Eric Boduch of Venture Studio 24 and Up and Revcast joins Nick to discuss Scaling Unicorn Pendo, When to Hire Your First Sales Leader, How To Construct a Team Pre and Post PMF, and How to Balance Stretch vs. Strain. In this episode we cover:
- Pendo’s Origin, Product Development, and Customer Acquisition
- Product Market Fit, Growth Strategies and Team Composition for Early-Stage SaaS Startups
- Hiring and Company Culture at a Fast-Growing Startup
- Building and Optimizing Revenue Organizations – Metrics and Assumptions
- AI’s Impact on Software, Dashboarding and Agent Orchestration
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0:18
Eric Boduch joins us today Raleigh, NC. He’s the Founder and CEO of venture studio 24 and Up and the founder of Revcast, a startup developed within the studio. Revcast is a software company that focuses on enhancing revenue performance for businesses. Prior to Revcast and 24 and Up, he founded unicorn company Pendo, which helps businesses understand and improve their digital products. Eric, welcome to the show!
0:45
Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.
0:47
Yeah, we’d love to maybe we can start with a quick overview of 24 and up and rev cast. Sure,
0:52
absolutely. I can start with 24 and up, since you know, in essence, that’s where rev crest was created. 24 and UPS a venture studio. What that means is, we create companies alongside entrepreneurs the way, and there’s a lot of different types of studios. The way our studio operates, it tends to be a build studio. So we’ll provide engineering help, design help, product strategy, work. My time in working with an entrepreneur to take an idea that, you know, quote, unquote, might be on the back of a napkin, like they always used to talk about, and turn it into a product first and then eventually a company. So we’ll do about two to four companies a year. Probably I would say two to three is kind of the sweet spot, working hand in hand with an entrepreneur. You can really think of the studio as a co founder in conjunction with the founding CEO. It gives me an opportunity to, you know, do the early stage work that I really enjoy over and over again. So it feel, definitely feels an itch of mine and an area I’m passionate about, and it’s just a lot of fun working with early stage entrepreneurs and helping them, you know, create and build something for nothing is very fulfilling. So we’d love to, you know, see a couple pendos, you know, out of the 24 and up studio some, you know, big, successful companies, that’s our that’s our goal. That’s how we’re oriented. As far as red cast, that was our first studio company. It came out of an idea that I had when I was at Pendo, you know, just thinking about how revenue organizations are built. And at the time, the big challenge was on quota, right? How do you make sure you have enough quota on the street? How do you manage hiring and attrition? How do you structure your teams? And it’s greatly expanded since then, as the markets changed, where we’ve, you know, obviously moved away from a market that was zero interest rate and growth at all costs, to now an environment where growth is still tantamount, but it’s efficient measured growth that’s important. You can’t just throw money at the growth problem so products like rev cast, which are really optimization solutions, become tantamount. Like, how do you optimize every last dollar you have that you’re spending in your go to market, your revenue organization, to make sure it’s delivering, you know what you need? Awesome.
3:05
And Pendo is a name that many of us are familiar with. Can you take us back and tell us a bit about the origin of Pendo?
3:13
Yeah, absolutely, it was. It was definitely a fun origin. So going back even a little farther, you know, Todd and I, the CEO of Pendo and one of my co founders, we had worked at a startup together right out of school. We both went to Carnegie Mellon University. Both had computer engineering degrees and worked at a startup, you know, career well, created a startup together right out of school. So this is, you know, back to, you know, 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago now and then kind of one of our separate ways, at least business wise, we always were really close friends, you know, best friends. And, you know, always had talked about starting another company together, and then the timing ended up being right for us to do something together. And we sat down and said, Well, what should we build? And went through a number of different ideas. So we actually almost started down the path of a company that would be very like, very much like an Anna plan. But that area wasn’t a passion area of ours. You know, neither of us had financial careers or finance careers, right? So settled on what became Pendo and then recruited the rest of the team, the founding team for that. Raul joined us pretty quickly. Thrown a couple of months later, and that was the founding team for Pendo.
