orb? I spend all my time in an orb. I'm in a Dublin Airport.
Yeah, I know exactly where
you are now. Yeah, how's life?
Life's good luck. Yeah, busy. But also similar, you know, just kind of new, new frames of the same stuff.
Yeah, kids are good. How
about you guys? Have you been,
yeah, good. It's a Wi Fi, shitty. It's a bit of a lag. Why
don't we both leave and come back two hours? You
Yeah. Is that better?
Maybe? Maybe, let's
try Yeah, a Yeah. Things are great. Thank you. Been a good summer being, like, really, really busy trying to figure out, like, what exactly the angle that we want to take. It's been good. Gareth is great. He's not busy with work. We had, like, I don't know if he got back for much, but, like, the most shitty somewhere ever, which made it a little bit easier just today. But yeah, it's good,
good, excellent.
So yeah, thank you so much for taking some time. I know you're crazy, crazy busy, but I wanted to come back to you as we kind of like think through how we're gonna we're gonna move forward with this. So to take a step back for a second, I mean, where we really focused at the at the beginning was, was helping teams to manage all the various customer feedback that they were getting. And it was, you know, same kind of places, it's happening on Gom, emails, intercom desk, wherever. And there's a lot of merit in that, and that's kind of still the use case that we're focusing on, but actually kind of some of the positioning that we're that we're working on has has kind of changed. One of the things that we've really found as we've worked with a bunch of people and spoken to, like almost hundreds of people over the summer, is that the best, the best intelligence that lies within a business is really an unstructured data, but leaders can't access it. So beyond a really small scale, you can't listen every call, you can't read every email, can't read every Doc, you can't dive into every tool. And so the way that we saw this happening was like, you know, people in C suite or VC level, kind of sending out emails and stack messages all day long, like, Hey, can I get an update on what our customers saying with this? What's feedback on this feature as our sales positioning getting received? Like, what are major objections on our calls? And just looking for those kind of anecdotal, unstructured updates. So one of the ways that we're thinking about kind of going through on this is really building BI for an unstructured data so right now, in the company, about 20% of Urban's data is structured, and we've got all sorts of beautiful tools for business intelligence there. But for the 80% of unstructured data, there's nothing, right? It's like a whole bunch of point solutions that give you intelligence on what they themselves know, but there's no kind of integrated data. There's no, you know, classic bi world like there's no abstraction, transformation and synthesization of all of that together. And so customer feedback obviously makes sense in a use case for that, but actually, there's a whole bunch of other interesting use cases. So you're
broadening beyond just that one use case. Broadening beyond
the use case. Yeah, I'm putting ourselves in a bi box in summary. And interestingly, we found a way that people wanted to get the intelligence. Well, it's exactly how bi started in the 80s. Like how bi started back then was like they connected to all the systems, they extracted, transformed the data, and they produced it into reports, and they sent reports to you. And actually, that's where we've ended up, as well as people asking, Hey, we just want to every Friday, can you send us some reports on these topics, of everything that people are seeing, calls or emails or any of the other interactions we're having. So for equals, I mentioned this in the email we're doing, they have like 15 to 20 hours of phone calls every week, and tries to set aside a weekend a month to go through them all. But inevitably, something comes up and that doesn't happen. So we're sending a Friday report now every week to to everybody in equals, like, Hey, here's all the consoles from the company last week. Here's what was said. And they can, you know, tell us, hey they want to understand negative feedback or feature requests or like, competitor mentions or paper cuts or whatever kind of perspective they want to put on that report, we can do for them. Similarly, we have another company that's using it to they're pivoting their product right now, and they want, they're doing a whole bunch of deep dive interviews, and they want to recap and synthesize all of those and share them with the whole team. That's kind of some of the ways. So I wanted to just, I can show you kind of what we've been building and how that looks, but I wanted to kind of get your feedback on that, and I know you jumped in and tried a few days. Does this feel like it'd be more valuable? Is that something that you could see yourself using, like, what? What are your thoughts?
Yeah, maybe let me try a couple questions to get my head around it so the still 100% clear. If what the scope of this sort of data you're talking about is sounds like you're going beyond, well, I guess before you were already ingesting different kinds of data, but with the unifying theme of, like product insights, is there, is there some bound to the sorts of data, governed by use case or driven by type of data? Just help, help me, like, understand the scope?
