Ed (00:56):

My guest today is Silvija Martincevic, the Croatian born, San Francisco based CEO of Australian founded Unicorn Deputy. Silvija’s executive career has been immense in the world of fast-growing technology, as the COO of Groupon, and then the chief commercial officer of Affirm, that scaled annual revenue through the billion-dollar ceiling and beyond IPO.

Silvija grew up in Croatia and while she didn’t learn English until she was 18, she’s an incredibly lucid storyteller. We traversed some key scaling challenges from moving Deputy from a point solution to a full workforce management platform trying to move from the fickle SMB market towards solving larger and more complex problems for mid-market customers. And all of this is wrapped up in a big global push to continue the growth trajectory that now has reported revenue well over a hundred million dollars a year. While Silvija is known in the industry as an incredible executor, as an operator, it’s her leadership skills that have been front and center in Deputy’s post Covid transformation, despite not being the founder, her ownership mentality is the cornerstone of her values-based leadership principles, which come clearly through as accountability, trust, and empathy. Her insights into scaling culture as a non-founding CEO were a real highlight of the conversation. This interview kicks off the Scaling Up season for 2025 where we’ll continue to bring great stories from Australia and abroad. As always, please reach out if you have any feedback or comments, and for more insights on a whole range of topics the new TDM website is a great resource for investors and operators alike. Now though, here’s Silvija Martincevic the CEO of Deputy.

(02:49):

Silvija, welcome to Scaling Up. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the TDM podcast. We’re sitting here in a studio in San Francisco. I think it’s a great place to start, just to give a quick lay of the land and a very short outline of Deputy.

Silvija (03:06):

Thank you so much for having me, Teddy. It’s awesome to be here in SF together, deputy is a global workforce management platform. We help small and mid-size businesses better manage their hourly workforce. We do that today for 350,000 workplaces all over the world. We operate in across 100 countries and effectively help small and mid-size businesses with ensuring that their workforce is happy, productive, efficient, and engaged at work.

Ed (03:41):

So given the multitude of workforce management platforms out there, there are lots of point solutions as well. Can you maybe give a flavour of some of the unique dynamics of the market that you operate in? As you described the on-feet workforce, what makes Deputy so effective as a solution for those particular customers?

Silvija (04:03):

I think it really is our origin story. We were started over 15 years ago in Australia by two wonderful founders, Steve and Ashik. Steve at the time was running an aviation management business and was trying to manage, as the business was growing from hundreds and into thousands of employees all over Australia, he was trying to manage payroll, labour compliance, operations, communications, and hired a Ashik to help him with operationalizing some of those aspects of the business. And about four years later, they sold this wonderful business and deputy was born out of the software that they built for the aviation industry. I think that is really, really special. Our founders understood the challenges of small businesses, when you’re a small business owner and whether you are working in retail or hospitality or you have a healthcare business, your largest costs and your largest challenge is managing your workforce, ensuring that you have the right people at the right time and that is what Deputy is trying to solve today.

Ed (05:16):

And of course, it’s those same people who are delivering more often than not a service, and so keeping them engaged and happy and effective at work is key of course.

Silvija (05:26):

Oh, absolutely, and you know we are incredibly fortunate to be working in an area and to be innovating in an area that has historically been underserved, right over the last 10 years when you look at so much work technology that’s been built, from Slack to Asana to workday, so many different businesses have been digitising work, but they’ve mostly been digitising work for office workforce. What Deputy is doing, we’re trying to digitise work for people that work on their feet. And, you know, surprisingly 80% of world’s workforce actually works on their feet. These are the people that make the world turn, whether they’re cooks, whether they’re restaurant workers, whether they’re retail workers and deputy obsesses every single day -How do we digitise and how do we help people that work on their feet be more productive and be more engaged at work?

Ed (06:20):

And just to round out this snapshot of the business, maybe you can give a flavour of some of the customers that you serve from SMB right through the mid-market sometimes to enterprise.

