One App to Replace Them All with Zeb Evans

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos? Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee My coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach. Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon. SDTechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on. Startups get the party. Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Thanks to our friends at Cox Business for being an instrumental resource to our startup and tech community here in San Diego. As a partner in San Diego Startup Week, Quick pitch and top tech awards, Cox Business has helped our ecosystem grow into the community it is today.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am thrilled to have Zeb Evans, founder and CEO of ClickUp, on the podcast. Zeb, thanks for being on.

Thanks so much for having me, Neil. Happy to be here.

Yeah. I'm stoked to have this conversation with you. I'm also a proud customer of ClickUp. With my team, we manage the podcast and our dates and everything in ClickUp. So thank you for that. Awesome.

Glad to hear that.

Do you want to give us a quick overview of what ClickUp is for?

Sure, yeah. So ClickUp is basically just a place for all of your work. So usually most teams, when they're working, they have a few different applications for work. Think of project management software, chat docs, places you can kind of create Knowledge bases, time tracking, OKR software. ClickUp really is just an all in one solution that has all of those usually separate pieces of software in one platform, but it's also extremely flexible and customizable. So some people kind of call us like a no code tool for productivity so that you can come in there and kind of build your own workflows rather than having this very opinionated approach to project management software or productivity software in general.

Awesome. I love hearing how many different use cases there are for. Every time I talk to someone I find they're using it for something totally different than we are. Kind of makes me feel a little bit like airtable in that regard to so many different uses. So I'm excited to hear some of that. Like the brainchild. I'm sure there were some pivots and what you've been seeing it being used for, especially during the pandemic timeframe. But first let's get to know you a little bit. Like where did you grow up? Where are you from originally?

Originally I'm from North Carolina actually. So I grew up there for most of my life. I actually lived in Maine for about three years. I lived in Orlando, Florida for about a year, ultimately moved to San Francisco and was there about two years before coming to San Diego. About a year, a year and a few months ago.

Ah, year. A few months in San Diego. You're a local at this point for sure.

During pandemic things have been a little bit different obviously. So I don't think I've gotten the full taste of San Diego yet. But it's been a great place to be during these times for sure.

Yeah, definitely. Can't complain whatsoever. Did you make it to San Francisco specifically to be in the tech scene or was there something else that drew you there originally?

Yeah, so it's kind of a long story, but I've had several near death experiences. During one of those was when I was in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had a smaller tech business and when it happened I realized I wasn't doing what I wanted to do with my life. We weren't really giving back to the world. In fact, we were just like inflating people's ego on social media was essentially that business. And so when that happened, really that next day I decided to leave and move to Silicon Valley. And it was two weeks later when I actually did it. And I had always wanted. When I was a kid, you're watching movies and you see these figures like Steve Jobs out here and Elon Musk and, and you kind of Just wanted to be in this. That realm of the world, the tech entrepreneur scene. And so we packed up, me and a couple people from my previous company, and we drove across the country to Silicon Valley. When you Google Silicon Valley, Palo Alto comes up. And so we drove to Palo Alto, and I was expecting Vegas with startup lights everywhere. And I got to Palo Alto and it was just like the sleepiest town in the world, and there was no startups in sight. But that is the story about how I got to San Francisco.

That's funny. Yeah, it really is. Kind of like a little. Little downtown strip, huh? Of just like little sleepy town. It's funny.

Yeah. There's actually an ordinance there. It says no signs, no business signs allowed. No tech business signs allowed. So that's a huge reason why you don't see any businesses there. And so we, you know, it's a very nice residential spot, but not a place to really build a company anymore. So we ultimately moved up to the city of San Francisco.

Got it. But it sound like you'd already hit the entrepreneurial journey long ago. Do you come from a family of that? Or how did you get into start and running your own businesses?

You know, everybody asked me this, and it's like I really was just born an entrepreneur since I was three or four years old. I just literally remember always wanting to sell things. Even when I was like five or six, at my birthday, I was asking for, there's this company, Oriental Trading Company, and I was asking for wholesale toys rather than like, toys for myself so that I could go sell them. Yeah, no one in my family was an entrepreneur. You know, my parents were in the medical field and they wanted me to go, you know, do the medical route through college and things like that. And it just was never for me. I had always just kind of carved out my own path and done my own thing. Yeah, there's some kind of hustle that I was doing pretty much every year of my life.

That's awesome. I totally remember the Oriental Trading Company magazine and just pulling out so many different little toys that you wanted from there.

It was my candy shop, the kids candy shop. That was Oriental Trading Company for me.

That's funny. So when did you stumble on tech and software? When was the leap to know that that was your calling?

