Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:18

Today, I’m very grateful and also proud that the founders among NEON portfolio that I’m very, very proud of, and, you know, NEON fund is super grateful to be invested in. I have with me on the podcast, Kiran Darisi, co-founder of Atomicwork, and Sreedhar Peddineni, co-founder of GTMBuddy.

Welcome, Kiran. Welcome, Sreedhar, on the NEON show.

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:39

Thank you, Sid.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:41

Just to describe to audience who are listening today, Atomic Work is IT service management and employee service management category. And ultimately, it’s competing with the giant Servicenow and replacing Servicenow, as we speak.

Kiran Darisi 1:57

Yeah. Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:59

And GTMBuddy is in revenue enablement category, and you have replaced the giant sites highspot’s of the world. Sreedhar, you are a third-time founder. You have built host analytics.

You have built a category in Gainsight. The customer success category never was there. I think it only exists today because of Gainsight, as we speak.

And Kiran, you are part of the co-founding team of co-founders of Freshworks that started the entire movement of India to the U.S. for the U.S.-India corridor. So I’m very grateful to have you both in Hyderabad today for this podcast. Both of you are repeat founders.

And being a founder, there is a joy of creating something. It’s a very painful process. You built two companies previously before starting GTMBuddy.

And Kiran, you co-founded Freshworks along with Girish. Why did you start again?

Kiran Darisi 3:04

I think this is the most asked question of me. Even in the IC committees or anybody I meet, in fact, Rapido founder actually was from Hyderabad, but his office is in Bangalore. So when he was in Hyderabad, he just met me just to ask, why you even started again?

So you actually had all the things going for you, Freshworks. You have all the fame, whatever. So why did you do it?

One thing is startups are very addictive. So where you actually started something and you wanted to do it again and again. So entrepreneurship is a pain.

You like to have it when you really miss it out when it goes away. So you need that to actually go do it. And the second for me personally is an accelerated learning.

Where I have a privilege of, this is my third help desk in building. One, I did it in Zoho, which is an installable era, where people install software to get things done. And I built Freshworks in a cloud era, where the technology is actually booming, but still it took time.

But I did it in cloud era, another help desk. I’m again building another different kind of a help desk in AI era, in where most of this learning actually takes a lot of your time, if you’re not in building phase. If you’re in building phase, you are actually compressing that entire thing into like a, okay, you fast forward it a couple of years, right?

Which you take outside, you may take some five, 10 years to actually get it. Because you’re building it, getting that feedback, have how the customers actually use a set, so that it makes you learn way, way faster. So those are my things, why I even started.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:57

What about you, Sreedhar?

You have even gone one step further, started third time.

Sreedhar Peddineni 5:02

Yeah. So it’s a question that I reflect upon, I get asked multiple times. So initially, I never thought that I would want to build my third company again.

So near to the exit of the Gainsight happened in 2020. Initially, I thought I’m going to take a sabbatical, I’ll figure out what I want to do. Do you want to do a PhD and get into teaching?

Or what do I want to do? I was trying to figure these things out. Then over the next six months or so, I started realizing that you start feeling some sort of a vacuum.

Every life, every one of us, we would like to have some purpose. So why do we come on to this planet for? When you start asking those questions, then okay, what are the things that you can contribute back on?

What do you know? What are you good at? Or at least what you think you are good at, right?

So invariably, in any which way I ask that question of myself, it all went back to one thing. I’m good at starting from the beginning, the inception, and building stuff from the ground up. And that gives a lot of satisfaction in terms of the creative urge that you have in terms of building from the ground up is something that stays with you, stays with you for a long time.

Despite all the ups and downs that you see in your startup journeys, which is part and parcel of the game. And also I have had the fortune of seeing the lasting impact that one could potentially leave. I would not quite use the word legacy, I’m too small of a fish to claim that.

But whatever little impact that you have in terms of reflect back upon, okay, in hostile states, where did we start? Who were the people who were part of the journey? And what did that learning journey take me to?

And what was the value that was delivered to other people? All of us grew as part of that journey. Same thing was true with Gainsight as well.

A lot of young people who were part of that vision and grew with the company, and that impact is something that stays with you. It’s not just the impact that’s delivered when the company got exited and people saw some cash coming out of that as part of the exit process. But how people grew professionally, that includes me.

That entire journey of building something with other people and all of us growing together, that’s something that I truly, truly enjoyed. And I was missing out during that period that I was in. And along the way, I was in touch with many people that I was connected to from my team and beyond.

We continue to have this conversation. Our favorite pastime when we get together, we don’t talk politics. We talk about what could we be building, what are the ideas and all of that.

That’s the typical conversation that we have. One thing led to another which came to the ideation of what do you want to build? What kind of a category do you want to build?

A new category or an existing category? These were like our typical conversations. That was at the genesis of what do I do with the rest of my life?

I was in late 40s and wanted to build again.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 8:22

I believe you were 49 or 50 when you started?

Sreedhar Peddineni 8:26

47, 48 years, late 40s.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 8:29

And you always knew that it’s a decade-long journey or more. You knew what you were signing up for.

Sreedhar Peddineni 8:36

There are some entrepreneurs who start building with an idea of an exit. If they achieve that exit quickly, good for them. It’s a model that I know of people and that I respect.

We have built with that model. But for a lot of us, when you start a company with an idea, you don’t really know the outcome of where it’s going to land. You’re optimistic, that’s why you’re building.

And if I’m starting to think about, okay, I’m going to exit in two years or three years, you’re not building anything that’s sustainable. If I were to talk about what are the things that I’m truly proud of today, something that started in Hyderabad with six people working for a model house in Panjagutta, people from Hyderabad would know that, is that company is still around 25 years later and it’s one of the top three companies in the world. That does give you some amount of satisfaction.

And in my case, I really draw a lot of inspiration and may say, so some amount of pride. I know I can’t take all the credit for the company’s outcomes and all of that, but I was a key contributor to that for sure.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 9:51

One important thing that has shifted for you is, first two journeys, you were the CTO and this journey you have been a CEO. How has the shift been?

Sreedhar Peddineni 10:02

Oh, that’s a hard one. That’s a hard one. So even though my titles have been more engineering oriented, I’m fundamentally a product guy.

My core strengths, every one of us have our secret powers, right? So my power has always been thinking about a problem statement from a product lens and giving it some shape and getting the team together to actualize that vision has been my core strength. And I always had that fortune of having a counterpart, a partner who would take the GTM side of the world.

I’m talking about early customer acquisition. And then after the customers are acquired, then again I had a role to play with the early customers in terms of how do you implement for the customers? Is the implementation going well?

Are we delivering value to the customers to the extent that we wanted and all of that? So that was my experience for the first 20 years of my startup career. Coming into GTM buddy, one thing that I grossly underestimated is in terms of how do I even think about pipeline?

Okay, what are the channels like? There are canonical wisdom that people do share a lot of advice, well-intentioned advice in terms of what worked for them. And in my case, I consciously chose to operate in an existing category that’s around, which is revenue enablement as a category.

That category itself underwent a lot of transformation. So we started focusing on content management. And just to take one step back, revenue enablement today is a relatively new category, as a software category I mean.

