Xero Annual Meeting 23 July 2014 – Questions?

Xero’s annual meeting will be held at 4pm on 23 July in Wellington.

I cannot attend this year and there does not appear to be an Auckland repeat, so I thought it would be an idea to put together some questions that I would put to the board of Xero. (and maybe, just maybe obtain some responses from Rod either at the AGM or prior 🙂 )

  1. Competition is heating up in the online accounting space both locally and globally. How does Xero, both now and in the future, differentiate itself from its competitors? Especially compared with Intuit and QBO in the US. What is your point of difference?
  2. Culture in the workplace. Xero has grown very quickly over the past few years both with paying users and the number of team members. How do you retain the ‘small startup/everyone mucks in’ culture when the company has this extreme growth? Is it a challenge to retain some of the team?
  3. Xero has a very open API so third parties can connect to the accounting engine with relative ease. Where do you see the future for this to continue for Xero? And is there any intention to buy companies/systems to add to the suite of Xero services? This is in light of Intuit in the US buying Invitbox, an accounts payable processing system.
  4. There is a lot of noise in social media especially on Twitter around Cloud Accounting with different vendors. Do you have a company policy with engaging with competitors? ‘Discussions’ around their products and/or pointing out limitations? Is it not a dangerous game to go down this road?

What other questions would you add?