Customer Obsession & Agentic AI Power Ravenna’s Reinvention of Internal Ops
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As people who know how to code as engineers, like the bias is just, let's go build because it's easy. Building is way easier than going and finding 20 customers who will give you a half hour of their time to validate your idea or whatnot. However, you're going to save yourself so much time disproving ideas, or you're going to validate your idea and have a lot more conviction about going off and doing it.

Welcome to Founded and Funded. I'm Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter, and today I have the pleasure of being here with Ravenna co-founders Taylor Halliday and Kevin Coleman.

Ravenna is building an AI-native enterprise service management platform that automates internal service workflows, starting with IT and expanding into other business functions like HR, finance, sales, and beyond. With deep Slack-native integration and an intuitive user experience, they're rethinking how companies handle internal support and operations. Taylor and Kevin are no strangers to the startup world. Taylor was previously director of AI engineering at Zapier,

where he saw firsthand how companies were hacking together automations and Slack to manage internal requests. Kevin, meanwhile, was head of go-to-market in Amazon Web Services for containers and serverless businesses and product lines. There, he witnessed how Amazon's internal systems help teams work, but also how they can be clunky and frustrating at times as well. Together, they saw an opportunity to build a next-generation platform that combines AI, automation, and consumer-grade experience to transform enterprise service management.

In this episode, we're going to dive into their founder journey, how they knew it was the right time to take the leap and launch another startup, the challenges of breaking into a market littered with legacy players, and what it really means to build a Gentic AI. So let's get into it. Kevin and Taylor, great to have you both here. Great to be here. Thank you, Tim. Fantastic. So

I mentioned in the intro, you've done a company together before, and this is a second one. We're super excited to have been able to invest in the company and the announcement that just came out here recently. But let's go back. Tell us about the moment you decided to start Ravenna. What problems did you see that you said, hey, we got to go solve this for customers? So I was at Amazon for four years. And I think the whole time I was there kind of looking around, trying to figure out what was going to be the next company that we go and do. It took a while to find it, but...

About halfway through my tenure there, I kind of realized one day that I was spending a lot of time in an internal piece of software Amazon has that serves as the help desk across a lot of different teams. It was the tool where I would go to request onboarding for new employees, to request new dashboards to get built from our BI team. My teams would use it for other teams to request work from us. And I just kind of realized I was spending so much time in this tool. It wasn't a

great product experience, but it was kind of the way to always describe it to folks is it was like the grease in the enterprise gears, if you will. It was the way that things got done internally. And so I kind of got

obsessed with like, what is this product category? It's so foundational to how Amazon as a business operates. And I just started doing a bunch of research in this space. I found out that it's called enterprise service management as the category service. Now as the leader, I finally understood like what service now as a business did and why they're such a valuable business, um, how large this market is. And I just started thinking like, what does

a next generation, amazing version of this product look like if like a very innovative startup built it that cared about design and user experience and cared about automation as well. I love that because ESM is a category. It's a big market. ServiceNow is a leader. But I also think like a lot of things, Amazon did it in an innovative kind of scrappier way. You actually used it for more things. This was the way you just

requested and got things done across different groups as opposed to this well we got to log it into this system of records so somebody has a record of it and it's like no this is actually the way it was getting done yeah absolutely and so I came up with this concept and and I

you know, when a concept gets lodged in your mind, you can't get rid of it. And so I went and ran to Taylor, who obviously is my co-founder previously and the guy I wanted to start the next company with. And I said, hey, I've got this awesome idea. We're going to build a next generation enterprise service management platform. Yeah, sure. I mean, I will just say like I'm first blush tickets and queues. I'm just kind of looking at this like, is this Jira? I don't really quite understand what's kind of going on here a little bit.

But like it came at a good time. So rewind the clock, chat GPT, hit the scene, Zapier, just like every other company, probably on the planet had a little mini freak out. Like, what do we do with this? What's this mean for us? Product strategy, what have you. At the time, I was lucky enough to pair up with some of the founders who basically we try to just do a listening tour, like head around to what I call like mid-market size companies, talk to C-suite directors, you know, executives, what have you, being like, cool, let's

