Laxman: So, our guest for today is from a company that revolutionized Customer Success management and is one of the top SaaS CEOs by the software report three years in a row and was a finalist at EY Entrepreneur of the Year and has one of the highest Glassdoor ratings and reviews and the list goes on. We have Nick. We have Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. Hey, Nick, welcome to the hype is real.

Nick: Laxman, great to meet you. And Jared, great to see you as well. Thank you so much for having me here.

Laxman: Thank you for being on the show. And, Nick, before we get into the show, first of all, congratulations on your recent acquisition. Insided - a community for customer success professionals, right?

Nick: Yeah, it's basically software that helps any company build a community for their customers. So, if you're a company that basically is trying to get your customers to better adopt your products, get value, you know, you can, the best thing to do is get your customers to talk to each other. We use the technology inside Gainsight for our own community for years. And we liked it so much that we decided to partner up with the founder of the company and have them join us, you know, a couple of weeks ago. And basically, our vision is that as companies want to scale customer success, one strategy is to have CSMs that work with your customers. Another strategy is having a community, so your customers help each other.

Laxman: Yeah, I think we are driving through this product-led growth, community-led growth.

Nick: Exactly. That's how we talked about this product-led growth, community-led growth, and customer-led growth. Those are the three new growth engines.

‍Laxman: So yeah, Jared will be more excited, since he’s building a community for revenue people.

Nick: Awesome. Yeah. Great.

‍Laxman: Wonderful. So, let's get into the show. Nick, on the Gainsight story, right. So, tell us a bit about the origin of your story with Gainsight. CS wasn't a thing back when you've joined. So, what convinced you to take this rocket ship?

‍Nick: Yeah, by the way, rocket ships look like rocket ships on the outside on the inside, pushing a rock uphill. So, before Gainsight, I had my career, I worked in enterprise software in a larger company where I was a general manager where we would sell our software and customers would install it. And they pay us upfront. And whether they use it or not, they'd paid us already, right the old business model that companies have. And right after that company, this is that work at Symantec. I went to run my first SaaS company, a company called Live office, which I didn't find, I joined as sort of helping to steer the company into moving into the cloud. So, they weren't a cloud company before we moved into the cloud. And in that movement, I learned firsthand that when you have a cloud business when your customers are paying you as they go month by month, year by year, you can't sell to them and walk away, you've got to actually sell to them. And then ongoing make sure they're getting value, making sure they're adopting your product, otherwise, they're gonna leave you. But if you, do it, right, they're going to expand with you, they're going to be advocates. And so, I saw that this whole process post-sale needed to be reinvented. And in fact, I was thinking of starting a company around this exact idea. At first, we sold our company, we sold live office, I was spending some time with VCs. And I was thinking that coming to this idea, Battery ventures introduced me to two founders, Jim Eberlin, and Sreedhar Peddineni. Jim was in St. Louis, Missouri, Sreedhar was in Hyderabad. And they had basically the same idea. And we teamed up and they had and when I joined there were about six beta customers that kind of had this big, you know, a very early version of our product. But we had this vision of something much, much bigger, which is companies changing the way they work. So that like after the sale is just as important as before the sale, and kind of calling that customer success. Now, to your point, back in 2013. In the whole world, there were probably 500 people that were CSM maybe, right not that but now there are other people that were doing similar roles, you know, account management and customer support. But the role itself hadn't really turned into a profession yet. And so, for the first, actually the entire time of Gainsight the biggest mission has been how do we create this profession around customer success? How do we create this community? And yeah, if we do that, they'll buy our software. And so now today, you know, there are several 100,000 people on LinkedIn that describe themselves as CSM. So, it's really, really cool to have seen this new profession grow up.

‍Laxman: Yeah, for sure. I think that's the first role that startups are hiring for these days.

‍Nick: Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, it's changed so much, right.

‍Laxman: Yeah, we did that in Outplay because now the importance is all about how well you can take care of your customers.

Nick: That's right. Well said.

‍Laxman: You're on mute Jared.

‍Jared: Pardon me, Super interesting journey that you had. And thank you for shedding light on the early stage you got there? We weren't exactly sure at the time. But you had six beta customers when you came on? How did you go from that to your first 100? Right? Like, for everybody listening, like, that's still pretty early. It's not a cold start, but it's close. Right?

