See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 32 Marketing as the Linchpin: Why the Future of Revenue is Creative.
00:00:25,700 --> 00:00:44,340 [Alex Shevelenko]
Welcome, Amit Pande. Enterprise product leader with over two decades of experience at Oracle, Yahoo, HP, and C3 AI, where he serves as GM and VP of their commercial AI applications. Welcome to the pod, Amit.
00:00:44,340 --> 00:00:46,540 [Amit Pande]
Thank you, Alex. Pleasure to be here.
00:00:46,540 --> 00:00:50,120 [Alex Shevelenko]
Well, listen, we, we go, we go way back. Uh, we share,
00:00:51,160 --> 00:01:21,680 [Alex Shevelenko]
uh, fascinations with bringing innovation in how go-to-markets, uh, gets done in, um, enterprise, uh, use cases in particular, and you have a perspective of, of having been through many waves and being a pioneer, uh, on this topic. So what, what, what's happening right now with the go-to-market? Let's dive in, and what are the biggest changes that you've seen, and what have you seen that's staying the same?
00:01:23,880 --> 00:01:45,440 [Amit Pande]
I've got, you know, you know, a decade ago, uh, if you'd asked me about go-to-market, you know, I would've said, uh, you know, is it just mark- you know, is it just marketing? Is it just sales? And I think one of the, the most exciting things over the arc of, uh, the last decade, right, you know, even sort of stepping into the AI world we're in, is that-
00:01:45,440 --> 00:01:46,140 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm
00:01:46,140 --> 00:02:04,010 [Amit Pande]
... go-to-market has now become a foundational construct. I mean, it's, it's actually quite inspiring to see how, uh, you know, people now talk of go-to-market engineers, and how everybody at OpenAI lists themselves as just working in GTM, whether they work on sales or marketing or... Right?
00:02:04,010 --> 00:02:11,250 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right. That's right. That's kind of obvious, but first thing is, like, most people 10 years ago didn't know what GTM stood for, right?
00:02:11,250 --> 00:02:11,820 [Amit Pande]
It didn't. So, you know, I-
00:02:11,820 --> 00:02:13,700 [Alex Shevelenko]
So it was not an acronym.
00:02:13,700 --> 00:02:38,450 [Amit Pande]
It was not an acronym, and I, uh, I, I remember, um, I used to work at, uh, at Tact.ai, right, the first AI sales assistant, uh, you know, a couple of moons ago. And my, you know, my then boss, I remember talking to him and saying, "You know, uh, you, we, we've got revenue and sales engineers and solutions marketing, you know, everything else, and we should just be intern-" This is, I'm talking 2017 now, right?
00:02:38,450 --> 00:02:38,700 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
00:02:38,700 --> 00:02:44,450 [Amit Pande]
And I remember talking to him and saying, "We need to construct our own identity as go-to-market internally too-"
00:02:44,450 --> 00:02:44,920 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:02:44,920 --> 00:03:24,440 [Amit Pande]
"... because isn't everything just go-to-market end product?" And he was like, "You know, you're right." And I said, "Well, product thinks of itself as product in a more unified way, but, you know, we need almost an identity evolution." And so I'm, you know, I'm thrilled that go-to-market is, uh, something that, um, uh, is now at least as, as VCs and PEs see it and founders, uh, you know, like you see it, and, uh, and the, and the world sees it, um, it's a, it's a foundational construct. Now, what does this mean in terms of, you know, what its implications are on what's changed and what's not changed, right? Uh, think, uh, in terms of this, m- this means real dollar flow, right?
00:03:24,440 --> 00:03:24,700 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:03:24,700 --> 00:03:34,780 [Amit Pande]
Because dollar flow follows, um, intent flow. And now, you know, if you know that in order to get this company or institution up and running, you need-
00:03:34,780 --> 00:03:34,790 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:03:34,790 --> 00:04:02,750 [Amit Pande]
... a product, and if you have to now go distribute that product, explain that product, you know, uh, transact on that product, you need a way to do it, and that's go-to-market. It means that the, the tooling for it, uh, the processes for it, the people for it, you gotta start, you know, thinking about it in that way. And I actually hope that the world of human resources and talent and the worlds of finance and GNA go through something like this in the future.
00:04:02,750 --> 00:04:02,760 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:04:02,760 --> 00:04:08,780 [Amit Pande]
Because I feel go-to-market, uh, as, as GTM, became more strategic.
00:04:08,780 --> 00:04:08,860 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:04:08,860 --> 00:04:20,399 [Amit Pande]
And, um, that means that the intent and money flow, you know, sort of into it increased. Now, in terms of, you know, I think what's specifically changed, I mean, uh, one, uh, the roles have changed, right?
00:04:20,399 --> 00:04:20,479 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:04:20,480 --> 00:04:33,170 [Amit Pande]
So, so, uh, it's interesting that you can almost, uh, create this, uh, you know, like, uh, you know, you know the, the Neanderthal turning into man kind of visual of back in the days when you would sort of have this, these stages?
00:04:33,170 --> 00:04:33,200 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:04:33,200 --> 00:04:51,040 [Amit Pande]
You can almost go from, like, sales ops, revenue ops, GTM ops, and now, you know, kind of where GTM ops and AI have now started becoming something new. It's still GTM ops, but I, I do think that, uh, this is here to stay. Um-
00:04:51,040 --> 00:04:51,700 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:04:51,700 --> 00:05:00,150 [Amit Pande]
Uh, and it's a good thing, because you and I have been on the other side of having a conversation with marketing ops and sales ops not even talking to each other. [laughs]
00:05:00,150 --> 00:05:07,320 [Alex Shevelenko]
They don't talk to each other. They rarely use the same tools. They use different metrics.
00:05:07,320 --> 00:05:07,760 [Amit Pande]
Right.
00:05:07,760 --> 00:05:13,820 [Alex Shevelenko]
And so I w- what I sort of, uh, think there's almost bifurcation, so there's some innovative organizations-
00:05:13,820 --> 00:05:13,940 [Amit Pande]
Yeah
00:05:13,940 --> 00:05:55,760 [Alex Shevelenko]
... they have this GTM, uh, you know, convergence. Um, they have people, they're creative folks like yourself that kind of understands that sales and marketing are not enemies. They're gonna... [laughs] And customer, customer success and expansion is not an enemy. That's all kind of an integrated team. And then there is the reality that there's a lot of complexity. The marketing suite is complex on its own, right? It has a lot of specialties, right? Like email marketer versus that marketer versus... Like, that is itself a beast, and then, and then the organizations are designed differently. So there's organizations and tools. And so who's pulling those threads together?
00:05:57,180 --> 00:05:57,290 [Alex Shevelenko]
What-
00:05:57,290 --> 00:06:14,440 [Amit Pande]
What is also interesting, Alex, is that if you go to the Fortune 500 side of the house, you know, they don't use the acronym GTM in the same way. Uh, people know the term go-to-market internally, but it's only when, uh, you start using, you know, the word commercial, and you and I-
00:06:14,440 --> 00:06:14,720 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right
00:06:14,720 --> 00:06:16,310 [Amit Pande]
... were talking about this walking into-
00:06:16,310 --> 00:06:16,310 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:06:16,310 --> 00:06:25,304 [Amit Pande]
... this conversation, that commercial execution-Is the, um, is kind of the adult language of go-to-market in a Fortune 500 context.
00:06:25,304 --> 00:06:25,434 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:06:25,434 --> 00:06:33,474 [Amit Pande]
But it's the, it's the language that a chemical company, a mining company, and a life sciences company can all rhyme around and say, "Oh, yeah, that's, that's what, you know, what we mean-
00:06:33,474 --> 00:06:33,474 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:06:33,474 --> 00:06:42,764 [Amit Pande]
... when we say commercial." So what's interesting to me is that, um, you know, what's... So, you know, I'll, I'll give you sort of three examples of what's changed, what's not changed, right? So-
00:06:42,764 --> 00:06:43,244 [Alex Shevelenko]
Okay.
00:06:43,244 --> 00:06:53,314 [Amit Pande]
So in terms of what's changed is that the term commercial operations or the term go-to-market operations, that's changed, so that means there's new jobs there, there's new, like, tooling for that.
00:06:53,314 --> 00:06:53,334 [Alex Shevelenko]
Okay.
00:06:53,334 --> 00:07:02,304 [Amit Pande]
But what's not changed is that both of them are still trying to ultimately solve the problem of how do I serve my customer better, and that's a good thing.
00:07:02,304 --> 00:07:02,374 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
00:07:02,374 --> 00:07:02,854 [Amit Pande]
Right?
00:07:02,854 --> 00:07:02,864 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:07:02,864 --> 00:07:13,304 [Amit Pande]
That's, that's a good thing because it means that, you know, you're saying that, you know, w- you know, w- is, is this customer being acquired faster? Do we understand them better?
00:07:13,304 --> 00:07:13,324 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:07:13,324 --> 00:07:22,484 [Amit Pande]
Are we growing them better? And so at that point, if you were customer success and you were sort of seen as, like, a, uh, like a poorer cousin of the revenue org, like-
00:07:22,484 --> 00:07:22,994 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:07:22,994 --> 00:07:22,994 [Amit Pande]
... in a-
00:07:22,994 --> 00:07:23,084 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:07:23,084 --> 00:07:27,604 [Amit Pande]
... same port, actually, you're now... They're more important. I think the second thing that's changed is that-
00:07:27,604 --> 00:07:27,614 [Alex Shevelenko]
Okay
00:07:27,614 --> 00:07:31,044 [Amit Pande]
... look, the AI tooling is eating up legacy tooling.
00:07:31,044 --> 00:07:31,254 [Alex Shevelenko]
Okay.
00:07:31,254 --> 00:07:38,364 [Amit Pande]
And, you know, certainly, it's, it feels like the systems of record are still safer because, well,
00:07:39,444 --> 00:07:41,924 [Amit Pande]
it's hard to rip out your intestines, right?
00:07:41,924 --> 00:07:41,964 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:07:41,964 --> 00:07:44,234 [Amit Pande]
And, and, and all these databases, well-
00:07:44,234 --> 00:08:27,754 [Alex Shevelenko]
And, and let's just, so, so, so, like, let's, uh, double-click on that briefly. B- we'll come back to the broader point, because there's all this thing, like, SaaS is dead and da, da, da, da. And, like, I think we need to distinguish what kind of SaaS, right? Is it kind of enterprise? Is it consumery things, right? Is it it... Like in a, like you said, system of record. I don't know. Like, I would not trust, um, I would not tru- as much as I love Claude Pro and, you know, myself and our team uses all the everything and everything, I would not trust something that hasn't been vetted, you know, to replace a system of record, um, that has a lot at stake around it, right? Uh, systems-
00:08:27,754 --> 00:08:27,754 [Amit Pande]
So-
00:08:27,754 --> 00:08:30,584 [Alex Shevelenko]
... of engagement is a different topic. We could talk about that, right? Like-
00:08:30,584 --> 00:08:36,724 [Amit Pande]
That, that's, that's a great point, Alex, because, because the, the system of payroll-
00:08:36,724 --> 00:08:36,734 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:08:36,734 --> 00:09:03,024 [Amit Pande]
... the system of customer and sales records, and the system of your marketing campaigns, and the system of your, you know, your, your, your employee records, um, you know, those systems are costly. Uh, they, uh, have been in place for maybe a decade, two decades, depending on sort of which function that you're in. And the reason the systems of engagement, and then there was this interim phase called systems of intelligence and so on, right-
00:09:03,024 --> 00:09:03,034 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm
00:09:03,034 --> 00:09:13,264 [Amit Pande]
... that we've kind of been through. These systems were meant to fulfill, um, large gaps that the systems of record had left.