Obviously, Zapier known for its automation game. We want to go ahead and try to figure out what would be a great solution here in the world of AI LLMs to actually bring a new level of value to you. Open question, where would you like to have us kind of poke and prod, right? We did this, I don't know if the count was like 20, 30 of these calls. And like,

it became pretty clear that like resoundingly just hear a couple themes one was that like i kept on circling on internal operations like over and over and over i had a problem kind of picking through that in my own head and you know i even actually had a blunt conversation with one of them ceos being like i've heard this so many times kind of what's the deal what's going on here right like why do i keep on hearing about internal operations very much just like you know i think it was kind of a couple answers one like hey look i i can really kind of wrap my head a lot better around like

internal efficiencies or lack thereof in this company and what we what we are hoping to do another thing too is i think there's this this like desire or kind of gap i guess of a desire kind of thing in terms of like i don't have a good amount of visibility it's like what folks are actually doing like i can't top down efficiency in my company and as much as i say you know hey look i want you to be more efficient do these different things i don't know super well what the marketer what the engineer is doing right they all kind of view like ai as an opportunity to help kind of maybe bottoms up

some of this efficiency without it being kind of a top-down thing. I think that was like a lot of the interest. And so when Kevin ran to me, I was like, hey, look, we have this, you know, idea. Sorry, you have this idea, you know, circling around this internal management tool. And there's an opportunity perhaps in this larger market that's like, you know, old, you know, 30-year-plus incumbents are all over the place. That's what got me interested. And that's kind of what sparked, I think, a lot of the collaboration in the early days. We...

think a lot about founder market fit when we're looking at new investments. And I remember our first meeting, Matt McElwain and I had together with you guys, and we both left like, oh my gosh, we have to find a way to fund this. And it was this unbelievable founder market fit that you had lived the tool and sort of the using it at Amazon. You literally witnessed it across all of these customers at Zapier who were using it to kind of get these automations in place, but it wasn't really a full product.

So awesome to see you both come together with those insights. I'm gonna kind of abstract away a bit, but we'll come back to Ravenna and the specifics about enterprise service management. But you guys have done a company before. - We have. - You've been through YC and you decided to do it again. So that's a testament to your working style, but were there things where you're like, okay, we've got the idea again. Are there other things like, hey, we're gonna do something different. We're gonna do it the same. How is it different for you guys sort of going at it a second time around?

Yeah, totally. So it's funny, Kevin and I, you mentioned like a company, it's it's I was kind of joke, like, it depends how you count a company. Kevin, I've been working together for quite a long time, have that be like, just honestly, in the early days, finding a coffee shop or bar at night working on the smallest app, then to, you know, in San Francisco, we ganged up together and try to start a CDP of sorts went through YC with that, and molded that into, you know, several different things. But regardless, we were kind of taking stock of that history, if you will, right?

Kind of like to your point, what went wrong, what went right. And I think like an interesting way of characterizing it, which I think, I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs like do this in the, like the early days, early innings is trying to like, what's the new, new, like, what's the thing that doesn't exist out there yet. Right. And I think that like, if you were to take a retrospective look on the stuff that we've put a lot of time and effort into, it kind of circles around like that. Right. Which is frankly speaking, some of the fun and exciting when you're with some buddies and like, Hey, this doesn't exist yet. What have we made this right.

We were thinking like, hey, look, what if we flipped it on its head this time? Instead of doing an approach, let's try to figure out basically a market that's super well defined and really try to focus in on opportunities to actually bring better experience, especially in the age of AI. It seemed like a perfect time to kind of target this one in particular. Yeah, Taylor hit the nail on the head there. Like we, for the life of us building software together, have always been trying to identify something that doesn't exist and shy away from competition. And this time we're taking it head on.

So we're super excited about that. Like big markets are exciting. We don't have to go find people who need like, you know, a small group of people who need what we want. We know there's a ton of people out there who need what we're building. That's really exciting to us. As part of like that, you know, analysis of like, Hey, look, what do we want to work on and kind of where we want to press? I remember actually talking to you, Kevin, kind of thinking about like taking a step back, like, what are we like, what kind of risks do we want to bring on? We kind of framed it like that. And come back to my earlier point, I would kind of characterize a lot of the early endeavors as pretty

pretty high market risk and we're trying to figure out like hey let's try to not optimize for that this time let's try to optimize for something else because i think we're pretty good at building a lot of products um i'm doing pretty fast too also getting together a lot of good folks to work with so you know for my you know call it a human capital risk like you didn't see that on the table picking a larger market trying to take the market risk off the table we tried to optimize more for what we thought was kind of go to market risk the other thing i say that we're

doing better on, I don't know if we're doing great at it, but we're doing better at it this time around, is really understanding who our customer is and being super clear about

what we're building for who. So ICP, ideal customer profile, if you will. Taylor mentioned the last company, the first product that we built was a customer data platform. We effectively at his startup, my startup, we had problems with our customer data. It was sprawling all over the place. Folks who are non-technical were always asking us to integrate various tools so they could get customer data where it needed to go. And so we would go around to potential customers and say, hey, you probably have problems with your customer data. Can we help you? And they're like, yes, of course we do. But the problem was

the problems were all over the place. There wasn't really like a product that we could identify that would cut across a bunch of companies. Part of that was we were early entrepreneurs and didn't really know what we were doing. But this time around, like before we even built any software, we spent months just talking to customers and understanding the space and understanding what pain they had before we started writing a line of code. Because we really wanted to be super clear about our ICP, what they needed, what their problem was, and then we back into the product from that.

