Royston Tay co-founded Zopim in Singapore in 2007 with Wenxiang Wu, Yang Bin Kwok, Qing Ru Lim, and Julian Low, who all met while studying abroad at Stanford University through the National University of Singapore Overseas College program.

Having caught the entrepreneurial bug, they worked on several ideas before settling on their most promising one, Zopim, a Live Chat product for the many small businesses just coming online. After graduating, they lived a Spartan lifestyle for more than two years, subsisting on US $410 per month as they tried to develop the product. When the co-founders decided to switch to a freemium model, they were surprised by how many of their existing customers converted to the paid product. Within a few years, Zopim was used by 120,000 websites in over 100 countries.

In April of 2014, Zendesk acquired Zopim for US $29.8 million, partially in cash and the rest in common stock. Tay was absorbed into Zendesk as general manager of Chat, and Zendesk had an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange just one month after the acquisition in May of 2014. Tay worked at Zendesk for more than three years before leaving in late 2017. Today, he’s an active angel investor and startup mentor in the Southeast Asia startup scene.

Gracy Fernandez: You happened to meet your co-founders during the NUS Overseas College Program. What formative experiences did you have together while abroad that would later inform your thinking around Zopim?

Royston Tay: The NUS Overseas Colleges [NOC] program has created a steady stream of entrepreneurs who went on to create household names, like Carousell, Shopback, 99.co, and MoneySmart. It’s no exaggeration to say this program changed all our life trajectories from ordinary undergraduates to passionate, determined entrepreneurs.

Zopim’s story is no different. Before NOC, I was en route to graduating with honors in engineering, before joining my friends in engineering or consulting jobs. In 2005, I was accepted into NOC and headed out to Silicon Valley for a year. It started off badly. I interned at a decent startup, but my job as QA engineer was dead boring. I did get really good at playing ping-pong. I signed up for extra classes at Stanford, which I was neither hard-working nor clever enough to excel in.

But there was this other group of NOC students who barely talked about work or school. Every night, instead of heading home, they were out there attending events and meetups, and networking, organizing, pitching their startup ideas, and pretending to be startup founders. “That’s better than pretending to be a QA engineer,” I thought.

I joined the group’s leadership team. Everyone got fancy titles. I was the VP of Mentorship. Armed with our fancy personas, we hosted events and meetups where established founders or early employees of red-hot startups like Facebook and YouTube shared their experiences with us wannabe entrepreneurs. It was intoxicating to finally feel part of the hallowed scene.

NOC also gifted me my co-founders, who were already brilliant coders and hustlers. I was the least accomplished of the lot. Somehow we clicked and spent weekends dreaming up ideas and developing prototypes. We would pitch them and invariably get shot down. Upon returning to Singapore, it seemed natural that we would continue doing that together. Of all the mostly crappy ideas we had, only one didn’t get shot down as much. That was how Zopim started.

On reflection, one lesson stood out—entrepreneurs aren’t made overnight. Unlike many other professions, there isn’t a career ladder leading there. Especially for young inexperienced founders, pretending to be an entrepreneur while finishing up a degree, or working a second job to keep the lights on is a necessary rite of passage. It’s tiring, exhausting, and demoralizing to have ideas and prototypes ridiculed by others. But if you can’t stomach that, or somehow see the sadistic thrill of it, you won’t be able to embrace all the crazier challenges that comes after.

Fernandez: Can you share the experience of doing a literal “elevator pitch” to famed venture capitalist Tim Draper?

Tay: Tim happened to be in Singapore, and someone organized a closed-door pitching session for him. We weren’t cool enough to be invited, but we were shameless enough to show up. He was larger than life, living up to his reputation by breaking out into an impromptu rendition of a song he wrote for startups. Thankfully, he’s much better at his actual day job as a VC.

The pitch was in a speed-dating format , a handful of entrepreneurs had about five minutes to pitch their ideas to him before another group was rotated in. It was Tinder on steroids, if he liked the idea, we could follow up for the next date. There were two of us at that event—Wenxiang, one of my co-founders, and me. We had several ideas at that point, so to maximize our chances, he pitched Zopim, and I pitched something else. I don’t recall Tim listening much to the other pitches, but he really liked Zopim and wanted to see our prototype. We had written exactly zero lines of code at that point but confidently promised to show him something “soon.” A couple of emails later with his PA, our second date was set two months later.