4:26
Awesome. And was there a key pivot along the way? You know, was there, was there a turning point for Pendo, where you went from, you know, experimentation to oh, now we have something that’s really working. You know,
4:39
a lot of times there are these pivots and changes. Like you hear like, oh, you know, every good company needs like, one or two good pivots. No, oddly, in the early days, as far as that goes, was just up into the right, right from the beginning it, you know, we hit a spot that that customers really liked, and we were building product for. Ourselves. All four of the co founders had a product background. We hand hired a great head of product on top of that really early on, Shannon Bauman, who’s ex Google, and we didn’t hold that against him. And Shannon was driving product direction too. So we had all we had, we had a lot of expertise in the space and building product for ourselves. And I think we just hit a natural need at the right time. You know, product management was becoming increasingly important. The role of companies was becoming increasingly important. The visibility of companies was becoming increasingly important. They didn’t really have budget, and that was one of the the issues a lot of VCs who had looked at us early on, you know, questioned, but they were able to find budget. Because when you think about selling to people trying to build software, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s the lifeblood of their business. It’s the most important thing is building, you know, them building software their customers want, I will pay for. We found it relatively easy for product managers to get, to get budget right, to be able to go to the CEO and say, Hey, I really want to use Pendo. And this is why, and then we would have CEOs get engaged, because oftentimes at software companies, especially smaller ones, they’re really hands on with product direction, product strategy. So we never had really had any hard pivots. We expanded pretty early, you know, we started out, you know, actually doing analytics with this whole idea that, you know, product managers, was really difficult to get information about how your product was being used. You had to put engineers on it, to do, to instrument it. And from the get go, our story was, you know, get data without instrumentation, without engineering. Just put the snippet of code in, and then you can see everything everyone does inside of your product, which I think is a really powerful statement, but we expanded that really quick, because a lot of it was like, hey, it’s great to know what people are doing, but how do we act on it? You know, one of the cases I remember early on was with us internally where, like, some of our customers were struggling to set up a staging server, not because it was hard, but because they just didn’t know where in the product, you know, what was the navigation path the UX to get there? And so we’re like, oh, it’d be great if we could take the data where we see they’re struggling on this path, and, you know, make some immediate action, as opposed to waiting to fix the product and make it easier, fix the user experience. And so, you know, we went down this path then of adding guides, like using data to drive guides, and combining those things together, where we could see that people are struggling, and therefore show them a guide that says, in order to set up a staging server, here’s the five steps and walk you through it. So the combination that expansion, I wouldn’t call it a pivot, but it was definitely an early expansion, and then we built a broad product right, very focused on product managers and very focused in the beginning on people building commercial product, and then expanded from there into, you know, people not only building commercial product, but people building product at, say, a traditional business like Bank of America or a Home Depot. And then expanded to the flip side of that coin, you know, with our last product offering, adopt our, I shouldn’t say our last, our second big product offering, because they’ve added a bunch of stuff since then. But adopt is the flip side of that coin. Like you have packaged software, how do you help your users use it better? You’re spending 10 million on packaged software, you know, don’t you want to make sure that, you know, they can get things done more efficiently, more effectively. So that whole guidance and data technology now applied to how people use the software they might have bought from others, and then the original mainstay of Pendo helping people build software that their customers love, that’s easy to use, that’s, you know, effective and efficient in allowing their users to get their jobs done.
