The On-Demand Enterprise with Greylock's Jerry Chen & Spoke CEO Jay Srinivsan | Greymatter

Hi everybody, I'm Jerry Chen, general partner at Greylock and welcome to our podcast, Grey Matter. Today we're talking to Jay Srinivasan, CEO and co founder of spok, a Greylock portfolio company, and the company defining this on demand workplace. Today we're going to talk about the on demand enterprise as a whole, the on demand workplace and what's really happening in our day to day work environment. And we're talking about lessons Jay can share with our audience about building. Spoke about identifying this need and really building this defining company that balances enterprise needs with consumer expectations. Jay, welcome.

Thanks for having me, Gerry.

So let's first talk about this trend, this on demand trend. And 10, 15 years ago we saw as investors and founders this trend of the consumerization of it. What was that trend 15 years ago? How do you define that?

Yeah, I think first of all, everyone has a slightly different definition of the consumerization of it. The way I thought about it, it basically has three components. Component number one is the user experience interacting with tools in your business life versus tools in your personal life. You're used to fast, easy to use visually attractive tools in your personal life. Why in the world am I using old clunky software at work? Right. So consumerization of it. I think there's an aspect of IT which is just around user experience. The second aspect of consumerization of it that I relate to is access and the purchasing ability of tools. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you would go through a year long RFP procurement process to get something versus now you're able to essentially go try out three tools online and choose one. Right. So this sort of democratization of who in an organization can find and use tools is a second part of consumerization of it. And then the third is sort of specificity. Previously I would have to buy one suite to do everything in my company, versus now I get to essentially take bite sized chunks. And so when I think about consumerization of it, it's those three things.

Yeah. And I think that second one as an investor is super powerful. I always talk about product go to market fit and distribution channels. And that whole idea of individuals are what I call Persona led marketing. Persona led sales really changed. So instead of the IT or the CIO deciding what tools to buy, I can go to a browser, get some SaaS application, I go to a mobile app store, download the app I want as a developer, as a productivity worker, as a designer. And we have companies up and down that spectrum right now. And it's really that developer Persona that really Pioneered what we're calling this on demand enterprise. Amazon's cloud, I can't believe, is 10, 11 years old now. I can't imagine a day we didn't live in this cloud world, but developers used to have to provision. That was my first job, racking servers in a data center. But instead of taking weeks or months to get procurement and it to set up a rack of servers, I could go to the cloud, spin up a VM or an Amazon instance on demand, and really within minutes have a whole compute infrastructure. And actually your first company was part of this on demand cloud experience, right? Tell us about Appurify.

Before spoke, I was one of the co founders and CEO of a company called App Purifying. We had built essentially infrastructure that allowed you to test your mobile apps on real iOS and Android devices. So talking about racking stuff, we literally had data centers where we'd have hundreds and hundreds of phones and USB cables and servers where we'd have these real physical phones. And if you were building an app, you wanted to make sure that it worked on every flavor of Android and every form factor, or it worked on every version of iOS. And we essentially provided on demand the ability to say, look, I want to test this app on these 20 device SKUs versus the sort of previous approach where I would literally have to physically go buy phones, have them in a drawer in my office, they're never charged, charge them up and then test the app versus with app Purify, it was basically an API through which I could push my app and then boom, it would test and I get results back.

It's really this API interface to the cloud that Amazon pioneered. And now we see in Stripe Twilio, there's a whole bunch of services now I can get on demand in the cloud world. But this on demand expectation started on the consumer side, right? It started with information. If I wanted to know something or had a question, I would just Google it and instantaneously, on demand, I would get an answer. And then the past five, six, seven years has seen this revolution of this consumer on demand experience. If I need a car ride, I call Lyft and Uber within five minutes I have a ride. If I'm hungry, I can call doordash and get food. If I want, you know, a dog walker, I can call that on demand. If I want movies or TV shows to binge, I have Netflix, HBO Go, et cetera. And so all of a sudden, in my experience as a consumer, as I have this long and fat tail of services, again on demand and what we've been seeing as investors at Greylock is this service level of having on demand information, on demand services carry over to the enterprise side. And so my expectation for food, music and movies is on demand. My experience now for customer support should be on demand. And I'm on the board of company called Gladly that supports kind of on demand real time services blend. Another company we're invested in is going to change the mortgage application process for getting a mortgage for a home loan from 60 days to hopefully nearly instantaneous. Talk about the future on demand mortgages. And then obviously he spoke is defining this on demand workplace. And before we get into spoke, let's talk about the on demand experience now in the workplace and how the workplace changing. Why are we talking about the on demand workplace?

