Vend

About Vaughn
Vaughan Rowsell: CEO and Founder
Top three apps: Card Munch, Yammer, Run Keeper
Coffee fix near the KLP office: Elite Audio
Favourite SF Nabe: The Mission
Next big thing tech prediction for 2013: Mobile Commerce – More using your mobile phone to pay for things.

Tells us briefly what Vend does:
Vend is a cloud based retail operating system for a bricks and mortar store. It’s a suite of tools that a retailer would use to manage product entry, counter transactions and POS, ecommerce, accounting, loyalty, CRM - all the business tools a retailer needs to run a shop.

You launched just over 2 years ago and are now in over 100 countries with 27,000 customers, what do retailers like about Vend?
It’s cost effective, easy to use, and probably the feature that really sells Vend is that retailers have more control over their store - they don’t have to have people coming in or talk to people over their phone to figure out how to use their software. And because it’s an online platform it can easily integrate with other online programs as well.

What does a typical Vender look like?
Anything from small cafes, through to multi-store chains use Vend. Typically it’s the small to medium sized retailer where the owner is very much involved in the business. Vend appeals to them because it’s so easy to use, and they can just set it up themselves and roll it out across all their stores. We’ve got a bit of a sweet spot with fashion retailers, another big segment for us is giftware, housewares, and cafes. Generally anywhere the retailer is young and progressive.

You’re in over 100 countries and sell to far-flung places like Brazil and Vietnam. Do you have different language versions for your international customers?
Language isn’t a barrier to using Vend, because you can customize receipts to be in the local language with the local currency. Also, we designed the product so that it’s very intuitive. We don’t use very many words in the interface. And because Vend is all web based, we even find that in some cases if the cashiers are not English speaking, they’ll just use Google translate in their browser.

What kind of hardware do your Venders use?
Anything and everything. The older existing retailers tend to already have an investment in some sort of computer system, and they typically are windows touch screens. Those retailers can just install Chrome, log in to Vend, and they’ve upgraded their point of sale instantly. Whereas a lot of the newer retailers are moving to tablets, iPad is obviously making a big impact in retail. Many retailers, especially the boutique style independents, don’t like having technology cluttering up their store. An iPad is nice and discrete, and it’s a really inexpensive touch screen. A few hundred dollars and can get you a point of sale terminal, whereas traditionally it was around $10,000 for a system.

You arrived at the Kiwi Landing Pad a year and a half ago. How did KLP aid in Vend’s transition to the United States?
They just made it so easy, we didn’t have to think about trying to find office space, or worry about who we would be sharing the space with.

We could literally just get off the plane, jump in the cab and turn up. Having lots of other Kiwi start-ups in the Landing Pad and being able to tap into that network is really useful as well, we’re all solving the same sort of problems around visas and tax and business development and just life in San Francisco in general.

Tell us a bit about how you typically spend your time in San Francisco.
The value of the Valley is that this is where our natural business partners are, like Google and Pay Pal. So we spend most of our time working on business development with our partners here. And of course we’ve got quite a few customers in San Francisco, so it’s always cool catching up with them.

That’s primarily why we come and spend time here, the Valley being the kind of ground zero for tech start-ups as well. It’s nice to talk to other like-minded start-ups in a similar space, you can get the feel for what’s going on, and what’s happening in the consumer space.

Based on your experience in SF, do you have any insights or advice for companies back in New Zealand?
The advice I always give is just to get on a plane and get over here. A lot of companies back home have this kind of mental block about coming here, they think it’s going to be really complicated, or they worry about how they’re going to get from the airport to the city. That should be the least of their worries. They should just be buying a plane ticket, getting over here and figuring out whether San Francisco is for them.

The second thing is that just being here doesn’t make stuff happen. You’ve got to be making the connections and talking to people. So you’ve actually got to determine why you want to be in San Francisco for a start. If you’re going to be sitting in an office and writing emails then you could probably do that from New Zealand.

Lastly, there is this perception that it’s really difficult to get into boardrooms and meet people, whereas it’s actually the opposite. It’s easier to meet with the companies that you want to do business with over here, than it is back home. Everybody is open to talking about new opportunities and will give you half and hour to meet and talk about your idea. We’ve met with the senior management team within Google and Pay Pal, but we would probably struggle to get in and meet the senior management at Telecom back home. It’s amazing how the entrepreneurial engine works here.

What can we look forward to from Vend in 2013?
We’re always doing exciting things from a product point of view. We’re disrupting the retail space, so we’ve got lots of awesome stuff coming out. I think the most exciting thing is just our growth, continuing to grow and grow and grow. Our goal for 2013 is really to establish Vend as the retail platform for small business, and we’re well on the track for that.