Mikita Mikado da PandaDoc

Jeroen: Hi Mikita. It’s great to have you on Founder Coffee.

Mikita: Oi, Jeroen. É um prazer estar aqui.

Jeroen: You’re the Founder of PandaDoc. For those of us who are not so much into documents and things, what does PandaDoc exactly do?

Mikita: PandaDoc helps to make sales customer-centric with beautiful digital proposals, contracts, signatures, payments, and workflows around those documents. That’s what we do.

Jeroen: É principalmente uma coisa em que você projeta documentos ou é mais em torno das assinaturas ou dos fluxos de trabalho ou é tudo isso de uma forma muito horizontal?

Mikita: All of that in a very horizontal way. We basically plug into your CRM system, allow you to build a library of templated collaterals – be that proposals, contracts or quotes. Then your sales team can save tremendous amount of time generating those documents, delivering those documents to the end customers, collaborating with the customers, and negotiating the deals. Then finally, enabling the end client to sign on the dotted line.

Jeroen: Yeah, yeah. It’s the whole document process. But all around sales, if I hear it well.

Mikita: Sim, nosso foco são as vendas.

Jeroen: Ok. Isso se deve ao fato de você ter sido vendedor antes ou de onde veio isso exatamente?

Mikita: Bem, a ideia, poderíamos dizer, nasceu de uma dor interna. Eu precisava vender. Há muitos anos, meu cofundador e eu dirigíamos uma empresa de software e desenvolvíamos software para terceiros. Tínhamos que fazer muitas propostas de vendas, e achávamos o processo extremamente tedioso, e queríamos criar algo que resolvesse esse problema interno.

We built a product, not PandaDoc, had a decent success with that product, and the product aimed at just small web design agencies, helping them to do proposal automation. Then we discovered that there are a lot more documents involved in the sales process, and a lot of the clients that purchase that product used it for more than proposals – for contracts, for SOWs, for invoices, and yada, yada.

Yeah, that’s the story behind PandaDoc. I’m going to say four and a half years ago, maybe even five years ago, we came up with the idea, a horizontal, all-in-one, quote-to-cash software. We launched it about three and a half years ago.

Atualmente, a PandaDoc ajuda cerca de 10.000 equipes de vendas a se concentrarem no cliente e a serem mais eficientes e eficazes.

Jeroen: Yeah. You’re saying you had a software business with your co-founder. Is your background in software?

Mikita: Yeah. I’m a software engineer by trade.

Jeroen: E você é de Belarus, correto?

Mikita: That’s correct, yeah.

Jeroen: Você cresceu em Belarus e estudou engenharia de software. O que exatamente você fez depois disso? Você teve algum emprego antes de ter a empresa de software com seu cofundador ou foi a primeira coisa que fez depois da faculdade?

Mikita: I had all kinds of jobs. I had jobs when I was a kid. I used to wash cars, and I used to sell berries on the farmer’s market. Then I used to do work in construction, and sell whatever I can sell, be that Pogs. I don’t know if you remember those or Nintendo cartridges or mobile cell phones. You name it.

Then I got this really good opportunity to go to the US. I took it, had about $400 in my backpack, and I flew to Honolulu, Hawaii. There, I had all kinds of random jobs. I had been bartending. I worked at the airport flipping burgers, at a café. I did moving. I did cleaning. Like, you name it. All kinds of labor jobs you can do out of Craigslist, I probably did them all.

Bem, talvez não encontros casuais. Eu pulei esse, mas, na maior parte do tempo, mantive-me ocupado.

Jeroen: Isso foi antes ou depois de você estudar ciência da computação ou engenharia ou durante o mesmo período?

Mikita: Enquanto.

Jeroen: Enquanto isso, tudo bem.

Mikita: Sim.

Jeroen: Uma mão virando hambúrgueres e a outra codificando.

