Simon Rohbach is Co-Founder and CEO at Plain, the API-first platform which is designed to transform customer support for technology businesses.

Starting out as an apprentice at Switzerland’s largest telecommunications carrier in 2004, Simon moved to London in 2008 for an internship as a designer, before taking on freelance clients and eventually starting his own design consultancy.

He joined Deliveroo in 2014 as an early employee, as both their very first hire in tech and first designer. During his time there he saw the company undergo rapid growth, scaling extremely quickly from a team of just 10, to over 2000 by the time he left 4.5 years later (2019).

A natural leader, Simon soon became a member of Deliveroo’s senior management team taking on the role of Director of Content, Research & Design. Here, he was responsible for building and leading a 40-strong team of user researchers, content designers, product designers and managers.

In this role, Simon was accountable for the user experience of Deliveroo’s rider, restaurant, customer and employee-facing products across all platforms and locales globally. He also co-led the 2016 successful rebrand of Deliveroo, which rolled out in 12 countries around the world.

It was here that Simon was able to work with and learn from some world-class product and technology leaders, witnessing first-hand what it takes to build, run and scale a product organisation while undergoing extreme growth.

After leaving this role in 2019, Simon would go on to join Index Ventures as Mentor in Residence (also referred to as Executive in Residence) - for a 1 year residency that would draw on his existing experience to become a key advisor to their portfolio companies on building products and teams.

Following the residency at Index, Simon would then embark on his underlying ambition to start his own business**, co-founding Plain in 2020 alongside Matt Vagni, a founding member of Deliveroo's UI infrastructure team**. The business has now secured a $6m investment co-led by Connect Ventures and Index Ventures, with participation from several prominent angel investors.

While working for Deliveroo and with other companies throughout his career, Simon frequently saw operational teams such as customer service, struggling with inefficiencies in tooling that would have taken someone in engineering a relatively short time to fix. For example, a button not being where it needed to be, or a piece of data taking 10 clicks or more to get to.

While these inefficiencies can seem low-cost, Simon recognised these individual issues compound when a business is starting to scale, and can therefore have a huge impact on the speed of growth, and the happiness of the teams and customers.

As a natural problem-solver who strongly believes in the business benefits of design as a discipline, Simon was able to see clearly how he could create something that has the ability to very directly impact how tools, and thereby organisations, work. It was this that inspired Simon to co-found Plain.

At Plain, everyone on the team has a technical background, including the co-founders. They intend to build an intentionally small team for as long as they can, so they can focus on building an excellent product at the same time as creating ****a good company and strong business.

As CEO and co-founder, Simon has created Plain to enable customer service teams to have the best tools in their companies, the best equipment, and the most support from everyone else. His ultimate goal with the company is for there to be a very clear before and after moment in customer support tools. Ultimately, Simon believes that Plain should be a company that other companies look to emulate.