Scaling, AI, and Leadership after Big Tech: Lessons from Highspot's Bhrighu Sareen
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I was looking for my next challenge. And I think every product person has this thing at the back of their mind, like you mentioned, which is like, huh, should I do a startup? Is this thing, is it just like grass is greener on the other side? I've been in big tech 17-ish years with Microsoft. Could I have taken another job at Microsoft and learned? Absolutely. But the depth of learning that this change allowed me to take was drastic. ♪

Welcome to Founded and Funded. I'm Tim Porter, Managing Director at Madrona. Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Brigus Sereen, the President of Product and Engineering at Highspot.

an AI-based sales enablement platform that helps equip, train, and coach go-to-market people and execute and measure sales initiatives to drive revenue and greater sales efficiency. Madrona invested in HighSpot shortly after it was founded back in early 2014, and Brigu joined in 2022.

So today, Bhrigu and I are going to dive into the next chapter of HighSpot, focusing on their ongoing innovation in product and engineering using AI and other strategies that Bhrigu has employed to drive efficiency and growth. Bhrigu spent nearly two decades at Microsoft before joining the HighSpot team. He was one of the early Microsoft Teams team members, and when he left, he was corporate VP and head of much of product management and engineering for Teams.

In this conversation, he will share actionable insights for founders thinking about making the shift from big tech to a fast-moving startup. He also offers advice for working with founders in navigating the transition from growth at all costs to efficient growth. We also dig into how HighSpot is leveraging GenAI in real-world applications and how the company is balancing innovation and efficiency.

If you're a founder looking for hands-on tips on leadership, innovation, and growth in today's market, you won't want to miss this conversation with Raghu. Raghu, thanks so much for being here. Hi, Tim. Good to be here. And thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I'll just say, if you're thinking about making a switch, Tim's actually a really, really good person to speak to. I remember the first time we met, I had spoken to Robert and the co-founders a few times. And...

Kind of on the fence, not sure. And then Tim met me at this coffee shop in Kirkland, Washington. - Zoka. - Exactly, yeah. He was only, I think, like 20 minutes late, maybe more. And gave me some excuse about how he was trying to raise a lot of money for the next fund or something.

I mean, not that I could verify, but we'll believe him. So memorable, not just from that, but actually thank you for always being there in terms of providing guidance and how to think about it and also specific examples from your past. So thank you. Thanks, Birgit. And that is actually a true story. My only defense, I don't remember why I was late, but at least I came to you. I drove across the lake and to the coffee shop in your neighborhood. All right, Birgit, why don't we start with

with your journey from Microsoft to HighSpot. What were you doing at Microsoft? Say a little bit more about building teams and what inspired you to make the switch from big tech. This is definitely a very common thing. You know, people that have had successful careers at big tech companies and, hey, I want to do something earlier stage. How do I do it? Why do I do it? You've done it super successfully. Tell us about that journey. Microsoft Teams is the last project I worked on, but prior to that, I had worked in Bing, MSN, Windows, and Microsoft

Microsoft is a phenomenal place because you can have multiple careers without actually leaving the company.

And so I got an opportunity to learn a lot, started my career there and just worked up through the levels, numerous challenges, great managers, great mentors, a lot of very, very smart people that allowed me to grow and challenge myself. Teams was a phenomenal experience. It was this small product. I mean, it was even before I joined, before we even went to beta. And no one knew where it would land up.

But the concept of redefining how information workers actually work, reduce friction, and having to use multiple tools to get the job done was appealing. And it was a phenomenal challenge and gave me a chance to really learn. When I joined, like I mentioned, we hadn't even shipped the product or it wasn't even in beta, but then went from there and took it from zero monthly active users to 300 million monthly active users when I left. So phenomenal growth and growth.

I'd been there six and a half, seven-ish years and done a lot of different roles, taken on different aspects of the product, built in PM Eng together, ecosystem, partnerships, customer growth. And I was looking for my next challenge.

I think every product person has this thing at the back of their mind, like you mentioned, which is like, huh, should I do a startup? Is this thing, is it just like grass is greener on the other side? I've been in big tech 17-ish years with Microsoft. And so I think in priority order for me, it was I wanted a challenge, a place where I, number two, was where I could learn and grow.

And the two different aspects, could I have taken another job at Microsoft and learned? Absolutely. I would have taken on a new challenge, a new dimension to it. But the depth of learning that this change allowed me to take was drastic. And I think the greater the challenge, the greater the learning.

And so the other end of the spectrum was you go big company to smaller company. I got to report right now directly to the CEO and that provides your peer group is like the CFO, CHRO. So learning in terms of what are the issues that are impacting the entire company. You're not just focused on your product area, on your scope. And that's the only thing I'm going to do. Learning in terms of speed and agility.