Mikita: It’s funny, but that actually what it was. During the day, I was flipping burgers. During the night, I was trying to catch up on school back in Belarus because while in the US, I had to transfer to study remotely, so that I get a degree. Plus additionally, in Belarus, if you don’t go to school, you go to military for a couple years, and it’s very different. For the most part, you just shuffle snow there, so I figured I better get that degree.

Jeroen: Sim. Você foi junto com sua família para os EUA ou foi sozinho?

Mikita: Era só eu.

Jeroen: Foi só você.

Mikita: Sim.

Jeroen: Qual foi exatamente a oportunidade que o levou a ir para os EUA sem sua família, estudando à distância?

Mikita: I mean, the average salary in Belarus was something like $300 or $400 a month. It’s not that much, as you can imagine. So I wanted to be able to build, I always wanted to have and run a business. I thought that, I don’t know why, but probably the American dream is very well-marketed, so I really thought America is the best place to do that.

Sim, eu queria fazer algo significativo em minha vida. Queria ter uma vida decente, ter uma vida decente para minha família. Então, fiz minha mala e me mudei para os EUA.

Jeroen: Legal. Você fez alguma coisa entre os estudos e essa startup com seu cofundador?

Mikita: Sim. Eu tinha uma loja de web design. Quando acabei de chegar aos EUA, fiz todos os tipos de trabalhos aleatórios, mas comecei com a criação de um site e fiz um pouco de SEO nesse site, direcionando, diminuindo o tráfego, direcionando algumas consultas para a Craigslist sobre web design. Transformei isso em uma pequena empresa.

Eu tinha um funcionário e eu mesmo, e também algumas pessoas que contratei da Bielorrússia. Meu cofundador era um deles, e já éramos amigos na universidade antes disso. Na verdade, essa foi nossa primeira jornada. Criamos sites juntos.

Jeroen: Certo. Depois, de alguma forma, você fez a transição para a criação de software.

Mikita: Sim, começamos com sites, depois criamos várias extensões para diferentes sistemas de gerenciamento de conteúdo da Web. Nós as colocamos on-line e começamos a vendê-las. Por meio dessas extensões, também conseguimos que os clientes personalizassem, modificassem essas extensões e fizessem coisas mais complexas.

At some point, I decided to pack my things, and go back to Belarus to be able to hire people, and build a software business – which is what I did. I want to say that was 2007 when we started that company. We grew it to like 30 employees. Then Quote Roller, which is the proposal product, and PandaDoc came around. That’s another story.

Jeroen: Seu cofundador ainda está baseado em Belarus?

Mikita: Não, ele se mudou.

Jeroen: Ele se mudou?

Mikita: Ele se mudou para os EUA. Há cerca de dois anos e meio ou três anos. Agora ele dirige nosso escritório na Flórida.

Jeroen: Certo. Parece que você sempre gostou de criar startups. O que o interessou tanto nisso?

Mikita: I don’t know. I just like building. I loved Legos when I was a kid.

Jeroen: It’s the building.

Mikita: Sim. Gosto do processo, de montar as coisas, de começar, de ver o sucesso ou o fracasso. Eu meio que gosto disso.

Jeroen: Alguma coisa específica? É mais empresa, mais produto, mais marca ou é tudo isso?

Mikita: All of them, yeah. I wouldn’t say there’s one that I love the most. I like them all.

Jeroen: If you see yourself building these things, are there any other startups or founders that you’re looking up to that you’re like, “Wow. The things they built are just amazing. I wish we would be more like that?”

Mikita: I mean, I look up to a lot of people and a lot of companies. I try to learn as much as possible from them. If you think of any well-known SaaS brand, there’s going to be a story of a lot of work and a lot of struggle behind them. It’s really, really hard. Yeah, there are a lot of people and a lot of companies that I look up to and I admire.

Jeroen: Certo. Qual é exatamente a sua ambição com a PandaDoc no momento?

Mikita: Há três coisas com as quais meu cofundador e eu nos preocupamos profundamente.