Silvija (06:30):

Absolutely, Deputy has been on this journey of starting and working with very, very small businesses, 10 to 50 employees. But as those businesses have grown, deputy has grown with them. So we have businesses today that have 10 employees on deputy platform, but we have businesses, one here not too far in SF that has 25,000 baristas that every single day use Deputy for all of their work needs. And I feel, you know, incredibly, incredibly fortunate that we’ve been on this journey where we can serve both small and mid-size businesses to help with all of their workforce needs.

Ed (07:11):

Let’s just put another foundational stone for this story together. Maybe a thumbnail sketch of your own career prior to Deputy because it’s an incredible career that led you here, the COO of Groupon, part of the leadership team building a firm from the ground up, and of course a public company board member at Lemonade. So maybe just a quick sketch of your career trajectory.

Silvija (07:37):

I’m an economist by occupation and spent many, many early years of my life thinking about data, thinking about economic progress. I had a wonderful career for 10 years investing in women and minority owned businesses. Those again often are under invested areas, under invested pockets of US economy. And for the last 15 years I truly have been fortunate to be a part of generational businesses and what I realised over that period of time is that in my heart, while I have founder energy, I am a scaler at heart and a builder. And so at the Deputy I get this wonderful opportunity to take all of that experience that I’ve had over the last 25 years of scaling technology businesses, taking them public, building amazing, amazing businesses, but also building incredible cultures and teams. So it’s a wonderful privilege to be a deputy today.

Ed (08:37):

So why don’t we join these two dots then because when you joined Deputy, there was a very interesting macro environment. It was post covid and there was a bit of a consumer hangover and that obviously plays into Deputy and its customer base, high inflation, low consumer sentiment, tight capital markets – the world had changed dramatically and so the needs of Deputy and its leadership team had probably changed, and you who’d had this wonderful tapestry of experiences -what were some of the things that made this a match both from a business need and also maybe give some colour as to your previous experiences and the lessons that you had learned along the way that allowed you to do the job of CEO?

Silvija (09:25):

So Deputy clearly has been on this wonderful journey. Ashik and Steve have built this great technology and when I joined the business, what was very, very obvious is that the company was ready to start to scale globally. And while we have an incredibly strong brand and great business in Australia, a world is a big place, and I think the board and the founders realised that for this next journey of deputy, what was really, really critical was to bring a leadership team that has done this before -battle tested leaders that have done the global scaling before. So that was unbelievably attractive to me. Having done that at Groupon – at Groupon, I ran 14 different countries across three continents from Tokyo to Melbourne to Barcelona to London, and I had the time of my life. I love the complexity of running global businesses and I love the complexities of scale.

(10:30):

And so I knew that this next chapter of deputy was going to need exactly the kind of skillset and expertise that I happened to have and it was going to be the work that I happened to enjoy and scaling a firm as well that we scale the firm from about a hundred million dollars in revenue and just 5,000 customers to over 1,000,000,003 in revenue, during the Covid era of three years to 200,000 customers across the world. And what I learned both from Groupon and Affirm at the end of the day is that we are all in the people business. That is it. We are all in the people business. And I think deputy board understood that as well. They knew that to build the next chapter of deputy, we needed to bring battle tested leaders that have done this before.

Ed (11:20):

We’ll definitely touch on the leadership that you’ve brought and the principles that have come with you, but let’s talk about the business and the key things that needed to be done because part of the transformation of this scaling journey, there are two things in my mind. One is from a point solution to a platform, and the other is moving up market. You said previously you have customers with 10 employees and now with 25,000 that has been a transition and obviously there’s a natural tension between serving both those customer bases but also how you go to market. So let’s pick off individually part of the scaling journey point to solution to platform and the lessons that you have learned previously that you could bring for that particular issue.

