Cresta | Amplifying Expertise

Hi everyone and welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast of Greylock. I'm Sam Motamity, general partner at Greylock and your host for today. On today's episode, I'm thrilled to have Zaid Enam join us. Zed is the co founder and CEO of Cresta, the expertise management platform that uses AI to make, in their own words, every employee and expert on day one. Zed, welcome to Gray Matter.

Thanks Sam, for having me.

Zed, I've really been looking forward to having you on. You and I have been friends, I think since 2015, and I remember the first time we met. It was just extremely evident to me that you're one of the few people I wanted to spend a long time working with. And it's been a privilege to be partners with you and Cresta since 2019. I think there's a range of interesting things for us to talk about today. It's an exciting week with Cresta with the company announcing their series B fundraise. I'd love to let our audience learn a little bit about the company and what you've done to date and your plans for ahead. The second piece I'd love to talk about is the future of customer experience and how that's changed following the COVID 19 pandemic and the role Cresta plays in helping companies enable Omnichannel digital customer experience. And then I'd love to talk a little bit about how you think about company building, but let's just start with you and with Cresta and maybe spend a few minutes introducing yourself and introducing the company.

So my name is Zaid and I'm from. I'm from Pakistan actually, and I ended up in California with a very lucky set of coincidences. So I was working on an open source project in Pakistan, sort of as part of a competition, sort of released it. And I got this offer for an internship at a startup down in Southern California. So I went way back In, I think 2006 or 2007 for an internship there and I guess I like my work enough that they gave me a year or two years later a few of the folks there spun out a company and they gave me a full time offer to come back. And so that's how I ended up in California. And I've been in California for about probably 10, 12 years now. Basically ended up taking classes at junior college in SoCal, went up to Berkeley, studied EECS there and then got really fascinated by the brain. And so like, how does the brain work? Why does it work the way it does? And that sort of led me into this whole thing about machine learning and artificial intelligence in terms of as a way of understanding the brain, understanding how those things work. And so I ended up sort of applying and enrolling into stanford for the PhD where I met like a troop of really just amazing, talented, crazy, unique, idiosyncratic people, but just very talented people. And yeah, so then we dropped out about three years into the PhD to start Cresta. And that's sort of been the journey so far in the United States.

Yeah, fantastic journey. Tell us a little bit about Cresta.