00:09:13,264 --> 00:09:13,464 [Alex Shevelenko]
Uh-huh.
00:09:13,464 --> 00:09:26,744 [Amit Pande]
But what's, what's interesting in, in the AI tooling of the last couple of years is that people thought systems of record were gonna be replaced, and as you rightly said, the systems of record are the only canonical truth you can actually rely on. Because at some point-
00:09:26,744 --> 00:09:26,754 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:09:26,754 --> 00:09:30,313 [Amit Pande]
... you need to know, you know, what to trust to forecast your business-
00:09:30,313 --> 00:09:30,313 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:09:30,313 --> 00:09:31,484 [Amit Pande]
... or what to trust to, you know-
00:09:31,484 --> 00:09:31,494 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:09:31,494 --> 00:09:33,324 [Amit Pande]
... like, know how many employees you have.
00:09:33,324 --> 00:09:34,064 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:09:34,064 --> 00:09:43,304 [Amit Pande]
Ironically, the systems of engagement, um, and the systems of intelligence, I think there's been more downward pressure on those.
00:09:43,304 --> 00:09:43,324 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:09:43,324 --> 00:09:54,564 [Amit Pande]
Because in some sense, uh, you know, without being as philosophical, intelligence is an interim sort of state that ultimately leads you to, to action of some kind, right?
00:09:54,564 --> 00:09:54,614 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:09:54,614 --> 00:10:08,734 [Amit Pande]
And so I think it, it was unsustainable that there were gonna be systems of record, engagement, intelligence, and systems of action. I think everyone knew that the systems of engagement or the systems of record needed to become systems of action,
00:10:09,924 --> 00:10:18,424 [Amit Pande]
and I think what AI has done, which is interesting, especially in the last year with, uh, choose your flavor of multiple agents working together-
00:10:18,424 --> 00:10:18,494 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:10:18,494 --> 00:10:20,004 [Amit Pande]
... with orchestration-
00:10:20,004 --> 00:10:20,014 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:10:20,014 --> 00:10:22,924 [Amit Pande]
... is that they've said, "Well, wait a minute. Ultimately,
00:10:23,944 --> 00:10:33,624 [Amit Pande]
your system of record could be your CRM, but it could also be your email, it could also be your Slack. It could be all of these places where things happen." But ultimately,
00:10:34,744 --> 00:10:52,364 [Amit Pande]
what you're really trying to do is to, you know, is to connect point A to point B. So the term systems of orchestration is quite a mouthful, but it is true that I think what's, you know, what's changed is that the systems of orchestration, um, uh,
00:10:53,384 --> 00:10:58,904 [Amit Pande]
are really evaporating a lot of the layers that had emerged-
00:10:58,904 --> 00:10:58,914 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:10:58,914 --> 00:10:59,904 [Amit Pande]
... on top of the systems of record.
00:10:59,904 --> 00:11:00,044 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. Yeah.
00:11:00,044 --> 00:11:11,574 [Amit Pande]
So I actually think where we're, like, headed is gonna be... And I, I suspect that this is gonna happen in the world you're in as well, which is that, you know, you have all these, like, repositories, but, like, ultimately you're trying to-
00:11:11,574 --> 00:11:12,804 [Alex Shevelenko]
Activate somebody. You, you-
00:11:12,804 --> 00:11:13,844 [Amit Pande]
Activate somebody. Exactly.
00:11:13,844 --> 00:13:31,850 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. So let me, let me share a story, and I'd love to get your reaction. So you, you guys are, um, uh, at, at, at C3, you enroll in your employee benefits, uh, you know, around November of this, this, this year. This takes care of your, your family health and benefits and wellness and retirement and whatnot, and this is a great thing for most US companies. And so one of our, uh, customer types that emerge at Relate2 are the, uh, brokers that support companies like C3 in, like, in s- like, in, in their benefits program rollout. And so their deliverable was a, a guide and a, like, lightweight portal explaining the benefits, activating, and then getting people to sign up for the right benefits and seeing the value in those benefits, and then throughout the year get to use them. And it was fascinating to see that, like, first they needed a system of record, just like, here's all the information, all your plans, all from, from health, from health to medical, you know, to dental, to whatever. You know, you've got everything in one place. That's a system of record.And then of course then they, they want... Well, but if I just dump a database of PDFs in front of people, that's not gonna help them make any decisions, feel the value of that huge investment we're putting in into, into benefits as a company. And so they started saying, "Well, can we have a summary, like a benefits guide that introduces it?" And so that, that was the first thing where it became interactive. It's a presentation. It's a, like always on leave behind. And then inside that, they now, like embed calculators around, like how to, what, how to do your 401[k]. So you start interacting with it, and then of course it immediately drives you to, like go sign up or, you know, go, go use whatever benefit that you need to right away. And so it was beautiful to see that it's sort of a, um, system, you know, system of record for what's the deliverable for these brokers, for the clients, and, and sort of sometimes these get audited and whatnot. Uh, system of engagement and education, and then system of interaction, which is, which is a slightly more evolved version of engagement, I would say.
00:13:31,850 --> 00:13:31,880 [Amit Pande]
Mm-hmm.
00:13:31,880 --> 00:14:15,960 [Alex Shevelenko]
And, and then ultimately, like what's the conversion event, and that's mult- or multiple conversion event, right? Throughout the year. And it was, it was really obvious to us that when we, once we saw that thread, we realized, well, this is, this is a really high value customer group for us, because they've got the full stack, and we could really add value to them. And im- you know, pooling that stack in one place, it would be impossible, right? Like you can't, you can't get that with like a, just a kind of a database type of, or, or file storage type of system, right? It just would, was not designed for that kind of evolution. So, uh, it seems like the,
00:14:17,140 --> 00:14:18,660 [Alex Shevelenko]
my lesson from this is that
00:14:19,700 --> 00:15:09,060 [Alex Shevelenko]
the, this type of thing is gonna happen much easier in smaller clients that maybe don't yet have, um, as much complexity, and so they could kind of say, "Hey, here's this concrete use case. I have a system of record, system engagement, action, all in one place." I still struggle to see how you could, you know, create a single integrated product that does all of this in much more, you know, complex use cases. It feels messy, and it feels like you'll still need a lot of, uh, you know, very, um, conservative, uh, development approaches to, to combine that. What have you seen? Like, have you seen the, the difference in this adoption across company types or industries? Um, and, you know, any, any patterns you could, you know, predict going forward?
00:15:10,180 --> 00:15:27,840 [Amit Pande]
Uh, the, the really interesting thing outside of high tech, uh, software, sort of 50-mile radius of, uh, of, uh, Silicon Valley, you know, around here, or any of the kind of, uh, similar to Silicon Valley ecosystems around the world, is that,
00:15:29,060 --> 00:15:39,350 [Amit Pande]
uh, the high tech companies, and, you know, you and I have both worked at different high tech companies that are actually somewhere in these stacks. You know, uh, high tech was really an anomaly.
00:15:39,350 --> 00:15:39,380 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:15:39,380 --> 00:16:15,630 [Amit Pande]
I mean, the, the vast majority of, uh, the industries out there, including the industries that are focused industries view, the insurance industry, the life sciences industry, the man- you know, the manufacturing, metals, aviation, aluminum, you know, steel, those industries are actually extremely underserved by technology. And so what I've seen, which, uh, uh, which, uh, you know, has been eye-opening to me is that you have this, uh, paradox, okay? Most of the companies in these industries, they have certain systems of record that their CIOs are aware of, the CFOs are aware of.
00:16:15,630 --> 00:16:15,640 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
00:16:15,640 --> 00:16:26,360 [Amit Pande]
They know they purchase these over time. They know that they need these systems literally, because without that, uh, it's hard to be fiduc- responsible in a fiduciary way, right?
00:16:26,360 --> 00:16:26,460 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah.
00:16:26,460 --> 00:16:27,520 [Amit Pande]
So you, you need, you need a-
00:16:27,520 --> 00:16:30,020 [Alex Shevelenko]
So it's a com- ultimately it's a compliance-
00:16:30,020 --> 00:16:30,500 [Amit Pande]
Yes.
00:16:30,500 --> 00:16:31,550 [Alex Shevelenko]
It's a compliance-
00:16:31,550 --> 00:16:31,550 [Amit Pande]
Yes
00:16:31,550 --> 00:16:33,430 [Alex Shevelenko]
... process thing that doesn't-
00:16:33,430 --> 00:16:33,430 [Amit Pande]
Compliance process thing
00:16:33,430 --> 00:16:34,640 [Alex Shevelenko]
... get you fired.
00:16:34,640 --> 00:16:36,080 [Amit Pande]
It doesn't get you fired, but-
00:16:36,080 --> 00:16:36,220 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:16:36,220 --> 00:17:07,800 [Amit Pande]
... the paradox is that, uh, you don't really expect that system of record to do anything more than that. So in fact, you know, when, uh, you know, when a lot of startups say, "Hey, you know, I'm going into this company which has 27 instances of Salesforce or seven marketing automation tools, and, you know, will they have appetite to use something new?" The answer most of the time is that, uh, well, actually, they don't really even think about these systems of record because they have now, um, uh, it's a certain kind of learned helplessness, right? Where these companies-
00:17:07,800 --> 00:17:07,900 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:17:07,900 --> 00:17:34,560 [Amit Pande]
... have, have, have acknowledged that, uh, "I need one of these things, and, you know, actually I'm talking to you because I want you to tell me what to do with all of this, like, foundational information that exists in these databases." Because by the way, while Silicon Valley companies were, you know, buying systems of engagement and intelligence from each other over these last 10 years, we didn't buy most of it. So, so the, so the interesting thing is that-
00:17:34,560 --> 00:17:36,510 [Alex Shevelenko]
Wow. Hold on, let's pause on this Amit, because-
00:17:36,510 --> 00:17:36,620 [Amit Pande]
Yeah
00:17:36,620 --> 00:18:19,950 [Alex Shevelenko]
... this is a beautiful nugget. I, I, I kind of intuited that same from our journey, is when I'm, like, in Silicon Valley, we're talking about, like, a point solution that sits on top of another point solution, that optimizes a third point solution because they're all buying the stuff and it's all, you know, very, uh, uh, you know, very open to innovation. Maybe they believe that software will solve all their problems because they're themselves software companies, right? And, and there's this openness to try things, and there's, like, a whole, like, thought leadership funnel of people talking about this, right? Like Marketo sold first to people in the, in that kind of tech universe.
00:18:19,950 --> 00:18:19,960 [Amit Pande]
Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:19,960 --> 00:18:31,330 [Alex Shevelenko]
And so it's always, like, very, very, um, specific, and the users are educated, and it's, so it's maybe, like, in a way good, but very narrow.
00:18:31,330 --> 00:18:31,360 [Amit Pande]
Very narrow.
00:18:31,360 --> 00:18:35,864 [Alex Shevelenko]
You just get niched.And, and then you step out of that universe,
00:18:37,304 --> 00:18:54,704 [Alex Shevelenko]
and it's like a completely different conversation th- because t- as you pointed out, they, they're just, like, maybe at the foundational level and they have a lot of information, and then they haven't, like, applied it to do great things for their business. And, and so the question is
00:18:56,044 --> 00:19:01,584 [Alex Shevelenko]
what, what propels these slow-moving folks that didn't adapt that earlier layer,
00:19:02,744 --> 00:19:16,264 [Alex Shevelenko]
what is changing now? Or is this gonna be more of the same with, like, maybe a little bit, they do some, like, AI experiments, you know, with the CIO budget because they need to do it in, in order not to get fired?
