Serval

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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. …”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”