Building a company is messy. Most of it never makes the highlight reel.

Imperfect Company is a podcast from Glitch Capital where Leigh Jasper and Sam Kroonenburg, two founders who've built billion-dollar exits before and are going again, talk about the strategic decisions nobody puts on the pitch deck.

In this episode, the two of them talk about the thing they've each now done twice: taking an Australian company into the United States. Leigh did it with Aconex and is doing it again with Firmable, which has just landed in San Francisco. Sam did it with A Cloud Guru out of Austin and is doing it again with Cuttable, which has just opened in New York.

They go deep on the decisions they're making a: why you transplant someone from the home team instead of hiring a country manager, how Aconex only found growth in the US after abandoning most of the market, picking a city for time zones and customers rather than prestige, when to flip the TopCo, and why Leigh thinks a founder eventually has to be the one on the ground.

Plus the American sales culture Australians tend to skip (President's Club turned out to be the best money ever spent), the coaching Sam got walking out of a US sales call — "you've got to be more American" — and the double discount that costs Australian founders: they understate their traction, then US VCs discount it again on the assumption they're being oversold.

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