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Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show. I'm Blake Oliver-

David Leary: [00:00:07] and I'm David Leary

Blake Oliver: [00:00:07] And we are at Suite World in Las Vegas talking to accountants, developers. We just spoke with Evan Goldberg yesterday, and now we are going to get to meet with some net suite accountants. So joining us today is Xenia Towfiq from Mozilla. Welcome to the show Xenia.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:00:27] Yeah thank you very much David and Blake, it's a pleasure to be here.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:30] You are the head of global accounting operations at Mozilla. And I understand from taking a look at your LinkedIn profile that you have talent. You have team members all over the world. You yourself are quite traveled. You originally from Ukraine. Correct. And then you spent time in Spain, correct? Yeah. Where are you now? Well, right now we're in Vegas, but where are you?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:00:58] Where are you place to be? Vegas, I guess so, yeah. That's correct. I do have team members all over the world. So I do have a team, which is, yeah, scattered between Berlin, San Francisco. Then we have also somebody in the East coast and then of course have people in India. We're all reporting to me. So that's a lot of fun. I've been with Mozilla for three years and have been working primarily in the Berlin office. So I've been living in Berlin for eight years and just a month ago have relocated back to Spain, to Canary Island. So Canary Islands. Yeah, very fancy place in Ireland and in the middle of Atlantic. I've heard Africa, I've.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:32] Heard of it, but I don't know exactly where it is. So it's in on the west coast, off the west coast of Africa.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:01:37] Yeah. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:38] Yeah.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:01:38] Wow. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:39] Mean is it hard to get around when you're in the Canary Islands? Is it easy to travel?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:01:44] Well, you need a car to get around my island. Tenerife has two airports, north and south. I live just close by to the north airport, which is more local, but for me to travel internationally, I need to get to the South airport, which is like one hour drive. So. But otherwise all works out well.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:01] Safe to say that Mozilla has embraced remote work.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:02:05] Absolutely. We are a remote first company. Before Covid, we have 51% of our workforce working remotely, and now I think it's nearly everybody. We just have two offices that are real office locations, and Berlin and Toronto and the rest are co-working spaces. So people are just going to traveling to places to get together, and they work where they essentially want to.

David Leary: [00:02:27] And for our listeners that maybe are not don't know who Mozilla is, it's Firefox. Yes. And then and David properties.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:33] So David was super excited when he found out we were going to get to talk to you, Xenia, because he is a massive Firefox fan.

David Leary: [00:02:40] I do not even have Google Chrome installed on my computer. I refuse to install it.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:02:43] So we just did an amazing marketing campaign in Germany, which was a little bit, I don't know what the gist would say. So. So basically the message was something like Safari is a good browser to download Firefox.

David Leary: [00:02:57] That's pretty funny.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:02:59] That's true. Yes, we have Firefox as our primary product, but we also have other things that we do. So it's not only Firefox and such.

David Leary: [00:03:06] So how how big is Mozilla currently. And like what are the business obviously of Firefox. And I don't even know if I pay for anything like that.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:16] Sounds like two questions there.

David Leary: [00:03:17] I'm trying to understand the business model of Firefox. How maybe how.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:20] Does Mozilla make money? How about that?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:03:22] How does Mozilla make money? That's a great question. It's a it's an interesting one. So there are different ways of making money. Of course we have different revenue streams. And the majority of our money comes from partnership with Google.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:33] Oh, so somebody searches on Google like in the search bar within the browser, within the browser, and Mozilla gets paid. Right?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:03:40] So this is in a nutshell. But of course there are different revenue streams within that. So there are sponsored tabs you can search things and so on and so forth. So there are different ways of kind of getting money back to Mozilla.

