AI at Scale: 8 Learnings from monday.com Co-Founder and Co-Ceo Eran Zinman

Things are changing so quickly right now. It's hard to keep up. But to see like real UI AI usage in the real world, like, I think it's still a process for a lot of our customers and for a lot of other SaaS vendors. We've been experimenting with a lot of AI features and functionality and we actually saw more than 17 million AI actions in the product in the last few months. So definitely feels like we found the use case for a lot of our customers. And I think something that might be a little bit unique in how we've done it is that instead of forcing them to use AI or to create a new feature for them, we just said we're going to help you automate a lot of what you already do with Monday or in your business using AI.

Hello everybody at Saster. We are here with one of our favorite founders at one of our favorite companies. We have Aran Zinman, co CEO of Monday. Aran and his co founder Roy have been kind enough to be part of Saster since earliest days. We talked about it before. We've done two, two great sessions with them. Iran came to Sasser Annual a little while back live and it was one of my favorite sessions. They came as attendees to SAS Annual I think in 2017 in the crazy days, they were coming up on 10 million ARR. Fast forward to today. Fast forward to today. In eight years, Monday went from 1 billion 1 million to over 1 billion ARR in eight years. And in the early days, maybe even until 18 months ago, I would say underestimated, would you agree or on underestimated by many?

Yeah, you can define it as underestimated, right?

Classic story of having trouble getting funded in the early days, right? Despite insane growth and also because Monday, many of Monday, but don't use it, you know it for CRM, project manager, others. But 70% or so of customers are outside of tech. Is that still about right? Isn't it, Iran?

Yeah, this is still true to this day.

Yeah, still true. So while many of us back in the day may have not totally groked the machine, that is Monday, right? In the rest of the world, everyone from churches and small businesses to larger enterprises now became Monday super fans, while in many cases others were fighting for that vocal but slim segment of tech. So it's always great and I want to dig in with Iran, but there's something I've been saying for a while on Zastra for almost two years actually. I've been posting a lot of the quarterly results results and Monday just released its earnings Tell me if I get it wrong or on. It doesn't matter if I'm a little bit off. But 1.1 billion in revenue growing 32% at this scale. 32% at this scale. Think about what that is. 30% free cash flow, which I want to talk about. 22% new customer growth. You're still finding new customers everywhere at 250,000. And even though you're going more enterprise with an SMB core, 110% NRR. And that's not just. That wasn't just 2021, it wasn't just today. It was when people thought there was a downturn. And Monday is always consistent. And so what I've told folks who are saying, oh, it's hard out there, it's gotten harder. I say to this that only some folks get it. Go find your Monday. Go find. Because Monday, it's always been an engine. And I want to talk about that in a minute. But any meta takeaways for folks on how you've been able to maintain that engine? Right. Even as others have more variability?

Yeah. So you mentioned a lot of kind of financial metrics, but I think eventually it all boils down to the, your customer base, the product, the expansion, expansion potential. And I think maybe what's a little bit unique about Monday is the variety of customers. Not just the total number of customers, which is relatively high, over 250,000, but the variety across different industries, different markets, different countries, geographies. And I think this diversity in a way creates stability in a business because you're not overly exposed to one business sector for better or worse. Right. I think a lot of companies who build specifically for tech enjoy the tech boom in 2020 or 2021. There's a flip side to that as well. So I think eventually companies who build for the actual industry or the some representation of the variety of businesses we have out there enjoy more stability over time.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. We, I recently, we recently did a deep dive from TUI, from Procore, which is just for construction. And in 08 and 09 they had zero revenue. People stop building and they're doing great today. But there is some sensitivity because of interest rates. Right. So there's. But you've got the diversity across the base. Do you look at a curiosity, do you look, do you see a lot, do you track it? Because you guys have a lot of dashboards, analytics. Do you see little pulse checks for different industries, like where little segments are at a macro level under. And do you change anything?