‍Nick: We had, you know, it's a great question. And it didn't feel like I mean, I know some companies feel like all of a sudden you get product-market fit and everything starts rolling. I never felt like that. It's always been, incremental, right? So, I don't even remember when we got our first 100 customers or what it wasn't some magic moment. And we had banners and confetti or something, right? It was just like, okay, we got the 100. Now, let's get the 101. But I do think that like, the journey, basically, was that early on customer success, as I just alluded to, is pretty small. And so, one of the biggest things we did was make sure that we were focused on the community and the category and the job first, our software second, and that really endeared us with a lot of people in the community. Right. So, like, we were throwing conferences, that had nothing to do with Gainsight, right, our pulse conference, they were about, like, how do you pay customer success people? Should they report to sales, you know, should they own renewals. And because of that, I think a lot of the thought leaders in customer success, in the profession, like the kind of like had a good affinity to the Gainsight brand early on, right? And just like like us as people and our values and culture and all that. And so that's, I think, an important thing early on. Because before you sell a customer, I mean, sometimes you can just go sell them a demo, and they buy it. But in a lot of cases, they're getting to know you as a company, you're building a relationship. And I find I don't know what you do. But I find now in most categories, there's like 30 companies that basically do the same from a demo perspective, the exact same thing, right? And so, part of it was getting that like, kind of like relationship and preference. And then what started happening is do different ones of those companies started saying, okay, we're gonna look at technology. Right? And back then there weren't, I mean, for people that are new SaaS offers now it seems like you know, there are 10,000 by 10s, of 1000s of Saas companies back then, there was only like, maybe a few 100 meaningful Saas companies. And so, every time one of those would start looking at technology, we would be like, oh, wow, we got to get this. And so, one of the things that happened is we totally rallied around those early opportunities. I mean, that the first marquee customer we had was Box, which is still climbing today. And, you know, Box, I remember when, you know, like, they were thinking about technology, and they weren't sure when they were gonna buy something. And I'm sure many of you listening if you're an entrepreneur have that experience, okay, when are they actually gonna buy something, right. And I remember going to their office, this is back when you could go to offices. And in fact, they were at that point, they were in Los Altos, California. And like, literally, like, basically going there every couple of days, because we were having different meetings and showing them demos. But then we're iterating on the product. And we're like, building stuff that meets their needs. We built a whole feature that they wanted because they saw it from another competitor. And honestly, they never used it. Nobody else ever used it either. So, it's pretty funny. But we basically were there, like every couple of days. And I remember Aaron Levie, who's the CEO of Box, is very well known. And a friend of mine, he is, you know, he'd seen me in the lobby and back. Why do you keep coming to our office? Like he wasn't involved in the sales cycle, just like, why you're still here? Why don't you just work here, if you're going to be in our lobby every couple of days, right? I got to know the reception is like I knew their Wi-Fi password by memory, right? Like that kind of a feeling. And so, Box is the first marquee customer. And then with that, then you started getting other ones. And other people, you know, should use them too. And we had a couple of other good logos too, like Marketo. And exactly. And so, then we went into all these other bake-offs. And by the way, we didn't want all of them, but we won most of them. And the ones that we didn't win, we eventually got back later, right? All pretty much all the competitors, except for one, all the competitors that were competitors against that back then are like all out of business. Right? So we were in some ways, just trying to outlast that competition, right, and just kind of keep going. And so again, your question when we got to the 100th? You know, my guess is? Yeah, I think we were actually about like 75 employees, you know, the product was a little more mature. One thing we did was invest a lot in R&D and the product and built a very sophisticated product to really scale, and so I think we started getting a little bit of that momentum. And I think the sales team started getting a couple of reps that like was really successful. We had an early rep named Rebecca Olsson, she probably joined around there. She actually had never worked in sales before. She's incredible when the best enterprise salespeople I've ever met. She's not against it anymore, but she is just very smart. She worked in consulting, and she was super, super hungry, and diligent. And she just like went after the customer and like would do 50 meetings with them, like whatever it took to figure out like understanding their need and really kind of tailor the solution to their needs. So, I didn't give you a direct answer to what happened at 100. But those are the types of things like we had marquee logos, we had I think somewhat of a sales playbook, a very early playbook. We had a few reps that were really successful. And we built out the product enough that there was some differentiation.

‍Jared: Nice. One thing that you said that stuck with me like before all of that, you said category first. Right? Like, and I want to dive in because you know, the next line of questioning, I want to unpack the wow factor. And I generally believe that that category first line, you said is a big part of it. Can you expound on that? And like, tell us about what you've done? And then how, in what you also said before, building out the CSM, functionally, like write the roll five writers now I do think they're both interconnected. Very close. And I'd love to hear your feed.

‍Nick: Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that for us, it's definitely been the playbook. And by the way, entrepreneurs asked me all the time, you know, category creation category first. And I don't think it's for everyone, I want this caveat upfront. Because if you just have built like the next version of like, an existing category, and your product is like faster, better, cheaper, I don't think you need to necessarily go create a new category. Like I think it's actually a lot of work. It's very expensive, takes a long time, right. But in our case, in some ways is a necessity, right? Because we are building software for a role that didn't really exist yet. Right? So, for us, we had to it wasn't like, oh, we want to be category creators. It was like, Wait, who would we sell our software to if there's no CSS. So, step one, make sure companies have CSMs. And so, we had to really, you know, basically invest in CSMs, being successful as a profession, companies investing in customer success, and then eventually realizing they need technology. And that wasn't like inevitable we had we did a lot, right. Like we'd like to create job boards for people to find roles, we wrote guides to hire Customer Success executives, we created internship programs where people get into customer success, we created an online training program to teach people customer success, we partner with universities to create customer success programs, I teach a day, a term at Stanford Business School on customer success, like all this stuff, that is just about the category, literally, they may or may not buy Gainsight, maybe the venture that Gainsight, maybe they'll buy a competitor and then later come to Gainsight. So, it's very much a long play. And so that category first for us was out of necessity. But one of the things it does give you is a massive asset, right? Like we have 1000s and 1000s and 1000s, actually, hundreds of 1000s of people who've like been involved in thought leadership and eventually wanted to buy Gainsight. And maybe they always start out with Gainsight. But they eventually want to and it's just like, it's just part of the ethos, right? It's on their job, they put it on their LinkedIn, like against that experience, right? It's just like a part because Gainsight now is, you know, we're probably 80% of the market or whatever. So now it's like, you know, Gainsight experience equals Customer Success experience, right? It's not the only way to get a customer success experience, but it's probably the most tangible way. And so, for us, that kind of accretion was out of necessity. But it definitely became the biggest thing we ever did. And we continue to focus on it. And now we're like, one of the challenges as a company gets bigger as you get into multiple product areas. So now we have community software, we actually have a product analytics product that's really strong, called PX, and so now we're kind of like, what's the bigger category? How do you redefine the category, which, you know, is the next chapter of that journey? That's awesome. Building on that was there anything else any other wow factors that you have, outside of freaking big logos we have to create a category that is massive, what else will contribute to you know, that secret sauce, so to speak, and I see that like, actually the root of all of that, for us, even whether it's the logos or everything, building the team. For us, it's actually literally our culture and values. Because one of the things we're very passionate about is like, actually being the same company on the inside like that and being the same people at home and being the same company with your customers, right. So, like your values, and the way you work at home. And the way you treat your coworkers. And the way you treat your customers should all be integrated together shouldn't be like you have to be different people. And we call that human first business like we're all human beings first. And so that's something that like we've been talking about from day one like that's the most passionate, then category creation is our values and culture. And what's interesting is, I think that is actually the long-term thing that's helped us because what ends up happening over time is I do think that customers buy and work with people that connect with them emotionally, right? Because there's a lot of commoditization of technology. Why Jared? Like, are you a coke person or a Pepsi person? What do you drink?