00:19:16,264 --> 00:20:12,904 [Amit Pande]
I think what's fascinating is that if you look at, um, the... There's an analogy here, right, uh, to draw from, uh, the relay to world, which is that when we, um, uh, experience, you know, Universal Studios, Disney, uh, uh, e- you know, everybody's, um, you know, once a year let's just go out to a movie theater and have this like, you know, amazing movie experience that, you know, the whole family kinda goes and watches. All the best ideas of multimodality, immersiveness, personalization, um, you know, enterprise at some point started opening up to these ideas because we couldn't really live in a, you know, black and white world at work, and then this amazing world of Technicolor at home, right? And so a lot of the best ideas that were around us in society, and i- ideas that we were experiencing as consumers, we were seeing these in our cars.
00:20:12,904 --> 00:20:12,924 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:20:12,924 --> 00:20:14,904 [Amit Pande]
We were seeing these, you know, with our banks.
00:20:14,904 --> 00:20:14,924 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:20:14,924 --> 00:20:24,594 [Amit Pande]
We were, we were seeing these in our iPhones. And at some point, the dam had to break and enterprises had to build more user-friendly software, and so on and so forth.
00:20:24,594 --> 00:20:24,624 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
00:20:24,624 --> 00:20:38,144 [Amit Pande]
I think the same thing's happening in the world of these large organizations with, um, the sort of year four or year five of the Chat- the post ChatGPT moment that we're in, right?
00:20:38,144 --> 00:20:38,184 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:20:38,184 --> 00:20:40,464 [Amit Pande]
I think this is a real, real phenomena.
00:20:40,464 --> 00:20:40,804 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
00:20:40,804 --> 00:20:57,894 [Amit Pande]
That, that these companies that, uh, for the longest time were looking at Silicon Valley with a, you know, sort of dual mode, right? They were looking at Silicon Valley companies that were buying all this tech and, you know, looking at it from the perspective of, um, you know, some jealousy.
00:20:57,894 --> 00:20:57,904 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:20:57,904 --> 00:20:59,834 [Amit Pande]
And then, you know, some, um-
00:20:59,834 --> 00:21:00,384 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:21:00,384 --> 00:21:06,364 [Amit Pande]
... you know, some almost, I would say, skepticism. And both of those, by the way, were very justified emotions, right?
00:21:06,364 --> 00:21:06,764 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:21:06,764 --> 00:21:11,624 [Amit Pande]
Uh, because, because Silicon Valley companies were growing at a different margin profile, and they were-
00:21:11,624 --> 00:21:11,664 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:21:11,664 --> 00:21:19,204 [Amit Pande]
... growing at a different, you know, um, kind of, uh, uh, growth profile. So, so let's say if you were Palo Alto Networks-
00:21:19,204 --> 00:21:19,294 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:21:19,294 --> 00:21:39,193 [Amit Pande]
... uh, or, or Zscaler, and you were buying, um, you know, Salesforce Einstein, and then replacing that with Clari, and then Gong, and then Avivio, and then SalesLoft, and all of these, then if you were Honeywell and you were looking at Palo Alto Networks, you were saying, "Well, you know, Palo Alto can do this because Palo Alto's growing in a different way, and we're Honeywell."
00:21:39,193 --> 00:21:39,193 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
00:21:39,193 --> 00:21:52,004 [Amit Pande]
"We, we, we're also older, more public, so we can't grow in the way Palo Alto does." But, but really, like, w- what is Palo Alto doing with all these technologies? I mean, is it really driving more revenue or efficiencies for them?
00:21:53,044 --> 00:21:53,084 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:21:53,084 --> 00:22:02,844 [Amit Pande]
Now, fast-forward, guess what's happened. And, you know, the reason I use sales tech as an example and rev tech as, as an example because, you know, you and I are both familiar with what has happened in those companies, right?
00:22:02,844 --> 00:22:03,564 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:22:03,564 --> 00:22:03,804 [Amit Pande]
Um,
00:22:04,984 --> 00:22:22,064 [Amit Pande]
Clari and SalesLoft, uh, you know, merged and had some kind of an unnatural baby in the basement of a private equity company, right? So that play is over. Outreach hasn't grown much. The only company in revenue technologies that are, like, really growing are either Gong-
00:22:22,064 --> 00:22:22,074 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:22:22,074 --> 00:22:35,533 [Amit Pande]
... which has done a remarkable job of staying independent and crossing 300 million, or there's companies like my past employer, Avivio, which have basically stayed, like, really close to the ground, haven't raised a lot, but have, like, now done 50, 60, 70 kind of million.
00:22:35,533 --> 00:22:35,564 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:22:35,564 --> 00:22:41,284 [Amit Pande]
Because they've said, "Look, let's focus on giving seven times more product-
00:22:41,284 --> 00:22:41,724 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:22:41,724 --> 00:22:47,554 [Amit Pande]
... to these companies." And so now if you were Honeywell, you were waiting for the world to change.
00:22:47,554 --> 00:22:47,584 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:22:47,584 --> 00:23:04,244 [Amit Pande]
And I think what's interesting about what changed in the world is actually not just the technology, Alex, right? Look, the technology showed you and me and, you know, uh, everyone that's twice our age also that, look, this ChatGPT thing is real and you can, you know, use LLMs to do summarization and so on. But I think what it also showed them is that-
00:23:04,244 --> 00:23:05,184 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:23:05,184 --> 00:23:38,344 [Amit Pande]
... they could build their own stack in a more meaningful way than they could do in a previous era. And I think that this is actually the biggest change, right? Like, when I now talk to these companies, they're not evaluating, uh, you know, all of the opportunities in front of them, um, you know, when they're talking to a Databricks or a, you know, a C3, or they're talking to Salesforce. They're not just looking at these companies as, what can I, you know, what can I buy? They're looking at these technologies and saying, "What can I buy that I can build upon in a way-"
00:23:38,344 --> 00:23:39,024 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right. Yeah
00:23:39,024 --> 00:23:41,974 [Amit Pande]
"... that I couldn't do even two years ago?" And I think that-
00:23:41,974 --> 00:23:42,904 [Alex Shevelenko]
So it's kind of the full-
00:23:42,904 --> 00:23:42,984 [Amit Pande]
Yeah
00:23:42,984 --> 00:24:04,464 [Alex Shevelenko]
... circle of this no-code kind of thing that got started, where you're building an almost a no-code platform. You're buying it, but the idea is that you're building it to create your own content. And so now you're looking that, like, across... That was kind of maybe top of the stack or a couple layers of the stack, now you're looking at that much more broadly. Is that-
00:24:04,464 --> 00:24:06,994 [Amit Pande]
By the way, though, I love that you use the word content here, right?
00:24:06,994 --> 00:24:07,004 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:24:07,004 --> 00:24:15,624 [Amit Pande]
Because in many ways, um, if you can deploy agents and you can deploy apps in the way you think about deploying content-
00:24:15,684 --> 00:24:15,844 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:24:15,844 --> 00:24:23,004 [Amit Pande]
... which every company, if you ask them, like, "Are you comfortable deploying content in your organization?" They would say, "I'm comfortable deploying content."
00:24:23,004 --> 00:24:23,024 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:24:23,024 --> 00:24:26,524 [Amit Pande]
But if you say, "Are you comfortable deploying apps?" They'd say, "Oh my God."
00:24:26,524 --> 00:24:26,614 [Alex Shevelenko]
Oh, yeah. No.
00:24:26,614 --> 00:24:28,834 [Amit Pande]
"Oh my God, we had this mobile app store era."
00:24:28,834 --> 00:24:28,864 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:24:28,864 --> 00:24:33,144 [Amit Pande]
And remember the, uh, you know, internal company app stores?
00:24:33,144 --> 00:24:33,183 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:24:33,184 --> 00:24:38,388 [Amit Pande]
None of that ever took off.And I think this is where, like, the question, you know, that, that, uh-
00:24:38,388 --> 00:24:45,368 [Alex Shevelenko]
But, but, but why? W- like, here's why. I think people underestimate the power of PowerPoint way back in, you know, Office Suite.
00:24:45,368 --> 00:24:45,618 [Amit Pande]
Yeah.
00:24:45,618 --> 00:24:53,888 [Alex Shevelenko]
Because that wa- you know, certainly Excel, uh, was the first kind of content/app builder-
00:24:53,888 --> 00:24:54,188 [Amit Pande]
That's right
00:24:54,188 --> 00:25:35,358 [Alex Shevelenko]
... that actually, you know, really been truly democratized in the enterprise. And, you know, maybe poorly, maybe not was the best templates, maybe without, like, a, you know, feedback loop that, that's kind of properly working underneath, but I think there is many years to the plate there, which is really different than, uh, than an app, right? Uh, unless you're... you've been building maybe, like, Excel, e- some people have been using Excel as apps, right? Like, effectively selling the, you know, in, in consulting, and I'm sure you've done this in the pricing world, like, you kind of build a, you know, a sophisticated Excel model, kind of put a nice wrapper around it so people don't see the cells.
00:25:35,358 --> 00:25:36,788 [Amit Pande]
It will, by the way, on the... in the, in the word-
00:25:36,788 --> 00:25:38,848 [Alex Shevelenko]
This has been an app for 20 years, right?
00:25:38,848 --> 00:25:39,878 [Amit Pande]
It's been an app for 20 years.
00:25:39,878 --> 00:25:39,967 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:25:39,968 --> 00:25:43,588 [Amit Pande]
I can tell you that if you look at pricing as an example-
00:25:43,588 --> 00:25:43,698 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:25:43,698 --> 00:25:49,788 [Amit Pande]
... of an area that, uh, like, really large Fortune 500 companies are looking to invest-
00:25:49,788 --> 00:25:49,798 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:25:49,798 --> 00:25:50,767 [Amit Pande]
... more and then get, you know-
00:25:50,768 --> 00:25:50,858 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:25:50,858 --> 00:25:52,608 [Amit Pande]
... the pricing tools that work for them-
00:25:52,608 --> 00:25:52,648 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:25:52,648 --> 00:25:54,988 [Amit Pande]
... for, for their internal pricing, you know, analysts and such.
00:25:56,548 --> 00:26:06,308 [Amit Pande]
The incumbency is not, um, isn't, is, is not off-the-shelf products because if you're in Novartis or AMD-
00:26:06,308 --> 00:26:06,318 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:26:06,318 --> 00:26:11,328 [Amit Pande]
... well, there's no one who could have built a pricing application for you. Your worlds are too different, right?
00:26:11,328 --> 00:26:11,568 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:26:11,568 --> 00:26:17,228 [Amit Pande]
It's actually Power BIs, which were next generation versions of the same Excels that you just spoke of.
00:26:17,228 --> 00:26:18,158 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:26:18,158 --> 00:26:34,308 [Amit Pande]
Right? That... I mean, essentially what you're replacing when you go in with new AI technologies in, in most of the cases, you're replacing, you know, what, you know, Bob the Builder and their teams over the last 10 years had maybe built up a few dozen Power BIs,
00:26:35,588 --> 00:26:38,968 [Amit Pande]
uh, more than a few dozen versions of spreadsheets-
00:26:38,968 --> 00:26:39,208 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:26:39,208 --> 00:26:44,288 [Amit Pande]
... and probably a few, you know, Snowflake, Salesforce, SAP type systems-
00:26:44,288 --> 00:26:44,448 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:26:44,448 --> 00:26:49,808 [Amit Pande]
... underneath that are, like, connected to these. So, so, so for them to replace that,
00:26:50,868 --> 00:26:54,388 [Amit Pande]
you know, you're not just trying to replace the interface layer, right? You're trying to replace-
00:26:54,388 --> 00:26:54,398 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:26:54,398 --> 00:26:56,368 [Amit Pande]
... the logic, the interface-
00:26:56,368 --> 00:26:56,598 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:26:56,598 --> 00:27:35,428 [Amit Pande]
... layer, and, um, if you think about, uh, you know, within those systems, what's gonna die? Well, the Power BIs and the Excels have natural limitations, but you, um... There's still no magical way, by the way, to take those Power BIs and Excels and then suddenly create an agentic application out of it. But the, the reason why I think the mobile app era inside enterprises largely failed, and the reason a lot of the web app eras, um, the web app era inside enterprise, you know, outside of the systems of record also didn't go as far, is because it actually goes back to something very fundamental to your, your, like, mental model around Relate2, right? Which is that
00:27:36,568 --> 00:27:43,008 [Amit Pande]
just like this conversation, in the real world, someone has a specific need that is activated-
00:27:43,008 --> 00:27:43,018 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:27:43,018 --> 00:28:01,718 [Amit Pande]
... in their, in themselves. Now, that need is often around an answer or a resource that you're looking for, and so if you're using Expensify, you're basically gonna use it to scan, upload, and tag, and then you're never gonna use Expensify. Okay, then that's... By the way, Expensify is a use case that's real, right? It's a-
00:28:01,718 --> 00:28:01,728 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:28:01,728 --> 00:28:02,598 [Amit Pande]
It's a real use case.
