The Exchanges

Q Maybe sort of on a, on a similar point, what's gotten vastly easier in the 18 months that you've been building the company from an enabling technology perspective?

A 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 the system. It's hard to just put anything into that prompt and not have code that spit out that runs and does exactly what you want it to do. If I had the product in front of me, it would be hard for me to come up with an idea that wouldn't work in the system, which is really, really cool. And that was certainly not where we were at a year and a half ago, where if you weren't on a kind of a predefined list of things we knew very, very well, uh, it wouldn't work. So we used to, for example, have defeated a bunch of contexts of Here are all the possible workflows somebody might want to build and here's the code. Here's what it looks like. You might want to use this code as like a reference point. And then as long as what you're trying to do was somewhat similar to the workflows that we provided as context, it would work fairly reliably. But as soon as you went off the rails and you want to do something crazy creative, it would just fall over and it would just get stuck. And that doesn't happen anymore. Now you can be as creative as you want, touch as many applications as you want. Internet search capabilities built into the…

AI assessment note: “Code generation works super well now.”

Q What are some of the examples when you think about the products you've worked on of you could not have landed on that thing if you did not embed and go deep in that way with customers?

A Yeah, one of the most striking examples from Verkata was panic buttons. We didn't know if they were even necessary. You know, it was a category that was kind of controversial whether or not they even needed to build those. And I went on site to a customer that was a payday loan customer. I actually spend time talking to their cashiers that spend all day behind a layer of Bulletproof glass. Every single one of them had been held up at gunpoint at some point while working at this company. I asked them about, you know, their day and what we could do to make their day better. And I was thinking about this from their perspective of what new products could I build. And the thing they said to me was, the ATM is in the lobby on the other side of the Bulletproof glass. Is there anything I could do To move the ATM to be closer to the door so they don't have to spend so much time in the unsafe part outside the bulletproof glass because they're worried that something's going to happen to them when they walk out the door and they have to empty the ATM. That was their biggest fear was being in the lobby and having to cross this hallway. And that lived in their head as the most important thing that, that they wanted from us. And then we're having this conversation of whether or not you can carry around the panic button or if it should be mounted to the desk. It's like, of course you have to c…

AI assessment note: “one of the most striking examples from Verkata was panic buttons.”

Q How do you keep this from not just turning into a mess, just like a free for all of stuff getting shipped in all sorts of random ways?

A I don't think it's that different of a problem that you face, even if you have people in the middle, um, because you're basically, you're replacing this middleman that's, that's trying to allegedly collect all this information and then, uh, streamline it, you know, directly to the folks that matter and do it in some kind of curated way. You're kind of getting rid of a little bit of the curation and kind of going direct to the source. It really comes down to the people that are receiving that information. Are they high caliber enough, both from a product sense and from an engineering capability to know what to build and know how to build it in a way that's really robust and is not just, you know, kind of producing slop. So it comes down to caliber. I don't think the scales, if you just kind of throw random people into the mess and say like, oh, just like build stuff and ship product. But if you actually have your four deployed engineers be the best engineers on the team, I think it's basically, again, reproducing this early co-founder energy where it's a CTO that's hearing the feedback directly from the customer and going and just fixing the product or making it better. And everyone knows that that is great. Everyone knows that when a CTO talks to a customer and goes and builds product features, that that's awesome. If you can scale that, you can scale the awesomeness. There is …

AI assessment note: “It really comes down to the people that are receiving that information. Are they high caliber”

Q Do you think, just given the rate of competition and startup creation, et cetera, et cetera, that, that, that sort of land grab dynamic today in twenty-twenty-five is, is much more substantial than three years, five years, seven years ago?

A Absolutely. The, the land grab is happening, and I think because there's so much of that top-down pressure from boardrooms, execs, To implement AI solutions. A lot of large organizations are going to make their bets now on startups that are fairly early stage. And yes, it's going to take a long time for implementation and the sale to go through, but you could get boxed out of a lot of these accounts if you're not moving quickly. And so it has created an environment where you want to get in front of as many customers as possible, even if you know the product might not be there, or you know that it's going to be a very long sales cycle, you've got to get in now. And it is a, it is a moment in time that you have to take advantage of.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. The, the land grab is happening, and I think because there's so much”

Q Is there anything you have to get right that's unique to building an existing category other than building an excellent product?

A I think the product has to be so much better than the alternative and you have to really understand why it's better and what stopped another company from building it before. A lot of times in these categories, obviously other people have tried to go after the big leaders, whether it's ERP, HRAS, CRM, ITSM in our case. And so you have to understand what's been missing and is there actually an opportunity to go after it? 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 just be a little bit better because people build their businesses around these systems. They're not gonna just transition and put up all of that investment and that change management process, unless the ROI is obvious from the moment they see the new version.

AI assessment note: “understand what's been missing and is there actually an opportunity to go after it”

Q How else did you spend time with customers, maybe chasing down any of these different ideas? Are there other questions that you asked or other things that, that you found either helped you rule opportunities out or, you know, go deeper into, to what ended up becoming servile?

A One of the challenges we had with a lot of these interviews is that we couldn't get somebody to say that X, Y, and Z was a big pain point. We, we got some information around things that, you know, they would, they would use labor to, they would add extra head count to go do a thing. That was really interesting. So then we started really digging down This automation concept of it seems like they want help to do a bunch of stuff and they want help building automations. They want to automate more things, which sounds super obvious and not super helpful. But one of the areas that we thought was really interesting was why isn't this already solved? Because it looks from the outside in, like there are a lot of great automation tools out there.

AI assessment note: “So then we started really digging down This automation concept”