‍Jared: Oh, man, depends on the stage of my life. I drink Coke right now. But I grew up drinking Pepsi because my mom drank it.

‍Nick: Yeah, so maybe it's better for your mom, like, there's a lot of people who are Coke or for Pepsi, but it's totally arbitrary, right? It's just like that for somebody. Like, why do you buy Clorox wipes? And so, in technology, you know, certainly there are some categories where I was like, oh, it's not about the brand. It's about like, you know, you're like you built the only technology that can do X, Y, and Z, but show me a software category. There's a vendor that cuts the only one that could do it as I challenge you to give me one, give me one technical area where there's not like a ton of different alternatives. And so, to me, the thing that the wow factor was the emotional connection that we've built with our community and our customers by being our authentic selves. And so, like that shows up in like, the thing we're most well-known for is we've made dozens and dozens and dozens of parody music videos, which I actually mostly write myself have that skill. So, you know, the Taylor F country music, rap music, Backstreet Boys, you know, Olivia Rodrigo, we've rewritten them all to be about SaaS and customer success. And people, they love them, they find them funny, they share them, but what it's not just about like the funny factor, it's like, oh, wow, like, I like these people, they get me like, that's one of the feelings we want to convey. So, for example, if you listen to our videos, if you're not in SaaS, you'd be like, what is this, this is weird. But if you're in SAS, you're like, oh, my God, that's exactly what the job of a CSM is, or a product manager or whatever, like, you totally get it. And I think that like, fundamentally, buyers want to buy from companies that get them. So, when I look, I invested in a lot of startups and stuff, why go to the websites? Like one of the questions is, do they get the persona, that they get the target audience, the pain of that target audience? Do they get what they've been through? And I think that's the long-term wow factor. They get me. Yeah, and all super insightful.

‍Jared: You touched on community, right? Because what you did was create a community. And now you know you're investing in the community.

‍Nick: I know.

‍Jared: When did you decide to do that? And yeah, tell us about it.

‍Nick: Because it's a perfect segue, because when you say they get me, um, you know, this company gets me, part of this company gets that, like, honestly, my job is lonely, especially in the early days of the profession. In the early days of the profession, you are building customer success, your boss doesn't understand what it is. Your salespeople don't say, what is your product, people understand what it is, you're the only one you go to your go home, and people understand what you do, you talk to your friends, they ask you work in ike customer support? And if you work at Comcast, right? Like that's like the life of CS in the early days, right? And so that person feels really lonely. What is the solution to loneliness? It's a community, right. And I don't mean community in terms of software or community terms of the event. I mean, the concept, community means like, it's a feeling of like, the fellowship of kinship, like, there are people like me out there. And so, all of our events and our music videos, and like everything we did was like, oh, my gosh, there's people like me out there. And so, we've done hundreds of events, again, say from 20,000 person events to like small, happy hours. And I always ask people at the end, how was it? Like, what was the best value you got out of it? And, Jared, like 99 out of 100 times, the answer is, wow, I feel a little bit less alone. I feel like I'm not the only one going through this. I feel like I'm not the only one that's struggling with this, right. The community gives us that sense of belonging and connection that we all long for. And by the way, like never more than like the last couple of years. And so, we as communities like it is a fundamental human need not even debatable, like that's like, that's why families exist. That's why cities exist. That's why tribes exist. But in business, people in the US sell to, want to connect to people like them. And actually, if you talk to any CSM and said, like, tell me like one of your top five questions from customers, one of them is going to be, hey, do you know any other customers like me, they're going through what we're going through, right? That's the big job of a CSM is connecting them to other customers. And so, our view was community is customer success. And we also saw it, because we created a community of customer success people, it's a little bit meta here, right? We ourselves were created. And then we actually created an online community using this technology inside it. And so, our customers were all like, oh, that community is great. I want to do that. And they were all implementing community software and stuff. And so, we're like, oh, we should get into community software, because it's something we're passionate about. It's something our customers need. And by the way, from a business perspective, one of the challenges we all face in SaaS is that we sell to lots of companies. That's the beauty of the model, right? Like you know, you can sell to people, you know, from India, online self-service product lead growth, what how to do you service and drive success for those customers in a scalable way. Right, if you have to have a CSM for every one of your customers at spending $100 A month like good luck, right? And so, what's a scalable way to make your customer successful, community get customers to talk to each other right another scale boy, by the way, is product lead growth and have the app itself guide you to do the right thing. So, we think the community is like deep in the roots of Gainsight it's what our customers need and what we needed and it's like the only way you can really scale Customer Success.

