Serval paired embedded services with an enterprise-first plan

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 6:27

   enterprise, to ever adopt these kinds of technologies. And this also, I guess, feeds into the traditional diffusion of this technology, which has been consulting firms, the Accentures and Deloitte's and the like of the world, kind of owning a piece of this, doing the implementation for people. You're kind of taking that and putting it in the hands directly of the IT department. Are you also exploring this more as for sort of forward deployed motion or how do you actually get this really built out in the enterprise or used effectively?

2. 6:51

   Yeah, absolutely. Diffusion is obviously the gap here. The technology can do so much and enterprises have barely scratched the surface of what's possible. And a lot of that is just understanding the people, the process, what workflows actually exist, how you want them to exist in the future. And we think that you still need people for that. So we deploy both a deployment strategist, we call them, and a deployed software engineer that go on site with customers, figure out how do we implement this?

3. 7:16

   How do we solve all your problems as a business and then walk you through the implementation? What we found, though, is that a lot of times after we've got this implemented and deployed, customers then have a long tail of more stuff they want. And as we've discovered with... Software engineering, there's actually unlimited demand for work, and we've started to build out a team. We call it ProServal, or automation engineering is the field, and we bring in these automation engineers to kind of do ongoing, continued support and services because there's so much that they want to automate, and they need the help to be able to figure out what can be automated, what do the processes look like, how do we navigate all of our systems, and then put it into production with a product like Serval. How old is the company today? Two and a half years.

4. 7:59

   And, you know, if you just look at ServiceNow as a business, I feel like Serval is one of the only companies that is like, we are direct attack, replacing enterprise systems of record, including for large enterprises. At the beginning, did you think you were going to do that? Like, how do you eat the elephant just in terms of, you know, how big that product suite is? I like to say everything has gone exactly according to our very delusional plans.

5. 8:24

   So we set out from the beginning to be the largest enterprise software company of all time. We actually made a list of all the companies. We circled ServiceNow and we said we're going to beat them and we're going to build something much bigger. We said that on day one when it was two people in my co-founder Alex's living room and we just said we're going to do it. And so even though that was crazy, that was always the intention.

6. 8:42

   We didn't grow into that ambition. We set out from the beginning. I think that that actually- A lot of people would have started with like, you know, automation on top of their ticketing system, for example. Yes, exactly. So the way you typically go after these large enterprise startups, at least, they build like the layer or they go down market. And those are kind of the two common approaches. Let's build a small layer, play nice with the big incumbents, AI agent on top of Salesforce.

7. 9:04

   Which has never worked. Which like, you know, it really caps out. I mean, I guess maybe the only one that worked is Viva or something, right? Because they started off on Salesforce and then they migrated to become their own platform. So they're the only one that I can think of that backwards integrated. It's really tough. It like caps you unless you find some niche to kind of like expand into later on.

8. 9:19

   The other approach is we just go down market, you know, go down market, service the SMB in mid-market. And you see that with a lot of, you know, competitors to Workday, competitors to Salesforce. They just say, we're going to be that. but for the lower end. And we just looked at- This is rippling our HubSpot for the first 10 years. Exactly, and we looked at that and we said, why not just go after the big one?

9. 9:34

   It's much harder, but at least the prize is quite big if you win. And I think that was so important for us because you end up making so many different decisions if you're building for the large enterprise from day one. All the product decisions, how you build your team, how you think about growth, they're fundamentally different than if you go and you serve one market