It’s a result of consolidation of multiple other categories together. When we started off, we were focusing on the content management side of the world, competing with the likes of Highspot and SaaSnic. With a belief that, okay, these systems were built during the very early days of Google Drive, and they were trying to compete with, by building a better content management system, starting in the 2011, 12, 13 time frames.

And we felt a lot could be made better. That was the founding hypothesis. So content management system focused on content delivery, deliver the right information to the right people, when they need it.

That was the founding hypothesis. Then as the 21, 22 started happening, the category dynamics started changing. I was hoping to be partners with MindTickle. KG and Deepak, they were focusing on the learning side of the world, sales readiness as a category, and how do you onboard people at scale, and how do you get them ready to sell, and then the content or information delivery comes into play.

Now these two categories started combining, consolidating. So CMS plus LMS became a thing. This is a larger category dynamic at play.

So I was thinking about MindTickle as a potential partner, all of a sudden you start looking at, okay, MindTickle started building CMS, and we had to start building LMS. So you get into a compete play there. So this is an evolution of the category. So as this is happening, how do you think about the GTM motion of it?

It’s easy to get carried away in terms of your comfort zone. My comfort zone is building product. And I do believe that we have built a great product with native AI foundations in multiple areas, well before the ChatGPT.

But that was my core strength, so kind of we gravitate towards it. But what is the narrative that you want to tell the market as this consolidation is happening? What are the customers thinking about?

And how do you generate pipe predictably in a sustainable manner? Those were some things that very early on, those were things that probably have taken longer than I should have to learn that. So you start, that’s okay, we solved that to a certain degree, and pipeline, as any CEO would tell you, that your pipeline is never enough.

You always want more. So that’s a continuing thing that every, like any other company you continue to focus on. Then, okay, you build the pipe, you have got a sufficient number of leads in the pipe, and we’re getting into the sales calls.

And people would look at GTMBuddy, but early prospects that we’re demonstrating to, this seems too good to be true. You’re talking about systems, a system where I’m used to taking in a thousand documents, and I will go in and manually tag each one of those documents. A thousand documents, I need to tag each document with, let’s say, five tags.

You’re talking about adding 5,000 tags to your document, to the documents in your repository. And here is a system that has an AI model built on the natural language foundations, and it can take in your business language, business vocabulary, and automatically tags content. And not only that, it surfaces the content.

In the reps workflow, you’re working on a deal where you’re competing with X. Without anybody creating any rule, content is automatically surfaced in terms of, with this competitor, here’s a customer story that you can tell. And here are the referenceable customers that you have.

Here is what you need to know about the competitive Intel, what kind of objections that you need to deal with. These are all part of what we built earlier on. So looking at all of that, the prospects would say, this seems too good to be true.

It’s sort of magical and all of that. And I would develop these happy ears. Wow, such a positive response.

This deal is going to close next week. Only to see that, okay, you’re waiting, okay, a month out. There are more people who are joining the calls.

And the deal cycle kind of gets extended. What you hoped that would close in a quarter, it takes much longer. The realization of the importance of the buying team.

How do you think about, how do you get the deal from generating initial interest to getting the deal all across the line with a signed contract, without any opt-outs or conditions and all of that. That’s been a pretty important learning process for me. From developing that happy ears, everything is hunky-dory, to what is needed to actually sell and get the deal over the line, knowing that there are 10 people that have to place the deal.

And you don’t get convinced too early in the cycle that just because people said great things about your product, you’re going to close it tomorrow. Not going to happen. So that’s the journey that, these are the two things for any company, technology company.

How do you build a pipe? How do you convert that pipe into paying customers? And how do you keep them?

These are really the essence of any successful tech company. Building product and supporting the product, all of that are important. I’m not discounting the importance of that, but the lifeblood of the business comes through from these three activities.

And my learning has been, especially on the first two. Building the pipe, converting the pipe into paying customers, getting those contracts over the line.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:31

And in your journey as CTO, did you expect it as hard to be as it was?

Sreedhar Peddineni 17:40

When I was focusing on the product, we built a fantastic product. There’s no other product that comes even close. Or we have this unique thing that we have built and people are going to love this and all of that.

I was not paying enough attention. In hindsight, I should have learned more on things outside of the product in the first 20 years of my journey. But I did not pay as much attention as I’m doing now to this motion.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:10

And Kiran, in your journey, Freshworks started as an SMB journey first. And then now you are building completely opposite of it, which is enterprise. What are your learnings and new learnings between the both journeys?

Kiran Darisi 18:27

There are some stickiness, which actually happened from Freshworks to this. Maybe very top of the funnel, which is very, very starting, is the co-founder compatibility. We are so compatible.

Even at Freshworks, there is a decade gap between me and Girish when we started Freshworks.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:48

How old were you when you started Freshworks? 25.

Kiran Darisi 18:51

25. So maybe innocent. So where I can say I can start.

There is nothing to lose. Even for that, it’s like the courage to start is from my wife. She just finished her MBBS and she’s going for housie.

And we need to get married at that year. Then I told her, I’m going to resign my job. I’ll leave it.

Go to zero. I’ll start it. Maybe I’ll try it for one year.

It is not going to happen. Again, I come back to the corporate world. So she said, don’t worry.

After housie, I’ll get around one lakh salary in Kerala. I can feed you. So you can go and start.

So that’s the courage to it. Coming back to what actually stickiness, the co-founder compatibility. Maybe I will take the same example of my wife.

I was very close. Everybody is close. Then girlfriend, now wife, etc.

Again, we came to Freshworks, started Freshworks, and we are ready to get married. So she told at her home that I’m going to marry this guy. He’s a co-founder in the company.

And her dad asked, how many people in the company? They’re like eight people. So we had this photos in the website, etc. to show. They said no. So they did house arrest her.

So they don’t want to sell it, etc. I was in a lot of stress because that is the second year of the running of the company. And we are actually doing like a hockey stick where I’m dealing both product engineering and DevOps, which is like I need to write code as well as scale it, right?

Both the things in the same angle. I was so stressful. So Girish asked what happened.

So this is what it is going. So then he said, okay, let’s plan a runaway wedding, which is basically you can say that, okay, from Nellore, that is my native, where you can able to come. In Chennai, me and Shan can take over.

We will actually set up the register. We’ll sign it, etc. Didn’t happen, but there was a plan to actually happen.

So even folks actually ran this story about Girish came with me to negotiate my house rent. But this is something I don’t think so anybody actually shared it, right? The same thing we did when Atomicwork we started.

The first thing we didn’t actually talked about, even though I know Vijay for a decade, we didn’t say that, okay, let’s start ServiceNow competitor, right? So what we did is, first we said, we are all at the same age again, 37 this time, right? 12 years in Freshworks and 37 I am.

And we said, can we exist as co-founders, right? Because we were in a long run, right? We need to actually be compatible with each other to even run.

At that point of time in Hyderabad, he’s in Bangalore, Parshu is in Chennai. So what we did is, we actually did around 10 meetups in person and started brainstorming about ideas. The thing is where we can say whether we can exist as the co-founders or not.

The thing is we need to negate the ideas of the others, but still stay in the same room, right? The thing is you can say no, no, no, from my tech point of view, product point of view or the market point of view, but still don’t say that, get out of the room, right? So that is something we have seen.