As a startup, you don't have a billion dollars in cash sitting in the bank. You don't have 25,000 developers that are at your, that you could pivot into whatever area you want to go. It's just speed and agility. - Team zero to 300 million, it's insane, actually, to think about that kind of growth. And I actually, I remember our first conversation, and I was struck by a few things about you.

One that this point about agility is that you seemed very much about making decisions and cutting through broader group dynamics. And sometimes part of the art of being a good executive at a big company is how you kind of embrace big group dynamics. And you were more sort of cut through it and had lived through this hyper growth. And so that seemed like a great fit.

I know even across our portfolio, there were more than one company that were recruiting you. Why did you pick Highspot specifically? So it's meant just a little bit about the product and what Highspot did. You wanted the right scenario with founders and challenge, but you had ultimately different product areas to pick. Why build in this area?

Another area of learning, in addition, was I mentioned all the teams I had worked in at Microsoft. I'd never worked in dynamics or in anything to do with sales or marketing technology. And so it was another dimension where I could grow in terms of a new technology, a new space, and one that was evolving very rapidly. And then coming back specifically to Highspot, Highspot, I think there's a few dimensions why. One was...

The people, when you're making such a drastic change, if it doesn't feel right in terms of the people front, it could become very, very messy. And I can see how that, I mean, you hear these stories about people working and, oh man, it didn't work out. And like three to five months, they're looking for their next opportunity. So the people was one very important part. And Highspot is super lucky. The three founders, Robert, Oliver, David, are just good human beings to begin with.

And they care. Second, like I mentioned, was the space was new. And then third was, Highspot when I joined was really known for content and guidance. And that was the key thing. How do you equip salespeople with the right content at the right time? But they had all the right ingredients.

A lot of companies never make the switch from being a single product company to a two product company to a multi-product company. With our release in October 2024, what's happened is Highspot has made that transition from a single product company to a multi-product company.

And when I saw these different ingredients, I remember after the first meeting with Robert, I got a cool story. If you should I digress a little? Let's hear it. So I remember, I mean, I wasn't actively saying, hey, I want to leave Microsoft because I really enjoyed working there. And the first somebody mutually connected us and it was a meeting from 4 to 5 p.m. It was 4 to 5 p.m. on a Thursday.

And our offices are downtown Seattle by Pike Place Market. So I drive up and go and meet Robert 4 to 5 p.m. And one thing leads to another. When I got back into my car, it was 7.15 p.m.

And I called the person that mutually connected us. And they said, I said, there's a person like how to go. I said, I think it went well, but I think Robert was just being nice because we were supposed to be done at five. We finished at 7.15. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. Robert's met other people. Usually it doesn't go this long. And so you feel that connection. And so when I went back the next time to meet Robert, I was like, hey, you've built a LMS. You have a CMS. You've got all these different pieces. If we stitch this together,

your TAM, HighSpot's TAM can be significantly greater than what it is right now based on the product offering you have. And so when you take all those three or four things combined together, it just felt like it was a good place to be. Fantastic. I want to come back to how you've worked with these founders.

So when you joined Highspot, there were, there still are, you know, three founders that are super active in the company. Robert, Oliver and David, we did a podcast, Oliver and I, you know, five years ago about Highspot. That's one of my favorite ever. And, you know, you and Oliver work super closely together now, right? On product. All three are really involved, which has been such an amazing part of this company. But also, you know, in

in theory, not easy coming in and having this big role. You're running half the company, product engineering, yet there's these three founders who are all very opinionated around product and engineering. Yet it's worked out. What has it been like coming in in your role and working effectively with founders? I'm super grateful to Robert, Oliver, and David. One, for giving me the opportunity and two, just

How they welcomed and included me into Highspot, I have a bunch of friends of mine gave me advice that this was going to be a really bad idea because they're actively, actively involved. Like you said, they have opinions, they have more contacts than I can ever have because they've been doing this for a decade. Absolutely. They have more knowledge, they have more connections, they have more foresight, because I had never worked in this space. And so I'll get super specific.

David was doing this role before I joined. And I've said this to David, I would not have been even half as successful or delivered even one 10th impact for Highspot if it weren't for David. David has been this voice in my ear

just all the time selflessly giving me advice, giving me guidance, whether it was people, product, process, strategy. Hey, Bhrigu, here's the pitfalls. Watch out for this, watch out for that. And he does it in this super humble way. He's not being arrogant. He's not trying to show me down. Like you could have said, okay, hey, great job. We got someone, good luck. If you have questions, let me know. But being proactive about helping me

and helping us move forward. So super grateful to David for that. - I think there's a question I sort of framed around how did you navigate it, but there's a great message to founders here, right, around how do you onboard a new exec, empower them, get them ready, work together with them, and I think that's super critical.

