Mikita Mikado, CEO of PandaDoc
As a cofounder and CEO at PandaDoc, Mikita Mikado’s commitment to solving issues created by document workflows, coupled with his immigration to the U.S., led to a leadership approach that personifies his values—cherishing freedom and the ability to be successful.
Karen Walker: PandaDoc started as a different organization, then you and your co-founder pivoted. What does PandaDoc do?
Mikita Mikado: My co-founder and I have worked together for over 15 years. And we tried and failed and occasionally succeeded with several business endeavors. PandaDoc launched nine years ago. We like to say that we take document workflows beyond electronic signatures.
Think of any transactional document, a contract, proposal, quote, purchase order or a form of any type. PandaDoc will help to generate those documents, collaborate on them, store them, and ensure nothing gets lost, and sign them electronically, or notarize them, if necessary. The ability to store them in the system of record—your CRM or ERP—is the connecting tissue that helps get deals done.
Walker: How did you decide this was something that you wanted to spend your time building?
Mikado: We ran a small software development firm. We had to create a lot of sales proposals, and we found that process to be highly inefficient.
We built a product for agency owners to save time and develop quotes and proposals. That product gained some traction. We made a lot of mistakes and learned a few things. We found that there was a much bigger opportunity in the marketplace— in transactional document automation.
We decided to raise money and I moved to Silicon Valley. We then launched PandaDoc.
Walker: I know you recently integrated with QuickBooks and acquired Live Notary. How does this integration and acquisition fit into your strategy?
Mikado: Taking document workflows beyond electronic signatures means a lot of things. Documents within PandaDoc are interactive – you can edit them, collaborate on them, and add functionality to them. We enabled all of that to integrate better with the systems of record. Many document workflows start or end in finance and accounting systems, and we combine well there.
An electronic notary is legally binding in almost all US states (all but two). When you send out a contract or a sales proposal that needs to be notarized, it’s just a streamlined workflow extension with PandaDoc.
Walker: You’ve raised over $50 million in outside funding, the last being a Series C. What’s your philosophy on raising money?
Mikado: We try to be as efficient as we can be. I didn’t know how the VC world worked when I came to America. It was scary to raise money for a software product in the cloud. So, we approached it little by little and tried to rely on our own resources.
Walker: What's your vision for PandaDoc in the future?
Mikado: Today, we're a market leader in contract management and proposal automation in quoting for small to midsized businesses. But there are more documented workflows that originate in, for example, HR, operations, supply chain management, or real estate, and so on. We're planning to continue to add markets by adding new document workflows and serving the industry. In the long term, I see us expanding beyond documents and finding broader workflows, such as approvals or contracts, life cycle management and so on.
Walker: You have about 30,000 customers now and 700 employees?
Mikado: We have close to 800 employees now. Typically, the bigger you get, the harder it is to grow, but we've gone through four years of accelerating growth, atypical for companies of our size. The reason for that is we've been blessed with word of mouth. Many of our customers are small to midsized businesses that do business with other small to midsized businesses. When you get a document, and it looks good, you get curious, asking, what kind of solution executed this?
Walker: Congratulations on your growth and your unicorn status. Let’s get back to something you talked about earlier, your personal history.
You were born in Belarus and spent most of your life there. Then you decided to take a risk and move to the U.S. when you were 19. Are there lessons from that, which have followed you and helped you?
Mikado: Yes, risks. Risks are only risks if big rewards or significant setbacks follow. I think my move to America brought a lot of rewards and a lot of setbacks.
Walker: What were your dreams or goals when you came to the U.S.?
Mikado: I was looking to be free.
This is one of those things that United States of America markets well, especially compared to Eastern Europe and to Belarus. I think I found freedom here, and I love it. In addition to that, when you start a business in America, it’s liking playing in the major leagues – the premier leagues. The rules are different, and I like the rules better here. It’s more competitive. It is so much more fun. The promise of the American dream and freedom and continuous change can be ignited from within. Those are all very attractive to me.
Walker: How are you building your leadership team?
Mikado: We are borderless when it comes to hiring. We have hundreds of people in America, in Poland, Ukraine, Portugal, and around Europe. Many people work as digital nomads, and the unfortunate events in Belarus and Ukraine, along with COVID, forced us to adopt a remote-first culture. We’ve been distributed from the beginning because I moved here, and my co-founder was in Belarus for a long time. We had to learn to communicate and work remotely.
Five or six years ago, things were bad at PandaDoc. We had high attrition and a lot of internal conflict. My co-founder and I sat down and had this difficult conversation, admitting that our culture didn’t work.
So, we put together a list of values to which we aspire. We’ve written a document describing who we aspire to be. Why do we do what we do? How do we like for the work to get done? And we started holding ourselves and others accountable for that culture.
Walker: I applaud you for taking that step and figuring out it. It's not easy to keep people aligned on the 10,000 decisions they must make every day. So that sounds like it is key to your success.
Let’s discuss “up and to the right,” the tagline for my consulting business. That’s the spot on the two-by-two matrix where we all want to be. Was there a moment in your life or your career when you knew that you were going to be successful, that you were moving up and to the right?
Mikado: Let's say since my move to America. In the early days, I was in the bottom left corner and moved along the diagonal line back and forth for a while, then I started to settle in the upper right-hand box.
It's normal for a human being. I’m going to wake up some days and feel that things aren't great and it's a terrible day (or terrible month or whatever, or a horrible year). And maybe even tomorrow is not going to be better, but that could be just one day out of seven or out of 30. It's essential to look at things in perspective and have a statistically significant set.
So, from that perspective, I feel like I'm in the upper right-hand corner right now. There are issues or challenges or difficulties, but every human being has those, every business has those, every team has those. With the right amount of energy, optimism and knowledge, we can address those challenges and setbacks.