So that is one which stayed. Then after that we say that, okay, we are not killing each other, right? So then let’s actually start.

Obviously that’s the second thing we can do. Then we started discussing about what to build. We have few ideas, et cetera, but there was the one which actually stuck with us when Freshworks went to IPO.

The kind of internal processes you do or the amount of context switching an employee does is like humongous, right? So that’s the pain area we took it where the companies can able to give instant support to the employees to get their work done is what we took as a problem statement and tried to attack it, right? Then went into market, all these things.

That is one thing which actually stuck. And the second one is believing in the employees, which is like we strongly feel happy employees, happy customers, right? Same Freshworks, same Atomic work, it’s the same.

One thing changed is in Freshworks it’s predominantly you take freshers and then train them so that we’ll actually teach the skin. And we actually tell for freshers from coming from BTech, we won’t say that you are a developer, you are a marketer or a sales guy, et cetera. It all depends on what he’s comfortable with.

What we teach is skill so that they can able to apply. But Atomic work, we are building for enterprises. We wanted both, which is like there are incumbents who are two decades old in the system.

We wanted both, which is somebody experienced. They already actually had all this up and downs, right? So which is like you can build high, down, all these things so that they know this is how companies work.

And the second one is the freshers who can be trained on the skills. On the AI side also, these are two paradigms, right? One comes to your startup saying that there are no limits.

With AI, I can build anything, everything in the world. And there is another spectrum which actually says that, okay, for the scaling, for the security, I need to actually do this, this, this so that I can sell it to enterprises. That’s the mix we have it.

But still happy employees, equivalent to happy customers is the path we took it. The unlearning is like, okay, not only freshers, we needed both variety of people. Obviously we had this credibility as well as the money and the second startup to actually attract people to come on board, to start with us, et cetera, right?

And the third one is we all did inbound in Freshworks. Everything is, we are working from Chennai suburbs, Keelkattalai, nobody knows where we are. People need to just sign up, put their card, buy it and go.

That is how the entire product has been built. The subscription management system, at that point of time, there is no ChatGpt. I built that subscription building entire thing.

I am like maybe first pseudo product manager for ChatGPT to actually build the product and replace, right? Now in coming to atomic work, this thing we actually say a digital sales is how it is in 2010, no more actually valid in 2020, right? Now completely changed in terms of how we need to do the digital sales.

Now we became more outbound. Our product managers are outbound, the sales is outbound. We don’t spend any money in Google digital ads, right?

So that is how we actually built that entire thing from product, engineering, sales, go to market, everywhere those functions on it. The last one, when I started Freshworks along with Girish and gang, right? So I was doing both DevOps and as well as the product engineering.

Whenever the app is done, I always think this is the last day of the company, right? So it’s like everything is gone, maybe from tomorrow, there is no company I can’t go in, et cetera, right? But Girish always used to tell an example of BMW.

Even after a hundred years, a company exists. And even if you drive a BMW now, you get the kick of driving it, right? But at the time I was so young, I can’t say that, oh, can I have this company for a decade?

Even after a decade, it is like 15 years, right? Freshworks is still there. They are doing $800 million of revenue.

We started Atomic Work in a native saying that, okay, companies will exist multiple generations. You need to build for it. The pillar should be there so that it can able to exist for multi decades of it.

That’s a stark contrast for me like, okay, you unlearn, relearn. There are some parts in terms of when you do for enterprise, the hygiene part comes very, very top. Let’s say in Freshworks, I did the security certifications, et cetera, and maybe 2015, 16, I don’t remember, but at the latest stage.

But at Atomic Work, at the second year, I have like 10 certifications. So that is like a trust you can build with the enterprises. Yeah, I’m doing it.

A CTO will not talk to like the customer in an SMB kind of a thing, right? Because the sale doesn’t actually have this like a $20, $50, $100 sales rate. For me, I have spoken to every prospect who actually touched Atomic Work.

The first thing they wanted to talk to a CTO because two things, right? One is they’re very afraid whether my data is okay, or it’s secure, or you’re actually doing something, it actually loses. The second one is now we are building in a way where everything changes every quarter, right?

People say two weeks, that’s like a news post, but it’s not 10 drivers. The driver comes in a quarter or so, right? When you say it, what is your vision?

So that they know that they can be able to bet on, right? These are the two things I do it. I have maybe taken more customer calls in Atomic Work.

In Zoho, I used to do customer support calls as well as in Freshworks. It’s like post-sale. Pre-sale is one where a CTO coming on board doing this is something which I don’t say I don’t want to do it.

I’m actually learning to do it. Last one I would say, right? The amount of a team you can have to build is completely different, right?

So which you say, maybe at an 80 to $85 million, I believe for Freshworks, it became a unicorn, a billion dollar valuation. It’s a good one, not in current terms, right? At that terms, it is actually a good multiple.

We were at around like a thousand, 2,000 people, right? I strongly believe at this point of time, my engineering team even won’t be 100 people. So that will be very strong.

I mean, view I have it in the size of a team who can able to deliver high value companies will be way, way smaller, right? So like you will have like a 100, 200 member team which is actually doing a $100 million kind of revenue, right? So that is a strong view where I need to unlearn fully and relearn again how we are doing it.

But there are bits and pieces, but these are the major pillars I would say.

Sreedhar Peddineni 29:42

Just adding to that, I was focusing more in terms of my personal learnings, but what I’ve been blessed by in building GTM buddy is just the sheer strength of the team. Today, we are able to replace High Spots and SaaSMix at over 30 companies amongst our customers, we’ve replaced them, and a lot of that goes to the strength of the product that we have built. Unlike the prior two companies, I was not spending as much time on the product. This is because, thanks to the team that we have, my co-founders, Santa running engineering, Chandramani running AI, all the AI initiatives for me, and Sundar running the customer success motions.

Without that, all of my learning around the GTM and all of that, not possible. With both Host Analytics and Gainsight, these are areas that I was totally, totally involved in. Now, I kind of take it for granted.

It’s not just that’s because of the strength that they bring in. They were part of the early years of Gainsight journey in terms of the part of the core team there as well. And the kind of people that we’re able to attract, with this relatively much smaller group, we’re able to build and prove the value proportion in terms of replacing companies that have been in the industry for over 15 years now.

So, the team aspect of it, the team dynamic is extremely, extremely important, which at times, I take it for granted, but shouldn’t be.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 31:21

Yeah, that’s what my observation is, right, at Neon. The first journey has been as an entrepreneur, and now the journey is again as an entrepreneur, but more as, not directly building, but being part of Atomic Work, being part of GTMBuddy and many other companies. Now, how can I be of help in enabling customer intro, talent intro, capital intros, and all three of them.

The observation is, in case of second-time founders, they are more conscious with choosing problems. They’re more conscious with building teams, and very picky about both of these things. Whereas first-time founders are very, very eager to build a product and give it to the customers. Why do you think is that?

Kiran Darisi 32:14

So, one is, it’s actually, innocence is one thing. So, where Freshworks innocently thought that we can be able to build a good global SaaS company from Keelkattalai, and at Atomic Work, we thought, okay, we are second-time founders, so that we know, so that we can be able to build very easily.

