Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Eynat Guez of Papaya Global On The Five Things You Need To Know In Order To Create A Highly Successful Tech Company
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Make mistakes and grow. Humility is the most important trait of an entrepreneur and CEO and one that serves you well in building expertise in your field or industry. There is a huge difference between managers and leaders. True leaders are honest with themselves about what they know and what they don’t know and how they need to grow to become better leaders. That means making mistakes, learning, and having a mindset of continual improvement. I learned some stunning lessons early on in my efforts to find the right investors in Papaya and decided I needed to find partners who would share my vision and stand side by side with me, not in front.
As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women Leaders in Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Eynat Guez.
Eynat Guez, an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, is a leading expert in global payroll and global workforce management in the remote work era. She co-founded Papaya Global after seeing the technology gap in global payroll. The company combines her three passions — technology, supporting the employee experience, and empowering finance leaders — to start a revolution in global payroll management. Papaya, now valued at over $3.7 billion under Eynat’s leadership, provides a nascent technology approach to how we pay people and how technology can provide real-time business intelligence around people data to finance, HR, and business leaders regardless of where companies employ workers. Within five years, Eynat became a female unicorn founder and CEO. Recently, Papaya, now the largest fintech company with a female founder/CEO, made the Forbes Cloud 100 (Eynat being only one of eight female CEOs on the list).
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I started my career as an HR and operations manager heavily focused on global talent and relocation services — instilling the value of supporting the employee experience regardless of where an employee worked in the world. I was drawn to HR because I believe in taking care of your neighbors and investing in people to improve their quality of life. In my first CEO role, I headed up a global relocation company to assist employees with their transition to new geographies and all the challenges that business has in managing a global workforce. Seeing the lack of technology to support a global workforce motivated me to co-found Papaya Global.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?
While I don’t like being singled out as the rare female CEO of a tech company, I quickly realized the challenge of gaining traction as a startup company seeking investments in your idea. Obviously, I see the broader struggles of women in the workplace finding their own personal successes and figuring out how to prioritize their energies. But I have appreciated the privilege of showing other women entrepreneurs and executives that you can have it all — family, career, and success. But that’s only possible with great support at home, which I’m so fortunate to have. I don’t know that it is a singular story, but I’ve learned through interviews like this to set aside my discomfort on gender topics and embrace them and encourage women in general to invest in themselves without feeling regret or as though they are sacrificing something.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It was a mistake for me to think that my background in global talent issues such as relocation services or payroll was boring. I laugh about it now. But I knew we had an innovative idea in consolidating global payroll and drawing data from what is typically a messy patchwork of multiple data systems. What I didn’t realize at the time was how forward-looking the idea was to simplify and bring outdated ways of paying employees into a modern era of consumer-like expectations of software. Think about it: Getting paid by an employer is one of the most important touch points between a company and its workers. From the employee perspective, people have been told how and when they will get their money for as long as organizations have been issuing paychecks. I learned that payroll is central to the employee experience and companies undervalue the data and insights that they have in workforce analytics. Now in the remote work and global talent environment, that idea is quite compelling.
Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
During Papaya Global’s first two years, it felt like such a struggle to convince investors of our vision. I couldn’t give up because I had seen firsthand in my earlier career roles how terribly complex it can be to manage a global workforce, capture data about those workers, and create a consistently great experience for those employees regardless of the country where they worked. I knew employees were having bad experiences tied to payroll and that finance leaders just had no idea of their true labor costs when their employee base was so spread out across the world. I’m glad we persevered and found great investors. We grew. Our valuation rose (now exceeding $3.7 billion). And we’ve grown and opened offices around the world.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Twentieth-century painter Frida Kahlo said: “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” I find this to be true in business and life. Entrepreneurs face endless challenges in building and growing a business, especially when it begins to scale globally. I have faced many frustrations in my career and as a co-founder, but I keep it in perspective, allow myself to fail, and move forward. I don’t believe in dwelling on the past. Instead, it’s important to always be looking forward.
OK super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?
Papaya Global is the first company to simplify and consolidate global payroll, whether a company has an entity in another country or they are just employing one or hundreds of contingent workers in another geography or multiple countries. You have to understand that most companies have no access to real-time payroll costs when they have a complex, multi-country workforce because they typically hire a different payroll provider for every country where they operate or hire people. That means all their people data is stored in disparate systems. What we’ve done is consolidate that information into a single platform and dashboard, empowering business decision-makers with real-time people insights. We’ve also innovated our solution to give employers new ways to make payments that are faster and can be made in any currency or when and how employees prefer to be paid. We do all that securely and follow every local compliance requirement regardless of geographical boundaries. And we’ve done all that while integrating with some of the world’s largest ERP systems used by finance, HR, and business leaders. Think of us as the Salesforce for global payroll technology.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
I think our company’s growth really stands out. It is not only humbling how quickly we’ve raised money, invested it into our technology, and innovated the global payroll market, but we’ve tripled our company growth by adding new employees and clients while increasing revenue for three straight years. When you think about our vision of transforming payroll and payments across the globe regardless of geographic boundaries, I’m proud of the way our company has expanded our own footprint with employees in Tel Aviv, New York, London, Kyiv, Singapore, Melbourne, and Austin, Texas. The other compelling story about our company is our continued innovation and investment in innovation. We’ve put 40% to 50% of our revenue back into the solution to solve some of the most challenging business problems related to paying and managing global workforces.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We’re forging new partnerships in the financial sector to continue our company’s transformation to being a hybrid between payroll technology and a fintech solution. The partnerships are key collaborations that speed up payroll and payments to within a few days compared with transfers that take weeks, all while ensuring compliance regardless of where a company pays its workers. It is really hard to label where our company is headed because no one has offered such flexibility in delivering payments and delivering payroll for companies as well as creating a new relationship between employer and employee as it relates to payroll. We believe that technology will change the way employers support their people with payroll and that technology will play a key role in making that happen.