A primeira é que queremos aprender, progredir e melhorar o que fazemos. A segunda é que queremos causar um impacto e, quando começamos o negócio, o impacto que queríamos causar era ter cerca de 1.000 empresas usando nosso produto. Isso parecia muito, muito legal. Depois mudou. Passou a ser 10.000. Depois mudou. Passou para 100.000. Depois, mudou novamente.

It was like, okay, so making our customers successful is really cool. It’s amazing. It’s a hell of an impact, but how about we look around. Dude, people are building careers at PandaDoc.

We’re having a blast, they’re having a blast. We’re all learning. We all are making an impact. The impact that the business started to make on people’s lives, on their careers is also huge. The internal impact aspect of it added, is quite amazing.

If I can help someone to build a career, hell yeah, that’s awesome. The impact is a very big part of the ‘why we are doing what we’re doing’.

Then finally, we want to have fun. As long as we’re learning, as long as we’re making an impact, and we’re having fun, we’re good. Those are the key values and they say that values aren’t goals, and I would agree with that, but for me, they are so close together that it’s very, very hard to separate.

Yeah, I want PandaDoc to be a successful business. I want PandaDoc to be a place where people are learning, where we are making an impact on the world, on the community we’re in, and then I want to have fun while all of that is happening. I want the same for our clients as well. I want them to have fun while they’re using our product.

Jeroen: Yeah. Now, I saw that you’re well on the investment track right now. How, because nowhere in these values or goals, I heard about financial goals, while probably for the parties you took on board, this is the most important metric? How do you combine these things?

Mikita: Como faço para combinar métricas financeiras e?

Jeroen: The fact that their goals are different from yours. Goals align with impact somehow, but it doesn’t align with fun, and it doesn’t so much align with learning.

Mikita: Na verdade, acho que sim. Eu realmente acho que sim.

Jeroen: Com o aprendizado?

Mikita: Yeah. With both actually – having fun and learning. It’s impossible to build a successful software business if you’re not having fun. What we do is highly cognitive work. You can’t perform highly cognitive tasks out of fear or be bored to death, and innovate.

It is just that those things don’t work together. It’s not how our brain works. Yeah, I think actually they do go hand in hand.

Now, in terms of the impact, most definitely this is aligned with financial results; as long as our customers are happy. Well, first, actually, as long as your employees are happy, then your customers are going to be happy. Your customers are happy, you’re going to do well. So it’s all connected. It’s all intertwined.

Jeroen: Sim. Quais são algumas das maneiras pelas quais vocês garantem a diversão?

Mikita: Quais são algumas das maneiras pelas quais garantimos nossa diversão?

Jeroen: O que isso significa na empresa? É colocar uma mesa de pebolim ou algo assim?

Mikita: [laughs] A foosball table…

Jeroen: Today I read on The Intercom Blog that they don’t put a foosball table because work is serious, and you shouldn’t put foosball tables because that’s not serious.

Mikita: I see. We don’t have one in San Francisco. We might have one in Belarus. We do have a ping pong table though.

Jeroen: Uma mesa de pingue-pongue?

Mikita: Sim. Temos uma mesa de pingue-pongue, para ser totalmente transparente.

First of all, I think for work to be fun for anyone, it’s important to own what you do. It’s important to have a stake at whatever is that piece of work you’re involved in. It’s important to understand the vision, the mission and the goals. It’s important to understand the direction of the company. If you’re all in and you get it, then it’s a lot more fun than to just do the job, if you know what I mean.

Jeroen: Entendo o que você quer dizer.

Mikita: I don’t know why I’m doing it. I don’t know what’s the purpose of it, what’s the point of it. I was told to do it, and I’m paid, so I’m doing the job. Yeah. When things are not like that, when things are mission-driven, vision-driven, when you truly care, it is a lot more fun, and when you own what you’re working on, when you’re completely bought into the stuff you do.

