactly that. So it was pretty early on in my journey at Bulb—I mean, like from day one, when I joined, we were struggling with an email backlog. Like many other energy companies, we struggled with phone wait times as demand got much busier, especially when there's seasonality in that industry. You have price changes, you have billing cycles, and so in that, I realized that we had a challenge of making sure we had the right people working on the right things at the right time. I started off by building spreadsheets to try to organize it and then realized that, like, the static nature of spreadsheets made that very challenging because you have different inflow patterns, you have different capacity available, and so I came to the realization we needed software for it. Ran an RFP process to look for software and realized everything out there was extremely antiquated and didn't fit with the technology stack that we had at Bulb. Eventually, when we implemented it, it was a very long implementation cycle and never really worked the way we expected it to. So that planted the seeds for what is today Surfboard, the business that I founded.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 14:52

But I was still pretty early on in my journey at Bulb. I think I was in my first like six months there. So I thought, 'There's no way I'm going to leave a brand new role where I'm learning so much and start something new.' But I couldn't get the idea out of my head. So I sat on it for just under two years, and then eventually, when I had sat on it for long enough, I had also gone through the process of speaking to many other companies, really with my Bulb hat on, saying, 'Hey, we're struggling with this; how are you dealing with it?' And we spoke to Monzo, we spoke to Revolut, and we spoke to Deliveroo. We went to Swansea, for example, to see the DVLA and realized that all of these organizations were struggling with the same problem. And I think that's where my entrepreneur hat really came on. I was like, 'Oh, there's definitely an opportunity here, and someone has got to capture it.' It took me just a while to realize that someone was going to be me.

Amardeep Parmar: 15:38

Did you start to like it on the side while you were still working at Bulb? Was it clean-cut?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 15:42

It was clean-cut. So I pondered it for some time, and then, I think in August 2020, it was still one of the lockdowns, and I went to go see Hayden, the CEO of Bulb at the time, to tell him, 'Look, I have this idea. I'm not 100% certain, but I'm leaning towards it and just want to get your views,' and I think Hayden probably had the same conversation with me that Andrew and Piton had had a few years prior, which is, 'Look, I would never stop someone from being an entrepreneur. I think if you have the idea, you should definitely run with it, and you'll probably have no regrets.' And so I think it was probably that conversation I had with him that made things quite definitive in what came next.

Amardeep Parmar: 16:21

And then what was the first step you took? So I guess, yeah, did you notice? Yeah, and how are people around you at that point as well? Were your friends supportive? Was your family supportive?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 16:32

Was my family supportive? Every time I say something that my dad finds mildly intellectual, he still says, 'Natasha, you could have been a lawyer.' So he's still, I think he's still hoping for that. My friends were very supportive. I think the most important support I got was from my husband because, obviously, like financially, it's a sacrifice for someone to leave a job and start something from scratch, but there's a lot of uncertainty. But he knew I had been mulling it over for some time. I was, I want to say, like 29 at the time, so I was at a good age to be doing it, and so friends were supportive, and my husband was supportive. I think the best validation for me was the support that I got from the founders of Bulb, the rest of the leadership team, and then, of course, I also spoke to the founders of Piton as well, and I think the combination of all those people are people who I highly respect and who also understand the peaks and troughs of entrepreneurship quite well. So getting their validation was really reassuring for me.

Amardeep Parmar: 17:30

So you've got a blank slate now, right? You're starting fresh. What are the first steps you take? Did you like it? How did you get this going for you today?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 17:38

So I think my last week at Bulb, I was still working full-time, but I was starting to speak to headhunters, and I was starting to speak to my network, and I was starting to map out who the first few hires would be. I knew that I wanted to raise money. I didn't know how much. I didn't know from whom, but I knew that that was going to be an important step. So I was starting to think about that. I was starting to think about who would be the first few customers that we would speak to and try to get early validation from. So that was all happening in that last week at Bulb, and then my first week out, I was like, 'Right, I'm going to incorporate the company. I'm going to open up a bank account. I'm going to start speaking to VCs,' and that's exactly what I did. I think I incorporated the company on the 2nd of September 2020, and then I think I had money in the bank by the 22nd of September 2020. So things moved pretty quickly.

