Why Plaid’s COO cold-calls new hires | Eric Sager (COO of Plaid)

**Brett Berson** (0:05)
I'm curious to get your perspective on what is unique about leading a company in moments of incredible dynamic change that's very different than leading a company when that's not the case. So you join and it feels like things are relatively ho-hum for maybe 18 months. Then you have the pandemic, then you have Visa M&A, then you have FinTech is dead market implosion, and then you have AI.
What's unique about running a decent portion of the company and the role of COO through those specific times?

**Eric Sager** (0:42)
So I feel at least as far as my journey at Plaid is concerned, in a weird way, there's nothing unique about it, because at almost every step there was something like that.

**Brett Berson** (0:48)
We should talk about the three weeks where it wasn't that.

**Eric Sager** (0:52)
There's always been things like that. I think the key is always, you just have to be relentlessly focused on still moving the business itself forward.
I think whether it's in the context of Visa or COVID or anything else, I think one of the things we've always really been very focused on, is ruthlessly focusing on making sure that we're serving our customers, we're serving the ecosystem, we'll continue to move the ball forward irregardless of what happens on something like that. There's a couple of tactical ways in which I think we did that. I think one is just in terms of how we speak to the company. We're very clear that this was just one potential milestone upon many. It is not the end goal, it is not the finish line. I think that's particularly important even if you see companies now going public and so forth, I think. I learned a lot there for my days at Square where that's how Sarah and Jack talked about the IPL. It wasn't the finish line, it was just another milestone amongst many milestones. I think if you take that attitude, it's easier to remain focused. The second is the way you think about the team. I think we've always tried to minimize the number of folks that are truly actively working on something like that. In the case of COVID, obviously, it's a little bit different, that affects everybody. But in the case of Visa, the team that was actively day-to-day working on the transaction was actually quite small, and everyone else was 100 percent focused on continuing to grow the business. They were certainly aware of the transaction, aware of what was happening, and obviously, how could you not be giving some of the press at the time?
But fundamentally, they were 100 percent focused on their day job and again, serving our customers, serving consumers, like building the platform and the ecosystem.

**Brett Berson** (2:23)
Do you think it's mainly a comms thing where you're just sort of relentlessly landing those messages? So is it just narrative and storytelling and keeping people focused sort of in the way that you communicate? Or are there other things that you have to do?

**Eric Sager** (2:38)
I mean, I think it's the substantive as well, right? I mean, in this case, I don't know if I would think of it as kind of falling apart. I mean, certainly the deal didn't go through, but then subsequently, right? Like we raised at a significant up round, we provided liquidity to our team, right? And so suddenly, from an employee's perspective, we're actually pretty happy about, right? And so I think that went a long way to kind of show the intent for what we're trying to build.
I think it's about just the culture and what you really value at the end of the day, right? And I think if you build a company around any given milestone, like an acquisition or an IPO or something like that, I think it's really hard to build a truly great company. Versus if you build a company and a culture focused on actually kind of delivering for your customers, delivering for the, in our case, the ecosystem that we're building, like I genuinely think our teams, certainly I do, believe in that, right? And we believe in that like much more than we believe in like any one of these kind of externalities that might happen.
And I think as a result, it makes it easier to kind of stay focused, right? So it doesn't just start when that event happens. It's like you're constantly talking about what you're trying to do for the ecosystem as a whole and for your customers and so forth and so on. And so it's not like it's a new thing versus I think to me, sometimes if you think if you frame it more as like a comms thing, it sounds a little bit more like it was reactive to just that moment, right? Versus, no, this was always the culture that we were building. It never changed, right? And I think the really great companies, they've been able to do that. They've been able to maintain that focus, to maintain that culture over kind of a very long period of time, irregardless of what happens. And I think that's what then builds the resiliency to handle all the ups and downs that you talked about. It's very rare that you find a company where it's really just straight up into the right.