Silvija (12:03):

You know what’s been super, super important as we have started to transform deputy from being time and attendance and scheduling software into serving more and more needs of businesses is we needed to really craft what is the game that we want to play? And I learned this beautiful lesson from running a firm. There was a period of time when a firm saw this massive deceleration in their market share because new entrants came into the market – the wonderful Afterpay of Australia, Klarna – and we needed to really crystallize what are we going to be the best at? not run after someone else, what someone else is doing, but what are we going to be the best at? And in the first few months of diving deep into deputy, what was really important was to nail not what everybody around us is doing, because competition is stiff in this market,

(13:01):

There’s a lot of HR players, but saying what is it deputy so uniquely does that no one else does? We build unbelievably beloved brand NPS of like, Apple and other world-class companies, our shift workers and our small businesses love deputy, but we also knew that they have more problems to solve that we were not solving. And so as I look over the last couple of years during this transformation of moving from just solving a subset of customer problems to solving more and more, what was really important, and this is a part of Deputy DNA, was to listen to our customers. Every product that we build, we co-design with our customers. So, there’s 5 to 10 customers that we sit down, we spend time with them weeks and weeks and weeks listening and then design that with them. And so today Deputy offers many, many new products that help our businesses serve their employees better from communicating with employees from onboarding.

(14:08):

If you have a business that’s a seasonal business, whether it’s events business or hospitality business that gets very busy during the summertime, you got to onboard hundreds of employees at a time. Deputy now can help you with that. Deputy can help you with managed leave and all types of very complex compliance. And so I think the most important lesson is we are an engineering company. We are known as the innovators, we created, created a platform for shift work in Australia and in the world, and we just need to put our head down and continue to be doing that, listening to our customers, co-designing solutions for them.

Ed (14:47):

The key call out for me is that customer empathy and building for them, and a great lesson for other leaders to be able to, even if you’re in a retail business, walking the floor and understanding the deep needs of the customer as it is in a technology business. What about the shift from SMB to mid-market? Two very different markets -one usually self-serve known for ease of use, intuitive, sometimes the product feature set is less rich and obviously moving up market requires a different product in many regards. How has that shift, and particularly it’s go-to-market motion changed over time while you’ve been there?

Silvija (15:28):

As you know, Teddy Deputy has been unbelievably successful, and we’ve been able to scale all over the world because of the strong product-led growth motion we built. Still today we get thousands and thousands of businesses that find Deputy and pick it up by themselves. So, our self-serve engine is still a powerful growth engine for Deputy all over the world. But what’s happened, some of those businesses have grown bigger and bigger and bigger and we don’t want to be in a situation where we’re going to have to offboard them. So it is a key part of our strategy to be able to grow with our customers no matter how large they are. And so listen, it’s that journey moving from a PLG lead business into a software business that can now serve mid-market customers and large customers. It’s not for the faint of heart and it needs to be really, really unbelievably rigorously nurtured.

(16:28):

And I’ll give you one example, I still believe that PLG engine actually is a wonderful source of leads for some of those businesses, and one example here in us, we have this brand, ACE Hardware ‘ACE the helpful place’ – our US listeners are going to know about it, one of the most beloved brands, retail brands in America – we serve today about 1200 stores of ACE hardware, 25,000 ACE hardware employees, ages 14 to 84, use Deputy every single day up to seven times a day. This has been a wonderful, wonderful partnership that has helped us to grow up. Now those customers, large customers that have multi-locations, when you think about what their needs are, they are not that dissimilar in every single store to a small business. They want also easy UX, very intuitive mobile first, but when you think about that large corporation, they want to look at things from regional level or corporate level.

(17:32):

So the complexity of building organisational structures, reporting structures, analytics, permissions and controls, this is where the crux of the challenges is. So, it’s been really, really important to ask ourselves as we serve those large businesses – and we now have hundreds and hundreds of businesses like that multi-location franchise businesses all over the world -and we ask ourselves, what are the most important aspects of being enterprise ready? Absolutely it is about our technology being able to scale and us listening to what kind of controls and permissions and reporting and analytics they want. But even more importantly, it’s about operational rigour. How are we serving those customers? How are we talking to them? Are we having quarterly QBR’s with them? I tell my team every single conversation that we have with our customers, we have to again and again earn their trust and prove our value. So that means we need to be much more analytically driven. And Deputy is so much more than just time saving. Mostly when we talk about software businesses always save time. No, no, no, no. Deputy helps you make more money. Deputy helps you save costs and then of course, it helps you save time. And so we need to make sure that operationally we are equipped as well. So it is as much about technology scaling up and understanding the different needs that those customers have, but it’s just as much about operating rigour.