I was gonna ask, like, how did you get comfortable with that was gonna be the case? Like, unfortunately, I've seen some cases where like, you know, yeah, you know, I talked it through with the founders, they really said they wanted me to be there, and then it turned out they didn't. You know, so, you know, in some level, it's just, it's a human thing, right? And you build trust. But was there anything on how you sort of got confidence that they were serious about, you know, not just saying that we're ready to kind of bring somebody else in and do all the things you mentioned that David has done to help make you successful? Two things. One is,

is if you remind yourself that we're all going to win together, it isn't as if David or Oliver are going to have some, they're going to have a different outcome than I'm going to have. So I tell myself, okay, are they coming from the right place? And wherever we're going, whatever decision we're making, is it going to take high spot to the next level? Like if you think high spot first,

Is it the right decision? Then it becomes easy. Then it's not about ego, right? Like, did you get, is your idea right or is my idea right? It doesn't matter. Is it the right idea for high spot? Clear these folks just wanted to win. Exactly. And so if you come in with an attitude to win, with an insane bias for action, and are humble enough to say, okay, we learned, because not all decisions will be positive. We learned from that and now we're going to go back and fix it.

I think it's hard, even the human nature part, I think, because founders in general have a different mindset. But these three things should align with every founder out there. So having a great partner on the engineering and product side and David and Oliver. Yes. You know, Robert is probably...

the best strategic product vision exec I've ever worked with. I remember seeing that way back at Microsoft and now in the last 12 years at HighSpot. But it can also be hard for you. I mean, he's always the head of product in some ways and that's what's made the company so successful. So how is that dynamic then? One other suggestion I'd make to the folks listening is communication is key and building a relationship is key. Yes, all three founders are at Microsoft,

And so was I, but our paths never crossed. Interesting. I had never spoken to these folks. A lot of people said like, oh yeah, this is easy. You picked Highspot because they were Microsoft. You probably interacted with each other and then they pulled you over. I'm like, I did not know individuals by that first name, last name even existed. We had never crossed paths, whether in social circles or at work. And so when you're starting new, commit to frequent communication.

and building trust. So one of the things that we put in place was every Tuesday, Robert and I have lunch. The second thing we do is the three founders and I would meet every Tuesday as well. And initially, they committed to actually sharing context, helping me grow. And we said, hey, we'll do this for three months-ish. I'll be ramped up four months. I'll have enough context and we'll cancel the meeting. We don't need it. Fast forward two plus years, we still meet every Tuesday. All the three founders and myself.

So if it's simple, smart mechanisms that are persistently applied, there's no substitute. Exactly. There's no substitute. There's no shortcut in building trust. You have to put in the time. It forces you to is also because a lot of I think animosity builds up when you're making stories up in your mind. He said this or he actually means that or he she said that. So this is what's going to happen. Why don't you just ask them what they mean?

But you're so busy in your day-to-day life that you don't... So that every Tuesday lunch with Robert actually just forces us to discuss a whole bunch of things. Maybe mention some of the initiatives or structural things that you've done at Highspot. As someone on the board, I've been struck by...

The overall company has gotten more efficient, but we're also shipping even more things. The velocity of things you're shipping is amazing. You've done some things around team and offshore and other things, but

Talk about some of the things that you, you know, put in place, you know, building on, you know, the great foundation that the founders and others had built and how that's gone. And, you know, has it all been easy? Has it been challenging? Has it, you know, what's it been like? I know a little bit of everything. Super complicated question. I know, but like, this is like, I'm not sure where to go because you've kind of thrown in how you, structural things put in place. How do you increase product velocity? How did you get our costs into control? Like, come on.

- We throw you a softball. You can take it any direction. Specifically, just how would you describe the major initiatives that you had to put in place when you got to HighSpot from a product and engineering standpoint? - I lived it the last two plus years now. And when I joined, I have to start by saying everyone's heart was in the right place.

the clarity of where we were going was always there. And that's like, that's like super important. Cause if, if your founders, the exec team, the VPs, senior directors, directors, and so on and so forth, unclear on where we're going, that's a big problem. But at least those two parts where everyone's heart is in the right place. And so then coming back to like your, the question you asked with that context is, um,

We realized that the company with growth at all costs, before I joined the previous 18 months, two years, it was just phenomenal. We've been hiring people all over North America. And so now that you have clarity of where you want to go, how do we make sure that we maintain the velocity by removing roadblocks for the crews? So we identified that our smallest unit of impact is actually a crew.

And one of the things we put in place was something we called an edge meeting. Because your ICs are-- - How big are crews, roughly? - Eight to 10, with a product manager, an engineering manager, a bunch of IC engineers, and a designer. And so the crew is your unit of work.

