Photo Credit: Dr. Catriona Wallace
Flamingo is an enterprise technology company that helps businesses to automate online customer experience for insurance and financial services industry The product – AI-powered Virtual Customer Assistant – enables companies to personalize interactions with customers in a quick and affordable way.
Dr. Catriona Wallace, Founder and CEO of Flamingo, spoke at Startup Global Sydney, co-hosted by GIF, at Stone & Chalk during the Spark Festival in Sydney in 2017. She shared that the company decided to be global from day one to scale their business quickly. Her recent trip to the U.S. “just confirmed that we will double down and continue to build out our business in North America and on the back of that will probably be China our next market.” In addition, Dr. Wallace encourages “all Australian entrepreneurs to think global from day one and to know you can be global possibly much faster than what you think.”
For Flamingo, the government plays an important role in helping the company success globally. “One of the great things that government does here is the R&D grant. We can get 40 cents for every dollar we spend on research and development from the Australian government…We don’t see that anywhere else in the world and it’s the reason why I’ve kept the developers and data scientists here in Sydney,” Dr. Wallace shared, adding that “One of the things we would love is for the U.S. government to provide some sort of incentive, particularly for foreign companies that are going into the U.S.”
Technology plays a critical role in assisting startups to success globally as well. Because of the nature of Flamingo’s business, “Communication is everything, particularly when you have distributed teams, so we heavily rely on communication platforms. Probably the best one we use is Slack to communicate. We’ve got Slack channels for all our teams and we have Slack channels for all our clients. It’s a fantastic tool for doing global business.” In addition to Slack, Flamingo uses Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, and LinkIn as main channels to expand market reach.