Yeah, Cresta started with this idea, how can we use artificial intelligence to help people be better? So I was in the artificial intelligence lab working with my co founders, Tim and Sebastian. Sebastian had sort of come back from building the self driving car back in 2006 and sort of starting Google X and Udacity and the whole view and the lens was that it seems like the whole world right now is focused on artificial intelligence as a form of automation. And so how does it do anything a human does, but how do we automate it? And there's folks that sort of have this kind of heuristic principle like think of artificial intelligence and the impact it'll have for your business as anything a human can do in less than one second. And our view was like, that's just such a narrow focus of artificial intelligence. Because if you look back at technology and the impact technologies had historically, technology has always been a building block to help us achieve bigger things. So like the phone makes us superhuman, helps us, we can pick up a phone and talk to someone. In Australia, the computer, Steve Jobs, famously with the bicycle of the mind, these things have always been building blocks that have unlocked our capabilities and unlocked our full potential. And so what we felt was like, there's this really lazy view of artificial intelligence which is like, I'm going to go automate anything a human does existingly. And we wanted to go approach with a creative view of artificial intelligence. We thought it was our responsibility and ultimately developing and to build artificial intelligence. Where can that happen? So we looked at a lot of different places. Where can artificial intelligence help people be better? There's actually a lot of, a lot of applications for it and huge amounts of applications. But one of the things I remember looking at one of the data is that you look at the number of people doing types of work in office knowledge work, which is cognitive non routine work and cognitive routine work. And it's basically you have three quarters of the world in this type of work and it's the kind of work that's really primed for artificial intelligence to help amplify the opportunity and amplify the experience and expertise of the best people on a team. And that's what we really look for. And we originally started with education. So, like, obviously being PhDs and a professor, we were like, okay, where can we have this biggest impact? Well, we hate grading papers. So, like, where can we use artificial intelligence to help people grade papers better? And so we started with a computer science class where we trained an AI that basically what it would do is that it would learn from the graders and the TAs in a class, and then it would identify, like, the mistakes that students are making. And the mistakes are common year over year. They're the same mistakes that happen in the class. So it turns out in our experiments, we were able to double the speed of a grader and also improve the overall quality of feedback that the students gave back to the ta. And that was like, okay, clearly there's something here. There's a technology that you can leverage that can make people better. And it was basically giving responses like, here's the feedback to give a student. Here's how to grade this assignment. Here's what the mistake is. Here's the best way to coach the student on this solution. So we looked at it and we examined it and like, okay, this is a neat piece of technology. But then when you try to sort of see what is the market for this, it was clear that there's not, unfortunately, a large market for that. And that's a topic. I guess it's worth a deep dive by itself, the education market. But we then sort of looked, okay, there's clearly something here, something that we can apply. And then we looked at email and we looked at sort of, how do people communicate? And we actually built a little chrome extension that sort of sits in an email and sort of responds to your emails, give responses, gesture responses based on learning from your pattern of emails. And that was something that we actually got a bunch of people in the first floor of Gates, the computer science building, to use. And I remember the day Google launched Smart Reply, I got like 20 articles from people telling me, hey, did you see this launch? I was like, yes, I did see this launch. It was interesting to get that piece because it was pretty clear, like, Google has just like 100x1000x data advantage there. So, like, while it was a useful piece of tool, it wasn't clear that we would have the advantage in terms of being able to build something that's really useful for people. And then secondly, just the realization was that email has so many external things. Your calendar, your family situation, all these things that's not in the email. And so generating responses with your historical email is actually really hard because it's open domain problem. But then that's when you got into enterprise and got into the business. And so we looked at really these teams, started partnering with corporate teams in the Bay Area and started providing artificial intelligence for support teams. And I would go to these companies and sort of shadow people to shadow, like, what does HR person do on a day to day basis? What does a finance person do on a day to day basis? What does a salesperson do? What does a support person do? And that was fun because for me, like, I just love like learning about jobs and learning what people do and like what their work is and what makes someone good and like what makes them not good. And so I just really enjoyed that, just studying people, understanding what their work is. And so basically then like that phase was just building tools and seeing like, what can artificial intelligence do? What kind of software tools can we build to streamline workflows, make people better, make people more effective? And then I remember at some point we were working with a sales team for a particular business and we were just, I built a tool for them to help sort of help them guide and help guide them on conversations. And we were able to prove that we were driving $100,000 of incremental revenue per month, which is a grad student in a small team. And so it was like a million dollars per year. And then like, remember going back to the lab and presenting, here's the results I had. And it was like, clear, like, okay, this is a business. Like there's this thing, there's something here. If, like a single grad student can have that kind of impact on a business and have kind of that kind of effectiveness on the business, then there's something there. And so that's like where Sebastian then asked me, like, I remember this specifically asked me, like, he saw these results and he's like, okay, so do you want to publish papers or do you want to start a company? And then I sort of went on this soul search of like, what I wanted to do with that technology. And that's what ultimately led to Cresta.

What an incredible story. And I think your customers and your team are probably excited you decided to go down the company route. You know, Zed, one thing that's interesting is Cresta today is focused on contact centers. But from day one as you've described the mission to me and everyone around the company as making every office worker 100x as effective, it's an incredibly horizontal and expansive vision. And contact centers are interesting because on the one hand they're massive. Almost every enterprise has a contact center. It's an important surface area of customer interactions. And on the other hand, most of us who have interacted with contact centers have had very negative experiences. Right. These are very manual, low NPS kind of areas of customer experience. And so maybe talk to us about why it's so important and why Cresta decided to start focused on the contact center.

When we got those initial results and like looked at the space, it was like, okay, how many people have this problem? And like, how big of a problem is this? Because the whole point is like, if you have a big picture, a big vision, that's a really difficult place to start because it's like so big that how do you even get adoption for it? How do you get things started? You always have to sort of narrow things down. You have to narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down. And at the end of the day, like, it doesn't matter what you think, it matters what is the value your customer is getting from you. Then you get the luxury and privilege to then execute on a vision if you start with some delivering value to your customers. And so the reason that we sort of started there is lots of pain, lots of opportunity where we could have immediate impact. It was like taking me like just in two or three weeks I'd be able to sort of just drive dramatic impact for these teams. And it's like, okay, clearly there's something here where we can start here and build something that gives us the luxury and privilege to be able to execute on longer term vision. And then every company I was just looking at, every single company in the world has a contact center because every company has conversations with their customers. And so it was a little bit like, I remember reading about Patrick and John and Stripe in the early days where like it felt like a little bit like people avoided the payments problem because it was schlep lineness is what Paul Graham used to say. And it felt to me like nobody I knew that was smart wanted to go work in the contact center because it seemed like a super unsexy place to go work. But it was like, wow, there's like every company in the world has this problem. No one sort of says that they do a great job at it. And like we have a product or something that can deliver value like, quickly and immediately. It's like, this seems like a big opportunity to be able to go execute on something big. And so that was kind of the thinking I had or the path down that I had.

