Ken Gavranovic – CEO of Product Genius Corporation

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze
Speaker 1 00:00:02 Welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast with Julian Castelli. Each week, we talk with senior tech leaders to explore stories and insights about the challenges involved with growing technology companies. We hope that these stories can help you become a better leader and help you navigate your own growth journey.
Speaker 2 00:00:27 Good morning. This is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week I talk with inspirational leaders and entrepreneurs in the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Work Front, CHG, Healthcare Pathology, Watch in Moment, canopy and the San Francisco 40 Niners, and many more. This episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated. We are a community of tech founders, CEOs, and CXOs who are committed to working together to share best practices and learnings in an effort to help us all become better leaders. We do this through educational programs like this podcast, as well as our annual Ski and Tech Summit. So if you like networking with other other tech leaders and you’re a skier or you like the mountains, check us [email protected].
Speaker 2 00:01:11 Today I’m super excited to welcome Ken Juranovic to the podcast. Ken was the CEO of a company called Web.com in the early days of the internet. He helped that company grow to over $200 million of revenue and guided the company to a successful IPO. Since that time, Ken has worked with a number of successful tech and media companies, including Cox Automotive, New Relic and Uncork. He also collaborates with top venture firms, working with many of their portfolio companies to drive value creation, and today he runs an AI powered customer intelligence startup called Product Genius that helps companies uncover unique customer insights. Ken, welcome to the podcast. Julianne. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3 00:01:49 For having me. How are things going and the beautiful state of Utah.
Speaker 2 00:01:53 It’s going great. Our ski season might be ending a little early. It’s only March and it’s 65 degrees outside. So depending on which side of the ski or mountain biking spectrum you are, you’re either happy or a little sad. But I’m grateful to be here and grateful to have you here from Atlanta.
Speaker 2 00:02:08 Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:02:08 Beautiful state. And of course, I love Atlanta too. Been here since 97 and, you know, great access to a lot of great parks, greenways, all that good stuff.
Speaker 2 00:02:17 Fantastic. Well, Ken, I’m excited. There’s so many things we can talk about today. You know, you’re an experienced entrepreneur. You help young entrepreneurs today, which I do a lot. And that’s what we try to do with this podcast. So I’m eager to hear your story and some of your expertise. And, you know, you’ve had so many different successes and experiences, but the Web.com jumps out. I mean, that’s the full IPO. You led that business to 200 million. Tell us a little bit about how that started. What’s your founding story there?
Speaker 3 00:02:41 Cool. Well, Julian, I guess I’ll jump in. I always like founding like I think about origin stories because one of the things, you know, we probably met lots of founders. A lot of times I go like, tell me a little bit about your childhood because, you know, times people don’t realize that maybe some of the good and bad things that you have in childhood really impacts your drive and emotion.
Speaker 3 00:02:58 So I only just say that for everybody’s benefit. Like I was one of those person that had a pretty crazy childhood. What I didn’t realize is that really gave me a lot of desire to not have that craziness, which meant I worked really, really hard. So, you know, in my early 20s, you know, I started off as a software developer, but I was always somebody that can figure out, okay, how do we build software? How do we solve problems? Like when I was 18, I built my first software company that the second year did $2 million. The only challenge was I wasn’t smart enough to say I should own a part of it. I did the marketing, all that stuff. So I would say I spent my first early 20 years kind of making a lot of other people, literally tens of millions of dollars and then, you know, but one of the things I realized I was really good at kind of noticing patterns. You know, when problems. I’m very, very keen observation of patterns.
Speaker 3 00:03:42 And I started seeing this thing called the internet. So back in like, let’s call it 95, 96, everybody was looking at the internet and saying, hey, is this going to be real? Is this a fad or is this just some other tech thing, or is it going to be real? And when I looked at it, I was like, absolutely, this is going to be huge. And at that point, everybody was focused on how do we start businesses to do dial up and get people on the internet. And I was at that point and I’ve lived in New York, but I was down in Florida and Florida at that time, had a 45 Meg connection to the entire backbone of all of Florida. So think about it. If anybody got on the internet in Florida in 95, you know, 45th May connection, that’s how slow it was. When I looked at that, I said, wow, every business can run the business on the internet and putting servers. That’s the business to get into.
Speaker 3 00:04:25 And at that point there were 3000 hosting companies. And I said, you know, this is something where we’ve got to focus on right about we’ve got to think about how can I market differently, how can I do technology differently? And then also just raw capacity. So I was down in Florida and I looked at the internet backbone and looked at the highest density of internet backbone with the lowest cost of living and actually moved here. I’m in Atlanta, have been Atlanta since 97 specifically for that reason.
Speaker 2 00:04:52 Was Atlanta, that bullseye.
Speaker 3 00:04:53 That Atlanta was that bullseye. And I went downtown Atlanta and took all of my savings. At that point, I think I had saved up $150,000 and rented a half of a skyscraper floor that had deep, dark fiber in the downtown and started this company at that point that was called Inner Land. And the first person I.
Speaker 2 00:05:14 Hired and this was the predecessor to Web.com.
Speaker 3 00:05:16 Yes.
Speaker 2 00:05:16 Yeah. And so you’re basically you’re focusing on basic connectivity, the basics.
Speaker 3 00:05:21 So think about like hosting like cloud computing.