So, both are wrong. So, this is actually, it’s a very long struggle to do it. But in terms of the choose of it, again, so, Freshworks is, we built with a reference in mind, so that we can be a SaaS company, so that we can be able to do it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 32:52

Zendesk was the reference.

Kiran Darisi 32:53

Zendesk was the reference, right? So, in fact, in 2011, Assistly has been bought by Salesforce for $50 million.

We all thought, okay, we can be a $50 million company, right, in 2011, right? So, we are very happy seeing that news in the office in Keelkattalai, right? But where we went is a different story altogether.

But if you see it now, we have seen the journey. The thing is, when you actually move from an SMB to a mid-market to an enterprise, all your systems should change. The sales motion should change.

Your GTM motion should change. I mean, and your marketing messaging should change. Your engineering should change in terms of how you actually present it, right?

But if you see, even now, there are only three, four platform companies which actually make money, right? So, like a huge money, like a $10 billion plus, right? Now, when we are building Atomicwork, we don’t want to build a point solution or a SaaS solution.

We want to build a platform where people can be able to build apps on top of it, rather than saying that, okay, I already built and this is how you need to use it, right? It should be configurable, highly scalable, highly compliant, so that you can able to tune it to whatever internal process you have it, where you build a platform company, but it’s hard. It takes time to build it, when to go to market, as well as how to sell it.

We are not doing a feature parity, right? We are actually saying that it’s a platform where you can able to build things on it. On a long run, if you see it, this is how an enterprise sales can be made, and you can able to scale it on a larger, larger way, right?

The second startup, it’s mostly about strategy and how you can able to take it on the long run. And the first is mostly like, okay, oh, I have an idea, I will go build it and sell it to the customer, right? So, those are two contrast variants of you see it, how the first and the second varies.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 35:00

Sreedhar, you being a third time founder, first Post Analytics, second Gainsight, and then you started Gainsight, you operated in a category creation cycle, which really very few entrepreneurs do, because I assume it’s extremely hard to do it, right? Customer success category synonymous with Gainsight. How did you think about this while starting GTMBuddy?

Did you want to build an existing category or create a new one?

Sreedhar Peddineni 35:34

So, when we started Gainsight, I would say that we’re really thinking about the category lenses as much, but we’re really operating from our personal experiences in Host Analytics, right? So, Host Analytics, we raised our series sale very late in the cycle, probably seven years into the company operation and so on. And my partner Jim took on the role of chief customer officer at Host Analytics.

And the company was scaling, scaling nicely. And at that point in time, this was probably 2008 and 2009, if I remember right. The state of the union on the model has matured by then, and people have understood, okay, there is a, it’s not on-prem licensing model, but this is a subscription-based revenue model.

Many, many companies across multiple categories that started. And people also started paying attention to, early on, it was all about what’s my recurring revenue, quality MRR, quality ARR, that was always the focus. Then we started realizing that as the company started scaling, there is a very interesting inflection point that every SaaS company comes across, which in our experience was more like, okay, in this given quarter, I’m closing X million dollars in terms of the new ARR.

And I also have the same X dollars, million dollars worth of ARR that’s coming up for renewal. Then that point was kind of a light bulb moment for us. So you added whatever you did, like 100% of the target or 120 on the new business.

But if you have leakage on the customers that are coming up for renewal, that’s pulling you down. And in order to do that, so when that starts happening, it was like all of a sudden in the board conversation, it’s not just about, okay, what’s your pipe? What’s your new business?

How many customers did you sign? What’s the addition to the ARR? But we also started talking about, okay, it is the renewal that came up, X million dollars came up for renewal, and we’re able to convert only 90% of it, for example.

I’m not quoting the exact numbers. And when that realization hit us, we started looking at, okay, are we just pulling a number out of nowhere here in terms of setting the forecast for the next quarter? It’s no more just the new business forecast, but also your renewal forecast.

And for doing the renewals, the state of the union back then was, we used to do a CSAT survey of some form, could be Net Promoter Score Survey. And we’ll do it once a quarter and talk about that. This is what the customers have told us.

And it’s a pretty presentation. And we identify, chalk out some action items across functionally, and done with it until the next NPS survey comes up. We started thinking that, okay, if we are looking at the growing importance of customer retention in our own company, look around, every SaaS company that has reached any amount of scale, that’s real, that there’s a real problem out there.

The state of the union was, there was nobody who was looking at retaining customers proactively. What does that even mean? If you are selling into enterprises, there’s an implementation team, and post implementation, it is support team.

If you have a problem, raise a ticket, there’s somebody from support that will take over. But who is connecting and managing the customer journey along the way? That was a missing problem statement.

That’s the trigger for thinking about the eventual problem that we wanted to start for which became customer success and so on. We’re trying to look at, okay, you can’t be in subscription based business. You can’t just wait for the renewal to come up and the customers will automatically renew.

You need to be proactive and you need to be deliberate about managing the customer journey. And started thinking about how does the platform look like for that? How do you manage customer lifecycle with your software?

Then you started looking at, okay, that’s a problem statement that we started with. And in 2011, when we launched, we called it customer success platform. At that point in time, to the best of my knowledge, there was no other software vendor who was actually talking about customer success.

So I’d say that it was less about thinking about the category, but thinking about the problem that we were seeing. And that problem is something that’s more universal beyond our own company. That was a trigger.

And the learnings about how difficult it is to create a new category that came after. So we had this great idea. This is a real problem to be solved and launch the company.

But then, okay, when you go into the market, how many companies out there did even have any function called customer success? Who are we even selling this thing to? We have this software that talks about customer success, but am I selling it to support people?

Am I selling it to implementation team? Am I selling it to the CEO? Who is the buyer?

That’s something that a journey that we had to go through. And fortunately for us, there was some market leading companies that started putting together a function, customer success function. And they were looking out for, okay, what kind of instrumentation do we need?

And got our early customers, but it took a good three, four, five years of evangelization, customer education for that category to form. Okay. That was a journey with Gainsight.

But moving on, coming into GTM Buddy’s foundational journey, founding journey, I really knew that what we wanted to do is definitely not try to create a new category. Okay. Multiple reasons for that.

Gainsight was a success story, but creating a new category from nothing does require certain skill sets and certain amount of capital if you want to reach scale, right? So that includes, you need to create some level of awareness in the market, and there has to be some kind of a buying team identified, buying motion identified, and companies need to have set aside some budget for that. Without that, creating a new category doesn’t work.

Seen multiple companies where they talk about category creation journey and even successful at that, but they become a big fish in a very small pond. That doesn’t really get the outcome that the founders or the early team members or the investors want. We didn’t want to be in that situation.

So we really started by focusing on, okay, what are the categories that we are familiar with? Okay. And where the category is large enough and where we believe that there is an opportunity to disrupt the existing category.

So that’s an exploratory process. We’re looking at multiple options and we needed to be aware of the category. So as people who are building products, we’ve always seen that the sales teams or the GTM teams don’t really understand the true capabilities of the platform that you build.

Kiran was talking about the power of platform. I do strongly believe that a significant reason for gains and success, at least on the product side of the world, is the platform nature of the product, where you could ingest many different kinds of data into the platform and action on it. And we’ve noticed across multiple sales calls that people rarely bring up the platform or the platform capabilities as part of the sales cycle.