‍Nick: Yeah, I get asked that question all the time. I know Lax has a follow-up but you're just closing this tip like running a community myself that launched in COVID. Belongingness was like a firecracker to get started and everybody wants to create a community so to speak. Be for it. And what I find is a lot of people are thinking about it from a marketing angle. Yeah, like how can I create a community and drive new leads? And I said, first, I say, first off, at the low level through all of your customers in Slack and give them private channels. And make sure to have a general channel where they can talk about hacks and best practices until your software, tell how they hacked your software. Like, oh, well, you know, you could do this with HubSpot that they don't tell you could do to make it better. And then when they get that, and that's the good stuff. Right. And I know lax has a follow-up question. But like that's a massive low-hanging fruit. And kudos to you for embracing that.

‍Laxman: Yeah, so as Jared said, right, everyone wants to build a community. But the major angle behind that is kind of marketing or lead generation. But, Nick, from your experience, what do you advise these new startups coming in? When is a good time to start a community? And what should be the main motivation to start?

‍Nick: Well, I think one of the general things in business, this is like all of us struggle with this 100% of companies, which is the basic thing, which is, most of the things that you want to do, that is really going to make your company valuable, are not going to have near term measurements. That is the brutal reality. There's a famous quote from Albert Einstein, that the things that count are really the things that are uncountable, right? And so like, creating a great culture and values, building a really scalable product, creating a community, creating an amazing brand, I challenge you to what are the lead metrics? What are the bookings that come out of the near term? I don't know. But long term, it's like the entire company, like Gainsight, like, that's literally the formula is our culture, our community, our category, our platform, right? Our formula wasn't sending a certain number of emails or by Google AdWords or whatever, right? Like that's not the formula. Those things are the increment on the formula. And I think one of the challenges people run into is that they are always looking for short-term measurements. And I understand why because I'm a CEO, I am too. And then sometimes you just have to do things on faith. I actually had lunch with my CMO yesterday. And she wasn’t a CMO for Gainsight for the last six months. So, she came into a kind of later in the story, and I was explaining to her that like, so many of the things we don't fit into like some neat, like ROI formula. And yet, like, if you zoom out nine years, we've been doing Gainsight like everyone in the world knows that they're the most important things like everyone that knows the company at all knows that, like we had to do those things. And so, to me, the community is like that, right? You early on just what Jared says totally right. It's not about like some technology. Eventually, its things like incited are great, and definitely look at it. It's about like embracing it as a concept, but not embracing it as it's going to drive leads knowing it will drive leads eventually. Right? But I'm saying like, like, hopefully, if you're doing this you genuinely like loving your customers. I mean, I would say that I know it's a little bit like touchy-feely, but I would say that that's part of it is just like, why do you do this? If you don't love your customers? Like, want to help them. Like, why are you doing this go do something different, like and so I love the people in the Customer Success Community genuinely love them, I want them to be successful, have great jobs, have their families be proud of them. And so, the reason I do community is I love them, I want them to be happy and connected. Like if I can be a small part of their careers. I feel so proud. Now, will that generate leads? Heck yeah. Will that generate sales and repeat buyers and retention? For sure. Like, in fact, it's like the only thing that we've done at the macro level. But I think starting with a pure intention on that. Now, what does that look like in real life? Well, like when you know, there are lots of kinds of ways to community right, one of them would be creating a Slack group, one of the things I would say if you create a Slack group it is encouraged it to not just be about your product, like what are the challenges the people in your role are dealing with, talk about those challenges, share them, encourage them, by the way, to be able to gripe about your product, potentially, don't be on maybe don't be on the Slack channel, like let them have a private version that they can that you're not there, right, and get some people on there that are fun, that will create some culture as we have, there's actually in addition to like, communities that we manage like we have our own community on our inside in technology for our customers, there's like a totally separate slack group of Gainsight admit people that you manage Gainsight, there's 1000s of people on it. And it's awesome. And it's like super, super active. But it's not just like, Oh, what are the tips about Gainsight people are sharing Gifs there, they're helping each other find new jobs, right, like and so I would encourage you if you can to find some people in your customer base that can be those community leaders to really help make it a community of human beings, not a community of customers, right? Because they're human beings at the end of the day, right? So, to me creating community early on is super important now it's not just these forums like Slack or Insided. It's also just like when you do events and get together so as an example, I do like I've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things, do dinners and happy hours and whatever, and I still do them. And I do like every cup every month, like a couple of virtual happy hours, we send people ice cream or wine or something, and we get them together. But we never talked about Gainsight. Like we don't I mean, the customer might mention they use Gainsight, or whatever, most of them use Gainsight at this point, but um, well, the topic will be something like, how do you prove the ROI of customer success to your boss? Right? And we'll always start with an icebreaker question. That's one of my likes, patent-pending, like, if you copy it, please use it. Every meeting I do starts with an icebreaker, including internal, external, you know, what do you want to be when you were a kid? You know, what's what superpower would you love to have? If you could have a superpower? Right? Okay, there are a million you can find them on the internet, right? But we try to get people to open up as human beings, and then talk about something that's not Gainsight related, but just something that they genuinely think about. So, to me, it goes back to like, I hope you feel that love for your customers because I think everything comes from that.