8:39
How did you acquire customers in the early days? You know? What did go to market look like
8:43
in the very, very early days? It was all like network, word of mouth and some small events. We did a lot of work with product camps in the very early days, those kind of conferences where we go, we’d speak at them, you know, we’d have a little, you know, table. They were usually on Saturdays, you know. So, like I went to, I don’t know, probably 20 in the first two or three years, right? So a lot of weekends I was other places, you know, whether it’s Atlanta or Vancouver, both of which had great product camps. Texas, Austin, there’s Chicago, there’s there’s a lot of those around, and they were a great source of conversations with early customers. We did a lot of back then, Twitter was kind of effective, and our early price points were pretty low, so we had a lot, started a lot of conversations, I know I did directly with product managers that was like, Hey, this is what we’re working on. This is what we’re doing. We’d love to show it to you, trying to drive people to demos. Back then, Google Analytics was really effective for us in kind of the early days, or, sorry, not Google Analytics, Google AdWords, was really effective for us in the early days. As far as driving traffic, I don’t know that it’s nearly as effective today. It’s kind of a it feels like a saturated, expensive marketplace. But then to our community in particular, it was, it was effective for us. But I think. A lot of it was networks, speaking, getting out there in the world, supplemented by digital both social and digital advertising. And then we started to do a lot of content. Eric,
10:10
how did you know when you reach product market fit? With Penda,
10:14
that’s a tough question, right? Like, what is product market fit? I think April Dunford says it doesn’t exist, right? Like, people can argue about this whole amorphous concept, yes, you know, product market fit. So I mean, if I define it as, like, when you felt like there’s really a market there, you know, for us, you know, it was probably about a year and a half in that we saw good signs of product market fit. But I mean from incorporation, so probably, like six, six months, maybe after we started selling product, you know, and it’s when things just start to get easy, if that makes sense, or a lot easier, like, if you’re early on, and every deal feels like a huge battle, not, not against competition, because I think that’s a different piece of it, but against this inertia, like, are they gonna even buy anything or do anything? You know, if everything feels like a huge battle there, then I don’t know that you have product market fit. But when that feels smooth, when they’re like, oh, yeah, of course we should do something like this, or, of course we need to solve that problem. Or, I love what you guys are doing here. You know, then it feels a lot like, like that product market fit. When that, when there’s this ease of sale, so to speak, and whether that sale is to you or to a competitor, I think there’s a there’s a different aspect when you think about the competitive scenario. But if, if they’re buying a solution for what you’re doing, or if they’re buying you know, your product, or a competing product that offers a similar solution, you know, I think those both count as product markets that, obviously you want it to be yours, but so you
11:45
founded a company that ultimately became a unicorn. I can’t imagine that’s, you know, an easy task, and I suspect that you and the team did a lot right along the way. What would you say was the biggest mistake that you made?
12:00
You know, startups are hard. I mean, of all the mistakes, I mean, you’re inevitably going to make when you’re growing quickly, people mistakes. We definitely made some of those, you know, the wrong person, wrong time, you know, I think we got to put in some more, you know, infrastructure early on, on, in particular, on the revenue side, just about visibility. Now, we had an amazing revenue leader, Chaz, guarantee no our first head of sales. And he’s like, I couldn’t recommend anyone more highly for that first leader in the revenue side than Chaz. He was an absolute rock star. But I do think on the on the plan side, you know, and how we how we built the organization, not not just revenue, but go to market as a whole. And I was running marketing at that point, I think we could have modeled things a little tighter so we knew exactly where our constraints are, you know. Like, where should we spend another dollar? Should it be on a BDR? Should it be on marketing? Should it be on a quota carrying sales rep? We had some exceptionally talented people. So in spite of maybe having some of that infrastructure, we were very successful. So, but I think we could have done more there, you know, and that was some of the idea of you hadn’t, you know, rev cast, right? It’s like, how do you build a revenue organization that really understands your constraints? You know, if you don’t have enough leads, you know, why hire another quick carrier, right? Or vice versa, you know, where’s the next dollar best spent? And to do that properly if they have a really holistic view of the capabilities, the different pieces of the organization and then all the assumptions,
13:26
right? When is the right time to hire your first sales leader? Definitely
13:30