There’s something that’s missing in terms of what are we building and what is getting sold or what is getting implemented. There’s always that gap. And that gap is around enablement.

So how are you enabling and equipping the field team, the GTM teams, with the right narrative, right story? And how do you do it at scale? That’s a problem that we’ve seen first time.

And when we looked around, that kind of led to two possibilities. One, either you build a sales onboarding system where you train people, you hire people and you’re training them, or you periodically retrain them. That’s one possibility.

The second possibility is like, okay, with every product drop or competitive emerging and so on, you’re creating a lot of intel. There’s a lot of effort that goes into it. And this information used to go on certain box in our case at Gainsight.

We used to store all of this content in box or a drop box, what have you. That’s where the content used to be stored. Nobody looks at them.

So the problem that we realized was that, okay, you’re talking about this is a problem that’s a billion dollar category because we already had Seismic and Highspot and Showpad, Big Tink and not a glamorous category. These are just content repositories for the most part. But companies are spending a billion dollars in that.

And these were like built, these companies with due respect to them, were built in an era where a good CMS did not exist. They created a system that where you can tag content and all of that. We focused on, okay, this is a category where I want to deliver this right information to the reps or to the GTM teams at the right time by leveraging it.

And it’s a billion dollar category. And if you are successful at it, I don’t need to educate the market. You’re already spending this money.

It’s about how do you do it better? So that is the thought process that we went into picking an existing category, which we believed and will continue to believe is the right category where a disruption is possible. That’s the thought process that we went through.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 45:35

But as a founder, how do you pick the right size of the market? Because let’s say there’s a CRM market, which is possibly 40, 50 billion dollars. Then there is a cloud market also on cloud ancillary services, which is above a hundred billion dollars.

And here this is revenue enablement category, which is a combination of high spot seismic or 300, 400 mill ARR companies combined.

Sreedhar Peddineni 46:06

So that’s a great question. I don’t think as deeply about that, but if I were to answer it right off the top of my head, I would say, what is the stickiness factor? If I’m doing it all over again, I’m trying to pick a category.

I’m assuming that that’s your question. One of the things that I would look at is, okay, I want to operate in an existing category. I’m still sticking to that hypothesis.

Two, how sticky is that category would be a consideration that I definitely keep in mind.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 46:40

So by sticky, you mean, would it remain in AI era or would it remain 10 years after?

Sreedhar Peddineni 46:46

Yeah. So AI brings up another angle to this whole thing. Some of the categories will exist.

Some of the legacy categories that existed, would they continue to exist in the future? That’s anybody’s guess. I’m not talking about that angle of it right now, as I’m talking about this.

There are some systems which are so deeply ingrained and have become the systems of record at some level. Those kinds of systems, it’s not easy to replace them. And it’s a much more frictionful journey to replace them.

An example would be like CRM. There is a rally cry about, is the approach of Salesforce in building CRM, is it outdated in the era of AI? It’s a lot of debate, a lot of companies which are starting in that category.

One thing I can tell is that maybe that’s possible, but it’s not going to happen overnight because the organization friction is not trivial to replace something as deeply rooted as Salesforce is. And it’s not just because of Salesforce. Salesforce has hundreds of applications integrated into it.

So for example, if I were to talk about Gainsight, Gainsight is deeply integrated into Salesforce. There are hundreds of applications like that or even thousands maybe right now. So you’re not just talking about plucking out Salesforce as one tool, but you’re talking about plucking out that entire ecosystem of integrated apps.

That kind of a problem, if I want to solve, that’s one beehack goal. But go for it. Make sure that you have the right firepower to actualize that goal.

That’s not trivial. And I think to some extent, you’re doing the same thing with atomic work and replacing the likes of service now.

Kiran Darisi 48:31

Yeah. Right. So I think so we did at Freshworks and we are doing it the same.

So maybe I’m actually playing in an opposite spectrum of things, right? So when Freshdesk started, that’s the first name for Freshworks, right? So there are already 650 helpdesk out there, right?

But where we saw it is in 2010s, in terms of the intuitive nature of a customer helpdesk, and also the channels it can able to fetch that customer queries and can able to organize it. People still treat email as the only channel, right? What triggered Girish is because he actually made that complaint in a different forum and still that should be got as a ticket where a customer rep should actually answer.

So there was on the intuitive nature, maybe on the UI UX kind of a thing, only Zendesk is there, but it’s a monopoly in terms of how they charge, et cetera, right? So that, and also Zendesk increasing 2X of their pricing, what actually triggered Girish to start, right? But we all came from Zoho school.

Zoho has the same mantra of go to a red ocean, actually capture the market, slowly eradicate kind of motion. We took the same. What we played on is the digital sales so that you are not rip and replacing, we are actually sending it to a customers who are, who don’t even have a helpdesk support.

We’re actually playing on email. So they wanted a record to actually do it. So that is where our primary market went in.

Or else somebody was looking at, okay, social as a channel, also look at it, right? Now, if you take it, maybe after a decade, everybody, all the helpdesk has the same features. There is no differentiation, right?

But for us to start it, can we actually don’t want to build an Indianized version of a helpdesk, right? We wanted to build a global product company from India to the world, right? So from day zero, that was the one.

So you fast forward a decade. Now, why Atomicwork? It’s the same in the red ocean and there are a lot of things, et cetera.

If you take for the last decade, you can’t find any startup who don’t have been good customer support or customer support tool, which is intuitive enough where you can able to chat. It can be Swiggy, PhonePe, anything you can do, right? A decade before, maybe Zappos has it, maybe like few companies, right?

But if you see for the last one decade, there is no innovation in the service management space, which is IT service management or an enterprise service management. If you take for last decade, still the leader is, the youngest leader is two decades old, right? So we wanted to rewind it, revive it, saying that, okay, maybe this is not the way service management should do.

The employee shouldn’t have that context switching. They need to get their work done wherever they are in. That can be Slack or a Teams or a browser.

We don’t mind even email. It’s actually, if they want to get their work done, they can able to do it. But there is an inherent friction to actually switch to a newer system.

But the mandate of how you can able to improve your internal processes or how you can able to move away from, again, very well-defined workflow or an internal workflow towards like a digital workforce, right? So that is where we are going. I would say we are building in a new era.

People expectation of new things should be different. The interfaces should be different. How it is actually being delivered should be different.

How people consume it should be different. So we are not actually saying that, okay, we patch a UX on top of a legacy system and selling it. We are actually redoing from ground up.

The interface itself is so different. People like to use it. Even though there is a friction, there is a lot of motivation to make things simpler.

But they wanted to make things simpler with a product which can able to define as a platform, not like, okay, I will be an assistant on top of something else, right? So they wanted like a full solution so that they can able to deploy, implement, and able to execute. It’s the same thing, right?

So that also gives you that leverage of second-time founder. You can able to take large leverage bets and think of long-term so that you can dream about impossible things, but still make it possible, right? But yeah, the journey is painful.

You need to have a lot of courage. You need to have a lot of capital. All these things need to happen to even think about the category, right?

So we feel that we have the right to win in this category and we have the enough expertise and also enough vision to actually execute it. So that’s why for us we took this category. But if I wanted to replay of what Freshworks did, I can’t replay, right?

The error is gone, right? So now you can’t do like, okay, I will actually bet on digital sales. I can able to sell as $9 per agent subscription.

