The following interview is a conversation we had with Brandon Daniels, CEO of Exiger, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $160 Million Raised to Build the Future of Supply chain and Third-Party Risk

Brandon Daniels
Hey, thanks. It’s good to speak with you. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? Yeah. 

Brandon Daniels
So as you mentioned, I’m the CEO of Exiger, which is one of the largest supply chain management and supply chain risk management software companies in the market. I have about 20 years of risk management experience as a practitioner. So I’ve done everything from work on the overhaul of the financial markets after the financial crisis in 2008 to help to overhaul the life sciences market in the mid 2000s after there were a rash of new regulations that basically regulated how they were interacting with doctors and selling their products and specifically focused on off label marketing through to helping the federal government buy goods. In the COVID-19 response effort where we helped the government buy billions of dollars products and avoid $500 million of fraud, waste and abuse. So I’m a risk manager as a practitioner, but then I’m sort of a business transformation and entrepreneur at heart. 

Brandon Daniels
So I’ve been a part of building a couple of different businesses. One was a company called CPA Global, which is today called Clarivate, and it’s a $15 billion company and probably the largest IP and legal software company in the world. Another company that I built was a company called Clutch Group, now part of Moray Global. And then finally the company that I’m in today, which is Exiger, I’ve been here for about going on six years. I used to be the president before I became the CEO, and Mike C, my predecessor, handed the reins to me last year. 

Brett
And when you joined the company, was that always part of the plan or did you just brush at your job and work your way? 

Brandon Daniels
Know, I would not say that. Mike Turkowski, who was the former CEO of USIS, the former CEO of Marsh McLennan, the former CEO of Kroll, ever gives anything to anyone. I think the plan was there was a requirement for succession. Mike, he’s got four years of corporate experience. There was a plan for succession, but I had to earn it, right? So I had to help build our technology business, make sure that we had good product market fit in the markets that were attacking, and I had to show the growth track record that we’ve had in order to take the CEO job. 

Brett
And take me back to when you were, let’s say, ten years old. Was ten year old Brandon just dreaming of risk management, or where did that come from? 

Brandon Daniels
No, ten year old Brandon definitely would have thought the technology part of the job was cool, would have been impressed with the fact that I’ve become a programmer first by hobby and then by practice. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
But I don’t think ten year old Brandon would have really understood or been as interested in risk management. I kind of ended up in risk management through customers. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
So I was at LexisNexis, and one of my largest customers, a company called Medtronic, needed me to run a few of their investigations. I was on the legal side of the LexisNexis business. They needed us to deploy our software, and then they needed someone to help them really implement it and accelerate the parts of the case that our software could. I got put in place as a consultant. Ended up really deep in the investigation in that one matter, and that really turned me into someone that loved combining risk management and investigatory skills with technology. And that’s been my career ever since. 

Brett
Nice. 

Brett
That’s so cool. Now, can you give us a behind the scenes look of what it was like as part of that COVID response effort and that task force? What are some of those stories that maybe haven’t been publicly shared too much that you’re okay with sharing, or just anything you can share from that experience? I think our audience would find that very interesting. 

Brandon Daniels
Well, so the first thing is the most interesting part for me is what it did to our business. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
So the COVID-19 response effort, we had been using our technology to help federal agencies, financial institutions, and corporates essentially do either reputational or cyber due diligence on vendors. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And so the need was 100% focused on compliance. In the COVID-19 response effort, we got to unleash the full capability that we had built that assessed operational risk, that assessed financial health, that assessed your technical capability to actually deliver the supplies that the customer was procuring. We got to use the full breadth of the platform that we had built in real time in a real sort of battle or mission focused scenario. Right. And so the most interesting thing was how relevant the technology was to this mission and to the fight where you’re trying to stop forced labor, where you’re trying to avoid adversarial finance, where you’re trying to stop fraudulent or fake companies from siphoning money away from critical initiatives like buying PPE, medical devices and pharma. In the COVID-19 frontlines, it was incredible to see how often were actually finding companies that were not appropriate to buy from, either because they didn’t have the technical capability or they were reputationally problematic, or because they were literally just fraudulent, companies stood up to take money away from the taxpayer. 