And they're the ones that get stuck because it could be cross team dependency. It could be because design as the designers working on another project have got to complete something or they aren't clear on the architecture or they take a decision that three months later, you've got to rework. And so the product leadership team decided that every two weeks, we're going to meet every single crew. So every week we do crews one to let's say 12 and then 13 to 24 will be next week. So we were spending about 15 hours a week

And initially the teams were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is like micromanagement. It's a bad idea. It's a waste of our time. And I said, one second, except for the product leadership team who's going to be in all the meetings, for a crew, you're only spending one hour every two weeks. But what it allowed the crews to do now when you look back, everyone's like, oh, this was great. And the Uber concept around that was enable every discipline,

to have a voice, to raise any issue in an open and transparent manner that is predictable. So it isn't because, you know, some PM and engineer had a meeting with our VP of engineering and they took a decision. So the design team was like, hey, you left us out. Or,

And it wasn't as if they were doing this out of bad intent. It was just because the speed at which we wanted to move, if you met someone, you got on a Zoom call, you took a decision, you moved on. And it wasn't because I'm purposely leaving the engineer out, I'm leaving the PM out. And so whoever got to the decision makers, took a decision, got a roadblock, moved, and they would move forward. And so that edge meeting thing was initially hard for people to kind of say, like, is it worth it? But now when you look back, and

Engineers bring in architecture documents. PMs bring in specs. We look at FIGMAs. And we've just been able to remove so many blocks.

Making sure everyone has a voice, smaller teams where everyone can be heard. And then also the frequency increased also. So instead of every other week, how often do you have this? No, it's still every two weeks. Got it. But what we've asked the crews are... But get much more out of those times together. But if they need additional time, they can always ask for it. Right. But it's predictable as in everybody in the company knows this particular crew is going to have review at this particular time.

That's fantastic. And then one more thing that I did because you asked like, what are the structural things? One other thing I did was cross-team dependencies usually for companies, I mean, depending on the size, whether you're mid-size or larger, even big tech, the...

One crew can never ship an entire thing. They're dependent on some infrastructure pieces, or cross team, or UX, or whatever it might be. So one interesting thing happened like six months after we put this thing in place. A particular crew comes up and says, "Hey, we are unable to ship this." And we're like, "Why is that the case?" "Oh, because we have dependency on this other crew, and they're unable to do it."

So we evolved the edge meeting to say, any crew can summon any other crew or any crew can join any other crew because it's transparent. Everyone knows the schedule, which crew is presenting when and they can come in. It did a phenomenal thing. 90% of cross team dependencies get resolved before it ever shows up to the PLT.

Because Tim, would you like to be the one? I come to you, you have a crew, I have a crew, we're PMs on our H4 crews. I'm like, hey, Tim, I really need you to show up to the product leadership team, our edge meeting. We want you in there because, you know, there's dependency. Like, Tim's like, oh, you're like, hey, hey, hey, can we just resolve this right here? Absolutely, right. Create an environment where teams can work it out amongst themselves and not have to bring everything up and bubble it up much faster pace. That's fantastic.

Maybe talk a little bit about how you've organized around offshore and a few centers of excellence. I know a big topic of conversation

for lots of companies is back to office and being together. But then there's also a need to be able to have, you know, engineering groups and other geographies for various reasons. I think you've done a nice job of finding a great way to do that. Maybe describe how you've done that. Sure. So I started in September 22. And if there's folks listening to this that are considering this move and you've always been like I was always in product

and never in other kinds of roles. If you're thinking of joining, once you join, I would recommend sitting down with a CFO or VP of finance and just understanding how the numbers work. Chris Darson, our CFO,

was super gracious with this time. And after I started in September 22, showed me the numbers and 22 was this interesting year where, and there was a second half of 22 where things had started slowing down and people weren't sure what's going to happen to the economy. Are we going to enter a recession? Is it going to be soft landing? And it could go any which way. And I look at the numbers and I'm like, if our goal is to hit profitability,

doesn't feel like we're gonna, this glide path isn't moving in the right direction. And so after getting educated, I realized we've got to make a few changes over here. And one of the things we looked at was, okay, we want access to a lot more talent. And can we do it in, where can we do it and how would it work out?

So the first thing we did was in November of 22, with my direct reports and through a connection at the Canadian consulate in Seattle, we actually went up and met the government of British Columbia. And from Seattle to Vancouver, it's only a...

three, two and a half, three hour, depending how fast you drive, Tim, two and a half drive or a three hour train ride. And it's super convenient. And you could do a day trip if you needed to, where you can meet the team, spend time. And we got a lot of good support from the government of BC. And we decided to open up an office in Vancouver, Canada. When we started, we said, hey, over a two year period, we'll put about 50 people in Canada, in Vancouver. And

And actually, in 18 months, we had already hit 50 people. And that provided us an ability to have a our first distributed beyond remote, we were already doing remote before I joined a spot. But it allowed us to have a center of excellence access to a lot of talent, and allowed our engineers and leaders to see could we do a remote center and

practice before we do something big. And then after we saw that working, we decided to start a development center in India. Now, that was a lot of debate internally, a lot. And you can imagine all the different reasons why we should not do it. And maybe a couple of reasons why we should.

