Fireside Chat #3: Scaling to $2B+: Lessons from Silicon Valley with Kevin Francis & Ganzorig Ulziibayar

Last Monday we hosted our third Fireside Chat, Scaling to $2B+: Lessons from Silicon Valley, at Kryptos in Ulaanbaatar. Thank you to the 95 founders, executives, and technology leaders who registered for the event.

It was an honour to share the stage with Kevin Francis and Ganzorig Ulziibayar. Kevin’s career tracks three defining waves of enterprise technology:

Oracle: Joining in 1996 as the commercial internet emerged, he built an exceptional 12-year track record, rising from individual contributor to Vice President of CRM.

Workday: As enterprise cloud and SaaS came to life, he joined the sales leadership team as Vice President. He helped steer the company through hypergrowth: scaling from 300 people and $25M in revenue to over $2B in ARR and 10,000 employees across his tenure.

Salesforce amp; Beyond: As Senior Vice President of Sales at Salesforce and later Chief Revenue Officer, he led through the next frontier of enterprise AI and modern go-to-market execution.

‣ A few of Kevins lessons that stayed with me:
‣ Timing matters with new technologies
‣ Follow good leaders, and surround yourself with people smarter than you
‣ Play the long game, and dont chase bright, shiny objects
‣ Take calculated risks, like leaving an established giant like Oracle for an early-stage
Workday
‣ Scaling means moving from founder-led sales to disciplined process and structure
‣ In the age of AI, you need a moat beyond traditional product differentiation

We also talked about how GTM has evolved in the US, and the real potential for Mongolian startups and tech companies to win customers globally. Kevin noted how exciting it was to be in Mongolia, and the energy in the room reflected that right back.

Ganzorig, Founder amp; Chairman of Mandal Financial Group and author of Strategy is Attitude, made a point I keep returning to: for investors, the single most critical factor is backing the right founder. He also challenged the ecosystem to think bigger, that Mongolia has the talent to build its own AI models and take them to the global market.

Thank you to the Fibo Cloud team and everyone who made the evening possible. See you at the next one!