Yeah, I think your explanation of the consumer trends is spot on. So over the last five years there's sort of been this unprecedented growth in access to consumer services and is, if you think about these services, they all have three or four characteristics. The first is this notion of immediacy and convenience. It's instant gratification. I get the service or I get the data or the goods when I want it and on my schedule and it's convenient to get. That's one part of it. The second part of it is personalization. I log into Amazon or I log into the latest food app. It knows what I've asked for in the past, it knows my favorite restaurants, et cetera. The experience is personalized, it's curated for me. And then third is actually an important one as well, which is transparency. When I order an Uber or Lyft, I know exactly how long it's going to take for the car to come. I know when to leave the office or leave my house to go get in the car. And if you think of these three things, immediacy and convenience, personalization and transparency. Simply put, our definition of the on demand workplace is those consumer expectations have come to the workplace when I interact with my colleagues, when I look for knowledge or services within my company because I'm used to it now on the consumer side, I expect immediacy, I expect personalization, I expect transparency. That's what we're defining as the on demand workplace. This change in the expectation of your coworkers.

I love this framework you just described. Immediacy, personalization, transparency. And I think our expectations on how we deal with our services and our personal lives have been transformed the past five years by having these computers in our hands and Internet everywhere. And like I said before, how we Interact with brands at the store, brands online, or companies in the store, or companies online, be buying airplane tickets, food or returning goods. We want immediacy, we want transparency, we want personalization. It's that level of support and experience we want today. And we slowly but surely seen that wave transform how large companies, businesses interact with their customers. Consumers, yes, but we haven't really seen that yet in how they interact with their employees. Inside the four walls, it first changed how we interact with our customers. And as customers we've all benefited. And you just describe how our employees expect the same experience now when they go to work. Why do you think the workplace has been a little bit slower to adopt these changes?

I think it's a combination of structural. For example, hey, I understand that you expect immediate service, but I'm a single IT manager, for example, supporting 500 people across five time zones. There's only one me, right? So part of it is consumer access has come to the workplace, but the workplace is structurally not set up to do it. That's one part of it. The other part of it is straight up tools. The way we like to think about it, workplace tools are largely focused on process, not people. And hey, I need to check a bunch of tick boxes. Not hey, I'm thinking about how my colleagues actually want to interact with me or how they're trying to go about their day to day job. So it's a combination of people, structural access issues that aren't keeping up with consumer based demands. And then the tools that they have and as we talk about spoke, those are obviously things that I'd love to dig into.

So this point around people centric versus process centric, it is super fascinating and we've seen how that has grown up inside the workplace. We have what we historically call systems of record, be it hr, it, erp, whatever systems that really is the database of the information. And then you have the existing IT systems built around these systems of record and they're really around a process. Could be hire to fire for hr, it could be order to cash for consumer business or commerce business. And they're really, when you think about these processes, they're automating what was a paper workflow in the enterprise for many, many years and not really think about how individuals want to work, interact and get information and get results. It's really automating paper moving around the office, but not really automating how you and I want to do your job in a better fashion. And so I think what we've seen with the 2019 and this trend going forward is we have the ability now as technologists to rethink about these processes. So they're not isolating these little silos of hr, IT, commerce, et cetera, but really think about how these processes should be. People centric, not process centric or database centric.