Amardeep Parmar: 18:22

That's really good going. So you raised money really quickly. Was that from people you already knew?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 18:27

Yeah, so it was a mix. There were some people I knew, like my previous fund, Piton, invested, which was really nice. There were some angel investors that I had met over the years, and then there were some new investors as well. But it was a small round. It was a £500,000 pre-seed round, which, in hindsight, feels like a very small amount of money, but at the time, it felt like a lot, and it was enough to hire the first three people on the team.

Amardeep Parmar: 18:52

And how did you find those first three people? Because obviously that's super crucial, right?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 18:56

Yeah, I think the first hire is always the most important, and I was really lucky that I managed to convince someone who I had worked with at Bulb to join me as the first hire. He's now our CTO, Dan, and he was employee number one, and then he brought in the second hire, who he had worked with previously, and then the third hire was someone from my network. So they were all people that I had worked with before, or people that people I had worked with before had worked with. So it was all through second-degree connections, which was really nice.

Amardeep Parmar: 19:28

So you've got the team, you've got the investment. What's the next step from there?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 19:32

So we started building. So we started building the product, and we were building it hand-in-hand with our first three customers. So we were really lucky that we managed to convince three companies to take a bet on us. They were all at different stages of maturity. They were all different sizes, different industries, and that was really helpful because it meant that what we were building was robust enough to handle the different needs that these different businesses had. We were building it with them, and then we launched the product in April 2021, which feels like a very long time ago now.

Amardeep Parmar: 20:07

And how did it feel when you got that first customer? Because obviously it's a big moment.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 20:11

It's a huge moment. I think it was a company called Laundrapp, which is an on-demand laundry company. I remember when they signed the contract, we celebrated, and then a week later they churned, which is really common in SaaS. I think the average churn in SaaS in the early days is something like 30% in the first month. So we were below average, but it still felt really bad. And then, luckily, the other two customers stuck with us, and then we started slowly but surely adding more customers.

Amardeep Parmar: 20:45

We hope you're enjoying the episode so far. We just want to give a quick shout out to our headline partners, HSBC Innovation Banking. One of the biggest challenges for so many startups is finding the right bank to support them, because you might start off and try to use a traditional bank, but they don't understand what you're doing. You're just talking to an AI assistant or you're talking to somebody who doesn't really understand what it is you've been trying to do. HSBC have got the team they've built out over years to make sure they understand what you're doing. They've got the deep sector expertise and they can help connect you with the right people to make your dreams come true. So if you want to learn more, check out hbscinnovationbanking.com. 

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Amardeep Parmar: 21:40
  So at this point I've seen you've just quit your job and you're taking the like leap into entrepreneurship and three months in, you've got a million in the bank, right? Yeah, you must be feeling pretty good at that point. But then you have to get, but you also have to get started in it, right? Like you get the team on board, get the product. So how did you go about using that money and trying to make sure you use it effectively?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 21:40
While I felt good, I would say I probably felt more stressed than good. I think the second we had the money in the bank, I was like, oh, the clock has started. And so even if we're not spending money, even if, you know, we're obviously not marketing, paying salaries, anything else right now, you know, investors still need to return, they need to see progress. And so we, I think I would say I probably spent the first three months just aggressively interviewing. I think from like for 12 hours a day each day it was either finding candidates or interviewing candidates. So my LinkedIn outbound was enormous. Also tried other tools and just met as many people as possible. We then hired a contractor, data scientist to start working with those design partner customers.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 22:24
  Because the other thing is, yes, we had investor expectations, but we also had customers that had signed these design partner agreements who were like, okay, you're building something for us. What are you building? And so we hired a data scientist to start building a part of our product today that is the forecasting algorithm. By integrating and pulling data from a customer's historical data to build those forecasts, that we could start showing customers early value without building a proper user interface