One of the interesting things I think is quite remarkable about Cresta is, is from day one, you focused on working with the very largest enterprises in the world. And as you said, every enterprise has a contact center. But the scale of contact centers that Crest is working with is very, very large. The company launched out of stealth in early 2020. Since then, you've begun working with many customers across verticals that are operating these very large contact centers. I have two questions related to that. The first is, how did you get your first customer? You rolled out of the Stanford AI Lab. You had proven these amazing results, and you, Tim and Sebastian, started Cresta. And how'd you convince these large enterprises to partner with you on such an integral part of their business? It's a funny story.

It was clear that the biggest market by far was in the enterprise, because the enterprise had the largest customer facing contact center operations. And it was the biggest place where you could just have huge impact and huge value. And because of the amount of data in terms of conversations, where artificial intelligence would have just the biggest impact, it's like, clearly that's a place that we're. If we start there, we're going to have the best product, the best customers, and ultimately the largest market that we can start with. So that was tricky. And so the thinking there was like, I actually remember at the time, like, looking at all these things and like, okay, what is the advice that Y Combinator has? And Y Combinator at the time has a blog post about, like, don't go for enterprise. Don't start with enterprise. Because it's like just, it's a fool's inn to start an enterprise. And so. But the approach, I knew that was a market that we need to go into, and that's the market where we need to start into, because that's where our product would have the most value. So I actually did a bunch of cold emails prospecting and ended up sending a cold email to Scott Cook, who was the founder of a company called intuit massive, like TurboTax, all the products that they make. After he gave a lecture, and I just sort of mentioned some of the PhD work I've been doing, some of the results I had, and I asked him if he had, like, some time, 30 minutes to go, sort of just talk it through and give me some advice on some things. And, like, he was super busy and he said, like, look, I'm super busy, I can't do this. But like, here's 30 minutes with my CIO. Go meet him, he can help. So I got a 30 minute meeting with the CIO, I'm intuit. And so I show down in Mountain view, still a PhD enrolled PhD student at Stanford. And I'm sort of going down. I have my PhD work, my results. Like, you know, just like the way you presented lab meetings I had. It's funny, but, like, that's the stuff I had. So I went down, sort of walked him through some of my results, what I've been doing, the value, the impact. And he said, like, this is great. Like, this is excellent. Like, we're becoming an AI company. This is like a key part of our mission to how do we use artificial intelligence to help our employees be better? And this is all fantastic. And so I said, awesome. Like, this is a fit, like right here, I want to work with you, you want to work with me. And I said, great. Like, I want to start a company here. So, like, would you be willing to sort of be like a first customer, early adopter of the technology? And he kind of looked at me for a second and he just looked at me and he's like, We're a Fortune 500 company with the nation's financial data in our systems. We can't work with one person. Companies like, you can't do that. But if you want to sign up as an intern, you're welcome to sign up as an intern. He basically offered me an internship, and I was like, huh, okay. So I took that and decided, okay, I'll take him up on the offer. So I signed up as an intern at Intuit, got access to their systems, got access to their data, went in, built the initial systems, the models, the software, all these things, and deployed to this team out in Tempe, Arizona. And so flags of Tempe, Arizona, that's where the call centers were, got the very first person using the product. And then he loved the product so much, he got the other people at that team to start using it. They adopted the product. And then when that team was like seeing great results, where their performance, Dakota went from 80% to quota to 160% to quota. They were like, okay, we need to expand this to another team. And so then they expanded Cresta to a second, much larger team. And so then that's when I went back to Scott and the CIO and said like, hey, like, thank you so much for the Opportunity, but, like, this is becoming like a bigger thing and like, you don't really want to intern supporting this project. And like, it makes sense to like, sign a SaaS contract with a business or a company. And so basically we came to an agreement where we have a standard SaaS contract, but the last clause of the contract is basically, this contract hereby terminates adnoms internship into it. And so then I signed as a CEO of Cresta and as Internet Intuit. And so it's funny because every time we do a renewal, I have to sign as both for that particular our first customer. But it's obvious a reminder of that experience.

