The Exchanges

Q And, you know, before we dive into, deeply into the journey of Wendly, would love to start, how did you and your brother ended up starting a company together?

A So my previous company, Wendley, had exited and sold to Workday. We were celebrating that at one of my friend's house. He was hosting a dinner. This was our college roommate. Uh, so my brother came over as well. My brother ran data operations at GE Aviation. And one of the migrations was not doing too well. He came in and he was like, hey, this is, he looked as if he had not slept the entire weekend because he actually hadn't slept the entire weekend, right? Uh, and most people who have run data operations resonate with that experience where they know when things fail and go bad, things can go really bad really quick. And then the ability to have visibility and know all the different moving pieces, uh, was not that easily available. So, uh, one of the things he thought about was there should be tooling that can help and show the entire picture of what's connected to what, all the moving pieces that does observability, alerts, incidents, management, All of those things. And he was toying with the idea of should he build a product like that? Yeah. And given that I had just been on the entrepreneurial journey myself, I very strongly encouraged him to take leap of faith and get started and not just solve the problem for GE, but for every company around the world by making this a SaaS product and getting started on that journey. So He resigned, quit his job at GE, gave some thought,…

AI assessment note: “I very strongly encouraged him to take leap of faith and get started”

Q And do you sell to the CIO or the chief data officer?

A Uh, generally it's three different personas that are part of every buy cycle. And it varies in terms of who's the primary versus the secondary and who owns the budget center versus not. Uh, the three personas is office of the CIO CTO, right? Cause they own the platforms and supporting the platforms, which is, uh, they're the ones who pay for Snowflake or Databricks or whatever else. Second persona is the CDO, the chief data, now the new title is CDAIO, right? So chief data and AI officer. Uh, they are responsible for the quality of the outcomes and deliverables in the metrics, which is like, hey, my tabular report and my analytics stack, is it producing value? Uh, so that's the second persona that's involved in the equation almost always. Uh, and the third persona is generally someone who owns Operations and support. So that could be like an SRE team and generally that falls in the CIO or CTO org, but sometimes it sits outside where they've outsourced operations or they've given it to one of your offshore providers. Uh, so like the, the vendor management, because a lot of the offshore providers, they log into our tool to do the job because a lot of companies have outsourced that offshore that.

AI assessment note: “generally it's three different personas that are part of every buy cycle.”

Q And you mentioned that the enterprise sales have also completely changed. Can you throw some light on it? How are the sales done right now? And how are the companies that you know are growing the ARR because it's not the usual contracts?

A Yeah. So a few things. One is, and especially in data, it's true where most companies want to do a POC, right? Uh, in your traditional enterprise sales, like take Workday or SAP or Oracle, they don't do POCs. Right? That's the first step of the process. Second step of the process is when you start thinking about, uh, infra companies, you're selling more to a technical audience than to a stakeholder. Coupa sells to a chief product officer. Workday sells to a CHRO, right? Uh, Salesforce sells to a CRO, right? So each of those, like, it's a very business persona or a business leader persona that you're selling to top down. Here, you're selling to a technical persona bottom-up. Completely different model. Then, if you start thinking about pricing, a lot of companies are moving towards usage-based pricing, and they're getting rid of the per-seat or per-license model. For Pantomat too, like, we have a connector-based pricing model. We're not tethered to any, like, seat count. Whether two people use it or 200 people use it, it's still the same price. So that's change, uh, which is good and bad, right? Like we, we hear both sides from the customer. The customer says, I used to like the SaaS pricing model because when I'm building my budget, I know exactly how many dollars to bake in for the contract for next year. And in data, that's very, very hard to do. Your Snowflake bill, your Dat…

AI assessment note: “a lot of companies are moving towards usage-based pricing, and they're getting rid of”

Q And also, um, the read and write permissions that the agents are getting, they are getting more and more every day, right? So the number of data that agents are writing.

A Yeah, that is, different customers have, they are all, like, customers are all over the spectrum on that one. Uh, some say that humans screw up more things, so as long as they can put guardrails and set a certain set of rules, engines, or tasks to do and tasks not to do, that the agent is allowed to do versus not allowed to do, they're like, Agents obey better than humans kind of a thing, right? So versus there's a contradictory point of view where it's like, nope, I'm going to give you read only, least privileged access, no right access, human in the loop, human has to review everything. And so customers are on different ends of the spectrum on this one. Uh, and that's okay because like, even when the cloud wave happened, right? There were some customers that were all in on the cloud and some were like, nope, we're going to run our own data centers or we'll, And they were late adopters to the cloud, and that's okay, and that's always going to happen with any transformational technology, but today I would say it's more ambiguous and more of a mixed bag, and that that'll play out over the next couple of years, where I think customers will have a better framework to manage these permissions, and will be more comfortable giving AI agents more permissions to do. Uh, so today when we say we'll resolve issues, Today we do it human in the loop, where the AI agent gives the resolution …

AI assessment note: “customers are all over the spectrum on that one. Uh, some say that humans screw up”

Q And how did the World Day acquisition happen?

A Uh, Workday already was looking at this category, and Workday Ventures had invested in one of our competitors in this category as well, so they, they were very aware of the category. In, in all honesty, it was very, like, yes, Workday drove the acquisition, but it was very customer-driven in the sense that We fell into a wave where customers were going through a legacy application modernization exercise, right? If you think about what was happening in the enterprise in that timeframe, uh, Workday was replacing PeopleSoft, and Coupa was going after Ariba, and ServiceNow was replacing Remedy, and like this whole next gen come replace legacy predecessor, 76% of our revenue came from replacing the other older VMSs. Right? So we fell very squarely into that category. So a lot of it is right place, right time. Uh, so that's where like most of our customers would modernize their HCM with Workday and then come to modernize their VMS with Wendly. And you could see a bunch of your workforce and Workday And then Vendly was a Workday partner, so we built that connector, and now you can see your whole workforce, employees and contractors within Workday. So it was really, really valuable for the customers. The customer feedback was resoundingly positive, saying, yes, this is like peanut butter and jelly. They belong together. So that's where the Workday acquisition happened, and kudos to Ani…

AI assessment note: “Workday drove the acquisition, but it was very customer-driven”

Q What has been, let's say if certain, I know you shared that you don't believe in some frameworks, but what have been some of the things in your life that have helped you grow, that have helped you reach here?

A Taking risks and more importantly than taking risks is from a personal life standpoint, putting yourself in a position where you can take risks and you don't have to live the guilt of it. So let me give you an example. When my wife and I were both working, we used to, ah, as our salaries and income went up, we didn't increase the cost of living to a point where, so we were living off of one person's paycheck and the others was all savings. So essentially when I went from being a well compensated executive at Kroger to doing my startup, It actually didn't change our life much. We still lived in the same house. We still drove the same cars. We still ate at the same restaurant. We still, cause we had never, we were never living beyond our means anyways, to begin with. So I didn't feel guilty that, oh, because I have chosen to take a pay cut and do a startup and now my personal ambition and putting my family through a ton of sacrifice. I didn't feel that because nothing changed because to begin with, we were never living beyond our means. So mentally that put me at ease to go do what I needed to do, and I didn't have to cope with constant guilt. So how you set up your personal life in a way that when the opportunity comes or when the feeling comes that I want to go take this job at the startup or do my own startup. Mentally, I'm just at ease, right? Because you're not constantly ba…

AI assessment note: “Taking risks and more importantly than taking risks is from a personal life standpoint”