Dennis (00:00):
A lot of entrepreneurial companies. The instinct because the first product was successful, is to launch a second and a third and a fourth before the first product is fully anywhere near its potential. When you do that, the risk is that you're going to lose focus on that first product and you're going to lose what made you great.
VO (00:16):
Welcome to Spotlight on a podcast about how companies are built from the people doing the building one messy, exhilarating decision at a time.
Sameer (00:25):
Dennis, welcome to Spotlight On. Thanks. Great to be here, Samir. I'm so happy to be able to talk to you and share with everybody all these cool stories that we and you have had together and talk a little bit about FreshWorks, but other things too. Sure. Let's kind of start off with just your background and career. What got you to FreshWorks? So you've been at Dropbox, Google, Motorola, running Motorola Impossible Foods. Very cool. Different experience and others. So can you just walk us through just a timeline of your career and then maybe pick out some experiences that really helped shape the leader that you are today?
Dennis (01:04):
Sure. So I grew up in Pennsylvania. I went to undergrad at Cornell. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, so that's how I wound up on the west coast. Went to Stanford for law school and then I think at Stanford. Of course the internet was brand new. Yahoo was a completely new company, and so I think I kind of got the tech bug at that point in time. I did practice law for a while, but I always kind of wanted to come back into tech. And a friend of mine became the chief people officer at Google, and I had used Google as a search engine like everybody. Well, it wasn't even there yet. I think the company had about a thousand people at the time. So it was off to the races, but it wasn't public yet. And my first job there was as the head of strategy, so I worked with Eric and Larry on projects that didn't neatly fall into sales or marketing or products.
(01:58):
So an example is I think we had offices in maybe 10 countries in the world, and Larry had this idea that, hey, we should be much bigger and people are searching from all over. We should have people everywhere understanding the markets and selling and learning stuff. We wound up hiring people in Kenya, in Nigeria, in Thailand, all these places way early as a result of that kind of project. So that was my first lesson that technology in particular and amazing founders think completely differently than I do, but that I can help that kind of a person by bringing the kind of organization and rigor and ultimately getting shit done, which is really what I've made my career around. But that was my start at Google, and one thing led to the next me kani was trying to hire somebody to do the emerging market part of the job in Europe, so from Russia to South Africa.
(02:56):
And I said, Hey, you should hire me. And said, well, Dennis, do you speak any of the languages? No, I don't. Have you ever been to any of the countries you're talking about Poland, Turkey, Israel? No, no. He said, I'm going to find somebody who's got a little more experience. I said, fine. So a month goes by and he hasn't hired anybody. I'm go back and meet you, find anybody for that role. No, but I'm going to get somebody. We're going to find somebody. A month goes by, go back again and say, you really just give me the role. He said, fine. So that's how I got into sales.
Sameer (03:25):
And why were you so convinced that you were the right person for that job?
Dennis (03:28):
I thought it was a hard problem. I thought that it required leadership, but it didn't necessarily require specialized understanding of the country and it required hiring the right people. And I thought I could do that. And I've always just thought of my career as a little bit of an adventure that I think it's more fun to not quite know exactly how it's all going to turn out. It seemed to be the biggest, most interesting job in the company at the time, and I thought, why not try it? So we wound up building out, I think 13 or 14 countries and then that actually worked really well for the company and I wound up getting promoted into a much more of a sales role, running sales in the uk. So that was really my first formal sales role. It was the biggest market outside the us and then it was just off the races within Google, and
Sameer (04:16):
That led from Google to the Motorola opportunity eventually opportunity,
Dennis (04:20):
Right? Yeah. So I was working with Nikesh in Europe, and Europe was doing really well for Google. This is like 2009, and our head of North and South America left to become the CEO of a OL, actually Tim Armstrong. So I got a call to take on that job. So that moved me into the us. So now I'm running the biggest market in the company, and that was right after the financial crisis. So we had big customers like GM calling us and saying, I can't pay my bill. Can you imagine General Motors can't pay its ad bill? Things were really chaotic, and even though the business wasn't terrible, our business went from growing 30% a year to zero Google. So we had to turn it around and we did. And now a lot of that's the economy coming back, but we also used that opportunity to retool the team, really focus on how do we turn what's still kind of a niche product search advertising into something every company in the world does. Every company in the US has to do. And so when we came out of the recession, we had built the structure and hired the right people and had the right relationships to just take off. And that's where we were when completely unrelated decision, Google decided to buy Motorola Mobility, and a lot of that was a patent battle. So you might remember Apple and Microsoft suing exactly.