So a hundred percent this time around, we're doing a lot better on that front than we were last time and we

we think it's definitely the right way to go. Well, this is definitely a super big market. And another thing that came through from the beginning as we have been engaging and working together is just customer driven, customer driven, just sort of the maniacal customer focus that is maybe the core attribute for, I think, successful startups. So that's been awesome. Let's talk a little bit more about, you know, what the product does and bring it more to life. And I'll, I'll,

lead you into that by talking about some of the investment themes that Madrona has that we thought Ravenna embodies. And a big part of that is AI and part of the why now for Ravenna. So probably our biggest theme is around how AI can reimagine and disrupt different enterprise apps.

You're using what I would call or many in the industry would call an agentic approach where you can actually create various agents that don't just surface insights but can actually automate and finish tasks. And I think this world and this product area is really ripe for that. And you've done some interesting things there. And then new UIs. And so the user experience, you've embraced Slack as a place that work is getting done and made the product be extremely slacky.

Slack native and fully integrated in people's existing workflow, as well as just an ethos around clean, simplistic. I mean, Taylor, you and I talked about this the very first time we talked about the product, but maybe just give a better description. So, okay, great service management tickets, people kind of have something in mind, but say more about like the key features and then maybe tie that back to when you were out talking to these initial prospects and

What did you hear about what was missing and what you could deliver in your product to make this experience? So it's such a big leap forward. So going back to why we picked this, there's a well-known UX product pattern that you see basically in this market. We weren't very impressed by what we saw. Just kind of like flat out. Okay. In the age of call AI LLMs, the popular thing I would say, I would argue, would it be just come at this with an intelligence layer? We definitely consider that.

And we made conscious decision what we think is maybe kind of the longer where the longer term value is, but also perhaps like a tougher, tougher one, which is that we're not just building the intelligence layer for this market. We really have a lot of confidence conviction, if you will, that there's room for a new rethought platform. So what that means in actual practice, for those who aren't familiar with even the space, a help desk is probably the most like down to earth version of ways we're describing here. So tickets, queues,

It's kind of a very similar pattern to how you expect to be from a customer interface with customer service software. Same type of thing, except the difference, the primary difference is that this software is geared towards basically solving your colleagues' problems. And so the canonical example, the IT help desk, you ask for password reset, new equipment,

what have you that creates a case, it creates a ticket. And that's kind of the typical way of going about this. I just want to set the floor so that we're not just talking purely about the intelligence layer and the agents, which we are super excited about. I think we're a lot of fun stuff there, but also very much, you know, building and rethinking what the larger brick and mortar ticketing platform looks like. Yeah, 100%. So enterprise service management is the category that's

That's a very broad term. Most people don't know what enterprise service management is. The easiest way to think about it is it's an internal employee support platform, internal customer support platform, if you will. So you have functions across an organization. So whether it's RevOps, HROps, sometimes called PeopleOps, facilities, legal, et cetera, they all offer internal services. And what I mean by that is they offer services that other colleagues can leverage. So in legal, a service might be, hey, can you review this contract?

In facilities, it might be, hey, my desk is broken. Can somebody come and fix it? And so this pattern exists across companies. And what people need is a tool that allows them to intake these requests, sign those requests, resolve the requests, and then get reporting and analytics. Increasingly with AI and automation, classic workflow automation, they want to automate a lot of this work as well. So what we're building is a platform that allows any company or excuse me, any team within a company to offer a best in breed service, best in breed help desk,

and provide amazing service to their colleagues and then also automate a lot of their work with our AI. That's pretty straightforward way I think of describing it. So you recently were part of a launch that Slack did for partner companies. Pretty cool. You're Slack native, but yet new company. Kind of an interesting series of events that maybe led to that. What's the background on that and what's it been like trying to partner closely with Slack? So I'll just say up front that

when you start a company, weird, cool, fun stuff just happens. It's kind of like Murphy's Law, right? Anything that can happen will happen. It feels like that is embodied in a startup to a certain extent. So yeah, we were a launch partner for the launch of the AI and assistance app category in the Slack marketplace. So you can now go find Revent in the Slack marketplace, which is super cool.