Those days are gone, right? So those should be rethought about how we wanted to build digital sales. The funnel itself is different.

I’m not saying the funnel is gone. The funnel is not Google Ads anymore. The funnel is different.

The funnel in terms of how you take it and how you play it is different. And also at what stage you play, right? So this is analogy what my mentor gives me all the time, right?

Whom you are playing with, where you are playing with. He takes this cricket of, okay, either you can play cricket in a gully or a Ranji or in IPL or for India. So you can choose your platform.

We like to play for at the world. So we chose that platform to go for.

Sreedhar Peddineni 54:35

Yeah. Excellent response there, Kiran. So just building on that a little further.

This is more for your question was more for new entrepreneurs that are starting right now, or if I were to start again, the way I would think about it, right? So, and you touched upon the AI angle of it, right? So AI angle changes some things pretty fundamentally, you know, am I competing on usability or so let’s assume all things being equal.

So seismic and High Spot go after certain kind of markets. They don’t go for smaller companies, not SMB business. It’s mid-market and enterprise, and we go after the same market.

Now, how do I compete in that? I need to have a point of view. Okay.

And that point of view, is it in the era that has gone by as Kiran described it? Is that an era where I’m talking about self-serve usability? Is that the way I compete?

Or is there a fundamental shift in terms of the delivery model? So if I were to talk about the enterprise content side of the world, people competed on search and discovery. Okay.

I have all this information out there, but how do I deliver it? Now the delivery model has changed pretty foundationally because of AI. So you’re no more looking at, okay, should I expect people to search for something and find some document that they’re supposed to read?

Nope. People are used to ChatGPT. People expect, okay, I have this question on my mind, I need an answer.

Okay. The conversational solutions to answer the questions at the speed of thought, it’s possible today. Two, can I even without the rep or any person looking for information or searching for information, can I anticipate in a given scenario, what kind of information do you need?

Can I go deliver it to them without them asking for it? These are changes that brings about that’s possible today with AI, with deep workflow integrations. We call it in our context, we call it just-in-time enablement is what we say.

Just-in-time enablement that happens in the reps workflow, as opposed to expecting them to go somewhere else, log into yet another app, sign in and do stuff. That is possible today with AI. AI is rewriting some of those tools.

And on top of it, one thing that I would like to clarify on what I was saying earlier is not all categories are born equal though. In the AI era, there are new categories that are born that did not even exist. We’re talking about lovable earlier today, a category that didn’t even exist.

You’re talking about fastest in history to reach 100 million dollars in era. That’s a brand new category. What’s the mode?

Is it going to be sustainable? That time will tell. But that’s a new category for all of us to see.

There are new categories that are getting created in this era, for sure. And then you are looking at existing categories, which part of those categories are going to live, which are going to die, and which of the categories that exist are large enough that can be displaced, that requires a deeper thought process. Some categories are easier to disrupt compared to some other categories that requires a deeper thought process.

That’s why the stickiness part of it needs to be taken into account.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 58:14

So according to you, the category that you are playing in revenue enablement is sticky enough that there is a long customer lifetime value, but it’s also not painful enough as CRM to uproot an existing tool. Is that what you are saying?

Sreedhar Peddineni 58:33

That’s the Goldilocks zone, I guess. So the category delivers enough value. It’s required if you’re in complex sales.

Nobody would debate the need that, okay, I don’t need to equip my GTM team to sell this thing. My sales team needs to be educated on certain things, the value proposition, the competition, a lot of things that they need to be enabled on. So nobody is questioning that need of enabling my people to sell, to market, to sell, to implement, and to deliver success to the customers.

So that the problem statement remains. But it’s not as deep-rooted as a CRM. Like Salesforce.

Salesforce was the one company that I had in mind because I do hear multiple, this evolving thought process around Salesforce is probably on its decline. Somebody is going to replace Salesforce. I do think it’s possible, but is it going to happen in the next two, three, four, five years?

I doubt it. The primary reason for that is that connected nature of interconnected apps and the stickiness of the data, not just of Salesforce, but all the connected apps writing into that same platform. That’s what I was referencing earlier.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 59:49

And I want to stretch and emphasize on the last part of the podcast on AI. And what is that changed in both of your styles of operating, right, and for entrepreneurs who are now stepping into a completely new world from, you know, like B2B SaaS for the previous world, how software was consumed, pricing, right. But before that, I just want to, you know, put a thought about the NEON partnership. And maybe Kiran, I’ll start with you, right.

Again, you know, super proud and grateful that part of the Atomic Work journey from day minus when you, Vijay and Parshu were just three of you, you know, discussing that idea. And you and Sreedhar both have produced two of the largest exits from startup, from Hyderabad ecosystem as entrepreneurs. Why did you choose NEON?

Kiran Darisi 1:00:47

Yeah, so thanks for partnering with us, I would say. And for me, you’re a good friend. I know you even before NEON.

I’ve actually interacted with you even before NEON. So we shared ideas. We even did like a few shows, et cetera, right.

So the familiarity is the first, right. So to actually get into even talking, right. So the familiarity is first.

And the other one is it’s actually like you are very reachable for the founders to actually go talk to, get anything and get a connect, et cetera, right. You are just a WhatsApp message away. So I can able to chat with you at anything, doing it, et cetera, right.

So we even chatted about when we get that first trench of money, when SVP closed, right. So all the money are there. So it’s talking to what’s happening.

Then you said, okay, this is happening. The others, you connected some of them so that we are talking. So the reachability and also the thing, it’s not like somebody just pushes the money, can get away, right.

So with the success, we had it with Freshworks. There is a lot of people who wanted to partner with us, but we like to choose the right partner for us, our journey, because the build time itself is long, right. Somebody needs to understand that.

To give a comparison at Freshworks, when we released the product, we released in three months. Because we actually ditched Java. We put Ruby on Rails because it is easy to bake in and actually release that entire product in three months, right.

It is not possible when you’re actually doing a platform company. That kind of a thought process needs to be there. The patience to build a long-term company with the right partners is what actually resonated with you and the familiarity and the reachability of you as a person actually ticked us to be like a long-term partner, right.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:02:52

Thanks Kiran. Means a lot.

Sreedhar again, super grateful to be part of your journey. Naman connected us very early and I’m super thankful to him that he made the connect happen and very, very proud that I can call to be a small part of the third journey.

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:03:11

Being kind, they said, thanks Naman for connecting us to begin with and thank you for believing in us and supporting us along the way. So, I still distinctly remember, I don’t forget, sometimes like in a startup journey, it’s a roller coaster. And when we got connected, I think we were going through one of those troughs, right.

And right from that instance, you came in, had the conversation, understood the context and a quick decision to support, which meant a lot to me at that point in time and continues to be. And since then, the level of understanding that you have when you’re working with us, any conversation, you try to understand deeper in terms of what’s the business context and both on the highs as well as on the lows, staying glued into that and being supportive. Being so approachable, there’s so much that I appreciate about you and I’ve not interacted as much with Kshitij but with him as well.

Truly, truly grateful for this partnership.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:04:24

But at that point in time, what was you that made you Neon tick for you?