Fernandez: How did you and your co-founders manage to build a prototype in as little as two months? What did Zopim look like at this time? What features did it have, and which did it lack?

Tay: Right from day one, we wanted Zopim to be an easy way for anyone with a website to easily chat with customers on it. “Why would you not want to chat with every hot lead?” was the thinking.

It wasn’t a new idea. “Live chat” had been around for a while, but it was very expensive and complicated to set up. Only Fortune 500 companies with large IT and support teams could afford to use it. Riding on the wave of emerging web technologies at that time, we believed two radical improvements would disrupt the industry, making “live chat” available to all.

Firstly, we believed it was possible to build a chat widget that anyone with no coding knowledge could install on any website. Secondly, it was possible to build a fully web-based chat application, so businesses no longer had to download any software. They could chat with customers on any computer with a web browser.

Today, these are industry standards, but back in 2007, these were big technical challenges. A good chunk of the two months went into deep research, showing up for end-of-semester exams and general procrastination.

Two weeks before, we finally holed ourselves in a dark dingy room to code day and night. Being engineers, our first eureka! moment was when we finally managed to send the first message from our experimental widget to our experimental web application, and back.

We had cracked huge technical challenges under the hood, but other than that, Zopim had none of the features that eventually made it commercially successful. It was also ugly as hell. We spent our last few days frantically slapping lipstick on the proverbial pig, coding up till minutes before our second date with Tim. Junliang—another co-founder, who was still in Silicon Valley—was waiting outside Tim’s office when we finally released the demo to him.

Needless to say, we bombed it. Tim politely spent fifteen minutes with us and said, “Come back when you have more traction.”

Fernandez: So many tech entrepreneurs choose to drop out of school once they get their winning idea. Why did you choose to work on Zopim while still pursuing your undergraduate degree?

Tay: Dropping out of school to start a company is a very Western concept. Since this book is Asian Founders at Work, we should advocate “Asian” standards—graduate with honors and build successful companies!

On a serious note though, the startup incubation arm of our university, NUS Enterprise, was very supportive. We were literally full-time entrepreneurs without having to drop out. We had free office space on the college campus, courtesy of NUS Enterprise. We spent almost all of our waking hours at work, skipping most lectures and doing the absolute bare minimum to graduate.

More importantly, we avoided having to explain to our families what we were doing. In their eyes, we were still students going to school, not unemployed bums trying to do this “startup thing.” Startups weren’t so cool back then.

Fernandez: Even if you did not end up raising from Tim Draper early on, you ended up getting investment from the iJam grant. What are the advantages of raising grants early on as opposed to seed funding from angel investors?

Tay: Let’s be honest, we weren’t exactly picky about funding. Back then, Southeast Asia had virtually no investment scene. There were few startups and even fewer investors. It was the classical chicken-or-the-egg problem. In the decade since, Singapore did fantastically well to engineer a vibrant startup ecosystem.

Early on, the government had to artificially stimulate startup growth using grants and matching investments. The timing was perfect for us. We became the second startup to receive the iJam grant.

Raising grants came with challenges. The grant sizes were small, which meant we had a shorter runway to achieve lift-off. We turned that to our advantage by instilling a culture of frugality, which lasted all the way past profitability and even after our acquisition.

Without raising venture money, we were also in full control of our company and had little dilution. When Zendesk acquired us, almost ninety-five percent of the proceeds went directly to the founders and employees, giving most of our early employees a deservedly lucrative payday.

Even though we had a good outcome, grants are no longer critical stimulants today. Our startup ecosystem is attracting great founders and a glut of investors. With market forces effectively picking out winning ideas and teams, ambitious startup founders should pit themselves against the best in the capitalist arena instead of relying on grants. But, should the music stop and venture funding becomes harder to come by, I hope Zopim’s story will remind entrepreneurs that bootstrapping to sustainable fast growth and profitability is still very possible.