after, I would say you have product market fit, right? And going back to that ambiguous, right, it’s probably you know even more you know, thinking about it from a software SaaS perspective, it’s probably at least a million dollars of of ARR. It could be a little bit sooner we hired it sooner. So I kind of caveat that it’s when those sales feel like they’re smooth and easy and they’re replicable, right? So, you know, saying a million, if you’re doing a million of ARR, it’s probably because you have something that you understand the ICP pretty well, your initial customer profile, you under understand the messaging that works, and you’re able to get those deals done relatively easily, you know, and the product delivers the value. I think that’s a good way to look at it, like, do you have the right you know, customer profile you’re going after? Does it resonate with them? Is your story resonating with them? Is your product fulfilling their needs? And are deal flows relatively smooth? And I would say a lot of times, you know that’s that probably is around the Million Dollar Point, you know that, that you feel really comfortable with it. I think we, we had, we had product market fit, probably around that point at Pendo too, that we had feelings of it earlier, and we definitely hired the sales leader earlier. It’s it’s not to say that that’s a bad thing, but it does if you have to change. It’s a lot harder changing a team of, you know, 15 with a sales leader and an 80 or two than it is changing a team of six, where I think people expect a lot of change in the early days. So. I think you need to get to that, that product market fit point. You probably need to get, you know, that first million dollars of ARR and I think in today’s world, there’s no reason not to approach it that way. So,
15:11
so you’ve built companies, you’re building companies, you know, you’re running companies. In your estimation, what do you think the team composition should look like early on, let’s say pre product market fit. I
15:22
mean, I think a lot of it comes down to what you’re building. But you know, if we’re talking about SaaS software, my perspective is it’s heavily build oriented, product oriented. So that might be, you know, two or three engineers ahead of product a designer. Maybe I do. I’m a big fan of good user experience and user design. So I think having a designer involved early, if you can afford to, is amazing, as opposed to outsourcing it, because you start building that, that expertise and that motion, that muscle memory in house, you know, I’m a big fan of having design in house as early as you can. And then beyond that, you know, it’s people selling the product. So, and that’s generally, you know, the founder, CEO, maybe another founder on the marketing side, you know, maybe an early marketing person that that is, is helping sell. But I would say, you know, it’s pretty lean team. We’re talking, you know, six ish people give or take. You know, early on, I think, is allows you to move a lot faster, and also sets expectations that you’re still figuring things out. You start getting too big and and people think that things have been figured out. And then it naturally when you have to make changes the majority of the time, it just then just becomes, you know, harder, where people are like, Oh, they’re like, is something wrong with the business? And like, no, it’s just natural that you have to make a have to make adjustments. But when you have a team that becomes quote, unquote sizable, you have to worry about, do people feel disenchanted as morale go down because you make adjustments, or can’t grow as quickly as you want? Eric,
16:57
you mentioned you made mistakes in the hiring process. Give us maybe your best insight, or some of your best insights on hiring after, you know, going through the scale and growth process that you did at Pendo, yeah.
17:09
I mean, I think everyone makes mistakes in the hiring process. You just try to minimize the ones. I mean, if everyone, if someone, tells you, every single person I’ve hired has worked out, I think they’re, yeah, they’re lying to you. So, I mean, I think that’s the hardest thing about startups in general. One of you know, I always put a lot of value on culture, but I don’t think I understood fully the importance of culture until the Pendo experience in the growth, right? We went, at one point, we went from 4014 people to 30 people in like 40 days or 30 days, it’s really fast. And I think the fact that we had a good, strong set of core values, we had a good, strong set of company principles, we had a good feeling of culture already at the 14 people stage allowed us to do that. I think it would have been very hard otherwise. But I think people had a rubric, so to speak, to measure not only a person’s skills against but whether they were going to fit culturally and culturally in the company, whether they’re going to help, you know, drive things forward, or whether they were going to create friction in the engine, just from, you know, do they think about things the same way? And in particular, we had a value about customer focus, and I think that we made sure, when we’re hiring people, that they really fully understood, I mean, the rest of them definitely, too. But the customer focus, I think, was an important one. Because not, I mean, not saying a company has to be that way. And in particular, I think we’re we described as obsessive about