The Exchanges

Q Kind of both core tenets to being a great leader there, in terms of inspiring the team, and then that majestic storytelling ability. But you've said before that there's two other bodies of great leadership. I'm really intrigued, Hal. What are those two other bodies?

A As you grow your company from a hundred people to 200 to 500 to a thousand and beyond, you have to apply, adopt different techniques in order to win, and one of the techniques I figured out early on was two bodies of leadership. That is, I carefully work with my direct reports, and I've got, yes, now I think 12, and that's about the maximum number that I think a leader can really have, but I also carefully work with and cultivate and Frequently communicate with all my direct, direct reports, of which there are 55. So I don't manage them directly, but I'm constantly in communication and contact, and so I have two bodies of leadership at Yext. I have the executive group, that's 13 of us, myself included, plus the 12, and then I also have the extended group, the second body, the leadership team. That team is not a decision-making body, but it's instead a group of leaders That helps set that culture from around the world. And the office leaders from Berlin to London to Paris to Tokyo are in that. Our head of product is in that. And that's a group that I get together. I actually focus more on cultivating that group a bit more than the executive team because the execs are pros and the leaders need to be the ones that are carrying out the vision, the mission, the strategy, the culture in the field.

AI assessment note: “I have the executive group... and then I also have the extended group”

Q Kind of both core tenets to being a great leader there, in terms of inspiring the team, and then that majestic storytelling ability. But you've said before that there's two other bodies of great leadership. I'm really intrigued, Hal. What are those two other bodies?

A As you grow your company from a hundred people to 200 to 500 to a thousand and beyond, you have to apply, adopt different techniques in order to win, and one of the techniques I figured out early on was two bodies of leadership. That is, I carefully work with my direct reports, and I've got, yes, now I think 12, and that's about the maximum number that I think a leader can really have, but I also carefully work with and cultivate and Frequently communicate with all my direct, direct reports, of which there are 55. So I don't manage them directly, but I'm constantly in communication and contact, and so I have two bodies of leadership at Yext. I have the executive group, that's 13 of us, myself included, plus the 12, and then I also have the extended group, the second body, the leadership team. That team is not a decision-making body, but it's instead a group of leaders That helps set that culture from around the world. And the office leaders from Berlin to London to Paris to Tokyo are in that. Our head of product is in that. And that's a group that I get together. I actually focus more on cultivating that group a bit more than the executive team because the execs are pros and the leaders need to be the ones that are carrying out the vision, the mission, the strategy, the culture in the field.

AI assessment note: “I have the executive group... and then I also have the extended group”

Q No, I couldn't agree more. You mentioned building the brain there, and we chatted before, and you said about the web to the brain. I have to ask, what is the web to the brain, Howard?

A Well, information today is moving from the web to the brain. If you think about what a website is, it's nothing more than a document that contains text and links and pictures. And in 97, Larry Page had that brilliant dream in the middle of the night. He woke up and realized he could download the entire web into his computer and build a search around backlinks. You type in a search, you get the most relevant part. And his big insight was that the web was not a bunch of individual documents, but instead one gigantic document. And Google can take you to the part of the document, let's say you want to find where, uh, how many calories are in a Big Mac, you type in Big Mac calories, and the original Google search would find the best part of the document that had that. But then it's up to you, as the end user, to look at the part of that document, probably on mcdonalds.com slash menu, and look at the line on the table there, and read Big Mac calories, and interpret the number of five 50 as corresponding to what you wanted, And you have to do the thinking. So while documents are a really powerful way to present information, they're also, they're kind of dumb. A user has to do the thinking. A user has to think about the results, and the user can't ask complicated questions. You can't say, hey, document, give me all the hamburgers that have less than 600 calories out there. Document's n…

AI assessment note: “information today is moving from the web to the brain.”

Q ask, I have Mark Thumbtack on the show recently, and he said that actually, you can take a very consultative approach to starting a company, come up with graphs, market maps, and really kind of isolate potential markets into exciting opportunities. Do you agree with that kind of strategic, analytical approach to finding a market, or do you think it does have to follow the passions of the founding team?

