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How Leena AI Wins Million Dollar Deals | Adit Jain
310 Plays2 years ago
"We are doubling down on our investment in continuing to be the best or 10x better than anyone else on the market."
Adit Jain's unwavering commitment to market leadership and continuous innovation reflects his ambitious vision for Leena AI and his drive to revolutionize enterprise operations.
Adit Jain is the Co-Founder & CEO of Leena AI, an Autonomous Agent designed for modern workplaces. Under his leadership, Leena AI has grown to serve over 500+ enterprises across 90+ countries, including industry giants like Nestlé, Puma, and Coca-Cola. Adit has raised over $40M in funding from prominent investors like Greycroft, Bessemer Venture Partners, and YCombinator.
Key Insights from the Conversation:
- The early challenges of selling to Indian customers versus global customers, and the importance of understanding payment cycles and customer expectations.
- The pivotal moment when Leena AI shifted its focus to HR, recognizing the acute pain points in enterprise HR functions, and the strategic importance of verticalization.
- Adit's emphasis on the long-term vision of building an "Enterprise Jarvis" (an AI-powered virtual assistant), and his strategic decisions around product development and market focus.
- The evolution of Leena AI's sales strategy, from early hustling and direct sales to a value-driven approach targeting high-value deals with Fortune 500 companies.
- Adit's insights on building and scaling a B2B enterprise SaaS company, including his perspective on sales, marketing, customer adoption, and competition.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 - Introduction to Adit Jain and Leena AI
- 00:01:59 - Early Life and Entrepreneurial Influences
- 00:04:47 - From IIT Delhi to Startup Life
- 00:13:14 - Early Startup Experiments and Finding Product-Market Fit
- 00:21:11 - Pivoting to B2B and the Birth of Chatteron
- 00:27:42 - The Evolution of Leena AI: Focusing on the Enterprise
- 00:35:41 - Cracking Enterprise Sales: Lessons Learned
- 00:42:53 - Y Combinator Experience and Global Validation
- 00:50:36 - Navigating the Pandemic and Accelerating Growth
- 01:01:04 - Expanding Leena AI's Capabilities: From HR to the Entire Enterprise
- 01:12:21 - Building a High-Performing Sales Organization
- 01:23:33 - Driving Customer Adoption and Retention
Hashtags:
#LeenaAI #AditJain #EnterpriseAI #HRTech #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Automation #SaaS #B2B #Startups #FounderThesis #YCombinator #Innovation #Leadership #VentureCapital #BusinessStrategy #ScalingStartups #HRAutomation #EnterpriseSaaS
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Transcript
Introduction to LINA AI
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, this is Aditya Dhan, the co-founder and CEO at Lean.ai.
00:00:15
Speaker
If you've used chat GPT and been amazed at how helpful a chatbot can be, then you would instantly understand the value of what LINA AI offers to enterprises. If you are working in a company and want to know what kind of allowances you are entitled to, or if you need to understand why your salary was less this month, then you can just ask the LINA AI bot and get an instant answer. No need to mail HR or wait for days to get the answer.
Adit Jain's Journey and Insights
00:00:39
Speaker
In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, your host Akshay Dutt talks with Adit Jain about his fascinating journey of building up Lina AI pretty much straight out of college. Adit shared some amazing insights about finding product market fit, learning to focus deeply and how to build a B2B product as an outsider. Lina has raised $40 million till date and is truly made in India for the world's SaaS product. Stay tuned and subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast to hear stories of founders finding product market fit and building large global businesses.
00:01:18
Speaker
So I did everything else apart from studying in college. So I did it somebody. I decided to join all kinds of clubs. So cricket, hockey, and then also did things like dramatics. And there was internal politics at IITs between hostels, within the hostel, and positions of respondents.
00:01:39
Speaker
student council and bodies and they did like two big events. One is the rendezvous, the cultural fest and the other one is the technical fest positions for that. So I did everything else apart from studying for four years. And then 2015 was a very interesting time. Actually, in 2015 and 2014 were very, very interesting times because those are the times when the Indian startup ecosystem was booming a lot.
00:02:08
Speaker
and you had the Zomatos and Swiggies of the world who were kind of coming to Prusa and Flipkart was happening. There was a lot of money flowing in, like big money flowing into the system at that time. The first smell of blood essentially was coming into the world.
00:02:27
Speaker
We were sitting in college, did not want to study. So we said, let's try and build something of our own. So on one angle, we figured that out. So we did some experiments here and there, small scale, joined a couple of day, did internships, et cetera, et cetera. The other angle I wanted to do, of course, why not let good cells open.
00:02:50
Speaker
I like how you describe me a beer. That was happening. So I took my cat, took the cat exam, end of 2014, I suppose, November or something. And then, no, I think before that, whenever it happens, right? I don't even remember now. What did that happen? In take of 2015, you took things.
00:03:12
Speaker
for the intake of 2015. Exactly. So, scored well there. So, I actually did.
College Days and Startup Inspiration
00:03:17
Speaker
I got 90.90% and you know, now at that time I was in this motion of what do you want to do in life. I'd actually sit for placement also. I got a job offer from Flipkart.
00:03:29
Speaker
And so job offer required, you know, I got 981 in cat and then I wanted to start up. So like all of this was happening, my co-founder and my co-founder, we've known each other last 11 years, right? So we were in the same vein in the same hostel in IIT Delhi, a lovely hostel, right? So we were great friends. We do a lot of things together, some projects here and there, some politics here and there, and it was fun. So
00:03:57
Speaker
At the end of it, we were like, OK, let's start building something. Let's see if something can happen. We did a couple of things, did two or three ideas, something in health care, something in education, and then all of that. And then we remembered we'd actually done this project of AI together in college as coursework, automatic content summarization. And we said, if you want to do it, let's do hard tech.
00:04:26
Speaker
and you know there was money coming into the system and we were like you know it's now not now then when you know and somehow i was able to convince both of these guys you know that like check you know what let's give us let's let's give ourselves a year let's what happened okay wow so they also had dropovers of course and uh we kind of we just kind of
00:04:50
Speaker
you know, got into it. We kind of convinced each other to get the rest of it even. We finally were added. It was probably the toughest time of our life, you know. Extremely, you had zero money, he had zero money. You have to survive and you have to do a startup and all of that. And I remember we used to... You didn't take admission for any MBA course then? No. No. Okay.