Fernandez: You and your co-founders famously lived off an allowance of around SG$500 for two years. What were the lifestyle sacrifices you had to make in order to live on this shoestring budget?

Tay: I’m an advocate for starting up young. One of the reasons is that we didn’t need much and the opportunity cost of starting a business was low. In plain English, we didn’t have lucrative jobs to walk away from, and we hadn’t acquired a taste for the “high life.”

Like many Asian families, all of us were living with our parents, who graciously continued housing and feeding us. Being comfortably middle class, we weren’t expected to put bread on the table yet. Five hundred dollars was just enough for a bunch of fresh college graduates who spent all our waking hours in a free office, eating cheap meals on a college campus.

Acquiring a social life was tricky, especially if we wanted to meet up with non-startup friends. Understandably for them, having been cooped up in office for the week, and having disposable income for the first time, weekends meant loosening the purse strings and enjoying life. Those were perks we couldn’t afford. We couldn’t travel far for holidays. We couldn’t plan for marriage, housing, much less kids. We never had more than a thousand dollars in our savings account. Watching peers and even younger friends zoom past us in living standards wasn’t easy.

But I don’t want to make it sound tougher than it was, because it really wasn’t terrible. We surrounded ourselves with startup friends who were in the same predicament. We became awesome at throwing low-budget, high-fun parties. Knowing how poor we were, our incubator, NUS Enterprise, often hosted events for entrepreneurs with free booze and food. This camaraderie and sense of purpose in what we were doing everyday more than made up for the perceived struggles of being poor. I still look back at those days with a lot of fondness.

Fernandez: At some point, you gave your co-founders an ultimatum about their commitment. Can you share what led up to that moment, and how it went?

Tay: More than a year after meeting Tim Draper, our product had launched into free beta, but with less than a hundred active users. In the meantime, most of our startup friends had cracked major monetization or funding milestones.

The engineer in me was still excited about coming to work to develop features and improvements for a growing customer base. But the entrepreneur in me couldn’t ignore the reality that we were a slow moving train wreck. Given we were targeting small and medium-sized businesses [SMBs], we needed hundreds of paying customers to barely break even. At this rate, we would run out of cash long before we got there.

As a coping mechanism, we desperately ploughed longer hours into work. One founder even moved into office with all his worldly belongings so he could work at night. In the morning, employees would tiptoe into an office that resembled the stinky living room of a mad scientist, which isn’t so far from the truth. Work started to feel laborious and highly inefficient. We had voluntarily stopped taking salary to stretch our runway and keep employees. “This isn’t fun anymore,” was probably how we all felt. One of us had to say it, but only we as a team could fix it.

I gathered all the founders in a quiet meeting room and shared my sentiments. I was planning to leave in one month unless we figured out, and committed to a plan that could get us to the next level.

I never came close to following through. The founders responded amazingly. We decided to roll our final dice of designing, developing, and launching pricing with our remaining short runway, something we’ve procrastinated for years. We also needed to spruce up the working environment. Evicting our live-in founder and all his worldly belongings would take too long. We needed a temporary, free co-working space that had AC, coffee, hot desks, and blazing-fast Internet. NUS Enterprise swooped to our rescue once again. Or rather, we swooped into the open meeting area outside their administrative offices, squatting there for months, often first in, last to leave in our mad race to the finishing line. Not only that, they helped us extend our runway with a bridge loan to tide us through a few tough months. Something we’re eternally grateful for.

In retrospect, one downside of not taking venture capital was not having someone to kick our asses when we needed it, to hold us accountable to key milestones. Without “adult supervision,” we had to find ways to manufacture a collective sense of urgency. “Ultimatums” aren’t sustainable, thankfully we eventually became great at keeping ourselves accountable without resorting to it.

Fernandez: After building your prototype and fundraising, what further changes did you make to the product to introduce it to actual customers?

Tay: As newcomers, we knew we were a decade late to building enterprise features that allowed massive customer support teams to work efficiently. Instead we focused our attention on the wave of small businesses starting to sell online. Our barebones prototype already made setting up and using live chat easy, which was better than expensive alternatives. So we very quickly launched our free beta, thinking users would give us feature suggestions in return for free usage.