Jeroen: Legal.

Mikita: I don’t want to pretend we’re doing an amazing job on that front. But we try to be there. Like I try to basically enable others at PandaDoc to own their part of PandaDoc. That’s number one.

Jeroen: Propriedade.

Mikita: Yeah, ownership. Number two is the ability to travel, ability to interact with other cultures. I mean, half of our business, half of our people are in Belarus, and the other half is in the US, and we try to blend people together, blend the offices, blend the functions within the business. It’s not easy, and it requires a lot of work from each employee, but it’s different, and we try to be different.

We try to mix and match cultures, and there’s a travel budget. There’s an education budget. There’s a budget for everyone to have fun. So whenever we’re doing really well, we travel somewhere together, and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, then finally, just regular, I guess, startup-y ways of having fun. We do have parties. I think a lot of people at PandaDoc are friends, so we go to shows together. There’s this weekend, a couple of folks from Belarus visited. We went surfing.

Nosso vice-presidente de marketing veio, então tínhamos um pequeno grupo fazendo isso. No fim de semana anterior ou dois fins de semana antes, fizemos um churrasco. Esse tipo de coisa que você faz. Muitas empresas fazem isso, e nós também fazemos.

Jeroen: Voltando ao assunto sério, o que você faz diariamente?

Mikita: What is it that I do on the daily basis? At this point, I communicate. Really, that’s what I do on a daily basis. Yeah, I mean, there are 160 people at PandaDoc, right. When we were at 30, I would answer this question, “Oh, I do some things on product.” Or like, “This.” Or, “That.” Or, “Blah, blah, blah.” But I don’t really do anything anymore.

All I do is talk. That is actually my most important job right now, to communicate the vision, the goals, the mission, what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and just repeat it over, and over, and over, and over.

Then I work with the executive team and the rest of the company on strategy of the company. Again, a couple of years back, this was very vague, and it’s like what do you mean ‘strategy’? What do you mean you ‘work on strategy’?

Mas agora isso se tornou muito mais tangível. Eu trabalho com estratégia. Faço muito planejamento. Tento garantir que a estratégia seja sólida, submetê-la ao estresse, obter feedback sobre ela e assim por diante.

Yeah, then finally, of course, external relationships – be that with investors or analysts or other CEOs or we’ll also stop there. Oh, and partners, yeah. That’s a big one.

Jeroen: Yeah. You’re mentioned that strategy became much more tangible now. What does that mean?

Mikita: It’s like I actually devote a lot of time to it, and I do it. Yeah. That’s what it means.

Jeroen: Ok. Você faz a estratégia.

Mikita: Sim.

Jeroen: Está bem.

Mikita: It’s like basically I would probably build 10 presentations a quarter on all kinds of different topics. There’s a master presentation for the company’s existence. Then it changes over time a little bit, gets tweaked, and it needs to be messaged, and blah, blah, blah. Then out of it, there is a yearly plan, and that gets tweaked, and that gets messaged. Then, there’s a quarterly plan, and that gets tweaked, and that gets messaged. So on, so forth.

Jeroen: Com todas essas coisas, o que exatamente o faz continuar? O que é que lhe dá energia?

Mikita: O que me dá energia?

Jeroen: Yeah. You’re doing all these things for years now. How do you keep going?

Mikita: I don’t know, actually.

Jeroen: Está bem.

Mikita: I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to answer precisely what gives me energy. I think I’m a normal human being, so winning definitely helps to release the right hormones, and keep me excited, and motivated towards inventing something, coming up with some kind of ideas. Or I really like finishing projects, however they come out, before that successful or unsuccessful. I just like getting things done. Interacting with people, that also makes you a lot happier. Yeah. Those things help you move forward, and of course, my family is a huge support.

Jeroen: Você tem esposa e filhos?

Mikita: Sim, tenho uma esposa e dois filhos.