00:05:18
Speaker
I said, if I'm going to do it, like, see, I can't do it. If they're not joining jobs and I'm not doing it, like, everyone has to do it. So, for sure. But the thing, actually, I had a lot of support from my parents. Your dad was an entrepreneur, so he understood the value of taking that risk to start something, especially taking a risk early in your career is much easier. Yeah, it's much easier. The cost of that risk is much lower than taking it later.
00:05:48
Speaker
Absolutely. So I had support from my family. Their families were tougher to explain to, but yeah, we got through that. And of course we had huge egos, so nobody wanted to take any money from their parents. Yeah. Okay. Okay. How did you survive then? And, you know, how did you, how did you find that product market fit that, okay, this is something which people will pay for?
00:06:13
Speaker
Absolutely. So we stayed on campus for the year. That was fun.
00:06:24
Speaker
But yeah, and here we started at that time because we were fascinated by, you know, the NLP space. We'd done something in automatic contents of realization. We were like, okay, let's try and figure this out. So we, at that time, if you remember, Shait Bhugma said, one quick question. You did a cop science engineering. Oh, no, no, no, no. I am on the chemical side of things. Yeah. Okay. But you were passionate about coding. You picked it up on your own.
00:06:53
Speaker
Absolutely. Got it. Please continue.
Creation and Challenges of ChatterOn
00:07:00
Speaker
So, none of us is actually technically a computer science engineer. Anand has done... Anand has a degree in computer science and the other two, me and Mayank we don't. One is Prachan, which is a production engineer, which is mechanical and then
00:07:18
Speaker
I am chemicals and textile. So that's me. And then we kind of sat down together and started thinking of ideas. And overall, we realized that it's basically just, you'll have to try a lot and probably one of these things will stick.
00:07:38
Speaker
So, we started doing a platform called ChatterOn. So, at that time, if you remember, Facebook Messenger and Kik and a few other telegram had opened up their platforms for chatbots, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Early days of Facebook Messenger chatbots. Exactly. So, those early days, it had a sense of NLP. So, the first idea we had was, okay,
00:08:03
Speaker
We're going to use the Facebook manager platform too. At that time, there was a company called InShots. They still exist. I think they're pivoted to some other company as well, but they still exist. It's actually an IT guy only, IT Delhi senior only.
00:08:19
Speaker
So we were like, okay, can we do in shorts on Facebook Messenger? Because people use Facebook Messenger every day. If they can get somebody on Facebook, yeah, that makes sense. Let's do it. We created the automatic content summarization algorithm. So in shorts, does it with people? We said we'll do it using AI. And this is Facebook Messenger. One of the first things of the product was called Zupyc, Z-U-P-P-I-T. That's the first thing. We started with a Facebook Messenger app and that was technically a chatbot.
00:08:48
Speaker
But we were using it just for new summarized news dissemination. And that was pretty good. We saw good traction overall. But how did you spread the word? Like add this to your messengers. You have to get people to add to the messenger. So how did you get users?
00:09:12
Speaker
So most of it was, you know, us going into groups, posting, posting, posting and all of that. It was like all good. We had no money to spend. And how many users did you get? We went to around 12,000 odd. Okay, pretty good.
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, it was pretty good. But of course, we made zero money. So, you know, we were surviving on AWS credit and our hostel met food. So, that's it. The journey kind of took a turn where we had to, okay, how do we make money, right? Interestingly, one customer, not customer, one person in India today.
00:09:58
Speaker
I actually saw the Zubit bot. Zubit bot on Facebook is the new Shambhri bot. And he reached out to us and he said, you know what, this is pretty cool. I want something like this for you today. I'm like, okay. We can't do that. And then he was ready to pay money for it. I'm like, this is super cool. That's the first, because nobody in the world teaches you B2B.
00:10:22
Speaker
in your bachelor's, right? That's from the church, nobody teaches you, right? So, I'm like, because it's going to be too real, that's so cool. And we actually made, I don't know, 3.6 lakh rupees or something, 30,000 a month or something like that. It was a SaaS product or it was like a one-time, you did or what? It must have been SaaS.
00:10:49
Speaker
30,000 a month so 33.6 lakh rupees and that was the first ever deal we made and I was super super excited. This is real money in our hands and you know you can actually do something
Pivot to Enterprise Solutions and HR Focus
00:11:03
Speaker
so.
00:11:04
Speaker
With that, we kind of extended the idea into a product called Chaturana. I'm going to fast forward to 2016. This is late 2016. All of this has happened. We made our first money. We spent first blood. And we're like, okay, this makes sense. Now, let's look at Shailesh Messenger's distribution channel and see if we can distribute. Again, all can be distributed. So, we just started going bonkers on ideas and then we said, okay, how can we
00:11:31
Speaker
give this distribution channel in the hands of everybody. The logical idea was to make business happen or transactions happen on top of Facebook Messenger. The idea was to allow businesses to themselves create chatbots on top of Facebook Messenger.
00:11:50
Speaker
And then, of course, we extended it just like a classic rookie entrepreneur. The idea was to extend it as much as possible so that you can create bots for the websites, Facebook handle pages, Twitter handles, everywhere. And that basically became ChatterOn. So the idea was to allow people to come and build customer support, marketing, sales, chatbots for their Facebook handle pages, Twitter handles, and websites. And so this would be one of the same. I want to say what GAPSHAP does.
00:12:20
Speaker
It is 80 billion or even when it is still SMS, to my understanding or to my estimation. So they are like whatever. But yeah, if you're talking about the chatbot business, or you can say it's like Microsoft Bot Framework. You can go and do it yourself. That is very important. It's a builder. So we went over 30,000 businesses using ChatterOn within a year. Crazy growth.
00:12:49
Speaker
Absolutely crazy. Like we had over 150 countries, companies in 150 countries who are using chat around the world. Crazy, crazy escrow. And again, the question of how did you get 30,000 companies? Like, how did you, I mean, was it like cold calling cold emails at all? Or was it like, organically, people were discovering you or
00:13:17
Speaker
Got it. So, we had actually become a part of... At that point, when Facebook manager launched, there were these micro-communities that got created. And about people creating Facebook Messenger bots or people who wanted to create Facebook Messenger bots. So, we literally were a part of every single one of them and I and the team, we were the top contributors to the whole community. So,
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, there's probably still a course they would see. There probably would still be a course on, you know, Udemy or some state. Yeah, you'd find like hundreds of thousands of people who have taken that course. Yeah. So, that was pretty much fun. And, you know, that happened now on the other side of the track.
