The Ledger, every show

“I think the need for a lot of product managers is probably going to go down. If you hire really product oriented for deployed software engineers, then they're going to be increasingly making the decisions on what makes sense to build for the max Some number of…”

“Automation doesn't actually work for this IT use case unless it's faster to automate something forever than to do it manually once.”

“I think so much of this legacy enterprise software, it's powerful and it's sticky because of its configurability. And if you're going to disrupt them, you have to disrupt them in a way that actually attacks that configurability head on.”

“And I think what large enterprises want to do is not adapt their process to your software, but adapt your software to their business process. And these large enterprise software platforms like Workday and Salesforce and ServiceNow, they're very good at that. T…”

“I'm really happy with where the models are at today because they don't have to get any better for us to build a massive business. How they work today is actually good enough for our use case.”

“The competitor I'm most worried about is the one that doesn't exist yet. The one that comes along a couple of years from now. And maybe these tools have unlocked so many crazy capabilities that they're able to move very quickly and build so much of what we bui…”

“Shockingly, I think there's higher order returns to being technical and being able to code than there were. I think there was this moment where maybe we thought everything would be no code. And I think this era of these models being very good at code generatio…”

“And I think the same thing is going to happen in AI. And in this case, a lot of times it might be the incumbent that still wins, but there are going to be AI native competitors creating a massive, massive value in these categories. And I don't know That it's g…”

“AI gives them a chance to compete both on simplicity and user experience and also configurability because you're using AI to set these configurations or maybe achieve value propositions that these other platforms just can't touch.”

“They have this classic innovators dilemma that it makes it hard to steer the big ship to add these capabilities while still protecting their existing product and revenue not making drastic changes that are not backwards compatible. And so they're just naturall…”

“And Verkata owned the entire platform, and so it was really cool to be able to sell a better camera to people that were going to buy cameras. And then you could also, by nature of selling cameras, also sell them these really cool AI capabilities, this really c…”

“It would have been very easy to start with an IT ticketing system and you could make it much better UX than Jira and ServiceNow. And you could try to sell that. We didn't think that that was really going to be the difference maker. We said, if we can build an …”

“These enterprises, which historically are very late to the party, they're feeling a little bit more momentum around inter internally and pressure from the board and the C-suite to start implementing or at least exploring AI solutions that those kind of two fac…”

“For us, it's as simple as giving our system context on the Microsoft API, and now we support everything Microsoft. And that architecture decision allows us to just, you know, serve those customers instantly and with very few Hours of development”

“There has to be top-down alignment. That's what we found, is that there has to be alignment from senior leaders that this has to be done. Because as you get into larger organizations, the actual folks doing the implementation, it can be a very large team. And …”

“I think in many ways, what the forward deployed engineer role has actually replaced are the implementation consultants for large organizations, large companies like Workday and ServiceNow and Salesforce that are customizing that software to meet these organiza…”

“I mean, Verkata was a thousand people and had two PMs.”

“And it's also a mistake that actually the really good product leaders do is because they're so focused on prioritization, they never touch the P twos. P two stack up and you can get a lot of them that just completely erode the product experience. And if you're…”

“No, I think we've definitely decided to bias more on really smart generalists that hopefully are technical or quantitative in some way, because I think all these technologies are going to change very quickly. The way of doing things is going to change very qui…”

“In some cases, It's not gonna be enough to just build a nicer, cleaner UI and a faster experience. You have to fundamentally look at what's been missing. And so in my opinion, the experience just has to be 10 times better. It has to be undeniable. It can't jus…”

“Seek out the hard things that are harder for other people to do that unlock a lot of customer value. And then once you've built them, it's so much harder for somebody to come in after you and build those same things because you decided to like go hard early.”

