> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://vaughan.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Vend10 : Year 4 — Global expansion - URL: https://vaughan.ai/blog/vend10-year-4-global-expansion/ - Published: 2020-09-17T20:52:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-07T23:23:22.000Z - Author: Vaughan Fergusson - Tags: Retail, Entrepreneurship, Startup Lessons, Vend10, Retail Technology, #medium-import This week we are talking about going global! Well actually Vend was global from day one. Our first 10 customers were from all around the world. We started our international “presence” with a few secret beacheads prior to “officially” opening offices. We did a lot in air-quotes in the early days. One such beachhead was Kara who was on the team already, she swapped coasts in the US and established our San Francisco foothold pretty early on. Shortly after I asked JC, our first Chief Revenue Officer, how hard it is to open up an additional couple of global offices and start hiring people. How hard can it be? Just jump on a plane and tada. Sorted. I’ll let JC fill in the details — he is much better with details (and less air-quotes)… ![](https://vaughan.ai/content/images/2026/11/9cada1045235.jpg) Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo — or just JC You have met me in Nick’s wonderful post: I am the Salesforce / Powerpoint / French cologne aficionado. I joined Vend when it was a start-up with a few people and left Vend when it looked very different; an established company with hundreds of employees. During my tenure at Vend my main responsibility was to grow the revenue. I was infamous for [my SaaS 101 sessions ](https://thoughts.travelperk.com/whats-so-great-about-saas-68692ff3bce6?ref=vaughan.ai)that have inspired / traumatized generations of Venders. We went from no sales and customer success team in 2012 to 100 headcount split across 3 continents by 2016, it was a remarkable change. In the early days of Vend, we sold mainly in Australia and New Zealand, but very quickly we got traction from all around the world.We realized that if we wanted to be credible, we needed to have local offices to be closer to our customers and to our strategic partners. We ended up over the next 5 years setting up offices in Melbourne, Toronto, and London. What’s remarkable is that 8 years and hundreds of million of revenue later, Vend still has the same hubs for its team. It highlights the importance of setting up the office for success. I will first tell you a few real life stories about how we set up our Melbourne and Toronto office and then in the second part a playbook on how to set up offices. ![](https://vaughan.ai/content/images/2026/11/481076e046d9.jpg) You will be mistaken thinking it’s mostly sheep in Australia and New Zealand ### **PART 1 : The VEND Worldwide Tour** #### **Melbourne 2012** Initially our first few customers were mainly in New Zealand but we started to have success very early on in Australia especially thanks to the Xero and Apple Partnership. While it was possible to serve the Australian market from New Zealand, there was value in being physically closer to our retailers and to our partners. After a quick deliberation we decided to set up our Australian Office in Melbourne. Why ? Frankly it was partly because our ambassador Fallon Savery loved Melbourne; also Nick and I really love coffee, so here we come Melbourne ! ![](https://vaughan.ai/content/images/2026/11/cb5e4bb87cf5.jpg) Our offices were often repurposed spaces It was a relatively easy set up: Melbourne was a few hours flight away, it has a similar culture to New Zealand and the rules and regulations were easy to understand. Our Melbourne team turned out to be the backbone of the company success and it was our beachhead to test new concepts: Payment partnership, focus on larger retailers, retailer community events. #### **North America 2013** A year later came *la piece de resistance*: North America expansion. We already had a small Business Development office in San Francisco but we didn’t have a credible presence. As our product developed (US state and city tax, how many sleepless nights you have caused me), we started to get great traction in North America. We started by employing a team in New Zealand that had a (very) early shift to service our North American market. It worked well for a while but it started to show its limit very quickly as we scaled. So one day, Vaughan in his unique style came to me: “Hey JC, can we have a North American office up and running in 4 months to align with the launch of the new payment partnership?” “Yes of course, Vaughan leave it with me” 4 months to find a location, an office, recruit, onboard in a continent where I have only been a few times. How hard can it be ? Of course we could have gone the easy way and set up an office in San Francisco like everybody else (at least in 2012) . However we wanted to understand what we expected from this office and not just follow the crowd. Vaughan, Nick and I tend to be a bit contrarian so it was not hard to question this well shared belief at a time **Hint* : Interestingly a lot of Saas Companies have since then moved away from San Francisco to Austin, Denver, Chicago … for their inside sales and customer support team. However in 2013 it was not very common. If you were a non American company setting up an office in the US, it needed to be in San Francisco.