spendesk

Rodolphe Ardant, CEO of French unicorn Spendesk, is this week’s guest on the Searching for Mana podcast.  

Rodolphe enjoyed a peripatetic childhood moving around the world every three years due to his father’s career, and says this instilled in him a ‘sense of curiosity’.  

Combined with the ‘autistic boredom’ he felt growing up, Rodolphe had a desire to create and build things from an early age, skills he honed at engineering school.

It's clear in this episode that Rodolphe maintains the restlessness that characterized his younger years.  After founding and selling his first company (and learning from the mistakes), he joined the car-sharing platform Drivy as Chief Operating Officer before realising he was best suited to the agile, fast-paced start-up environment.  Spendesk was born and was built on two key values: freedom and trust.

This is a great episode with insights into how Rodolphe used his highly technical, entrepreneurial mindset to build one of France’s tech start-up success stories.

Watch & Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3sSnmMa

1:10 Spendesk’s mission

4:00 Lessons learned while COO at Drivy

5:55 Understanding the problem to create the solution

8:30 Money is about emotion and having control

11:17 Thinking deeply about becoming an entrepreneur again

15:50 Spendesk is built on two key values

19:25 – Rodolphe’s childhood and how it influenced his career

20:22 The joy of solving problems, and autistic boredom

23:09 What makes an entrepreneur mindset?

24’56 Getting over mistakes

27:04 What motivates him in the face of continued success

It’s our 50th episode! What a milestone. 

To celebrate, we’re giving away lifetime access to our Content Strategy Frameworks course to 2 winners. Congratulations Abass Sahrawi and Emma Fanning! We can’t thank you enough for listening. 

Now for this week’s episode. Finding career success is about more than just making more money. It’s about finding a career path where you’re motivated to put in hard work without crossing over into burnout. 

When you’re only in a job for the money, every challenge or difficult situation will push you to the brink. Alfie Marsh, head of U.S. GTM for Spendesk, said that the key to long-term success is finding work that aligns with your values and your skills. That way your goals and the job’s goals are in sync, and the hard times are manageable. 

In this episode, Alfie shares what he's learned about starting from scratch in new markets, how to aim for impact, and tips for growing a career.

Show Topics

• Start from scratch in new markets
• Start with assumptions, but pay attention to feedback
• Have ownership over what you create
• Aim for outsize impact
• Share knowledge
• Align your work with your values

Check out Spendesk

Follow Alfie Marsh on LinkedIn or Twitter

Alfie’s Newsletter - Rocket GTM

Past guests on The Long Game podcast include: Morgan Brown (Shopify), Ryan Law (Animalz), Dan Shure (Evolving SEO), Kaleigh Moore (freelancer), Eric Siu (Clickflow), Peep Laja (CXL), Chelsea Castle (Chili Piper), Tracey Wallace (Klaviyo), Tim Soulo (Ahrefs), Sean Blanda (Crossbeam), Ilona Abramova (AppSumo), and many more.

Some interviews you might enjoy and learn from:

020: Spark Creativity and Generate Memorable Content with Ryan Law (Animalz)

041: Actionable Tips and Secrets to SEO Strategy with Dan Shure (Evolving SEO)

045: Building Competitive Marketing Content with Sam Chapman (Aprimo)

009: The Long Game Podcast: Building Communities, Teams and Companies through Marketing with Sabel Harris

019: Peak Performing, High-Earning Freelance Writing with Michael Keenan (Co-Founder at Peak Freelance)

028: Purpose-Driven Leadership & Building a Content Team with Ty Magnin (UiPath)

Also, check out our Kitchen Side series where we take you behind the scenes to see how the sausage is made at our agency:

015: Should You Hire Writers or Subject Matter Experts?

017: How Do Growth and Content Overlap?

027: Is Organic Traffic the Best Traffic?

Connect with Omniscient Digital on social:

Twitter: @beomniscient

Linkedin: Be Omniscient

Listen to more episodes of The Long Game podcast here: https://beomniscient.com/podcast/

Your host for today is my partner Ani, founder of the Fintech Marketing Hub. In this episode, Ani chats with Stephanie Bowker, Head of Marketing at Spendesk. A product marketer by trade, she lives by the mantra that customers always come first. Before Spendesk, Steph worked at Intuit and was the first product marketing hire at Gusto.

Spendesk is an all in one spend management platform built for finance teams. They do company cards, expense reimbursements and automated accounting all in one place. They now have over 40,000 users and raised $18 million back in October last year.

In this episode, Stephanie and Ani chat about how she built Spendesks 6,500+ CFO community, Spendesk’s current marketing mix and how to create shareable content.

This episode is brought to you by VC Innovations. 

VC Innovations is a full-stack marketing services agency dedicated to innovation industries with a special focus on Fintech. They work with businesses across 3 key areas of marketing infrastructure, demand generation campaigns and event properties including the must-attend Fintech Talents Festival. Check out www.vcinnovations.co.uk to find out more. 

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, we host Rod Ardant, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendesk, about how to build a global company.

An engineer by education, Rod always enjoyed building stuff and co-founded his first company, Wozaik, pretty much straight after college. In 2013 it was acquired and Rod started plotting his next venture. He increasingly saw the discrepancy between how people could pay for things in their personal life and professional. Spending time manually uploading receipts or always needing to borrow a credit card from a manager was outdated he believed. Spendesk was born in September 2015 to improve this. By the following June when the product launched, Rod and company had made a bold statement to the media - they would be operating in multiple markets from the start. To make that happen and scale it, Spendesk has had to be global from day one, doing massive amounts of customer research to understand the local mindset and hiring with inclusivity in mind. 

Listen on to learn:

• How Spendesk decided which markets to approach 
• One simple thing that has allowed him to build a great foundation for an international team
• How he has created a feeling of belonging among all his employees

Going global from the early days and building teams that are not simply diverse but also inclusive are topics that speakers from around the world will be covering at length at SaaStock19 on October 14-16th. Have a look at the full agenda and grab a ticket now.

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