Ed (19:06):

It’s interesting because often businesses that grow up in product led growth, one of the advantages they do have is they’ve been at the heart of the consumerization of software and the user experience is often beautiful. You can think of Xero or other examples where they’ve started small but been able to scale that user experience at the heart of attacking the mid-market and enterprise, and as you just described, it sounds as though Deputy has really cracked that.

Silvija (19:34):

I think at the core of it, for any founders that may be listening that are thinking about doing that journey, just know it’s going to take you longer than you thought it would. It’s going to be harder than you thought it would. And really what is so critical, what’s been so critical for us is to hire people that have seen this journey before that can look behind the next corner. We have our wonderful Chief Commercial Officer, Jaimie Buss, who joined Zendesk as Zendesk was transforming from a self-service business into enterprise and she built that mid-market and enterprise motion for Zendesk. We have wonderful leaders in our engineering and product that have done that as well. So it’s important to have a team that has seen this story before.

Ed (20:20):

A great point and we’ll talk to people and culture in a second. The last topic on this scaling journey that I’m fascinated about, is Deputy born in Sydney, Australia, which oddly has been the founding home of so many great HR software businesses, for the American listeners, I guess, Australia has very rigid compliance and regulation around workforce laws and so a lot of solutions were born out of them, but now truly a global business. You are based here in San Francisco, much of your team is here serving customers all around the world. How has that transformation from Sydney startup to global workforce management platform taken shape?

Silvija (21:05):

As I was considering joining Deputy, I actually asked myself the same question. Why are there so many wonderful HR tech businesses born out of Australia? And so, a little bit of history, Australia in 1904 created a conciliation act that was the first labour regulation in the world. So Australia has had a hundred plus year of history of protecting and regulating the labour markets. And I know that Deputy could not have been created in United States. It needed to be created in Australia given the complexity of regulations of pay rate awards. And I actually think Deputy being born in Australia is a massive competitive advantage. We have spent 15 years building for 150 pay awards in Australia for tremendous complexities for local SMBs. And building that tremendous labour compliance software in Australia allows us to scale all over the world in a much, much easier way. Because when you look at the regulation outside of Australia, it is not as complex.

(22:22):

So because we have built for the complexity of Australia and built it in a scalable and configurable way, it allows us to accelerate our global expansion. And I’ll give you one example -US has started over the last few years, post-covid, creating what is known here in America as Fair Workweek laws. But the way that US is executing that is on a, not even on a state level, but on a city level where in some instances every city has a different minimum wage. Every city has, not state, a city has different leave requirements and lunch breaks because of the compliance platform we’ve built for Australia, we can literally be up and reconfigure our platform for any new regulation anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. And that is a massive competitive advantage. So I believe I am proud that deputy is exporting Australian technology into the world and I think it’s a great advantage. We were born there.

Ed (23:26):

And what about scaling the go-to-market motion for instance, given Australia is a unique market in many respects, but perhaps some of your experience of doing that in the US before, particularly at a firm, what were the lessons that you took from that and have applied to Deputy?

Silvija (23:44):

One very important lesson for anyone that’s thinking about scaling into new geos is that do not take what worked in one geo and apply to the next, because I promise you, there is a hundred percent probability, a hundred percent probability that it will not work.

Ed (24:03):

Great advice.