the customer, but we would go out of our way to make our customers happy, you know, do whatever it took to make our customers happy, and that instilled a lot of our approach in product direction and how we grew the company, and all of those kinds of things. And I don’t know that. I mean, you’re gonna say, oh, you know, you don’t want to hire someone that’s not customer focused, but there’s trade off decisions there. I mean, I think about some of the, you know, if you take an extreme example, the mobile gaming kind of thing. So like, if there’s, like, make a little bit more money off of charging people for things, or keep my customer happy, or they’re going to chose the money one, right, you know. So, I mean, it’s part of that business model. And a lot of the companies are that way, where we might, you know, we might make the difficult decisions of saying, Hey, we’re going to make right by this customer, even though we don’t have to. Maybe it’s something that they did wrong, but we’re going to help make it right, even though it’s going to cost us money. Right. So I think you know to have values. You have to have in product principles, too. If you think about it from a product decision, there has to be a reasonable chance that you could be on either side of that. And so we set up a core set of values that you could make an argument that doing the opposite is just as good, but the people we wanted were going to be doing a instead of B. Eric,
19:54
when it comes to challenging yourself and challenging an early stage team. With, you know, big, audacious goals and outcomes. How do you balance stretch versus strain? You know, in other words, how do you how do you set goals that are very challenging but but attainable versus unrealistic? You
20:16
know, I think Todd was a lot better about that than I was. Just to some extent, I used to just hire the right people, and I would stack rank things, and I’d be like, Hey, here’s the 20 things I’d love to do. I know we only can get 10 done. Let’s do them in this order, and let’s see how. Or I shouldn’t even say, I would say we only can get 10 done. I know we can’t get them all done. Let’s see how many of them we can get through. Right? And not everyone agreed with that philosophy early on, at least from other companies. But you know, I mean, because there’s always something to do, no one ever felt like they were done, but it definitely challenged and stretched people by doing that. You know, Todd always used to ask a little bit for the impossible. I don’t know that that was bad, but I think more than anything else in the in the stretch versus strain is if you have a team that is aligned, you know, from a cultural perspective, a drive perspective and ambition, perspective of where and where they want to get to, or where they want to bring the company to you naturally will push each other. And I think that creates a lot of the stretch, you know, just trying to make sure that if, like, you know, Chaz is crushing it on the sales side, and delivering and closing all the deals you know that we hand over on marketing. How do we get them more right? Like, and there’s this natural back and forth of wanting to be the person that’s the strongest player on the team, or, at a minimum, at least not feeling like you’re holding the team back, right? And so I think that stretches people out when you have people that are naturally aggressive about wanting to, you know, crush their their goals. Eric, you
21:46
know, there’s, there’s a lot of content these days describing exactly how to build and optimize your revenue organization. Clearly, you’ve had some efforts there through rev, cast and in previous experiences. You know, I’m curious, how do you respond to frameworks that worked a couple years ago and are now sort of suggested as as the standard for success?
22:08
I would argue that there’s really not, there’s not a lot of frameworks out there like the couple years ago. Philosophy was like, just keep hiring AES as quickly as you can. That’s right, throw as much money at marketing as you can. You know, a lot of companies didn’t have the metrics and and you know, even some of the bigger companies didn’t, you know, it was amazing how how little visibility they had into the assumptions that made up the backbone of their plan. So while I think at the high level, there’s a lot of metrics like, this is what your CAC should be, or this is what your LTV or CAC should be, or this is what your growth should be. A lot of those were goals, not operational metrics, right? It was like, Okay, well, how do we get there? What are the assumptions that make up your cost of customer acquisition? You know? What drives you that? And I think that level of detail was never really in place in the vast majority of companies, and even today, I think people struggle with it. It it was like, Okay, you’re gonna grow from one to four, you know, do you have the quota capacity? And people like, Well, I think so, you know, you hear a lot about that, or, like, I’ll see people’s plans. And they’re like, here’s our here’s how the head count. We’re gonna add next year, you know. And they, you know, are do the math behind the quota and the percentage attainment they might need and and make sure that the quotas make sense. And then you see that they have no attrition. Like, they’re they’re like, Yeah, we didn’t have anyone quit last year when we were two SES, and