We don't change anything because I don't think we have specific offering for specific industries. But definitely you can look at the Monday customer base or momentum we have in different countries or different industries and that might be a leading indicator for other kind of macro events that we can anticipate or the world is going through. But I really feel that because of the ease of use and the variety of use cases that we have, we do represent the broader economy and we ride on that wave. So I think that contributed to our stability. In addition to that, I will say that having you mentioned those dashboards we have across the office, I think that we have a lot of visibility into the, what we call the machine or the engine of the company and that also really helps stabilize the company over time because a lot of things, there's a lot of moving parts in enterprise SaaS companies and things can go wrong, sometimes they improve and you don't know what's the underlying reason for that. So I think we always have like a, like a pulse check of what's going on and we have more transparency into the business and what's working, what's not. So definitely helpful over, over a long period of time.

Just. You guys have been so analytic since day one. Right. Which if we have time, I'll touch on at the end. But at your scale at 250,000 customers, 1.2 billion. Do you pretty much know how every quarter is going to be and your job as CEO is next year six quarters out? Like, do you sweat any given quarter anymore?

Within a range and in a way I would say there's some, some flexibility within the quarter. I think what's great about SaaS businesses and one of the reasons why as a category we enjoy a relatively high multiple, is the predictability of the business. Once you go into a quarter, once you publish the results, you're already halfway into the quarter. And SaaS is a very predictable business. You have NR, you have your existing customer base in large numbers, how they're going to behave. So I think that's one of the great things about SaaS companies and specifically for Monday, because of that, we have high prediction ability into the quarter. And you can see a lot of SAS companies, when they give guidance, it's usually like they give a very narrow range in terms of revenue, sometimes even a few millions over a billion. Which other industry can offer such prediction and guidance?

Let me ask just one more niche question on this and then I want to get into AI and multi product and stuff. But when we started working, when we were all started getting going on SaaS. We thought NRR was this Lighthouse Lighthouse metric. Right. And then to some extent it became grr. Like how many of your customers do you keep. Right. And Monday is like top decile for both. But what here from this big backlog to go public in late states that is their founders are being pushed on how durable your revenue are is. Yeah, everyone got burned when they saw folks that had 120, 130% NRR in 2021 and now it's 100 or something. And so what have you learned on durability? Is that a right metric? How do you, do you have a way to measure durability? And how are you being asked about this? How are you thinking about durability? Because clearly you've got it. That may be the consistency that I des is durability, right?

Yeah. So first of all, like I agree NRR and cross retention are two key metrics. They're often by the way legged indicators because you know, you sum up like the last 12 months. What's going to happen in the next 12 months? That's a good question. But I think it's a great metric especially as you scale Once, once you reach a billion, if you want to grow 30%, the majority of revenue is going to come from your existing base no matter how efficient your marketing is. And we have a very efficient marketing engine. But yes, but just how math works, most of the revenue is going to come from your existing base. So having a good ndr, it's not a benefit, it's a requirement if you want to continue and scale as you grow your business. Maybe I can share some perspectives. One is we have our highest gross attention ever I would say currently gross attention of the company given the economy, given everything that happening in the world. Just to give people context like we see gross attention going up actually once you think find a great use case with your customers, they want to stay even longer and expand their usage. So definitely there's opportunity to increase that. And look, I think there's no magic here. It's a lot of hard work. Eventually it boils down to going up market, selling for larger customers, being a more critical role playing more critical role in their stack and how they do business. And you have to check all those boxes. Having a great user interface, having a great product, it's important, it's critical. But that's not enough. If you want to scale, you have to grow business and support those kind of customers. Otherwise it's just not going to happen.

Yeah, let me ask you a related question because I have you. This is one I think about all the time and I think it's hard. You've got 3200 bigger customers, 50K and 100K. They're growing 45% for 100K. Right. So I have to imagine half the conversations in the hallway of Monday are about the 100k customers. Right? It has to be right. And it's even more than that because they have your NRR is not as variable as some, but they're still the highest nrr. Right. And they buy the most products. Right. So as a founder, how do you make sure the small guys get enough attention? I see the small guys, honestly between us and anyone else watching, listening, I see a lot of leaders abandoning the small businesses. A lot of the products we, we use, especially the, the simple, the ones that have the slacks like I, I love slack but I haven't seen it evolve in six years. Okay, Zoom. I love zoom. But all the energy's in the enterprise. Right. How do you force the team to. How do you take care of the small guys when you're going more enterprise? I don't think any few are doing this well. So how do you do it?

