7. Nick Houldsworth & Damien Tampling of Xero: Building Your Platform The Right Way

Highlights of Avanish, Damien, and Nick's discussion include:

• Xero’s growth story from one person’s headache to a global platform supporting over 3 million customers
• The genesis of Xero’s impressive platform strategy
• How the company has created a playground for developers to solve for Xero’s customers in new and innovative ways
• Understanding the role the tension between things that the company could do and things that the ecosystem could do plays in overall platform strategy
• Practicing transparency both internally and with your partner ecosystem
• Defining your ecosystem platform principles to strike balance between first-party and third-party propositions

And much more!

Guests: Nick Houldsworth & Damien Tampling

Damien Tampling, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, Xero

Damien leads Xero’s global strategy, corporate development and partnership teams. Prior to joining Xero, Damien spent nearly 20 years at Deloitte in a number of senior strategy, M&A and other executive roles and was a founding partner of Deloitte’s global online and mobile technology practice, Deloitte Digital. He holds a Bachelor of Business from RMIT University, Melbourne and is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Nick Houldsworth, Executive GM Ecosystem, Xero
Xero is a global small business platform, with over 1000 connected apps in its ecosystem. In 2021 Nick oversaw the launch of the new Xero App Store, and has held board and advisory roles for a number of startups. He is passionate about building a network of innovation through Xero’s ecosystem community to support small businesses worldwide. He is based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Host: Avanish Sahai

Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.

About Tidemark

Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.

Links

• Follow our guests, Nick Houldsworth and Damien Tampling
• Follow our host, Avanish Sahai
• Learn more about Tidemark

You can find the full transcript here.