Totally agree. The way I like to think about it, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, the tools that you bought in the enterprise, you bought for the manager, you bought for the executive. They wanted reporting, they wanted the audit trail, they wanted to be able to provide financial reports. It wasn't for the, for example, the IT support team or the HR support team. It certainly wasn't for the end users. Five to 10 years ago, the trend with satisfaction of tools, with more specific tools, the trend moved from the manager to the, for example, in ticketing the support worker, what is the most convenient agent experience? Now the trend is, and this goes straight back to consumerization of it. Now the trend is what are the tools being built for the end user? Right? We're working our way down to the end user who at the end of the day is the person interacting that you're trying to serve with these tools. And so that's the trend that we're seeing. And here's the sort of implication of the on demand workplace. There will be winners and losers. And the point around the losing in the on demand workplace is being perceived as a workplace that's sluggish, that's antiquated. If I am used to lightning fast experiences in my consumer life, if I were to go into work and have this old interface on a tool and it takes seven days for someone to respond to me for something, you get perceived as antiquated and sluggish. And the difference between again five or ten years ago and now, just like what happens if I have a poor food ordering experience in the on demand economy, I choose another restaurant or I choose another app. There's fluidity now, there's choice given to the consumer. The same exact thing is going to happen in the workplace where if you're not adapting to the on demand workplace because you're not focused on the end user employee experience, they are going to go do it themselves. They're not going to wait for it to make sure the tool is secure and they can use it. They're just going to go download something and start using or not download, they're going to start using some SaaS tool. And I think that's the big implication of the on demand workplace for sure.

If my Uber takes five minutes, my Lyft is four minutes. I can't wait that extra 60 seconds. Or if my meal is going to take 22 minutes versus 15, I'm just switch apps.

There was an interesting discussion that I was looking at recently where, for example, in one of the popular food apps, they don't highlight the name of the restaurant anymore, they highlight the food item because you're actually disambiguating where the food is coming from versus what you're choosing. So yeah, Uber and Lyft are interchangeable to some degree. I want to get from point A to B. I will choose the service that's most convenient to me. Think about how that applies to the workplace.

So Jay, tell me what is Spoke.

Spoke makes it easier for people to get immediate access to knowledge and services within a company. The easiest way to think about Spoke is it is a modern ticketing system coupled with the knowledge base. So, for example, if I'm in an organization and I need help from it, or I need help from HR or marketing or design, Spoke is the system that you use to get access to that. And there are three pillars to how we've built Spoke. The first is to say, look, the existing ticketing systems out there tend to be cumbersome, tend to be hard to use, and very siloed in terms of the functions that can use them. For example, they're largely optimized for it. So the first part of Spoke is we're just a well designed, easy to use ticketing system for any team in a company. It's powerful enough for it, but hr, office management, marketing design can use. In addition, Spoke works wherever your colleagues work. So Spoke has arguably the best Slack integration for any ticketing system out there. You can talk to Spoke through Slack seamlessly. You don't always have to send an email or fill out a web form. Spoke also integrates with sms. So the first part of Spoke is a multi channel, easy to use, intuitive, fast, responsive, beautifully designed ticketing system. The second part of Spoke is a knowledge base that's integrated with our ticketing system in such a way that when you're answering something that you think is repetitive of hey, this question that Jerry just asked me, I'm sure Jill's going to ask me the same question. Spoke allows you to capture that knowledge seamlessly. And so our system learns based on what you've responded to in the past. And when things are repetitive, it's capturing that in its knowledge base and handling it for you automatically. So our machine learning is essentially learning who knows what in the company. As well as what the right answers is to things and when possible, tries to automatically respond. The third part of Spoke is how we integrate with the tools that you have in your workplace. So, for example, Spoke integrates with your HRIs. So when someone makes a request, you know exactly who they are, where they sit, who their manager is, et cetera. So sort of taking a step back to summarize what Spoke is, we are a modern ticketing system plus knowledge base and the sort of simple way to think about our core loop. Somebody in an organization needs access to knowledge and services. The first thing that we do is we're everywhere they are. So if they're on Slack, they can ask for help on Slack. If they're on email, they can send an email to Spoke. If they're on the road, they can send a text to Spoke, or they can use our intuitive web interface. One of two things is going to happen when they make that request. Spoke is going to intelligently say, hey, I've seen this question before. I've seen something similar. Here's the best answer. And that might help the coworker immediately, in which case, fantastic Spokes machine learning handled that request automatically. When Spoke doesn't know the answer or it's a service request, what Spoke does is it intelligently routes the request to the right team in your company, and it collects the information that you're going to have to go back and forth with that coworker for. So, for example, if someone's requesting a new laptop, Spoke will recognize that that's a new laptop request, know that it has to go to the IT team, but also make sure to ask you what model, how much memory you want, et cetera, provide all that information, the ticket. Once that request is handled, Spoke can potentially learn to handle it on its own in the future. And essentially, over time, as you go through this core loop, more and more requests are either automated or automatically triaged and sent to the right folks.