* **Choosing the location** *Why do we want to set up this office ?* Our business model is based on high volume Inside Sales. As a consequence we need an office that will be on the right timezone to host Inside Sales, Customer Success and Customer Support. *What are the criteria?* Based on the objective, we defined a framework with a grading: 1. **It needs to fit with our Brand.** It is a subjective criteria but we needed to have a place that aligned with our quirky, friendly, retailer obsessed brand. 2. **The cost needs to be acceptable**. We worked on the SMB market at an ARPU of about $100 per month, so we needed to keep our LTV / CAC under control. 3. **We need to be able to attract the right type of talen**t. It is a fine balance to find a location that has a great pool of talent without being so competitive that you can’t recruit anyone. 4. **The city needed to East / Central coast** in order for us to have a “follow the sun” support ( the rest of our Customer Support team was based in New Zealand) 5. **We wanted a city that had a vibrant tech and retail community**. We used the local offices as a way to gather insight. We will visit retailers locally very often. *Finding the right location* So I went on a quest to map every single city in the US that fits this criteria. I called every other European or APAC SaaS company that has set up offices in the US to learn about their experiences. From there we defined a shortlist of two cities based on the framework above. It ended up being Austin vs Toronto. I presented the case to Vaughan and the board and we decided to opt for Toronto as it fits all the criteria. Toronto has a vibrant tech and retail ecosystem, we could attract great talent at an acceptable cost ( thanks for the lower value of CAD$) and it fits with our brand. So here we are one month in, I have a location : Toronto. Now I have 3 months to set up the office, the entity and recruit the team to be ready for the partnership launch. **Setting up the offices** Did I forget to mention that I have never been to Toronto before ? So yeah I didn’t know the city but how hard can it be ? From there I had three main steps: 1. Find ambassadors from New Zealand that will be keen to relocate for at least 6 months to transfer the know-how and bring our culture 2. Find an office where we could grow from 7 to 20 with a very high level of flexibility 3. Recruit 5 people in Sales, Customer Success and Customer support. Before I booked my flight to Toronto, I asked if anybody was keen to spend the next year in Toronto and I was lucky enough that I had some great ambassadors in the team that wanted to be part of this experience. **Hint:* For all the ones that ended up being ambassadors it was a life changing experience. Most of them came back to New Zealand after a few years but it helped them to grow much faster both personally and professionally. If you ever have the opportunity, just f… do it, it is an amazing experience !* I booked a flight to Toronto in August, reserved a (cheap and horrible) hotel for 2 weeks and here we go. For the following two weeks I drank a lot of coffee, ran around the city to find an office that would fit our brand; went through 10 interviews a day and searched for a payroll provider so that we could pay our team. Two weeks later the mission was accomplished: we had a wonderful team of five Canadians plus two Kiwis relocating to Toronto and we had a hipster office in a great location. We were ready to launch ! *Here is an account of one of those early interviews from Alex Panetta — who ended up a few years later being our Head of Sales for North America* > “I walked into a small shared office space in central downtown Toronto and anxiously waited in a small meeting room for Vend’s (at the time Chief Revenue Officer ) JC. This was my first interview with this odd yet appealing kiwi startup. “ > “My past experience with “CRO” were that they were stuffy and not that approachable, but after only a few minutes a young Frenchman walked in wearing sneakers, a t-shirt with a blazer over top. He was carrying not one but TWO red bulls. He put them down and smiled across the tiny desk between us, and I immediately knew that this was the start of what was to be an epic relationship.” ![](https://vaughan.ai/content/images/2026/11/39de08e0396a.jpg) The start of our Toronto team and not the end of t-shirt wearing **What happened next ?