Silvija (24:04):

Period. Why will it not work? Because the tastes of customers in different geos are different because the regulatory environment is different and because your competitive set is different, whereas very compliance heavy positioning in Australia has led to so much growth that is irrelevant in US in most areas. So, we have to reposition Deputy, we have to crystallise what values are we solving. So our positioning of deputy in US is very different than positioning in Australia and then UK is sort of in the middle. So I want to tell founders again, as you scale, basically throw your playbook from your first market out. Start from the first principles, what do customers want? What are competitors offering? And how can you better serve the needs of that market?

Automated (24:57):

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Ed (25:14):

Let’s move to a theme that I know you are very passionate about and we’ve had some great conversations over the years and that is scaling people and culture. You’ve seen small, you’ve seen very large, you’ve had this great operational experience, but you are now a CEO, the CEO of a business that had a founder that has now transitioned out of the business. We had two founders, in fact, both of which had served as CEO. So a unique position. Let’s talk about founder transition more broadly and I guess your experience balancing the tension and I guess the assumption that you are going to bring rigour and discipline against the perception that founders bring innovation.

Silvija (26:00):

I consider myself the founder of Deputy 2.0 and I’m proud to say that I bring a different energy, but it’s still a founder energy. I’m a relentless competitor. I am customer obsessed, but the flavour that I bring to Deputy is a little bit different. I’m not an engineer. I am a business leader and a scaler and a commercial and partnership driven leader. And so, I want to say that I give such amazing credit to Steve and Ashik and the board to assess, what is it the Deputy will need in this next chapter? And listen, I think I have such great empathy for founders that are going through that transition and it’s not an easy transition, but where I think we always fell back to, Ashik and Steve and I, is that our values at our core were the same values. And listen, you are always going to disagree with people around the table. And that’s actually healthy. That’s not a bad thing.

Ed (27:05):

It means you usually get to the right answer.

Silvija (27:08):

Exactly. But I think having core values that are the same, even in those tough moments when you revert back to, but we’re all here to build a generational company. We’re all here looking at the same North Star. We want to improve the world of work one shift at the time. No one else has focused with such relentless passion on that. And I think we fall back on that. And I also believe that when I was considering Deputy, what was really important to me certainly was the product, this massive market that we have, but again, I said earlier, we’re all in the people business and the determining factor when I took this opportunity with Deputy was when I took the leadership team out, it was a really open search. It was I think Ashik and Steve handled this incredibly well. So the leadership team was aware that a new CEO was going to come in and the whole leadership team took me out to dinner. And I asked this question, I don’t think I told this story before – I said, if Deputy was a person, what would she be like?

Ed (28:15):

And how did they respond?

Silvija (28:17):

Of course, it was a big test and it was after a few glasses of wine. We all had some wine, so I knew that we had truth serum in the air. And the way that they responded was Deputy has quiet confidence, Deputy is humble, Deputy is transparent, competent, passionate, and all of those words truly describe the kind of culture that I wanted to build. And so I feel coming into the company and taking the reins from a founder who was beloved, it was not as hard because the culture was solid and good, and I’m so thankful to Steven and Ashik for that.

Ed (28:54):

So we’ve got a great sense of the foundational culture that you walked into and the things that you really wanted to keep. But I’m sure you also wanted to put your own flavouring on that culture as a new leader. And maybe you can give some examples of the things that you thought that you could bring or maybe needed some attention as part of the culture that you knew were going to ensure the next journey was going to be as successful as the first leg of the journey.

Silvija (29:23):

I really believe that to come to the right solution, to come to the right answer, you need really diverse perspectives and you need a safe space where they can speak their mind. I often joke that I’ve had this great privilege of rebuilding the leadership team – So we still have three wonderful teammates who have been on this journey with Deputy for years, and then we have six teammates that are brand new that joined together with me. So, it is a nice mix of the OGs and the New Blood – but I often call us the band of misfits. Here is what that means. It means that we have brought together a group of people that really, really think differently, a group of people that have had different experiences, lived experiences and professional experiences. And when you bring such a diverse group of people together that live all over the world, it is super important-

(30:20):