David Leary: [00:03:51] Interesting. And is Mozilla a nonprofit I think. Didn't it go through some cycles of being like a public company private. And is it a nonprofit like what is the current entity of Mozilla?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:04:01] Right. So thank you for this question. First of all, Mozilla was founded 25 years ago. So NetSuite and Mozilla celebrating both 25th anniversary this year. It's a big year. So Mozilla was founded in 1998. I believe if my math is correct, I'm an accountant. I cannot be wrong.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:21] Don't ask us to do math live on the show. It never works out.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:04:24] Really, really wanted to run. Well, I've.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:27] Got my computer here. I can pull up Excel and we can. We can do it fair.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:04:31] So Mozilla was founded 25 years ago by a group of engineers, actually the one that came out of Netscape. If you remember those times, I'm not sure if your listeners will remember that or not. Maybe some of them remember Netscape.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:46] It was a beautiful time.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:04:48] Yeah. So what they did, essentially they open sourced Netscape. And this is how Firefox came to life. And first of all, it was a mostly, you know, the product that was made out of a good. Will and good heart and but all the good will and good heart has to be maintained with a little bit of cash, because we need cash to pay for things, and even for coffee or for a drink. We we need that. And we accountants love cash, of course. So of course we needed to find sources of revenue. So we partnered with different, different companies. And one of them of course was was Google. But we are not partnered with Google exclusively. We also partner with Bing. We also have partnership with other other folks around the industry. So Mozilla. So first of all, the so first part is making money from search. And another thing, we also have products that are subscription based such as Mozilla VPN. We also acquired read it later pocket about 567 years ago something like that.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:53] Pocket the the app. Yeah the app. Yeah yeah I used to use pocket use it.

David Leary: [00:05:57] Yeah.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:05:57] So maybe you're paying for pocket. Yes. And if you are using a VPN you're probably paying for Mozilla VPN. So all these all these fantastic products are have an account which is integrated with Firefox. So if you log in into your browser and create your account within Firefox, then you would also be able to use this account for pocket, use this account for VPN and other Mozilla products that kind of come along. So we do have a little bit of money over there, but of course it's all the majority of the set is search business, search.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:31] Business and some subscriptions.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:06:33] Subscriptions, a little bit of advertising, revenue of sponsored advertising on pocket and so on.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:40] So so we're here to talk about Net suite where it's Suite World. So we got to ask and I ask this of every guest. If you had to say on a scale of 0 to 100%, how much of the suite you are using, how much of the suite is is Mozilla using?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:07:00] Well, we just went live in January, so this is our 1010 month of being live in. Net suite. Okay. And I'm came to this conference to learn what can I do more. So I was the one who was leading the implementation project together with my team. That's been a wild ride I would say so, but I'm so grateful for us all pulling this through. That's just amazing team effort.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:23] So how long have you been at Mozilla? For three years. Three years. Okay, so you came in and they did not have. Net suite. Right. And you decided we got to do this right. What was Mozilla using before.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:07:34] Sage Intacct.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:35] Okay. And why why did you switch.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:07:37] Well Sage Intacct is a great system I would say. However it was not suitable for the growing business needs essentially. So we needed to have a bit more visibility. We needed to have a bit more transparency, ability to drill down to transaction in and take informed decisions. What we're doing right now together with our colleagues, so county and essentially all organization partner with a strategic project called product. We want to understand what exactly is our product, a profit per product and what expenses there for this particular product given Mozilla revenue model, of course, we do have a lot of money from Firefox, but we also want to invest in strategic initiatives in innovation. And as each innovation, each node, the products, they they require money first. So essentially you put money there maybe not profitable for a while, but then this is a thing where you can develop and that can be a source of revenue for Mozilla going forward.

