Buy or build? Make a change or stay the course? Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott on scaling startups

 Well, thanks so much for joining us. I'm super excited for our conversation.

 Hi, thanks for having me excited to be here. 

 Um, one of the areas that I thought that might be interesting to start the conversation is sort of on the topic of when to change something when you're operating a business and sort of when to, to leave it alone. And, and I'm particularly interested in exploring the, the idea because you joined Zen desk when it was something like 50 employees over a decade ago.

And now the company is something like 5,000 plus employees. And so I assume there's always this, uh, strain between. keeping things the same or doing the thing that you think made you successful in kind of reassessing priors and sort of changing your mind or changing something in the business.

And so curious to hear what you've learned about that.

 Yeah. Yeah. I think the, you know, the truism you always hear is what got you to 10 million, what get you to a hundred million? What got you to a hundred million, won't get you to a billion and you're like, oh yeah, heard that before. Um, but as you look in the rear view mirror, I it's rare that you don't think about decisions and, and safety yourself.

Oh, I should have done that earlier. We should have done that earlier. Um, why did I let that go on for so long? Um, and some of that learning it's about, uh, too much stem, you know, sentimentality too much. Desire for stability in the organization, you know, in rapidly growing startups, everything has changed.

Like it's constantly changed in terms of the scale of the application, the scale of new customers, the complexity of new customers. And I think it's easy to want to, it's also, you know, somewhat healthy to want to stabilize the team. But, you know, as an example, those moments when you go from, you know, bespoke curation of customers or bespoke curation of your organization into a more farming of those efforts, right.

More industrial scale. Right. You know, I've heard people talk about it, how you, as a leader, you have to move from being an individual psychiatrists to associated. Like we used to hand deliver cakes to customers when they hit a million tickets in the Zendesk platform, And you know, as we've shifted, now, we have customers doing a million tickets a day and all those things that is not practical anymore. And you have to let these things go. You have to move from people to process. And I think in the, in your own organization, um, that becomes very clear. there is a step function moments where, you know, you're going to add another a hundred people and it's important to add the kind of leaders who can bring those people on and motivate them and drive them and, ready for the next scale of the organization.

You try and grow people to do that. But if you're growing too fast, that's a really hard thing to do. And you have to bring people in from outside. Another example would be something that was like really tough for us to do is, and that's cause we were thinking about our IPO, which was take the mascot that we'd had as a company and the branding, right?

Zendesk was the highly green website company with a laughing monk image and the sort of playful whimsical love your help desk branding. And it, you know, it really worked for our early startup customers. The head of customer support for Twitter. I actually met her during my interview process was in desk.

And she was like, yeah, the thing that really attracted me was sort of the green color on the website. And you guys look like fun. Um, when you're sort of, you know, pitching an enterprise story and going for an IPO, you have to, you have to, um, think about is that where we're going to be for the next five for the next 10 years.

And I think, you know, your branding is super important and ours was restrictive. So we killed off that character and we made a change and we built a new brand platform. And that was, that.

was sort of hard to do because it was so familiar and dear to the employees, you know, I had a wardrobe full of Patagonia fleece that represented that and t-shirts, but for the long-term, it was the right thing to do. 

 From a system level. How do you identify when to change something particularly? I think it's difficult when it's served a purpose and maybe was a tool that helped you get to 10 million or helped you hire great people or what have you, do you think about it at the system level or have a set of frameworks such that you're not constantly sort of wrestling with these things and then looking back and saying, wow, I wish we did that earlier.

 what one of the disciplines, I think that's helped. I wasn't a discipline we had early on, but something that's really helped me is thinking about sort of being a little more formal and deliberate as we think about return on investment. I think when you, when a company gets to a certain size, you get to be very familiar with this because you know, you go through.

Headcount rituals and headcount allocation is, and budget allocation is sort of this annual ritual that actually reminds me of sort of a truism about British soccer. Right. You know, football is a game played by 22 players who run around and, you know, tactically adept formations against each other for 90 minutes.

And then at the end of 90 minutes, you should out and penalties in the Germany. Right. That's football. I think head count allocation and using ROI, justification is the same way. You know, you go through this theater of spreadsheet, comparisons and, you know, slide deck competitions or whatever, which is basically what they are.

