The Wisdom Wall

“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. They can be adapted to whatever the internal business process…”

“shockingly, I think there's, 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 generation has actually made it much more valuable to have…”

“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.”

“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 cool video management software platform. But you did that by…”

“these enterprises, which historically are very late to the party, they're feeling a little bit more momentum around inter internally, uh, and pressure from, uh, the board and the C-suite to start implementing or at least exploring AI solutions that those kind of two factors met. We had a product that was ready for the…”

“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 the chances that all of them are going to be completely…”

“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 organizations needs. Now the forward deployed engineer is coming in…”

“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 never having anybody that looks at the P twos, you're going…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 really want to offload to somebody else?”

“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.”

“So I think a lot of delays on software teams is because of thrash, because you change direction and you, 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 it out because we never had to, we never had to…”

“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 capabilities of these products. You're actually more limited on…”

“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 ends up being very, very unique from company to company. And so…”

“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 tools. And that's creating a contrast that as these IT leaders…”

“traditionally you've got, uh, 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 it gets scheduled in a sprint one day or added to some…”

“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 to answer. It's more, you have to be in a Slack channel with…”

“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 their peer because they weren't a full software engineer. They…”

“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 find interesting, projects, you know, big life decisions. I…”

“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 people that are good enough that are maybe, you know, better…”

“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 look at that spend because there might be something that the…”

“We took that to a lot of customers. I did customer discovery and nobody cared. Uh, 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 devices are deployed and you got through the early…”