The way it happened is very fun. Matt McElwain, who is obviously your partner here at Madrona, when we were going through our recent fundraise, he said, hey, there's a local entrepreneur you should go and talk to. Made the introduction. This local entrepreneur went on a walk with Taylor, heard what we were talking about or what we were building. And he said, hey, a certain high level executive at a large CRM company in the Bay Area who happens to be Slack's parent company.

should learn about this. And so he ended up, you know, we were like, of course, anybody who's an executive of these companies should learn about us. Ended up forwarding along our deck. That got forwarded over to the executive team at Slack and they got in touch with us and said, hey, what you guys are doing is super interesting. We should talk.

So we had a conversation. We got a Slack channel open with a couple of those folks, as you do when you're working with folks at Slack. And then we noticed that this new app category is coming out. And so because we had that introduction there, we reached out and said, hey, we think Ravenna fits really nicely into this new app category. What's going on here? How can we get involved? And it was fortunately really good timing. We got connected with the partnership folks over there and they said, we're launching this category in two months. If you guys can get your stuff ready, we're happy to feature you as a launch partner.

Funny how these things work out. You all have been great about using advisors, but also just using your own networks to get feedback, get access, and you just never know where it's going to go. You never know. So just another example of sort of putting yourself out there, getting the feedback, and sometimes it takes you right through to the CEO's desk. 100%. Kevin mentioned, it's actually kind of one of the funner parts, to be frank with you about it. I mean, if you have

humility to just kind of understand that like look like there's so much out there to learn right especially going to a category that you're trying to you know make some hay and kind of do a different thing and it's valuable to get a lot of perspectives there and the more of that that you do there's a tangible stuff that like you know tactically you might kind of get some like p's and q's kind of learning along the way but there's also just some of the funner random doors to get open such as that one yes 100%

One thing I think is cool too, and part of it is using Slack, part of it is how you can pull data in from other places, is that questions get asked and people didn't realize this question's been answered already.

And so how do you create sort of like this instant knowledge base from what's already in Slack all over the place, or maybe from an existing knowledge base that is there, but people don't go look at it. It's easier to fire off a Slack like, Hey Taylor, can you just tell me the answer to X? And by doing that, you can create an automation that the person, you know, the task gets finished and you didn't have to do anything, right? That is, that's a big unlock here. So you've mentioned Slack a couple of times and we should revisit that really quickly. So

Slack is the interface for the end customer of the platform. And that's super critical and was actually a learning during our listening tour at the beginning of last year. The traditional help desk, there's basically a customer portal where you go, you fill out some form, and then like your request goes into the ether. And you don't know what happens to it until somebody like pings you back a couple days later, like, hey, we resolved your issue.

What like basically every customer across the board told us is employee support happens in Slack now. So if you guys are going to build this platform, everything needs to be Slack native. That's where our employees work. We don't want to take them out of there. So that's like super key to us. If you go to our website, like it's very clear that we're deeply integrated with Slack. So we started building in Slack. And then to your point about knowledge, we started talking to customers and said, hey,

you get a lot of repeat questions. A lot of those questions pertain to probably documents or knowledge bases that you've written. If you give us access to those, we can ingest them and use AI to basically automate answers to those questions. So you don't have to answer them over and over again, just save you time. Some people are like, that's amazing. Let's definitely do that. Other people basically said, yeah, it's not going to work for us. And so we were like, okay, why not? They're like, we don't have good knowledge. We don't have time to maintain it. It gets out of date really quickly. And frankly, like it just doesn't make the prior priority list. And so

We asked the next question, which is, okay, if you hire somebody, how do they get up to speed? Like, how do they learn how to answer these questions if you're answering them in Slack? And they were like, we literally point them to Slack channels and say, go read up on how we answer these questions. And that's how you should answer going forward. And so that was kind of this light bulb moment where there is like a treasure trove of corporate information and really knowledge that exists in Slack.

or any team chat application, so teams as well, that is just sitting there. And companies don't derive a ton of value from that. And so a lot of what we're trying to build is not only give

you know, operators of these help desk tools to turn Slack conversations into knowledge-based articles, but really build a system that can learn autonomously over time. So you should assume that when you're using Ravenna, your answers are going to get better over time. The system's going to get better at resolving your internal employees queries over time, because we're listening to that data and evolving the way that we respond and or take action based on how your employees are answering to their colleagues' questions.

You know, one of the things that is super exciting here to me is that I just see this as how work gets done, you know, inside businesses and it's really broadly applicable. On the other hand, a truism about successful startups is they stay focused.

And there is this IT scenario initially where, you know, IT is used to using tickets. People are used to asking for IT for things. Those things tend to be, you know, maybe more automatable, higher. I don't know. But how do you balance that staying focused on like, let's just go nail something.