Over time, the growing pool of beta users pushed us to invent features no one had thought of. For instance, many of them used Zopim to chat with customers while fulfilling other duties. Logging into our app was too troublesome. We found ways to send messages to their favorite messaging apps and let them chat with customers without even logging into Zopim. Back then, it was Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo!, Skype—the ancient predecessors of today’s WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack.

Eventually, these features snowballed to make our official pricing launch a successful one.

Fernandez: You have stated that its Zopim’s customer-centricity that has allowed it to succeed. How exactly was the company customer-centric in its earliest days?

Tay: Customer-centricity means putting customers at the heart of business decisions. This might be easy to forget in larger enterprises where employees are far removed from customers. But startups rarely have this problem, they are either customer-centric or they die.

Like many startups, we did things that didn’t scale in the early days, as long as it kept customers happy and gave us a better understanding of their needs. It helped that our software was designed for that. In the early days, we stalked every customer on our website to chat with them and solicit feedback. We were so enthusiastic they often thought we were bots. Sometimes, their bug reports or feature suggestions seemed so important that we’d implement them on the spot and push it out while chatting with them. Later on, even though we hired a dedicated support team to handle questions, we made sure everyone in the team continued serving customers at least one hour a week, bearing the full intensity of customer complaints in real-time. No better way to build empathy!

What set us apart from many startups was that many SMBs used Zopim as their first customer support software. Therefore, we also had the opportunity to introduce new standards for customer-centricity via our software design. For instance, we made our chat widgets prominent and welcoming. Customers on a website could start chatting with live agents within one click, instead of being inundated with prequalifying questions designed to scare users away. Our customers loved this.

We also encouraged our team to adopt a slightly irreverent style of conducting customer service through live chat, mixing in messaging lingo and emoticons, while staying responsive and professional about the task at hand. That allowed us to establish an instant friendly rapport with customers in ways that wasn’t possible through email or phone support.

Today, this emphasis on making it easy for customers to get help, either via self-service, automation or through a friendly and personable human agent has become the standard.

Fernandez: You were tasked with creating the business dashboards for Zopim. Did any of the metrics that business leaders wanted to see surprise you, and why?

Tay: To understand the metrics that our “business leaders” look at, it’s necessary to take a short detour. Zopim was unlike other Enterprise startups of that era. We didn’t build a sales or marketing team until we were comfortably profitable. Our early growth engine revolved around virality. That is, we achieved exciting growth numbers while spending zero dollars on marketing and sales.

From the start, we wanted Zopim to be a great product for SMBs at a free or low price point, so any business that needed live chat would choose Zopim without a second thought. In return for this fantastic deal, we insisted on keeping the “Zopim” branding on the chat widget, with little exceptions. This meant every time we signed new customers, they were effectively advertising for us to users and competitors on their websites. When we say our product sells itself, we truly mean it.

Given this backdrop, we weren’t fixated on Monthly Recurring Revenues numbers like other Software-as-a-Service companies. It was important, but still a by-product of our viral funnel improving over time, which were the numbers we examined closely. For example, an unusual metric we tracked was the “rate of referral” from our widget to our website. Another metric that our product managers insisted we constantly improve was the Net Promoter Score, which measured how satisfied customers were with our product.

It’s no coincidence that customer-centric companies look at similar metrics. The difference is how we see these numbers translate directly to revenue growth.

Fernandez: Once you introduced the paid subscription, why were you surprised that adoption of Zopim was higher than it was when it was a completely free product?

Tay: It’s common sense that the cheaper a product, the more likely customers would afford it. Nothing is cheaper than free, therefore if customer adoption was low while Zopim was free, it would be disastrous to launch pricing. This was our naive thinking for two years.

Turns out this thinking applied mostly to consumer-products. Businesses on the other hand valued reliability and quality. First impression matters when they evaluated products. A “free beta” didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence. Prospective customers were worried we might lock them into an expensive pricing once they started using us. Or worse still, terminate their service when we ran out of money.

Over the years, we’ve learned to think about pricing as a feature of our product. As with developing product features, we put in as much love into designing an elegantly simple pricing plan which extracts a fair value from the smallest to the largest customer.