We've heard many stories around landing the first customer, especially in enterprise. I think that going and signing up as an intern and then converting that into an enterprise deal is an incredible example of customer centricity. And I think the next time we have a new founder who's scared of breaking into the enterprise, Ed, I will, I will make sure to refer them to you so you can, you can.

Walk through how you did it.

Okay, so going back. So Intuit, your first customer started with a meeting with the cio. You showed him what you could do in the context of the same way you had shown in the lab with the lab results. Now, fast forward several years. I think last week Cresta had a very big product announcement, sort of coincident with the big funding news. Maybe talk about where the product is today and what are customers buying, how are they deploying it and how are they driving value from it?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, like, that sort of transition or that journey from that point to now is really the fundamental transition that you sort of have as CEO, which is like the switch from a founder to CEO. And how much of the business are you driving by hustle? And how much of the business are you driving by building a machine? I mean, what I'm excited about now is that, like, we launched Crest of Voice and it's just like every single customer sort of has been asking us for this for a while. We've deployed to early sets of customers, and they're just having tremendous, amazing results. And it's because, like, at the end of the day, like, everyone recognizes that there's an opportunity to be better in these conversations they have with their customers. We started with digital and chat, and we started with these products, and they were seeing the value immediately. It was really quick to get to value. They would see the value immediately. And they renew and expand to other business units and other use cases. And the first question on Everyone was like, can you help me with voice? Like, that's my lion's share of customer contacts. And so we've been working hard at it. It's a much harder problem because you got to solve a lot of fundamental R and D problems in terms of latency for speech attacks, in terms of being able to provide behavioral prints, hints and prompts in a way that's consumable by the agent. But the team's been working really, really hard and really solving these key design and AI and UX problems. And we've got into it and I think we have an amazing product that was excited to launch yesterday. We're already seeing really fantastic results with companies like earthlink who are seeing these things. And it's like, it's just the start for where we're headed as a business.

One of the things I'm curious about is how you think about the engineering challenges here. And you just mentioned some of them, like particularly around voice, getting the prediction latency down so it feels real time. And that's one center. I think the other piece that I've always found really interesting kind of connects back to something you said earlier and I think you said when you were starting Cresta back at the lab at Stanford. Kind of one hypothesis you and your co founders had was the market's view of the impact AI could have was quite narrow and it was really focused on automation, so taking kind of low hanging fruit use cases and automating them away. And your hypothesis was actually there's a lot more to be gained by building AI systems that can work with humans and make humans more effective. Can you talk a little bit about that? It's such a unique thing to see an AI company in the market building software that really augments and works alongside humans. And then the thing I'm curious about from an engineering and product challenge perspective is how do you do that? Like how do you build a system that someone, you know sitting at Intuit or sitting at earthlink working in a contact center environment, wants to interact with and can effectively interact with that sort of strategy.

That approach came from a few different things. One is just the realization that the combination of humans and AI is ultimately going to result in something superior than the individual. And then the second thing is just like if you look at the state of conversational intelligence or conversational AI, we are not at the level where we understand the fundamentals of language enough to deliver human level conversations. And so whenever folks tried with the approach of automation first, they just ended up with just poor Experiences and sort of just frustrating experiences, to be honest. Our approach was like, look like the best, like in any market, any opportunity, any technology is like, not sort of bringing things down to the lowest common denominator and trying to sort of solve it for the lowest common denominator. But what is like the best, like working take the technology, the product, and ultimately result in the best. In this case, what is the best conversation possible? And how can we leverage what we have, the tools in front of us, which is like amazing advances in artificial intelligence and nlp and also just the amazing things that humans are amazing at. And how do you just get to a point where conversations are better, where companies have more empathetic, more effective, more efficient conversations with their customers? And so that was the approach that we took. It's a different approach. But ultimately, like, what we think is that once you get to that point, once you, like, really make every single conversation excellent, then you have just all kinds of things you can do and all kinds of things that open up as opportunities. Then sort of starting with the lowest common denominator automation type task.

I want to zoom up from Cresta 30,000ft and just talk about what's happening in the market. And Cresta today works with large enterprises across verticals, right? SaaS, companies like Intuit, financial services companies, retail companies, automotive companies, Zed. I want you to rewind to March 2020. You're the CEO of Cresta. Cresta is focused on serving these verticals. Contact center is a core part of customer experience. But obviously the physical retail and physical is also a very big part of how your customers interact with, with their end customers. And, you know, March 2020, the pandemic begins and all of that comes to a halt. What happened? Like, how did customers who were so reliant on retail and physical channels adapt? And what do you think sort of customer experience looks like looking forward, hopefully coming out of the pandemic this year in the new normal?