00:14:00
Speaker
One quick question here. What did the Twitter bot do? Because Messenger, I understand, there's two way customer typing Messenger responding. What does the Twitter bot do? Same. It's not a tweeting bot. So when you do a DM on Twitter, it fits for that. Okay. And Twitter allowed, it had opened up that API for bots to handle. Yeah, probably not only 2016, I think 2017 or something, but yeah, it is open.
00:14:28
Speaker
Okay, okay, got it. And what was this price then? How were you monetizing? So, I was coming to that. So, we had a 3M model. So, it was free up till 1000 messages per board. And then as you became, you got above 1000 messages, right? Now, why we had a great top of the funnel, our conversion rate is so shitty, extremely, extremely shitty, right? How shitty?
00:14:52
Speaker
We had just like 20 paying customers. Pretty shitty. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,
00:15:19
Speaker
We made the classic rookie mistake of entrepreneurship. In order to build or in order to be everything for everyone, we basically ended up being nothing for nobody. Because it was a platform and conversation AI was such a new thing that nobody even knew how to create a conversation experience.
00:15:38
Speaker
We had given them tools but they don't know how to build a conversation experience and this is typically hard. It is typically hard tech. We had dumbed down the tech or we had simplified the tech using our platform but still the elements of experience etc, integrations etc was completely missed by the person who was creating the platform or who was creating the bot on our platform.
00:16:00
Speaker
So, this led to a lot of revelations for us. Having done that mistake, if I look in the hindsight, it's probably one of the best mistakes I've made. Because now, if I do anything new, I know what not to for sure. That's how dreamers are. Dreamers always dream of really, really big things. But now,
00:16:24
Speaker
as an intelligent dreamer I can tell you that you can dream as big as you want as the universe but you have to always make sure that you get the earth right and then you can go get the universe right so that's the idea that's something that's just helped us forever so what we did is actually we started looking at the customers who had actually converted who had actually started paying us right the 20 odd customers idea
00:16:50
Speaker
At that point, we realized that these 20 customers are basically, there was a handful of around 12-word of these 20 customers who were using Aeternon to build internal chatbots. This is HR and IT chatbots. Wow. Okay. What kind of companies do you think like software companies or like large companies? Large companies. So one was Pidilite, Coca-Cola, some big organizations. And I was like,
00:17:16
Speaker
I was looking at what they're doing and I'm like, what the fuck is happening here? There are people who are applying these, there are people who are...
00:17:25
Speaker
looking at lead balances, people are looking at, you know, adding bonfiches. I'm like, what is happening? What is all of this? Having zero work experience, I never had a salary paycheck. I was like, what the fuck is even happening, right? But PDlight would have been using like a web version of the chatbot, right? Not through Facebook. Yeah, not through web version. Put it on the internal website.
00:17:55
Speaker
So internet, right? So put it on the internet. So very, very fun. Like I was like, okay, this is great. So let's, let's, we rang up all the 12 customers. We took hours of this time to try and understand what they're doing. You know, I remember being in meetings and they said, we have integrated your platform with AD. I'm like, what is AD? I don't know. What is AD?
00:18:18
Speaker
Microsoft Active Directory is basically your employee's authentication. If you have 100 employees, all of them will be in Microsoft ADS. That's how you authenticate them into all your systems. I'm like, what is AD? How did you integrate our solution in AD?
00:18:39
Speaker
But apparently, because we are engineers, the way we had made the platform, we had made it extremely flexible platform. I can even tell you this today, after not having worked on that for the last, I don't know how many years, it's still one of the most flexible platforms in the world, still is. We are hardcore engineers who had zero baggage.
00:19:05
Speaker
and who wanted to solve for all the use cases in the world like literally every single use case that you can think of from airline booking to you know delivery to support all use cases were thought of in 2020. You saw it as a like a global platform that companies would build out like say a centigrade like although like not exactly but yeah something like that which becomes a de facto platform.
00:19:30
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. So it was like this crazy, this crazy, crazy flexibility that we built in and they were like, we love how flexible it is and you know, all of that. And like, okay, this is great.
Y Combinator and Early Success
00:19:41
Speaker
But then, you know, we went deeper to try and this was like, why are you doing this? Why are you building this? Like this should happen in some other application, right? You are integrating as well as SAP and or equivalent or whatever, right? So a workday. So why are you, you know, like it would be happening there anyway. So why are people not going there?
00:19:57
Speaker
So, what we then looked at was that in large companies there is a problem of access to information. There are so many different people, departments, systems, applications and information that you need to do a job just gets lost.
00:20:09
Speaker
And that's essentially where we realized that there's a huge gap of access to information. And something like Linaya could come in and actually solve it. So our vision initially and even today is to build a Jarvis for the enterprise, a city Jarvis, Alexa, whatever you want to call it, for the enterprise. And that's where Linaya was born in late 2017 as a city for the enterprise. Yeah.
00:20:38
Speaker
Did you choose the name Lena, inspired by Siri, like a female assistant? Well, no, it's my ex-girlfriend's name. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I was kidding. You're insisting a lot that you're kidding. I don't want to. There is a Swedish supermodel named Lena Sauterberg.
00:21:08
Speaker
So, the photograph of a face is used in face recognition. When you write a face recognition algorithm, let's say you and I both write a face recognition algorithm.
00:21:21
Speaker
Whose is better? How do you know whose is better? So you have to run the algorithm on one photo, on just the exact same photo, and you have to do feature extraction. Nose, length, price, level, feature extraction, and then we'll measure who's better against what we... Because on that photograph, there's a global standard that has been created that this is what measurements are. So that's how you do it.
00:21:51
Speaker
Now, the photograph that is used is that of one Lena Soderbergh who is a Swedish supermodel in the 1960s and her face is said to be the most left-right symmetrical face in the world. So, the left-right symmetry of her face is the best in the world and that's why we kind of thought, okay.
00:22:14
Speaker
Why not? Fascinating. Fascinating. That's so fascinating. It's like there's this Henrietta Lacks or something. I don't remember some woman whose blood is still used for a lot of medical testing. Something like that. I remember reading. Fascinating. Yep. It's just like that. Yep. Okay. Okay. So just one or two quick questions here. These enterprises that you were talking to were all Indian or they were across the world?
00:22:40
Speaker
We had Vodafone from Germany who tried using Jetron. And you had that ability to handle multiple languages in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we wanted to be everything for everyone. Amazing, amazing, okay.