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Amardeep Parmar: 22:48
  And you said there about the team and getting those. You did so many interviews. What were you looking for? What did you want in those early team members? And did you feel you were quite successful in finding those traits?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 22:58
  You never know until you're doing it yourself. I remember that when I was at Piton, I read the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things and I just didn't really get it. I was like, okay, this seems fine, but it all just seems so obvious. And then it wasn't until I read it, probably around that time period that I really. It just stuck with me and I was like, this actually is a very good book. I just wasn't the right Persona for it when I wasn't an entrepreneur.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 23:22
  And so I think there's a lot about stage appropriateness of the mentality that somebody has to join a company from day zero, get it from that zero to one phase, understand the speed of execution, how much that speed of execution matters, understand the value of iteration, not committing to things fully MVPing, but then also just hard work and tenacity. And so I was looking for all of those. I would say as an entrepreneur, you get better at finding things over time, but maybe never perfect. But I would say over the last three years, there's a lot I've learned about hiring, what to look for, what to make sure you avoid. That I wouldn't have known in those early three months.

Amardeep Parmar: 24:02
  And then with the product itself as well, you had the idea of what you're going to build, but you didn't have the exact specifics of exactly what it's going to be. I imagine it's kind of pivoted over time with iterations and things like that. What exactly is Surfboard today for the people who are listening to understand what it. Exactly.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 24:17
  Yeah. So Surfboard is a workforce management software for customer service teams that enables them to predict the amount of tickets, calls, chats they'll get at any point in time and schedule their teams accordingly so that you, as a customer, for example, are never calling a customer service organisation and left to wait on the phone for 20 minutes, or emailing a customer service organisation and not getting a response. So we build those optimization tools to make sure that the right people are available at the right time.

Amardeep Parmar: 24:42
  And then you smiled there, as I said, about the pivots along the way. What have been some of the things you've had to change along the way, or maybe the wrong alleys you took at some point. So you then had to backtrack and go in a different direction.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 24:53
  We built the product from May 2021, so that's when we started building the first version of the user interface. We released it, we had customers using it. I think we had about 20 customers using it. We raised our seed round in 2022 and then took the decision quite shortly after that seed round was raised that were actually going to replatform and rebuild the whole thing. Because while I do really believe that in the early stages you build things that don't scale, it became really hard for us to build additional features and additional capabilities on top of what we had already built. And so that was quite a limiting factor for us, I'd say. What was really difficult about that decision is that it came from a very technical perspective.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 25:44
  I think if I could revisit that decision today, there would be a lot more questions I would ask about speed of getting that new version out. So that ended up taking us about like five to six months. And in startup land, when you're a seed company, five to six months is a lot of time. And so I count myself very fortunate and lucky that our investors were patient with us at that time. I don't know that I would be that patient. In hindsight, I think there were just a lot of unknowns and I probably had a fair bit of imposter syndrome around asking questions around de scoping around, prioritising, deprioritizing, iterating, adjusting to make sure were building the right things in the right order to get customer value out as quickly as possible.

Amardeep Parmar: 26:23
  Where did that imposter syndrome come from at that point? Why weren't you asking those questions and why do you feel more comfortable to do so today?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 26:30
  I think as an entrepreneur, you always have to back yourself. I think there's two things that are never going to be untrue. Number one, you care about the business more than anybody else. And when you have that in your mind that you care about the business more than anybody else, it gives you the right to ask all the questions. And it's always coming from a good place. You're not looking to attack anybody. You're just looking for one thing and one thing only. And that's to ensure and guarantee the success of the business. Number two is that as an entrepreneur, your instincts are usually right and that just comes from surface area. And the surface area is that you're in all the customer conversations, you're reading all the updates from the product team, you're reading all the customer success notes about how customers are engaging.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 27:05
  Nobody else has that surface area that you have. And I think that gives you the right to again ask questions from a good place, but also a place that has the most relevant context, that when you're speaking to a product team or a tech team in isolation, they might just be missing context. And sometimes the imposter syndrome comes from an assumption that everybody's working off the same information and that usually is untrue.