So let me just make this real. So I'm a workplace that uses Spoke. All my employees have instant access to information or getting results. So if I need a laptop, I type in Slack or email, hey, I need a laptop. And Spoke will ask back or respond via email, hey, what kind of laptop? Give me the specs. I tell them the laptop specs, MacBook Pro, et cetera, and then it'll automatically create a ticket for me. Or what happens?

Let's take three different scenarios. Scenario number one, something easy like, hey, someone's visiting my office, they need to get on the guest wi FI network. That's an example of something which is a super easy knowledge snippet. I might like go through our company knowledge base or I might walk by somebody's desk and ask them what the guest WI FI password is. In that scenario, the easiest thing to do with Spoke is probably just to go on Slack and say, hey, Spoke, what's the guest WI FI password? Spoke responds immediately. Fantastic. Let's take a second scenario where I want to know how to update my 401k. First of all, the first question I asked was an IT question. This is an HR question. We don't want the end user to have to go to seven different places for seven different things. They just go to Spoke. Spoke is smart enough to recognize that this is actually an HR request. And what Spoke is going to do is it's going to send that HR request to the HR team. When the HR team responds in Spoke to that ticket or request, they're going to say, look, other people are going to ask about the 401k, how to update the 401k, and it's actually a fairly standard process. Here's the link to our 401k tool on the page where you can update your contribution and they're going to respond to this first person that asked the question, but they're also going to tell Spoke to automatically handle it for them in the future. So guest WI FI password Spoke took care of for you. This 401k request spoke sent to the HR team, but the HR team taught Spoke to handle it in the future on its own. The third request, which is the laptop, is an interesting one, right? Because that's a service request. In that situation, Spoke's not going to be able to automatically handle the laptop. Not yet, at least not automatically able to handle ordering the laptop for you. But what it is going to do is know that it needs to go to the IT team and also know that the IT team is going to ask these seven questions. Let me collect that information for you and provide all that back to the IT manager. The point here, when someone doesn't need to work on repetitive stuff, Spoke will handle it for you. When it needs to collect information, it will collect that information and triage it and make sure it gets to the right person, all while providing ease of access, ease of use to the end user.

So that's amazing. From Slack or email or text Spoke and Answer it tickets or questions, HR tickets or questions, or processes and workflows like provisioning your laptop all in one place. Again, this is your Person centric, people centric, workplace versus process centric. Where in the past those were three or four different processes, three or four different apps that I as an employee had to interact with. Now it's just one, as we call it, system of intelligence across hr, IT and workflows.

Absolutely. A few things I want to point out here. 80% of Spoke's customers use Spoke with more than one team in their company. So it's one of the cool things about SPOK is the way we've built is not just for it. It is a powerful tool. It is feature equivalent to what you would expect from a sort of traditional IT ticketing system. So the SLAs and the routing rules and the audit requirements and the analytics we provide, but we've also built it in such a way that it's not just for it. So 80% of spoke customers use spoke with more than one team. 25% of spoke customers use us with more than five teams. That means they're not just using us for it and HR, they're using us for sales. Sales ops, marketing, office management, the design team. Any situation where your colleagues come to you because they need the same information over and over again or you provide some sort of service to them, Spoke is applicable, right? So that's one part of it. And previously this was handled in an organization in essentially three different ways. Method number one was a sort of traditional big iron ticketing system that IT used. Method number two was this sort of static centralized knowledge base which may or may not be up to date. You're hoping people go to. And then method number three was was post it notes. The design team didn't have a ticketing system. The office management team didn't have a ticketing system or knowledge base. They wouldn't even think of using the traditional IT ticketing system. We are stitching all of those together and providing a single pane of glass to the end user to say when I need knowledge or services, I go to Spoke and then Spoke will either handle it for me or find the right person.

So Jay, what is the on demand workplace? What are the requirements and how we define what an on demand workplace is?

So going back to this theme around immediacy and convenience, personalization and transparency, our definition of the on demand workplace consists of two components, the end user experience and the agent or the support team experience. In the on demand workplace, employees or your coworkers have immediate access to the knowledge and services that help them get their job done. For your co workers who are part of support teams Like IT hr, the on demand workplace is a workplace where they're able to provide timely assistance to their colleagues. They're able to use things like machine learning to handle the repetitive stuff so that they don't have to do the same things over and over again. And they're able to spend time on the creative, more value add activities. Right. So it's a two sided coin in terms of how the employees perceive the on demand workplace and how your support teams are able to support the on demand workplace.