But we made our, we moved forward. Again, this is about agility, speed, let's try things out. And India offered HighSpot access to an insane amount of talent. Insane amount of talent. And over the last two, two and a half decades, talent in India has evolved. You could always get really good college hires. But over the last two, two and a half decades,

So many companies have opened up offices there. So what that has allowed us is middle management and typically having the right managers will help you because they can coach, mentor, grow the early in career talent that matters. And then senior leadership matters.

there's actually a decent population of senior leadership who could run your development center in India. And that's been key for you. You have a great leader on the ground. Gopri has been an awesome partner in making this work and growing it. And that brings me to the other point I was going to make, which is exactly perfect, which is the Indian population outside of India

who have lived here, who have worked for these companies, a lot of them actually moving back. Gurpreet actually spent, I think, 30 plus years in the United States. And then for family reasons, he wanted to move back. And so he moves back and

All of that knowledge on how to work with an American company, how to work cross geo, how to work cross time zone, how to actually have conversations with customers. Because when you're building product, end-to-end ownership, there will be moments when they're going to talk to your customers and you want to feel comfortable that they can handle that situation. And so GroupEat is a great example of having a leader who can take and offer some zero

And I mean, real stats, July of 23 is when he signed his employment offer. And fast forward, September of 23, we had four employees, a group with two engineers and a designer. And fast forward right now, we have 125 people there and lots of open positions. Fantastic. So we've

we've been talking about things that have gone well and coming to an earlier stage company from a big company. I'm

I'm sure it's not always that way. There have been challenges. We've managed through them really well. Just for the listeners, what was a surprise? You kind of knew you had a good sense with this team and everything, but there's still surprises. Was there something that was a surprise that like, hey, this was a big transition to go from the big company, lots of resources to something smaller? And how did you deal with that? I think...

If I were to prioritize all the challenges, I think the number one was how drastically the economy changed. Yeah, there was a big externality that came about that wasn't really expected to the extent that it hit. Exactly. I mean, I'm changing jobs, changing scale, changing employer, changing manager, changing technology, changing all these different dimensions.

And then the last thing you expect is this meteorite coming from like middle of nowhere. You're like, oh my gosh, what's going to happen now? So that, I mean, but if you ask like, how do you think about it? I actually look at it from another perspective, which is,

Like I said earlier, my number one goal was learning and all a number of different dimensions. Guess what? That learning just got accelerated. And when you come out the other end, you're going to be, huh, I did all of the things I was trying to go learn, but then did it in an environment that might not show up. I mean, it's cyclical, so it will show up at some point, but maybe not for another five years, four years, 10 years, who knows what the exact timeline is. But that I think was the biggest challenge.

And I mean, you're on our board. So those board meetings are interesting. Okay, burn, like your burn rate is like crazy. But hey, can we just raise money like we have been every single round previously before? Somehow money dries up. What the goals that the market is expecting you to hit change. And the company had never done layoffs before.

I think it's just like super hard. It was a hard period. I mean, the biggest thing is that a company like Highspot that had been growing meteorically in a large part as...

existing accounts were just hiring lots more go-to-market people, seat-based. And so the renewal rates just kept going up and up and up. And all of a sudden, all our customers' budgets didn't just get frozen, they got slashed. Correct. But we managed to keep innovating through that, find more things that give them and add value, while also getting efficient ourselves. There's some of the things we've been talking about. Exactly. And so the second thing I'd say on that topic, the previous question you asked, which was, you touched on a really good point. Because

We've all heard stories that X amount of companies during the dot-com bust actually decided not to do product innovation and just ride it. Or through the financial crisis, not do product innovation and just ride through it and save money and conserve cash. But

Thanks to the folks on the board and the leadership team, we decided to just say, no, we're going to make this transition. And now we're seeing the fruits of that investment decision actually start paying off. That's perfect. Let's talk about that. You know, Highspot's always been an ML-based company. I think of the very early days and how do you find all the sales content? Well, if you get the right signals and you put those into an ML system, you can find the right things more effectively.

but it wasn't AI in the way it is now. Talk about some of those, give some examples. What are the things that you're shipping? How do you use AI today? And we can dig into that a little bit. Every company is becoming an AI company, but Highspot is really there and has it in production with customers. You're absolutely right. I mean, there's patents with our co-founders' names on it and other folks on there around ML technology and things like that.

