Veriff Welcomes Guy Zerega and Opens New York Office
Veriff welcomes Guy Zerega, a former Executive Vice President of Revenue of Stack Overflow. Zerega serves as the Senior Vice President of Sales at Veriff being in charge of building the company’s global sales organization and business expansion. He will also be leading Veriff’s New York Office.
Karita Sall
“I am super excited to be here at Veriff. It’s pleasant to see that a company as young as Veriff is so far along. I see great potential for the company - its product is awesome, and I am really excited to see it improve. When I think about the world in a couple of years’ time, I believe the idea of online verification will become commonplace. We would think how funny that it did not exist until now. That’s really how I see the potential for Veriff, and how that’s going to dramatically change the online verification process.”
An advocate of trust
Guy is a strong believer in trust. In the light of cybersecurity issues and massive online fraud, the precondition for the online verification to work is to have trust. Companies have over time taken trust for granted and that is a mistake. Often, online fraud is referred to as a five percent tax on businesses. Businesses worldwide bear losses of about $200 billion every year due to identity theft. Moreover, 60% of consumers worldwide report having experienced online fraud.
Guy believes that without trust there’s nothing, there are no relationships. Trust is the foundation upon which all relationships are built.
“Most intimate relationships are built on trust, and the same thing is true of businesses and customers but also with your team and your colleagues - there has to be trust. When I think about Veriff, I think of trust and that’s something I can get behind and get excited about. That was really the pivotal thing that made me attracted to Veriff, in addition to the team - I recognized early on that I could work well with these people."
In tech without being a tech-head
Guy has been working in tech for most of his career. The last 8 years he was working for Stack Overflow based in New York. He was the Executive Vice President of Revenue of Stack Overflow, a programmer-specific Q&A portal, where developers can ask their programming related questions by combining the idea of a Q&A site with voting and editing. Regardless of his long history with tech companies, Guy thinks of himself as one of the least technical people that you’ll ever meet, and people often find it funny when they hear this.
“The thing that initially attracted me to tech is it is ever-changing and how technology continues to impact our lives in very dramatic ways. I am a person who cannot sit still well and because of that, the rapid changes within tech align perfectly with my personality - who I am, the way I am and think about things.”
Guy also has a very strong altruistic streak and is always looking to improve things for those around him. This philosophy syncs nicely, “With Veriff there’s also an altruistic component as well. The combination of its mission and stellar tech has made Veriff a perfect match and I couldn’t imagine working at any other company or in any other industry right now.”
Building global businesses
Guy was the 38th employee at Stack Overflow. When he started, there were 3 salespeople at Stack and today, the company has three lines of revenue and a total of 135 salespeople across the world. When at Stack Overflow he shortly recognized that the company had the potential to become a truly global company as roughly two-thirds of the traffic came outside of the United States.
“It seemed crazy not to have any presence outside of the US. So one of the first things we did was to open an office in London. Over time we recognized that our German market was very strong, so we opened an office in Munich. In between, we also opened an office in Denver, Colorado. As I have experience in opening new offices, market expansion, creating distributed working effort, I am very much looking forward to expanding Veriff’s global reach.“
When you are thinking of building and scaling a sales organization in any company, you want to build that organization to reflect the market that it’s serving. “There’s a degree of product-market fit exploration happening. Obviously, there’s a product-market fit with the fintech space, but what are other industries, will Veriff’s services be applicable, and understanding those needs and building the infrastructure to meet those needs will be a critical component of my mandate.”
Go-to standard of the industry
All in all, our goal is to make Veriff the preferred vendor in the industry and become the go-to standard of the industry. When you are scaling a sales organization in any company, you need to understand the customer journey - what customers go through in order to buy the product, what is the offering and based on that, building support for every step of the way. That means from awareness to pre-sale, sale, post-sale, to renewal, to growth - all these stages.
“For this to work seamlessly, you have to have the correct personnel in place to support the customer so that when they hear Veriff, they know Veriff is the best company to do business within as it relates to particular product and sector.”