Sameer (05:44):
Get the Motorola patents
Dennis (05:45):
Suing. And so we went out Larry Page, again thinking big, went out and spent 12 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility. And that obviously was in retrospect, primarily motivated by the ability to defend the Android ecosystem, which was getting sued by all these other manufacturers. But it also came with a company of 20,000 people. And I remember my first board meeting at Google, I walked in the board and I said, okay, let me describe the company that we bought. We have 20,000 employees including 5,000 in China in a manufacturing plant. We're in the foam making business now. And by the way, we lost a billion dollars a year for each of the last five years. And honestly, I'm not sure the board knew that. So my job was to not.
Sameer (06:30):
So what did we just buy a little bit?
Dennis (06:32):
This is what we just bought. So my job became how do we not lose a billion dollars? How do we ultimately recoup our investment? It was the hardest job I've ever had because we didn't have any competitive advantage from being part of Google. We just had money. It was like having a very large bank own you. We didn't get any software in advance or anything like that. We couldn't use the Google brand on the phones. So we were competing with Samsung and Apple and these much bigger companies. A little bit of a disadvantage, and ultimately I recommended to Larry and to Eric that we exit and we wound up selling the company to Lenovo. And that's when I think you came into the picture for me.
(07:19):
So after we sold it, I remember Brian Schreyer and you connecting with me and introducing me to Drew, and I got to know Drew, I got to know RA little bit, and these guys had this rocket ship Dropbox that was just totally taking off. I'd been at Google for 11 years and I'd seen it from small to big, and the growth phase was what always got me excited and I thought, these guys, I can help them and I can take what I applied at Google and elsewhere and bring that in and help 'em scale. So that's when I joined.
Sameer (07:51):
So we got to Dropbox. If you think about that incredible Google experience, which seeing that kind of story, it's so unique from that phase where you joined it to where it got to and and Motorola different kind of thing that you did. What were the two or three things you take away that said, Hey, these are my big learning moments or experiences that going to say, I'm going to use these in the future. I kind of know
Dennis (08:17):
That
Sameer (08:17):
I got a couple things out of this up to this point. What were those things?
Dennis (08:21):
So I think the first thing is working with people who have a very strong sense of the long-term vision I think is really healthy for me because I tend to think more in the short term and I tend to think a little more concretely. So for me, I've always liked working with a visionary founder because that's not necessarily my skillset, but I've learned to believe in what they're saying and what they're thinking and then translate that into something that's concrete. I think that for me was a really important lesson because you don't get that anywhere other than Silicon Valley. I think I learned the importance of just really hiring the right people for the right role. It was really hard early on to find people who understood anything about the internet. So we just had to find athletes who came from technology generally, and we could teach what we did.
(09:19):
And I would say to this day, all my success is all because I've hired really amazing teams and been able to help them actually operate together as teams. So I think those were two learnings that were really important for me. And then just being willing to, Eric Schmidt would say this, say yes, just be willing to say yes. And so many people, they want to know everything about the next job or the next role or the next business or whatever it is before they say yes. Just say yes and trust your instincts, and then you'll figure out all the hows and the steps. You can't figure that stuff out before you've said yes. So those are some things that I learned
Sameer (09:59):
When you left Dropbox, not sort of the most obvious thing. No. So it'd be great to understand your, just your thinking about your career and what you wanted to do next. Now you became president of Impossible Foods. It's a totally different kind of business, consumer business. Talk more about
Dennis (10:15):
That. Yeah, so that again, that's kind of in keeping of the follow what you're curious about and be willing to take an adventure. So I had gotten to Novin Oak Coastal when I was at Dropbox, and Vivino called me after and he's like, you got to meet some of my portfolio companies. So he introduced me and he has a lot of deeply MedTech companies. I'm meeting these med tech and I'm like, I can't help here. I don't understand any of this. But then I was like, but impossible. That sounds like a pretty cool company. Again, it had nothing to do with what I was doing before. The things that I could apply were there was a sales element, there was a manufacturing element. I had manufacturing at Motorola, we had plants all over the world. So supply chain was important trying, it was a disruptive product like a Dropbox or a Google early on that most people had not heard of.