And at the end of it, you know, the CFO gives all the money to sales because they proved that if you add five more feet on the street, you'll get X more revenue. And that's the thing that we should. I think that's because when we lose in that battle, in some ways we're failing, because we're not thinking about benchmarks against other companies, you know, having the CFO look at where, where other people are spending and thinking about what kind of company we want to be.

And then also thinking about in your own organization, you know, in the product organization, right. What it is that is driving value. And as you, as you understand more and be more deliberate about the investments, you're making the ongoing, you know, the sort of zero-based budgeting, thinking about those investments and the new investments as you deliberate, you can, you can make clear choices and it's a little easier to then say, well, something has to change.

We have to go make an acquisition. We have to invest heavily in this area. Or, you know, this product is failing and we the need to do something about it or wind it down. 

 So, what does the process look like for you all now in terms of looking at investments, getting better at seeing what's working and what's not, and making new bats then, and maybe kind of, what do you do to avoid the, the problem where the, the thing, oftentimes with the clearest and or shortest term ROI?

Generally gets capital allocated to it versus things that are more speculative speculative, but that if they do work, they have the chance of, of providing some sort of outsized outcome.

 Yeah, there are tools out there to help you. Right. And we S we definitely started thinking about our investments and strategy in terms of, horizons, you know, one horizon, one horizon, two horizon, three investments, right. Things that are making you money today, horizon one things that will make you money next year, horizon two, and, you know, longish term bets, horizon three, and then you allocate, you know, 80 15, 5.

Percent of your revenue to each of the horizons. I think about it in different ways, depending on the stage of your company that was useful for us. But I think it's also as a framework, it doesn't help you with some of the details. And so lately, um, we've been using the Jeffrey Moses zone to win framework, right?

Where you think about, you know, there is the performance zone, whether the things that are making you money today, and you're going to put all of your effort in the transformation zone, which are ready to go into the performance, zone and build for you, uh, the incubation zone where you're trying things out and the optimizations on what you bet you'll be trying to make, the way that you run your business better.

What I like about that framework is it forces you to think about the metrics in each of those. Uh, and the objectives of the initiatives in those zones differently, it recommends that you put very few things in the transformation zone. So you're not just throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall. You know, when that, when you go from one product to multi-product, right, you have this, this transition, which is really interesting.

And you have to learn to do more than one thing at once. And I think if you judge your second product by the, by the metrics and outcomes of the first one, it'll never get any love. It'll never get any coverage, right. You'll never be able to build it. If you try and do too many things at once and transform the company in too many ways at once, you're just going to be peanut buttering.

You know, peanut buttering is the enemy of growth, right? It's, it's just a way that you never get good at anything. And so as a one product company, it's really important then to figure out what are the initiatives we have that aren't our main thing and how are we going to measure them? And what does success look like and how are we going to treat them differently?

And I think you need to have one thing, which is your transformation thing, which is like, everyone's going to care about that this year, we're going to really work hard on it. And we're going to make it a main motion. Like last year for us, that was messaging. We, we felt like the transition to messaging channels in customer service and in people's lives in general was real and what's significant.

And so we went out and we acquired a Canadian company smooch, which was a SeaPass platform because we needed to inject. Um, DNA and that thinking into the company, we also got amazing technology, but it was, it was so much more than that. And that's sort of, you know, a successful transformation, an unsuccessful transformation is really where you launch a product and you know, you're like, oh, well, isn't. Our main product, you know, the support product in our case is generating X amount and growing X fast, right?

This thing is a distraction and a pain, you know, and these people want what marketing help and they want, you know, finance help to model everything and blah, blah, blah. Like, why are we doing this? And I think if, you know, making it a big thing, because it isn't generating the same revenue or using these unrealistic metrics and goals to measure it, you're going to fail.

So right now, and our stage, I like zone two, one, I think horizon 1, 2, 3 is a good way to think about strategy. And then, you know, um, if not either of those things, just writing it down and saying it out loud to each other and making sure you all agree, which is maybe what Zandesk earliest stage of it was, is incredibly important.

 You gave one example, um, of, of these different parts of zone to win. Can you share a little bit more about some of the past examples that fell into each one of those buckets that.

I think, you know, we talked about the transformation zone, I think incubation, um, you know, we, we launched a product a long time ago, um, called, uh, talk, which is a, you know, voice-based context sensor. And that product came very much from the incubation zone. we took the Twilio API APIs.