After repricing Zopim a few times since, this initial surprise has given way to quiet confidence in our ability to deliver great value even at higher prices.

Today, there are already plenty of pricing blog posts guiding entrepreneurs on key pricing considerations. Our personal revelation was that even with a ton of pricing research and surveys, the only way to learn with certainty is to actually roll out pricing changes. In a fast growth startup, newly minted features and evolving buyer profiles mean pricing plans and price points have to be tweaked every so often. A healthy SaaS startup should review their pricing every two years at least. Just be responsible to old customers by “grandfathering” them appropriately.

Fernandez: You initially turned down another acquisition offer prior to the Zendesk deal. Why did you decide against the deal?

Tay: We never ran Zopim thinking of any particular exit strategy. We believed as long as we ran the business well and customers loved us, opportunities would come along. True enough, over the years, we received several offers.

There was one offer that stood out. It was from an 800-pound gorilla in our space. I was at an event where their founding CEO was speaking. He is a pioneer in our industry and still someone I highly respect today. As he was leaving, I went up to introduce myself. To my surprise, he’s heard about us and had wanted to reach out. We quickly found ourselves bonding over drinks, which led to talks of a potential acquisition.

Despite our mutual respect, there were several reasons it didn’t work out. Valuation was one, but the fundamental reason was that he didn’t believe our self-service business model of winning customers would scale. He predicted we would hit a sales plateau in a year and be forced to compete with his company for enterprise deals, involving expensive marketing and sales teams.

We respectfully declined his offer and proceeded to blow past his “plateau” several times over. Today, enterprise companies like Zendesk, Atlassian, Zoom, and Slack have proven that it’s possible to build highly efficient sales and marketing operations around the same product-centric, self-service approach that we were built upon.

Fernandez: How did the potential acquisition by Zendesk present itself? What was the discussion like with you and the co-founders when choosing whether to push through with this deal?

Tay: To give some background, Zendesk’s first product was a highly popular help-desk software. It wasn’t a new product category, but they were growing phenomenally because of their “beautifully simple” product philosophy and self-service business model, an approach that resonated with us. Some of the hottest tech companies back then like Twitter were using them for customer service. We were also customers and had always admired or stole liberally their UX design patterns.

One day, I received an email from a Zendesk email address. Two of their senior executives wanted to fly to Singapore to meet us. There wasn’t a stated agenda. I replied, “Yeah, sure,” and within two weeks, we were hosting them in our cozy little office.

They quickly made their intentions clear. They viewed live chat as a fast-growing, highly complementary space to theirs. They tried building their own chat product, but it was so shitty—their words—that their salespeople often recommended other products. Zopim was one of the top names. What did we think of being part of Zendesk?

As a marriage of two product categories, it was a match made in heaven. Live chat was indeed fast-growing, but a tiny industry compared to help desk. We had many joint customers, and our integration feature with Zendesk was hugely popular. In our own business plans, we forecasted having to enter the help-desk industry to compete with Zendesk at some point in the future. Two market-leading brands working together would certainly shake up the space. We didn’t discuss valuation at the first meeting, but I remembered looking at their cash balance thinking they’d never be able to afford us. I left the door open and said we were happy to explore it only if the offer made sense. In the meantime, we had a thriving business to run.

A few months passed before they reached out again. This time to invite us to meet their entire senior management team in San Francisco. Everything checked out. We passed each other’s “beer buddies” test. We sat down with their VPs across many departments and shared best practices. A lot of mutual admiration was built up over this intense short period. There was still the problem of valuation.

Their cash position hadn’t changed much, but something else had tilted the equation significantly. They revealed they had filed privately to go public on the NYSE. If everything went according to plan, their shares would soon be tradeable, making a part-cash, part-stock acquisition more attractive. It also introduced a lot of uncertainties into the negotiations. Suddenly, we had to put on our banker hats and decide for ourselves if the valuation of their shares made sense. The tables were turned one afternoon when their CFO pitched us like investors, running us through their numbers to convince us that their valuation was fair.