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Amardeep Parmar: 27:27
Yeah, I think that's such a key point. I see it so much as well with different people of intuit where it's. We always think that everybody knows. I do it as well when I'm like with my own team. Right. So why didn't you know? Well, because I haven't told you it.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 27:39
Exactly.

Amardeep Parmar: 27:39
Yeah, I haven't told you it. Then how like. And then you get frustrated. It's like. Well, actually, yeah, like you said, it's if people don't know what you know, then how are they going to make the same decisions as you make?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 27:46
Yeah.

Amardeep Parmar: 27:48
And obviously now, so the version 2 has come out and it's going well, hopefully touchwood. But could you share with us like where you are today and what's the biggest wins you've had, like what you most proud of?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 27:59
Yeah, I would say that over the last six months we've been working with larger and larger companies and we've moved from a product that is part of a daily workflow to a product that drives a return on investment. And so I think the biggest wins are when customers come to us proactively. So we have a customer beauty pie, for example, and we didn't ask them to do anything. And on their own accord, they surveyed their team to ask what the impact of Surfboard was and came up with stats of 100% of the team find their days clearer and easier to follow. 75% of the team are working on the right task on a more often basis.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 28:35
This has resulted in a 20% improvement in our service levels and we've been able to make the international team much more efficient from a capacity or headcount perspective, resulting in X count, Sorry, X cost reduction. And so when you hear that come directly from customers unprovoked it's so validating. Stuff like that, where you wake up and you're like, this is why I do this every day. There's good days, there's bad days, but when you see that it's definitely a good day, that makes it all worth it. So I'd say that was definitely when in the last few months is just like the customer stories that have come out around success and utility they've gotten from the product. I think number two is in the way that the team has evolved their way of working.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 29:18
I think every startup has probably had to adjust over the last two years around a new macroeconomic environment, I would say, while Surfboard hasn't used the macroeconomic environment to force the adjustment. I think at the beginning were in that zero to one phase. In that zero to one phase, you can be a bit scrambly. The pace can change at different times. You can feel like you're zigzagging around. But then when you go from that one to ten phase, you really have to be moving a lot more linearly. And it feels like we've picked up our pace on that and that's. It's just made everything feel good. I take a lot of inspiration from football teams, and so I started watching that new Netflix Manchester City documentary. And while I'm not a Manchester City supporter.

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Natasha Ratanshi-Stein:

Who do you support? Football. I support Arsenal.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 30:09
Are you a Manchester City supporter?

Amardeep Parmar: 30:11
United.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 30:11
Okay. All right. So you dislike them probably more than I do. They are just a high performing team. And you see the energy that high performing teams have. You see how much of a snowball effect it has. And that's something that I really strive to build every day because I think results get more results. You know, you have those managers of Premier League teams who win the Premier League and they say now is not the time to celebrate. The next thing to do is to win the Champions League. And I think that's the type of high performance culture I really want Surfboard to have. And it feels like that's starting to develop.

Amardeep Parmar: 30:43
So you've just set me up nicely for the next question.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 30:46
Is it about football?

Amardeep Parmar: 30:47
No, it's not about football, but it's about what is your Champions League. What is the big dream here? Coming forward? What would you hope Surfboard you can talk about is doing in five years, ten years time?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 30:56
Yes. For us, the Champions League is how we fundamentally evolve the way the customer support teams work. We're really lucky that when you look at what's happening in the world more broadly, we are at a really exciting phase in how customer service teams are changing. And I say that across two things. Number one, the development of AI, and number two, a bit more consolidation happening around the tech stack of where telephony providers sit, where CRM sit, and where we as a workforce management provider sit. And with artificial intelligence, we want Surfboard to be the default tool that is able to orchestrate a team that is, for example, 50% humans, 50% AI.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 31:34
And what we need to do first before we get there is get to a critical mass of customers that are working with us, working with the existing structure of mostly humans, maybe outsourcing agencies and a little bit of automation, and then help them on that journey to cross the chasm to becoming a much more efficient and optimised team. With that.