David Leary: [00:08:34] So started there three years ago. No. Net suite at that time. So did you have previous experience with. Net suite because I imagine to roll it out and basically two years you had to start on day one. You made the decision. So did you have a previous experience?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:08:50] Well it was even more interesting than that. I didn't have previous experience with Net suite. I had a little bit of experience implementing one of the modules of system called Business World Unit for in my previous company. I worked for Getyourguide before, but it was very brave and very motivated. And if you're talking about two years, that's not how it started. We decided to implement. Net Suite in July and we went live in January. So it's been done in five months. Wow. By the team of five, six people that were having their accounting responsibilities on top, led by me, very, you know, ambitious, brave, but non-technical person and of course supported by my manager and the rest of the team over there. But we we didn't have like a project manager, we didn't have a technical resource from Mozilla, but we had great support from NetSuite professional services. And I'm forever grateful to her, to some people from that team, that actually kind of helped us to build off the project.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:48] So getting back to the original question, which is how much of the suite are you using? Which modules have you implemented so far?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:09:55] So, so far we're using the basic financial model. Then advanced revenue management I think it's called advanced revenue management.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:02] That's for the rev rec right.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:10:03] Rev rec. Yeah that we we're using fixed assets and. I think that's pretty much it essentially for now.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:12] And any plans to expand? You said you were here to learn more.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:10:16] Yes, I'm definitely here to learn more. What I'm doing the majority of time is just kind of talking to people, trying to understand how they're using NetSuite, what is working, what is not working. I'm trying to kind of talk to partners that are offering services that are on top of NetSuite to understand, okay, this is what you're offering. That means that might not be working very well with NetSuite or NetSuite might go, let's say 80%, and there's another 20% that could be fixed with this solution. But my like the interesting conversation that I have is just going around the lunch table with other folks that are saying, listen, we're just doing this. So I was just having my lunch and I just found out that NetSuite rolled out E-invoicing module that was signed with Avalara last week. So this is what you found. So I rushed to Avalara and said, okay, how can we do this? And they said, no, this is actually NetSuite. So when I'm going back, I'm planning to reach out to our account rep and just kind of discuss what can we do there. And probably that could be a solution for us. Speaking about automation, you know, the old fashioned way is to type the invoice in. The newer way is to use the OCR. So just kind of recognize characters from the PDF and so on. But the new new way is actually to use the E-invoicing with invoice is actually flow into your system without the need of OCR. So I'm very excited about that. It's very early to talk about it, but that's something I'll be looking into.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:46] E-invoicing here in the United States is almost nonexistent. It's not something the government mandates. And so we are at best sending PDFs back and forth via email. But it's different in Europe and the rest of the world. A lot of companies have moved to this e-invoicing system. Can you describe how that works for our listeners?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:12:09] Um, to be fair, we still haven't implemented it in Mozilla. I haven't used it before, but as I said, I'm very brave and I'm willing to try new things.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:18] Well, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but like, the way I envision it working is, let's say you have a supplier or a vendor that's on NetSuite or even another ERP system. When they send the invoice, their invoice becomes a bill in your system just seamlessly the system.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:12:37] Is that how it's supposed to work? Yeah. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:39] Yeah, that would be kind of amazing if we had that.

David Leary: [00:12:41] But I think that's the promise. But then the way things the Mozilla's open source tries to play fair sense of community. And of course, a lot of the accounting systems, they're going to often play nice with each other to move these back and forth. They're going to have they're going to happen. We'll see. Can be tricky.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:00] So how did you end up at Mozilla?