But this paradigm of employees in the workplace and their support teams or managers that try to enable them to be successful, that carries throughout every function. So we've seen this in legal, in finance, not just HR IT or support, but pretty much every line of business in your enterprise or marketing, sales, it, HR compliance, it's all transforming because there's all employee populations that need information, tools and requests to make their day to day jobs more productive and faster. And today it's either incomplete or very slow in creating this friction inside the workplace. So what we're seeing as investors is every function inside the enterprise will become on demand.

Absolutely, every function will become on demand. And you have tools like Slack and Zoom that essentially at the end of the day, what do Slack and Zoom do? They provide you a curated view of your workplace and they provide immediate access to your colleagues. So company wide, you have tools like Slack and Zoom providing immediate access on a vertical by vertical or function by function basis. They are adapting to on demand requirements. Spoke is sort of taking the view of you need a system that stitches all this together. So yes, Legal might have this fantastic system where when I need an NDA, a system provides it to me automatically. But here's the problem. If I am a salesperson that needs an NDA once a year, I probably don't know where to go to get that on demand experience from Legal. That's why you need a system like Spoke. When you don't know where to go for information, you go to Spoke and then Spoke will find that and bring it back to you. And the cool thing here is once someone teaches it. Yeah, when you need an NDA, this is the API call or this is the portal that you go to for an immediate NDA. Spoke learns it to handle it for you the next time.

So Jay, why should a CEO care about the on demand workplace?

So there are a few reasons why they should care. For one, employees are happier in the on demand workplace. They get immediate access to the knowledge and services they need to get their job done. So that's part of it employee experience. The flip side is if you don't adapt to the on demand workplace, your tools or your support functions are perceived as sluggish and antiquated. There's an expectation of immediacy and you're not providing that. In addition though, what ends up happening is that you run the risk of people going around you going around the support functions and either running with potentially inaccurate or outdated information or even setting up things like shadow it where they'll just go purchase a tool because it didn't get back to them fast enough.

So what I'm hearing, Jay, is really three things. Employee satisfaction or delight. Two is speed. You can basically move your business at the speed of on demand in terms of getting answers or resources quicker. And third is cost. And cost is either a making my reps or support reps or managers more productive because I can support more employees, or also just managing costs in general because without transparency or immediacy, I run the risk of shadow it. Or people spending things beyond budget or. Or people replicating efforts or costs.

Absolutely.

So you guys did some research on the on demand workplace. What did the data tell you?

Yeah, so we just released a report on employee requests in the on demand workplace. And first of all, one of the cool things about this data is it's based on aggregated data across all of our customers. We're at the stage now where we have hundreds of customers generating thousands and thousands of tickets on a weekly basis. And taking an abstracted view of all this data actually points to really interesting trends. There's some cool things like people tend to go to IT first thing in the week, they tend to go to HR later in the week, they go to it at 10 o' clock in the morning, they go to HR at 2:30 in the afternoon. So there are some cool, interesting snippets like that. But as it relates to the on demand workplace, there are basically three things that really jump out. The first is the gap between employee expectations and actual service delivery time. So we looked at an external survey of hundreds of IT ticketing systems and the average time to handle an IT incident across these hundreds of companies that were surveyed, not unspoke hundreds of companies that were surveyed was something like seven hours. So it took seven hours, seven business hours, seven work hours on average to resolve a IT incident. When we went and surveyed employees, what is your expectation of how quickly you want to respond? The average was much closer to five hours. So seven hours is what's being delivered. Employees expect five hours. And then we Looked at the spoke data, an IT team on average at spoke resolves issues in four hours. HR teams resolve issues in two hours. So that's probably the first data point that I really want to point out. And by the way, this 7 hours is how long it took for IT teams to respond. Their SLA is usually 24 hours, which is completely not aligned with what employees actually expect. So that's Data point number one. The second data point, when given the option, 70% of tickets in Spoke go through Slack. So previously, when you're using a traditional ticketing system, you had to send an email, you had to maybe fill out a web form. When they started using Spoke and our Slack integration, 70% of the requests started coming through Slack. That's what people preferred. They expected to just be able to go like they were chatting to a colleague to go request something from it or something from HR. The third thing is around the repetition. 30% of all requests that spoke saw were repetitive and 15% were word to word repetitive. It was literally the same words over and over again. And all of these teach me that one. In the on demand workplace, you need to align with employee expectations, but you also need to use techniques like machine learning to handle the repetitive stuff to give you your time back and also provide convenient, easy ways to get in touch with you. Like a robust integration with Slack.