-there are some ground rules and one important ground rule which we live by is we want to build the kind of culture where we care personally, and we challenge directly. And when we do that, when we know that we care about each other deeply, when we challenge directly, it means that we’re challenging because we care so much. And I really have tried to build not just a culture where we are humble and honest, which are all of the wonderful components of Deputy, but also where we are ambitious and competitive and at times really, really tough when it requires. And so, it’s this integration of high care and high performance. It’s not one. Or I think as human beings, what we often see nice cultures or really ruthless cultures, I think you could bring both of those together. We can be kind and care a lot but also challenge directly and ask for high performance. And I think that is our superpower. We aspire every single day to build a culture of high performance but also high care.

Ed (31:33):

Yeah, there’s no doubt that kindness is built in clarity.

Silvija (31:37):

Clear is kind.

Ed (31:38):

Right? Exactly. And having built that leadership team, you know you would’ve had to screen for the kind of candidates and the leaders that you wanted, and now you’ve had to build trust in that leadership team. As you said, there’s been a lot of turnover since you joined. You talked to a few examples, but how have you thought, as the boss essentially how, you are going to build that trust and build it quickly?

Silvija (32:05):

Yeah, that’s a wonderful, wonderful question. Building trust starts with trying to get someone and recruiting them into your company. And so I live by this principle of extreme transparency. I don’t sell people on joining Deputy. I actually oftentimes sell them not to join Deputy because I tell them, here are the challenges, and I have been unbelievably honest about challenges that we have and the kind of people that I believe can tackle those challenges and that transparency I think instantly does breed trust. I believe that you don’t beat around the bush. I’m Eastern European and Eastern Europeans are known to just like no beating around the bush, just get to the point. And so I believe not just bringing an elephants into the room, but putting them on the table. So I do ask uncomfortable questions in the interviews, questions like, what’s the worst feedback you ever received from your leader and how did you handle it? Things like this that kind of provoke people a little bit where they may not have a perfect answer to give. And if you have a business that you’re trying to scale, here’s the news for you – If you bring in an executive that wants to sit on their seat and be the big executive, it’s not going to work out.

Ed (33:30):

Rip the Band-Aid off.

Silvija (33:31):

That’s it. You need both hands-on leaders as well as strategic thought drivers. And so I have had a situation on this journey and prior journeys where one person can impact the energy and the trust of the whole. And no one is worth that. Nobody ever says, ‘oh, I wish I held onto that person a little bit longer’, so when it doesn’t work, I think it’s kind and compassionate thing to do to rip the band off fast.

Ed (34:00):

It’s brilliant advice for leaders of all shapes and sizes. You touched on transparency, and it’s fair to say we’ve got a pretty clear view of your leadership principles based in kindness, accountability, and transparency. Do you think a leader can be too transparent or do you think that sets the standard and if you continually show that transparency, it trickles down to the very bottom and organically then moves its way back up?

Silvija (34:31):

I do not think that leader can be too transparent, but it’s how you define transparency. I believe that as a leader, it is your job to be a storyteller, a storyteller, and a nurturer of your people culture. And so this is something that I think when I first joined Deputy that I know that surprised some deputies, I share most of our board materials with our deputies. We don’t have an external story and a board story and an internal, we have one story. And I believe that that storytelling is really, really critical. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to run to your people and share everything and give them a play-by-play, but you do need to every single day explain why are we doing what we’re doing? Where are we going? Why is it important? And so yeah, I believe in transparent storytelling.

Ed (35:22):

You can certainly get a sense of the founder 2.0 energy in the entrepreneurial spirit that you’ve brought to the organisation. My last question around people and culture, and I guess your leadership is around your role as a board member on Lemonade, and in Australia it’s probably not as common for current operators to sit on public market boards, and yet this great opportunity exists. It’s much more common in the US to be able to add value to another company, but also bring things that you are learning back from that company to your current role. Can you give some colour as to how you both balance those? Because it’s a big responsibility being a public company director, but also the advantages to which you’ve felt it’s helped you as a leader?