Speaker4: [00:13:02] Um, so before.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:13:04] Mozilla, I used to work at Getyourguide, and I think that was a great company to join at the time. What was it called? Get your guide. Get your guide. Yeah. Get your guide is a is a again it's a tech company but they're doing like tourist tech. So it's an app or website where you can just kind of go and book travel book experiences. It's a it was a really like early start up when I joined. So when I joined there were like 200 people, but within the four years that I've been with them, they grew up to more than 1000. So just a high growth. Yeah. Environment where one has to be bold and learn the skills of not being afraid of making a mistake and just do try new things, do this, do that. So it was a great place to work. However, during corona times, tourist industry was really majorly affected and then a kind of were thinking about new options and got to recruit a message that was pretty appealing. And then when they saw that this is Mozilla, I didn't hesitate to apply for a job and actually joined Mozilla.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:07] Were you in the Canary Islands living there at the time?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:14:11] No, I was living in Berlin.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:12] I have to go back to the Canary Islands thing because I'm just curious, like, why? Why do you? I know it's beautiful. I mean, I've heard about it. It is. Why do you live there, though? Like, why there instead of anywhere else in the world?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:14:21] My husband is from there.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:22] Oh, okay.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:14:23] Yeah, yeah. So it's a we have a little bit of mix in our family. I have two daughters, and neither of us in the family were born in the same place. So, as you know, I'm Ukrainian. My husband was actually born in Venezuela, but from parents who were from Canary Islands. So he is technically Spanish. But if you're born in Venezuela, you always stay Venezuela, I guess, or the Venezuela. My daughter was born in Barcelona, Spain, and then my second daughter was born in Berlin. So we are. Yeah, we traveled around a little bit and we are very a mix of people here in our family as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:03] If you prefer not to talk about it, we don't have to. But I must ask, like how how is the war in Ukraine affecting you?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:15:11] It's been tough. Of course it's been. It's been really challenging for the family, for friends. And there is some good stories in Silver Linings, some good stories, because Europe has offered a lot of support for Ukrainian refugees, especially Germany. For example, my mom since a year and a half lives in Berlin, so she's fully supported and taken care of from German government and really appreciate that because for her being, you know, 75 year old, you know, it's kind of different story. You cannot really do many things in your life. And so many people that are in her situation, they are afraid of change, afraid of travel, afraid of starting things somewhere else. So I guess, yeah, but I'm forever grateful to German government to kind of taking care of her. The people that I know personally, that started with me back in Ukraine. Many of them now live abroad in different places, but I think maybe 90% of them want to return back. Um. It's when you have already built your life. You have, I don't know, you have everything. Ukraine was a great place to live. Essentially. There are a lot of opportunities. People traveled. Of course, maybe Ukraine is not as rich as the United States, but still, economy was booming. There are opportunities. Remaking your life again from scratch sounds tough. And even like if you're also in a situation where you have maybe financial stability, you are comfortable, then kind of starting from scratch and there and being a refugee, feeling that, what do I do now? Do you learn language? Do you learn a new skill set? What about my kids? What about my husband left there to probably die. So that's that's that's stuff. Um, but yeah, I'm grateful for support that people are giving. And yeah, it's just very sad that happens.

David Leary: [00:17:14] So that kind of question about your team. So your team's remote international. And here in the States where there's an accounting crisis or globally there's an accounting crisis, like how are you staffing your team holes or using automation or AI? How are you kind of running your day to day operations in light of talent shortages?

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:17:32] Oh, that's a great question. It's true. It's really hard to hire an accountant. I guess our listeners, many of them are hiring or had this hiring experience. It's really hard to find talent around the world. I have my experience in German markets. So even when we publish a job offer saying, okay, and this is Mozilla, they know that's a great company to work for with the Values Manifesto. And we do offer great benefits and we do offer, I would say probably above the market salary to join us. But yeah, it's tough to do that. So the way we're doing it.

Speaker4: [00:18:10] Um, yeah.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:18:11] It's again posting on the job boards, as usual. Very traditional. We brought a recruiter from us to United, from United States to Germany to actually help us recruit from in and transmit that values, mental values and the motivation to the candidate directly versus going through a hiring agency. So that, I think, makes a difference, because we did hire some really good candidates. And then we also focus on high skill roles, because the way Mozilla accounting department is structured, we do have BPO services located in India. So those folks over there are real support for us. They're doing services. Services, services. And we also have payroll, which is kind of outside of my team but also there. So they're taking a lot of workload out of out of accounts that are located somewhere more closer to the Western world, let's say so. And this way, you know, we kind of make up for that part of it because if an accountant is talented, they always want to progress. They always want to be senior account and then accounting manager and so on. So they really want to move really fast forward in their position.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:19:21] So offering a workplace where people have meaningful jobs, where they really can see their impact is is the way to go now. And I don't want to say that the jobs of our colleagues back in India are not meaningful. They are, but they are also professionals that are just going to start in their career. They are out of university, they are just going to build in their first experience. And I really hope that the way we are, the relationship kind of goes with Mozilla because we treat them as our own team. They always say to us that we are their best customer in the relations that we build with them, help them to know more how their accounting functions and help them to grow in their careers. And I can give a positive example over there. So basically recently we promoted somebody to a senior accountant position in the BPO services, and that was unheard and unseen before because like I think that ignited a lot of folks there. So understanding that this is this is a place where they can grow and that their work is appreciated.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:23] So that's that's great. Wonderful. Well, Xenia, it has been a pleasure speaking to you. We have been talking with Xenia Topcic, head of global accounting operations at Mozilla here at Suite World. Great to see you.

Xenia Tovchykh: [00:20:38] Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.