Yeah, that's another one. I went to school for two years. I went to Virginia Tech for two. I actually started a DJ mobile DJ company in high school. And flash forward to college. I kind of created an entertainment company out of that. And we worked with some Rappers actually and did their social media and did things like that. And there's a huge problem at events. And this was 20 years ago, keep in mind, or really a little bit less than that, I guess I'm not that old, probably 12, 13 years ago, but during that period there was no service when you were at an event, when you had an event of 10,000 people there, like nobody had service. The cell phone carriers couldn't handle it then and so you couldn't tweet, you couldn't send out social posts or anything like that. And there really wasn't much that existed at that time. So I actually had my second near death experience during school. I was actually robbed at gunpoint and a 17 year old kid put a gun to my head and a home invasion. And that was the first one where I had like a long time to think about what was going on and like how I wanted to change my life. And I realized school was not for me. And so I dropped out of school a couple days later and knew that I wanted to be in business. I had always had a little bit of a love for tech also and I had always just been very, I don't know, good with it. And so I started learning how to code like that week, and within a couple of weeks I was able to build a very simple application that could schedule your tweets ahead of time. And that was the start foundation of my first, like small tech company where we built automation for social media and social media management and reporting.

Oh, interesting. Oh, and there's plenty of companies around that. How come that didn't, did that turn into a full fledged business or did you pivot away from it?

It did. So for about four years I did it. It grew a lot. And social media, we kind of coined the term social media management. We were the first people in SEO to start using it. And so we got a ton of, we had a ton of customers. We did, and it was making quite a bit of money. But I didn't see it being that scalable kind of, you know, life business that I've always wanted to build that would change the world, as cliche as it sounds. And so when I had that third near death experience, I want to mention at first where I realized I wasn't doing what I wanted to do, we weren't giving back to the world like that was that. I really just realized we're inflating people's ego on social media. I mean that was essentially what we were doing and so it wasn't helping things at all, in any way. And so I actually wanted to. We were going to build a Craigslist competitor where you could pay an app and remove sketchiness from Craigslist. At the time, Craigslist was the largest source of fraud in the United States. And before we did that was when how ClickUp was born. We created this platform for us. We thought it was going to be an internal tool. And very long story short, again, just turned into a tool that we released to the world a few years ago.

How long ago was that? The idea and the piece came to fruition.

The idea was about four years ago. We've had a public product for a little bit over three years now. And so there's been a huge shift in what we had from the beginning three years ago versus what we have today. But the mission and that vision was always, it was always still the same. We always had this kind of relentless focus on building and everything for every one platform.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it's kind of interesting thread of thinking, building internal products for yourself, using yourself as the customer and then realizing the masses need this. So you're building this tool for yourself. Have a team, I'm guessing around you, building the other stuff, or was it just you just building that out and bootstrapping it?

So we had. I took two people from my previous company, from that smaller tech company, and then I found a couple more. I found who I was our CTO today at IBM actually in North Carolina before. Before I left. And so it was really just about five of us that were building out that first kind of MVP for ClickUp with the intention of actually using it internally. And the benefit of being in Palo Alto was that everybody there is in tech. So when we're at coffee shops meeting people, they're asking, what are you working on? We tell them and show them. And they actually just started using ClickUp. And so that was the grounds of it kind of starting to build organically. And today it's still a vast majority organic, organic growth product.

Wow, that's awesome. At some point you realized or I guess felt you needed some outside seed capital. What was that inflection point that said, hey, we need to put some either fuel in the fire or what.

Any seed, seed money that we have was actually internal. We were essentially bootstrapped. I used some money from my first startup to fund this one, but we never took outside capital until our Series A about. About a year ago. A little bit less than a year ago now. And by the way, before that I was very focused on bootstrapping. I'm from North Carolina. You don't ever see venture capital out there and the stuff that you do hear about is not good. And so you're very skeptical. And I was always very skeptical. And so I didn't see a reason to raise honest. And so we were, you know, flash forward, let's flash forward to about a year ago when this was happening. This round was coming together. We were still in the camp where I didn't really want to raise. We had preempted offers from, you know, several companies or several venture capital firms. And we had, we had declined a lot of them. And ultimately I did have this shift in perspective. David Sachs, who is our board member now and co founder of PayPal and founder of Yammer and Kraft Ventures, who led our Series A. When I talked to him, he was the first VC that I actually loved talking to and that felt like a real person that understood like what we were going through and our vision and our struggles. And because, you know, he had done it himself. And so we aligned very philosophically, I think on a lot of things, including business and outside of business. And ultimately it was, it was at first VC that I met that I felt like that, that connection where you can, you can be with somebody for a long time. Everyone says you're getting married to your investors and that was that first person that I really felt like that I would be comfortable with that type of relationship with.

