CEO TODAY’S AWARDS WINNERS www. ceotodaymagazine . com 38 In terms of keeping an innovative culture, we always encourage team members to raise questions and keep as open a mind as possible to the ideas they bring up. How important do you rate international expansion for your business growth as a SaaS company? It is extremely important, and that is why when you look at our website it is clear that we are focused on multinational business. When you create a solution for a problem that exists everywhere in the world, rolling it out to additional continents and creating infrastructure comes with risk and opportunity that tends to far outweigh that risk. We have found that putting in additional effort to localise, for example, can pay off in a big way. For example, traditional Chinese has been integrated into AnyDesk from the start, and it has given us a significant leg up on the competition. As a developer of remote working technology, how has your business developed during the pandemic, and how has this development progressed since? We have seen signups in the hundreds of millions during the pandemic, and that rapid growth is continuing. Though life will hopefully go back to normal in the near future, work’s ‘new’ normal is remote and hybrid offerings that tend to save time and money and make workers happier. The new remote and hybridwork realitymeans companiesmust ensure that they are compliant with local data regulations, can offer network admins greater transparency, and provide secure connections to work information even when employees are out of office. AnyDesk ensures the highest possible safety and compliance levels and as an added bonus, it is more convenient for users who can undertake memoryheavy tasks such as video editingwith greater ease than on their personal computer. All of those changes and capabilities point to a continuation of the momentum we have been experiencing. What would you say is your greatest achievement of the past year? The way we were able to transition the company to the point where it is ready to execute on the expanded vision. In essence, both the product itself and the way 38 www. ceotodaymagazine . com For our readers who have not met you before, what was the initial vision that led you to found AnyDesk in 2014? I was deeply involved in the software business and had always been interested in business strategy. In my previous company, the strategy I saw was to build features into a platform that was not built in the optimal, scalable way and had room for improvement in its core product. Still, the higher-ups failed to see it that way, so I quit to found my own company, AnyDesk. The initial vision we had for AnyDesk was to build a super lightweight, ultra-low-latency remote desktop platform before focusing on growth and then using it as a platform to grow and develop additional features. What major challenges have you overcome since then? The primary challenge is the same as most hypergrowth companies face: scaling incredibly fast while performing a balancing act of maintaining an innovative start-up culture, yet making sure to coordinate between teams to hit strategic objectives. You can focus on different implementation projects much better early on, whereas now when you have 200 employees, you cannot call a meeting with all your employees each week, and you cannot address all the departments in the same manner. The answer we have found is to reflect on people in the best way you possibly can. That means addressing departments individually and having a solid management team that can do the same. We always encourage team members to raise questions and keep as open a mind as possible to the ideas they bring up.
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