We figured out what the core things we wanted to do, and we built those things. And over the years we've built a team around that product. You know, that team is now best in Dublin. We've built sort of, uh, up a content farm on the website. We've built up expertise in the area. We've rolled our international numbers.

And we've slowly, you know, marched from basically an incubated effort that was also sold on the website and wrote along into something which is part of the cause and a suite, you know, through transformation. And now I would consider to be part of our performance zone and sold in that way. We put a decade into it and it's, you know, it's made money all along.

It's great. But, and have that, uh, have people who care about it and run it. I think you can be successful in that way, incubating a product, other things we've acquired. And that's what different things from a, from a performance point of view, if I were to go back in time and have a word with myself a few years ago, um, it would be about investments in the performance zone where, you know, a lot of the attention from the board, a lot of the attention in your marketing, a lot of the intention, you know, and, and glory is on the new and interesting.

And, uh, that pulls attention away from your core product. And it's your core product that, you know, in a SAS business, your customers are paying you to operate every day in our case Zehnder support. And, you know, there were, there were, I don't want to say LOLs and investment, but there were times when the, you know, the noisy neighbors at the edge, uh, of the suite were getting more love and more attention, certainly more of my attention than the core.

And I think for me, that's one of my mistakes and refocusing on the core and reinvesting in that I think has really helped the business. And it also, um, thinking about it in terms of being in the performance zone has been incredibly important. And then, um, You know, the, the efficiencies zone. Um, not a plus.

I live very comfortably to be honest with you. Um, but I think again, as you grow and you look at, you look at your CAC which is a great way to think about the efficiencies zone. You know, I'm not getting too involved in accounts payable and how many people we have doing that.

But, uh, if we look at the cost of acquisition, one of the things we learned in the efficiencies. Was, um, that we spend too much time adding the next agent for one of our existing customers, right? There was a, there was a theory that an early revenue officer had that it was whenever a customer wants, you know, to add one seat, even if for a thousand seat customer, right.

A relatively skilled customer. And they want to add one seat, but we should have a conversation with them. And it's a good opportunity to engage. And that's how we keep the motion of sales going. Actually, you know, for most of those things, they just want to hit a button and get that seat. When they want to have a conversation, they want to have a conversation.

Mostly, you know, that's about operational efficiency, you know, And we had this project actually to take, you know, um, the price for next agent, with all of the discounts that have been applied and everything else out of, um, our Salesforce automation system. And, you know, out of the way it was obscured in that process and out of compensations into, well, the client just presses a button.

And if we, even, if we have to figure it out manually, we'll figure it out on the backside. You know, we have a revenue team, whatever, whatever, and it will work, but we'll, we can drive a ton of efficiency into that. Time back to our salespeople to go talk to new customers and, you know, sell new deals. Yes.

You still need to do success with your existing accounts. You still need to engage with them. But I think that was a, that was a great learning. And, um, you know, from a revenue point of view, like if you look at the revenue attributed to just being able to hit the button and upgrade, hit the button and add agents, you know, it's huge.

It's like, you know, probably one of the most successful, you know, individual development projects we undertook in the last year. And so when you, when you think about efficiency in that way, it's just, it's just really important and it can be, it can be transformative for your revenue. 

 Given, we're talking a little bit about, um, product strategy. I'm interested in, how do you think about the role of competition? You know, when everyone says, oh, you know, just focus on your customer, build what they need, or I'd say more Silicon valley sort of YC and. Um, and at the T at the same time, you operate in an intensely competitive category, both upmarket and downmarket.

Um, there's a zillion other things that people can use. And so when you think about what to build or how to build it, how do you think about, uh, competition as, uh, as kind of a stakeholder or, or, um, constituent.

 I, I mean, focus on what you're doing is really great advice. It's the same as my focus on the core focus on the core focus on the core, right? Because that's, what's paying the bills, but at the same time, looking at the competition is actually another way of looking at your customers, right? You, you, you know, in our market, we have bigger competition who are really having the conversations in some cases that we want to have, and they're having more of them all the time.

And we have smaller competitors that are more agile and more aggressive and, you know, potentially moving faster. And I think I look at them as. Incredibly important research organizations, right weather, you know, distilling all of the input they get.

