Aswinkumar Rajendiran is the Co-Founder of Maple.

Maple is an all-in-one revenue management platform that streamlines sales-led and product-led billing workflows and tracks holistic revenue metrics as quickly as deals are signed without weeks of reconciliation.

Maple can be leveraged in no-code or low-code mode by enabling quick experimentation-ready basic, credits-based, usage-based or seat-based billing capabilities into your product with just a few lines of code.

Takeaways

• Attending UWaterloo and working on side projects
• Getting into YC and building his first company
• Joining Rippling ($13.5B valuation) as the first employee
• Learnings from Parker Conrad and the unique way Rippling builds product
• The decision to move back to Canada and launch Maple
• Why billing is such a problem and headache for companies
• Billing processes have become increasingly complex in modern businesses
• Working closely with early customers
• Maple's product strategy and building a full stack solution for billing
• Founder-led sales, how to do them well and for how long
• Raising money
• Building the right team - focusing on great engineers

Chapters

00:00 From Side Projects to Founding a Startup

05:56 Joining Rippling: The First Employee Experience

12:13 Building Maple: Insights from Rippling

18:12 Strategic Selling: Targeting the Right Customers

24:09 The Importance of Founder-Led Sales

30:00 Building the Right Team: Focus on Engineering

35:51 Raising Money: Aligning Vision and Funding

Keywords

startups, entrepreneurship, Y Combinator, Rippling, Maple, billing solutions, founder journey, product development, go-to-market strategy, team building