So yeah, so we will do it by use case, and we see that as kind of a way of growing or expanding over time. So right now, we are just going to focus on the focus on customer interactions. So it's anywhere from speaking to customers prospects, right, and pulling out insights from that. What's interesting as well is there's kind of other use cases that are different, but, but you know, structurally, we would attack in the same way. So for example, like productivity, right? So you have people working across emails, Docs, linear, like all these various tools, and a lot of leaders just want to know what the fuck is going on, like, what work is getting done. And if we can do it for customer attractions, we can actually do it for that as well. And so you could see building out a kind of report based on use cases, and then based on those use cases that would pull in, you know, various pieces of data, and that would change based on the use case.
Cool, okay, got it. And then for Ben's use case, there, would you categorize that as a product use case,
as opposed to, like, no. I mean, it kind
of sounds like it could be considered a sales use case, right? Where Ben is, like, he's thinking about how they market their product to that group of people. I mean, it could just be sort of a general leadership or, like, an unbranded
it's, it's kind of general leadership, right? Like, the, honestly, the quote that we heard from every person, I suppose. I just want to understand what the fuck is going on? Yeah? Yeah, totally. And the gap is, like, all of this data and understanding is already inside the business, just nobody can access it. Or if they do, it just takes way too much time. Superman. So they just, they asked direct reports to synthesize it, and so all these high cost employees become, like, expert report writers, yeah, and so we're just automating that. Yeah.
Cool. Cool, cool. Okay, great. Yeah, no, it makes sense, man. Um, I'd love to see it in terms of, like, I was thinking about this just kind of the minute or two before the call. But like, last time, we kind of dived into how centric could power, like a real thing for us right now, and you guys even went and shipped some stuff. And then I think you probably correctly, like, cut your breath and said, you know, we're gonna go reflect on all the stuff we've learned and come out in different direction. And so I'll just put it out there. Like we, you know, one obvious way to help is to get up and running with a real use case like equals are doing, and give you feedback I am conscious of, just like, how busy we are, and like last time I felt slightly bad, or, you know, something you were waiting for me to do. And, you know, kind of come back. Another way to do this is, like, I'm basically happy to do a bit of a fake version, if that'd be useful for you as well. Like, you know, take it for a spin, get a few people looking at it, but maybe not do all the upfront integration work. But, you know, you can still, you can still, like, use us or refer to us. So I just want to put that out there, like, I'm super open minded about, like, supporting you here. Okay, don't feel like a bunch of contrived implementation to get to, like testimonial or logo or whatever,
okay, okay, that's that's incredibly helpful, and you get the game that we're in, right? Sure. And actually one of the, one of the things that we realized is, like, people just don't want another fucking tool, right? Like, nobody wants another implementation. Nobody wants another tool to search for log into, Yeah, fucking in the answer to onboard people to like, it's just not, not actually what people want. And so we built the platform right now to do the stuff that we actually do automatically for everybody, and nobody logs in anymore. And I think that's a really interesting place to be. It's like, it's a subscription, but it's actually more of a service that we're offering because, for example, in equals the report that we clicked, we send it on slack in a PDF format every Friday, right? Like they don't log in. They have all the source names. They can go to Gong, they can go to the existing source of tools that they use, but they're actually so we're really just this kind of like, invisible intelligence there. That's a tip of all the existing tools, and I'll just send it to the places that they're already working. We've got email, we've got slack. We can do stuff in linear like, you know, where you read tickets, and we can share feedback that's relevant to that. Like, like, we can play around with all that. But the view that we're pursuing right now is, like, beyond you logging in for 15 seconds to authorize that we can adjust your Goncalves or something like that. You don't have to do anything. And if you want something in a report, or if anyone has any questions, you just need to deploy. So let me just show you, for the sake of knowing that it's actually put me there and you can see the output.