Wow. It's an amazing question because I think that's something that a lot of companies are in my opinion might be getting wrong. I think a lot of companies intuition is we're going to move up market. So abandon the SMB mid market segment because you do the math and you say oh, I'm spending that amount of effort on closing those deals, getting those customers onboarded. I might as well invest time in the larger customers because it's become more cost efficient. But I think that that might be a big mistake because eventually NFTs in so many kind of veteran SaaS companies what happens is eventually you abandon the mid market S and P segment and then you have this huge vacuum. You leave a huge vacuum in the market. I think to some extent and not an expert but that will happen with Salesforce and HubSpot. Salesforce moved up market in a HubSpot saw this huge vacuum in the market and ho and behold they captured a lot of the mid market SMB segment of that specific market and more.

Now they have a majority of that segment.

Yeah, but that's, that's the thing. People don't realize that the SMBs and mid market of today are the enterprise of tomorrow. So they, they getting used to use another product, they're getting used to use another platform and eventually they become the enterprise companies and Then those enterprise companies, those SaaS, companies that move off market, leave that vacuum and eventually I think over time just become irrelevant in a way. And I feel that the fact that we cater both, first of all, I think it's a moat as a company because you don't leave like a vacuum in your market for other players to come in and capture that market. I also feel it keeps you humble and keeps you focused on the user experience, on creating a great product, on creating great onboarding for your customers. And I think enterprise customers eventually benefit from that as well. So I think it's a win situation.

So you asked me how all the energy wants to go to closing the bit, especially the GTM teams, right? But product too, how do you do it?

So first, as management, as CEO, as co founder, you need to make this decision and be very specific about it because if you say to everybody in the team, we need to focus on enterprise accounts, everybody get that message and just move on. So we were consistent with our message. We want to do both, we want to do SMB, bid, market and enterprise. And we also invest our time with the growth team, with the design teams, with the UX team because we show, we demonstrate to everybody it's important. And then we measure that, we measure the go to market with the sales team and so on. But also we measure the self serve, their extension, their usage and so on. So overall like we invest a lot of resources and time and energy on both fronts and everybody in the company got that method and everybody understand it's a cocktail of customers that we want to serve over time.

Are there roughly in sales and marketing or gtm, Are there roughly three teams like small, medium and large? Is it all one team in terms of these motions or.

Yeah, so currently we have like strategic accounts, enterprise, mid market and SMB.

That's how we got the classic breakup. Do you just. Because I think everyone gets this, almost everyone gets this wrong. Do you as a CEO, do you give them budgets, cash, story points, features like do you say, listen, I don't want the SMB to get ignored, I'm going to give you 20% of the product budget. Do you get that granular or how do you manage those pieces?

We have some percentages, allocation, but I think it's mainly the message for management and what we care about and how we behave in meetings and how we split our time, which really conveys the message to everybody and the DNA of the company. And like I said, eventually in a product like ours, you want enterprise customers to use it on a Day to day basis. So eventually it boils down to the same things. Great user experience, great usage. You care about usage and retention and so on. So I really see it as a win. Although you have to focus on two things, which is always hard in a way.

Yeah, I love to hear it. Let's talk about AI next. But definitely if you build this moat and you do it for real, not for pretend, the enterprise customers totally benefit because the products that are enterprise only are never as easy to. They're not even remotely as easy to use. They never are. Right. The onboarding is. Humans always do the onboarding. Right. Humans do the integrations, humans do this. And if you have a 500k deal, throw a couple people at it. It's logical. Why would you build the world's best onboarding solution or self procure, self procurement, self onboarding. If you could put a person on it, your engineering team would kill you. Putting. Put a person on that. I'm going to go build this complicated enterprise workflow.

Yeah, definitely agree.

So it's special if you do it. All right. The competition can't do it. Okay, so help. I want to make sure. Let's talk about AI in the real world. And I bet if we have this conversation in a year, it's going to be pretty different. Yeah, it's going to be pretty different, right. If it was a year ago, it would probably be out experiments, but you're just rolling out a lot of your functionality. Right? I want to talk about it, but before we get there, what both smaller and larger customers, what are they actually asking for, if anything? You have a diverse customer base. It's real world. It's not full of techies and Twitterers. What are they asking you for in AI, if anything?