I think one thing I think just to be or the American system should be proud about is just the dynamism of the economy, where, like sort of we just had whole functions, whole parts of the world just shut down. But somehow we managed a way to sort of keep going and keep doing business, figuring out a different way to interact, to transact, to do things. And that's remarkable. I think few economic systems have that kind of resiliency to be able to sort of have major parts of the system cut off and be able to do that. And I think, like, really our partners were like, super super innovative and intuitive about where does the customer expect to meet them. Now there's all kinds of places where sort of the interaction shifted from purely retail in person interactions to entirely digital interactions over messaging or voice. And companies pivot amazingly, and companies that did that correctly, they succeeded tremendously. And they sort of did that in a really effective way. I remember actually in the beginning of the pandemic, you forwarded me a note from one of our customers, Sleep number, their transcript, their earnings transcript. And in that transcript, sort of. Actually it's interesting because sleep number had shifted from an entirely retail focused operation to a operation where they were selling and supporting all the mattresses and products over phone and phone and digital. And so they presented their Q1 earnings just at that time in March to Wall street and they exceeded analyst expectations for what the revenue of the business would be. And they actually attributed that revenue expectation beat to phone and digital over performance in phone and digital channels. At the same time, they had brought us in and we had shown a 24% increase in revenue per conversation for their digital channels and conversation. And so like being able to sort of drive and see that impact. So first of all see that from our side where we can improve the impact of revenue and then see that impact the ultimately the stock price of the company. Help Shelley, who's the CEO of Sleep Number, help her beat her quarter and ultimately help her increase her stock price by 30% and ultimately increase the GDP of the United States. I mean, that was just so exciting. Just that moment when it's like the recognition that you built a technology that sort of, sort of not only is making individual people productive, but is actually fundamentally increasing the GDP of the country because you're improving productivity of like one of the core functions of a business. That was awesome. That was cool to see. But we saw that, we saw that play out across many different industries, many different customers who sort of have become top level strategic priorities. Like another one of our partners, Porsche, which is this amazing partner, recognized that like all their storerooms are like now just seeing one tenth of volume that they saw pre pandemic, right? So they're really investing at the CEO level, like strategically, how do we get the best at digital experiences and how do we sort of convey the Porsche brand and the Porsche experience across not just our retail operations, but across our digital experiences with phone and digital and messaging and all these things. And how, how can we leverage artificial intelligence to do that, to sort of not just automate the basic things, but ultimately get to like the Porsche experience? What is the best possible conversation to have there. And so that's what we saw. And I think that's just a testament to our economic system and testament to the innovation ingenuity of all our partners and customers that we're able to sort of pivot like that and sort of work in this brave new world.

Yeah, those are excellent anecdotes and I think two things you kind of alluded to really resonate with me. One is I completely concur. It was amazing just to see the dynamism in our economy and in these companies, you know, specifically like and sleep number is just such an interesting one because if you think about any company that relies on retail presence for their business, physical retail presence, selling mattresses, where, you know, folks want to come in, they want to lie down, they want to try the mattress that's at the very core. And for that business to completely reinvent the way it maintains relationships and with its customers in such short order is incredible. And we've seen that happen across verticals. And then I think the second piece which ties into that is just the opportunity companies like Cresta have to help drive that transformation. And it's really, you need both of those pieces. You need forward thinking organizations that recognize that they can use innovation to adapt to new worlds. And then you need companies like Cresta that can bring the expertise on the solution side to partner and get them there. So it's really interesting and powerful anecdotes. I want to spend the last few minutes of our conversations, Ed, talking about how you're building Cresta as a company, because I think there's several things you do that as I've observed you, I've learned a lot from and I think are very distinctive. And I want to start with building an AI native company. Zed, you often talk about, you know, Cresta, from day one has been building AI products and has architected the company in a way to deliver AI products that improve over time. Maybe talk to our audience about what that means and what does it really mean to build an AI native company.

