Episode Details

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Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO of Xero, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why cracking the US took twenty years and an acquisition despite Xero being the more open, cheaper alternative to Intuit, why she treats “respected vs. liked” as a false choice a new CEO has to reject on day one, and why the biggest threat to a twenty-year-old platform isn’t a faster competitor but the capital and infrastructure it takes to replicate what that platform already owns.

About XeroXero is a global small business platform serving over 5 million customers across 180 countries, providing cloud-based accounting, payments, and payroll software for small businesses and their advisers.

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During this episode, we also cover the strategy behind narrowing Xero’s US focus from “5 million customers” to a single unicorn-revenue number, how a survey of Xero’s own customer base splits into a majority still non-native to AI and a fast-growing minority already building on the company’s APIs (4x since January), and why Airtable selling for $1.2B on $450M in revenue is the cautionary tale for the current market.

As we know, layoffs happen across many companies, and Xero was no exception. Six weeks after joining as CEO, Sukhinder laid off 700–800 employees. We get into how she ran the numbers and surveys, and why she believes accountants will outlast the “Claude will just tell you the answer” argument because human judgment and advice still matter.

We close on why she’d rather be model-agnostic than bet the business on a single AI partner, what a week actually looks like running a 5,000-person public company, and how she keeps a fiercely scheduled career next to a deliberately unscheduled personal life.

Available everywhere you listen to podcasts: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

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Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Sukhinder Singh Cassidy(2:17) The Current State of Xero(5:35) Why America Was So Hard to Crack(10:05) Why It's Important to Focus(12:55) Joining Xero as CEO(16:40) Being Respected vs. Liked(22:57) How to Prepare for a Layoff(27:30) Being a Publicly Listed Company CEO(30:07) The State of SMBs(33:30) Thinking How to Partner with AI Models(

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