Yeah, maybe on a broader perspective. I think it's a very interesting thing. Just before we started recording, you said, things are changing so quickly right now. And I couldn't agree more. Every few months there's a new announcement, new technology. It's hard to keep up. And I think there's a lot of noise right now in the SaaS industry. Everybody, for example, talked about AI. I think a lot of the things people talk about are things that customers might be using or new features they're going to be introducing. But to see like real UI AI usage in the real world, like, I think it's still a process for a lot of our customers and for a lot of other SaaS vendors. So maybe I'll share a little bit of our journey. So I would say in the Last year we've been experimenting with a lot of AI features and functionality and I think eventually we managed to find like the, I would say product market fit for AI in our product. And we just came off from our earning call about a week and a half ago and something that we share with investors is that we launch AI blocks and we actually saw more than 17 million AI actions in the product in the last few months. So definitely feels like we found the use case for a lot of our customers. And I think something that might be a little bit unique in how we've done it is that I think a lot of companies are trying to build new features with AI and I think here there's a lot of friction. Customers need to adopt new technology, they need to change how they use the product. And we went back to our playbook of Monday, which is we want to make technology available for our customers, we want to make them more efficient. And then when we translated that back into the product, essentially instead of forcing them to use AI or create a new feature for them, we just said we're going to help you automate a lot of what you already do with Monday or in your business using AI. So everybody's using AI with Monday in a different way, but we just made it accessible for them. People are using AI on a personal basis, but when it comes to their business, I think it's still a big question mark how I'm going to implement that. And that's our approach, same way we've done with Automations or any other technology. So our customers are adopting that, they're putting that into their boards for workflows and the adoption is through the roof. So we're very happy with the usage. And actually last week we also announced as part that we're launching our pricing for AI. And also here we had a debate should we do it per seat? Should we do it on consumption basis? And eventually we made the decision to charge per consumption and not tie it to the seat model because I think that if this going to be widely successful, maybe some of our customers would not hire as many people as they plan to. So maybe we should probably be charging on usage and AI deployment as opposed to add like additional charge per seat. Just to share some of our thoughts.

Around this for sure, if you look at Pure Play contact center vendors, right, a lot of them have seen 20% seat reductions in a year due to 20% across the board. Right. So it's very, from a business model perspective it's a, it's an interesting one. In A head scratcher. Right. Because it's not going to happen in every vertical in every use case. But Contact center was so early to AI that you've already seen. Yeah. We've driven ACVs up with a lot of vendors that are pure play. Generally they report about 50% increase in ACV but 20% reduction in food counts.

Yeah.

So I'll tell you what I. Tell me what you think. I mean and feel free to challenge me on this. But the rate of change is so fast. Right. I think in 18 months we may not be able to charge at all. Yeah. Because there has to be a core set of software that I get with my seat. You can't charge me for login, you can't charge me for. There's certain things that have to come and right now it seems like a feature now maybe it's built in like with Monday and it's easy to use and you don't. There's not a lot of business process change. But I think there may come a time quickly, the world changes quickly that this is like a single sign on or login like I it Monday just ha. Because it's automation 3.0. Like I just. And so I think we're in a. We don't know. I don't think we know where all this pricing and stuff's going to land.

Yeah. I think there's a few questions behind it. One is the cost of using those APIs. I think here also there's so many different paths this can go through and you see some companies release like free to use models, some charge for their API. But I think eventually for SaaS companies. So I definitely agree on SSO or any other features. But if it's a feature that directly tied to the value you deliver, it has to come with some sort of pricing. Otherwise does it listen? Yeah. Maybe it will come more to become more of a commodity.

I just don't know. I just think it's just when we talk. I love what you said when we talk about SMBs and mid market especially I think AI in many cases is automation 2.0. It's okay, you have automation now. I want to do automation with no work. Right.

But in plain English.

Yeah, plain English. But when we look. When I look at what I get for 20 bucks from Claude for 20 bucks a month, I'm like I wonder what our customers are good that are paying more than that are going to expect from SaaS in a year. I feel like it makes SaaS look overpriced when I get so Much from Claude or open AI for 20 bucks.

Yeah but I think there's a big difference between using it on a personal basis for yourself and using it across organization. Yeah, that, that's the big question behind it.

Okay, so last one on the AI it's, it's good and then I want to just spend a couple of minutes on multi product before run out of time. You said 17 million actions right over the last six months or so, right?