Even though the deal was worth a widely reported US $30 million, which fell short of what we had in mind, we were bullish that after IPO, Zendesk would continue growing, and the value of the deal would increase if we held on to the shares. This leap of faith was thankfully justified with their shares today worth many times what their CFO pitched to us.

We flew back to Singapore with the term sheet in hand, but it was only the start of an intense three months of negotiations, due diligence, and flipping back and forth on whether to follow through with the deal or not. The dilemma was obvious. We were on a good growth trajectory, and so staying independent was a great option. On the other hand, being part of a fast-growing company allowed us to be more aggressive in our growth plans without worrying about funding and other execution risks.

Two months in, with Zendesk growing weary of our indecision, we locked ourselves in a hotel room, resolving to only leave the room with a unanimous decision on taking or rejecting the deal. Nine hours later, we emerged from the room bleary-eyed but with a decision. I think what tipped us over was that being part of Zendesk would shorten our learning curve as entrepreneurs scaling a company. Our employees would have the opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in Silicon Valley as well.

Fernandez: So many founders dream of an “exit” that is often a literal one—they leave the company they founded with significant cash or stocks. Why did you and your co-founders prefer to stay on post-acquisition for such a long period?

Tay: That’s the impression many non-startup friends had as well. “Why are you still working? Why aren’t you sipping martinis in the Bahamas?”

People in the tech scene usually know an acquisition often requires founders to stay on a few years to properly integrate their products, employees, and processes into the parent company. The acquirer often paid up part of the acquisition proceeds over a few years. If we left early, we would be leaving money on the table. It’s aptly known as “golden handcuffs” in our industry. For us, it was three years.

Beyond the monetary aspect, because we had such a tight-knit team in Zopim, the founders took it upon ourselves to ensure we stayed to lead everyone through the tough process of melding our strong product identities and culture with Zendesk’s.

Fernandez: What was the most challenging part about adjusting to the newly merged companies post-acquisition?

Tay: We definitely underestimated the challenge of integration. If we had done our research, we’d have known most M&As fail by default. The first few years was the toughest period for the founders. We gave ourselves a lot of pressure to sustain Zopim’s growth rate, while at the same time integrating our employees and products. It was two full-time jobs squeezed into a day. In the early days, it was common for us to attend conference calls in the wee hours, followed by a full day at work. We often reflect that we’ve never worked ourselves so hard before, even compared to our founding days.

With hindsight, it’s obvious that we didn’t have mid-level managers who could “tango” with Zendesk’s managers on important decisions. We had great employees, but they weren’t adept at building relationships, understanding a wider array of stakeholders and power structures, negotiating compromises and acquiring resources. They were builders not managers.

Ultimately, this power vacuum created an us-versus-them mentality, which often required a founder’s involvement to find a compromise. That was often me, since I headed up product development, marketing and sales. If I could do this all over, I would have hired senior managers to run those departments much earlier, reporting to me so I’d still have final oversight over decisions. Since then, I’ve seen how great managers triage problems, find elegant solutions to complex challenges, and enable rank-and-file employees to focus on doing the things they love.

Today, despite the hiccups at the beginning, through lots of goodwill and sheer will from both Zendesk’s and our team, the acquisition is undoubtedly a resounding success story in the landscape of M&As.

Fernandez: Culturally, what did you make it a point to keep, continue, or maintain at Zendesk from Zopim, post-acquisition?

Tay: We were a younger team, so we made it a point to keep the environment cozy, casual, and fun. This meant allowing employees to continue coming to work in shorts, flip flops, or walk around bare-foot if they wanted to. Other than that, our employees shared a close transparent relationship with the founders. We tried to build this up over time with the rest of Zendesk leadership. Whenever senior executives flew over, there would be intimate, no-holds-barred town halls. The Q&A often threw up unfiltered awkward questions which were gamely answered by the leaders.

Fernandez: Were there any challenges in consolidating Zopim—the brand that you had spent years building—into the Zendesk mother company?

Being a close-knit company, we had developed our branding and mascot not just to appeal to customers, but also to represent us. Not surprisingly, it was emotional for employees to let go of this identity, even though we shared plans to merge the brands very early on.