Speaker 3 00:05:23 Right now we call it cloud computing. Right. But back then when there was a website.
Speaker 2 00:05:27 And I remember how many, how many different hosting facilities there were at that time. Right. It was it was kind of the Wild West.
Speaker 3 00:05:32 And you might even remember this is because at that time, you know, a couple of things that I did differently and we’ll talk about that is first I said, all right, this is going to be all about scale. So I need to build a system that’s very, very automated. So at first person I hired was a developer to build automation for hosting. And if that makes some sense, and we said we’re going to automate the heck out of that. We filed patents on it. And to this day, the company that still exists, It’s private equity owned. Unfortunately goes around. And as a patent troll with the patents that we created to automate hosting originally, we also built some technology that ultimately led to to Microsoft investing. But at the beginning when I looked at it and, you know, this is what you and I are putting desks together, I said, this is going to be huge, so let’s get in the right location.
Speaker 3 00:06:15 What’s the first skill set? I need a developer. We need to automate this business. How do we think about KPIs and then how do we break out of the mold. You know, how do we break out of that? I’ll jump into that more. I don’t know if you have any questions.
Speaker 2 00:06:27 So yeah, of course. So you focused on automation and scaling early. Is that because it was so competitive? There’s so many people trying to to provide this basic service. Was that your idea of how to differentiate your business?
Speaker 3 00:06:38 No, no, this is and I think that you see this sometimes with with founders, right? Sometimes you have this vision and you have this belief, right? And necessarily didn’t have data, but I had this big belief that that the internet was going to be huge and that every single business was going to run on the internet. And if that was true, if I was right, then how quickly I could onboard people and get them using and be able to publish their website and start to do e-commerce, which was a big thing, that point would be a key differentiator.
Speaker 3 00:07:08 So that was, you know, the first part is this is going to be really big. So we need to be able to automate it, because at that point a lot of people were literally hand configuring things.
Speaker 2 00:07:17 Yeah. Right.
Speaker 3 00:07:18 Right. I’m server perspective and so forth. So we built stuff that automated all of that right from the get go.
Speaker 2 00:07:23 Okay. So automation was one of your key tools that you use to accelerate and scale faster than the competition. What were some of the other key things that allowed you to be one of the winners? Because there was there was a lot of consolidation. There were a lot of winners and losers at that time. It was kind of the arms race. Right. And so you you guided your company to being one of the winners. Automation was one. What were the other other couple things that you looking back you said, man, I’m glad we did ABC sure.
Speaker 3 00:07:46 The other part is going back to sometimes we call it, you know, product market fit or we think about marketing, how are we going to position this in the marketplace.
Speaker 3 00:07:53 So at that point it was dominated by technical leaders, and what they were selling were bits and bytes.
Speaker 2 00:07:59 So rich, the audience doesn’t really know how to consume that, right?
Speaker 3 00:08:02 Correct. You’re a business leader, like, hey, there’s this new thing, I need to do something of it, but I get 20. Meg. Is that too much or is that too little, I guess?
Speaker 2 00:08:09 Exactly.
Speaker 3 00:08:10 Thousand megs of transfer. Is that too much? We did something that was crazy. Is I actually, again, going back to, you know, being bowled bought by there’s a magazine back in the day. You might have missed it. Remember at PC magazine, the back cover and we put this really goofy farmer on it that said he’s got a website. Do you? Question mark. Real simple. And if so, blah, blah, blah blah.
Speaker 2 00:08:30 Blah creating FOMO in the audience.
Speaker 3 00:08:32 It created FOMO. It differentiated. It was funny. It was memorable. We actually won PC Magazine Editors Choice and that that particular ad just blew up the business, along with the automation and along with the things that we built to make it very easy for customers to start to do this new thing called the internet.
Speaker 3 00:08:49 So we went from literally from zero when I would hire people and say, here’s your desk screwdriver. Put it together to a couple hundred million dollars in a few years. And, you know, and we went through the venture capital, which that was fun. You know, again.
Speaker 2 00:09:02 How many rounds did you do? I mean, you went from zero before you went public.
Speaker 3 00:09:06 We did. We did one venture round and we did one strategic round to two rounds. And just going back to I always say this to people is like, if you’re a founder, you got to believe true life story. I remember sitting in New York City and when we were doing our venture round, and I was in this, you know, really beautiful office, you know, mahogany everywhere, you know, million dollar pictures and I and at that point, you know, again, I was 20 something. I’d hire people from Southwestern Bell. So my entire team was twice my age. And I remember sitting down there and went through my whole presentation, and the venture capitalist looked at me and said, so what are you saying? And I said, the bottom line, every business is going to run their business on the internet.
Speaker 3 00:09:43 And he looked at me and he said, kid, do you believe your bullshit? And I always remember, you know, but again, those are the kinds of things, you know. You know this you’ve worked with startups where you have to like, you have to believe, you know, you obviously have some data because certainly you can go in the wrong direction, but you have to believe in that mission. So I was like, absolutely. So we end up doing that, that raise at a nice valuation. Afterwards we had Verizon, Microsoft Invest. We became the largest reseller for, you know, almost anybody that provided hosting. And then I got something that happened that was I’ll call it really exciting. I remember we filed in March of 2000. Do you remember March of 2000.