A I think it is possible to do either. I think it's completely possible for you to assess potential markets from the top down, Or from the bottom up. I will say that I think if you historically look back at the greatest companies in history, they typically have come from more of a grassroots organic type of feel like Microsoft or Apple or even IBM or going back to the Ford Motor Company, going back eons ago. It's entrepreneurs that have an idea and they make a thing from the bottom up. I'm not sure how often Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were Conducting market analysis of potential businesses to start, and then jumping into it. I think they had an idea, and they executed that idea. They dominated a niche, and it turned out that that niche, which appeared to be small, was huge.

AI assessment note: “I think it is possible to do either. I think it's completely possible”

Q I love that, but moving from one legend to another legend, I am gonna try and string all these together with some terrible linkages, by the way, so apologies in advance for that, but John Lennon's storytelling trick, and, and how have you interpreted and used it?

A You know, it's funny, John Lennon was one of the greatest storytellers, greatest musicians of all time, and he realized, he once said that when he would write a new song, he would intentionally not write it down. A lot of us, when we write something, we have to write it down immediately, or we'll forget it, but he wanted to, when he composed a new song, a new line, he purposefully didn't write it down, and would come back the next day, and see if he could remember it, because he realized that if he couldn't remember it, it probably wasn't very good, because if the author, if John Lennon, the master genius Beatle, can't remember it, how is a fourteen-year-old on the radio gonna remember it? And so in this, when I read this quote from John Lennon, I realized that he had figured out a hack, a defect of the human brain. Let's take a step back. 10,000 years. The oral tradition was the only way to pass things down. This is before we could write things down on paper. It was certainly before we could digitally record any bit of information. Now today we can write everything down. We can record everything. Probably Alexa is listening to everything as we say it. But 10,000 years ago, the only things that survived, the only works that survived were those that could be remembered from the oral tradition. And so the human brain, I believe, has evolved in a way to understand certain rhythms …

AI assessment note: “when he would write a new song, he would intentionally not write it down.”

Q No, I couldn't agree more. You mentioned building the brain there, and we chatted before, and you said about the web to the brain. I have to ask, what is the web to the brain, Howard?

A Well, information today is moving from the web to the brain. If you think about what a website is, it's nothing more than a document that contains text and links and pictures. And in 97, Larry Page had that brilliant dream in the middle of the night. He woke up and realized he could download the entire web into his computer and build a search around backlinks. You type in a search, you get the most relevant part. And his big insight was that the web was not a bunch of individual documents, but instead one gigantic document. And Google can take you to the part of the document, let's say you want to find where, uh, how many calories are in a Big Mac, you type in Big Mac calories, and the original Google search would find the best part of the document that had that. But then it's up to you, as the end user, to look at the part of that document, probably on mcdonalds.com slash menu, and look at the line on the table there, and read Big Mac calories, and interpret the number of five 50 as corresponding to what you wanted, And you have to do the thinking. So while documents are a really powerful way to present information, they're also, they're kind of dumb. A user has to do the thinking. A user has to think about the results, and the user can't ask complicated questions. You can't say, hey, document, give me all the hamburgers that have less than 600 calories out there. Document's n…

AI assessment note: “instead of sending you a part of a document... they just tell you the answer directly”

Q ask, I have Mark Thumbtack on the show recently, and he said that actually, you can take a very consultative approach to starting a company, come up with graphs, market maps, and really kind of isolate potential markets into exciting opportunities. Do you agree with that kind of strategic, analytical approach to finding a market, or do you think it does have to follow the passions of the founding team?