Jeroen: Como você consegue manter tudo equilibrado? Você trabalha muito em casa ou vai mais ao escritório? Que tipo de horário você faz?

Mikita: I mostly go to the office. I don’t really have a set schedule, but if I’m not working before nine, then I don’t know, something is going on. I don’t really have a set schedule. Sometimes I take a flight in the middle of the week or try to work outside of the office just to basically reset my brain.

My job is not about putting a lot of hours in. It’s not how I believe I can be effective. My job is about making the right decisions, and that requires a clear mind that’s not triggered by anxiety or that’s not tired or fearing or whatever negative emotion that we might have because of that.

Jeroen: Como você mantém sua mente clara?

Mikita: Oh, there’s a ton of stuff I do. Ta, ta, ta, ta, I meditate. I like to do morning runs. I surf. Surfing is amazing, and surfing in California, where I am, means surfing in the cold water. There is something about the cold water – be that cold showers or surfing on the West Coast in Central California, it refreshes you. It recharges you, and gives you that calm. Surfing gives me calm. What else?

Jeroen: Muito bom, como posso dizer?

Mikita: Treino.

Jeroen: Yeah, it’s quite a big workout.

Mikita: É um exercício.

Jeroen: I think surfing is cold in most places, at least as far as I know. Like if we go surfing in Spain or so, it’s pretty cold. If you go to, I think Bali, perhaps could be warm. I don’t know.

Mikita: Yeah, dude, I lived in Hawaii, and there it’s beautiful.

Jeroen: Quente?

Mikita: It’s so warm.

Jeroen: Sim.

Mikita: It’s really nice.

Jeroen: Is that where you mostly like to spend your time when you’re not working? Family and sports or surfing?

Mikita: Yeah. Family and sports. Honestly, if I can live in the forest for my vacation, for like a month, I would totally do that with my family, and surfboard or something. Something like that. I’d be really happy.

Jeroen: Yeah. That’s also what you do, if you wouldn’t work on PandaDoc, would it be that or would it be having another company?

Mikita: I don’t know. I really don’t know. Honestly, I thought about it, but I don’t know if I get bored, like if I will get bored really fast, but I’ll be sure to try. I mean, it’s just kind of like seeing the difference because the pace of life in Silicon Valley and the pace of a startup is very high. It’s intense, right? Yeah, sometimes you get to really wanting a break or a little bit of time to relax. The past five days, totally served that purpose. It was enough. Yeah, I don’t know if I can do a lot more than five days.

Jeroen: Você lê livros?

Mikita: Sim, mas ouço muito mais. Atualmente, ouço muito mais livros.

Jeroen: What’s the latest good book you’ve listened to and why did you choose to listen to it?

Mikita: The latest one I’ve listened is called Quiet Leadership. It’s a good book, and it’s about management, but based on the theory of management based on neuroscience. That was a really interesting book.

Then prior to that, I listened to Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, very good book, extremely useful to executives. Actually, it’s extremely recommended for anyone as it is on how to have uncomfortable conversations that are hugely important to have.

Prior to that, I read a book about the CIA. Doesn’t matter what it’s called. Then prior to that, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, amazing book. I recommend it to everyone. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that I’ve listened to recently.

Jeroen: Última pergunta: se você tivesse que começar de novo com o PandaDoc, o que teria feito de diferente?

Mikita: Oh man, a ton of things. I’ve done so many things wrong. I think the biggest thing I would change is that I would focus on people more. That’s definitely the case. I’m not necessarily the most, oh, it’s going to be hard, it’s a terrible thing to admit, but I’m very analytical. I’m not super empathetic.

Jeroen: Sim, mais voltado para as tarefas, menos voltado para as pessoas.

Mikita: Exatamente. E isso é algo que eu mudaria, a proporção disso. Eu mudaria isso.

Jeroen: Yeah. Cool, well, that’s all I have for today, Mikita. Thank you for being on Founder Coffee.

Mikita: O prazer é meu!