Speaker 2 00:10:18 I think, yeah, I think there was some market disruption at that time, wasn’t there?
Speaker 3 00:10:21 Right. I remember as we filed in right after that the.com crash and so.
Speaker 2 00:10:28 Was it toys.com that you know, led the.
Speaker 3 00:10:31 The well who knows.
Speaker 2 00:10:32 Who the first barrel over the waterfall.
Speaker 3 00:10:34 I think the when there’s too much capital like we’ll go back. We’re going to talk about AI a little bit later. Like right now there’s a lot of capital going into AI and there’s going to be some huge AI winners. There’s going to be a lot of huge losers too. So I think it was the there was the classic. There was just so much capital thrown at so many things. So that discipline wasn’t there. And then people didn’t realize the cascading impacts of like, if this company went what they’re buying from and so forth. But it was a it was a good lesson at a young age because, you know, we actually were able to go public after that. We went public July that that summer.
Speaker 2 00:11:08 Did you file and then pull it back and hold it until the market got better. And then and.
Speaker 3 00:11:11 Then the markets came back and we were able.
Speaker 2 00:11:13 To get it. You’re taking a company public, a CEO.
Speaker 2 00:11:15 How old are you at this point?
Speaker 3 00:11:16 I was 29. Wow. Yeah. So when you see your net worth, you know, go up and down, you know, it was a it was an exciting time. But after we we got public, then the market really crashed, which was fun and exciting. And I was like, all right, well, this is going to be a scale game. You know what? What do you need to do? Like when you see an industry this is consolidating. So at that point there was a company called micron PC that had bought ten different hosting companies, and their ten hosting companies were equal to my ten hosting companies. And it was funny, at that time, I didn’t realize how bad the PC business was until I had a lot of PC manufacturers come and want to buy me with micron PC came and we had a conversation. I said, well, I don’t want to be in the PC business, so if you want to jettison the PC business, we’ll put these together and we’ll be a pure play of hosting.
Speaker 3 00:12:04 You know, your ten companies that you bought and we grew 100% organically. So we did that. It was kind of nice that, you know, in our land was the kind of the HQ of of that. And, you know, I then and all the fun consolidation and then we built it and renamed that company to Web.com. It’s still there. And it’s funny to this day, like the guy.
Speaker 2 00:12:22 So you did a merger and acquisition.
Speaker 3 00:12:24 No. So two public companies merged micro on PC and land. That’s complex. And then we became Web.com. Yeah. And I have fun stories of, you know, 3:00 in.
Speaker 2 00:12:33 The how many investment bankers were around the table.
Speaker 3 00:12:35 Oh, yeah. Yeah. We’re on the phone with investment bankers at literally 3:00 in the morning night before we go on CNBC to talk about the deal. So that was a good you know, I say a really good experience. But also it wasn’t all just easy right. Yeah I got to experience the really fun part.
Speaker 3 00:12:50 And then a lot of really tough parts too, which I think really helped me a lot later in my career.
Speaker 2 00:12:55 You know, as you look at that experience, I mean, that’s the that’s the dream, that’s the prototypical experience. It’s not always up to the right, but you, you, you know, you managed to get through bull markets, bear markets, you know, go public, do some acquisitions, build it up to 200 million. What were some of the lessons in terms of building a team? How many people did you get up to at that point, and what did you learn about building great teams and people management?
Speaker 3 00:13:16 Well, I learned a lot of different lessons that I applied. So I will share is the 20 something version of me. Like many founders powered through it. So the 0 to 250 employees, a lot of the decisions came to me. A lot of the strategy came to me whether it should or not, and I brought some really great people, but they would still come to me sometimes for the ultimate decision, which.
Speaker 2 00:13:37 That’s a lot of weight on your shoulders.
Speaker 3 00:13:39 A lot of weight on your shoulders. And as we know, you know, when you start to scale, that doesn’t scale. There’s a point where it’s just you actually start hurting the business. And the good news is I realized that and started realizing, okay, great. What kind of data points? What kind of measurements can we set each of the team members. Let’s get aligned in what our goals, what the metrics are. You know, I would go into meetings where everybody would say, we did this, we did this, we did this, we did this. I’m like.
Speaker 2 00:14:02 Okay. Reporting on activity.
Speaker 3 00:14:03 And reporting on activity. And I have this I have a deck on it of a blog post on the outcomes over activity. But we’re going through all these KPIs. But these are the KPIs that matter. And again, where’s the target. Because the other part like, hey, I did a bunch of activity and I’m good. Well, how do we know we’re good, right?
Speaker 2 00:14:18 Whether I want a meeting full of people telling us how busy they are.
Speaker 2 00:14:21 Exactly. You got 12, 12 busy reports, but you don’t know where you’re where you’re going.
Speaker 3 00:14:25 Yes. And I would say I became pretty good at that when I had 600 employees, you know, working for. But I would say much later in my career, I got a lot better because I realized that that part is one of the key differentiators to scale. Absolutely. Taking, starting, taking a data driven view to every component of the business and each person piece of it is a function of business you need to have. And I know you know this too, right? We got to have our holistic strategy of where we’re going, but then we need to break it down. And everybody needs to own a specific part. And I’m a big red, yellow green guy, you know. And I.
Speaker 2 00:14:59 Love that.