IT service management, ITSM, versus we have this broader vision around better automation for how enterprises get work done. How do you get that balance right? And what are you learning from customers and what they, where are they drawn to initially as you start talking to them and start working together through your existing, an initial set of users and customers? I'm going to tie this back actually to some of the questions you asked around kind of like, you know, what do you say, get excited about working on this. Okay. Yeah.

We're around the clocks, Kevin runs over, I got this great idea. The market's called ITSM. I'm like, what? I've never heard of this thing. Like, no, it's a huge market. Like, really? Like, I've never heard of this acronym before. ITSM is the name of the larger market. And that's kind of, it's been traditionally known as, okay, half the acronym's IT.

So today, if you say, look, like who's the ICP? Who do you want us to, who do you want us to introduce you to at a company? We're going to say, look, it's the IT manager. And it's because they know what it is. Again, longstanding industry. They know what to call it. They know that funny acronym. They know the pain points very, very well. And they understand how to kind of, you know, wait for the software. And so that is typically, I'd say like the beachhead, if you will. Yeah. For us approaching. That's the initial wedge. That's a great place to enter. Correct. Where this gets more interesting, in my opinion, though, I remember kind of noodling on this thing. I was looking at,

at Zapier's help desk channel. And I was kind of looking through it and being like, this is not the most inspiring, you know, password reset, what have you kind of stuff. Is this really this massive market that Kevin's super excited about? No shade, as anyone from Zapier's listening. Channel's great, by the way. But I would say it's kind of what lightbulbed me is that kind of looking around the rest of the company,

it was like the same interaction pattern, the same user pattern like that you see and like what was traditionally known as like the help desk channel. That same pattern is present in HR ops. It's the same thing that you see in marketing ops, the same thing you see in engineering ops. It was interesting though, because like I was really being very coy interviewing a lot of folks back then. IT knows what they call it, they know what the class of software is, right? But the folks who were in charge of marketing ops, engineering ops, like it's, I couldn't find many who knew the acronym ITSM, so I stopped doing that pretty early, but they know the pain.

And it's kind of those things I kind of started to realize and come around circling around to being like, look, if you are in call an ops position, marketing, engineering, kind of pick your flavor and or the department, if your job is to provide great service to your colleagues, like you are operating help desk, whether or not you know it, okay, that's just kind of a fact of matter. So again, it's your question about like, who do you start with? We start with it.

It's the most well-known commodity in that space. The excitement for me is like, maybe it's broader than IT. Maybe there's more stuff than that. Other folks kind of see basically a better class of software being introduced by IT. And it's kind of this interesting thing that's infectious being like, wait, what is that? Where'd that come from? And so therefore, we are trying to maintain like in terms of, you know, I would say precedence, like,

IT is the number one persona and that's the one where we're gonna kind of, you know, I'd say charge ahead on the absolute most in terms like the actual bespoke workflows that they have to do and the ones that we have to help automate better. Nonetheless though, HR ops seems to be the one that we've just seen an organic pull with. It's kind of second in position and after that is revenue ops. I'll give you a very concrete example. This morning, I had a demo call with a

a large email marketing tool in Europe. And they got out these four IT guys to get on the call. They're like, hey, we're looking for a new tool. Like, you know, we need a new help desk tool. We need AI, et cetera. And we're like halfway through, they're going through all the requirements. Like, oh, by the way, it's not just us. It's facilities, it's HR, and it's, I think they said product is the other team. And that happens all the time. Like we are always talking to IT people, but it always comes up on our calls. Like it's not just for us. Other people who offer internal services need this as well.

So like, it's really exciting for us because like IT is the entry point, but then you've got this really nice glide path into the rest of the organization. And again, like kind of, I don't know if it's a secret or whatnot, but it's one of the, one of our core learnings you're going through this journey is like,

There's a lot of teams across these companies who need this type of tool. So that's exciting for us. Yeah, it's an interesting form of land and expand because IT has budget, they get it, they need it, but everybody is asking them for something. So you can get sort of a viral spread and there's no different in the product functionality to start using it for sales ops as you're using it for IT ops. Exactly. So we referenced ServiceNow a couple of times. So, you know, one of the most valuable application software companies in the world, $175 billion market cap.

VCs like to use shorthand to describe companies investments. You know, one of our best investments ever, Rover, it was Airbnb for dogs.

I've shorthanded Ravenna as an AI native ServiceNow for mid-market and growing companies. ServiceNow is obviously upper enterprise. You like that moniker? Should I keep using that or do I need to disabuse myself of that type of VC speak? - That's a VC speak. No, I think it's a good one. It ties back for me at least to the distinction I made earlier around the platform versus the intelligence layer. Kind of like, what are you guys doing? I always like to joke, for better or for worse, we're doing both.