A I think it is possible to do either. I think it's completely possible for you to assess potential markets from the top down, Or from the bottom up. I will say that I think if you historically look back at the greatest companies in history, they typically have come from more of a grassroots organic type of feel like Microsoft or Apple or even IBM or going back to the Ford Motor Company, going back eons ago. It's entrepreneurs that have an idea and they make a thing from the bottom up. I'm not sure how often Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were Conducting market analysis of potential businesses to start, and then jumping into it. I think they had an idea, and they executed that idea. They dominated a niche, and it turned out that that niche, which appeared to be small, was huge.

AI assessment note: “I think it is possible to do either.”

Q Love that. Tell me, public versus private, pros and cons?

A Well, private, nobody bets against you. Public, people can bet against you. First off, being public is way better than being private. For those people that say that you shouldn't be public, that's just a timing thing. And honestly, sometimes it's a VC that has a self-interest that wants to do a late stage round before you go public. Being public from a competitive perspective, you're bigger, you're badder, you have more cash. Cash is king. You can pay people more because you have RSUs. You attract better, more executive senior talent. Your brand is more famous. You get the ability to sell to big banks that want to look into your financial statements and know you're real before they install or use your software. Being public is the only way to be big. If you actually want to be a gigantic, huge Company that changes the world being private is just, it's like a step along the way. It's like asking a butterfly if it's better to be a butterfly or a caterpillar.

AI assessment note: “Well, private, nobody bets against you. Public, people can bet against you.”

Q I ask, with there's no tournament, there's no clock, there's no scorecard, there's no finality or definitive milestone, a lot would argue or have in their head that an IPO is that milestone. How did the IPO feel for you, and was it kind of quite a strange moment when you have an IPO and then it's back to work, building the sustainable, profitable company that, you know, you can?

A The IPO is a step along the way. It is certainly an achievement. It's an achievement that no one can ever take away, and I'll tell you the story. When you go on an IPO, you pick a couple of banks, and we chose Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan and then some other banks to round out our syndicate, and they were all terrific, and you spend a couple weeks going on this crazy roadshow where you meet with at least eight meetings per day to investors that For the first time in your life, aren't just thinking about betting for you, but could also bet against you. That's a new thing that an entrepreneur doesn't have to deal with because when you have your VCs and your cap table and your early investors, they're all rooting for you. And if they choose not to invest in you, that's fine too. But now there's a class of people that are extremely smart. They are quantitatively superior to you by an order of magnitude. And they see things in your numbers that you didn't even know existed. And if they don't like you, not only do they bet for you, they could short you. So you have a whole new set of people that you have to think about that you have to deal with. And so the road show, it's one of the cool things is you get the, the banks get you a plane. You're in a different city every night. You have a breakfast meeting where you pitch investors, four meetings that are about one hour each as you zo…

AI assessment note: “The IPO is a step along the way. It is certainly an achievement.”

Q I love that, but moving from one legend to another legend, I am gonna try and string all these together with some terrible linkages, by the way, so apologies in advance for that, but John Lennon's storytelling trick, and, and how have you interpreted and used it?

A You know, it's funny, John Lennon was one of the greatest storytellers, greatest musicians of all time, and he realized, he once said that when he would write a new song, he would intentionally not write it down. A lot of us, when we write something, we have to write it down immediately, or we'll forget it, but he wanted to, when he composed a new song, a new line, he purposefully didn't write it down, and would come back the next day, and see if he could remember it, because he realized that if he couldn't remember it, it probably wasn't very good, because if the author, if John Lennon, the master genius Beatle, can't remember it, how is a fourteen-year-old on the radio gonna remember it? And so in this, when I read this quote from John Lennon, I realized that he had figured out a hack, a defect of the human brain. Let's take a step back. 10,000 years. The oral tradition was the only way to pass things down. This is before we could write things down on paper. It was certainly before we could digitally record any bit of information. Now today we can write everything down. We can record everything. Probably Alexa is listening to everything as we say it. But 10,000 years ago, the only things that survived, the only works that survived were those that could be remembered from the oral tradition. And so the human brain, I believe, has evolved in a way to understand certain rhythms …

AI assessment note: “exploit to your advantage when you're giving a speech”

Q No wonder Jonah asked this question. Jonah asked, how do you think about the rise of China and China's kind of prominence over the coming years?