One of the interesting things, because also the stage we're in right now, I mean, there's this hype cycle where we're the trough of disillusionment, I think is where we are right now. And a number of our customers asked us saying, hey, is any of this thing real? Is it all just hype? And what I try to land with them is,

If you're big tech and you're trying to reason over the significant amount of data you have for an individual, it could be across their emails and meetings and calendar and everything else. There's three dimensions. It's like, how much compute do you want to put against it? Or what's the latency? Because if you give the large language models or your algorithm enough time, it will actually give you the right answer. Or three is the cost. How many dollars do you want to throw at this problem? Or every time there's a query that's sent. And

I was talking to some of our customers and saying, in relation to that, the amount of data HighSpot has to reason over for a particular individual or across an entire domain or an entire customer is tiny.

It's super tiny in comparison to what the technology afford allows us to do today. So it's tiny. Two, there's a number of dimensions that we could actually put together offline to process it once a night. So we don't, so the latency part gets taken care of. And there are actually real scenarios with real value. One of them, I'll just, as an example, a major fintech company,

Most companies do a sales kickoff once a year. You bring your salespeople together, you have a conversation, and you share the new products you're launching. And in some cases, they'll ask them to do a golden pitch deck, which is marketing's created the pitch deck. And let's say we're colleagues sitting around the table at the sales kickoff, or you're my manager. What I'll do is I will read up, learn about it, and then I'm going to pitch it to you. You've got a rubric, you will score me on those things, and then I'll do the same back for you.

And that's expensive because you have to take people offline out of their day jobs, go get them to do this. Or you have salespeople recorded, then the managers have to take time out and score them. And a lot of sales managers like, I need a head quota this month. I don't have time for this.

So we built a feature as part of our training and coaching product where the person creating the learning and development, the training, has the training, has a rubric, verbal, nonverbal skills that they're looking for for the salesperson to be successful and saying the right words or how the pitch should come out. A fintech company used this, sent it out and got 800 responses back.

And then the manager gets to see the video recording, the rubric, the AI uses the rubric that is provided to grade all 800 of these. And the manage, what we saw was in 55% of the cases, the manager left the AI graded feedback as is. In another 40%, no, 45%.

whatever 91% minus 55 is, in those cases, they either added or deleted one sentence. And only 9% of cases did managers actually delete what AI recommended as feedback and rewrite it. Wow. And this FinTech, this financial services company, not FinTech, huge financial service company, super impressed. And they're actually now rolling it out. They've decided to, I mean, there was a few...

Like there's a few hundred people, 800 or so that had access to it. Now they're talking about thousands of licenses for this one feature because the value and the time they're getting back is significant. And so the focus on features that will save salespeople, marketing people, support services, learning and development people that are creating it,

time and showing the right ROI and I can go on feature after feature after feature. That's been resonating. That's awesome. This is this AI real-time coaching and that the AI is really working both and the feedback is really accurate in that the manager doesn't have to rewrite it and then you see the impact with the end users.

There are a bunch of features. You know, you talk about the Highspot AI co-pilot. There's the ways you do scorecarding. There's ways you do content summarization, auto document generation. I think people are interested, like maybe don't know Highspot. Yes, they can go read the website, but maybe just rattle off a couple of these other new features and how you use AI for customers. Perfect. So one other one that I'll talk about is...

A lot of organizations have a system of record for their CRM, like for the customers. They have a system of record for, let's say that's the ERP. But today they don't have a system of record for their go-to-market initiatives.

And it's super interesting because you have so many different disciplines that have come together to actually take an initiative. So one of the initiatives as an example, and I'll use that to just outline the capabilities we're talking about, which is in 2022, 2023, the CFO or the VP of finance inserted themselves in the buying process. And we saw more and more sales cycles were getting elongated.

And it wasn't just procurement being able to, once the solution owner says, I want to buy this particular product, the procurement just does the paperwork and is able to negotiate and get the deal done. But finance is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to make sure this spend is happening. Is it correct? Is it worth it? So sales folks, so there were initiatives where our companies wanted, where a lot of our customers wanted to roll out, which were, how do we train our salespeople to talk to the finance people? And they do the rollout training.

Now, if one of your initiatives was to increase expansion on product line ABC, there are so many pieces that have to come together for that to be successful. One is what content will get used? And is it being used? Is it created? Is it effective? How do we provide training? Like, for example, one of the training could be this financial, like how to talk to people in finance, and then product training on whatever the product line it is that you're talking about.

And then you want to, so that is preparing them. What's the right sales player to use? Here's a digital room. All these are capabilities that Highspot has, but you include it in your initiative. And then you want the ability to say, okay, all this training that I'm providing, the keywords I want to use, are they actually being used? And so how do you check that? The really cool thing is today, a lot of meetings are getting recorded.