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:04:31

So, it was, we were not personally connected prior to that. So, Naman introduced and after that, I did talk to multiple other people in the ecosystem. I don’t recall if I spoke with you at the time, Kiran, but I did speak with multiple people.

All of them said exactly what Kiran was talking about in terms of fantastic human being, approachable and supportive when you need him. That was a recurring theme with everybody that I spoke with.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:05:02

Thank you so much.

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:05:03

And thank you so much for staying true to what I heard. Thank you.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:05:07

I’ll try to live up to it, the expectations. I want to talk about AI, which is the concluding part of today’s podcast, but one of the most important conversations. So, if you have to paint a picture, Kiran starting with you, what does next 5-10 years are going to look like?

Especially for B2B software, how it’s going to be consumed. A lot of founders have doubt that, hey, SaaS pricing, perceived pricing is going to be killed. Is it going to be consumption-based pricing?

Open AI of the world, Anthropic of the world are going to eat into all vertical softwares. What is left for vertical software to do with? Cloud is now supporting BFSI.

And these companies want to go after every TAM possible.

Kiran Darisi 1:06:02

So, maybe 5-10 years is like a very long horizon to even before AI to look at. Because the technology trends are going to change every two to three years. But with AI, it kind of fast forwarded.

So, which is basically in a quarter, we are actually looking at a different trend to do it. But I would actually look at how you can build a company in this era. I will give an example of how we are building at Atomic World.

We are building an AI native product, but plus we are building an AI native company. Completely my workflow in terms of how my work is changing in terms of how you can able to build. Let’s say how you produce the code is completely changed a decade back to this.

How you deploy or how you even do a security testing is actually different. Now, it is like the pen test doesn’t on the web, right? It’s on the chat, which is basically, can I actually jailbreak a prompt so that I can able to make it work in a way which it didn’t intend to work.

So, your security testing is also different. And also, let’s say for, I will take you one, maybe developers is something everybody knows, everybody’s doing. I don’t see that there is a difference, etc.

So, let’s say for a QA. For a module to generate the test cases. So, you don’t need to know how you need to do it, because it already knows the past.

It already knows the context. You actually give them the Figma files or whatever. This I’m talking about enterprise ChatGPT, right?

So that you can able to generate the test cases. And the same thing goes into my own process, right? Which is like, I created my clones of me, where your first part of the review conclusion can happen, so that you don’t need to wait for me to take a decision so that you can able to take a first level decision.

Still, I will come review it, etc. But it saves time, because you’re talking about some X developers to one CDO, it’s not going to come, right? So, or even product, so that we created those clones so that you can actually able to do it.

And also, we created like, what is good? How do you make a decision? What is good?

Whether it can be strategy, or it can be like code, or any of those things, so that you can able to debate and say that, okay, this is good. So that you are not talking to a human, that review is happening within, what you say, very crude CDO, right? So, maybe as a persona.

So, you can able to debate it, get it done, etc. So, that anonymously can happen in five to 10 months. So, the building of a company itself is changing, your workflows and how you can able to deliver is changing.

And coming back to what you can build, there are multiple things, etc. But still, I strongly feel the disruption is going to be happening in the application space. That application can be anything.

The application can be how you can able to deliver a SaaS solution, so think of it, this entire model is like an infra layer. And you have your processes, internal processes, like a CRM or IT, everything is there, where in their raw format, but you are actually pushing this, the intelligence, where you can able to deliver the product itself in a very tangible manner, right? But if you see what you can able to do better, where on an agentic workflow, the reliability of that workflow for an enterprise is paramount.

You cannot say that, okay, I was taking this, say for DoorDash. So, if I say that, okay, I will deliver 95% correct, 5% I will not deliver, it is not going to cut out, right? So, that 5% matters, because you are actually delivering a real thing.

In terms of the decision making, how you can able to do the state management, all matters, but what kind of an application I can able to build it, you can actually build an application, just a layer on top of a legacy systems, where it can able to give you immense value, but you will be replaced, because a new tool comes. So, it is like there is no stickiness to it, right? So, you are actually as good as a workflow, where a new workflow comes, you can be better replaced.

But if you started building the whole platform itself, you hold the record, your system of record, let us say, for example, for us, we hold the asset record, service record, user record, all these things. And then we are actually building the agents on top of it, so that we actually hold that entire thing. So, we becoming like an operating system for the backend team, so that they can able to deliver the support instantaneously, right?

So, that is how we are thinking. But there are a lot of things, I know companies like Adalat AI, which actually built a legal copilot for judges in India, right? They are actually reduced the time of 30%.

I support this, it came from their incubator. And there is this startup called Karya, which actually picks up Indic languages from a tier two or a tier three city of recording it. So, you are still making money.

It is still a SaaS subscription software, but the delivery of it is quite different, right? So, I still strongly feel the disruption is on the application side. We have not even scratched the surface, right?

We have not actually put that full potential of being AI inside the systems. I think so there is a lot to build peripherals on the lot of legacy IT systems.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:12:02

Sreedhar, what is your view? Is AI expanding the pie or AI is eating into the existing software or tools or platform pie, especially by the large folks?

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:12:15

I think it’s both are happening at the same time, in the sense that there are new categories that are getting created for sure. And the existing categories are fundamentally getting reinvented, reimagined as we speak, that’s happening. The new categories, existing categories are getting reinvented.

And yes, some categories are dying. It’s a combination of dances. All three are happening simultaneously.

And it’s happening so quickly that like what Kiran was mentioning, it’s really hard to have a crystal ball to say next five years or 10 years from now, what exactly is going to happen.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:13:00

Can you give some examples on the three things that you mentioned?

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:13:03

So a new category would be like, if I were to talk about my personal experience, these are ways in which I use AI or we use AI within our own company.

So as you’re building startups, one of the things that you want to do is always stay in tune with what the customers are talking about, what prospects are talking about, what’s their pain points and all of that. And it used to be a painstaking process of not talk to people, keep talking to people and so on. Today’s world, you have got multiple conversations that are getting recorded.

How do I take that information? There are multiple podcasts very similar to this one where for different audiences that we talk to, all of that information is available there. How can I get that information?

How do I synthesize that to create a voice of the customer as a quality custom GPT could be a notebook LM that you would create? It’s far more easier today compared to it was ever before. A lot of the content creation effort that we do needs to be rooted in terms of what are the customers talking about?

What are the pain points in their world? That’s just one example. Then I forgot to take that into account.

And then what’s the impact of what was my content creation process earlier versus now? How does that change? How many people do I need for that?

Then you get it into, okay, take these inputs, especially from customers. And I want to create requirements for the product engineering teams. That process has completely transformed in terms of internally talking about.

So earlier the process used to be, okay, we have got product managers who are gathering these requirements from the field. And then they would write up the requirements and user stories and so on. And then they would work with the design team to create mock-ups, if you will, wireframes, and then the mock-ups and so on, which get presented to the right folks, leadership team and the engineering team for a bidirectional exchange of views.

And it goes back to the drawing board. You miss this and so on. This entire process, I could go and use, we don’t use lovable as much for its coding progress in terms of actually writing code for our production grade code, but we use it for prototyping, rapid prototyping.

I can take a call with customers. And on the same team, how many calls where the customers have brought it up, we take that thematically, convert that into a requirement node and use that requirement node to create a high fidelity prototype that I can have used for more informed conversation with the team in terms of, is this idea even resonating? The process that used to take a month can be done in a couple of days now.