Speaker 3 00:15:00 You know.
Speaker 2 00:15:01 And not but not green because I worked. I accomplished 15 tasks. It’s green because I, I, I hit one one on 1% of goal that we all agreed.
Speaker 3 00:15:11 Right. Target their specific metric. And like even I think sometimes people know what red yellow green is. And you know, I’ve done this so many times even advising and consulting. And I just say, listen, green is you got it. You’re on target to hit your you’re.
Speaker 2 00:15:22 You’re gonna have to.
Speaker 3 00:15:23 Plan. Hit the target. Right. Yeah. Yellow is you’re a little nervous and you want to either make people aware or you need help. And red is you don’t know how to get there. You definitely need help. And what I would always tell people is I’m, I’m I’m fine. If something goes from green to yellow all day long. No problem. If it goes from green to red suddenly, then you need to have a good story.
Speaker 2 00:15:46 Because as one of them, with the yellow light to slow the car down, didn’t it didn’t didn’t happen. Right. Yeah. That’s a great that’s a great metric. And you know it. I guess it took you some time to transform your your executive meetings from reporting on everything we did to, you know, how are we doing versus plan and having the data to support that.
Speaker 2 00:16:04 Did you know, did you just do that yourself? Or, you know, if I’m a young entrepreneur right now and I’m getting a bigger team, and of course, you know, when you’re when you’re doing it, you’re you’re learning by figuring it out. But that’s why we do this podcast. Maybe we could we could provide some some advice. How would you suggest so you know, who’s in that situation transform to that type of, framework today?
Speaker 3 00:16:25 Well, what I would say a couple different ways. First of all, just share how I got there is, you know, obviously doing I started a lot of businesses where I made other people money, but I understood starting businesses. So a lot of experience of doing things right and wrong to I’ve just a reader, you know, I like Tony Robbins, you know, different types of motivational things. So I was really into like, let’s get focused, let’s get excited about where we’re going. I think those were key things, I think, for founders today.
Speaker 3 00:16:51 You know, they have an advantage is they can certainly learn or they can hire somebody either as an advisor or as, you know, part of the team that’s been there, done that. Like now, sometimes I’ve been in ones, you know, I did did one a couple years ago with 225 year old Columbia grad founders, and we took it from 4 to 10 million in one year, sold the business for 81 million. You know, and I think that’s because we were able to short circuit some of those learning curves.
Speaker 2 00:17:17 What do you think about the chief of staff as a role emerging to try to help that executive, you know, drive that change, right. Because I recall when I was in the seat, of course, I wanted more data driven activity, but that means there’s a bunch of extra work that you’re assigning to folks that are already at 110% of capacity. If you if you’ve seen the chief of staff emerge as a more common role, that kind of helps do some of that coordination and make sure that, you know, people come to the meeting prepared with the data and the dashboards are set up.
Speaker 3 00:17:44 Yeah, I think chief of staff were increasingly and like, I have people talking to me about, like SEO roles, I think chief of staff or SEO role, where you could take some.
Speaker 2 00:17:53 Chief of staff. Biz ops and SEO are key roles that can help do that because that stuff doesn’t come for free, right?
Speaker 3 00:18:00 It doesn’t.
Speaker 2 00:18:01 It requires an investment of getting the data, keeping it updated. You know, of course, you want your leaders to use that data to organize their day to day. But the step it’s like setting up Salesforce, right? You know. Right. It’s great when you have it. But man, before you start or if you’re trying to change it, you know, it requires a lot of operational building blocks to get you to the point where you’re looking at those those data driven reports every week, and you can tell exactly where you are on yellow, yellow, green, red, right?
Speaker 3 00:18:28 No, I totally agree. And going back to I always say people do what they’re incentivized to do, right? That’s one of the things people have to to keep in mind.
Speaker 3 00:18:35 And you’ve probably seen this like a good example is I love critical thinking. Frameworks are one of my favorite, but I’ve seen so many times where OKRs have been implemented poorly and drive actually the wrong behaviors. So like as you set up some of these dashboarding, that’s where I think it’s important to have somebody that really is thoughtful in the measurements and the targets. Because as humans, you know, the way we’re wired, we will do, unfortunately, things that aren’t in the company’s best interest if that’s how we’re measured.
Speaker 2 00:19:05 That’s right. If you get the wrong targets, you can start driving the wrong direction. So. So Ken, that’s an incredible story. So you go from getting Web.com to 200 million positive IPO. But then you started working with a lot of small companies. When did you shift from kind of or. Yeah shift from from your experience there to, to using your experience in that to helping other companies? And how did that transition happen?
Speaker 3 00:19:25 Yeah, well, I’ll jump through some of it.
Speaker 3 00:19:27 I would say as I started doing big and small companies, and then a recruiter actually reached out to me for a startup at a company called Cox, for those of I actually, even though I live in Atlanta, I wasn’t familiar with Cox. I should have been.
Speaker 2 00:19:40 But yeah, one of the big media companies in the country, but definitely a big, big dog in Atlanta.
Speaker 3 00:19:44 Well, I’m not supposed to know the media part, but automotive, If you think about any time you trade in your car like they run that if you think about Kelley Blue Book, if you think about AutoTrader, like all things automotive, a third of the back office of car dealerships run on a Cox Automotive product. So in the automotive space, just just huge. And a recruiter reached out to me and they had this really great idea to let dealers start trading their wholesale inventory together. But they had a lot of, quote, technical problems. So at that point somebody hired me. And again, I have a technical background.