Brandon Daniels
It was coming up more often than you’d think. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
So if we would vet 1000 vendors, there would be some cases where you’d have 1015, 2030 companies that you would exclude from the bid because they were so clearly unable and unprepared to deliver. So the first thing that struck me in the COVID-19 response effort is the demand or the requirement to conduct rapid due diligence on companies that you plan to do business with to make sure you’re making good buying decisions was so critical and was so real. The second thing that came out in that process is the need to understand more than just the surface level of companies that you do business with. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
So very often you’d have a company that was a bona fide distributor, but they would be purchasing masks from a company that was three weeks ago, just like an esthetician business, and they wouldn’t even know that potential supply was tainted, or wouldn’t meet the mask mandates, or couldn’t qualify as an N 95. So the second thing that it did for our business is it helped us to not only understand how critical the need was, it helped us to understand a little bit more about our customers use case, which is we need to pierce the veil not only on who we’re buying from, but who they’re buying from and who they’re buying from so that we can see the problems that potentially sit at the bottom of the supply base. And so the ability to give customers supply chain visibility and to rapidly risk assess vendors using open source data on the fly was born out of the COVID-19 response effort, right. 

Brandon Daniels
Over the last three and a half years, everything that we’ve done was informed by that one mission set, Brett, so it was transformative for the company. A couple of things that were really interesting, sort of beneath the surface, were the issues that were able to call out. So, as an example, back in March of 2020, you may remember, everyone was talking about needing ventilators, right? And there was this huge push for companies to get into the ventilator market, right? Ford was talking about building ventilators, bloom Energy was talking about getting into ventilators. They were starting to pull ventilators together from like, scrap parts. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And one of the things that was really interesting is that a few companies released open source schematics that any company could utilize to create ventilators to ramp up production. And everyone thought, okay, we’re going to end up with 20,000 ventilators coming out from industry every month when we did the analysis in the platform. So when we built out the ability to see the supply chains, when we did the analysis in the platform, what we saw was that the fact that everyone was trying to create the same ventilator actually created an inherent dependency in the supply chain where they were all trying to get one part, which is called a solenoid valve. It’s essentially what allows you to sort of attach to the ventilator the actual breathing tubes. That solenoid valve that was attached to that commodity ventilator was only made by one company in the world. 

Brandon Daniels
And that company was a small company based in Italy, and that company based in Italy had essentially set all of their employees. You know, you basically have this negative externality from something that was extremely sort of egalitarian for companies like Medtronic and ResMed to do, which is to release these open source schematics that people could start trying to build themselves. You have this negative externality where this one company then becomes this critical supply chain dependency and no one knows it. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
So the other thing that it illuminated for us was the sort of frailty and the dependencies that we have in our supply chain that no one could see, no one knew about until were in a crisis and the requirement to change that, to add visibility. One of the other interesting things from the COVID-19 response effort was the amount of effort that went into securing the supply chains. From a cyber perspective, I think one of the coolest things that the government did, and were a part of sort of assessing all of the suppliers along the COVID supply chain logistics. One of the coolest things that the government did is actually we did the cyber assessments. And if we found a critical supplier in the logistics of the COVID-19, vaccines or medicines, they would actually reach out to them and like CISA and DHS, would offer them services to help them increase the resilience of their cyber infrastructure to make sure that they could remain a part of the COVID-19 supply chain. 

Brandon Daniels
I always thought that was an interesting way to sort of interact between a private entity and a public entity, to sort of reach out and ensure that you’ve got the expertise, that you’ve got the funding, that you’ve got the skill sets that you need to become cyber resilient, basically like proactively mitigating risk for the company. Using open source data was another really cool example of something that was totally novel that we did in the COVID-19 response effort. 

Brett
It’s interesting to hear it from your side because I was on a different side of this. So I was working with a vendor and I was an advisor for a vendor called Sio Two, and they were part of Operation Warp Speed. And they won a contract, I think it was 150,000,000 to supply vials to the government for Operation Warp Speed. And what I saw there was, just for lack of a better description, it was insane. The growth that they saw from being part of Operation Warp Speed completely transformed their business. I think they’d been around for like seven, eight years, something like that. They were very heavy in R D, and I think they were struggling a little bit to get adoption. And then the second they won that contract, it seemed like the floodgates opened and they just got a lot of trust and credibility from being part of those efforts. 

Brett
Did you guys experience something similar? Did you get a lot of that trust and credibility by being part of this task Force? And then was that able to translate into business growth for you? 

Brandon Daniels
The answer is absolutely yes. So being a part of the Joint Acquisition Task Force, being a part of Operation Warp Speed, what it did was it set us apart from our competition because our competition was all in the sort of bidding process, in the pilot process, at the very beginning of the COVID-19 response effort. 