Kiran Darisi 1:15:49

So this is like a new category creation of product speculation, which was not there. It is being tuned towards only designers, which is like Big Bang, etc. Now it became to CEOs and also the prod guys, anybody can able to do it, right?

Very high fidelity, usable, clickable, so that you can able to do it. And there are wedges also, as you said, it’s actually like, you have this listening, I forgot the name of the company, where we have Granola. So Granola is one, which is like a wedge, which actually started as you’re listening, like a fireflies kind of a thing.

Now it actually goes into, okay, can I able to create a product spec or action items in a Jira board, either one of it, right? It actually expands to it. But these are the wedges where it is actually acting upon, which is already there, but expanding it in a way that, okay, I can able to search through what happened before.

Also actually able to create some action items for you to do, that it can be any other platform, right? It can be like a CRM or your ERP or your Jira board, any of those things, so that it can able to do it.

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:16:55

These are some examples of the business process itself is getting fundamentally reinvented. You’re talking about this kind of a transformation, what does it mean for all the players who are in the process? I can clearly see that our dependence on Figma is still there, but it’s to the fag end.

I’m doing a lot of iterations using LLMs, using prompts, all that iteration, everything is being done. And once I get to a prototype that we have internally debated and agreed upon, directionally we’re all aligned, and I can even use that prototype to presenting to our customers, get a buy-in, and then before it goes into engineering, we’ll convert that into a Figma mockup. A process that used to be so much on Figma, I can do a lot of things ahead of time without even touching Figma, using prompts in a matter of hours as opposed to taking weeks and weeks of effort to get to that point.

And along the way you have, what does it mean for people who are doing the market research, who are doing the competitive research, and what was the process of creating requirements? What does it mean for all the product management tools in the process? What does it mean for the visual design process that used to happen earlier?

All the companies, the business process, the whole thing getting reinvented right now, reimagined if you will. All of this are getting done in much better and much faster.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:18:28

Let’s say if you have to reimagine your category which is revenue enablement, how would you reimagine it now?

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:18:35

So it’s primarily about doubling down even more on the founding hypothesis for us in terms of, it is not about content management, content organization is not what companies are looking for. People want the right information at the right time, delivered at the fingertips. And earlier people were thinking that it’s science fiction, now people see that it’s possible.

Now it’s bringing up another question for us, that’s another angle, where people say, okay, I can create a custom GPT, put in all this content in the custom GPT, then why do I need GTM body even? Yeah, I agree that you’re doing a better job than a High Spot and a Saasmix, but why can’t I do this one? Then there is a notion of, in terms of when you look at enablement, who is maintaining that GPT?

What’s the version control in that? How do you translate in terms of every other week, your product team is releasing new capabilities, your competitors are changing continuously, how do you do even manage that with custom GPT? Do you have visibility in terms of what is a custom GPT usage?

Do you have visibility in terms of what information is getting shared with the customers? You need to connect that workflows end to end for building a full business process, which is re-envisioned by AI. The process itself is not going away, it’s getting much, much better.

And the custom GPTs, which are increasingly something that most companies are trying out, almost every company is trying out, is also only one part of the problem. We’re just talking earlier today in terms of, in the world of ITSM, one of the common things is how do the information discovery questions in terms of what am I entitled to? I’m tired of this laptop, can I get a new laptop?

People ask, raise a question. Now, there is a policy that supports it in terms of, okay, you are supposed to be using it for 36 months before you can ask for a replacement. People would raise a ticket and all of that.

This becomes a conversational query. So, that information retrieval process is an area where it’s getting into that gray zone in terms of is it a ChatGPT style question or is it a workflow integrated system? Except for that, any company that is deeply embedded into more complex business end-to-end workflows, those workflows are getting smarter with AI.

And a chatbot, including a ChatGPT, is not replacing it. And when you’re talking about making it smarter, of course, we are using OpenAI, we are using Gemini or Cloud APIs as part of that to improve the workflows. But those workflows are not going away.

Kiran Darisi 1:21:12

So, on the same thing, right? So, when the same question asked, if it is an Atomicwork, because we manage their assets, we know their IT policy, and we know the user asset also, when you ask, you are eligible for this laptop, I already raised a ticket, the approval has been sent to your manager, he needs to approve it. Once it is, I’m going to ship it.

Even the shipping workflow is with us, right? So, that entire thing can be owned. So, people can do parts of it.

Information retrieval, they will do some. Asset management, they will do some. But if you actually see it as a whole connected thing, they’re like very few actually does end-to-end of it, right?

At this point of time, nobody. So, you need to buy a ServiceNow plus Moveworks to do it. Yeah, they bought it for $3 billion.

But yeah, they need to buy this to actually to make it work.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:21:58

Which you are pointing out to the replacement, let’s say OpenAI tomorrow develops their own ITSM.

Kiran Darisi 1:22:06

Yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:22:07

It’s very hard to do because of interconnectedness.

Kiran Darisi 1:22:10

Yeah, interconnectedness. And also, you need to have a deep expertise in terms of doing it, right? I will just add like a little bit in terms of where is your market is, the market is shrinking, etc.

When Sreedhar explained, right? So, the market is going to increase for one reason, now you can see it’s not G20K, it will be G50K companies who can able to do $100 million of revenue. Because the build is actually becoming shorter, and the technology is becoming more widely used, it is reachable to you.

So that when we are selling any company, when they actually grow, whatever the size, the complexity will be there, internal process will be there. Let’s say for Atomicwork kind of a product, we always have a market or a customer or a prospect to say that, okay, we can able to sell. So, in our lens, this is actually increasing.

That’s why we don’t have a seed pricing, right? Where we say that, oh, these many agents are there, okay, we’ll sell it kind of a thing. We actually say that, okay, you don’t need to grow your team to manage the complexity, I can able to help you to manage that complexity.

So that I’m actually selling you not workflows, but I’m actually selling you the workforce, which is a workforce which can able to work along with your employees so that get your job done, right? Now the pattern of okay, instead of 20,000 companies, I will sell it to 50,000 companies. So in my mind, it is only increasing, it’s not decreasing.

One thing is I’m irrationally optimistic on doing things. So in that sense, things, I feel that it is going to improve. Everybody is good.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:23:54

They’re not thinking that the market is shrinking in any sort of way.

Kiran Darisi 1:23:58

No, it’s actually like the size of the company is shrinking, but the value they are creating is increasing. That to number of companies creating more value is increasing, right? So that’s a hypothesis of building companies at this stage.

Otherwise, it’s actually like the boom, I mean, like a doom world of, okay, everything will get shut close and all. I personally don’t believe it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:24:23

Thank you so much, Kiran. Thank you, Sreedhar. It’s been an amazing conversation.

I learnt a lot, and it’s been very eye opening for me, especially getting a chance to discuss with both of you how your worldview worked because of the experience that you both had, and how you’re thinking about the future because of it. Thank you. There are a lot of things for founders to tap into, right, like tapping into the minds of two of the India’s most brilliant CEOs, I would say.

Sreedhar Peddineni 1:24:53

Thank you. Thank you, Sid.

Kiran Darisi 1:24:23

Thank you.