Speaker 3 00:20:14 So that was great. They said, hey, can you come help us fix these technical problems? And like many times, you know, going back to people process and technology, they thought they had a technology problem. When I got in, they really had a people process. There was a misalignment, you know, and you’ve seen this many times with startups. Something might be helpful. Sometimes sales has a focus, product has a focus. Maybe you’re not listening to your customers. And that was the classic. Everybody was going in different directions. Plus they had technology problems that that simply weren’t working. So that was kind of the first step into like starting to get into digital transformation, which now is kind of a little bit older term. But at that point it wasn’t even a term. So I went from that business unit, and then the business president invited me and said, hey, listen, can you come help us at our biggest business unit, which was Mannheim, and bring us a team? Because I built a really good technical team and, you know, kind of best practice how you do product and engineering and went into this really large corporation to.
Speaker 3 00:21:10 And I didn’t know to drive transformation, which I had some pretty fun listening. I don’t know if have you ever tried to do transformation at really old established companies?
Speaker 2 00:21:18 Well, yeah, the digital transformation was a term. I used to be a consultant in McKinsey, and it was a huge, huge business practice for for all the consulting firms. And, you know, and actually we have some experience together. I was in Atlanta as well, and I worked for Primedia and we had big media assets, you know, including one that competed with AutoTrader. We had the auto guide, and we started with the the newspaper like magazines at the beginning, at the head of the grocery store. Right. And we had to transfer all of that into digital marketplaces. And so that was, that was, that was bringing the internet that you started with webcam, that was bringing it into everyday businesses to actually it ties nicely back with your vision. People are going to be on the internet, right? Well, they didn’t start there.
Speaker 2 00:21:56 So someone has to move them, right?
Speaker 3 00:21:57 Yeah. And so when I went into Cox, like one of my other visions is the, the, the in the, you know, I’ll call it the old days. People wrote software and there’s a big disconnect between the customer experience, which might go to sales or might go to product, and then it would get filtered, and then it would go to engineering, and then people would build features and functionality that may or may not serve customers. And if you go back to and I’ve worked with many companies, if you go and take a company and do an audit, if they don’t have a lot of discipline on their product approach, there’s many things where they’ve spent, you know, tremendous amounts of efforts. It’s behind a feature flag. It’s being used for one customer and all this kind of noise. And so I was a big believer is modern software is all about connecting. And again, efficiency, you know, the customer experience to the developer.
Speaker 3 00:22:43 So I started doing lots of transformation at that point to going back to at that point when he’s had VBox and VMware, but it would take a software development team maybe 3 or 4 weeks to get compute. That’s really slow. So I said, hey, we got to go to the cloud. And I actually brought Jassy in there and got all the global CIOs all in the room. And we talked about what modern software looked like. and so I kicked off a big migration, and I started bringing in tools, like I mentioned, New Relic, who I like to work.
Speaker 2 00:23:10 Right.
Speaker 3 00:23:10 New relic allowed software teams and business and product managers to do is to build dashboards of business metrics. So when they built a piece of software instead of successes shipped, they could say, hey, we’re trying to drive this utilization, we’re trying to drive this sales. And they could set that up, and they can literally see in real time after they release the piece of software, the business metrics, as well as the technical, the quality of service.
Speaker 3 00:23:35 And that was just a huge game changer throughout the organization. So I went from that in the biggest business unit to then kind of having people in all business units reporting to me in a federated way. And then I kind of like many big companies. I got to the point where I’m in this really amazing, fancy, corny office, but I still like to drive, change and make things happen. And a lot of it was more kind of, you know, call it politics and the other parts of organizations. And I’m like, I like to get stuff done. And so I knew that I had to look at the next thing. And that’s what brought me to New Relic.
Speaker 2 00:24:04 Got it. Well, let’s let’s shift to AI. Right? Because you you went through one business transformation, which was, you know, bringing people onto the internet. And today we’re right in the middle of of the next one, perhaps even more exciting, which is bringing people on to AI. So, you know, as we talked before, before the pod, you were sharing how you’re helping a lot of companies bring AI into their business.
Speaker 2 00:24:24 And I’m really eager to hear, particularly around product management, which is, you know, you have a great expertise in you know, I’m going to ask you about AI across the stack, but let’s start with product management. How are you seeing AI being really used there.
Speaker 3 00:24:36 And so first of all, let’s say how excited. And you know, depending on where you’re at and people could be scared about AI, I think of.
Speaker 2 00:24:42 Course.
Speaker 3 00:24:43 It’d be bigger than digital transformation by far. It’s going to be bigger than the internet. It’s going to transform every single business in the way that we live our lives. And if you look at it, whether it be ChatGPT or Claude, the adoption rate that you’ve seen with AI is faster than any technology transformation we’ve had.
Speaker 2 00:25:02 Well, because it’s a, it’s a it’s a consumer, you know, it’s language, right? It’s speaking our language. So it’s open to everybody in the world who has an internet connection. Right.
Speaker 3 00:25:12 Right. And a lot of people that aren’t in this, they think I just happened, you know, three years ago.