now we’re going to be six. We don’t think we’re not going to model in anything, or we’re even worse, it was six last year. We lost a couple people, but this next year we’re not losing anybody. So, like, I think a lot of the details around that aren’t there. People don’t come back and think about, like, things like sales ramp. Like, you know, if Bobby sues crushing her number for the last two years, quits and you replace her with a new person, she’s that new person, him or her is not going to be as good right away. You know, might never be as good. So, like, how do you model that in there properly? And then, how do you track these assumptions over time? Because you think about it team by team, I have, you know, hiring assumptions, I have attrition assumptions, I have quota assumptions, I have ramp time assumptions, I have attainment assumptions against there, and that’s just on the quota side. Then you have the pipeline side, like, how much pipeline is coming from my reps? How much is coming from my SDRs? What’s my marketing contribution? Is that evenly spread across territory, because, you know, marketing gives me $2 million a pipeline, which is what I want, but it’s all for the West Coast team, then the East Coast, you know, then I have over capacity in West Coast and not enough capacity in East so I would argue we didn’t do almost all of that. And when we did do it, because it was done in spreadsheets and it was really hard to do, we would do it once and be like, well, we’ll check in on it every quarter, year, whatever. And oftentimes they didn’t even adjust, you know, future plans based on results. You know, we would be like, Yeah, you know, we’ve never really looked at our ramp, right? We, we took an enterprise ramp, which was, you know, 000, 2550, 7500, or or what have you of your quota capacity. But we never actually looked. And said, Is that really true for us, right? So, like a lot of a lot of things, were more like, let’s hire great rainmakers. Let’s hire great closers. And money covered all of that up, right? Absolutely covered all of that. You need more demand. Throw a bunch of money at marketing. Hire some more. Go to carriers. Let’s push our BDR team. But I don’t think it was scientifically done. It wasn’t like manufacturing where you’re like, Well, we have these seven machines, and this is how the combination of them, you know, yields, you know, this number of different output products, right? We weren’t thinking about it that way. And it really needs to be thought of that way, right? You really need to be able to go and say, you know, $1 if I have an extra dollar to spend, this is where it should go, and this is why, and be able to back that up and then track those assumptions so
25:44
well, it’s like you, you address one bottleneck in the system, right? You scale up your machine capacity. All of a sudden it shifts to a different place in the chain. And like, Absolutely,
25:52
absolutely. And people are like, and often they change goals last minute, or like, well, I know we’re going to go 20% CEO came in and said, We want to grow 30% so I’m just going to hire another three AES. I’m like, Whoa, you know, you’re like, Whoa, hold back. What about the other constraints? You know, we didn’t even talk about the supporting staff before, like, like, do you have enough SES to support that? Is that a constraining factor, or do you actually have capacity? How are you adjusting? You know, your marketing demand gen, or your your sales demand, Gen organization, what segments should they go in? Like, you know, if you’re big enough company that you have different segments, either like, enterprise to corporate, or, you know, APAC to EMEA to United States, like, where is it best to hire them based upon capacity and where there’s more opportunity and others. So there’s a number of huge opportunities there to, like, optimize this, this system, and really rebuild how revenue organizations are built. And I think it’s good for the head of sales too, right? Head of Sales have always had short tenure, and they’re even shorter these days. And I think one of the reasons, well, I know one of the reasons they’re short is as a board member or as a CEO, even when they hit numbers, you’re kind of like, but he hit numbers, and he’s not sure why. So that’s starting like next year, the numbers a lot bigger. Do I trust him to deliver that? And that’s when they get layered on, right? It’s not often. It’s not even their performance. That means that, you know, we need to hire a CRO and, as opposed to promoting the VP of sales to CRO, it’s their understanding of the system, the process, the playbook, what their assumptions are, how to identify quickly when things are going wrong, how to build that confidence, not just in their sales team and their ability to close deals, but how they build their organization, and build that confidence that the CEO and the board has in them, that this is the right guy that we’re gonna bet on. And a lot of that isn’t about hitting numbers. A lot of that is about how they build their organization, 100%
27:48
thought process organization. There’s a lot of revenue leaders floating around that, you know, either take credit for the ramp or maybe they were the one replaced. It wasn’t working before the ramp, and it’s just absolutely, absolutely, it’s tight. It’s tough to parse that stuff. Eric is, is AI over hyped, or is it under hyped?