00:23:01
Speaker
And what was the pricing at this time in the self-service module when you had this as a self-service? It was a per-message pricing. Probably a send or something per message, but yeah, it was a per-message. Okay. So then once you decided to build a solution for enterprise HR, tell me the journey after that. How did you figure out that these are the sources of data, that these are how I need to connect the data, this is how I need to organize the data,
00:23:30
Speaker
you know, all of those nuts and what, because you hadn't worked in HR personally. I mean, you've never got a paycheck. So how did you figure out all that?
00:23:41
Speaker
Yup. No, great question. So actually, initially we wanted to build an enterprise series. So not just focusing on HR, but across the enterprise like HR, IT, admin finance, procurement sales. Employees can go in and take all kinds of enterprise support. So if my laptop is slow or I'm not able to access, let's say SAP or I'm not able to send an email or my video is not working on Zoom or I want to add a dependent or get my salary slip or ask why my taxes are high.
00:24:05
Speaker
all kinds of problems. Where is my reimbursement pending? Any kind of question, if I have, you come to Linai. That's the vision of Linai today. Back then, it remains to be our vision at this point too.
00:24:21
Speaker
But we had a huge learning, right? The learning was, don't be afraid. So early 2018, we were just three people. We took a call. We started talking to these customers, the 12 customers we had, and we realized that enterprise architecture and landscapes are
00:24:40
Speaker
extremely complicated and we don't know jack shit, right? So, if we try and do everything again, we'll be done, right? Of course. So, we need to kind of learn from our biggest mistake and get better at it and that's why we verticalize into HR very, very deeply action.
00:24:58
Speaker
We said this time around, we're not going to make the mistake. We'll not touch anything at all. Our vision is to be an enterprise virtual assistant, but let's just focus on HR and be an HR virtual assistant for now. And then as we raise money and as our teams grow, we will look at doing other things as well. So that is where our journey started as an HR virtual assistant. It was
00:25:19
Speaker
It was super, super amazing for us and I think it paid off really well because we got like 20 odd customers and then we went to YC in summer of 2018.
Global Expansion and Seed Funding
00:25:30
Speaker
Within the span of six months, we got 20 odd customers and maybe we went to YC. You like co-built with these customers to figure out the connections, the data structures and all of that.
00:25:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had zero access, like they use SAP, we don't have any access to SAP, right? So, I think it's just about, hey, you know, we are doing this, we are the best, we know how conversationally I work, we are very, very good globally at that, but, you know, we need your help and we need, we need, and don't worry, I'm not going to give you a $100,000 bid to do this, right? Give me $5,000, $10,000, you know, if I don't figure it out, I'll pay it back to you, no worries. I'll give you the money back.
00:26:12
Speaker
But give me an opportunity. I think, I do feel this really strongly as well. I think the entire enterprise SaaS business is kind of very, very
00:26:24
Speaker
It's kind of very tough to break into. If you look at all new even startups that are in this space, that do enterprise SaaS, the founders are experienced folks like they have 15 years, 20 years of experience getting in. I think you're probably the youngest. There's nothing to be proud about. I think it's a huge disadvantage. It's a huge advantage and disadvantage at the same time. Disadvantage being that we have to learn everything from the scratch.
00:26:51
Speaker
I think it's very tough to break into the enterprise and sell it to customers because you don't know jack shit. I'd call SAP SAP.
00:27:07
Speaker
make internal customers fear, and one point whenever customers are always, don't call SAP SAP in front of anybody, they think you're a fucking no. Imagine a customer having to tell you that, right? So yeah, which is very tough. So I think for people who are listening to this, who
00:27:28
Speaker
who want to get into the enterprise has to do that. I think it's great money. I think it's probably one of the best businesses that you can build. Because once an enterprise, they pay you a lot of money and they don't go away for years. There's no churn problem. They don't churn. They stick with you. If someone wants to be in that game, I'd really recommend
00:27:48
Speaker
you know just saying admitting that hey we are here to do it we are here to build we don't know how to build right now we don't know how to integrate with your systems but we are ready to co-build with you and
00:28:01
Speaker
And of course, you can't cut a $100,000 check on day one, or I tend to cut a $100,000 check on day one. I'd probably not give myself $100,000 if I, you know, I did that four years ago would come and try to sell to me, right? So it's all right. So you would like hustling and like just using your network to reach out to people and convincing them of this.
00:28:21
Speaker
LinkedIn. So I had built this bot on LinkedIn that would reach out to people, you know, left, right, and say, hey, what is the big hit? Delete hack. You know, it's just like boom, boom, boom, sending messages to people all day long. Make you look at someone whose designation was CEO or founder or something like that.
00:28:43
Speaker
Yeah, that too. And even CIOs, CHROs, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And the picture was very simple. I was not even selling AI or anything. I was not telling conversation AI or something. I was saying, I have a founder from IIT Delhi. And I'm trying to build AI in IT, in HR, and just send it out, send mass messages. And I want to seek your help. I want to have a conversation. That's it. Not selling anything, nothing.
00:29:10
Speaker
get them on a call and then just give your ideas. But yeah, it's super hard work because the thing is you understand the pain of being a consumer yourself. So you understand the pain of having to talk to a Vodafone customer support or the IATL customer support or the Geo customer support. You don't understand the pain of a CHR. You don't understand the pain of
00:29:35
Speaker
Someone who is using SAP because you have never used it before. So I think just like trying to just keep being in front of customers, speaking to them, understanding. I think that becomes the most important play.
00:29:52
Speaker
here and then saying, Hey, we don't know jack shit. We are here to learn and we're ready to cobalt. Just pay me something which makes sure that which tells me that you are, this is a big problem for you. That's why, because he, if you are not paying anything, then probably it's not a big problem for you. Right. So, uh, just pay me something that tells me that it's big enough problem for you. I'll go ahead and, you know, make sure I'll, I'll, I'll give my 200% to solve it for you. Okay. So what makes after YC, like how, how did YC change the, uh, the trajectory you are on?
00:30:23
Speaker
So I think YC was very, very pivotal for us overall to give us a global perspective. That's the first time I ever went out in the US. I went to the US and I got to speak to customers across the globe, especially in the US.
00:30:46
Speaker
Overall, I got to say that yes, the same problem exists everywhere in the world.
00:30:53
Speaker
I think that was the biggest plus that, yes, what we are doing is actually a huge, huge global problem. YC opens a lot of networks, just opens a lot of doors for you, not just from a customer standpoint, but also from a VC standpoint. So we also did raise our $2 million seed round post-YC at the demo day. So that was also pretty amazing.