That's fascinating. Just the fact that it gives you a support level commitment of 24 hours and they supply an answer in seven hours. They think they're doing good.

They think they're crushing it. Yeah.

But the reality is they're failing because employees need five hours or sooner response. And so even though they think they're crushing the stated goal, they're really missing the goal, which is how to make your employees productive by 20, 30%, exactly two hours out of seven hours. And it's interesting that 30% of the requests are seen as spoke or repetitive, which just shows you that if you had the system intelligence to automate a bunch of these workplace requests, you can actually make things instantaneous.

Exactly.

So let's talk about how Spoke is being used by some of our customers right now. Give us an example of a spoke customer that is really leading this on demand workplace charge. And what have they seen the results to be?

Yeah, so when we look across our customer base. So for example, companies like Doordash or Allbirds, Stockx, Evernote, Anki, Glossier, the characteristics of these organizations is they've adapted to the on demand workplace. They are extremely focused on employee experience. They're all incredibly successful companies that are growing really quickly. They have distributed workforces in different time zones with different rules. They're essentially living the requirements of the on demand workplace on a day to day basis. And one, these customers are incredibly happy with Spoke. And when we actually ask them why, when we talk to them, they essentially bring up three things. The first is actually they don't say on demand, they don't say machine learning, they say simplicity, they say ease of use. One of the primary reasons companies are thrilled with using Spoke is the ease of use of the system. So we provide for example, all the functionality that you need in an IT ticketing system, but we do it in a wrapper that allows you to get through tickets 80% faster because it's so convenient, so easy to use. They also love our Slack integration, the threading that we provide in Slack. Recognizing that there's no point in constantly asking your colleagues to go file a ticket or send an email if they're going to talk to you on Slack. That's how you should be able to interact with them. And then finally, of course, the time savings that they get from the machine learning as well.

So these workplaces either had an existing IT ticking system or they had nothing in place for hr, office facilities, et cetera. And they really wanted two things. One, this whole engagement through Slack and this conversational user experience. But more importantly, they wanted this on demand experience for immediacy for their employees, to make them more productive.

Yeah, so there are typically a few characteristics that apply to our happiest customers. One, more often than not they are using some sort of chat tool. Something like a third of our customers don't have Slack because in that case they're still getting bombarded by requests through email, web interface people walking by your desk. But chat tends to be a common characteristic. The second actually has to do with fragmentation of knowledge in their company. If you think about again how things have changed over the last five years. Five years ago I might have had one company Wiki or one company SharePoint folder. Now the answers to things are spread out across hundreds of Google Docs or Office 365 docs. They're spread out across a bunch of different tools. So getting a handle of this fragmentation of tools and knowledge is a critical part of it. Third common characteristic is either growth or distributed workforces as well.

So Jay, tell me about the Inception story. What inspired you to start and found spoke with your co founders?

I'm fortunate enough to be able to have started spoke with my co founders, Dave Kaneda, And Prathush Patnaik. So Dave, Prathyush and I were at Google after selling Appurify to Google and a few different things happened. One, I think personally we really, really enjoyed the act of creating something from scratch. And Google was a lovely place to work, but figuring something out from scratch was important to us. And so we were pretty sure we wanted to start a company again as we actually thought about the problems that we wanted to solve. I like to think of Google as both a muse as well as a place where we saw a pain point. The 30 folks from App Purify that joined Google, we were looking for information and we didn't know where to go for things. And it's such a common experience when someone joins a company, they have no idea where to go for stuff. And even at Google it wasn't that intuitive to go get everything that you needed. So sort of this pain point of how do I get immediate access to knowledge and services we saw highlighted even in our first few days at Google. But at the same time we also saw at Google the power of, of well designed specific tools. So for example, there was this Android app where if you saw a maintenance issue, you could take a picture, it would recognize where you are and create a ticket. That is an elegant smart point solution to a problem. And so we saw the potential of well designed, easy to use solutions to solve issues coupled with sort of this challenge around information and service access. And that's when the idea of bespoke started marinating.

