Seamless Interim Sales Leadership and Continuity During Volatile Growth Periods

I didn't feel like he was an outsider. He felt like he was a core contributor throughout. And I think that's his kind of testament, someone who's actually genuinely interested in solving the problem and helping. I'm Matthew O'Riordan. I'm the CEO of Ably. So Ably is a real-time experience platform. We provide APIs for developers to add real-time features and capabilities to their products. So if you think of things like big sports events where maybe lots of fans are engaging, communicating with each other, we facilitate that communication. Ben's always stepped in in a sort of interim role to help us. What he's enabled us to sort of do is... just that continuity through those sorts of volatile times. It's just enabled us to kind of not have these huge gaps in the organization while we rehire, restructure and make changes. It's quite hard to find a balance of someone who's got the experience of actually working in a company, in a tech company and is able to step in and kind of bring that knowledge on an interim basis and fill those gaps. So it's a bit of a unicorn to find someone who's got that experience and is willing to kind of get their hands dirty and muck in and help where it's needed. Ben really stepped into an organization where we had a serious gap in the sales function initially, and I think what's pretty unique about Ben is that, know, within days started to become effective, understood the business, understood our customers and could work with the team. didn't feel like he needed to ramp. And I think that's a testament to his experience, but also really just his ability to listen and then start applying his knowledge. just provided. significant continuity and easy to work with. know, many times you bring people into an organization to help in these sorts of interim periods, they either are slightly ineffective because they don't want to change everything, or they come in and try and bring their own way of doing things, which is disruptive. And I think Ben's managed to strike that balance, you know, to just provide that continuity of the way we want to do things, but also bringing his expertise to improve things. He has a very unique. quality that we still sort of consider, you know, how we can apply it, which is just a sort of radical candor that doesn't bring negativity somehow. don't know how he delivers quite strong feedback that I think if I delivered would come across negatively, but he somehow manages to do that in a very constructive way. And it's, it's really quite enlightening in the team. He's very direct in his approach, but again, it's delivered in a way that seems to be constructive. So it's just efficient. It's an efficient way of working with Ben. You want someone to sort of. able to see around corners and kind of been through those and have the scar tissue, but really apply it to, you know, the current context and the business. And I think he brings that sort of intelligence approach to how you solve problems. It's really quite impressive how quickly he can get up and running, have an impact. You know, we've worked with Ben in three different contexts. He first came in as a salesperson and again, just applied himself and was quite effective. And then when we had a gap later, he brought him back again. So I think that's. Just in itself testament that he is very effective and you know, we'd work with him again in a heartbeat if we, if we needed that sort of gap. And, and I had many conversations with him about not working on an interim basis and you know, kind of trying to join him, join the team fully. So I think again, that's kind of just testament to the belief we have in his ability to add value.