I think the whole industry for artificial intelligence is already providing impact, but it's still so nascent. Like what we've done is barely scratch the surface of what's possible with artificial intelligence. And so what we're doing is by focusing on this, focusing on artificial intelligence and then building basically the core, like what is the core value the company delivers and focusing on what is that core value and how does artificial intelligence deliver that value and then building all the necessary pieces of software and Enterprise software around it to sort of be useful and consumable by the customer. That's a very different company than a company that tries to sort of build software and then tries to bolt on AI features into that software. Because it's just a different mindset and different approach to how you approach a problem. Because at the core of it, an AI company lifeblood includes the data, the way you sort of provide and deploy these models and provide value to customers. And it has to start at that. Like, the data is a product, the product is the data. And if you do that right, then you sort of have folks that are focused on that, focused on delivering value to customers. It's a little bit of a different mindset than sort of a standard, what I would say, software company that sort of tries to build an AI feature that becomes a key piece of the company. And I think the second thing is just like you're also at the end of the day, I think that the unique thing that AI company has is that there's rarely been a case where you have a software company that can so directly tie to business outcomes that the customer is looking to achieve. Where like, with artificial intelligence, like, the business outcome is literally, you tell me what you want to do. Do you want to increase sales? Do you want to reduce, like sort of call handle time? Do you want to sort of reduce churn? And then like, we can tune and train our models to sort of drive for that business outcome and deliver that business outcome. And so the unique thing is that the whole company can be aligned to deliver on the business outcome for the company customer. And you can do that in a highly repeatable, productized way. And so then that becomes like a unique opportunity where it's like no longer this kind of thing where you see an enterprise software companies where like engineering is off in this world, sort of building sort of a product that throw over the wall and tell sales to go sell. And sales are going to try to figure out, okay, how do we make this product work and deliver business outcomes? How do we map customer pain to these things? It's like, no, the whole company is aligned using from everything from the technology to the product to the marketing to sales, to sort of delivering for business outcomes for the customer. And that is a unique opportunity to build a company that's aligned that way. And I think that's one of the things that sort of makes a lot of the things that we do possible at Cresto.

I want to double click on that alignment and Zed, you often refer to kind of Two engines or core centers in the company. One is the engineering and product engine, and the other is sales and go to market. I want to talk about both of those. Let's start with engineering. I think one of the things that is distinct about Cresta, even from when the company was early and had in the tens of employees, was you had a large number of engineers on the team who were former founders and who were very entrepreneurial. And then the team has always worked in a kind of hyper customer centric way. Talk about how you build that center and how you build that culture.

We think of, like, the company and the team, like, as a lot of that engineering is entrepreneurial engineers. And it's like a lot of the way that Tim and myself and a lot of the early team, we view ourselves is that, like, yes, we're technical people, we built software, we did a PhD, all these things, but, like, we built the software, we built the initial product, but not only did we build the technology, we built the product, but then we also, like, figure out how to go sell it. And we sold the first set of customers, and we were in front of customers that made sure that they got it, they got the value, all these things. And I think, like, sort of being able to sort of one approach each function, each sort of piece of that journey with respect and curiosity, I think that's key. So if you recognize, like, none of those things is more important than the other, and you sort of build a culture on the fact that, like, look, we're gonna try to become the very best at every single piece of this customer journey. Everything from building the technology to the product, I think that's key. And so, like, for example, like, it was really common, actually. The first time, literally the first week that Tim and I met, we sort of had dinner. We decided to work together the next morning. We've been working together since then. The first week we decided, hey, we should really go to the call center. We should, like, like, try to understand everything that's happening. So we flew out, like, just next few days after we met, like, in terms of working together, we flew out to Las Vegas and just went and shadowed for a couple days. Like all kinds of call center agents understanding what was happening in their operations. And then we just made it part of the. Before the pandemic, we made it part of the company tradition where, like, we would literally fly out half the engineering team, three quarters of the engineering team, and we'd get an Airbnb next to a big call center site where our customers were and we just go, go there for a week and then we just basically talk to users in the morning, ship product at night, have a bunch of fun as well. But it was like such a key part of understanding like what is our customer, what do they want? And it's also super motivating because you understand your user in a way that's real because they're a person, they have a story and they have a life and they have kids and a family and all these things. You understand what is your product doing for them. And that's actually a big gap I think often in engineering teams where actually Karl Marx said this, right, like if you don't know what you're doing, like who is the person you're solving or delivering value to in the world, you sort of your work feels meaningless. And so being able to like actually meet the person and interact with them and talk to them and see, have them like tell you how excited and how this feature is like literally reducing the stress of their day to day and like making them happier as a person helping them beat their quota, like that's so meaningful for someone who's building a product. And I think that's such a key part of what our culture is and I'm really excited to get back to that. Once folks are vaccinated to be able to visiting regularly for these contact center sites.