Speaker 3 00:25:17 You know, I’ve been doing AI for seven years. So like a new relic. You know, one of the things it monitors, like, if you go back to if you go to Disney, if you wonder why your Disney app works really well, that’s because it’s monitored by New Relic. And, you know, sometimes maybe some weird thing would happen and cause an error for you and then more people would have it and then it might be a total crash. One of the things we launched is a thing called New Relic AI, that took all of that data and looked for the anomaly. So that’s like early.
Speaker 2 00:25:41 Anomaly detection was one of the early, you know, for security, for customer service. Right. You’re you’re just monitoring and say, hey, there’s a there’s a spike here. Look at it could be a problem, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:25:51 We’re looking for some pattern and we’re looking for to see what’s connected, which AI is great at. And if you think about it, essentially that’s the underlying hood for those people are curious of how ChatGPT or cloud works.
Speaker 3 00:26:03 It’s really just a series of kind of, you know, kind of trying to mimic the brain, but it has just a tremendous data set in it.
Speaker 2 00:26:09 Yeah. It starts with data sets, you know, then it went to patterns when we were doing this with software. And now we train the AI to to look for those patterns. Right. Yeah. And and and they speak our language. So we think it’s magic right.
Speaker 3 00:26:20 Yeah. And that’s why like even hallucinations, if you think about it, that’s just where essentially guessed wrong, you know, and made something up. Right.
Speaker 2 00:26:27 Exactly right. It’s wild. So so you know, if I’m a if I’m running a startup today, you know, where do you see AI? What what what are the top three departments where AI is having an impact that you’re seeing today?
Speaker 3 00:26:39 And I’ll hit it. I’ll hit the easy ones and we’ll hit on product management. I think that one’s I think a little bit newer. So first of all, if you have any type of thing, AI for development is a no brainer.
Speaker 3 00:26:49 And I’ve seen it.
Speaker 2 00:26:50 I’ve seen it. Start with a copilot.
Speaker 3 00:26:51 You could use copilot. There’s a number of different tools out there.
Speaker 2 00:26:54 Copilot like tool like the, you know, the AI assistant for the coder. Right? That’s why things have gotten less expensive and faster, right?
Speaker 3 00:27:02 Yes. And going back to people process and technology, if you just give the if you give the developers a tool, you won’t see the same usage. You have to actually talk about a vision of how we’re transforming to an AI empowered company. And that it’s an expectation that that’s how you solve problems. Because I’ve seen companies, I’ve seen.
Speaker 2 00:27:21 You have to train them because it’s change management.
Speaker 3 00:27:23 That’s change management. And people don’t. A lot of times people are forgetting that this is change management because a lot of developers are like, oh, I’m just going to figure that out. And then they feel uncomfortable when suddenly this thing that was really hard to figure out is really easy. And so I think when you implement across the company, I think that’s important.
Speaker 3 00:27:40 So just I’ll mention at the first level, I do think if you’re a startup and if you’re a startup, it’s easy because you get to say, I’m going to be AI from day one, a native company.
Speaker 2 00:27:50 Then you got a bunch of people who entire career is being threatened or at least uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 00:27:54 You got to put a cross-functional group and start to analyze where it can work in your business. So engineering is a no brainer.
Speaker 2 00:28:01 Everybody should be in engineering. You’ve got the copilot or the code assistant type of things. What else are you seeing in engineering? Is that the main thing or is there other other uses of AI as well?
Speaker 3 00:28:10 I think building code, you’re starting to see QA.
Speaker 2 00:28:12 QA quality because because they can see the anomalies. Right. Just like we just talked normally.
Speaker 3 00:28:16 Even the testing I’ve seen new technology where a lot of times like a product manager write a test case in words where.
Speaker 2 00:28:23 I can be done by the AI.
Speaker 3 00:28:25 And build a full automated test.
Speaker 2 00:28:26 So, yeah, you don’t have to write the test cases.
Speaker 2 00:28:28 They know how to do it.
Speaker 3 00:28:29 It does it automatically for you. So engineering search building software QA operations has already been there. As I mentioned, with things like New Relic, I think that’s that’s huge. So that’s that’s an interesting part. People are going there. Obviously, I think the next obvious one is customer service, because a lot of times you think about that function is I’ve got a blob of data.
Speaker 2 00:28:48 You have data, it’s repetitive. It’s it’s consistently applied. Right.
Speaker 3 00:28:53 Absolutely. And so that’s that’s obviously a huge trend. And that, you know, you have to take a little bit thinking about your business. We see on smaller businesses, you know like smaller startups, ones that lean into AI. You know, you have outside counsel. But a lot of times I’ve seen companies where they raised, you know, $3 million and they’ve got a $300,000 legal bill. I’m seeing companies, you know, still use lawyers, but many like, for example, they have a standard SaaS agreement.
Speaker 3 00:29:19 Maybe they don’t have to send that off to the law firm every single time they can.
Speaker 2 00:29:22 Okay. So now we’re moving into operations in Ghana. So you’re seeing it in legal finance accounting. Right. All these tools are starting to automate sales. The the person plus spreadsheet correct sales.