It helped that we were able to keep the brand for almost two years before rebranding Zopim as Zendesk Chat. By then, we were mentally prepared. Not only that, our branding teams also did a fantastic job of rebranding Zendesk from a monolithic product brand to a brand capable of supporting multiple products. This meant that Zendesk also retired their own beloved branding and mascot that served them well for almost a decade. We were in this together.

Rebrands are often on the receiving end of vitriol and hate from customers, but Zendesk’s was a resounding success. The design team deservedly won an award in 2016 for this rebrand.

Fernandez: What was the most surprising part you experienced in preparing Zendesk for IPO?

Tay: The preparation for acquisition and IPO happened simultaneously. Zendesk listed very shortly after our acquisition went through. So my job was to make sure we didn’t mess up the IPO inadvertently. For a scrappy startup running out of Singapore to suddenly be ready for an American IPO from the financial and legal perspective was crazy already. And this was on top of the intense negotiation over acquisition.

We had lots of professional help of course, but I remember there was a never-ending checklist of things we had to complete. One example stuck out. Before the acquisition, our self-service model had won us customers from all corners of the world, which included a tiny handful of customers from a country sanctioned by the US. Even though it was inadvertent, it put us in serious breach. We had to quickly terminate those accounts in advance of the acquisition and gently nudge them towards other solutions. Zendesk's legal team got reprimanded sternly on our behalf and we were often teasingly reminded of it.

All in all, it was well worth it. For not messing up the IPO, I got to represent Singapore and Zopim on the NYSE podium. I also introduced Wall Street to the new Asian phenomenon then—the selfie stick!

Fernandez: Now that our communication is splintering across multiple mediums like social media, chat, and other platforms, what role do you see Zendesk having in this environment?

Tay: Consumer behavior changes all the time and businesses are always trying to engage customers on their favorite media. To always be at the bleeding edge, we assign small teams to work closely with customers to co-develop new products based on these emerging behaviors. For instance, to help businesses chat with customers on multiple social media and messaging platforms, I led a small team in Singapore to experiment with a product called Zendesk Message. Some of these products eventually fail, some take off, some are merged with existing products, but we always learn a great deal being on the frontline.

What doesn’t change is that as businesses grow, they need a centralized set of customer records that captures the entire history of every customers’ interactions, regardless of where it happened. They also need a robust engine that automates interactions where possible, and hands customers to the right employees at the right time via the most appropriate media. At the core, this is what Zendesk provides across our multiple products.

Fernandez: Beyond using Zendesk of course, what advice do you have for founders in Asia on becoming more “customer centric”?

Tay: As mentioned earlier, in the early years of a startup, founders naturally spend a lot of time with customers to develop product-market fit. Customer-centricity is rarely a problem. Beyond a certain size though, day-to-day management, meetings with ever-growing groups of stakeholders and fire-fighting tend to consume founders or CEOs. Customer face-time decreases as good hires take up sales, product and support managerial roles. This is natural, but if left uncalibrated, it’s easy for customer face-time to slip down to zero for founders.

In Zendesk, one of the founders used to keep reminding everyone that every time we huddled inwards for internal meetings, our asses were facing customers. True to our values, the founders and senior executives often lead by example by scheduling time for customer visits, especially when they travel beyond our San Francisco headquarters. At town halls, they often reflected on what they’ve learnt on such visits to encourage employees never to stray too far away from the people footing our bills every month. Nothing beats leading by example.

Fernandez: What unconventional advice do you have for startups who want to build an organization as successful as Zopim?

Tay: Especially for founding CEOs, my unconventional advice would be find time to be “bored.” For most people, it feels great to develop an expertise in one particular field, subsequently immersing themselves in work that they’re good at and enjoy. Personally, once I catch myself slipping into this “state of flow,” it often means I’ve figured out the work enough to hire someone to replace me.

It’s scary to not have my scheduled filled all the time, but it gives me time to think and be curious about challenges happening elsewhere in the company, in the industry, in the world. Quite often, this led me to clear-headed decisions on what our company and I needed to focus on next.

It’s no surprise that many high-powered executives set time aside for downtime and meditation. Steve Jobs himself said, “Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.”