Amardeep Parmar: 31:52
Before we get to Quick fire questions, ask you one more. Where does the name Surfboard come from? A cool name.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 31:57
I really like the name. One of our advisors and investors, Russell Davies, helped me come up with it. I was struggling to come up with a name and then he did a bunch of word association and I saw him go from Bento Box to Switchbox to Switchboard to Surfboard and I saw Surfboard and I was like, that is it. And I think what he hadn't pieced together when he got there on the word association was how much it resonates with the industry we're in. Because often people refer to, when you're getting lots of phone calls or lots of chats, you refer to it as a wave of inflow. And so when I saw Surfboard, I was like, yes, we are the tool that helps you navigate those waves.

Amardeep Parmar: 32:36
Very cool. I always have to ask, where did Bent it? Why did it start at Bento Box?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 32:39
I have no idea how you got there. That's a very good question.

Amardeep Parmar: 32:42
I was like, wait, what?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 32:43
Okay. I actually really liked Bento Box as well because I just feel like Bento Box is a nice visual prompt to think of how different things come together in a well organised way. But we're not called Bento Box, unfortunately.

Amardeep Parmar: 32:54
Okay, so we're going to go into quick fire questions now. So the first one is, who are free British Asians that you think are doing incredible work and you'd love to shout out for the audienc?.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 33:03
Yes. The first one is our head of product, Sagar Haria. Sagar and I worked previously at Bulb. I was in so much admiration of him at Bulb that at the time I asked him to co found Surfboard with me. He rejected me. But then two years later, I was lucky enough to hire him as head of product and working with him has been instrumental. The things that I describe around culture evolution to be a lot more focused on performance, a lot more focused on results, the importance of speed of execution. He's been really instrumental towards deriving within the team. And then the other two, I would probably give a shout out to two of our investors.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 33:41
So Deepali Nangia from Speed Invest, who led our seed round is and who's on our board and Reshma Sohoni from seedcamp who invested in our pre seed round and followed on our seed. Both of them have been great mentors, they've been great to see spar ideas with and I think they've also been the right type of investors who just understand the stage they're investing in, the challenges, the opportunities, the strategic, the tactical and balanced everything very well together.

Amardeep Parmar: 34:11
Awesome. The next one is if you want to find out more about you and find out more about Surfboard, where should they go to?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 34:17
We're pretty active on LinkedIn, both myself and Surfboard. A lot of the stuff we talk about is customer service, but also just Surfboard news. So I'm on LinkedIn, Natasha Natanshi Stein and Surfboard is on LinkedIn, Surfboard.

Amardeep Parmar: 34:28
And then is there anything that audience could help you with today?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 34:30
Look, we are moving across multiple fronts. We are always looking for customer service teams that want to work in modern ways of working, making things simpler, smarter and fairer with the right automations. Number two, we are hiring ahead of commercial. This is an exciting role that crosses sales, marketing and partnerships. And number three, as we think about reinventing what customer service looks like in this hybrid AI and humans way, we are always looking to understand and research more organisations that have implemented AI really to make sure that we're mapping out the right workflows and productizing them within what we do at Surfboard.

Amardeep Parmar: 35:08
So thanks so much for coming in today.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 35:10
Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Amardeep Parmar: 35:11
Have you got any final words?

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein: 35:13
No, I think this has been really great, really enjoyed it. And look, I would say the same thing that people told me before I started Surfboard. Nobody ever regrets becoming an entrepreneur. You're never going to learn as fast, you're never going to work as hard, but it's certainly very worth it and it feels like it adds a lot of meaning to what you do in your day to day work.

Amardeep Parmar: 35:33
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.

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