00:31:18
Speaker
But my biggest take over was not the $2 million dollars, I think it was or the fundraise. I think it was the fact that yes, we got huge global validation. We're just looking to people because at the end of the day, I think things get figured out over a period of time. It's a matter of founders just staying at it for years to make it happen.
00:31:40
Speaker
You know what I mean? And for that to happen, that belief needs to come from within. And it's probably just stupid a lot of times as well. But this is what gets you over the line.
00:31:55
Speaker
2 million is a pretty good seed round. What was it? Was it the fact that you had been at it for a while? All of you were IITs. It was like a heartache problem, AI and all of that. All these factors combined would have helped. Plus enterprise, as you said, is a good business to build.
00:32:20
Speaker
Absolutely. I think it's just the fact that we also had customers, apart from us being from IT, apart from us doing deep tech. I think we had customers. I don't think VCs care about where you are from.
00:32:32
Speaker
I think that has changed in the last five years, which is very good. I don't think VCs came at you from. Especially in these markets today, as you look at 2023, definitely what is more important is customers' traction growth. Backgrounds do matter. It's not like that they don't.
00:32:55
Speaker
probably just 5% now as compared to a lot more earlier, five years ago. And what did you learn about making pitches to investors? Like you were a newbie on that also. Any learnings there or you were satisfied with the pitches you made?
00:33:11
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. I was. So again, one thing that you would have understood about me is if I want to do something, I just put like 300% into it. So the day gives you two minutes. It's a two minute slot, right? 120 seconds.
00:33:28
Speaker
I practice that pitch probably 120 times. It's 120 seconds and it was practiced. I'm telling you to practice at least 100. I have recording every single time I practice, it was recorded. I have taken feedback from my co-founders, from extended team members.
00:33:47
Speaker
Absolutely. Every single word was measured. Dead what? Once you got this $2 billion, what next? And you also got that understanding that this is a global opportunity.
00:34:02
Speaker
Yes. So next was to start building the real business. Now you have cash, you can hire folks and you can actually build a real business. So we had most of our team in India, but I wanted to open the US market. So I personally shifted completely to the US, spent time in the Bay Area, spent time in New York.
00:34:23
Speaker
in Chicago. We decided to stay in New York because the time zone was much better from an East Coast to India perspective versus the West Coast to India perspective. 2019 was all about building, building, building, building.
00:34:38
Speaker
getting the team in shape and starting to properly sell. I think our sales motions got better. Back in India, while I opened up the New York office, in India, we opened our Mumbai office. We got a couple of people there and things started to happen. You were heading Saints?
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, I've always had sales for Alina. So that happened and then things started moving. We understood our customers, we were building products that were extremely relevant for them and we were also selling the product pretty well.
00:35:22
Speaker
It was good growth. We did probably 4x in 2019 for sure. We did a proper 4x of any growth and we're very, very excited with the prospects of 2020. How much did
Pandemic Growth and Series A Funding
00:35:36
Speaker
you gross 2019 net?
00:35:39
Speaker
I don't remember exactly. It should be around 600 years or something like that. What did you learn about B2B sales? I'm sure you would have like from that early pitch of give us some money and we'll co-build with you. You must have become a single keyboard-polished approach. Absolutely. So I think every six months at Leena, our sales methodology changes.
00:36:09
Speaker
So, the reason is, I think we just mature up, we mature up. It's like, you know, we're in school, we're completing classes, at Leena, every six months our sales methodology and the way we sell changes, I think. It's been a crazy journey overall and I think the learning in 2019 was specifically on the
00:36:28
Speaker
you know, on the fact of, okay, you know, can we get customers to sign up upfront, right? And they're not talking about $5,000 as something to talk about. Can we talk about $20,000? Can we talk about $25,000, right? And that was the biggest portion. At that time, that seemed to be so, so hard for us to do. And I think we were fairly successful in 2019 to be able to do that, but still there were a lot of pilots, which were getting converted instead of direct.
00:36:57
Speaker
sales. I think if someone is giving you whatever amount of money, every single dollar is valuable to them and it's justified for them to seek value or conform value before they spend. That's how I explained today.
00:37:19
Speaker
Yeah. So 2019 was more about music, but like low cost pilots for companies until they are convinced and then convert them into a full paying customer. Okay. Got it. So any 1990, well, yeah. Yeah. Then what? Like once the pandemic hit, how did that impact you in any way? Tell me about that.
00:37:45
Speaker
So we had a great pipeline. Exiting March, we had a super amazing pipeline. And we were very, very, very excited. March, we had a super amazing. We were really excited about what we're going to close and all of that. Suddenly, the US had already reacted. So the US business was anyway. And then India also reacted in March itself. And certainly, we were like, OK, we had 40, 45 old people at that time. And we were like, OK, shit, what's going to happen? What are you going to do?
00:38:15
Speaker
all the pipeline froze. Thankfully, none of our customers churned and within like a month or two, so April was probably very, very like frozen, but
00:38:28
Speaker
post April, you know, we actually had a vicious quarter, you know, closing September. Because everyone was moving the board. So the need for tools that make remote working smoother was shooting up and you got that like, like the way Zoom got that pandemic boost. I'm guessing you would have also benefited from that.
00:38:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Just like Zoom, we had the largest quarter ever. Till then, at the point when the pandemic started, we were getting crazy inbounds from VCs also.
00:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, we actually did our Series A fundraiser in the middle of the pandemic in November of 2020, led by a great craft of $8 million. And it was just running out of the back off. I think we would have still been there from any perspective.
00:39:29
Speaker
But I kind of believe that it became such a high priority that this review was being discussed in board meetings in front of CEOs. So I think overall the pandemic didn't have a huge silver lining for us as a business. How quick was it for a customer to get onboarded? Did you have to spend a lot of time in integrations or was it like in 24 hours your night?
Enterprise Integration and Sales Strategy
00:39:59
Speaker
So, we take 28 days to go live. Okay. Okay. Tell me the journey of onboarding. Absolutely. So, the biggest time is spent in two things. So, there are two parts of the solution. One is integrating with your knowledge. So, policies, documents, how to process documents, right? That's the last one. So, if you ask, okay, you know, what is my leave eligibility, right?
00:40:25
Speaker
That's like a knowledge, just like a policy thing. Then the second question is, how do I apply for relief? Or what is my leave balance, for example? Now the first one is a knowledge query, the second one is a transactional query.
00:40:40
Speaker
Typically back then you should take more time to do the transactional integration because we didn't have a lot of out-of-box integrations. Today, the story is completely different. We have kind of crunched down times because we have integrated pretty much all the HR, IT, ERP, CRM solutions out there many times over. So we have like out-of-box integrators with every one of them. At that time, it usually takes time doing those integrations as well.