 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
They threw every technology in the world into the basket of tools that those Operation Warspeed and Joint Acquisition Task Force product owners had available to them. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And so when people saw our ability to quite literally due diligence on 11,000 companies and illuminate 30 markets and to support billions of dollars of transaction decision making that reverberated through the federal government. So we ended up getting a contract through GSA to support a Federated Information Sharing, utilization or use case for our software across the federal government for all of supply chain risk management. So we saw the federal government recognize the unique nature of what it was were doing, utilizing open source data to get supply chain visibility. And we saw all of them come to the table and say, we need this in our weapons systems. We need this in our critical infrastructure. We need this know the things that we buy every day. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
And then the other thing was, at that moment in time, the Honorable Ellen Lord, who’s the undersecretary for Ans, had stood up with a couple of her key deputies, namely Jen Santos and Stacey Cummings and Katie Arrington. They had stood the industrial based council. And what they were quite literally doing was showcasing the data that were producing every day on the markets, on the suppliers, on the buying trends, on the places where we could get reliable sourcing and ethical sourcing and where we couldn’t. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
So what we ended up seeing from that was a huge amount of growth because then those cloud companies that were involved in the Joint Acquisition Task Force and the Operation Warp Speed Task Force, they were all immediately privy to how our technology worked and how it was differentiated. So they became customers. The medical device, Pharma, PPE companies all were getting our data, were a part of the procurement process that were effectively supporting. And so then they became customers, the defense contractors that received funding because we identified that there were programs that they had that were at risk in the supply chain, they became customers. And so what we saw is the company ramp extremely quickly in supply chain and third party risk management. We went from 10 million of arr in 2019 in the third party and supply chain space to a place where in the next twelve months we’ll be at 100 million in error. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
And so if you think about it, that kind of explosive growth only happens when people see how your technology, how your capability can meet a need in real time, right? It’s a bit of a black swan moment, but it’s also then sustaining and continuing that kind of delivery that then leads to expanded or explosive growth. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now, back today’s episode, and I want to just talk about that growth a little bit because it’s just crazy numbers, especially given the funding that’s been raised. So we’ve brought on a lot of companies where they’ve raised 500, 700 million. And when I ask them about growth, they’re very quiet about revenue. And I think that’s typically because it’s very low, I think in the media a lot the last couple of years, they’ve been saying there were companies that were raising hundreds of millions of dollars with multibillion dollar valuations, and they had less than 10 million in revenue. 

Brett
So given how much you’ve raised, that’s just such extraordinary growth. That’s honestly amazing. So let’s talk about that. What do you think you’ve gotten? Right? How do you pull that off? I’m sure there’s a lot of factors that go into it, but if you had to try to distill that growth and maybe reflect on some of the lessons learned from achieving that growth, what would that look like? 

Brandon Daniels
Yeah, in the first few years of the growth, or first couple of years of the growth, it was really focusing on the customer need in terms of our product development. So we had experts in the supply chain use cases, we had experts in the governance risk and compliance use cases, and we had built out a fantastic team of engineers to work with them to modify the use cases to that layer of expertise. But really, it was being led by our customers. So I’ll give you an example. About maybe two and a half years ago, actually, we had a customer say, hey, so I love the operational risk, financial, health, ownership, control and influence and reputational risk scoring that you do. But I really want to carve out for just ESG risks. So just environmental, social, and governance risks that we’re encountering. 

 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
And so what we did was we focused on a rapid Iterative customer informed development plan to carve out from our other risk scores the things that were specifically focused on environmental risk management or decarbonization or climate change. The things social bucket that were about forced labor or about health and safety or some of the other issues that are aligned with sort of the s piece of ESG. And then looking at cyber and sort of corporate directors management for the governance side. We basically went on a six month sprint with that customer building and Iterating with them, right? And so one of the things that we did was as long as it was in the use case of third party and supply chain management, were pretty flexible on allowing our customers to bring us into new areas that allowed for additional share of wallet or allowed us to get new economic advantages or a better economic mode. 