‍Laxman: Yeah, genuine love for the customers. And a natural outcome would be whatever the leads, new, whatever.

‍Jared: An aha for me, my buddy's partner works for Ted conferences, right?

Laxman: Oh, that's awesome

‍Jared: And she runs the community, just for the translators of 10. There's like 1000, there are 4000 translators in 300 languages, if that's even as many languages and there's a community just so niche down even within the bigger thing, so like, hey, these are my customer success, people how it relates to this conversation on Salesforce on my spot. Yeah, like, all this, like niche down, because they have unique needs.

‍Nick: That's a great point, Jared, that communities are the most niche, right? Like if you said, oh, we're going to create a community of all human beings in the world. Like, that's not a thing. It's not a thing, right? Like, and so the community of translators for TED is a great example. You know, in our world, there's a role called Customer Success operations professionals, kind of like sales ops, but for customer success, and we've created a sub-community just focused on that. And they are, they're super passionate, and they have their own, like, culture and all that stuff. So yeah, niche communities are the best community.

Jared: Yeah. And I spoke with her with the intention to learn the secret sauce about Ted, right? Like, I'm like, Ted is great. And I came out with that. I just handle this. And I'm like, whoa, that was like a big aha moment. Right. Like, I love it. Super cool. But no. So, going on, like, secret takeaways of insights? Like, do you have a couple of insights from Gainsight that maybe you haven't shared regularly, that you believe will help revenue leaders listening?
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‍Nick: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't have that secret. I don't think they're brilliant, but just maybe, like, painful, painful lessons. Um, I think the one thing that we one mistake we made is, and I was talking to somebody about this yesterday, the rate of change of how you change the environment for your sales team, I think is too high for most companies. So, I was there. The way this came up was yesterday, I was talking to somebody and she's an investor, and whatever and how do they do it? And she said, one of the things that the CEO who was she was talking to said was, they're not changing things all the time. And so I think that's something for you to think about for all your employees, but particularly for salespeople in general, though, to customer success, everyone, how do you reduce the amount of change and so now that's hard as a CEO or founder entrepreneur because what that means is like, when you make a decision, you got to be really confident. And it's easier to change all the time, right? Because, you know, we have this whole agile and that's awesome, right? Make our products change, etc. But human beings, it's like a cost of change. And I think you really frustrate people when there's too much change. So, we changed territories too much. We changed comp plans too much we change processes too much, right? I think, like really being thoughtful about change management, how often you change, that's something that I wish I had done sooner. Related to that is one thing we have adopted as a company, and I think it applies to revenue but everyone in the whole company is trying to adopt and we've adopted it just in a few places so far, but we're going to mainstream it in Amazon has a process called PR FAQ. I don't know if you guys have ever used it or heard about it, but PR FAQ stands for press release frequently asked questions. And basically, the idea is they write this document, basically about let's say you're planning your strategy for the year or maybe it's like your sales strategy for the year, instead of like having slides that say, here's what we're doing, they actually write a document. And it's actually a press release, written a year from now, or however long that time period is about what will have happened. So, I'm writing mine right now, because our fiscal year starts on February 1, about the next year's strategy. And this, the press release is February 1, 2023, like so one year from now. And it's like Gainsight achieves X and delivers y through these strategies. And so, you're writing it in the future, right. But this is like what we're converting to. And so, whether you use that format or not, I do think as part of getting good at like, change management and strategy is really thinking ahead. And this Amazon PR FAQ process to me is extremely, extremely interesting. It's as fun because you're envisioning the future like, what will it feel like a year from now when you hit your sales plan or whatever? What will you have achieved? What things would you have had to do to get their people can debate it said something I think that is it's that process is something I wish we had done sooner. And I'll give the third one. I think the companies like I believe that there's supporting functions and companies that a lot of CEOs, including me under-invest in early on that, create kind of this like debt that you have to fix later. That's like tech debt, but for your business, right? So, examples of that sales enablement, oh, my God, we should have done so much sooner. We hired like a great sales enablement leader named Kelly Jarrett, you know, not six, nine months ago, just transformed everything, Product Marketing, we didn't invest in Product Marketing enough. And those two roles are very related. Because you don't have sales. And if you don't have product marketing, you're sending the sales team kind of into the field with almost like no support, right? And so, I would say, as a CEO, you might be like me, and have a tendency to say, why would we waste money on all those things? Let's just hire more sales reps and CSMs, and engineers, but honestly, you're just not going to make them very effective. And so, I would say all of that stuff that helps salespeople be effective to me, super important to do early.

Laxman: Well, this is like you're reading my mind.