28:08
Yeah, this is a good question, because I think it the answer is probably both. And, you know, in the I think right now, we’re in transition where there’s a lot of people are saying, Oh, maybe AI can’t deliver, and can’t deliver. And we went through this cycle of overhype where people were like, well, chat GPT is like having an Elon Musk in your computer. And that was never the case. Like, you know, it’s never gonna it’s not like chat GT he has all the answers. It’s a prediction engine, right? And so it’s hard to get the best in class predictions for a problem from an engine like that period, right? So I do think early on, there’s a little bit of overhype, and now there’s maybe it’s trending towards a little bit of under hype. It’s like that Gartner adoption cycle. You go through this trough of despair. But I think in the long term, if anything AI is probably under hyped, when things settle out, I think AI is going to change the way a lot of businesses operate in our run, in the long term, it’s probably even today. I mean, it is today, under hype, and I think it’s just a question of understanding, you know, how it’s going to change things, both in the short, medium and long term. You know, we’re not going to just be able to, you know, tell AI to solve all of our problems, you know, that are algorithmically hard, like that. Have a thought process. You know, you’re not going to replace an April Dunford of the world and build a digital April Dunford to do your positioning for you. Right? That’s not going to happen in the short or even the medium term. But I would be really scared if I’m like at Google of the world. Could you build a better, you know, search engine, sure, especially for certain domain problems, like, you know, that are very time and time sensitive, like, you know, how the Red Sox do yesterday, or what have you, you know, who’s the best? There’s a lot of things that are time sensitive. Like, you’ll search on and get results from, you know, old reviews, like, what’s the best TV, and it’ll come. Back with stuff that was like from two years ago, but you really, you know, things have changed like, so what’s the best TV now? That kind of thing, which I think AI inevitably is going to be able to apply and solve a little bit better, maybe, but in search, I think, is an interesting space for AI. You know, I think experts in their field is going to be really hard to replace still, but things that are not heavily expertise oriented, you know, will get outsourced, and things that have less value will get outsourced. AI and then, and then you start thinking about all the changes that will take place in the way software and systems work, and there’s gonna be a lot of those. I’m I don’t want to make this answer too long, since we probably have more AI questions.
30:40
How do you think AI impacts software?
30:43
I mean, I think it’s gonna have a huge impact on software. I just think of, like, the whole dashboarding interface kind of level is going to be rethought, right? The idea I can ask a system, you know, questions like, Hey, how did my enterprise, East team do this year, versus my enterprise, you know, West team. Or, you know, Bob’s been a manager for six years right now. How has he done, you know, at each of the different teams he’s led, right? Those kind of questions, that kind of interface, I think, is really interesting for software products in general. It might be like my marketing campaign, how that compared to the other ones I ran, or I ran this webinar last year with this partner, well as our leads, and how do those compare? Like it’s just you’re never going to have a dashboard or a data analytics team that could answer all of those ad hoc questions right off the fly. So I think that the dashboarding, information gathering portion of software is going to change a lot, and there’s going to be a lot of different interfaces to it. And then I think you’re going to see, you know, there’s a company that we support in the studio way found. That is it builds orchid agent orchestration and how agents are going to talk to other agents. You’re going to see a lot more of like, set of just point solutions for like, here’s a customer success chat bot. There might be a customer success chat bot along with product management agent that takes in trends from customer success, aggregates them, applies it to product roadmap, right? So you’re gonna have agents that will meet with each other and exchange information. And maybe that, you know, leads to two things, like Product Marketing adjustments, where, like, customer success is hearing about new things that are important to customers. How does that get fed back to product marketing? Maybe the product marketing agent stalking to a customer success agent, then feeding that information to the Head of Product Management. It was like, here’s the big things we’ve heard from the customer success team that you might want to incorporate into your messaging. So I think we’re going to see a lot of things like that. We’re going to see whole new interfaces to software. I think there’s a lot to be said about, you know, a lot of people talk about software being successful because their users are in it all the time. And I’ve always argued that’s that’s not necessarily the result you want. You want your users getting their jobs done faster. In my extreme example, when I used to talk about this at Pendo and speaking engagements, was like tax software. I’d rather never, ever go into tax software. I mean, I mean, I want my taxes to be filed. I don’t want to go to jail or pay the right amount and not too much, not too little, right? I want to get that all done, but I don’t want to spend I don’t
33:08
be a daily active user in Turbo Tax. Yeah, I
33:12
don’t never want to go in there. I mean, ideally, so the less I can use certain signs of software, the better, you know. And I would argue that it’s not a it’s not a feature people in things more than they need to
33:24
be, right. Interesting. I mean, is it the end of SaaS? It’s
33:27
definitely not the end of SaaS. I think a lot of people talk about the end of SaaS, in large part because sales is a lot harder. But we started Pendo back in what 2013 2014 sales was harder that it just was. And then in 2021 a lot of the people that were just new into sales is like, sales is just calling people and taking orders, and that’s not what sales is. So I think we’re sales is harder than probably the mean, the average, however you want to think about it, but, you know, because of that, people say, Oh, it’s the end. This model is too tough. We can’t grow as quickly as I was like, No, you just need good people, you know, realizing what it takes to market and sell and what it takes to build product customers want. You know, it’s not the end of SaaS, you know. And you need to be just more responsible about how you build an organization. There’s a lot of bad information out there, you know, as far as guidance. So, you know, be responsible about how you’re building an organization. Think about that from both sides. Like, try to have that, that balance. I’m a Libra, so I believe in balance. You know, that balance viewpoint of things.