00:28:02,598 --> 00:28:02,608 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:28:02,608 --> 00:28:05,268 [Amit Pande]
Everyone has to manage it when they're going to do this.
00:28:05,268 --> 00:28:05,328 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:28:05,328 --> 00:28:13,668 [Amit Pande]
If you could get away with... So the, so the, the friction was you're now downloading this Expensify app from an internal app store in the company-
00:28:13,668 --> 00:28:13,678 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:28:13,678 --> 00:28:22,688 [Amit Pande]
... and you're downloading another 51 of those applications, and those applications have maybe 25 screens, but guess how many of those screens you're actually using at any given point in time too.
00:28:22,688 --> 00:28:23,117 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:28:23,117 --> 00:28:31,298 [Amit Pande]
So, I actually think you could, if you, if you turned the heat up, you know, kind of, I think, in the, in a, in kind of French style slow reduction, right? Like, uh-
00:28:31,298 --> 00:28:31,298 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:28:31,298 --> 00:28:43,868 [Amit Pande]
... you did a reduction technique, and you said, "Let us just put all the web applications and mobile applications of the previous around a slow boil, and let's come back in a couple of days and see how many real core value screens-
00:28:43,868 --> 00:28:45,828 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:28:45,828 --> 00:29:04,828 [Amit Pande]
... are needed by users," you'll find that the, the same power law applies, that people are actually using maybe 1% of those screens. So, so now fast-forward to the agentic world where, in your amazing example, by the way, of like, you know, how to choose 401(k) plans or, like, you know, uh, should I do Kaiser or should I do PPO, you know, classic-
00:29:04,828 --> 00:29:05,038 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:29:05,038 --> 00:29:20,308 [Amit Pande]
... California question, right? As you think through those, I actually think the reason why generative AI was a false start is because generative AI, uh, created this very, uh, I would say, like, slightly fake use case. Talk to your PDF and, you know-
00:29:20,308 --> 00:29:20,477 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:29:20,477 --> 00:29:24,688 [Amit Pande]
... like, uh, talk to this agent. But, but people want guidance.
00:29:24,688 --> 00:29:24,908 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:29:24,908 --> 00:29:40,898 [Amit Pande]
And now the layer of interaction that you mentioned, right? Where whether it's, um, you know, through, uh, full control to the user versus kind of you slide it to the right, and you have this concierge-like thing that's kind of guiding you and saying, "Wait a minute. Um, let's talk about your teeth," you know? Like, let-
00:29:40,898 --> 00:29:40,898 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:29:40,898 --> 00:29:42,488 [Amit Pande]
... let's talk about what kind of-
00:29:42,488 --> 00:29:42,498 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:29:42,498 --> 00:29:55,358 [Amit Pande]
... dental plan's right for you. If we can give people that 1% that makes a material difference to their life, then it's easy enough to fire the previous generation of software, and I think that's, you know, that's kind of what-
00:29:55,358 --> 00:30:17,848 [Alex Shevelenko]
Well, let, let's kind of dig into that, right? Like, we were talking about, um, kind of mission critical decisions in your life, and so, like, for example, in this benefits use case, uh, it was a total eye-opener for me that, um, the, the killer apps were, uh, for, for people who wanted, uh, to understand what the fertility benefits were.
00:30:17,848 --> 00:30:18,848 [Amit Pande]
Mm-hmm.
00:30:18,848 --> 00:30:33,008 [Alex Shevelenko]
Uh, or if they wanted to have a kid, you know, what's, what's the b- kind of best, richest, kind of, uh, most valuable option in kind of having, you know, next... that, that, that they could be covered on in terms of, of a plan. And
00:30:34,048 --> 00:31:12,530 [Alex Shevelenko]
these questions were so important that for the first time, these HR folks that were administering this, that where they were able to answer them instantly, you know, from 150-page PDFs where you would normally try to get some Control+F answers, right? And then the AIYou know, in a AI conversation al-allows to unlock it, then you drill into the specific pages, so you have the context. You know, that ability turned this from a, um, you know, something that I deal with in HR type of thing, that it's a thing, to
00:31:13,840 --> 00:32:36,700 [Alex Shevelenko]
wow, right? Like, I am gonna work my ass off for this company because, uh, you know, this health plan that addresses... that they're investing in anyway, that now I've selected, that is gonna allow me to fulfill my life dream as a mother or as a father or, or whatnot, that is, you know, f- unlocked, right? And so to me, that's, that's sort of this dream of content that's actually coming to life, where it's like it was... The, you know, you're going from information packaging and maybe sharing, to actually, like, solving a life problem for an individual that works at the company, solving a problem for a company where it's sort of like it's not doing this thing for nothing. It wants its, you know, its employees happy and engaged and, you know, really, like, pushing it in a, in a, in a great way. So that's sort of the story behind the benefits. And then for these brokers who are selling a commodity, was no... Like, I love it, but, like, they are great, amazing people, but, uh, basically they differentiate themselves in service, and n-now this is the service in the AI era, right? That they're able to deliver and they say, "Hey, look, these are the stories that they tell now to their clients." Or when they bring the RFP,
00:32:37,720 --> 00:33:48,180 [Alex Shevelenko]
they say, "Here's y- how we don't hide behind small print in our RFP. You could chat with it, you know, deep dive into relevant sections. And if you like this approach, by the way, that's the v- the experience that we deliver to your employees when they're looking for your 200-page benefits guide." So it's sort of s- to your point earlier that we discussed, sort of start, you start serving your customers, you start serving your customer's customer, and all of a sudden, that's the game changer that these PowerPoints were never meant to really deliver, right? All of a sudden, they become the PowerPoints, the PDFs, the Excels, become apps that are game changing for the brokers, right? And they're, they're, they need to do it, and it's no longer something that, uh, is, you know, uh, for a relatively conservative industry, this is no longer science fiction, right? This is now becoming a, I would say, competitive necessity to keep up with a, you know, relatively conservative market. So, uh, this is what I see, um, in, in sort of the regulated verticals-
00:33:48,180 --> 00:33:48,300 [Amit Pande]
Uh-huh
00:33:48,300 --> 00:34:24,080 [Alex Shevelenko]
... that have been stuck typically in being late adapters, right? And I think you, at C3, you guys are also known for kind of not necessarily always going for the software tech, right? By, by focusing on these huge mega industries that are, that have their own adoption challenges because they're deeply regulated and have certain ways of how they do things. What have you seen that's in, like, specifically regulated world that's taking off, that maybe is less relevant in unregulated world, as you kind of humanize this AI solutions and bring it to market?
00:34:25,440 --> 00:34:46,010 [Amit Pande]
You know, if we go from the, if we go from the bottom to the top, right? The, m-one of the most interesting starting, like, troubles that any regulated, um, company has, and I would say that, you know, at the extreme end, there are, like, everyday companies that are, you know, facing similar challenges to these regulated-
00:34:46,010 --> 00:34:46,010 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:34:46,010 --> 00:34:48,700 [Amit Pande]
... industry companies as well. You know, it's, um,
00:34:49,780 --> 00:34:54,030 [Amit Pande]
that everybody has a lot of guilt and shame about their data, right?
00:34:54,030 --> 00:34:54,060 [Alex Shevelenko]
Really, yeah.
00:34:54,060 --> 00:35:13,159 [Amit Pande]
They, there's, there's a lot of, like, g- I think there's a lot of guilt and shame around, like, well, you know, in our world, like, you know, those, that type of data has always existed in this repository and, you know, we, we have all of these other repositories that have certain access patterns that are like, maybe it's not normal at all, unlike, you know, things you've seen and so on. And I think, like, um-
00:35:13,160 --> 00:35:15,719 [Alex Shevelenko]
Our SharePoint sucks, I'm sorry. Like, we-
00:35:15,720 --> 00:35:15,860 [Amit Pande]
Yeah.
00:35:15,860 --> 00:35:17,480 [Alex Shevelenko]
We know it, right? Like, yeah, yeah.
00:35:17,480 --> 00:35:19,170 [Amit Pande]
I mean, actually, the, uh, SharePoint's a great example, right?
00:35:19,170 --> 00:35:19,180 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:35:19,180 --> 00:35:33,140 [Amit Pande]
Because, because, uh, uh, you know, if you ask the 10, uh, 15-year, um, younger version of me, I would've said, "Oh my God, SharePoint." And today, you know, I was like, oh, like, you know what? I mean, I love the SharePoints and Teams world. Like, it's not like I miss Slack with not using-
00:35:33,140 --> 00:35:33,240 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:35:33,240 --> 00:35:37,500 [Amit Pande]
... Slack for, for many years because you, you start going towards value, right?
00:35:37,500 --> 00:35:37,980 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah.
00:35:37,980 --> 00:35:49,160 [Amit Pande]
And, and, uh, you start differentiating between kind of like, uh, like, uh, sometimes showmanship and, and, like, real value. And what I think is interesting is that for these companies-
00:35:49,160 --> 00:35:49,860 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:35:49,860 --> 00:35:52,920 [Amit Pande]
... if someone can help them with
00:35:54,260 --> 00:35:59,960 [Amit Pande]
letting their data be where that data is, rather than requiring-
00:35:59,960 --> 00:35:59,970 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:35:59,970 --> 00:36:05,820 [Amit Pande]
... um, an upgrade on their, on their, uh, on their technologies or an upgrade on their people or-
00:36:05,820 --> 00:36:06,620 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm
00:36:06,620 --> 00:36:11,510 [Amit Pande]
... uh, you know, th-there is an upgrade in the thinking, right? Like, which is that, listen, in order for us-
00:36:11,510 --> 00:36:11,539 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:36:11,539 --> 00:36:14,260 [Amit Pande]
... to serve you better, we do need to-
00:36:14,320 --> 00:36:14,330 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:36:14,330 --> 00:36:48,420 [Amit Pande]
... bring your data from where your data is, you know, into a Blob instance or into a Snowflake instance, or into some other instance. Uh, and if your data cannot be brought into an instance because it's on the edge, we'll, you know, figure out a way to work with there. So actually the, the most, um, I would say, like, boring conversations around compliance, security, um, uh, you know, sort of the h- uh, the, um, if you call it the, um, you know, the FedRAMP certifications and all of this, this is actually the starting point for a lot of these companies. And I think that it's a,
00:36:49,480 --> 00:37:18,596 [Amit Pande]
you know, it's something that if you're a vendor in that space, right? And you, um, uh-Have, um, uh, you have the, uh, first the understanding that there's a lot of fear, guilt, gre- you know, and such that is associated with this, and you put the right people in that point in the conversation, well, you're addressing the biggest elephant in the room, which is that, you know, my data may not even be ready for you to do anything with it with regards to, you know, to, to AI. Okay, number, number one. Number two-
00:37:19,616 --> 00:37:20,896 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:37:20,896 --> 00:37:42,256 [Amit Pande]
If you can use AI, and I think this is where there's very few companies that have figured this out. I'm a huge fan of this kind of AI-based, forward deployed engineer model, right? Where it's not just you or me as an FTE coming in, but it's you or me with a backpack of AI tools coming in and saying, "Listen, you know, um, you know, Alex, let me take a guess. You have a lot of duplicate data." And you're like-
00:37:42,256 --> 00:37:42,516 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:37:42,516 --> 00:37:44,946 [Amit Pande]
... "Uh, y- absolutely, we have a lot of duplicate data."