Brandon Daniels
So during the first couple of years of growth, we really focused on customer demand. The second thing that we did to ensure that the growth was there is as soon as we had that first bit of momentum, right? So we’re talking late 2020, we had all this customer momentum from the industrial based councils and the COVID-19 response effort. We started to immediately implement an expanded salesforce, right? So went from no BDRs to ten BDRs, right? We doubled marketing spend. The thing that we had to do is we had to make sure we didn’t lose that momentum that were able to cultivate. Because once you have momentum, you have to keep it and it is very easy to lose it by not betting on yourself, right? So in addition to sort of being customer led in our product development, so we knew that what were doing was adding value to the customer journey or use case. 

Brandon Daniels
We also ensured that the momentum that were seeing off the back of the COVID-19 response effort was being capitalized off of. And then the last thing was when we hit the recession, right? So you’re walking into 2022, tech valuations have dropped precipitously, right? You’ve got sort of this 70% year on year growth, 89% CAGR that you’re trying to maintain. You’re sitting there and you’re thinking to yourself, well, I’ve got two options. I can either continue to invest in the scale and burn, or I can basically take a little bit of the foot off the gas off of growth and I can get to EBITDA positive on a sustainable basis so that I can just weather the storm, right? And what we did was we did a much finer review of our sort of core SaaS metrics to actually dictate what we should do. And what we did was we identified that one our data hosting, or actually our overall hosting costs, our data costs and our essentially services costs, like the open source services that were using that we had grown them on a consumption basis and hadn’t reset them now that we had gotten to an economy of scale. 

Brandon Daniels
So what we did was we shrunk our pool of hosting companies, shrunk our pool of data providers, and actually spent more with each of them. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
So we brought it down and focused our hosting on like, AWS, right? We took our data vendors from 83 to 20, but bought more from the 20. And basically what it allowed us to do is to cap those costs so that as we scaled up in terms of revenue, we would get the delta between what had become cap costs that might have been at higher rates than previously feasible. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
But we got the benefit of cap costs as we continued to scale, and we knew that we would scale and we knew that we could dilute it in unit economics, which has come to fruition. In fact, every net new dollar that exit your ads in terms of software revenue equals 90 plus percent gross margin. That falls to gross profit. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
So the unit economics that we’ve achieved by focusing on the elimination of waste and hosting and consolidating and building strategic partners on the open source data side has been phenomenal. The second thing is on services, there’s a lot of work that can go into like, were using a translation services example. There’s a lot of work that can go into nuancing when you do or do not need a service. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And we had just sort of taken this blunt instrument approach to translation as an example and it was costing us a few million bucks a year. And what we did was we said, okay, the URLs that we’re bringing in, the open source data that we’re bringing in, we’re going to build a cache of that. And all we’re going to do is if that URL already exists in the cache and has already been translated, we’re going to use that translation. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
And then we said, what we’re also going to do is we’re only going to translate put through the translate function data where translation is required for the core function of the product, right? So we don’t need to translate names of companies. We already have that built into the way that we screen and match companies. So we made that one change and it took it from two and a half, $3 million of translation all the way down to about $150,000 a year. So we first looked at our total cost of goods sold in Opex and we identified where there waste that had come out just because were 100% focused on scale and not focused on efficiency. And that ended up generating more margin. And then what we did is we said, now that we have that margin, we are going to invest it in sales and marketing because we have to push through the headwinds of the recession. 

Brandon Daniels
So we still got to EBITDA positive. But what we did is we took all of the benefits of these efficiency initiatives and stuck it into sales and marketing to make sure that we could maintain our growth rates without trading our long term sustainability. And that goes to your efficiency of funding point. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
Like, we tried to self fund, essentially the doubling of our sales and marketing team from ten to 20 million. We tried to self fund it with Efficiencies and waste removal, which were able to do. And then what that allowed us to do is to say, okay, so we’ve invested this money. Are we willing to take a hit on our sales efficiency numbers for the next year, live with the cash trough of taking on new reps, taking on BDRs, taking on marketing investments that aren’t going to lead to MQLs until 2023? We hit the I believe button on that. 

 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And it’s accelerated our Arr captures significantly. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
So, like, we’re 2 million ahead of our bookings targets for April, $2 million in bookings in excess of what our bookings target was. So we’re 2 million above Arr for April, and now that’s all flowing through into the PNL and it’s creating net new cash that, again, we can reinvest in the business that we can put into product that we can put into mechanisms to ramp. So you have to make trade offs. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And so what we did was we looked at our overall enterprise and we said, okay, we’ve got to focus on efficiency, generate new margin. Then when we’ve got that new margin, we have to reinvest it into the sales and marketing area and say to ourselves, we’re okay with a sales productivity issue in 2023 because we know that it’ll have the benefit of ensuring that we maintain our growth rate. 