“Verkata waited several years to support things like SCIM and SSO and SOC II and various compliance frameworks. We did all of those things from day one because we knew that that was going to be a blocker to sell into the large accounts that unlocked the bigger …”

“One of the questions I started asking that I thought was really interesting is if you could hire somebody today to just sit next to you and do work for you, what would you have them do? And it's another way of getting at what are you spending time on that you …”

“The IT buyer in particular really prides themselves on figuring things out and being a problem solver. And so they don't think about a lot of this process as being problematic because they figured it out. It works and it's quite effective.”

“No one wants a mediocre ticketing system and a mediocre workflow builder and a mediocre access management system all kind of stitched together. And they don't even want a B plus version of any of those by themselves.”

“Every customer, in addition to having a forward deployed owner, also has a member of the regular engineering team as an assigned person. So every engineer on the team has a deep appreciation, understanding of what we're building, who it's for, why we're buildi…”

“Our roadmap hasn't really changed in a year and a half. When we first pitched first round, those slides are basically our roadmap today. You know, priorities shifted, but The same core things that we're trying to build are true then as they were true now.”

“So I think a lot of delays on software teams is because of thrash, because you change direction and you try different things and you pivot around. I think we had a lot of conviction on what we were trying to build here. And we've been able to just like hammer …”

“I think the gap here that humans are solving Is translating the business rules and requirements into the underlying product. What's really interesting about all of these AI products today is they can basically do anything. You're not really limited on the capa…”

“And there's shocking diversity from company to company, not, not even mid-market enterprise, but even within mid-market companies within enterprises on how they want password resets to work on how they want people to get access to applications. All of that end…”

“Code generation works super well now. So when we take these prompts to code, there used to be so many gotchas where the code wouldn't actually work, whether the API is not well supported or it makes a couple mistakes here and there. And now It's hard to break …”

“Obviously the universe of things that you might want to automate is much bigger than the things that have very neat, clean APIs.”

“IT is witnessing sales have amazing AI tools and design having amazing AI tools and engineering, of course, having amazing AI tools. And they're just sitting watching, often implementing those tools for the org and paying for them, but not having their own too…”

“Traditionally you've got solutions engineers, you've got customer success staff, sales, AE, they talk to customers. Maybe the SE here is a good idea. They communicate that to a product manager. Product manager talks to the engineering manager about that. Maybe…”

“There is very little difference other than we expect the forward deployed engineer to be spending 20% or more of their time talking to customers.”

“You have to be embedded with a customer and it's not, oh, I'm going to schedule a customer interview and I'm going to have an engineer talk to a customer for 30 minutes because we're doing a customer interview and they've got a list of questions they're going …”

“Now an IT professional, for example, with some degree of programming experience, Is incredibly valuable to the organization because of all the things that they can build for the company. Whereas five years ago, they were maybe marginally more valuable than the…”

“I love a storytelling interview where I ask people to tell me their story, starting with where they went to school, why, what they did there, internships, why they went and took their first job, their next job, and then I just double click into things that I f…”

“When we're looking at candidates that we're bringing in, I like to make people tell me on the interview panel, who are they better than at the company? Because I think what often happens at your company. What often happens is coming to scale is you bring in pe…”

“We evaluate every candidate on their ability to recruit the next candidate, and we consider that very highly. And that could be them actually being somebody that goes out and makes phone calls and recruits, or also just being somebody who's so good that we kno…”

“There's some folks on the team that have done quite well financially that are probably making more money from referrals than they are from their salary.”

“Weighing those two is, is more valuable than adopting either one wholesale. I think a lot of companies struggle to create new categories from scratch and they kind of ignore the fact that we should maybe look at why there's a category called ITSM and maybe loo…”

“We took that to a lot of customers. I did customer discovery and nobody cared. It turns out that was a very Verkata customer focused problem. And that was very top of mind when you're talking My customer is doing a big device deployment, but after those device…”

“The demo can be kind of broken up into everything that comes before showing the workflow builder and then everything that comes after, because before you show the workflow builder, people are bored and everything you show them, they think they've seen before. …”