00:37:44,946 --> 00:37:44,946 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. Yeah.
00:37:44,946 --> 00:38:05,416 [Amit Pande]
"How are you gonna address my duplicate data?" And I say, "Listen, what if I deploy agents and new data pipelines in my kind of plumbing that help us catch your duplicate data before we ingest this data into our platform?" At this point, I'm actually addressing your bad data, stale data, duplicate data problems. I actually think that that's really important to get right in a regulated industry-
00:38:05,416 --> 00:38:05,426 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:38:05,426 --> 00:38:17,576 [Amit Pande]
... because, because, uh, you know, without that, it's a, it's kind of a non-starter. And I would say that one of the reasons, Alex, why a lot of the traditional systems of record failed, and I'm not talking about a Veeva, right? Like-
00:38:17,576 --> 00:38:17,776 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right
00:38:17,776 --> 00:38:38,686 [Amit Pande]
... you know, which was built for that world. But I'm, you know, I'm talking about even kind of where the Salesforce, ServiceNow world initially struggled, and certainly most of the horizontal apps in Silicon Valley struggle, is that, you know, they try to force the customer's process around them rather than, you know, go specifically to where the customer is with purpose-built tooling. Um-
00:38:38,686 --> 00:38:38,686 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right
00:38:38,686 --> 00:38:41,276 [Amit Pande]
... you know, kind of people who can talk that domain language. Like-
00:38:41,276 --> 00:38:41,286 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:38:41,286 --> 00:38:43,476 [Amit Pande]
... you know, like the GM model that you, you mentioned.
00:38:43,476 --> 00:38:43,756 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:38:43,756 --> 00:38:48,346 [Amit Pande]
Um, and then, okay, now let's go further up the stack, right? Okay, what does everybody want on top?
00:38:48,346 --> 00:38:48,376 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:38:48,376 --> 00:38:48,896 [Amit Pande]
Okay, look,
00:38:50,376 --> 00:39:08,016 [Amit Pande]
e- even if you live under a rock today, you're probably doing something in a regulated, in your regulated industry with MCP protocols. You know, uh, Joe and his boys have probably deployed a couple of test agents on the inside. So when you go in with this, with this open conversation and you say, "Listen-"
00:39:08,016 --> 00:39:08,066 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:39:08,066 --> 00:39:20,476 [Amit Pande]
"... we know you've done a bunch of MCP experiments. We know you've done a bunch of agents. We know you've probably also deployed some agentic apps." If you bring, now that we've solved the data problem, now that we're talking about the workflow level above the data,
00:39:21,596 --> 00:39:30,075 [Amit Pande]
let's first of all have an honest conversation and say, "I'm not going to ask you to kill your agents. In fact, you can bring all your agents in."
00:39:30,076 --> 00:39:30,265 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:39:30,265 --> 00:39:44,516 [Amit Pande]
"And if you're using SAP's agents and Agentforce's agents, you can bring those agents in, and let's coexist with those agents so that we can give you the control layer to then deploy the next thousand agents." I think that's an honest conversation. Ho- honestly-
00:39:44,516 --> 00:39:44,806 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right
00:39:44,806 --> 00:40:19,256 [Amit Pande]
... a year or two ago, I think everyone was kind of, you know, dangling... I mean, I have a old kind of BMW key, right? Like, everyone was dangling this key of like, here's this one master agent, and, and, and you and I know that, you know, it's still too early to call whether there's gonna be 10 super agents inside an organization or one supervisor agent and, like, a dozen agents under them that are specialized. Um, it's still early, right? So, so if you think that the company you're talking to in this regulated industry is only gonna deploy one agent,
00:40:20,376 --> 00:40:22,956 [Amit Pande]
well, then you're definitely being naive because-
00:40:22,956 --> 00:40:30,396 [Alex Shevelenko]
Well, the more regulated it feels like, the more there are legacy approved workflows.
00:40:30,396 --> 00:40:31,056 [Amit Pande]
Correct.
00:40:31,056 --> 00:40:36,086 [Alex Shevelenko]
Which means it's gonna be harder to put the one super agent.
00:40:36,086 --> 00:40:36,136 [Amit Pande]
Exactly.
00:40:36,136 --> 00:41:00,276 [Alex Shevelenko]
I think, like, at a startup, like, I think that's where the sort of buzzwords come in, like, yeah, okay, great, I'm a founder and I'm, you know, building, you know... Alex, I, you know, I'm build- you know, I, I build the agent for CEOs of startups, right? Like, that I get, right? Like, whether I use it or not is still a big question. But I think when you get to that level of sophistication and work flow and, and needs for approval,
00:41:01,456 --> 00:41:26,816 [Alex Shevelenko]
um, I think what you're saying makes m- a lot more sense to me, is like you kind of need to coexist with what's already there because this is not your industry that's like, "Oh, great, latest shift in AI technology. I gotta jump on it," right? They, I think they wanna do it, but they, they have to respect the existing workflows, and that means this integration play, um, is more likely.
00:41:27,856 --> 00:41:33,976 [Alex Shevelenko]
And, and I guess the broader question is, like, where do you see... If there are gonna be pockets of innovation-
00:41:33,976 --> 00:41:34,356 [Amit Pande]
Mm-hmm
00:41:34,356 --> 00:41:37,476 [Alex Shevelenko]
... within the regulated world, where do you see those happening, right?
00:41:37,476 --> 00:41:37,786 [Amit Pande]
Actually, Joe, part-
00:41:37,786 --> 00:41:39,156 [Alex Shevelenko]
We were talking about... Yeah, yeah.
00:41:39,156 --> 00:41:49,716 [Amit Pande]
This is a great question, right? Because, because, uh, you know, the innovation in the simplest use cases, uh, there's a lot of mileage for that to run today, right?
00:41:49,716 --> 00:41:49,896 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:41:49,896 --> 00:42:16,286 [Amit Pande]
I can tell you that, um, I've probably looked at a few dozen AI council presentations or kind of, you know, our internal AI czar and, you know, how we're thinking at a variety of Fortune 500 companies over the past year. And, uh, I've, I noticed this interesting pattern that either the companies had already formed an AI council and they were trying to figure out the right mix between innovation and governance.
00:42:16,286 --> 00:42:16,306 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:42:16,306 --> 00:42:21,556 [Amit Pande]
Because you've gotta run enough experiments at the edge, but also you, you have to govern those experiments-
00:42:21,556 --> 00:42:21,606 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right. That's right
00:42:21,606 --> 00:42:57,876 [Amit Pande]
... kind of with possible controls. Or there were companies that were literally going to have that meeting in November, December, or, like, now on, "Oh my God, we're, you know, launching this AI council." And, and in fact, I, I remember talking to, um, some of the sales leadership, uh, you know, both in my organization but also outside, and saying, "You guys need to figure out how you're gonna have that AI council conversation, because you'll need to figure out, you know, in, in very polite terms, whether this is an AI council that is, you know, that is a, you know, a set of people that have self-appointed themselves as bureaucrat in this large company to-"
00:42:57,876 --> 00:42:58,306 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:42:58,306 --> 00:43:03,886 [Amit Pande]
... you know, kind of throttle AI, or is this actually a real council with budgetary power? At which-
00:43:03,886 --> 00:43:03,896 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:43:03,896 --> 00:43:08,386 [Amit Pande]
... point this is almost like an economic buyer for you, and you've gotta model that out into your, you know, into your, into your-
00:43:08,386 --> 00:43:08,386 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:43:08,386 --> 00:43:15,352 [Amit Pande]
... sales and commercial process. And so if, if you look at-The number of contacts with my customer.
00:43:15,352 --> 00:43:16,132 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:43:16,132 --> 00:43:30,452 [Amit Pande]
Each contact with my customer, whether I'm having that contact, uh, you know, in a kind of an agentic sense or through a content workflow, improving efficiencies around those, improving complaint resolution, uh-
00:43:30,452 --> 00:43:30,482 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:43:30,482 --> 00:43:41,452 [Amit Pande]
... you know, improving, um, kind of almost what you would call, uh, the quality of serving of those customers, you know, perennial, ancient problems-
00:43:41,452 --> 00:43:42,012 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:43:42,012 --> 00:44:01,912 [Amit Pande]
... the amount of innovation that can be brought there, you know, with agents, um, uh, today, uh, I actually think that's the first starting point of innovation. Because what happens is that you're taking an existing problem that is already connected all the way at the top with, you know, something that's a board level metric.
00:44:02,972 --> 00:44:07,962 [Amit Pande]
And once you've proved that, so, so let's just say the customer contact problem, right? How often-
00:44:07,962 --> 00:44:22,742 [Alex Shevelenko]
So customer call, so and, for lack of a better word, this is a customer call center, right? Or that, that's right now, that's expensive human, you know, maybe not deep experts in what you're doing, referring to manuals, uh, to answer those questions.
00:44:22,742 --> 00:44:22,752 [Amit Pande]
Right.
00:44:22,752 --> 00:44:35,252 [Alex Shevelenko]
And so you, you're saying, "Hey, we ha- we can productize, ans- you know, delegate high, high complexity questions to, to individuals, and then have immediate answers through-
00:44:35,252 --> 00:44:35,502 [Amit Pande]
Right
00:44:35,502 --> 00:44:35,702 [Alex Shevelenko]
... AI workflows." Yeah.
00:44:35,702 --> 00:44:53,352 [Amit Pande]
And you can, you can flip that same thing onto the other side of the funnel and say that, look, you know, with my, uh, uh, 5,000 salespeople, and with the marketing budgets that I have, which, you know, often with the large companies you work with as well, you know that a lot of that marketing budget is actually trade shows, events-
00:44:53,352 --> 00:44:53,662 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah
00:44:53,662 --> 00:45:08,862 [Amit Pande]
... you know, kind of billboard spend. So, so the amount of marketing spend that's actually going into digital innovation and digital technologies in a lot of these larger companies, you know, as a, as a function of, you know, like spend going into trade shows is still lower than it, than it needs to be, right?
00:45:08,862 --> 00:45:25,001 [Alex Shevelenko]
Got it. So if it's a butterfly, you're saying, like I got like one part of the butterfly and another part of the butterfly, top of the funnel and the very bottom, those kind of are relatively easy. What about the middle, kind of where you need, uh, more, you have more complexity, you know, more at stake?
00:45:25,001 --> 00:45:58,392 [Amit Pande]
I think in the, I think in the, in the middle, this is where, um, you know, drawing in, uh, drawing a line from your example of benefits, the AI assistance, uh, guidance, uh, you know, kind of expert AI by your shoulder helping your existing salesperson or your existing, you know, product and solutions person, I think that that middle has a lot of room for not, uh, you know, automation of the process, but augmentation of the process, of the human, right?
00:45:58,392 --> 00:45:58,412 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:45:58,412 --> 00:46:18,841 [Amit Pande]
So, so let's take an example. Uh, now if I'm, uh, in, um, a sales cycle with you, uh, you're a life sciences, uh, VP of marketing, and you are, you've been told that Amit might have some ideas on, um, uh, how to improve the effectiveness of your new drug launches.