And so Highspot's conversational intelligence capabilities, again, using AI and other aspects, is not only able to just draw out who said what, but then understand the intent behind that. So now you can have a single scorecard, a system of record for here's all the initiatives that we care about. Here's the cohorts, because it could be a mid-market initiative, it could be targeting enterprise customers, or mid-market customers, or commercial customers.

And then in a single view, if you can actually have a conversation with your CRO and say, all right, this is the content being used. Here's how it's being used. Your CMO can look at how it's performing to make changes. You can see the impact of all the training in real time and look at your salespeople. Are they saying the right thing? How are customers responding back to it? Again, it shows up in your initiative. And you can look at individuals, like I said, in the case of...

the other previous example, where you can see, hey, this rep, for example, on these 12 metrics, and eight of them you're doing really well, nine of them you're doing well, but on these three of them, you could actually do a little better

And HighSpot is that one unified platform that you go from content to guidance to understanding what's actually happening with the salespeople, what skills and competencies they need to get better, and then recommend a training. Because a lot of platforms out there today can tell you, hey, this meeting went well, here's the agenda, here's the topics that were discussed, here's aspects of the intelligence around the meeting. That aspect is now a commodity.

But when you want to take action on that, oh, they could have used the meetings over in our standard digital room with this aspect. HighSpot can do that. You want to take another action around, here's a set of skills that you could do better in. HighSpot can do that. Now recommend a training based on the skills they need to improve in. HighSpot can do that. You want to now be able to follow a sales play because we've combined data with CRM to then say, okay,

This is a pre-sales opportunity in the financial services business. Marketing has created this template. Let's just automatically generate a document, the presentation that will go for this particular thing and bring in pricing if you choose to do that. I think it's so cool and illustrative that it's such an integrative story from just purely the customer's perspective who doesn't necessarily care about technology. They want outcomes.

You spend so much time, I see this across so many of the companies, even the very early startups, all this time and effort on we're going to do this initiative, we're going to do this campaign, we're going to launch this thing.

And so we have to get everybody ready. We have to train them. And then at the end you say, or as it's going, you see results like is revenue going up or down and you can see individual reps are hitting quota or they're not. But the why within that is so hard to tease apart. And so you can go from all the way from the, how do we train folks to what were the actions to what

ultimately is working in that way drive more revenue, more efficiency, the two golden things. Like every company is like, how do we get more revenue? How do we get it more efficiently?

And so not only is it an integrative experience for the customer, but you're using AI in so many different ways. - Exactly. - Call recording and insights, automatically generating content, you know, analyze it. So that's pretty neat too. - Recommending content. - Recommending content. - A lot of different aspects. - Putting it together. So what does that mean? You know, we invest in new startups. There's lots of innovation happening in AI. And one of the exciting things about it is you can build things really fast, you know, that have an impact.

How do you think about, and there's a lot in your space. There's a lot of cool things happening around, you know, the AI SDR or, you know, the AI, all the different pieces across sales even. How are you thinking about, you know, all of those startups and the opportunity for them to innovate versus what Highspot's doing? So, Tim, I'm going to go back to something you said to me in 22. Uh-oh. Yeah.

It was something interesting you said that there was a realization in the startup world that a lot of companies that got funding prior to 22, it was a feature, but it could grow up to become a standalone company. And I think, I don't remember the exact words, but my takeaway was that there was a number of startups that could have very, very good outcomes, but as opposed to being standalone, their outcome will be as a capability as part of a bigger product. Yep.

Something like that, right? And that kind of stuck with me because when I look at a startup, I'm like, hey, especially early stage, if you have a great idea, that's awesome. Keep going. But know when it is time to be part of a bigger thing. You think it's a really cool idea. It's growing well. You found product market fit. Either you have to start expanding or

into verticals or areas or product spaces that are adjacent, or you have to figure out when's the right time to say, okay, I got to just be part of a bigger product.

It also, to connect back to something you referenced earlier, it often comes back to data too, doesn't it? Access to data. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. Super good point, yes. You know, you mentioned the big co's, like your former employer, they just have so much data. Insane. Across everything. But it becomes, and yes, it's almost always better to have more data than less data, but it also creates challenges around. It's just super expensive to actually process all of that.