Let’s zoom out a bit and talk in more broad terms. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in tech? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?
Again, not a topic I’m most comfortable with because I don’t see myself as a woman CEO — with emphasis on the adjective modifier. I am a CEO. I bring a perspective and have a responsibility to bring up women through the ranks to better opportunities for themselves and their families. The status quo is not going to change for women until we can achieve pay equity in work and central to solving that equation for finance and HR leaders is having better data around internal equity. Once companies have better data and can make fair decisions about equity, the market overall will begin to course-correct around external competitive salaries. At Papaya, we walk the walk with 50% of our workforce being women.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?
Have you heard lately someone ask how a man is going to work a job and still manage to raise a family? Even now, with paternity leave, there are more men that are working from home and many more women in the CEO chair. This question still arises only in women’s interviews. Only women seem to have to make a choice between their children and career. I think that it’s too often framed as a false choice. Certainly, there are difficult choices that many women have to make. Like I said before, I’m fortunate enough to have a great support system at home just like many men have a great support system at home, right? Certainly fostering more inclusive work environments that are focused on flexibility and putting the employee experience first will solve not only challenges for women but also reduce stress on workers facing an array of life’s obstacles.
What would you advise to another tech leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill? From your experience, do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?
I suggest following these three things: be pragmatic, be brave and stand behind your people, and the last one I call the trolley exercise. It works like this: When you travel and start packing a suitcase, you take everything that is critical and essential that fits in your luggage and that you’re capable of carrying. What I mean by that is you have to make critical decisions that keep an eye on the future but reduce the cost of everything that is not critical to continue your growth.
Based on your experience, can you share three or four strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?
Customer support in technology has evolved far beyond triaging user issues affected by features and functions of the software. The best strategy for customer support is for a point of contact to bring a level of strategic guidance to operations to help companies thrive and grow. At Papaya Global, our customers need legal services to deal with complex payroll compliance issues, and it is no longer enough to just offer templates to address issues. If you offer legal services, you need to be able to customize that guidance. It is also a good strategy to provide your users with a knowledge hub, or a library of information to answer questions. For example, if they have legal questions, the content should provide a level of expertise that businesses would normally seek out costly advice from a law office that could be easily answered with hypotheticals. From a global payroll perspective, another strategy is to have a center of excellence with experts on immigration, pay equity, and benefits all with a breadth and depth of knowledge to localize the expertise.
Here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful tech company?
Make mistakes and grow. Humility is the most important trait of an entrepreneur and CEO and one that serves you well in building expertise in your field or industry. There is a huge difference between managers and leaders. True leaders are honest with themselves about what they know and what they don’t know and how they need to grow to become better leaders. That means making mistakes, learning, and having a mindset of continual improvement. I learned some stunning lessons early on in my efforts to find the right investors in Papaya and decided I needed to find partners who would share my vision and stand side by side with me, not in front.
Think fast. Leading a technology company requires evaluating the market needs in real time and having the ability to see where solutions are headed from a user experience and how they fit into a larger technology stack or ecosystem. That requires quick thinking and decision-making. A good example of that was how we thought about how to quickly scale our vision for employee payments and quickly seized the opportunity to acquire a global payments company (Azimo). If you think for too long in tech, you’re probably behind another competitor.
Solve a real problem. Far too often in the technology space, we see people develop applications and then look for someone to buy or people they need to convince need their solution. Know the problem you want to solve. Develop around the customer experience of the problem and in the context of their workflow, knowing how solving that one problem can also impact other areas of the business. I built on my experience in HR of seeing firsthand how complex the work experience is for people living in countries outside where their employer is headquartered — that was the problem I set out to address.
Center around data. User expectations for B2B technology have never been higher, driven in large part by the fantastic features and benefits of consumer applications on computers, phones, and other portable devices. While having nice functionality is great and will wow your customers, data is even more important. CFOs, finance departments, heads of HR, and the C-suite expect more from our digital systems, especially around data visualizations and real-time insights. Data will prove ROI, it supports business functions, and it can help serve other stakeholders within a business. From day one of launching Papaya, I knew putting data and insights around the workforce would be a huge differentiator because of how complex global workforce data can be.
Continuously innovate. Startups are born every day. While some signs point to venture capital cooling a tad in the technology industry, record levels of investment have led to countless startup ventures trying to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems faster, more efficiently, and with more pizazz than ever. You cannot assume no one offers the same features and functions. Or, at least, some other company out there will claim that they have a better solution (even if it’s not true). Stay relevant. Talk to your customers and find out how their requirements or business use cases are evolving and do your best to stay ahead of the innovation curve. I push our team all the time to expand the definition of payroll — an evolution that one day will be unrecognizable by today’s standards.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the U.S., with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I would love to meet with Julie Bradshaw, who first swam the English Channel when she was 15, because I would love to discuss her open-water swimming experiences (something I do in my spare time as a form of meditation). I wonder how other prominent women meditate and become more mindful in their daily lives.
Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!
Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Eynat Guez of Papaya Global On The Five Things You Need To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.