Silvija (36:10):

Absolutely. I would advise more founders and CEOs to do that because if you are someone that loves to learn, what a beautiful opportunity to be sitting next to other operators and founders who are building global lasting businesses. So, I feel like I have learned so much more than I have contributed to Lemonade, and I hope I have contributed as well. Though what needs to work, Lemonade at the time when I joined it, it had just gone public just as a firm has so we were on this joint journey of newly public companies and of course Lemonade built a beloved brand that was mostly direct to consumer, and so as a newly publicly traded company, it was important to think about are there other go-to-market motions that they can build and how do they start thinking about a multi-product journey? And I had done both of those at Groupon, at Affirm, of course, at a Affirm, we scaled the whole business through partnerships.

(37:10):

And so that was an important way that I thought I could contribute to Lemonade and think about how could we continue to involve the go-to-market motion. And so, it’s been incredibly, incredibly valuable. And what’s been great to watch, this was my first board that I sat on first corporate board, seeing how the wonderful CEO Daniel brings the board along because that is today my job at Deputy. And what I learned from that experience is that you should not be managing the board. The board is on your team. They are your team. You should be bringing the board along. And so that kind of mindset rather than reporting to the board or presenting to the board, no, no, no, the board is your team. And I see our board an extension to our leadership team. They’re my team. And so I learned that from Lemonade and it was a really wonderful, wonderful lesson.

Ed (38:06):

And why do you think many founders and CEOs don’t try and recruit more current operators to their board? Do you think they’re fearful of having a domain expert as you just described? Sometimes if you feel like it’s us versus them or your reporting to them and they’re not on the team, there’s a fear of actually having someone who might be able to call you out.

Silvija (38:29):

I couldn’t pretend to know why founders are not keen to do that. But what I do know, we have brought on, Ashik and Steve have brought on a wonderful independent board member, Alison Deans, who’s been an absolute rockstar and is my first call on whatever challenges we may have. And so, I would encourage people not to be afraid to bring board members that can complement them. I think too often leaders think that they need to know it all and be it all. No, you don’t. You just need to be yourself and be introspective enough to know where you still have room to grow. If you’re an engineer, you’re probably not exceptionally brilliant on sales strategy and partnerships, and that’s okay. Just as a commercially minded founder is probably not brilliant at writing code. I mean, it’s just a matter of a fact. So I think thinking about how can you ensure the greatest probability of success, that’s it. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about.

Ed (39:33):

And there’s no doubt that the best companies have high performing boards. And to have a high performing board, you need both a diversity of thought but also skill and domain expertise. And as you just described, there’s so many benefits to that. Last topic, and in many ways, we run these podcast series annually and there’s like a topic of the year, and there’s no doubt the biggest topic of the day is AI. I was at a conference this week in San Francisco and it’s very clear there’s a wide spectrum of companies as to where they are on the AI curve, both from an internal process point of view, but also how their products are adapting and their customer facing strategies around AI. But one thing that is clear is that you need a strategy and without a specific AI program, you’re a sitting duck. I’d love to hear your view more broadly, I guess on AI’s impact on software, and then of course its potential impact and of course benefit to Deputy.

Silvija (40:37):

I think that if you’re not thinking about AI strategy and you’re in the software business, you are in trouble. But also, I don’t believe in just jumping on the bandwagon and doing things that are counter your mission and just blindly running into a wall. I don’t think that’s smart either. So, the way that we’re approaching it, first of all, we ask ourselves, again, going back to first principles – what do small businesses that we serve, what problems could AI solve for small and mid-sized businesses? On one hand, and on the other hand, the end users of Deputy are Gen Zs. They are now the largest working population in the world. It’s no longer Baby Boomers, it’s no longer Gen X, it’s Gen Zs. This is now majority of our workforce. So, I’ll share a couple of stories where we have recently learned what the sentiments are. Over a year ago we interviewed, we surveyed Gen Z shift workers. Again, these are baristas, hotel cleaners, nurses, and there was early on, as the large language models started to become super popular, there was huge apprehension about AI. About 65% of the surveyed shift workers said that they were afraid what that meant for them.