Speaker 3 00:29:33 Again going back to you think about pulling that data. And this is where I’ll jump into the product. Where I’m also starting to see is companies, you know, you think about, especially if you’re selling to enterprise, you often have a pretty extensive documentation of win loss, why you won right, why you lost. And oftentimes that’s reviewed in some sort of format that, you know, whether they’re using maybe a challenger sale or whatever it may be. But a lot of times that’s where it lives. And so what I’m seeing people start to ingest that data, that customer success data, and then customer requests, like putting AI in the ability for customers to request that you see tools like product board and you see also people integrating it.
Speaker 3 00:30:08 But what are our customers telling us that they want? So if you think about it now, you’ve got a data set of why you’re winning deals while you’re losing deals, right? Right. You’re servicing customers and then the pain points that your customers are seeing as they experience. So what I’m starting to see in that area is a lot of people are taking all that data, putting it together, and when they start to build their their roadmap, it’s really driven by that data versus sometimes and again, product managers, some of them are visionary. You have to pick where you’re going to do this. You still want to have vision because as we know AI is terrible about new creative thoughts, right? It’s all derivative. But for many of the things you do, just capturing that data builds you a much, much better roadmap, you know? And, you know, sometimes you maybe you don’t need you, you maybe you can reprioritize some of the team members work. You see people having a smaller team to start with.
Speaker 3 00:30:56 Whereas you might have had a ten person product management team, maybe you’ve got four. But it’s much more informed because it’s really tied into what’s going on in sales, what’s going in customer experience, and again, what your customers are directly telling you that you need to do.
Speaker 2 00:31:10 Great. So we talked about it in engineering. We talked about it in customer customer support and customer service. We talked about it in sales and marketing and even in a so it’s it’s applicable now across all the functional stacks. But it can still be overwhelming right. If you’re a CEO who’s operating at 150% capacity and you’re you’re focusing on your mission, what are some practical steps on starting to bring AI into the business and transform?
Speaker 3 00:31:34 Yeah, well, I’ll talk about a private equity company that I’m working on doing exactly that. So the patterns, it’s really it’s transformation. Same thing. There’s the same as you did digital transformation a lot of the same patterns is, you know, first you got to be clear of what you’re trying to do.
Speaker 3 00:31:48 We’re going to make a decision. We’re not half guessing, you know, whether we’re going to the cloud or we’re digital business or we’re going to I a fire business. So this is something we’re going to do at the leadership level. I think that’s in step one.
Speaker 2 00:32:00 Commitment decision and a commitment.
Speaker 3 00:32:02 Decision and commitment at the top.
Speaker 2 00:32:03 Because otherwise how do you measure like, okay, we commit to what we’re going to use AI, but is there a metric we’re going to say x percent of, you know, what is the metric that you have to put on that dashboard? What might it look like?
Speaker 3 00:32:13 I totally agree. Well, again, I’m going to give you the I’ll call it the the inexpensive approach because there’s other ways you can obviously have third party consultants and do advisory. But what I’ve seen is a very ad hoc way is once you’ve kind of got that alignment, then you have a cross-functional group of team members, and you actually tasked them to see how they can use AI and come back with ideas of how they can quickly implement without, you know, a multiyear expense, because, again, it starts Start somewhere and then increment.
Speaker 3 00:32:39 You know, versus like, hey, the first thing we’re going to do is $120 million. Build a custom model. You know, that’s not the right path, right? But start to do that. And what I’ve seen is when you do those kind of internal contests, you’ll start to see each part of the organization, think about how this technology can help them. And then from there, then you can start to build a roadmap of here’s the areas that we’re going to do, here’s how we’re going to measure success so that we know that we’ve done it. So like I’ll give you an example of engineering, which is one of the ones that they started earlier, is they had a good idea of number of days coding and velocity that they had on feature delivery. And so how much effort went against that so they could measure what that was. They could measure the point velocity that they had in a sprint. So how fast are we going? And then when they did that, they they literally saw that they basically got a free developer for every three developers on a team.
Speaker 2 00:33:30 And that’s a fantastic, tangible metric that you could share. Cross-departmental. Right. And create that competitive dynamic.
Speaker 3 00:33:36 Yes. And as you, as we as we all know, is if you have that cross-functional group and someone does something and they show the results, then as humans, we look at that and he’s like.
Speaker 2 00:33:45 Oh man, I better get I better figure out how to save, save an FTE on my side.
Speaker 3 00:33:48 Yes. How can I drive some of that, that same thing. And again, it makes them they might think about things differently. I’ll go back to one. smaller P company, $20 million. They literally save $400,000 a year in legal fees by having their security and compliance guy who’s already used to reviewing contracts, just work with their existing contracts and literally just clawed and ChatGPT.
Speaker 2 00:34:09 Right. Get get the basics organized and then go to the lawyers for the really unique challenge.
Speaker 3 00:34:15 Or you need a P, right. Because, you know, a lot of times SAS agreements are pretty standardized.
Speaker 3 00:34:19 There’s some you know, red, red labels typically come for your large enterprise customers, but you can really resolve 90% of that with those tools.
Speaker 2 00:34:27 That’s awesome. So taking a centralized approach, getting, you know, making a priority with with goals, having your all the teams somewhat compete and share successes are all all great ways to do that. If I’m a CEO trying to bring AI into my business or any, any, websites or books that you’d recommend to read.
Speaker 3 00:34:45 Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know if I’ve seen many, books to to read, but what I would say is read books on transformation because this is a people process transformation, although it’s it’s new technology.