That's great. Quite the conviction obviously on both sides for that relationship to come to fruition. Especially for it seems like you were pretty far along successfully as a company when you took that first outside money. That's pretty incredible. I know that you were based in San Francisco and decided to move not just yourself but the company into take us through that kind of framework and what ultimately made the decision for you.

Yeah, I mean, so look, I think there's a couple pieces to it, but one of the hardest things to do in San Francisco is hire people, especially for rates. When we were bootstrapped in San Francisco, right. So we couldn't pay six figure salaries for customer service, it just wasn't possible. And so we naturally had to start looking outside of the city. And it was still just very tough for us to hire people, particularly in some of the roles that we really need to scale to have a great customer experience. So the wheels had started already turning on if we were going to have a location like a headquarters where there's a cluster of people, meaning not remote work, then it wasn't going to be able to be done in San Francisco with us with not raising funds, and we still had them and not doing it then. So that was a big piece of it. The second piece of it was, you know, I had, coming from North Carolina, thought California was everything you see in the movies, and San Francisco is the opposite of what you see in the movies. It is. It is not the best. The best quality of life and the best experience in general. And so we started looking outside pretty quickly. We just. We weren't really. It wasn't just myself, but it was really kind of everybody that had moved there was like, yeah, this isn't what it's cracked up to be. You kind of want to get out of here. And so we looked at other places. We looked at the natural places that people move to. Austin and places in Florida, even Salt Lake City. And when we found San Diego, I just fell in love. Like, that day, I was like, this is the California that I was looking for you. Great people, awesome weather, amazing food, very diverse community and people and everything. I mean, you can get everything that you want here. Everything from Little Italy to La Jolla up to Encinitas. It's just so many different things that you can do. And this was kind of like, I think, the California that we were looking for.

And so you've been here a year and change is it. I mean, obviously the pandemic has hampered a little bit of discovery. But I'm curious what you've learned about San Diego even more than what you thought that first day when you fell in love.

You know, I think that I learned how big San Diego is and small at the same time. We really can say San Diego is all the way up, you know, past Del Mar even, and some of these other locations. And so when you move here first, I don't think, or at least we didn't realize that we kind of knew downtown San Diego and basically Ocean beach and Pacific beach, and that was it. And so we started looking outside. There was just so much more that you can do. And so many of these places that feel. Honestly feel like different countries that you can go to, they really feel like completely different countries. Even mountains, right? You can go to mountains 30 minutes away, go skiing an hour and a half away. The beaches here are incredible. And, you know, you can even great surfing. I didn't even realize how huge of a surfing community there was. But then at the same time, you also realize kind of on the flip side that the community here is pretty small compared to other cities. Right? It's a Very tight knit community in a good way. You can network with people and you can find a lot of people that you know are interested in the things that you're doing. And I will say that, you know, everybody from the outside is like you're not able to find people that want to work hard in San Diego or you know, that are really focused on tech and it's just the opposite has been true. It's been been much easier finding people here than anywhere else.

That's awesome to hear. You know, we obviously love also our different communities here. I think they say there's like 85 different communities and a lot of them have that sign over it, you know, that say Little Italy or Oceanside or you know, City Heights, which is kind of cool. That kind of localized pride that each little community has. For sure. You plop the team down in, in where you. Gaslamp downtown.

Yep, yep. So we, our current office is in Gaslamp right near the Pendry actually. But we actually just signed a lease on, on a new office right next to, to the ballpark where that house space used to be.

Ah, congrats.

Yeah, thank you.

That's awesome.

We're super excited.

Yeah, that's a great space. Great spot. A bunch of other tech companies in the building too, which is nice to have with Classy and a few others. How is it in terms of attracting new talent, especially during the pandemic? I'm curious, the conversations you're having with people you can recruit from anywhere now, theoretically, are people still saying I want a place to be and root myself in?