I say for better, for worse, again, because it's a lot of software, but that's where the conviction is. And so ServiceNow is what we view as someone who's taken a very similar bet a long time ago in terms of like, look, we want to actually own the data layer. We want to actually be the thing that's, you know, that has, it's close to basically all the customer data and the employee data at a company. We view that as a more durable, longer term play rather than just the intelligence layer. And so I like the moniker. Definitely like the moniker. All right. I'll stick with it.

So it's been fun in this conversation as you ping pong back and forth, Taylor talking about go-to-market things, Kevin talking about product things.

Taylor, your background is traditional engineering leadership. Kevin, you're most recently been doing go to market at Amazon, but an engineer by background. How do you divide it up? How do you divide up the responsibilities inside the company? And that's always an interesting thing that sometimes founders struggle with is we, you know, we're full stack. You guys are both full stack, but we have to have some roles and responsibilities here. Yeah, I would say it's for Kevin and I.

given how long we worked together for, I think it's a little probably more blurry than most, but I think that's also one of the benefits of working with him. I know him so well is that I can trust him for a wide range of things. That all said, we do try to basically divide up the product and how we kind of go about this. And so I try to focus more on the AI automation side of the fence. Kevin is very much more on the broader platform side of the fence. And so that's roughly speaking from a product angle. From a go-to-market angle, you know, I'd say it's messy at this point for a young startup. It's kind of like hit the network, hit all your networks. There's

With this point, you know, we're... Both of you are on customer prospect calls all the time. I mean, if you... It doesn't... Rules are nothing better. Rules and responsibilities only matter so much in terms like if you have people that you think that might want to buy this kind of stuff, we got to do that, right? And so I think that like...

It's good to have some delineation between roles, you know, but I think at the earliest stages, it's just messy. And embracing that, I think, is part of the deal. Another way you run the business that was actually super nice for us in the process of leading up to investing is you're like radically transparent. And so all of the prospect calls or customer calls, all those videos you record, they're

They were all on Slack. You just gave us access to all of them. It's like, here, go watch them and see what we're learning and help us along the way. That was super nice, but that must also permeate through your organization. And maybe it gets to the culture a bit. Maybe speak to the culture some and what you're trying to be intentional about in terms of building culture here in the relatively early days of Ravenna. I think this was, for me at least, a core learning from the first business.

We didn't do a good job of talking about what we were doing or telling people what we were doing. And part of it was like, I don't know, some, I didn't think what we, like the business that we had was like the most exciting thing in the world. And so a little bit like didn't want to broadcast it as much. I don't know, something like that.

like I would, you know, hang out with friends and whatnot and they wouldn't know what my business was back then. And I would be kind of frustrated internally to be like, how do you not know? You know, we don't have a lot of friends who started businesses. Like you should know. But the fact of the matter is they shouldn't know. I should have like been a lot more vocal about our business. And so this time around, I think there's two things. Like we want as many people to know about what we're doing as possible because we think it's pretty cool. Hopefully other people will think it's pretty cool. Hopefully customers will think it's pretty cool. But the other thing is we want as many people

sharp minds helping us and in the product, in the business as possible. And so we think the way to accomplish both of those goals is just being radically transparent. So it's radically transparent with our team, with our customers. So like when we talk about roadmap, when we talk about the stage of the business, what we have and what we don't, like it's all an open book. And we're just very transparent with them on where we're at and where we're going. And then with investors as well,

Like we shared a ton of stuff with you guys and it wasn't like an angle to get you guys excited about what we were doing. It was more, we really liked you guys. We thought you were really sharp. And if we share a lot of stuff and you guys see what's going on, hopefully you'll get excited about the business. But then also hopefully you'll,

I don't know, see something that we're doing and be able to give us feedback on how we can sell better, how we can build better, pattern match across different portfolio companies that you've seen and help us. So it's really like we want everybody to know what we're doing and we want as many smart people helping us and just being transparent helps us accomplish this. Super effective. And we should say in other investors that were even investors before us, COSLA, Founders Co-op, been really, I'd say best practice in making a great collaborative style where we're

We always are up to speed and can try to add value. It probably has impacted recruiting too. You got, you know, it's a hard recruiting market, especially for good technical talent and AI talent. Done an amazing job of building the initial engineering team, including great AI background.

you know, without giving away any hiring secrets, you know, talk a little bit about how you've been able to do that. It's never easy, but you've made it look relatively easy in these early days. What's it been like in this hiring market, especially when you're competing for AI talent? Yeah. I don't have any like deeply held secrets here kind of stuff. So if I did, I wouldn't give away anyways on a podcast. No, I think that like, well, hey, thank you. We're super excited about the team we have. And I think even equally as proud about the culture that we've been much more intentional, I'd say this time around building.