So yeah, so, so kind of, let me pull this out and show you so. So it's kind of similar kind of structure, right? We've got a bunch of data sources. This our actual real life data that we use, and all the feedback that we get. We have a bunch of different, bunch of different data sources set up conversations and so many emails that we push design reports. We've got a positive reporting sales report to all the various conversations we have when you're setting up a report, it's really simple. You just go create it, you give it a name, you tell it when you want to send it to you, you select the data sources that it should come from and the various kind of perspectives that you would like you would like, we do all of this for everybody. Nobody actually ever sets this up themselves. Yet, I think in a world, and I'll tell you where I think we're going to go over time, but this would be like step three for us, and in our kind of longer term vision, would be to get it people into the platform, to, like, dissect and dive into it, but not doing that for a while. You
have a centric desktop op, or is that like a saved Safari thing? What is that in your doc
here? Yeah, yeah, I just converted the chrome into nice. So, so right now, super manual. You basically just, like, hit, run, pick timeframe, and it runs a report. I ran one earlier and I asked, like, hey, just tell us everything that people have said about competitor. Mentions, yeah, feature requests, negative feedback. Positive feedback. Again, we have this like option to actually go in and dive into the data. Again, we just kind of built this thinking people might need to put more for ourselves so we can say, hey, let's check that this shit is real, and it has all the usual stuff of giving you, like the original quote, the inside and the link. So, so it's all there. But actually, when I run the report, what happens is it does in two things, are you getting an Infinity Mirror? No, you're all good. So I pushed the report to my email, and basically it condensed that report down into like, what's happened the time period, and then it gives me every single competitor mentioned and the quote and the source. So people basically just get this push clear inbox every Friday, and it tells them what they want to know. It breaks it down by section, and then people hit reply if they want to include anything. It also gets sent to me on Slack, so it's everything tells you what's in it. It tells you the conversation. So in this report, we broke into conversations and over 20 hours of call recordings, and it publishes it into like, not a very designed duck, but everything was there, cool, and that's actually this, this report, product is actually like what I see as our first product that we would bring to market like I can't if we can do this super cleaning and accurately, and that the content is insightful. I honestly can't think of a leadership team that wouldn't want this. Like, we say it takes no effort to set up, and every Friday we'll just send you high grade intelligence stuff breaks down. Like, what is 10s and 10s of 10s of hours conversations every week, platforms, your inbox. It feels like a no brainer. Sell, right? And we've done a bunch of calls in the last two weeks to people just like, Hey, would you use this? And everybody everybody's like, reacting pretty positively. So, so where we're actually going to go longer term is we're going to change the name from centric to format, okay? And my vision is that actually what we do is we just take all this kind of unstructured data and organizations converted into a charity, and then we share with the right people and teams through engaging formats. And our first format is report, and it gets into by email or second PDF. But actually, there's a whole bunch of other formats that we could run, and, you know, you could have multimedia formats. So we've seen companies do really interesting things with recorded calls and manually clip them up into podcasts as a LinkedIn team. And so could we actually start to take the intelligence and what starts as just a great PDF, could we actually start to build that out into much more engaging format, you know, through podcasts, think videos, think reels, think like social media virality, kind of stuff that gets people hooked and actually starts to really surface up the value of all the intelligence authority. That's how we go, like, horizontally, how we then go vertically is more, you know, giving curated or like, personalized intelligence to each person based on what they're working on. So we know what everyone's done in linear we can monday.com, Santa, whatever we understand what each person does. So then can we deliver to you created indulgence that you care about? And then the colleague who works in sales get something totally different, because they care about different. They don't want the same stuff as you want. And so we can go higher on the edge, through these different formats, and we can go vertically by getting more and more personalized and creative for each individual, closer organization and who buys like Theo, interesting. I think we just start selling to CEO like I want to go ahead and raise 2 million bucks on this, on the report product. I think, you know, in order for us, it would be interesting. Like, why you think it would be worth? Like, how much would somebody pay for this? Because while the output is really simple and the input is very quick, the processing that we have to do in the AI, capabilities that we have to do, to do that, are actually really complicated. And so I just yeah, sorry to
congratulate who's who's in the space, like, Who do you think is the closest? If there is one company to this today,
there's one called momentum, momentum, okay, momentum to for sales information, and they have created all these go to market workflows that sit on top and basically integrate back, right? So they always say, you know, a 60 minute call has got something like 8000 words, but the average sales force is 25 words. So think about how much information has been lost there. Yeah. And so they do, you know, auto updating of Salesforce fields, you know, outreach and ABM, and they're doing all those sorts of good homework,