00:46:18,841 --> 00:46:18,852 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:46:18,852 --> 00:46:23,302 [Amit Pande]
And you want one of those new drug launches which moves your stock up by 10%, right?
00:46:23,302 --> 00:46:23,372 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:46:23,372 --> 00:46:46,082 [Amit Pande]
And you're like, "Listen, man, I mean, I've used a bunch of these like tools from like, uh, whatever, Veeva and all these other companies, but you know, none of th- that does like new drug launch orchestration for me." Like, because new drug launch orchestration in the life sciences world is like a six-month process versus, you know, uh, Salesforce, uh, announcing Agentforce in like, you know, two weeks and then everyone moves on, right? [laughs]
00:46:46,082 --> 00:46:46,121 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:46:46,121 --> 00:47:07,272 [Amit Pande]
Uh, so, so software launches are probably juvenile as compared to like new drug launches in, in, in the, in the biopharma world. Now, at some point, if I show up and I give you my first call deck of seven, you know, pages, let's just say I'm a Series C, you know, startup, and I have some credibility and, you know, I have a Stanford medical guy on my board and whatever, right?
00:47:07,272 --> 00:47:07,352 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:47:07,352 --> 00:47:20,182 [Amit Pande]
When I show up in a conversation with you, I show you maybe six or seven pages, and then I show you a standard demo, it is almost entirely guaranteed to fail, right? Why? Because I don't really understand your specific problem.
00:47:20,182 --> 00:47:20,192 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:47:20,192 --> 00:47:28,862 [Amit Pande]
But now instead, imagine a new sales process, right, where I'm in this conversation, I've showed you, I haven't even showed you a deck. Okay?
00:47:28,862 --> 00:47:28,902 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
00:47:28,902 --> 00:47:47,692 [Amit Pande]
Let's just say I started my meeting with a, with a relay two, and I showed you maybe three vignettes, okay, and I said, "H- here's kinda how we, you think about the world," and it gets you convinced enough to start talking. And you say, "Well, you know, Amit, the biggest problem that I have is that, you know, I actually think we're doing all the right things."
00:47:47,692 --> 00:47:48,412 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:47:48,412 --> 00:47:57,362 [Amit Pande]
"All the right things, but, um, you know, my problem is that we do all these right things, and then we have a one-week spike, and then crickets," right?
00:47:57,362 --> 00:47:57,362 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:47:57,362 --> 00:48:02,082 [Amit Pande]
"If I could make that one-week spike a one-month spike-
00:48:02,082 --> 00:48:02,082 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:48:02,082 --> 00:48:13,352 [Amit Pande]
... and now the whole world knows about my new drug, is that something you can solve for me?" Now imagine you telling me that in the first 20 minutes of a 45-minute call, right?
00:48:13,352 --> 00:48:14,252 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
00:48:14,252 --> 00:48:19,472 [Amit Pande]
The way I can manage the sales process with AI differently today-
00:48:19,472 --> 00:48:19,692 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
00:48:19,692 --> 00:48:28,511 [Amit Pande]
... is that instead of me saying, uh, "Alex, let's set up a call after you're back from the holidays with Janet from my team in Colorado. We're gonna do-"
00:48:28,512 --> 00:48:28,862 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:48:28,862 --> 00:48:40,622 [Amit Pande]
"Yeah." No, no, no. You're hot in this moment. Now imagine if I could, in the same conversation, say, "You know, let me show you an example of what this could look like." And meanwhile,
00:48:41,652 --> 00:48:50,732 [Amit Pande]
the, the tool that's next to me, and let's just say I have a solution person also with me on the call, they're listening to you, and they've vibe coded-
00:48:50,732 --> 00:48:50,972 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:48:50,972 --> 00:48:59,022 [Amit Pande]
... an example dashboard on our platform of something that could look right for Luma. Let's say that's your new drug.
00:48:59,022 --> 00:48:59,032 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:48:59,032 --> 00:49:06,182 [Amit Pande]
And I say, "Alex, uh, in the spirit of showing you something, you know, that relates to your world, can I show you something, you know, my colleague Jake, who's also on the call?"
00:49:06,182 --> 00:49:06,432 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:49:06,432 --> 00:49:10,152 [Amit Pande]
Meanwhile, Jake is using an AI tool, right? And Jake shows a dashboard-
00:49:10,152 --> 00:49:10,512 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:49:10,512 --> 00:49:13,172 [Amit Pande]
... which at least looks 75% like-
00:49:13,172 --> 00:49:13,362 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:49:13,362 --> 00:49:28,192 [Amit Pande]
... what your ideal world looks like. At this point-You know that the empathy with which I am approaching this isn't just words. I've just showed you something that is different from the 17 other vendors that, you know-
00:49:28,192 --> 00:49:28,412 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:49:28,412 --> 00:49:31,042 [Amit Pande]
... you've been talking to, you know? So, so I think that in the-
00:49:31,042 --> 00:50:26,952 [Alex Shevelenko]
That's beautiful. I love this example. You kind of remind me of something that I, I love doing on some of our calls, is, like, we discuss what are your, for example, biggest content problems, and the person inevitably says, "Well, I have this thing that I'm launching, this, you know, our annual report, or our, like, this e-book that is, like, for marketers." Um, and they, they share it with us, right? Like, they kind of start sharing. It's like... And it's kind of like, "I wish I knew more data about it," or, "It was more whiz bang and exciting, and it gonna help us stand out and really get our message across to our buyers faster." And so we kind of just... If, yeah, I can... Sometimes I've done it myself, where if you have, like you said, like, a, a sales, uh, sales expert on the call or a CS expert is you can do it, you know, they could do it while you're talking. But generally, like, the wow factor happens when on that call-
00:50:26,952 --> 00:50:27,042 [Amit Pande]
Yeah
00:50:27,042 --> 00:50:41,672 [Alex Shevelenko]
... you're basically transforming that. And we've even done, like, a time clock one time. It was like, "Okay, well, here's, [laughs] here's your document. Let's just cloud the seconds, and we'll come back to it in, whatever, in two minutes and see what this person has done behind the scenes."
00:50:41,672 --> 00:50:43,712 [Amit Pande]
That building, like building up anticipation to-
00:50:43,712 --> 00:51:21,202 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah. It's sort of like... And it was so much... And it's fun, right? Like, basically what you're changing, yeah, you're, you're selling or... But, but also you're just having a real engaging, you know, non-bullshit, uh, slideware show. But, like, a real conversation on something that people care about, right? 'Cause that's sort of the key word that you've brought up, right? You're, you're, you know, you're going from a theory into, like, something I deeply care about, and it's fun, right? Like, I think that's the whole nature, uh, I think of what sales could change, and we're talking about how you could change, AI could change things.
00:51:21,202 --> 00:51:21,232 [Amit Pande]
Right.
00:51:21,232 --> 00:52:23,451 [Alex Shevelenko]
It's like bored people receiving boring materials. That's traditional B2B, right? And, and, you know, sometimes it connects because you find the person who's, like, really, you know, excited about that problem, and they'll power through your boring materials. But not all the time, right? Not, not, like, the, not, not as often as you would like. And, and so you end up with a bunch of stalled opportunities and people, you know, the d- uh, like, meetings that go nowhere. And imagine you kind of are able to make it exciting and then get people out of their, like, "Oh," you know, "another meeting on Zoom," you know, that, that it kind of doesn't shake me up. And you, you know, whether it's through your personality, but hopefully it's through your product, uh, as well, you're, you're able to ingest, uh, somebody inside this, you know, old-fashioned industry or a really mature industry with, like, the possibility of how their world could be transformed and how they could be an enabler of that change for their organizations.
00:52:24,692 --> 00:52:59,212 [Alex Shevelenko]
And to me, that feels like that, that's the big opportunity that, like, bringing a, a, you know, GTM tooling and also itself the, the kind of the AI, the new AI generation products, like, I think the sort of need for ability to have instant, instant value in these complex, uh, industries and complex use cases, which normally take years to deploy, is that is part of the game changer that sort of almost is more important than the AI, right? It's sort of the velocity of change that is now-
00:52:59,212 --> 00:52:59,242 [Amit Pande]
Right
00:52:59,242 --> 00:53:16,282 [Alex Shevelenko]
... unlocked through AI, right? But if, if it was something else that it was unlocking it, doesn't matter, right? It just v- like, unlock the, the velocity for, for, for people that have historically struggled because of the nature of their industry to move fast.
00:53:16,282 --> 00:53:56,312 [Amit Pande]
And now, now, to close that call, right, like, that you and I are on, now if you, in the last five minutes, open up and you say, "You know, um, guys, I gotta be honest with you. Uh, I tried this Boston-based startup last year and, you know, six months in, we didn't really have a very good experience because, uh, uh..." Well, they got acquired and, you know, and then I was like, "Oh my God, like, I, I'm running this POC with you, and now your, your kind of your own future has changed." And, uh, so, so at this point, you're opening up a vulnerability in your world, but you're just being honest about saying, "You know what? I have this kind of unfinished project that I did with that other startup."
00:53:56,312 --> 00:53:56,642 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:53:56,642 --> 00:53:59,752 [Amit Pande]
"And I actually tried solving this problem last year."
00:53:59,752 --> 00:54:00,312 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:54:00,312 --> 00:54:06,532 [Amit Pande]
Um, so, you know, remember, a burnt, a burnt, uh, prospect that was burnt by somebody else-
00:54:06,532 --> 00:54:06,852 [Alex Shevelenko]
Is your best customer.
00:54:06,852 --> 00:54:08,272 [Amit Pande]
Like, well, you're kind of-
00:54:08,272 --> 00:54:08,751 [Alex Shevelenko]
[laughs]
00:54:08,752 --> 00:54:11,172 [Amit Pande]
They're, yeah, they're, they're an interesting customer because-
00:54:11,172 --> 00:54:11,382 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. Yeah
00:54:11,382 --> 00:54:13,972 [Amit Pande]
... now, and if I say, "Well, um, you know, um,
00:54:15,012 --> 00:54:38,552 [Amit Pande]
uh, I have an example of, uh, you know, somebody we worked with that's, you know, not in your industry, but they're in a different industry. Maybe it's not exactly biopharma. Maybe it's a, you know, different, in health insurance or something. And, um, you know, we helped them migrate from, you know, their existing vendor to us. And, you know, one of the ways we were able to help do that is because we've kind of built this tool that makes data migration possible in 36 hours."
00:54:38,552 --> 00:54:38,572 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
00:54:38,572 --> 00:54:40,652 [Amit Pande]
Now, at this point, you're gonna be like, you know,
00:54:42,372 --> 00:55:12,512 [Amit Pande]
I, I do wanna follow... L- Getting the follow-up meeting is actually the, the hardest problem. Now, as you rightly said, like, you know, the way I measure that in my CRM and I track, like, how many meetings happened and so on and so forth, that's all just digital exhaust being captured. The real, uh, victory, uh, or failure is happening in this, you know, conversation. And, uh, I, I think that, um, uh... Y- You remember, um, oh gosh, man, like, 20, 30 years ago, the lovely movie Ratatouille, you know where, like, the-
00:55:12,512 --> 00:55:13,032 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. Yeah
00:55:13,032 --> 00:55:13,892 [Amit Pande]
... the, the, the chef, you know, the-
00:55:13,892 --> 00:55:16,232 [Alex Shevelenko]
The French, uh, little, uh-
00:55:16,232 --> 00:55:19,158 [Amit Pande]
Yeah. And, and he's-The, um, the-
00:55:19,158 --> 00:55:19,818 [Alex Shevelenko]
Rat, rat that was doing-
00:55:19,818 --> 00:55:20,228 [Amit Pande]
The critics, right?