Ed (41:58):

Were they fearful of replacement?

Silvija (42:00):

They were fearful of replacement, they were fearful of robots and all the things they envisioned this could mean for them. Now forward, just one short year later, and this is coming from our state of shift work report that we just published, 70% of shift workers surveyed shift workers said that they’re optimistic about AI, seven zero. This massive flip of huge fear a year ago to very optimistic about AI. And when we actually dug in here is what we found. We found that shift workers, the way that they’re perceiving this first stage of AI is that it will mostly be impacting desk workers, office workers, not service industries that they are in. And they see AI as a quote-on-quote helper to help them do their jobs better. So, we asked this question, do they use AI? Majority of them are using it. And then we said, we asked a question of whether AI or their manager is more helpful to them in their career growth?

(43:09):

50% said AI is more helpful for their career growth. I think this optimism about AI for shift work is coming from that. They believe that AI can help them. So then if you step back and you think about, well, how does this now apply to Deputy? We need to go back to what is our superpower. Deputy has been spending 15 years collecting very, very detailed work data, work patterns across industries, across geos. And the way that we are thinking about AI is how do we leverage billions and billions and billions rows of data that we’ve accumulated over 15 years so that Deputy can continue to be a deputy to our small business owners? That’s it. How do we help them make more money, save on costs, and help them run a compliant and more efficient business?

Ed (44:08):

And no doubt that will lead to all kinds of great predictive models that small businesses can use to roster people and benchmark pay in different ways in different stores. So I’m fascinated to see how that plays out. But of course, there’s internal processes as well. I think you have 250 engineers.

Silvija (44:27):

That’s right.

Ed (44:28):

They’re going to be far more efficient, I imagine, but only if you give them permission to be at the forefront of this AI journey.

Silvija (44:37):

Absolutely. If you are an engineering driven company and you’re not using AI to improve the efficiency of your engineers, you are behind already, and if you read articles, you can see from 20 to 40% improvement in engineering productivity on the basis of using AI as engineering helpers. We also have used deputy inside our customer support of course, and our marketing. Those are sort of all ways that you could improve your internal operations. But again, what’s more important is how can we enable small businesses to be more thoughtful and more predictive and be more proactive about anticipating their needs?

Ed (45:19):

It’s probably asked big questions of you and your leadership team and how this is actually going to impact the culture and what you want this next stage to really look like. When it comes to enabling AI, for instance, in your products or your processes, how has it affected your leadership?

Silvija (45:38):

I think what’s really important, and I know that some governments all over the world are having this conversation, but more conversation is needed at a government level and at the corporate level, is how do we ensure the safety of this new technology? And what I want to make sure that we do is that we build technology that can be compassionate of the problems that our customers are facing. Over the last couple of years, we built machine learning, auto-scheduling, and what we learned through that – so we’ve been using AI inside the Deputy platform for the last couple of years – what we’ve learned is that businesses small and large, they’re not just going to take a number that’s there. So if you are building machine learning or whatever other predictive models that you may be building, just make sure that you are providing as much opportunity for control or as little as that business wants.

(46:41):

So some businesses may take what the AI model says, but I’ve never seen in all the data that we gather that people just blindly schedule their employees on the basis of how the technology is telling them. There is always a need for human oversight and human overlay. Let’s not fool ourselves that anytime soon AI is going to be riding the world. I think the human overlay and that’s what we’ve learned from our data, is really, really important. So make sure when you’re building those models that you provide that opportunity for human reasoning on top of tech.

Ed (47:13):

Silvija, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for giving up your time. The combination of your leadership skill and a great Australian success story has been great to watch and looking forward to seeing what the next couple of years hold for both you and deputy,

Silvija (47:31):

Thank you so much, Eddy, for having me, and it was so wonderful to be able to tell the Deputy story.