A I'll tell you a story. I was riding a train, the Gautia is what it's called. It's a high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai, and I was about to give a speech about AI, and I memorized the speech in Mandarin, and I wanted to practice it one last time. We were in the front car of the train. There were eight seats in the front car, seven of which were occupied by Yext, and the last seat was occupied by Not by a yexter, but by a Chinese national. Um, we had no idea who this person was, and so the seven of us got in the car, and then the guy sits down, and I figured, well, you know, we have enough of the train for me to stand up and practice, and hopefully the guy won't care. So I practiced my speech one last time in Chinese, and at the end of it, he stands up and starts clapping, and he's clapping, and I'm like, wow, I must have really gotten through to him. That was pretty cool, so I wanted to pay him a compliment too, and I said to him, Which means the Chinese train is essentially faster, better than the American train, and he looked at me, and he looked at me intensely, and I was like, uh-oh, what did I do? And his eyes kind of, like, lowered, and he stared at me, and he said in perfect English, yes, I know, I am an engineer for the Chinese military. It is the mission of my generation to study America and to To crush you. And then he sat back down.

AI assessment note: “It is the mission of my generation to study America and to To crush you.”

Q I ask, with there's no tournament, there's no clock, there's no scorecard, there's no finality or definitive milestone, a lot would argue or have in their head that an IPO is that milestone. How did the IPO feel for you, and was it kind of quite a strange moment when you have an IPO and then it's back to work, building the sustainable, profitable company that, you know, you can?

A The IPO is a step along the way. It is certainly an achievement. It's an achievement that no one can ever take away, and I'll tell you the story. When you go on an IPO, you pick a couple of banks, and we chose Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan and then some other banks to round out our syndicate, and they were all terrific, and you spend a couple weeks going on this crazy roadshow where you meet with at least eight meetings per day to investors that For the first time in your life, aren't just thinking about betting for you, but could also bet against you. That's a new thing that an entrepreneur doesn't have to deal with because when you have your VCs and your cap table and your early investors, they're all rooting for you. And if they choose not to invest in you, that's fine too. But now there's a class of people that are extremely smart. They are quantitatively superior to you by an order of magnitude. And they see things in your numbers that you didn't even know existed. And if they don't like you, not only do they bet for you, they could short you. So you have a whole new set of people that you have to think about that you have to deal with. And so the road show, it's one of the cool things is you get the, the banks get you a plane. You're in a different city every night. You have a breakfast meeting where you pitch investors, four meetings that are about one hour each as you zo…

AI assessment note: “The IPO is a step along the way. It is certainly an achievement”

Q had an interesting conversation with another VC on the show the other day, and they said that the power of brand will completely diminish in the rising world of voice, because you will ask for more toothpaste, more neural, more commoditized, whatever you want to do, but you lose the power of brand. How do you think about that? I'm intrigued with the kind of database answer you just gave.

A I think voice search is half the puzzle, to be frank. It's the most natural way to engage with a computer, but I also think that you're going to see augmented reality become a huge part of it. I think voice search is only half of the natural computing input puzzle. When you combine being able to speak with being able to see, who wants to be hunched over in their phones, typing, looking at stuff all day? You want to see the windows in your screen. You want to be able to talk to them. My view strongly is that voice is in its early days. And a lot of the reason that voice has become big in the last couple of years is because of the fact that we've gotten really good at transcription. We're now at, you know, 96, 97% accuracy, which is about as good as the human ear at transcribing things. NLP is that next step being able to take what you say and understand the intent of it so that we can essentially build a database query to give you that answer. I don't believe that brand is over because I think that voice search is only half the puzzle. While exciting, Augmented reality is going to be the other part of that puzzle that completes the evolution away from the smartphone into a next generation user interface.

AI assessment note: “I don't believe that brand is over because I think that voice search is only”