00:55:20,228 --> 00:55:20,868 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah, yeah.
00:55:20,868 --> 00:55:32,448 [Amit Pande]
Yes. The critics in the, in the restaurant, and the critic eats, uh, the two... And, and the critic is transported into, like, their grandmother's cooking, right?
00:55:32,448 --> 00:55:32,498 [Alex Shevelenko]
Ah.
00:55:32,498 --> 00:55:54,367 [Amit Pande]
And that's because they've just had the, the soup. And, you know, the soup's, of course, been, been, you know, built by the, by the, uh, rat that's in the, in the kitchen. Uh, and by, you know, by the human, but the actual- the human's a noob, right? And the, it's actually the, the, the spice mix is the, is the genius rat. And it's those, those special peak moments, right?
00:55:54,368 --> 00:55:54,418 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:55:54,418 --> 00:55:55,888 [Amit Pande]
And, and I think the, the reason why
00:55:57,228 --> 00:56:12,808 [Amit Pande]
I'm very bullish about where the world of kind of AI-generated content experience is headed is because, um, you know, the way you elevate the mood and the consciousness of that entire process-
00:56:12,808 --> 00:56:13,048 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:56:13,048 --> 00:56:28,028 [Amit Pande]
... is you, you have to show something that people look at and say, "You know what? That was really interesting." Like, "I learned something, and you made me feel better, you know, about this call." And that kind of sales conversation always has the next meeting.
00:56:29,068 --> 00:56:35,608 [Amit Pande]
And, uh, so I actually think we're, we're, like, in, in this conversation, like with marketing and, and kind of content, right?
00:56:35,608 --> 00:56:35,788 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:56:35,788 --> 00:56:40,928 [Amit Pande]
I actually think this is gonna be more and more of the sales process going forward. I mean, I'm 100% convinced about this.
00:56:40,928 --> 00:57:17,428 [Alex Shevelenko]
So what you're saying is, look, you're, you... And obviously we, we, we're slightly biased in this, in, in this agreement, but it's, it's about elevating the experience when you have humans involved, uh, so that it's, it really is like you feel like you're genuinely solving problems. It's not some kind of linear monologue that you're stuck with, right? Like you're, you're jump- You're really uncovering things, and then you're not, like, waiting for, like, 15 cycle meeting, cycles of meetings. You kind of get the confidence that, hey, look, this is a meaty problem, but these people, I see a path how this could
00:57:18,448 --> 00:57:29,788 [Alex Shevelenko]
make an impact on my organization, make an impact on my career, and sort of this, sort of turning something that's abstract into real. So that's part of the experience. Here's the big question:
00:57:32,208 --> 00:57:36,578 [Alex Shevelenko]
how, how does this happen if you're not in the room, if you're not having this meeting?
00:57:37,768 --> 00:58:18,308 [Alex Shevelenko]
Before the meeting, people are doing, you, you know, we, as we know, like, a lot more discovery is happening through digital channels, through talking to chats. Um, and then obviously after the meeting, the real decision-maker oftentimes is not the person that was in the meeting, right? And they're, they need to make an assessment, kind of experience, uh, a little bit of what you had in the meeting, uh, and so that they could, you know, bless it or at least can get, get the right folks on board. And I feel like this art of sales has been very good at the meeting historically, right?
00:58:18,308 --> 00:58:18,528 [Amit Pande]
That's right.
00:58:18,528 --> 00:58:34,268 [Alex Shevelenko]
Like you, you work for Mr. Siebel, you know, brought you into C3, like they created, like, the ultimate sales, uh, person as well, right? Like, so that's been well- done well. Obviously, it's changing now, as we discussed. But the art of
00:58:35,508 --> 00:59:04,828 [Alex Shevelenko]
education that doesn't bore you to tears, or the, the kind of eg- like deeper follow-up versus some email chase, you know, for booking the next meeting, that's been struggling in my assessment, and I don't see that it's changed at a 10X multiple in any meaningful way. What have you seen, um, and what is your kind of recommendations for people that wanna innovate in the sort of when you're not in the room mode?
00:59:04,828 --> 00:59:21,658 [Amit Pande]
One of the most, uh, bullish areas for me about AI is that AI, uh, allows us to create these, uh, meaningful moments and experiences when either a human is not in the room because they-
00:59:21,658 --> 00:59:21,848 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:59:21,848 --> 00:59:26,288 [Amit Pande]
... they, they couldn't have, they couldn't be there in that meeting. Or frankly,
00:59:27,668 --> 00:59:38,348 [Amit Pande]
there's just not enough humans who can be in those rooms in those conversations. And so what I'm bullish about is as AI gets more multimodal-
00:59:38,408 --> 00:59:38,468 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
00:59:38,468 --> 00:59:50,037 [Amit Pande]
... and AI starts taking on perhaps the best versions of what we can all do as we, you know, sort of... You know, the, the best parts of Alex and Amit may, uh, may or may not be the way we look, right?
00:59:50,037 --> 00:59:50,088 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:59:50,088 --> 00:59:54,708 [Amit Pande]
It may be our, our embodiment of our ideas in an AI.
00:59:54,708 --> 00:59:54,718 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:59:54,718 --> 00:59:58,448 [Amit Pande]
You know, you say, "You know what? I spoke to this AI, and it kind of felt like I was talking to you."
00:59:58,448 --> 00:59:58,828 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
00:59:58,828 --> 01:00:19,678 [Amit Pande]
I think that, um, treating the, the buyer very intelligently and knowing that when the buyer is in discovery mode, you need to give them, uh, a very, um, sort of like an old world shopping experience, right? Where they feel, um, not hassled.
01:00:19,678 --> 01:00:19,728 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right.
01:00:19,728 --> 01:00:23,078 [Amit Pande]
Uh, they feel, um, they feel not watched.
01:00:23,078 --> 01:00:23,088 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:00:23,088 --> 01:00:48,238 [Amit Pande]
Uh, they feel, um, like, uh, the entire store... I mean, you know, if you've, uh, you know, in, uh, in Europe and Asia, when you're buying, like, jewelry or, like, clothes, uh, for like, you know, important family things or weddings or whatever, you get that experience, right? Because you're in a place where there's no technology, but the people have, have reoriented thems to, uh, themselves to showing you 500 products if that's what you wanna see.
01:00:48,238 --> 01:00:48,258 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
01:00:48,258 --> 01:00:52,348 [Amit Pande]
Because they're just warming you up to get you into the mood to buy.
01:00:52,348 --> 01:00:52,408 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
01:00:52,408 --> 01:00:57,578 [Amit Pande]
Because they know when you buy, you will, you will probably buy a lot more than you originally intended to buy.
01:00:57,578 --> 01:00:57,728 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm.
01:00:57,728 --> 01:01:01,188 [Amit Pande]
And so I think in very specific terms with AI
01:01:02,308 --> 01:01:07,488 [Amit Pande]
being used to serve up content, apps, uh, calculators-
01:01:07,488 --> 01:01:07,498 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:01:07,498 --> 01:01:29,004 [Amit Pande]
... utility, toys, or build almost a simulated world of what you, you, you sort of need, I think that the website has to-Carry a lot more weight in where we're headed because, one, the website is going to be seen by APIs and AIs also, and the website's gonna be seen by humans also. So you kinda have to, you know, like-
01:01:29,004 --> 01:01:31,444 [Alex Shevelenko]
You have to meet both needs, right? You have to be-
01:01:31,444 --> 01:01:32,384 [Amit Pande]
You have to meet, you have to meet both needs
01:01:32,384 --> 01:01:32,844 [Alex Shevelenko]
... yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:01:32,844 --> 01:01:40,844 [Amit Pande]
And I think that with short-form video, whether those videos happen to be TikTok style AI, you know-
01:01:40,844 --> 01:01:40,874 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:01:40,874 --> 01:01:46,454 [Amit Pande]
... of that version of you or me, like wearing the Sp- Spock Star, you know, Trek uniform, uh-
01:01:46,454 --> 01:01:46,454 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm
01:01:46,454 --> 01:01:54,844 [Amit Pande]
... kind of so that it feels like this is an on-brand person, uh, or, um, you know, it's really just, uh, three-dimensional product tours-
01:01:54,844 --> 01:01:54,953 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:01:54,953 --> 01:02:00,813 [Amit Pande]
... which make a traditional piece of software feel like buying French luxury.
01:02:00,813 --> 01:02:00,984 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:02:00,984 --> 01:02:18,064 [Amit Pande]
I think that the, the heaviest lift in the future, and in kind of practical ways, I think this, this, this, this means that, you know, you hire the marketing ops and the, you know, the AEO, SEO, GEO person, but if I were putting a bet... You know, someone asked me this the other day, you know-
01:02:18,064 --> 01:02:18,224 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:02:18,224 --> 01:02:26,214 [Amit Pande]
... venture capitalist asked me this. They said, "You know, Amit, if you were, uh, to hire three people in your AI future marketing team, right, what would, what would you hire," right? And you know what-
01:02:26,214 --> 01:02:26,294 [Alex Shevelenko]
Great question
01:02:26,294 --> 01:02:33,004 [Amit Pande]
... the first, the first person I said to them is I said, "You know, this is a certain kind of creative producer. It's a new kind of creative producer-"
01:02:33,004 --> 01:02:33,054 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:02:33,054 --> 01:02:43,764 [Amit Pande]
"... that knows how to wield AI tools and creates, you know, bespoke content experiences." And then I said, "The second person I'd hire is like a, is like a GTM engineer that knows how to-"
01:02:43,764 --> 01:02:44,544 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:02:44,544 --> 01:02:45,784 [Amit Pande]
"... rig the, the stack together."
01:02:45,784 --> 01:02:46,094 [Alex Shevelenko]
Interesting.
01:02:46,094 --> 01:02:52,324 [Amit Pande]
And I said, "The third person that I would hire is someone that actually knows how to throw a great party." Like real world events that feel like-
01:02:52,324 --> 01:02:52,334 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
01:02:52,334 --> 01:02:53,964 [Amit Pande]
... salon, you know, style and-
01:02:53,964 --> 01:02:54,384 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. Yeah
01:02:54,384 --> 01:03:07,204 [Amit Pande]
... and so I think that, um, the answer is actually marketing. Like marketing can elevate each one of these digital touchpoints in a way that now the decision-maker that was not in the room-
01:03:07,204 --> 01:03:07,684 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:03:07,684 --> 01:03:11,914 [Amit Pande]
... what they get back from you... Look, the practical ways to do this are still-
01:03:11,914 --> 01:03:11,914 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:03:11,914 --> 01:03:13,194 [Amit Pande]
... microsites or-
01:03:13,194 --> 01:03:13,194 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:03:13,194 --> 01:03:19,464 [Amit Pande]
... password protected things where, you know. But imagine if, um, you know, if, uh, at the end of this meeting,
01:03:20,544 --> 01:03:28,784 [Amit Pande]
um, I got a note which said, "Hey, here's a five-minute Alex narration." It could even be an audio narration-
01:03:28,784 --> 01:03:28,793 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right
01:03:28,793 --> 01:03:41,164 [Amit Pande]
... of like what you missed in the meeting and kind of what we discussed and, you know, and I'm simply like, like listening to it. You know, there's no reason to believe that won't be as powerful as, "Here's an email," which basically reads out the read.ai summary.
01:03:41,164 --> 01:03:41,173 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah. Yeah.
01:03:41,173 --> 01:03:43,184 [Amit Pande]
I mean, that's, you know. So, so I-
01:03:43,184 --> 01:03:48,244 [Alex Shevelenko]
Well, beautiful, Amit. I, I think you're recruited for our, uh, advisory board at Relate to.