And you can see the hypothesis that they've built around that in the features they're releasing and then the products they release. And then you will hear from your own customers and, you know, your own prospects, what is getting traction with them in terms of the messaging or the capabilities or things that are important.

Um, and so. Uh, I think competition is extremely important because you were generally in, in our business putting choice in front of customers that comes from, you know, uh, Zendesk or one of the others. And, um, each one of those, in the longterm is an existential conversation presenter.

So we have to understand those dynamics. I think, overly, focusing on your competitors, tactics, or their position or the market or other things like that can be destructive to the organization, right. That's not, that's not using that information to create. it's a distraction.

And I think, you know, understanding what is a distraction as you look at them, which is, you know, how are they speaking about themselves? You know, what is, what is that take down competitive page in SEO for you? It's like, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Um, those things aren't helping, right. But if they are launching new capabilities or shifting direction in the market, I think you have to sort of think about what your response is going to be.

Do we want to follow, do we think it's important or is that unique to them and the way that they think about the market and the business. 

 One of the things we touched on, um, a little bit ago is, is this really interesting topic of mano versus multiproduct and when a company shifts from one to another and when to do it and how to do it. And so I'm interested both kind of how you approach this over the last decade at Zen desk, and maybe what you think you got right or wrong when it comes down to the idea of executing on a multiproduct stress.

 yeah. I, you know, transitioning from single to multi or just adding another one, those are difficult decisions and it's, it's really difficult if you have one scaled product to get the others moving and get them evolved. Um, you know, all software innovation is ultimately the joke is bundling and unbundling your packages.

And I think bundling second products into what you're doing is a great way to increase, you know, your share of wallet, uh, and get that product moving and get it into. I think there are build partner buy discussions that you have to have, and you have to understand long-term what the, what the strategy is going to be.

Um, and then there are organizational questions, um, for us, we had three or four products and actually what had happened was we'd set a goal of getting to a billion in revenue in, uh, three or four years. And we did an analysis of our market and we said, okay, you know, if we run a thousand Monte Carlo simulations of, of trajectories of each of the products that we have, um, we need a couple of them to get to a hundred million to get to a billion.

And So, we invested heavily in independent motions for those products as a result. And, um, each one got a GM, a general manager to run it who had some control over the go to market and the business, et cetera. Um, although we had kind of a monolithic Salesforce and play to get some overlays and we tried to run the business in that way, but step back now with the benefit of hindsight and look at that effort, I think where you have a different channel or a different economic buyer for a product that actually makes a ton of sense because you have to invent and stimulate a new motion for go-to market.

And. Um, you may have product market fit, but you have to really think about the, how is this go to market different? How do we navigate in New York versus if you have a single economic buyer and the second products are helping with new use cases, new instances, or, um, just increasing the share and taking it from, you know, another partner that they were using for that solution.

I think in that case, uh, GM is possibly a destructive way to run the business and we collapsed our GM's, where they were kind of running, um, independent units that just became noise in the organization more than it. Um, because, you know, persona wise, who is the buyer, you know, what are they paying you for?

 we have to understand that we have a core asset that is the money printing machine. Ad-ons that go with it and think about, multi-product strategy in that way and where it's not like that, where we have a different entry point into an organization. Uh, and we're trying to build up our reputation, the entry point.

 We have to think about what are the cross sell motions? What are the ways that we can find those use cases in customers, and then adapt the York to be able to build for that?

 So, can you talk a little bit about the story behind the different products that you've launched over the last decade? Um, and maybe kind of how you thought about sort of that idea of attaching other products that do different jobs to be done for the same buyer versus the decisions around additional products that maybe had a different buyer or user inside the organization.

 Yeah, I, so the first one I already mentioned was talk, we built on top of, uh, other API APIs created the contact center. And if you think about it, right? certainly at the time, most of our customers were small medium-sized businesses, maybe lower mid market. Um, we were their sole customer service or internal help desk, and it was natural for them to want to put a voice extension on that product.

And I think so there it's like, SaneBox. Um, something which has probably already attached to Zen Desco, which they would like to have. And so our philosophy was, well, we need to make it super simple to just go into the product and click a button, choose the phone number and you're up and running with a contact center.