Yeah, six months, yeah.

What are what give me just to get some there. What are like the number one or number two most used actions automations through AI that are using. What's the 10x AI use case?

I would say the most common one we saw is processing unstructured information. So I think a lot of companies are working with unstructured data. I'll give you a few examples. One, let's say CV screening. You have a HR team. We for example we get about almost 100,000 CVs a month for new candidates.

Unprocessable, everybody.

Every CV is in a different format, different design. You cannot predict what the information is going to be. You cannot automate this. But using Monday and AI you can extract information not just you know, basic information like the person, email or name but actually we have, you can have a prompt within Monday saying oh sum up the amount of experience this person has working in SaaS companies. You write that in plain English and 2 seconds you get a reply, no need to go into the cv. Another thing you can ask is how senior this person is based on their experience and you define the criteria. Again plain English. So you turn CV screening of 100,000 people a month from being a few thousands of work to a few seconds. Same goes for going through invoices, RFPs, images, PDFs, you name it. It's a lot of unstructured data that businesses go through and analyze every day on huge amounts. And I think that's one use case which is a classic AI usage that will just become a thousand x more efficient for most businesses big or small.

Yeah, yeah. The unstructured data, it's all we've been able to do before AI was get a little bit of structure out of maybe there's some fields that have been inputted, maybe we can do some basic text level search. Right. But a lot of unstructured data, it's almost unusable. There's too much of it. There's too much of it. Right. It's destructive. Too much. Right. It is, it's less the folks that you hear. Aaron Levy and others talking about this because it's all they do. Right. But it is under discussed how disruptive this is for real businesses, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. And it just doesn't have just to be files. It can be conversations, zoom calls, whatever. In any format, any medium. Yeah.

These note takers are just a tiny bit of where we're going to be. All right, just before we run out of time, there's a bunch of things I'd love to chat about. But because you're expanding your multi product and I think your newest products are service management CRM as it is still relatively new but growing gangbusters. Right? 108% I think I want to talk about those. But before we do, two questions. How do you pick where, what industries to go into and honestly and because Monday has done the second one. How do you make sure they're all great for real, not for pretend. But when you have so many. How many core products does Monday have now? Four core. Okay, so we're going from. So service management. I get a little confused on the.

We got the work management, CRM, service and dev. Those are domains.

Okay, okay. And I get it. But how do you. So when you go to four, then you're thinking about how do you make them all great and how did you pick service management just for, for, for learning.

So maybe before we dive in, I just. I know you've been talking this for, for a long time and I've seen some of your tweets. I cannot stress this enough for the founders. Go multi product. That's critical for future success.

Yeah.

I don't know what's the best timing to do that. I think you, you advocated to do this earlier in the journey. I think we've done it relatively late in our. If you want to scale a company past a billion and even 2 billion, you have to go multi product. There's no other way you can do it. So the sooner the better because you have more time to learn, more time to improve and so on. Another thing I want to share with the people listening to this. Every product is different. So it's not just the ui. It's different go to market. Different buyers, different sales cycles. It's not just about the technology. Each product have a different way that people buy it and, and as a company, you know, goes multi product, you discover all those things and you discover that on some products it's easier to do cross sell. On some it's harder to do cross sell because. So I'll give you an example. I've shared this during our last earning call. We just recently released Monday service and what we found is that we have a big overlap, not just in the use case between Monday service and work management, but also in terms of the buyer, which is as important as the use case. So usually the person who buys work management is the CIO CEO. Same goes for this service. So you got their attention, you got the relationship and it just make it easier when you do cross sell. And that's another factor you need to take into account like who's the buyer, what's the sales cycle, who made the decision? Is there overlap with the use case, overlap with the buyers, as many different aspects to it do you find?

If you're, if it's the, if it's service, if service management's easier because it's the same buyer, do you worry at all that you'll fatigue the budget?

No, because it's different departments, it's different budgets for companies. And you ask me like, how do you choose? I think in our case it might be a little bit easier because of the nature of the platform because it's so flexible. We actually a lot of the products we just created were based on what our customers were already doing with the platform. Sorry. We saw them using Monday as a service tool. We saw them using Monday as a CRM. So that's led to making those products.

Makes sense. You saw what they were hacking already. Right. And formalized it in, in, in new discrete products.