Speaker 2 00:34:58 Yeah, it’s more probably about people process than the actual technology, the technology you just speak to. It’s pretty easy. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:35:03 To me, you can almost take like a cloud transformation or digital transformation playbook, and run it with AI. It really is. You know, fundamentally, the only part you have to keep in mind is that AI is going to move, you know, especially if you’ve got a larger business, you know, smaller startup, maybe not so much, but larger.
Speaker 3 00:35:22 It’s going to move a lot of cheese.
Speaker 2 00:35:24 Yeah. That’s awesome. Hey, tell us about what you’re doing now. I saw that you got a new company called Product Genius.
Speaker 3 00:35:28 Yeah. Great. So thanks for asking. So I said, I’ve been doing AI for seven years, and I was like, you know, everybody’s doing this in medium enterprise. prize. What if we could take this technology and let small business use it? And so we’ve built technology that can go into stores and can basically interact with customers. So customers have questions they want to share feedback.
Speaker 2 00:35:47 Stores like retail stores.
Speaker 3 00:35:48 Retail stores, retail stores.
Speaker 2 00:35:50 What’s the interface?
Speaker 3 00:35:53 Different interfaces. So anywhere if it’s a website to embedding to a global QR code where they can scan a QR code and instantly start engaging and knows all of the information so it scans the website so it can answer any question about that particular business and then allows people to interact with it. And then what’s interesting that what we found is like, say, in a restaurant is it takes all that data and of course, you know, answers to customers, takes that feedback.
Speaker 3 00:36:18 But this is where it becomes value.
Speaker 2 00:36:19 Give me an example like give me an example. In the restaurant I walk into a restaurant and who am I interacting with?
Speaker 3 00:36:25 You know, tell us how we can improve. Okay, maybe.
Speaker 2 00:36:27 A little survey I gave you, you know, give the thumbs up. And, you know, I serve the bread faster.
Speaker 3 00:36:34 I think the thumbs up and stuff has been there to me. Like we’re all bored with doing that questionnaire. No, this is you scan it and it’s like, hi, I’m Julie, you know, blah blah, blah. It has a whole personality. Whatever the company, it said it might have a promotion that if they interact, they they get entered into sweepstakes or some type of thing, but they can literally just have a conversation.
Speaker 2 00:36:52 So it starts a conversation versus just throwing you into a survey.
Speaker 3 00:36:55 Yeah. Survey or whatever. You can talk about whatever you want to talk about. And what it does is it has intelligence.
Speaker 3 00:37:01 So for example like I’ll give you some examples in restaurants. Hey, it was really beautiful. I really enjoyed it. Some the business can say if it looks like they really enjoyed that, that’s a potential upsell or this. Then tell them this and then ask them this and text my booking person like maybe it’s a wedding venue is another place where we have it, so it allows you to. If you think about the conversations that were already happening between your human employees and your customers, or conversations that were happening in your customer’s mind, but there was no way for them to actually.
Speaker 2 00:37:31 Yeah, who are they going to tell?
Speaker 3 00:37:32 We’re capturing that. And what’s really cool about this is we’re seeing like a restaurant, and the system gives you a report every week that says, here’s the trend, here’s the pattern, here’s what you could do. It literally is saying things like, it looks like you have a staffing issue on Fridays from 12 to 2. You might want to consider increasing staffing. It looks like the staff is not cleaning the the the bathroom on the Friday shift at this time.
Speaker 2 00:37:54 So it’s it’s having conversations with customers and pulling those insights out in a conversational tone versus a survey.
Speaker 3 00:38:02 Yes, it’s it’s capturing a conversational tone which gives you more data. And then looking at that and again, what I does really good is finding out the patterns. And then with generative AI, with those models, not only the pattern but what you can actually do to resolve it.
Speaker 2 00:38:16 Exactly. Well, that makes a ton of sense. I will, I will think of you when I when I get a chat bot or something that is asking me these questions at a restaurant. I look forward to that.
Speaker 3 00:38:25 Yeah. Well, I say, if you see a chatbot, don’t look to me. Because to me, chatbots where it’s like, here’s you got four choices. None of the choices I want.
Speaker 2 00:38:32 No, no, that’s right. That’s that’s the old. That’s that’s the old.
Speaker 3 00:38:34 What is the conversation?
Speaker 2 00:38:35 Decision tree.
Speaker 3 00:38:36 Model. I’m looking to to to book my wedding. How much does it cost to do this? And, you know, do you have availability in May 6th? And then it instantly gives you all of the answers.
Speaker 3 00:38:47 That’s the kind of things we’re talking about.
Speaker 2 00:38:48 Oh, yeah. That’s fantastic. Well, Ken, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for sharing. You know, both your your journey as an entrepreneur and some of these great tips on AI. And I know that it’s top of mind with a lot of our listeners. And we appreciate you sharing it with us this morning.
Speaker 3 00:39:01 Thanks, Julian. Have a great day.
Speaker 2 00:39:03 All right. Great.
Speaker 1 00:39:07 Thank you for listening to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please follow us and subscribe on your favorite podcast player and we’d be grateful if you recommend it to a friend. If you’d like more resources on how to become a better leader in business, we invite you to visit us at growth. Com. We’ll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.