which I think they don't sell to CEO, right? They sell to the sales. CRO, yeah, selling the CEO, I think, is really interesting. I think it's very unconventional, especially for, like, obviously, there's products yourself, the office, the CEO, or, like, just personal software CEO, where there's, like, lots of spam, the CEO will push for or care about the most or have to approve. But them being the personas, I think, just kind of interesting. Like the buying
persona, I find, like, firstly, signs of the highest average person in organizations. It's really helpful. They don't need to go get approvals. Yeah, they can spend what they want. And also, the CEO feels like the person that's experiencing this most, right now, right? They're the person that wants to be on top of everything, but just definitely cannot be, yeah? So they just rely on the direct reports to give them the intelligence. And
they have an inverse approval problem, where, like, one of the reasons that CEO's done all what's going on is because they're getting, it depends on size of company, type of company, but they're often getting stage managed by their direct reports who are, like, filtering and blocking and processing data. So you're gonna have, like, an interesting kind of inversion there, where part of the friction the CEO faces will all be all these fucking spoofers who are like, I don't want you to see the
data we're seeing that a little bit in, I won't specify the company that we're working with, but in one of them, we found that one of the individuals who was responsible for socializing a lot of this information was actually a little bit hesitant, because we were surfacing all this shit that person probably didn't surface before, or it just creates all this conversation. So I think we have to do that in a way that's helpful and that we're not, like, writing people out, and we're also not creating all these unnecessary conversations. Like, Oh my God, this person from big company said this, like, this, and someone does, yeah, dude, it was a handle it four days ago, like, you know, and not, not create that sort of distraction. I
think, though, there's maybe, maybe where you could sell it through that lens, like, if you don't have a CEO, that's the, that's actually the reason to buy this is, like, you can't trust you guys. Like, what's his name? What's his name? The, I'm blanking his name, the outgoing snowflake CEO, like, best enterprise software CEO ever. His whole thing is, like, you go in and you do not trust your deputies. Like they're all lying to you. They're all because he's like, famously, joins these companies, doesn't find them. Joins them, makes them really big, leaves. But he, like, goes in and he has to, like, connect with the ground floor of sales particularly, and like, look at the data himself. I kind of think that's like, most CEOs got hate, hate their companies. Like, they hate, they hate their people in a way, you know what? I mean? Like, they're like, who these
they're always so conscious they're being managed. Yeah, right, yeah. I like, there's nothing worse than working on a team. Being a person above you is, like, really good at managing people, but everyone hates CEO is the last person to find out. So, so there is an interesting thing. There's also an interesting position here where we do thing, like, for like, just call the whole thing, like, what the fuck is going on? And you really, you, like, really lean heavily into a bit, not like, satirical, but just like, tongue in cheek was, like, you don't know what the fuck is going on. Yeah, we're gonna tell
you. It's punchy, man, that like, when you, you said that a few times throughout, I just, it just resonates each time. Like that is, that is the underlying problem. One other perspective on the CEO persona is, like, it gets more interesting, the less defined one use case. It is so like, you know, Ben's one, okay, Ben's CEO, but it's the same sort of persona he he cares about both the sales angle and the product, product angle. And actually, the truth is that those things are inseparable. We just, we just divide companies in sales and product, because we have to divide it somewhere. But there's completely, they're completely recursive, those two things in the context of a prospect who has a perceived problem with the product that's both a product and a sales issue. So just wondering, if you, if you're taking that, like, top level vantage point, maybe the unique offering of this thing is that it's not siloed to one department, and that you're, maybe they're these more, like meta use cases, or, like, not even a use case, like, it's just company level stuff. I think that's, a really, potentially differentiating angle. I've taught a
lot about thought a lot through this. My challenge, when I get to it is kind of starting to explain what it is, yeah? And I'm like, I get to some shitty fucking phrase, like, we're bi from structured data, like no one knows what, yeah, too generic. And so I think it's, it's it's important to the challenge that I have right now, and I need to figure this out before fundraisers like, how do I express the breadth of what we could do, while also encapsulating the direct value that we can provide in specific areas? And that is actually kind of something I'm kind of struggling through and
remind me the data that you're looking at, is it all conversational data? Is that what hasn't happened right
now? Yes, yeah. But I mean, it would, it'll be, it would generally move to just general laws and structured data. So we'll look in Docs and tools, and then I think in the future, we'll also look at numerical statistical data that exists. Those are right story, like, going from
like customer data to all unstructured data, like we have, for example, like a, like a big data lake or data warehouse, okay, it's semi structured, but, like, we don't untold quantities of weird information in there, like, that's, that's like, so many orders of magnitude greater than like conversation data. So
I I'm thinking of it, not in terms of like data structures. Really, I'm thinking of more like, hey, what if people care about like? People care about the conversations, the interactions, people care about the shit that people writing documents and the shit that people shit that people are writing into tools, like, what are they doing? Like, like, that's what people care
about, right? There needs to be some explanation of why they care about those things and what they have in common. Like, what makes that data different and more interesting than other data?