And it, you know, you don't have to put in, um, desk phones or anything else you couldn't, you know, Bish basically have it ring your cell phone and do all these other things. I think when we, when we hit that sweet spot, it just basically worked right. The idea of I can turn on a cloud contact center, um, in 30 seconds.

And I think I actually went to the first Twilio signal conference, which was not the high production value it is now. And I created a context center in front of the audience in 60 seconds and had them all call it. And the first call, I answered it through them as an index t-shirt um, And, you know, that, that, that actually was a great way to go as it's scaled out.

It turns out that, you know, you can't, um, support a hundred agents on a DSL line, um, in Argentina, uh, you actually have to get into the basics of your network and all these other things in the selling process becomes more difficult. Um, but that was a great way to start that business.

And we've grown it since and developed expertise chat we actually built. Um, so, you know, session-based chat that goes on the website with a widget. We had a widget for help already on the website. It was a natural extension, same buyer. Um, and so we built. A, uh, nascent chat product in 2011, um, uh, basically looked at what other people were building the chat products with, had an engineer or to kind of come up with something and built it.

And we then, as we unpacked it, we just realized just how big and complicated it was, uh, as a process and that we were behind. Um, and we had three or four partners doing great business in the Zendesk ecosystem, selling to our customers through our app store. And, um, we looked at them and evaluated them and we bought a company called Zeppelin that was based in Singapore, uh, just before IPO came with a bunch of expertise, a lot of new customers because they had their own motion, their own self-serve business.

They also did chat for sales on the website, not just chat for support, which was important to us at the time we thought that would be, uh, a really good asset to have in a business to grow. And we, uh, Wanting to diversify where we were hiring developers and not develop a centers and establish a presence in Asia.

So it, ticked a bunch of boxes. Um, and we brought that product in, it was a great product. We've scaled it. You know, I think it, as an acquisition at two years in, it was, we were probably from a book of business, point of view making every year, what we'd paid for the whole. Which is great, you know, that's when acquisitions to work like that, it's tremendous.

And, um, I think with that one killing our internal product and acquiring was the right move. it's always interesting to think about the mistakes, right? I wish we'd integrated the technology stacks earlier. Um, but we were more interested in sort of running the business and not putting any kind of headwinds into the growth of that business, um, that, You know, shifting feature developers from new stuff that customers were asking for our stuff for ever larger and larger customers and use cases that were coming in versus stabilizing and putting on our platform.

Um, hindsight's 20, 20. I wish we'd done that. Um, and then from, uh, those, you know, those are the two cool other products. The other product that we have guide, which is our self service knowledge base, FAQ, and community, that product was completely homegrown and has continued to be homegrown. It's developed in Copenhagen by a great and incredibly tenured to.

Um, and we've just built on that. those, I think are the core extension products. And what we've changed though really is the, the way that we think about pricing. And I mentioned you know, are they independent things that we sell that are independent motions?

Or are they, part of a suite? Cause our customers that's that economic buyer we talked about is, uh, trying to buy a single contact center that salts has, you know, his or her chat cell service, uh, and voice needs as well as being a ticketing engine in the CRM. And, um, as we've gone from, you know, sweet emphasis to individual emphasis, each of which have their, their advantages, we've seen those products kind of grow and shrink.

 You know, you mentioned a couple, a couple of the examples of the new products, uh, or business lines that have worked really well. You've chosen to acquire integrate, and then scale is ease there. Anything that you, um, you deter or have become opinionated about to make those acquisitions exceptionally successful?

Because I think in general attends, it tends to be more likely that a company acquires a new product or adjacency and it doesn't work or it doesn't get to the scale that they had hoped. And so it sounds like in a couple of the instances that it worked just exceptionally well. And so I'm curious what you, what you did or how you approached 

 Yeah, I, I conveniently forgot to mention the ones where it.

didn't, um, naturally, uh, yeah, I think, we actually bought, uh, for a bunch of different reasons, uh, uh, a YC graduate company in San Francisco, And one of the mistakes that it was really easy to make in a cooperative process is say, you know, I like, you know, we like this company because we want the tech and the team, and we're gonna integrate it into our offering, whatever it is into chat, support something, some stuff we want to do around messaging, we're going to integrate it.

And then, um, we're going to keep the business going. Right. But, you know, the way that we described that is like, Yeah.

you know, we, we acquired a, um, A BI tool, for example, based in Montpellier in the south of France. And it had a, you know, it was a going concern with an ongoing business, you know, a lot of French customers that are European customers, but basically, you know, for a cloud BI implementation.