01:03:48,244 --> 01:03:48,804 [Amit Pande]
[laughs]
01:03:48,804 --> 01:04:37,894 [Alex Shevelenko]
Because ac- actually we do have the narration, audio narration product that, that we're kind of releasing. But I think that like to build on your, what you said is the key word to me is multimodal. Because you don't really know, you know, which part of human is gonna be showing up, right? Is it gonna be the visual Amit who, who likes to look at the charts and, and, you know, kind of like it really 'cause a picture says a thousand words, or it's gonna be Amit that's going for a walk and he just like does not wanna look at his screen because he's been looking at screens all day, but would like to have, you know, a ch- a, a short summary, um, and then like if that leads to something, drill into the one visual that he needs to on the walk, right? Or, or you have something that you could forward to your colleague out of the box that kind of is like real- ready to go, so it's-
01:04:37,894 --> 01:04:37,894 [Amit Pande]
Right
01:04:37,894 --> 01:05:28,504 [Alex Shevelenko]
... zero friction, right? So we don't, like we struggle, I think, right now to predict what these are. And so I think having some kind of a buyer experience center, for lack of a better word, that's deeply personalized, that kind of it collects the latest things, right? That's adapts to you as a buyer, um, on the fly and it could, you could have a very different need depending on which device you're on or which part of the sales cycle you're on, and then there's your colleagues, right? That, that could be caring about very different things, but they still need to be engaged. That I think has been the dis- nirvana of like a proper sales process, and I, I, I do think the tools are getting in place. Uh, we're seeing it with our stack to address that, and that's what I'm hearing kind of b- b- be like on the,
01:05:29,704 --> 01:05:44,884 [Alex Shevelenko]
what kind of, uh, the sales, salespeople acting like marketers, and then marketers acting like sellers because they could deeply personalize and get away from a vanilla message to something that is gonna be relevant to that particular individual.
01:05:44,884 --> 01:05:47,324 [Amit Pande]
And you gotta get people into the product. You gotta-
01:05:47,324 --> 01:05:47,334 [Alex Shevelenko]
Right. Yeah
01:05:47,334 --> 01:05:50,534 [Amit Pande]
... if you get people into the product, I think this is the, one of the-
01:05:50,534 --> 01:05:51,324 [Alex Shevelenko]
The third lever, right?
01:05:51,324 --> 01:05:51,343 [Amit Pande]
Yeah.
01:05:51,344 --> 01:05:51,843 [Alex Shevelenko]
The third lever.
01:05:51,844 --> 01:05:52,104 [Amit Pande]
Right?
01:05:52,104 --> 01:05:52,114 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:05:52,114 --> 01:06:19,484 [Amit Pande]
Like it, it, it, i- you know, even if one of the, your things r- you know, around it is that, hey, I've sent you an email which says, "Hey, we have created a time box version for you with like, I don't know, 1,000 credits, and you can..." I mean, if you think of, um, what the, uh, AI tools have done really well, uh, you know, the, the, the Claude, uh, uh, you know, Gemini, uh, variations is that I think they just made it possible for us to throw a bunch of input in.
01:06:19,484 --> 01:06:20,374 [Alex Shevelenko]
Oh, shit in. Yeah.
01:06:20,374 --> 01:06:20,984 [Amit Pande]
And then, you know-
01:06:20,984 --> 01:06:21,004 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:06:21,004 --> 01:06:32,864 [Amit Pande]
... sort of say, let, let me show you something interesting that can be, that can be done with this. And I think that even if you're selling an engineering software, like you're selling MATLAB for the 2027 era-
01:06:32,864 --> 01:06:33,104 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm-hmm
01:06:33,104 --> 01:06:47,884 [Amit Pande]
... uh, there's no reason for you to not build a funnel of things that, you know, that people, you know, sort of, um, you sort of experience. I mean, intuitively we get this, right? When we go to, uh, the museums in Paris or DC or wherever else, right?
01:06:47,884 --> 01:06:47,924 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:06:47,924 --> 01:06:55,474 [Amit Pande]
We, we get it that you need an open staging area where everybody can hang out and sort of have the taste of at least, you know, the pyramid or kind of, you know-
01:06:55,474 --> 01:06:55,474 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:06:55,474 --> 01:07:00,604 [Amit Pande]
... uh, you, you know, not everyone has to sign up for, you know, get your guide. But, um, the,
01:07:01,744 --> 01:07:02,444 [Amit Pande]
I think the,
01:07:03,684 --> 01:07:18,104 [Amit Pande]
the interesting thing about the content problem is that whether it's the first time you start looking even when you're not even sure what you wanna buy, all the way to, you know, what we covered earlier in our conversation about like the post-sales-
01:07:18,104 --> 01:07:18,244 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:07:18,244 --> 01:08:19,586 [Amit Pande]
... you know, customer engagement cycle-If the entire, um, you know, linchpin of technology products is that, you know, I need to model a 5 to 10X LTV for Alex over a period of time, I mean, you're not gonna drive any of that LTV unless the, the, the product that they're already using, they're getting the most out of that product. And, uh, the next upsell, cross-sell you do with them, you know, you're actually walking alongside them and helping them get value out of that also. I mean, if in, in many ways, the reason software valuation multiples are compressed right now is because a lot of the math on LTV and TCV is, it just smells funny because, you know, people are saying, "I already have enough," and, you know, "Do I," you know, "Do I, do I really need more software?" And I actually think the answer is the world needs more software, but the only connective thread, and, you know, this isn't, like, a pitch for the CMO role of the future, right?
01:08:19,586 --> 01:08:19,596 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:08:19,596 --> 01:08:39,296 [Amit Pande]
But re- really if you think about it, I think what you and I have seen with, like, the world's best CMOs is that, you know, they're, they're really, like, aware that you have to look at your regulated industry product or your traditional agentic product or whatever the way the world's best consumer brands think about customer life cycle.
01:08:39,296 --> 01:08:39,356 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm.
01:08:39,356 --> 01:08:44,676 [Amit Pande]
And I think that's where, uh, the only role that can really go
01:08:45,736 --> 01:08:56,696 [Amit Pande]
up funnel, mid funnel, bottom funnel, cross funnel, late funnel, and then, you know, dead funnel, and then you gotta, like, bring those people w- kind of reanimate them [laughs] and bring them back into the fold again, is actually marketing.
01:08:56,696 --> 01:08:56,716 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:08:56,716 --> 01:09:32,275 [Amit Pande]
And I just, I mean, I, I, I just, uh, you know, think that the chances of the marketer becoming, like, a CRMO, whatever those things are, CMRO, uh, just as there are more CPMOs today. Um, but, um, but I, I think, you know, that's, that's one part piece of the puzzle, and the second piece of the puzzle is you just, like, you know, like technologies like yours, you, you, you, you need to think like that for every single persona in your, in your current and future ICP because that way you're creating these created, you've created these beautiful ungated journeys.
01:09:32,276 --> 01:09:32,465 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:09:32,465 --> 01:09:32,906 [Amit Pande]
Right?
01:09:32,906 --> 01:09:32,936 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah.
01:09:32,936 --> 01:09:35,496 [Amit Pande]
For when you're not in the room, and that's-
01:09:35,496 --> 01:09:36,216 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:09:36,216 --> 01:09:39,256 [Amit Pande]
... you know, that's, uh, that's nirvana.
01:09:39,256 --> 01:09:43,376 [Alex Shevelenko]
What, what I think is beautiful, and I'll just s- start wrapping up, but the, the,
01:09:44,496 --> 01:10:59,446 [Alex Shevelenko]
you're talking about a new type of CMO, right? Like, you are, you're a product guy that, that have been a CMO, that has talked to customers and sold things as a GM, right? And that is a mix of obviously, like, way more sophisticated marketing, but also the mentality around how does product do more of the selling, and then again powering sales was marketing, and then bringing the insight that the best sellers have into the marketing experiences that you create to create the Paris, you know, Paris Museum experience, with a personal guys that's serving you macaroons, uh, as you're consuming and kind of imagining your future, right? Like, you're bringing all that in one place, and, and I think that is a very unique skill set. So my answer to that VC that was asking you about who are the three people that you need to bring on is, bring on Amit, [laughs] and then, and then he'll figure it out. So good to have you on. So good to share, uh, all your experience and lessons learned across the journey. Um, any last words on how people could engage and find you, uh, you know, on- online, and you know, what, any parting wisdom as, as we wrap up today?
01:11:01,196 --> 01:11:35,016 [Amit Pande]
Uh, people can find me online, uh, on, uh, you know, LinkedIn, uh, and, um, um, sometimes X. Uh, and, uh, always happy to connect with, uh, you know, folks, uh, with a shared passion for, you know, content, next generation storytelling and UX, and of course, you know, all things sort of agentic and AI. And, you know, the, the, the, the closing thought I'll share with you sort of connects to, you know, where, um, you and I started the conversation, is that this is probably the most profound period of identity shifts for-
01:11:35,016 --> 01:11:35,216 [Alex Shevelenko]
Mm
01:11:35,216 --> 01:11:42,116 [Amit Pande]
... not just, um, you know, not just, uh, those of us in, in tech, um, but also those of us not in tech and
01:11:43,356 --> 01:13:00,956 [Amit Pande]
likely to be affected by AI in some, you know, form or the other. And I think that, um, you know, with where we're going, especially with, um, the future of go-to-market, you know, I have this optimistic take that AI will help us. It may cause a sugar crash and an identity crash in the short term. It's, it's quite possible that, you know, we might look back at AI's output and say, "Oh my God, you know, this is better than the best, uh, class project I did at GSB," or, "This is better than, you know, the best strategy report I ever wrote in a company." But I actually think that if we go far back enough, right, and I, you know, think back, like when I say lo- far back enough, I think of, like, 100 years ago, the kinds of things Isaac Asimov and other folks like that were writing. I think there's a reason to be, to be bullish that 80% of the work that we have done, um, even us, right, that we have done in our, in our, in our work lives, and if I went back to that 80%, I would say, "Yeah, actually, I don't know if, you know, that 80% was really as, as valuable." [laughs] And I, I think that, um, um, if we can embrace AI, not just kind of at the, you know, the McKinsey, LinkedIn level of, like, you know, intellectually s- fa- feeling what's happening-
01:13:00,956 --> 01:13:00,966 [Alex Shevelenko]
Yeah
01:13:00,966 --> 01:13:06,216 [Amit Pande]
... but the way I'm trying to challenge myself now is, I think the way you're challenging yourself with Cloud Code, is that,
01:13:07,236 --> 01:13:27,196 [Amit Pande]
you know, let's just, uh, go right at the, at the, at the grassroots of this. Because in the process of learning AI and becoming more hands-on with these tools ourselves, perhaps ground up a new kind of identity will emerge for us, whether we're in our, like, 40s or 50s, uh, and then this will
01:13:28,556 --> 01:13:52,326 [Amit Pande]
m- make for a smarter, lighter, more interesting version of us. So I'm, in the medium term to long term, [laughs] I'm more bullish with AI. In the, in the extreme short term, I think it's gonna be a little bit crazy. But, uh, you know, I encourage everyone to, to take it as an opportunity to redefine that new identity. And who knows? The next time you and I do this formally, like, you know, we'll have figured out another new hat in that new identity. So I'll kinda leave you with that-
01:13:52,326 --> 01:13:54,736 [Alex Shevelenko]
I'll, I'll send my avatar for the next one, Amit. [laughs]
01:13:54,736 --> 01:13:58,216 [Amit Pande]
Yeah. Maybe we are out there talking to each other next time.
01:13:58,216 --> 01:14:01,855 [Alex Shevelenko]
Beautiful. Thank you, Amit, for joining us and sharing your wisdom.
01:14:01,856 --> 01:14:02,636 [Amit Pande]
Thank you so much, Alex