Yeah, exactly. And this is, was really helpful for us to pick those products. But I think you mentioned CRM. Like we have great momentum with CRM and we're super proud of the growth and it's actually growing faster than what Monday did back in the day, which is pretty impressive.

Yeah, we can end on that. I totally get it. But broadly speaking, CRM is one of the oldest and most crowded categories. Right. And I would imagine. And so your smallest customers, they might have nothing. Right. But as you get just a little bigger, there's some conflict with another vendor. Right. There's some conflict. Right. Which. So why is it working at that level? Because it's not greenfield in some cases. Right.

Yeah. So I would say it boils down to two main reasons.

Yeah.

One which I think is a little bit underestimated is the flexibility of the Monday platform. People when they buy, whether it's a CRM or a service software or whatever it is, I think the SMB segment usually or the mid market segment is usually the players are what I refer to as rigid software. It's software that you probably have a great user interface, but it's very hard to customize. And if you want to further customize it, you have to go enterprise. You have to buy like the big enterprise companies that offer like 100% flexibility. But the problem there, the cost of doing it and the complexity of doing that in those enterprise companies is far greater than any other platforms. We offer the best of both worlds. You can customize Monday to infinity, basically, but it's easy to use and you can do it yourself. So that's reason number one why we win in a lot of those categories. And the second one, which is a big part of our strategy going forward and also I think maybe a little bit underestimated, is that people want to connect between the different softwares. I think softwares today inherently create silos within the organization. If somebody have access to salesforce, usually the sales team, the marketing team or the product team doesn't have access. Same goes for Zendesk or any other SaaS tool you're using. And then you essentially create silos of information between different teams. Just the nature of using different SaaS tools and people when they buy multiple products from Monday and because it's kind of multiple products for different departments, they love the fact that data flows between different products. They love the fact that they create a dashboard that shows them a picture of what's going on all the way from the service to the work management to the CRM tool. And I think over time, as we scale those products and gain more momentum in enterprise, companies will be able to sell bundles of those products that people will buy the Monday brand, hopefully. But that's where we headed.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think we. There's been a lot of discussion about platforms versus standalone vendors as there's been consolidation. But I think it's not really that. It's that if you could have it all work on one platform, you'd want to. Who in their right mind wants to now? Sometimes you have to. And Monday got started as a point solution. We all because you had something special. Right. And so it's not an either or. But no one in their right mind wants 11 vendors, especially today when it's harder to get them to integrate, when prices are up everywhere. Right. When it's why would you want that.

As a rational and especially now that AI becomes more dominant, you want AI to have more access to more information across the different products and you get more benefit from that. So definitely. And because of that, you don't necessarily have to have the best CRM in the world. It might be second place, but because of that integration and because of that data flow between the different products. But you get such huge benefit from that that it's a huge advantage over any other kind of player in that industry.

Yeah, that's the meta line that you've crushed. Which is. Okay, listen, if you have all the data and it flows across all of your products, maybe it doesn't have to be absolute the best. It just needs to be top decile. Finding that being honest about where that line is I think is complicated. Yeah, it's complicated, right? Yeah. Your CRM is growing faster than Monday ever did. But it took HubSpot a long time to get going. It was free for years so that they could get a rebutt. Just enough product to even charge for it. Right. They tiptoed into that line carefully. Right. And then blew past it. It's. But you have to got to at least be honest about that line, right?

Yeah, I think you have to be honest. And again, it's a journey. So it doesn't have to be perfect when you. It's not going to be perfect when you release the first version. But I think the point here is that you release it, you iterate, you improve the go to market, you improve the sales cycle, you build organization to support it, which is moving from a single product to multi product that changes the whole organization. But once you do it Monday, today would be a completely different company. If we haven't implemented this strategy and we didn't have a multi product lineup.

We were doing 8th of what it is. Probably worth an 8th of what it is.

Yeah. I don't know what it would be worse but maybe. Yeah, less. I'm not sure how much but I'm so happy we've done it. And I think all sound as they want to scale past that point. Have to go through that route.

Yeah. Aran, this was great. I know we are out of time, but thank you very much. And let's, let's do a deep dive on AI in about 12 months. I'm really going to learn together.

Awesome. And thanks for having me. Jason. Always be part of that community. Thank you, thank you, thank you.