00:41:07
Speaker
Okay, and how did you absorb the knowledge? Was it like just like import all of it in Word documents or like how was that happen?
00:41:19
Speaker
The customer used to give us their PDF files at that time, and then our AI would run on top of it. Today, though, it's very easy. Today, fast forward to today, we have integrations with SharePoint, Confluence, Zendesk, Knowledge Management, ServiceNow Knowledge Management, Salesforce Knowledge Management, All Knowledge, Dropbox, Drive, File, whatever. Give us a Knowledge Management system, we'll integrate with it. Our AI will go through it and do all the magic at the back.
00:41:49
Speaker
Does this need human training? I'm sure it must have initially needed some sort of human training to make sure that you're reading the policies correctly, you're not getting something wrong. Backing at large, policies can be very complex.
00:42:08
Speaker
Back in 2019, yes, it did need some amount of training. But today, we have automated 99% of it. That's one of our biggest competitive advantages today as well because something that you will need to set up in a chatbot company will probably take a year or two years to set it up. Lina, I can set it up for you in seven days.
00:42:34
Speaker
Wow. Amazing. Yeah. Okay. Nobody is even close to our technology today. So now that 28 days is compressed to 7 days, you're saying.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yes, but the size of our deployments have increased many for luxury. So, we are doing multi-country, multi-geography, you know, in those cases, of course, there are, oh, approvals, oh, that is not approval. Our time spent is probably just like seven to 14 days, but customers have like, of course, we're talking about the largest of the largest customer, right?
00:43:12
Speaker
15 approvals to take before and that's okay. That's part of their process and we respect that. So the time probably has not crunch the time effort on our end has completely gone now. This is the, yeah. And how do you monetize? Like it, I've chatted on it was a per message monetization, which I'm sure now would be maybe a per employee or something like that. How do you do it? It's a per employee per year subscription chart. That's correct. Okay. How much is that?
00:43:39
Speaker
So we have like eight products at this point and like all the products are, you know, like they solve some specific problem for the customer, right? Either in HR in IT or then there's the enterprise module as well. So you can either buy the HR module, you can buy the IT module or you can buy the enterprise module as well.
00:43:59
Speaker
Then there are other modules like finance, ERP modules. So you can buy any one of these or you can buy the enterprise module and you get everything, right? So it depends on what you buy. It could be, you know, it also depends from geography to geography. So we do realize in our cognizant of the fact that, you know, from a business case perspective or an ROI of automation perspective, automating away, let's say, 1000 tickets
00:44:23
Speaker
for a customer in the US versus automating a 1000 ticket for a customer in India, just has different value or different dollar value. So we're cognizant of that fact. So pricing varies for geography as well. But what's like a range, like say for just an HR module for what would be the range between India and US? It would be very different. So it could be starting at
00:44:50
Speaker
let's say $3 to $8 per employee per month in India.
00:44:57
Speaker
The US would be starting at around $10 to $10 to $50. It depends. What you're buying, HR, IT. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rooker. ERP, enterprise. But yeah, of course, we are now, we add a lot of value to our customers. And we do charge a premium for the value. We are the best product in the market. We know it. We are doubling down on our investment in continuing to be the best or 10x better than anyone else in the market.
00:45:26
Speaker
And there is a premium attached to that as well. Okay. So I understand HR module. It's like what we've already discussed. IT would probably be like a help desk, like my system is not working or I need access to a software, need a user ID or whatever. Finance would be like asking about reimbursements and stuff like that or filing a claim and so on. What does the ERP module do?
00:45:52
Speaker
So, finance is not just that. Finance also sometimes means other things like vendor payments, purchase acquisition, purchase orders, finding status of payments, et cetera, et cetera. ERP can do a lot of things, and CRM also. So, we have a CRM integration, a CRM module also. So, CRM module, let's say, is for integration. Sometimes enterprise companies say that, okay, we have a problem where our reps go.
00:46:18
Speaker
and have conversations, but don't update Salesforce. It's very tricky to use. Lina is on the mobile, on WhatsApp, on Slack, on Microsoft Teams. Lina is everywhere, right, for the employee. When Lina go to Akshay and say, hey, Akshay, you had a meeting with the CFO of J&J, how did it go?
00:46:37
Speaker
You know, give me some notes. Do you want me to remind somebody about something? Do you want me to set up a task? Do you want me to change the value of the deal? You know, so that, you know, the rep does not need to kind of go, because it feels like a task. I've done sales myself. It's just my, I love talking to people. I love talking. I love understanding their problems and solving them for it. Now I'm going to make notes because I need to present. Oh my God. Do I need to put it in the Salesforce?
00:47:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's all. So then you take a picture and it's not set upload date and stuff like that. And then put it on from Slack or Microsoft Teams or WhatsApp, you know, just Lina is coming to you, right? You want me to update something in the, in the deal? Take a screenshot, send it to Lina. Lina will send it to the deal in Salesforce, right? You didn't need to open Salesforce. You don't need to do anything. You create a follow-up task or follow-up meeting, whatever you want. Yeah.
00:47:31
Speaker
There are multiple, there are many, many such use cases, right? A vendor is following up with you, Akshay, you know, where's my payment? Now you would basically go to a finance person and say, okay, where's this guy's payment? You don't need to do that shit anymore. You can just go to Lina and say, status of PO numbers or invoice numbers, and you get information on your Slack or on your Microsoft Teams right there, and you can just send it to your vendor. Or if I were to take it forward, your vendor can also access this directly or WhatsApp or on SMS, you know? Amazing.
00:48:02
Speaker
So a lot of different use cases that we are entering into, of course, again, just to kind of for the benefit of the audience here, you should not do this until you have a firepower or cash to do this. So when you start, just focus on one thing really, really, really, really well, very, very deeply. Make sure you're the best in the world at that.
00:48:24
Speaker
then raise a ton of money and then do whatever you want. So you raise that ton of money in your series B round of 30 million dollars. So that was for building out a tech team to build all these products. I'm guessing this would be pretty expensive to build all of these.
00:48:47
Speaker
It's a $500 billion plus play over the next 5, 7, 10 years. And I'll explain why. If you look at the service now, BMC, Jira, the IT ticketing tool marketplace, you would realize that they're all currently trading at a cumulative value of market cap of $500 billion. Now, what is their sell? They say that I'm going to go to companies and I'm going to help them manage tickets better.