‍Nick: Oh, there you go. I guess we all go through the same pain, right? I just, I just had an argument. We have a new process after the last 24 hours about change management and like actually presenting a formal business case now. And this is literally in our Slack leadership channel. 

‍Laxman: Exactly. And it's very tough to not do the change management in the early days, right? You just feel like okay, all of a sudden, you just wake up and we have to change this to hit this. And then you feel you have to do it now. Because being agile and small startup, you have to do it fast.

‍Nick: I totally and I'm a very, very much like extreme. Do it. Now personally, I like to do everything immediately. And I had to like, correct that. I think one of the big changes by the way, as your company gets bigger, one of the basic things is people don't live in your mind. So, you are yourself as a founder, CEO, leader, sales leader, you're thinking about a change for a while before you do it, because it's in your mind. But then to that, it's like all of a sudden, oh my god, they just like changed the pricing. They just changed this. They’d ask why was there no advance notice? And it does hit you when you go from you know, five people or seven people in your startup, you know, 40 or 50 that starts happening. People start really being surprised. The analogy I use for myself is you know when you're in a car if you tend to get carsick. It's very rare that people get carsick when they're the driver. But you get carsick when you're the passenger. Now, why is that? Well, what happens is your brain when you're the driver knows the turn you're about to make, like you you're in your mind. And so, your brain actually starts anticipating it. And like everything about like, you're, you’re all this stuff about like how you get dizzy, you're getting ready for it, but the passenger doesn't get to anticipate that. So, for them, all of a sudden you just turned and therefore you get sick. And so, I think a lot of founders, including ICOs, make our teams carsick by that kind of herky-jerky driving.

‍Laxman: I love that analogy.

‍Jared: A 100%. No doubt, because those are the same things, right? As I said, the primary three learnings and that's kind of my follow-up question. The main thing that you've shared is about change management, not doing a lot of changes, too frequent. And then one of the learnings was about sales enablement, right.

‍Nick: Yep, exactly product marketing, sales enablement.

‍Laxman: Marketing, sales enablement. It's like, it looks like exactly all the founders go through the same thing.

‍Nick: So similar. I think it's a very similar journey. Yeah.

‍Laxman: Exactly. Exactly. So Nick, my follow up question is, if we kind of put us in a way back machine and then go back to your early days of Gainsight, what was some of the one or two top mistakes that did, that you think you would want to change or the stakes or improvements or whatever it could be hiring it could be anything else?

‍Nick: Yeah, I think that I'll continue with this the T theme of like business debt, so like technical debt business, so you make that you make decisions, and then you have to pay for them later, right? So, I think there's a lot of things that are like the product marketing, sales enablement that, you know, things that we just wish we had done sooner or different. I'll give you a couple of examples. I think on pricing. If you have an enterprise-type business, there's a tendency that oh, you can just change the pricing and do a custom quote for this customer, you make a difference. And like, over the years, you know, you end up with like, 1000 different pricing models, and there's a lot of debt there. So doing pricing properly, earlier and thoughtfully, and not just changing all the time. That's, that's a mistake that we definitely made. And pricing got too complicated, etc. Another one that's related to that is quite similar it conceptually, it’s being thoughtful about titles, levels, compensation in your company, because it feels like when you have seven people, there's an eighth person you're hiring, it's like, okay, well just give them whatever they want and hire them. And then there's a ninth person, they wanted certain kind of equity, and the 10th person wanted a slightly different title and the 11th person, and then it's like, oh, you are 1000 people with like, 1000 different ways that you've decided on stuff. And by the way, people talk to each other. And they notice how come I'm not at this level, and then eventually have to promote everyone and everyone gets a raise, that doesn't work, right. So, you're like, you really create a lot of debt for your HR team later on. So having strong like, we call them our teammate success team, but you know, basically HR early on having that be strong and having kind of a thoughtful process. Because I think all these things at a startup feel like I'm just making a one-off decision. I'm being agile, I'm doing something different. Do whatever it takes. And it makes sense, right? And you don't want to go to the other extreme, where you're not making decisions. But I do think being thoughtful matters a lot early on. One of the big things I've just like come to the conclusion on is like, as you grow the company, at the end of the day, like I feel like early on, if you think of your job is being a mix of like making driving action and making like driving, making things happen and making the right things happen. So, think of these two different buckets, right? So early on, frankly, you're like you got to do a lot of making things happen, whether they're the right things or not, you try things you make things happen, you are just you're like a bundle of energy, just make stuff happen. As the years go by, it's more about making the right things happen. It's more about making a small number of things happen and making them really right. Like, the inside is like 1100 people. So, it's like I can't really impact the day-to-day that much. So it's like, Okay, I've got to actually be really good like to make sure that insided was the right decision of the right company to buy or make sure this product market that we're getting to is the right one or whatever, you know, and so it creeps up on you pretty fast that you realize, wow, I've got to make good decisions. I've got to be thoughtful and organized, whether it's about compensation or pricing, or about, you know, Product Marketing anything. I've got to make really good decisions in my, my, my as being a leader, you know, I know that's so obvious. But I think the startup ethos is Oh, don't worry about that. Just move fast, move fast and break things. You move fast and break things too much and everything broken. So well move, you can move fast and break things when you're the only driver in the car, right? Yeah, they're not. Like, like, I keep going back to that. And as soon as you put a passenger in, if they're your ride and die, one passenger, you can move fast and break things. I've kind of turned a blind eye, but as soon as you fill that car up, you need to you nailed it. Early on, you do have those riders die people, which is awesome. But then yeah, eventually, you know, eventually you have other people do we're also great, but they're not there. They're like what's wrong with his car. Why? What's wrong with this? Yeah. Are they drunk? Yeah.