Then you have, you know, new co's who it's like, do you actually have enough of a data set? In your case, you said you don't have that big of data relative to someone like Microsoft, but yet, you know, I'm thinking through some of our biggest customers, right? Some of the biggest technology companies, the biggest logistics companies, financial services companies, medical device companies.

you have their whole corpus of sales, marketing, content, docs, decks, white papers, et cetera. How do you think, you know, is that sort of like, is there something about having the right amount of data, you know, for these feeds? Say more about that. So you're absolutely right. People always say, hey, get all the data, get all the data, get all the data. But you've got to figure out the right sweet spot for the scenario you're trying to deliver. And I think that's something we've been very disciplined about internally is,

getting the data, cleaning the data, attaching it and making getting the right insights around the data. And then I think just as important switching tracks as I agree with the point you made is the user experience. And I think as startups, you have to decide because you can say like, hey, I want to be the single pane of glass where everybody shows up. But guess what? I think Teams, Slack, Zoom, Outlook, Gmail,

are the horizontal applications, regardless whether you're sales, marketing, finance, procurement,

engineer, PM, designer, you're going to spend your time. That's where you're spending your time. Those are the tools you're spending your time in. And then you have role specific. If you're a designer, it could be Figma, it could be Adobe. If you're a finance person, you have your own application. If you're a salesperson, it's CRM. So there's a set of horizontal applications that people spend their time in. So the UX part, I think, is another aspect which

a lot of companies need to make a decision is, are you going to say that your data and your insights or the AI experiences that you've generated should only stay in your own and operator properties? Or is it okay to show up inside Zoom, Slack, Teams, Outlook, Gmail, inside where users are today? And then there's another question you got to ask yourself is the new user experiences around these agents and co-pilots.

Do you surface your data, your insights there or not? Or do you do a teaser and you got to bring them back to your product? And then once you figure out the user experience, so data, insights, user experience, once you figure out that stack, what do you do about the business model?

So let's say I want to, let's say I'm a customer and you're here to sell me. And I said, hey, you know, I've built my own internal co-pilot. Like that's our company wide thing. I love this insight about this, that around content recommendations. It's a good example. And our salesperson is sending out an email and our co-pilot sits inside our email platform with this Outlook or Gmail. And we just want you to plug into that.

And so we don't really need to buy this other whole thing because we're not using the product. We're not using the scenario inside your product. We just want API access. So we'll just pay for a data transfer fee and that's good enough.

But you're like, wait a second, I ran all the analysis and I'm delivering you an insight. I'm not just delivering you something over an API for access to data. But these are interesting conversations that we're going to have to have. So let's put our future hats on here. So much continues to happen in this space with AI. Agents are a big topic of conversation. Salesforce is certainly talking about those a lot. Lots of new startups.

If you think a year or two ahead, maybe pick a year ahead, what are some of the things in AI you're most excited about that Highspot will maybe be going to in that timeframe? Last year, you would have asked this question, you would not have used the word agent, you would have used the word co-pilot if we had recorded it. This year, you're calling it agent. Two years from now, I have no idea what is going to get called. But the one thing that I am confident about is that

month over month, just because the speed of innovation is just amazing. It's such an amazing time to be in tech. I mean, I think every decade we say this is an amazing time to be in tech, but it's still- Keeping right. It continues to be an amazing time to be in tech because I think every month, it doesn't matter what you're working with, whether it's a big company or a small company or a medium-sized company, or you're thinking of starting something new,

If you ask yourself, we ask ourselves this thing, is how do we take advantage of the technology that we have access to, to provide value to that task in a day to that user? And so regardless of what it's called, if we just focus on that, and our list of capabilities where we can actually have measurable return back to our customers, and delight, I think that's the two things a lot of times like, oh, the ROI is huge or not, but yes, but can you also have delight?

A lot of companies focus on ROI, very few really focus on the delight. And we have this unique opportunity where I have to I have a 200 slide deck, which is actually a library that I have to then customize. Before I go present, I'm a salesperson before I present to the customer. And then they would spend, I don't know, an hour, two hours to do that, putting in the right logo, the logo is not the right size, making it smaller, making it bigger, all kinds of things.

The delight of being able to complete that by answering four questions and getting it done in six minutes, mind-blowing. The look on the reps' faces is priceless. So, Tim, I'm not sure what we're going to call it, but I would say focusing on return and delighting the customers, I think that would be...

I think what I hear you saying is there's just going to be ongoing radical productivity gains. Yes. Just being able to do tasks so much faster, maybe more accurately. I think there's something, just so you're not the only one putting yourself out there. I think there is a huge thing to this agent notion. Yes, it's a newer naming, but where people will be able to interact with HighSpot through natural language, through voice,

the system will just complete tasks for them. To your point about reducing steps, etc., it might be the same outcomes, but getting there faster and the system does more of it autonomously. My guess is we'll be talking about that in your user conference in the year or two to come.

Well, Prigu, thank you so much. Thanks for all you're doing at Highspot. Thanks for this great advice on innovating in AI and thinking about making the jump from big code to earlier stage company and super excited to see we're going to go build in years to come. Perfect. Thank you very much for being here. Tim, thank you for having me. Thank you very much.