I'll be honest with you, though, a couple of things. We've just tried to hold a really high bar with the folks that we're interviewing with. I think that was more of a self-serving thing originally, but...

I like to think that comes through, frankly speaking, for a lot of the folks that we are speaking with. And I think that it's not just about, you know, the mission per se. It's also about like knowing that we basically have built quite a bit of software in our past lives, you know, and have a lot of perspective and a lot of basically conviction and not just like the market we've talked a lot about, but also how to go about building this, how we're thinking about taking a different approach. And so I think like that itself has helped basically attract a lot of folks that, you know, like frankly speaking, like we're honored to be working with at this point as well. Totally.

My playbook, I'm happy to share it because it's pretty simple. I reach out to a lot of people and I tell them that Coastal and Madrona put some money into a company to help go after ServiceNow's market and people get excited about it. Yeah, you know, it's just trying to find really good people and trying to get them to have a conversation with you and then explain the vision of what we're doing and why we think not only the opportunity is really big, but like we want to build the next great company

Northwest software company, if not West Coast software company. And we really want to be intentional about like building an amazing engineering culture, an amazing product culture, an amazing culture that really works backwards from customers. Amazon likes to say they're the most customer centric company. Hopefully we're going to be the most customer centric company over time. And we're very much

striving to do that right now but just yeah really build a great place where people want to come work what's an example of something that maybe you had an assumption coming into this company now you're later it turned out to be wrong and you had to kind of quickly work through that and uh you know not necessarily like an 180 degree you know change in direction but constantly sort of course correcting goes back to perhaps what i'd say about picking a large market being conscious about that but nothing in life is for free you get into that you quickly realize a couple different things if you pick a large existing market

Sure, people know what they're there. You can assign a market cap to it. It probably makes the investor conversation a lot more easy in terms of figuring out what the TAM is. But you start actually building here. You really quickly realize that a well-known market has a lot of well-known features, a lot of well-known capabilities, a lot of basically well-known just expectations from the buyer.

which in some levels good, it kind of clears things up. The trade off that what we found is that just kind of translates into a lot of software. So again, I would think that kind of the safer, better for worse fits well to some of our strengths. And also some of the recruiting that we've done, we've been moving extremely fast, because we have to, I think it's another just kind of quick tenant about Kevin, either way, we think about doing just building companies, the whole stealth thing is like orthogonal. So I'm not gonna go so far bash some of the folks who want to do that type of thing. But like,

I think one of the things of learnings from our journey is that there's nothing more like true, harsh and real than the market. OK, and every bit of time that you spend not interfacing with that market before you're building is just basically a gap that you are accumulating and accumulating, in my opinion. So, yeah, one thing we talk about at Ravenna is making contact with reality as fast as possible.

I 100% agree. I think the value from asking for feedback, shipping and getting the feedback from actual shipping so outweighs any risk of, gosh, somebody else took my idea or we should have stayed in stealth longer. It's just not even close. You guys have lived that.

We keep talking about this big market. We alluded to this, you know, that a way to think about Ravenna is AI native ServiceNow for mid-market. So ServiceNow just did a big acquisition about this company called Moveworks. You know, biggest acquisition in the history of ServiceNow. It's kind of an AI ITSM company.

How do you think about that move? Does that, is that relevant for Ravenna? How do you, how has move worked similar or different to the product you're building and the market you're going after? In terms of, is it relevant? Sure, it's relevant in the sense that it's like definitely in the market that we're playing in. So we got really excited when we saw it. Like there's clearly,

We're not like the only smart people in the world who know that there's a lot of opportunity in this space, but it's just exciting to see like the activity and obviously is a big acquisition. So it's cool to see. Moveworks is a previous generation AI intelligence layer on top of existing help desks. And so it got brought up a lot by investors when we were going through initial fundraising, which was like, are you guys trying to be Moveworks? Are you trying to be

ServiceNow, how do you guys think about it? Because there's AI, but there's also the platform. And our approach is distinct from them in the sense that MoveWorks sits on top of existing platforms like ServiceNow, whereas we're trying to build the foundational platform plus the intelligence layer on top. So at the end of the day, customers will get similar AI capabilities from Ravenna. You know, current

next-gen capabilities because we're LLM native. I think they were built on previous generation NLP technologies. Which has a huge impact on accuracy and actually does it work. Yeah, exactly. I'll say that. I mean, no shade or anything to the Moveworks folks. They've clearly built an awesome business and had an amazing outcome and congratulations to the team because that's fantastic. That's what every entrepreneur strives for. We just believe in the fullness of time, the majority of the value accrues to the platform if you can become the system of record.