And we were going to use it as our, and it is now desk explore, use it as a, uh, implementation for BI. And it was an expensive acquisition for us at the time, but it was really, really important. Right? What is more important than the data about your customers and how you report them on them and how you analyze the operation that you run.

And I think, In that, uh, Corp dev justification deck, um, talks about where we can keep the existing business going, right. It comes with a sales team. We can apply some Zendesk juice to the marketing. It'll be great, It turns out that that wasn't our DNA, right? And, um, that independent product, wasn't what we were going to sell. We were going to sell customer analytics on top of your CX implementation, where, or, you know, the majority of the data initially was first party.

It came from Zendesk, and then you eventually could bring in second party and Marriott through extensions to one of the products or directly importing that data and build, you know, really powerful customer dashboards. Should have focused on that because you got to stick to your knitting, that's our business.

And that's what we wanted to do. We didn't really want to be in the BI business, but it's easy to make that calculation. We made a similar mistake when we acquired, um, Uh, the YC company, the market, our mission company, uh, outbound IO, where we got, uh, basically, uh, CDP stack, you know, customer data platform stack, and the ability to talk to segment and target and trigger customers.

And, you know, I still am a passionate believer in the need for, uh, Proactive views and your customer experience, right. Be able to say, okay, this is Adrian. He owns these products. He recently bought this one. He's probably calling about that. Let's trigger him on that and ask that question and, you know, not have him go through the 70 steps to get to the point where we figure out what it's calling about.

Those kinds of things I think are really important. And there's still a ton of, uh, work to be done in that space to, to build great and simple implementations that are understandable. And I think we're still passionate about working on it, but again, you know, for that acquisition, uh, we, we were running two stacks, one in Amazon, one.

It was too expensive. You know, the transfer costs between the two for all of our data was, was, you know, going to cripple as we, we didn't have all of the expertise we needed. It didn't come with a big enough team to be the kind of asset that we wanted it to be that wouldn't shrivel and die-ins and desk.

And again, it wasn't our expertise or it was too early for it to be our expertise in terms of selling. And from a framework, point of view, as you look back, right, if you're making a second team and you don't really, really want to be in that business, uh, you've got to kill the product.

You know, you've got to, you can't read that. Uh, you have to take it out the back and shoot it in the back of the head and disappoint the customers. We recently acquired cleverly.ai, the best in pro primarily in Lisbon Portugal. Um, and almost all of their customers was end as customers, right?

They, they provide just some fantastic, um, intent identification to ticket classification, calls, tools for customer service, super important in the customer service AI. To be able to take any kind of input, decorate it with, you know, intent extract the core concepts from it. And then they have a taxonomy which basically would take, take a question from a customer down a series of flows, you know, basically using a machine learning model that would be like, okay, this person wants to do a return.

This person is calling about billing. This person is, you know, yada yada yada, and you know, great asset, but they had sold products based on that to eight to 10 customers, we've made it our goal. You know, we, I think which is right based on our learnings to basically discontinue those products, but replace them eventually with Zendesk implementations and the first, you know, we got, we acquired it in the summer and the first reimplementation, that's a Zendesk implementation.

That's our technology. That's not in our app store. Um, has gone live as a beta and the rest will follow. And I think that. That's a good use of learning for us, like, and a good model. Um, we didn't want to be in that separate ML tool business. We wanted to be in the Zendesk business, but we wanted to have it cover those features and that functions.

 On your point about the story, when you acquire the company to help you build the chat part of your product, you know, you mentioned that you had a small team and you started to work on it and it quickly became clear that it was a much more complicated product and, or problem. And I was, I was interested in kind of exploring that a bit because it feels like one of those things that, you know, you're in a meeting and you're like, ah, customers, you know, want to chat with their customers.

Photo of Adrian McDermott in a blue shirt against an orange background

Adrian McDermott joined Zendesk in 2010, when the company had 50 employees. Now as CTO, he’s seen the team grow to over 5000. He shares his lessons on scaling, answering common startup dilemmas and offering advice for leading product and eng teams. 

Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott's advice for common scaling challenges

Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott saw the company grow from 50 employees to over 5000. Here, he shares his lessons on common scaling challenges.