Yeah, I think everyone's different. Our perspective is that we want clusters of people with a headquarters for people that want it. And I think that there is a large majority still of people that do want it. Based on our surveys, it's still, still over well over 60% of people that want to come into an office. So. And by the way, we're not going to be strict on like, you know, every day eight to five, Monday through Friday. We're always going to be pretty, pretty flexible on when you have to come in. And we always have been very flexible on when people come in. Because the reality is some people work better certain days and doing certain types of work remote than they, than they do in person. So we want to give that flexibility to people. But with that said, you know, there's, it is I think impossible to replicate the same culture and connection you have remotely. It just isn't. Everybody can kind of preach that. You know, you can, you can do it this way and do virtual things. And it's just not true in my, my opinion. So we do want to have a place where, you know, we can have that community, that, that sense of a really tight knit culture. And so San Diego is certainly, you know, that, that footing for that. As far as your question about being able to get people here, it's been shockingly easy. I mean, we've got a lot of people moving from, or already moved from San Francisco, from New York that now realize that they don't have to be in those cities in order to be quote, successful in tech. And honestly, it's been kind of a good tailwind for us post pandemic being able to get people to think outside of the box a little bit and move to a different location.

That's fantastic to hear tell some about, you know, the product and how it's been recently. I'm sure there's got to have been some pretty significant growth with the pandemic and people working remotely. How's that been? And then also take us like going forward, what do you envision? What's on the horizon for, for the company itself?

You know, lots of people think we're like a pandemic business when, when it gets expedited as far as growth goes. But the reality is, you know, that six months leading up to the pandemic was, was our biggest growth period still, still today we were throwing up 30, 40% month over month growth during those months. And actually when the pandemic hit was the first month that, that stalled, but then it recovered, it bounced back really, really nicely. You know, and we've continued to see kind of phenomenal growth since then. So we're very fortunate to be able to help people during the pandemic and you know, help teams come become remote and connected when they have to be and also in the future, even when they're not. I think we have a chance of making people more productive even when, when they're, when they're in person. For us, you know, it's been phenomenal growth throughout and we've been very fortunate to be able to help a lot of people during, during that period.

Sounds like since the beginning, you know, the strong pull of having, making an impact has always been a part of that and helping people beyond just like a widget or you know, tweeting, what's the, what's your grand vision or kind of world domination that you hope to, to get to.

You know, there is no, it's a very fragmented ecosystem in productivity and there is no Winner takes most. And so we really want to be that winner takes most in the category. Not not only, you know, from a pure kind of growth perspective and dominance perspective, but, but more so that when you do that you can affect change on a much greater part of the world and larger part of the war world. When you have an ecosystem of tools built around our platform, when everybody is familiar with it, you know, when you have something like, like a salesforce but with great user experience and that becomes like the de facto standard where everybody knows how to use it, even though it's not the easiest tool in the world, that's really ultimately our vision. And we think that, you know, we think users are not dumb. I think there's, there's a big mentality that users are dumb. And so we've always errored on the side of building something more complex than the very simple products. Because if you, if your reality is, if you, if you can get by with just a simple product and that's saving you a ton of time and your whole company is able to work on that, then you should do that. There's no reason to get more. But what we found is that people want more and that users are not dumb anymore. And so we've built that platform, I think where people can come in and build what they want. Still not the easiest thing in the world to get started on day zero if you don't know what you're doing. So we're building out. We actually have now a real time live coaching program. So anybody that wants a coach, they can get on there for free. They get a free 30 minute coaching session with an ClickUp expert that will help you set up and help you onboard regardless if you're going to be a paying customer or not.

That's awesome to hear, especially because there are a bunch of different frameworks and I feel like people get really into the methodology of like, oh, I'm a purist to this style of organization. I could see how that coach could come in really handy. So that's smart. You've been in town a year and change now sounds like you've explored some neighborhoods. What we want to know is where your favorite taco spots are. Have you found them? Do you have the list?

Yeah, there's a couple. Not tacos. It's one in Little Italy, kind of right around this area. So I've been a good one on that one good customer there. And then the taco stand, taco stand.

Also can't go wrong with either one. Sam, the cooking guy, that's his place, not Tacos. Kind of a local celebrity chef who I think then turned a little nationwide and he's opened I think a burger restaurant over in another part of downtown too that I think I hear is worth checking out too.

So I've been wanting to open everybody tells me not to open a restaurant, but I'm huge into air frying and I love air frying french fries and chicken wings and so I want to open a restaurant that has air fried chicken wings and french fries and so hopefully we'll be able to do that sometime.

I love that. Would there be a theme? Do you have a name already?

Air Fries. Air Fries is. I do actually. I have it have trademarked so I'm ready to go. It's just, you know, I don't know if I'll have time anytime in the very near future, but hopefully in the next year or two we'll have a restaurant somewhere.

Love it. Really cool. Excited to have some air fries with you. Well Zeb, thanks so much for being on the podcast and thanks for being a great community leader in building some great tech companies. Appreciate it.

Likewise. Thanks so much Neil.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad introduction. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter Eelbloom as well as Fresh Brewed Tech and Tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos in tech. You know we got it.

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