Yeah, it's such a powerful practice and it connects to something you talk about often which is you want kind of consumer grade product and engineering in the enterprise. And I think it's easy for or it's easier for folks who are building consumer products because they're end users themselves. They can talk to their friends who are end users. But by flying your team out to the customer site, you replicate the same tightness of feedback loop before an enterprise product. It's super unique. How about on the go to market and sales side? How are you building that part of the company and what are some things that differentiate the sales and go to market culture?

At Cresta, I think again like it all starts with curiosity, respecting every single function within the company and every single job that someone shows up at Cresta to do. Like everyone is showing up to do a job and everyone's looking to be amazing at what they do. And it has to start with a stop. So it has to start with you selling yourself. And like if you sell yourself, you gain some empathy for what the sales process is and how important it is. Our first customer was called email. So it's pipeline generation. And I think pipeline generation and prospecting is a fundamental part of sales. And people call like the calisthenics of sales where like if you're good at prospecting into customers, it's like the fundamentals of sort of staying tip top as athlete. And I think that's a fundamental piece. Like if you have like this engineering culture that's built around the customer and built around the outcomes of the customer customer seeing with super talented, amazing engineers that understand the customer and have empathy for the customer. And you build a sales team around people that aren't just like sort of laid back, but are sort of prospecting actively pipeline generating into accounts, hunting into sort of these customers. Those are the two engines of the business almost where if you get those two things right, you can get a lot of other things wrong and still build an amazing business. And things can layer on top of that, where you can layer marketing and product and all these pieces on top of those two engines. But if you get that sort of leaned in forward thinking prospecting, pipeline, generation for sales and a very customer centric approach to engineering, it's this beautiful machine that sort of starts turning. The one thing is that I think unfortunately a lot of sort of people view sales or go to market or technical CEOs, they disrespect or they don't have the respect for go to market that they should. I think, I think that's a disservice. I think like really understanding the craft and the art and the science of sales and marketing and what makes someone really good, I mean that's one of the funnest things I think for that CEO job is just understanding these things, understanding what makes someone truly excellent. And how do you do this the very best way possible. I think that's one authentic when you're leading people and it's like something that motivates and is inspiring. And so I think like that sort of thing ties and helps sort of create a team that's just always approaching each day. How do we get better? How do we become the best across the company?

Absolutely. As you think about continuing to grow and scale this machine, as you said, one topic on a lot of founders minds and startup employee minds is how work is going to look coming out of COVID and coming out of the pandemic, hopefully over the coming months. How are you thinking about Cresta and building Cresta in this new normal as we exit Covid and enter the next chapter.

So I think about this obviously a lot and all these pieces on these things. And for me personally I think like for example, so I spent a lot of time with my parents in Pakistan for most of my life, right. So if I think of a home, right, I think like I have a sense of physical sense of belonging, right? Where, okay, that's like when I think when someone says, hey, are you gonna go home? Like I have a physical sense of like my parents, my bedroom, all these things. And I think that's so that's such a key part of a bond and sort of like this sort of connection that you have with people is, is that sense of physical location. And so like I do think like hybrid approach, like a hybrid work approach is, is the right way in the future. But I do think sort of a physical location is just so ingrained to us in our sort of, in our psychology and our brains. Like people have done these studies, the rats, where like you sort of put them in these mazes, right, and you sort of, they have these place cells, right, and they, they can actually sort of, you can put treats and all these things all over the place, but they'll still always have a few set of neurons that are dedicated to what was the home position position and like where was that position is, and then know how to navigate back to that home position from like wherever you sort of modify that. And so there's something fundamental about sort of knowing like a physical location, being able to tie to it and sort of that being the heart and soul of a place. And so like that's for us, we're gonna, we're gonna sort of put down, have a three or five year lease on office space in San Francisco because it's such a key part of, I think what, what sort of becomes a part of the company experience. And we'll be a hybrid company for approach. But I mean it's going to be a place where it has to be beautiful. It has to be a place that people enjoy, people enjoy coming to. People sort of see it as this gorgeous, amazing place. I'm not going to say where it is because we have to still sign the lease before anyone else competes with us to get the lease. But it's just, it's just such a key part and such an iconic part of I think what's going to make Cresta special. So that's one of the things we're doing. For example, we're investing in that and we're going to continue investing in that as part of the company.