And so we just, we, we honestly felt like this was the time now to take a shot at building a new system of record in this space. And so that's kind of like one of the fundamental differences between us now in terms of like near-term impacts on the market, like

I'm not sure what ServiceNow's plans are for Moveworks, but there is a large kind of call it mid-market enterprise segment of customers who need this AI capabilities. And so whether or not Moveworks continues to play there or ServiceNow kind of brings a more up market into like large enterprise, which is where they like to play,

there's just a lot of opportunity for us in this space. Yeah, that's a great point because I think the things we talked about, Slack, easy to get up and running, beautiful UI, but another thing is price point. Yeah. You get a lot of functionality at the enterprise level, but you're making this accessible and a price point that's accessible for faster growing companies and for them to grow with you. 100%. We've talked about how AI is an integral part of the product and you also build AI systems

systems at Zapier Taylor. One question we think about a lot from an investment standpoint is what's durable? You know, is there a moat from the AI itself? What's your take on that? And do you feel like the technology itself is a place that you can build competitive advantage

You're building an agent-based system here. Like, what does that mean to you? And is that part of what you think you'll provide customers with, with kind of durable competitive advantage over time? This goes back to actually some of the things that I think that, you know, got me excited about this originally. It might be first like useful instructives, like breakdown when we say AI and automation here. Like, what's that mean? Big generalization.

Big time, 50% of the stuff in terms of automation here falls into the category that we talked about earlier around like, hey, there's information somewhere. It's Slack. It's a KB. It's in these other interesting places. Can we answer that in a more automated way? That's one side of it. And the other side of it is actions. And so when I say that, for lack of a better example, instead of asking, hey, what's the procedure to reset my password?

it's more interesting to say, hey, can you receive unpassable rate actions? So on the first side, I think we covered decently well, right? One of the things that Kevin touched upon is that accreting knowledge. I think that's a very interesting thing here is that, you know, whether or not you want to call it us building a KB, we haven't kind of gone so far to

put that stake in the ground in terms of a product feature yet. But nonetheless, one of the things that gets me frankly really excited about the idea is like Ravenna growing with you, okay? That this knowledge is on all these disparate places and we have the ability to actually go through and really hone in on where people work and make Ravenna better. Awesome. So exciting. So much to go build. So much opportunity.

Last question, any advice for other aspiring founders out there thinking about, you know, going to get something started in this market right now with AI? The thing I, yes. So the thing I would encourage everybody to do if you're thinking about building a product is go talk to a lot of customers before doing it. It was definitely the biggest mistake we've made many times throughout our career is like, oh, this seems cool. Let's go and spend,

you know, three months, six months, because as people who know how to code as engineers, like the bias is just let's go build because it's easy. Building is way easier than going and finding 20 customers who will give you a half hour of their time to validate your idea or whatnot. However, you're going to save yourself so much time disproving ideas or you're going to validate your idea and have a lot more conviction about going off and doing it. So, yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice I can give to folks who want to start companies is go talk to 20, 30 companies or

or customers before you start writing a single line of code. You think you've done enough customer validation? Go do more. Double down. 100%. You can never have enough. I mean, even now, like every customer call we're on at our stage, I mean, we're not a super old company. We're eight months old, but we treat it as a discovery call. Like we spend most of the time

asking questions and trying to learn as much as possible about the pain that they're trying to solve for. Because that influences what we're going to build next week, next month, et cetera. And we spend a little bit of time talking about revenge as well. But like the learnings are still critical for us. And I think we'll always be. Bring us home, Taylor. I'm always reticent to give advice. It's because like I've kind of found that, you know, just doing...

called this game for a decent amount of time, like everyone's experience is so bespoke to them at the end of the day. And so I do love advice. I do love hearing about other people's journeys, but that's the way I kind of think about it.

You know, one of the things I think maybe from my, like, you know, just journey that I try to hold clear, or sorry, hold true. And I think have, I always get worried even in conversations a little bit like this. We've talked about service now so much and kind of incumbents out there. But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the customer. That's the only thing that matters. And so I try very much to hold a, call it competitor, you know, aware of a customer obsessed point of view. And I think that's just really critical because I've seen the playbook the other way around. And I've just seen basically to like not a lot of success. Whereas if I have been lucky enough to work with folks,

Even to my surprise, the maniacal just focus on the customer, despite the fact that we were circling around by crazy incumbents and everything on the wall said we're going to lose. It was that like maniacal focus on the customer and the problem that pulled us through at the end of the day. So I'm trying to pull that together. We're at hit tier two. Customers. It's all about the customers. 100%. Thank you both so much. It's a real privilege and a ton of fun to be working together. Looking forward to the future. Thank you, Tim. You as well.