34:28
Eric, if we could feature anyone here on the show, who do you think we should interview, and what topic would you like to hear them speak about? Well,
34:35
you know, I think the snowflake story is good. If you got someone early on in snowflake around, like, how they, how they built that, you know, that monster of a company that early growth and found that market opportunity. You know, that might even be that, you know, one of the VCs from Sutter Hill that were driving that early on. I’d love to, love to hear that story about, you know, the early days of snowflake. That’s one. I’m gonna give you a second one. Trade desk is an intriguing story to me, from Yes. Know, getting to find their you know, the early story there, because my understanding, and I very limited understanding, is that, you know, it took them a long time to build as much product as their customers needed, and that became a challenge, and then eventually a boat. And then what eventually happened is, like, they had this product, and things just exploded, and everyone wanted to buy it, right? So I think that’s an interesting story from the standpoint of, like, how do you know you have enough there, there to really make your customers happy and get to that point? And how do you keep the morale going when you think, like, oh, you know, I thought we were going to have that a year ago. Now, it’s two years from now. I do think having that small, tight team helps, but I’d love to hear those two stories. Eric,
35:37
do you have any habits, tactics or behaviors that are a force multiplier,
35:42
ooh. I mean, I think I grew up, you know, public school, you know, I definitely didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in the mouth. I’m a big fan of hard work, right? Like, you know, the people who work hard or passionate or obsessive about a problem or a company or their product, you know, tend to be people that win. So I always say that, you know, can’t change how smart you are, the opportunity you’re given, but you can definitely affect how hard you work. So, you know, sway things in your favor by just, you know, doing more than others are willing to do. Eric, is
36:17
there a book, article or video that you’d recommend the listeners That’s a harder one.
36:20
I like to read fiction. I tell people not just to read business books, but to also read fiction. Get some inspiration from fiction. You know, maybe it’s sci fi. If you’re in the tech space and you’re like, Oh, this is an interesting way to like. Just changes the way you think about things. Step back from the business books sometimes. And, you know, read some fiction. Love
36:40
it. And then finally, here, Eric, what is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow along with your efforts?
36:45
I am the only Eric bodak on LinkedIn. So that’s a really at least I was the last time I checked. So that’s a really easy way to get in connection with me. I mean, they can, they can send me an email to them, Eric at 24 and up.com but LinkedIn is easy to find me. Doesn’t get caught in spam filters. You know, I’m I try to keep up with my email, but it’s not great. But, yeah, it’s easy. It’s easy to reach me on LinkedIn, email or LinkedIn are always good.
37:12
Very good. He is. Eric bodak, the founder of Pendo rev cast in 24 and up, Eric, it’s been such a pleasure having you today. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank
37:21
you, sir. This is blast.
37:28
All right. That’ll wrap up today’s interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social, or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated with you? I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that’s a wrap for today. Until next time, remember to over prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thanks so much for listening.