 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And what that has done for us is not only had that effect of maintaining the growth rate, but actually accelerated and seen higher benefits because our customers have largely put us in a nondiscretionary bucket as a critical technology area. So we didn’t see any headwinds as we anticipated. We started to outperform, which is a great result, right? 

Brett
Yeah. That’s so amazing. And when it comes to customers, what’s the split between government and private companies? 

Brandon Daniels
Yeah, so it’s about 50. We’ve seen lots of defensive sort of acyclical growth in the government. And the government is focused one thing right now. It’s getting our supply chains. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
It’s making sure that the products that they’re buying are resilient compliant and cost effective. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
And in the commercial space, we’re seeing also continued acceleration because they’re trying to solve the same challenge. So right now, the AR split is about 50. 

Brett
And I’m sure you’re seeing this conversation as well, but what I see a lot online is I guess we could say it’s like a shift where it’s becoming cool again for Silicon Valley and tech to work with the government and support the government because for a while there, it was not cool. I think Google had some contract or Microsoft, one of the big companies, and the employees walked out and were protesting it. And that was happening a lot with startups and just tech companies in general not supporting the government. Are you seeing that as well? And are you seeing those conversations shift and change for the positive? Are tech companies becoming more open to working with the government? 

Brandon Daniels
I think it is some of the coolest work we do because it’s the one place where I know what we’re doing is going to a public good. I think that some of those contracts had less to do with the fact that it was the US federal government and more to do with the fact that it was about analyzing. You know, there are real questions on data privacy. There are real concerns, know sort of oversight, know intel data collection on people. I think some of those contracts may have come under scrutiny just because of the types of data that they were managing. But when we find a supply chain issue right, so, like when Russia invaded Ukraine, right, were able to deliver to the federal government information on those supply chains to make sure that those sanctions were punitive to the folks that were infringing upon the democracy of the Ukraine. 

Brandon Daniels
But were also able to make sure that weren’t, for instance, unnecessarily compromising the requirements and the demands that our defense industrial base has, or that our critical infrastructure has, or that the European infrastructure has. 

Brett
Right. 

Brandon Daniels
So the work that we’ve done for the federal government has largely been to know the US. Citizen. But then even the global community of democratic allies, like, a lot of work that we’re doing is looking at how we can source goods from Korea, how we can source goods from India, how we can source goods from the UK, how we can have better global economic relationships, how we can diversify supply chains. And so I think when you’re working with the federal government, you have a real opportunity to do a public good. And if you use that opportunity, I think that should always be in vogue. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
But the other thing about the federal government is that the federal government is trying to make sure that it is cool to be a vendor. And so they have redesigned their procurement practices to be adaptive, faster and smarter. They have made it so that you’re able to prioritize your development of your product in a way that they’re able to be a good customer and partner in terms of IP, in terms of funding. And so I think Silicon Valley is really interested in working with the federal government because there are lots of benefits to the way that the federal government has changed its manner of procurement or acquisition to be foot forward and to inspire innovation in the. United States, which hasn’t always been the case, right, but it’s certainly been the case in the last few years. 

Brett
And would you recommend for startups, depending on the technology, to pursue the government as their first customer and trying to get the government as the very first customer? Or would that come later after they’ve already tested it with some private companies? 

Brandon Daniels
So I’m a little bit biased. I think you really have to have something that’s ready for deployment in order to go into the federal government just because there are a number of gates that they have from a security perspective or from a technical acceptance perspective that you want to make sure you’re ready to meet. But there are a number of really interesting programs that the government sponsors that help startups to get their first foot in the door that I would really advocate for. So one of them is Afworks. It’s an adaptive acquisition platform put together by the Air Force. I’ve had a number of friends that have worked in conjunction with the Afworks team. In fact, Major General Holt from the Air Force is on the Exiger advisory board, and he was a big champion for Afworks. So Afworks is a great opportunity to get funding to get into siber programs, to know sort of demonstrate cutting edge technology and how it can support the US federal government mission. 

Brandon Daniels
Also the sort of innovation areas of the US federal government, like there’s a Defense Innovation Agency, they are also great on ramps into the federal government and then finally everybody knows about it. But InQTel right is another area of investment that has funded a lot of the technologies that we use today on the commercial side. So I think that there are great ways in which small software companies, startups, even companies that make electric aviation or unmanned aerial vehicles or drones or whatever it might be. There are lots of ways that technology companies can get into the government on some of these R and D type vehicles, and I would advocate for those all day. 