I guess because it's, it's the output and the explanation behind so. So the way I'm thinking through when my thoughts aren't super crystallizing this, but it's like traditional business intelligence gives you numbers and stuff, and it's kind of like the output. It's the result of something, the revenue is also turning but it never tells you really, like wire house, and the insight for those things exist in conversations and thoughts and tools, right? It's like what led you to that point? What was people's thoughts process, what people's plans and feedback? And so feels that that we can start to give clear answers on the how and the why. One last piece of
feedback that I felt a couple of times here was just the use of the wording. Use of the word intelligence and, like, it's obvious that you're gonna be using a bunch of, like, language modeling stuff and some machine learning techniques to consume this and aggregate and whatnot. That's just a given. But, um, I think what's appealing to me is less, the less that this will give me some sort of intelligent explanation of something, or, like, a truly creative Association like this may have been caused by this, but rather that it's just going to do the Drudge work of Ben's weekend per month where you have to just, like, listen to all this stuff to find not, like, it's not intelligence. It's just, like, interesting or salient or meaningful or raw, like, useful raw data. Like, what's the intelligence there?
Yeah, it's a good point. Like, Ben gonna do
the intelligence right? He's gonna see these, like, Oh, fuck. That's like a needle in a haystack. Now, I put that in my brain, but I think there just could be some, there's maybe some angle for a refreshing take here where you're not claiming it's some sort of a magic AI. It's just doing, like, tons of grunt work and, like, finding these things. It's just, like, fast and efficient or something, yeah,
a fun name could be grunt, like, leaning heavily into that. That's really interesting.
But one other, one of the potential, you've heard of them already, but glean Yeah, like they're they stand out, just because they're growing very fast and they're big and they're arguably similar, like they're looking at different this is kind of one of the questions asking about, what do you mean by data? Because, like, they're looking at, I think, a more conventional sense of data. It's like all the companies, files, all the companies, like SaaS, apps and the objects in those systems. I think what's interesting about yours is it's a bit more transient, like, it's a bit more like the flow rate of information, like the new or relevant, the stuff that's not really in neat systems, you know, like, that's the that's what the hell's going on. It's not the like, orderly, structured data that we've built up over time. It's like the shit that's just swimming through right now.
So how and glean is predominant is there? So you can search and find it, right? So how do you picture us being different to glean than from, like from an actual user action? Because, to me, the output is really different, right? Like glean does, synthesize and send your reports, right? They just help you find it. And maybe they'll for them, I guess, because they're
because they're trying to ingest so much data, they how would they start with a report? Like, maybe, I guess they could do it. They could do themed ones for specific tools, or pairings of tools, or themes of tools, but, um, like, if you the more expansive your outlook on the data gets, the more you have that problem, right? Like, how can you automatically do the report? Like, there needs to be some more instruction or tool used to define, I don't know, but I think that could be just leaner. There's such a such an obvious company at the moment that it could be really great to have your your like, your talking points differentiation really nailed. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, I agree. But fundamentally, whatever the output is, I think our output is more valuable, right? Clean. Clean just helps you find stuff. And you could just, in the same way, you could ask someone to write your report and give you an update. You can also just ask them to find your shit, but you don't have to, because it was your it was your time and their time. But actually the time to do that is much shorter than the time it is for someone to write a report on everything. And so I feel like they are helpful things harder in terms of how much we could charge. Yeah, especially they're
charging 50 bucks a month per user,
right? And
people love it. People really like lean, yeah. It almost feels a bit more like the Think
of Gong. Think of Gong like they charge 300 bucks per user per month, yeah?
But glean is the whole company. I think it's interesting.
It is and but, like,
you can charge way more if it's like leaders
totally, if it's like a CEO digest, like, we tell the CEO what's going on. Like, also for gone, it's like, does anyone actually use Dawn for revenue intelligence? They use it and so that there's like a line in the sandwich actually said, like, yeah, extra like, sprinkles on top of that. Like, these people are charging more ICPs. People spend $300 a month. And so the the reason why I was leaning into intelligence a little bit is like their revenue tells revenue intelligence, but like their level of intelligence is actually very low, where our level of intelligence is a great higher than the tools. And so if they can charge 300 bucks, I want to be respectful of your time, and I really appreciate you spending time. Um, what do you think would be useful for you? Like, like, I totally agree. Like, you need to spend no time on this, but I really appreciate your insights. Well, I make sense. Yeah. Like, with your offering,Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much.I love telling little stories. Can't wait. This will be the most thrilling thing I do that week. Yeah, that's great. I'm excited for you guys. Great to hear that Ben and Daryl will be helping out as well. Helping out as well. I think Dara would probably get a lot of use out of this his company.