00:49:14
Speaker
steamlight ticket management. But at the end of the day, the tickets are being sold by humans at the back, right? Of course. So, when that is happening, Akshay, I am going in and saying that, hey, I am going to kill tickets before they are created. I am going to probably kill 60-70% of the tickets in IT, in HR, in admin, in finance before they are created.
00:49:40
Speaker
Right. So I'm not just making the ticketing tool use less by 60, 70%. I'm not eating, I'm not just eating up the ticketing tool value by 60, 70%, which is like $300 billion in itself, but I'm also, I'm also saving human costs. If you have a hundred people ID support team, I'm going to make that 30 or 40 in a year. Right. So that's huge dollar savings for any enterprise.
00:50:12
Speaker
Amazing. So do you also enable that human ticketing, like say somebody being actually able to raise a ticket to another human being in IP for whatever, like something which is not covered in the knowledge base that you ingested?
00:50:29
Speaker
Yes, so Leena can, of course, at the end of it's AI, it cannot answer all kinds of and all queries, right? So we have built our own case management system, which is also a ticketing system, so that anything that Leena cannot respond to actually goes and gets raised as a ticket. Okay.
00:50:46
Speaker
And that would probably eventually get added to the knowledge base because when somebody answers a ticket of a certain type, then the next time that type of ticket is created, you can just answer it directly. And that is correct. Amazing. So are you also looking to extend this towards customers? I mean, for a few months, working with customers, especially for SaaS companies, this could have value.
00:51:16
Speaker
No. So, the way we believe that this market is playing out, Akshay, it's very important to be really, really deep in a vertical. So, I don't want to make the mistake of being everything for everyone again. I think there is immense and then I tell you why. So, there are two things that are playing out together. One is the NLP algorithms that understand what people are asking for. That NLP algorithm
00:51:39
Speaker
our LP algorithms are very focused or we have custom NLP algorithms just for HR, just for IT, just for finance, right? We have built like, we are not taking the platform approach that, okay, this is a generic NLP, do whatever you want to build on, no. That's very poor in terms of ROI, in terms of accuracy in the real world, right?
00:52:00
Speaker
We have a specific algorithm for IT, we have a specific algorithm for finance, right? Now, that's one part of the story. The other part of the story is also integrations, right? It's not just, see, let's say you ask Leena, Akshay, you go and ask Leena, why is my salary less this month?
00:52:19
Speaker
Now, to answer this question Akshay, Leena will need to understand what you're saying, which is the NLP, that Akshay needs to know why is the salary low? And secondly, Leena will need to have access to data from multiple systems.
00:52:36
Speaker
like your payroll system, your HR, IH, your leave-in system to put this together and then give you a response. So one is the NLP, the other is the integrations. And both have function and were really, really deep in an enterprise to be able to add value, to actually be able to do 70%, 60%, 70% automation. So we have ambitions of being the Jarvis for employees.
00:53:00
Speaker
But we don't want to go anywhere close to doing customer support or marketing bots or something like that. I think what we are seeing is in the next five years, just like two platforms come out. So the CRM platform and the ITSM platform come out as separate platforms. Technically, you can use the Salesforce as ITSM. You can, you could if you wanted. ITSM means IT service management, like ticketing.
00:53:30
Speaker
what's happening right okay like sales force has a ticketing tool of its own right so for customer but but you see that cio's manage two platforms one is a cim and because they go deep in their own own areas something that insports can't do sales service now does
00:53:46
Speaker
or a BMC does, and something like a BMC cannot do a Salesforce does. So they go very deep in their own areas in every single day. And I believe in the next five years, this industry is going to evolve where there's going to be a master's enterprise virtual assistant, Lina AI.
00:54:04
Speaker
which is going to do all employee support and employee service experiences. And then there's going to be something on the consumer end that a CIO will buy on top of Salesforce. So I think that's how this market is going to evolve. Fascinating. So what is your current sales challenge that you're solving? Like you told me 2019, it was about getting customers to buy upfront and you evolved every six months. What has been the evolution since then? What have you learned?
00:54:33
Speaker
I think the biggest difference is we are doing extremely high value and
00:54:43
Speaker
a high value deals with proper value selling. Now, what does that mean? If I'm going to a customer today, Akshay, I don't talk about products, why our product are features. I talk about ROI. I talk about understanding the exact problems that you have as a CIO, as a CHR, as a CFO, and saying, okay,
00:55:05
Speaker
If you want to reduce costs, let me help you reduce costs. Today, your IT support team has 100 people. I'm going to take that down by 60 people in the next one year. Not just that. I'm going to tell you exactly how I'm going to do it. So today, these 100 people, they get these 1000 tickets. These 1000 tickets are categorized into these categories and subcategories. In these categories and subcategories, I'm going to do this much automation.
00:55:33
Speaker
This category, I'm going to do 100% automation. This category, I'm going to do 20% automation. This category, I'm going to do 80% automation. And this is exactly how will I automate. I'm not just telling you I'm automating. I'm also telling you this API I will use to automate this. So when an employee says my password is, I want to reset my password. Right now, a human is doing it and then SMS is sent on the mobile. I'm going to use this API to automate it like in real time, right there, right then.
00:56:02
Speaker
So I'm going to tell you this and then I'm going to go to the, I'm going to go one step ahead and I'm going to say, this is how you're going to save 60 people. This is their salaries. This is the total dollar I'm going to save you in a year, right? Now pay me this much. This is real dollar saving for you and to sweeten the deal. I am going to tell you that in your contract,
00:56:27
Speaker
I'm going to commit to you a self-service ratio. I'm going to commit this ROI, this 60% automation in the contract to you. In case we don't achieve this number by the end of the year, I'll give you credits back. Now we go to this level. Now this is the maturity level today in 2022, but it's been a journey.
00:56:52
Speaker
It's been an amazing fulfilling journey, like learning how to, and our ECVs are kind of, we're doing millions of dollars of deals right now. ECVs average contract values. Yes, average contract value. You must be selling to like Fortune 500 businesses.
00:57:12
Speaker
Yeah, global fortune 500, US, Middle East, Europe, South Asia, India. So the way you do sales is first you need to get this information from business like what are the number of tickets, category of tickets, what is the confidence and so on and then you make your pitch. Yep. Because it doesn't make sense, right? So if I can't save you money, what will you do with the problem? The problem will not be worth the paper it is printed on, right?
00:57:41
Speaker
Amazing. How do you make it institutional that this is how you make a proposal? I'm sure you would be a pro at making a proposal like this with exact ROI and so on, but how do you institutionalize it so that someone who's joining you today is able to make such proposals in a couple of months time?