I'm excited to see the new office Zed. I think the Cresta offices that I've been to Both your most recent one in San Francisco and the one before that in Palo Alto always had a very unique, as you said, soul and energy to them, and I'm excited to see that back getting up and running, hopefully this summer. This has been an awesome conversation. I actually want to end with one last question related to this, which is I remember in the fall of 2019, when we were spending time together in your office discussing partnering on your series A. In addition to the soul and energy and excitement that was at the office, there was a painting from Diego Rivera that you had in the office. And that painting is important to you, and I think it's important to Cresta. I'd love for you to share with our listeners what that painting is and what it means to you and the company, and that'd be a great place to close this conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. I remember that fondly. We'd spent hours talking about the future of Cresta and all these things. It was awesome. Yeah. So, like, that painting is actually. So it's Diego Ver's mural. He was commissioned to basically paint the Ford Motor Company in the early 1900s, first half of the 1900s, where he was commissioned to paint what does the Ford Motor Company look inside? So this beautiful, like, massive mural that's in Detroit that you can see, it's like he painted of this place and he did this where he would paint people at work. So he did all kinds of a series of places of people at work. And Diego Rivera is a communist by. He was a communist by political ideology. And so he sort of viewed, like, what is people's experience at work and like, how to experience it. And he sort of did this set of paintings. He actually has a few in San Francisco as well at the Coit Tower. They're absolutely gorgeous. But the thing that always stuck about me, and I've sort of taken that painting to everywhere I got it originally doing the PhD at Stanford, sort of put it up as probably the only piece of art I had at my graduate dorm. But then I took in every place I've gone for the last five or so years. It basically, Ford built the motor company to be like innovation factory, where, like, the whole thing was set up to be these set of experiments where people were empowered to sort of say, hey, if there's a better way to build a car, we can try it and we can save time on it and we can sort of do that more effectively, and then let's go build that. So, like, the innovation for the assembly line, it came up because someone Came up with idea. They saw a butcher shop and they saw a butcher sort of moving meat and cattle through through assembly line. They said, hey, if we did that, it would save a bunch of time in terms of moving parts from one end to the other. And so they innovated, they got that and it actually saved seven minutes of production time for every car. And then they figured out, hey, if we sort of hang drills up by pulleys instead of having people bend over to pick them up from the ground in these areas, if you held it at their height, that saves four seconds off every bolt that's screwed in. And that ends up being two minutes on the line. And so you get these massive improvements by just running these experiments. And the whole thing became this massive thing about how do you dramatically enhance product productivity of people building car. And so like within four years able to quadruple the productivity. And ultimately they were able to sort of 100x productivity of producing a car where a car couldn't be built before efficiently could now be built in a way that's affordable and affected by the middle class. But that's always been an inspiration to me because I think it's one. It's an empowerment of like sort of ideas and like the power that ideas can have and the core technology can have in the way people work and how much more productive it can be. And then the thing is like the car was like you had this assembly line technology that made people more productive. But then that was a fundamental technology that then had huge second order impacts on society. Where now cars could be used to sort of drive from point A to point B, where you could go to restaurants and visit friends and roads are built and highways are built. And it just all started with a fundamental sort of piece of technology that dramatically enhanced the productivity of someone in the factory. And the way society functioned was built was the same. And so like when personally when I was dropping out, when I had to make the decision to drop out of Stanford to start Cresta, I had to make a phone call to my dad. That was the one phone call I was not looking forward to because he's conservative father, which is awesome as well in many ways. But I had to sort of explain I needed to gain conviction that, okay, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna have this conversation. And there's the same time that I was reading Ford's biography and also the same time that I got this mural as sort of gave me conviction that, hey, if I believe that fundamentally artificial intelligence as a technology is going to dramatically improve the productivity of people at work, then the same thing that happened with the car and actually happened 100 years before that with the Reaper will happen as well. Where it might feel like an unsexy technology to go work on call center tech and sort of start there, but the second order impacts of making people much more productive have just so much impact on society and so much impact on how we live and work and play as humans that it was just like, this is clearly what I should go work on. And so for me, artificial intelligence is that it's the assembly line for office work, where we're making people 100 times as effective and 100 times as productive. And I think I'm just really excited for what the world will look like when we can unlock that potential where we're not spending busy work. Yeah.

What a great story. That reinforces the mission and opportunity ahead for Cresta. And I hope your dad is listening to this and happy that you made that phone call to him. Zed, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for joining us. And thanks everyone, for tuning in to this episode of Gray Matter.