** We ended up using the same playbook to set up offices in other locations ( London, Berlin) and continued to invest in the Toronto office as our North American presence expended. We had 70 people in this office when I left and the US Market was a significant part of Vend’s revenue thanks to its wonderful team. I actually ended up moving to Toronto the following year to build our credibility on the American market but that is a different story that will probably deserve its own blog post ! ![](https://vaughan.ai/content/images/2026/11/94a884ce8dc9.jpg) Dress code was… interesting ### **PART 2 : The 5 things I learned setting up the offices** #### 1\. The one-person show never works While I have enjoyed this journey, I have also made some mistakes and if there is only one thing you keep from this article…**I have never met anyone who can testify that they have successfully set up an office by putting one person on the ground and letting them work remotely.** Setting up a new office and developing a new market is a very difficult task in itself. If you compound this with the loneliness and disconnection of being the only person there you have a recipe for a resentful employee who’s unlikely to deliver results. Early on we tried this approach in San Francisco and it didn’t work. I have tried a few other times later on and it never works ! (If you are remote first company, that’s a different story obviously) #### 2\. The Minimum Viable Team Ideally, you need to plan on having a minimum of four or five people in the first 6 months of your new office. Why? Simply because below this number, you can’t really create an office culture because you don’t have enough colleagues. Human connection is one of the reasons for employee happiness. As soon as someone goes on vacation, there you are, all alone in the office wishing you were on holiday too. In both Toronto and Melbourne, the initial 5 people team was a very close knit group that could go through the difficulties of setting up a new offices and developing a new market because they had the connection ![](https://vaughan.ai/content/images/2026/11/e785be693e68.jpg) At times we grew so fast we ran out of space #### **3\. Relocate a Cultural Ambassador** Startups and small companies have a lot that isn’t written down on paper. This unofficial know-how is really impossible to grasp when you are not located at HQ. You can have a great employee handbook or onboarding period, but you won’t cover everything. Furthermore, your culture is not what you have written on your career webpage, it is how people interpret it. Therefore you need to relocate a couple of people who fully embody your culture Fundamentally the success of the Melbourne, Toronto and London office is down to the wonderful cultural ambassadors that have helped us. They have shaped the culture and transferred the knowledge #### 4\. Don’t treat your remote offices employees like 2nd class citizens Before you do anything, think about how it works for the remote offices. Got a meeting at a specific time, how do the people in the new office connect? Does the time zone work? Where can they see the product roadmap? Are they flying back for the Christmas party? These are not trivial details designed to annoy office managers, they are pillars of culture that really matter. If you don’t pay close attention to these details, your remote office will feel disconnected. It is not enough to put stickers on the wall with the company values. However they are not enough, ALL of your leaders need to go there on a regular basis. The remote offices will get a lot out of unstructured discussion and time together. They will feel a higher sense of belonging. They will hate you less. Vaughan , Nick and I travelled on a regular basis to our remote offices, at least once a quarter we were in all our offices. Is it exhausting ? Yes absolutely but it is the price to pay if you want to keep a global aligned team. #### **5 The Country Manager Dilemma** Finally as you develop an office, there will come a time when you want to have an owner for the market. The single most important factor that will decide the culture and outcome of your office is the quality of your recruitment and on-boarding of your Country Manager. Being a remote country manager is a very difficult position. You have to develop a new market, you have limited availability of information because you are not at HQ, and it is harder to recruit. I have personally worked with amazing country managers, but I’ve also made some fairly epic mistakes with this position. If you want to avoid my mess ups: - Spend as much time as possible in onboarding sessions with the country manager: They need to be immersed in the company. Have them spend at least one month of their first three months at HQ. - Make sure that the Country Manager is comfortable with traveling to HQ very often. For those of you at Vend currently, it has been a privilege to share with you my experience of the earlier days and the foundations and f#&k-ups we made in our quest to create a global company. With customers all over the world all Vend’s offices are headquarters for their region and play an epically important role in the success of Vend.