00:58:02
Speaker
Absolutely. Again, I don't think we have reached the level where I'd say it's running like clockwork today. It will be in the next two months because we've figured it out. It's a journey. Getting to this level is a journey in itself.
00:58:18
Speaker
I think the plan, not the plan, what we already executed is that, okay, there are discovery questions. So like written down discovery questions that, okay, ask this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. If you ask these 15 questions, you'll have your, you'll know whether the case can be created or not.
00:58:35
Speaker
whether we can add value or not. Once that is the case, then you ask these more questions, put this in, so there's an Excel template that's been created, you put it in. Of course, every time I don't think you can actually use an Excel, this is enterprise sales. Enterprise sales, okay, no, I don't do it this way, I do it that way because every enterprise is unique.
00:58:54
Speaker
So I don't think it can be completely templatized ever, but if a person is logical and they know how to think about things, you have to just think with first principle. This is the problem. This is the number of people that they use to solve that problem. This is what these people do. This is how our technology will automate this part of this process. So this is the dollar chain. It's pretty simple. It's first principle.
00:59:16
Speaker
Tell me about building up the organization.
Sales Team Challenges Post-Series A
00:59:21
Speaker
You look after sales specifically. How do you build up your sales organization? What's the way in which you scaled up and hired people and made them productive?
00:59:35
Speaker
We've made our fair share of mistakes on the way, for sure. I think post our series, we scaled up very, very rapidly. We went from 7 sales folks globally to over 40. We made mistakes in terms of
00:59:54
Speaker
you know, hiring the right people, like competency, we didn't check competency. It was like an accelerated sales hiring process, right? We were giving out offers in like two interviews. So I don't think we checked for competency properly. I don't think we... But what does this mean to check for competency?
01:00:12
Speaker
When you do enterprise sales, there are many competency frameworks available in the market, but I can tell you a few of them very directly. If you want to look at any salesperson, they need to know how to run a good discovery, enterprise sales, how to run a good discovery, which is basically talking to the customer, identifying their pain.
01:00:36
Speaker
articulating and understanding that business problem really, really well. So running a good discovery, articulating and understanding and articulating that business problem really, really well. Tying it to business value. So having an understanding of the solution and how that solution can solve this business problem is basically tying that problem back to and creating a business value. And then I think
01:01:04
Speaker
enterprise sales has multiple stakeholders. So whenever I go into sell, I have to sell to the CIO, to the admin, to the finance person, CFO, CHRO. There are so many people because we are selling to the enterprise like the entire C suite. So that person should be able to do a knowledge of an edge to hold conversations with any kind of persona.
01:01:28
Speaker
It might be the case that to run Discovery, the CIO sent you down to an admin level person or the leader of shared services. He's also a leader, another leader of the leadership, who might send you to even further down to a manager or to a direct IC level person who is closing tickets.
01:01:46
Speaker
So that you need to be a humble enough and you need to have that acriment to talk to every single customer across the value chain. So to that IC person who's solving tickets, to that CEO or CIO or CFO, you need to be able to have conversations and build relationships across the spectrum. So I think
01:02:08
Speaker
You know, we didn't kind of do that enough, but thankfully, you know, out of whatever we had, we got a good bunch of folks who we have been able to train and scale up now. And if I were to do it all over again, I'd just say that I'd be more strict on these competencies and probably higher slower than faster.
01:02:26
Speaker
I think hiring this fast was definitely not needed. And it led to us doing a lot more training later on than what we could have got directly from the market. But it's okay. How do you assess these competencies? The way I understand these are so complex that maybe you actually need people to join and work with you for a month or two before you will genuinely be able to assess that, yes, he has these competencies. That is pretty much true.
01:02:56
Speaker
What you can do is you can hire from companies that you know follow these competencies, like a sales. So hire from sales, almost hire some service now. You know, these guys have such competencies already. They're also tough to get on board. They're also tough to get on board, but yeah. But you should be okay with hiring slowly, but not compromise on these competencies because it takes, you know, a person who does not have these competencies, you'll have to spend those six, nine months just training, training, training, training, training, get them up to speed. You know what I'm saying?
01:03:24
Speaker
Okay, okay. Fascinating. So tell me about competition. I believe MoveWorks is one of your competitors, right? I
Future Goals: Disrupting Legacy Systems
01:03:33
Speaker
guess they would probably be the biggest in the competition. Yeah, I think, you know, we are one of the best in the markets globally, right? In the market globally, right? And I think other pair would be MoveWorks for sure. MoveWorks for sure. And
01:03:52
Speaker
I think I'm not too concerned about move works or anybody else. I think our biggest competition or the industry we are here to disrupt is essentially service now. We're disrupting service now. And we're disrupting BMC, the likes of BMC and Ivanti and those legacy ITSM softwares. So I think it's a, I told you it's a $500 billion plus market. I don't think a move works is a competition to us.
01:04:34
Speaker
So I think, you know, we're already at the top of the pyramid at this point, like there were probably a lot. So back when I started in 2015, 2016 in conversation AI, by the end of 2017, I think there were 2000 companies that were doing conversation AI globally. That was everything, not just enterprise, but everything, customers were over marketing. And most of them were on that side, right? Customers side. I can tell you this, yeah, I can tell you this that only
01:04:50
Speaker
I think the real competition or the real war will be between us and ServiceNow.
01:05:02
Speaker
10 odd remained relevant today. That's it. Probably just 10 odd. 20 odd, let's say 20 odd remained relevant today. Only 1% have remained relevant. I think all of them have won and will win a lot of and will make a large impact on the world over the next five years, all of them. But I also do think that out of these 20, probably just two or three remain on the enterprise side of things. So we've already won.
01:05:29
Speaker
like whatever we have achieved in the last five years is a lot of hard work. It's not like somebody can come in overnight because that's the other thing our enterprise has. There are so many complex moving parts of the puzzle, AI, then your integrations and not just that, your sales competencies, your marketing competencies, you have to figure out how to go and sell in a particular geography. There's so many things that are happening. How do you make sure that customers do not churn? That's another set of
01:05:58
Speaker
you know, math science that's happening. How do you make sure adoption is good? How do you make sure, you know, customers continue to renew? So, like to get all of this right, you know, it takes years and we've already spent that. So, I think
01:06:13
Speaker
Clear windows have already emerged. And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at ad at the podium dot in. That's ad at t-h-e-p-o-d-i-u-m dot in