Brett
And if you had to choose one piece of advice that you’d share with a founder who wants to get their technology in with the government, and let’s say they’re early stage, they’ve just raised a seed round, $5 million, something like that, what would be your advice to them? 

Brandon Daniels
So one of the things that most of us don’t think about is that the government wants you to align with the US federal government, right? So when you’re taking funding, when you’re looking at potential funding sources, you have to assess your foreign ownership, control and influence. Meaning focusing on Silicon Valley funds, focusing on US funds, focusing on VCs that are in your local incubators or are in your local angel groups that can give you that first bit of funding. It takes off a huge impediment that could exist as you start to scale, right, because the government is getting more and more serious on foreign ownership, control and influence and how it’s going to dictate whether or not they’re going to buy from you. And a lot of companies, especially the largest technology companies, are starting to account for this as well because they’ve got large federal government contracts and cloud hosting or in services or in large scale technology deployments. 

Brandon Daniels
They’re all starting to assess where your software is made and who owns your software or who’s funded your software. I would say focus on five I partners, focus on those funding sources that aren’t going to be an impediment from a due diligence perspective later on. And the other thing I would say is consider partnerships. I mean, I’m not a huge fan of partnerships and marketplaces for startups on the commercial side, but when it comes to the federal government, things like the AWS marketplace into some of the classified or secret environments, things like creating partnerships with large system integrators. Those are great ways into government vehicles where you can gain your first level of visibility into the major decision makers and start to scale on your own. 

Brett
And one quick follow up from that first point. So is the government concerned about who the LPs of the fund are as well? Is it digging that layer deep or what does that look like? 

Brandon Daniels
Yeah, so there is a question on who the LPs are, but the major issue is who controls and manages the and so, you know, focusing on US funds that are distributed across LPs and are not essentially owned and managed by a foreign investment house or investment fund or where there isn’t a single LP that largely dominates the investment and therefore could theoretically gain control of your business. That’s where I would focus time. So there is a question as to who are the LPs of the fund, but usually that’s so diversified that as long as 75, 80, 90% of the fund is US, UK, Canada, Australia, whatever it might be right. That usually passes initial muster. 

Brett
Got it. 

Brett
So just not taking money from the sovereign wealth fund of North Korea is the high level advice there. 

Brandon Daniels
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And there are a few other countries you could put on that list. 

Brett
Perfect. All right, last question. I know we’re up on time. Let’s zoom out into the future. So three to five years from today, what does the company look like? 

Brandon Daniels
So our aspiration is to do good and to do well. So we want to be the platform that is helping our customers to not think about risk. And what I mean by that is procurement people, compliance people, operations people have so much that they have to consider when making business relationship decisions that we want to be the platform that returns that conversation to a question of just performance and price because that’s where they’re naturally skilled. That’s where our global procurement and supply chain professionals have operated for the last 30 years, and what we’re trying to do is make it so that the risk management aspect of it is something that the platform is providing you insight into if and when you need to know it. 

Brett
Right? 

Brandon Daniels
And so the way that I think about our future is we’re making the world a safer and more transparent place for our customers to succeed. So we want our customers to be using our platform to make every single business relationship decision, to buy every single one of their products, to buy all of their services downstream, because they know if there’s an issue that would stop them or cause them pause before making that decision, they know our platform is going to flag it. So we want to be the procurement platform for all of our customers to orchestrate, efficiently, manage, and to maintain compliance within their procurement environment. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. Brandon, we are over on time, so I’m not going to keep you any longer. This conversation has been a blast. Before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute on this vision, where should they go? 

Brandon Daniels
So Exeter.com is a great place. The other place is actually our LinkedIn feed. It’s got all of the events that we’re doing. It’s got all of our thought leadership, and then, most importantly, it’s got all of our acquisitions. So you can see how we’re continuing to build out our total addressable, market and the impact that we can make for our customers. 

Brett
Amazing. Brandon, thank you so much for taking the time. I’ve learned so much from you on this episode. I know it’s going to be a hit with our audience. They’re going to love it, too. So thanks so much for taking the time and sharing such tactical and valuable insights. Really appreciate it. 

Brandon Daniels
Yeah. Thank you, Brett. Appreciate your time. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. 

Brett
You it’s.