So you guys were inspired by some of the tools you had at Google to solve things like knowledge management and information and office maintenance and you want to bring that to the rest of the world?

Yeah, and we also just really wanted to go figure something out from scratch again.

So what has been the challenges of trying to combine this on demand experience to solve facilities, hr, IT, ticketing, at the same time creating this consumer like experience? What have you learned in this journey?

That it's hard is the sort of quick answer. So having the ability to work with folks like Dave and Prathyush is sort of the complementarity of our skillset. So Dave is a phenomenal designer and product mind. Prathyush is a phenomenal engineer. How do you essentially bring design principles to a space like ticketing is the challenge that we've been working on over these last two and a half years. How do you build a system that has all the features that an IT manager is used to, but is still intuitive enough that your marketing manager or your facilities manager knows how to use it, right. Marrying this consumer grade experience, usability for any team in a company with the power and functionality that is required for a traditional ticketing user has been the sort of fundamental challenge that we've been working through. And sort of the quick answer to that is you do a lot of user research, there's some trial and error, but most importantly, you need to establish a quick design product engineering loop. And I think spoke, one of the things that we do extremely well now is how tightly integrated that loop is. Design is not an afterthought, the product process is not an afterthought. Engineering obviously is not an afterthought. But how those three functions work together and in a loop, basically led by Pratyush and Dave, is, I would say, one of our unique strengths.

Can you give us an example of a feature or requirement or a release that went through this loop and it was the result a better design product or a faster design product.

So a great recent example is a feature that we released in Slack called Threading. When someone creates a ticket through Slack, it shows up in spoke and then when, let's say an IT manager responds, we actually now maintain that ticket state in Slack as well, so the end user doesn't have to leave Slack. It would have been almost trivial for us to turn on threading on day one, but we didn't do that because how do you manage noise on the agent side? So yes, as the end user, I only have one IT question, maybe a month. So it's not particularly noisy there. Spoke and I asked her to question. I'm getting its answers. But imagine the IT manager or the HR manager suddenly in Slack where it's already Noisy, they have 100 threads for each of their tickets. It's just chaos. And so thinking through the agent experience, not just shipping threading because it's an easy thing to do, but instead tuning the notifications, figuring out how to if the agent is on the web app, not showing those notifications in Slack, maintaining that state, all of that is hard to do. It's like part of our instinct is just ship it. But part of our instinct is if we keep shipping things like that, our end users aren't going to be happy. They're not going to come and say, hey, I use spoke because one of the reasons I use spoke is simplicity. And so that's an example.

It's a great example because threading in Slack is something that I don't think still works very well today. The fact you kind of nail threading correctly for your support managers in hr. And it is just a gift to productivity.

Absolutely.

So, Jay, last question. What do you think the future of the on demand workplace is? What will our workplace look like next 5 or 10 years?

A few definite thoughts on my side. Increasingly distributed, increasingly fragmented. Now I say increasingly distributed and fragmented as it relates to where people are, when they work, how they work, where information is stored and where tools are stored. There is no way in which that trend is going to slow down. You are going to get more distributed, more fragmented. One answer to this question. I think about Yahoo circa 1999 versus Google. So the Internet in the old days was the wild west. Yahoo came and corralled it by creating a bunch of directories, a map. But at some point that directory got unwieldy because there was too much fragmentation, there was too much distribution. And so you essentially needed a single search bar. With Google, that's one thing that I definitely see happening in the company. You're going to have a single search bar, for lack of a better phrase, for your company. And that's one of the things Spoke is trying to do. How do you provide a single search bar or a single Slack conversation or a single Alexa prompt to anything that you need in your company? You're going to have to adapt fragmentation. There's no point fighting it. So how do you actually adapt to it?

It's interesting. The old tools used to reflect the way we work. And you're saying with new tools we can work differently. And so new tools are enabled to work more distributed, more remote. And so it's kind of flipping the paradigm's head that with new tools, the way we work, the way the workplace is built, will look very different in five years.

The workplace will come to you. You don't have to go to the workplace is how I think about it.

That's great, Jay. Thanks for your time today. Good luck with spoke.

Thank you so much, Jerry.