‍Jared: They're also great, but they're also not blood brothers or sisters.

Nick: That's right. Yeah. That's life. Like, you're not gonna have everyone be like that. Right. So, it's exactly right. Another one, by the way, maybe? And one final, on the same lines. I think that's probably relevant for people, especially right now. I, I, we read there's a book called The Alliance by Reed Hoffman. And it's basically about how companies should think of the relationship with employees as an alliance not like, as like a lifelong commitment, right? There's this weird thing where companies are like, I can't believe you're leaving. But on the flip side, if they need to part ways that somebody, they fire them, you know, in a heartbeat, right? And so, the relationship between employee’s employees is weird. It needs to be like, it needs to be much more like this mutual benefit thing. That's what the alliances are all about. We read that early on. It's a great book. And so, one of the things that taught me, and I think it took years to get there is like, it's okay when people leave like it's okay. It's like healthy, you know, like, it's like, now if somebody leaves after three months, yeah, you got to go figure out you've made a hiring mistake or there's something wrong with a company, but it's somebody that your company like for years and then moves on to go do something, maybe they got a promotion. It's kind of like good for them. That's exciting. Like if there was an opportunity to turn That's, that's like fine, you know, and so kind of normalizing people leaving. So, you know, what's the one way to do that? Like, when people leave Gainsight, we always like to announce it on Slack. And that was kind of like a decision early on people like Wait, are you sure you want to announce me leaving on cycling cat? Why? Why would we have them disappear into the night? Like, they're still friends? And then when actually one of the things I do is, what if it's something I've known personally, you know when they're on LinkedIn, they post a new job. I'm like, congratulations, you know. And that’s and thank you for all you did. And that, obviously, I know that like, because I have a lot of LinkedIn followers. That means everyone else sees, oh, wow, this person just left Gainsight, I am like yeah, people leave Gainsight. Like, that's totally normal, right? This is like, and I think getting comfortable like you if you're a founder, you'll get a lot of these conversations over the years where you'll get a text message email that says, hey, do you have five minutes to chat? And by the way, like, like, especially if it's on, like, on a Sunday or something, you know, the person's telling you they're leaving. And I would just encourage you to be like, that's fine. Like my response when somebody is leaving is, first of all, thank you for all you did. Second of all, congratulations. And third, you know, what can we learn for the future? But it's not like, oh, my God, I can't believe you're leaving. Why early on, I actually had one of those reactions. I really regret it. Like, I'm like, I'm embarrassing myself. I was like, I can't believe you're leaving blah, blah, blah. And I've never liked that doesn't matter who it is like, anyone can tell me they're leaving Gainsight I'll be bombed as go because I like them. But your life moves on. And so, I think getting comfortable with that is another thing I've gone through as a growing experience.

Laxman: Oh, that's great advice, Nick. And that's a great book as well. I'm gonna add it to the list. I almost felt the same thing. When the first employee of Outplay decided to leave, I was like, why are you why are you leaving? But it's part of the game. Yeah. And so, moving on, uh, slowly wrapping up, Nick. So, the one other question that I have is like you have a lot of empathy for employees and all that stuff. And that's probably the highest rated on Glassdoor. And continuously for three years, tops, SEO, and all that stuff. And with 1100 employees and all these numbers on top of your head, how do you keep up to your game? What does your day look like?

‍Nick: Yeah, it's interesting, because I do think that as you get bigger, there's a lot of systems that you can develop to like, reinforce whatever your strategy is, as a leader, right. And so, I have a very, very like organized system of like, how I run my week, which is, I won't go through all the details. But like, on Sunday night, you know, I asked my team to tell me to send me like updates through slack of like what they're working on, there's like a set of questions like, what were your highs from last week? What were your lows? What are your priorities, like an update, and then I kind of do an update for the management team on Slack? And then I turn that into a companywide email that I send to the entire company once a week. And I've been doing that, by the way, for like 20 years, I've very consistently what's happening in the company, but also what's happening in my personal life, what books am I reading, so try to be very transparent. And then Mondays are all like, I try to kind of pack in all the leadership stuff. So, I might executively meet, we have kind of a broader metrics meeting, we have kind of a quick like company all hands for 30 minutes, just to get everyone excited for the week, and I try to do my one on ones. And then the rest of the week, there's a few categories of stuff I do, I spend a lot of time with customers, I just I love my customers, right. So, um, you know, probably 15, 20 meetings a week with either customers or potential customers. I do a lot towards helping people in our community. So, every week, probably five to 10 calls with CS executives thinking about how to find their next job or whatever. I spent a lot of time with a lot of entrepreneurs too. And I just like, you know, they want advice, or you know, startup, you know, investment, etc, things like that. And then a couple calls on my board because I have a great board and then you're talking to them as well. And then and then you'll usually like there are some meeting strategic-type topics we're working on. And so, there'll be some deep-dive meetings on those. And then I have for our product because our product now it's a big team, I every week, I have a review on one part of the product and so that over 13 weeks on a quarter I basically review all the different parts of the product and that review they present roadmap and what they're working on and you know, and give feedback and all that stuff. So, I kind of have this very specific cadence, and then, by the way, the most important part Friday night I like literally it's probably very inefficient, I'm sure I can use some apple feature to make this easier. I turn off email on my phone and I delete all my workouts so that from Friday night to Sunday night I'm really just like totally disconnected. That's my routine. So, it ends up on my somebody analyze my calendar, one of our interns and it ends up that like I spent a lot of time with customers. It's been a lot of time with employees kind of one on one and roundtables and a lot of time kind of trying to help people in the community. Those are the big three areas that spend time on.

‍Laxman: Spot on customers and employees first.

‍Jared: I think there's a way to show that as FYI.

‍Nick: I know I need to actually somebody told me you need to use a focus feature and the new iOS Focus Features. I mean, look at that.

‍Jared: My brother does stuff like that. But it really works for me. So, I like it a lot. So, you know, just from an inspiration standpoint, are there any leaders that inspire you to follow the times?

‍Nick: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because the word inspires me like, I think it in some ways, like when people use terms like mentor inspire, I think it creates kind of, like, maybe an unreasonable expectation, because honestly, when you meet people, they're all like regular human beings, and they're not like that different from you and stuff like that. So, it's more like I just take, you know, try to take the best from each person, right? Like, there's every person has something they do really well like, just to give you a few examples. So, you know, Aaron Levie, runs Box, one of the early Saas companies, you know, has its ups and its downs, I, he inspires me for just, like, continue to go for it, you know, like, the hustle, the persistence, the grit, you know, I love the grit, like, that's something I try to aspire to have, you know, I think, Frank Slavens, a CEO of Snowflake, he's like a really well-known CEO. And he is extremely performance-driven. So he's like, the, like, the thing that I'm not, but I know, I need to get better at so he's the one like, if I had like a tough coach that I don't know him, but if I had a tough coach, that was like, gonna give me some tough medicine, like, he'd be the one I'd want, you know, Marc Benioff, just cuz honestly, he runs a company where they really tried to, like, drive value for all their stakeholders. He's the ultimate, you know, and Salesforce. And just like that, he created that whole paradigm, all of us are sort of like following he created the whole SaaS paradigm. I mean, all of us are just like, following his footsteps being honest, right. So those three, there's a CEO, Rachel Carlson, who runs a company called guild education, I'm lucky to be a friend of hers. And she, her company is like, inspiring in terms of its mission, which is basically helping people that work in like blue-collar jobs, and lower-paying jobs get like upskilled to like higher education, it's really, really cool. And so like, infusing purpose into work, like she's somebody that I really, like, get inspired by. So, if I can give you less like 100, it's more. I love Twitter because I can see hear about all these people and what they're thinking and what their vision is. And so, I kind of really love curating more and more people to learn from and never thinking, it's like one person has the answer, including me, by the way, I'm definitely just most of what I told you in this podcast I've gotten for other people. It's a small percentage of the right answer is that I probably gave you a lot of bad advice today. Sorry. So, I don't know what it's like. But my point is that like, you kind of have to curate your own list. And I don't, I don't think the mentor concept or the inspiration concept. I don't know how much it exists anymore. Because people are just like real human beings. I think in the old world like you never got to meet these people. And you didn't see them in real life. So, you okay, they can be like this mythical creature, but then you realize, actually, like, even the most famous people, they've got their flaws there. They're not exactly what they see, like on Twitter or on the Internet, or whatever. So yeah.

Jared: I love that answer. I find myself inspired by brands like Nike.

‍Nick: I love brands, by the way, I didn't talk about that. And love brands.

‍Jared: Yeah. And it was Salesforce. They did a simple thing. I'm inspired by Salesforce. Because they've created the biggest category that is today with Yeah, simple thing they had. They have the sign that said software with an extra.

‍Nick: That's totally right. That's how they started. And it's amazing. Yeah, go if you don't know, Google that history, it's incredible history. And I know we're almost wrapping up, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

‍Jared: Lax, do you have a closing remark?

‍Laxman: Yeah. So, Nick, one last question I have is, so if you have to recommend one person to be on this show, who would that be?

‍Nick: Good question. I would say just given the nature of the business, you're running, you know, it's interesting if you wanted to like one person that I'm very biased here. But one person that I really respect is actually the CEO of insided of the company we just bought. His name is Robin van Leisha. And the thing that's interesting is he basically created this company, for the community because he was like a part of a community and like both Robin and I was both like, pretty lonely as kids just, you know, just our backstory. And he's this really interesting story of like, he created this community for people that were into consumer electronics. And that then that like, led him to say, let me create community software. So, I find founder stories super interesting. He's a very compelling person. I'm really biased as I just got to know him by that's the first person that came to mind.

‍Laxman: Wonderful, thank you. We'll ping you for help on the connection.

‍Nick: Yeah. Awesome. Hey, great to see you. I love these questions, and really appreciate all you both do. Thanks so much.

‍Laxman: Thanks a lot, Nick. Thanks for being on the show. And all the great advice for startup founders. Basically, everyone should go through this.

‍Nick: Awesome thanks so much. See you all thanks a lot thank you

‍Laxman: Thank you. Have a good day, bye!

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