(11:09):
And I thought, well, but there's something there. It was a demonstrably better product in many ways than animal meat. And over time, and I still think this is true, over time, the supply chain, as that business grows, the supply chain should make it so it's actually less expensive than the animal. And if that happens, then you're at a tipping point and that should take off. It's a little like an electric car at first. They're super expensive, and over time the cost curves come down. So I was interested enough in both the economic argument, like, okay, I had enough that I knew that I could help and what an incredible adventure. After doing software and tech, I completely misestimated how hard it is to actually do all that, and at the end of the day it becomes a real consumer marketing problem. But that's kind of later when I got there, we were just about to land the biggest deal that we have, which was Burger King, and we got it across the line two months after I got there.
(12:10):
So now we have Burger King, one of the biggest consumers of burger products in the world as our customer. And we realized we have no way of actually scale this thing up all wound. I went up to the factory, which is over in Oakland, tiny factory, and I went to the supply, the plant manager, I said, how are we going to produce this demand? He's like, I didn't even know we did that deal. I didn't understand how big this was going to be. This is going to be really hard. And we didn't know how many burgers we produced the prior week. We didn't have a forecasting. So it was really, really small. It's really the beginning in terms of
Sameer (12:47):
It was totally scaling up the business.
Dennis (12:49):
So we wound up, pat said, I remember the company all hand said, okay, I need everybody in the plant. So the entire company, PhDs who were these esteemed biologists, biochemists, they all went up to Oakland and we worked the plant for a month and got the thing to work and got it to pump out product. And that's how we got the company kind of scaled up, and then we went out and we got Starbucks and Walmart, and now you can kind of get the products everywhere.
Sameer (13:18):
What's sort of the one takeaway when you think about, because you sort of refer to this, it's a consumer company and brand and marketing, our big element of the strategy.
Dennis (13:26):
Huge, yeah.
Sameer (13:27):
What's the big takeaway there in terms of what you learned?
Dennis (13:30):
It's very hard to change embedded consumer behavior unless you have a product that is so differentiated, so disruptive, and I think for technology companies, your technology can be vastly different than what came before. For food, it's a lot harder. You can be incrementally better, but incrementally better is not good enough and you need everything to work. You need the marketing to work, distribution, the price point that means your supply chain in order to change that kind of embedded human behavior. So the adoption is much slower than of a classic technology product.
Sameer (14:08):
So I'm going to shift to FreshWorks because you came to FreshWorks from Impossible, basically, right? And so if we were to level set, what did the company look like? Just talk about what it was back when you were thinking about joining and then flash forward to today several years later. What is it
Dennis (14:23):
Today? Yeah, so just rough revenue size then was around four 50 million in a RR we're headed towards a billion. We're over 800 now. The size of the company in terms of people was about the same. It was about 5,000 people then about 5,000 people. Now, the mix of business was way more SMB, and I thought I was joining much more of an SMB driven company, but we were seeing success with larger deployments in particular on the fresh service, actually both sides, but Fresh Service in particular was really seeing deployments in mid-size companies at the time.
Sameer (15:02):
Tell us a little bit about when you saw the company, what was it in your progression of things we were saying, this is the next thing I want to go do, and I also want to reflect back on now you have a very dynamic founder in this company, what that first interaction was like?
Dennis (15:19):
Yeah, I remember you called me on a Saturday morning, I
Sameer (15:21):
Did call you on a
Dennis (15:21):
Saturday morning, and you said, I am working with this company. They're in a space that you have some familiarity with in that they're in customer support, and I want you to meet the founder. And I remember doing my research after that call, and I had not heard of FreshWorks, which was surprising because I'm in the valley and they had gone public the year before,
(15:44):
And I was on the board of ServiceNow. So we know the competitive landscape for the most part, but I've not heard of the company. And I actually viewed that as a positive thing because as I looked into it as it's got this amazing software, it's got amazing customers, it's already passed or roughly half a million in recurring revenue. Imagine if I had heard of the company or I make it heard, what could we do? So I remember going up to the offices in San Mateo, and this was still COVID, so there wasn't many people in the office. It was me and Geris. And we talked for a couple hours about his background and where he came from and how he grew up and what he was trying to do before FreshWorks. And his story is fascinating. I know you've read his book all In, but he doesn't follow the straight line path to entrepreneurship.
(16:35):
He actually ran away from home twice. He didn't go to IT, he went to the next level of schools and his first company didn't work out. So he's had a lot of life experiences that I think have made him a better CEO and entrepreneur over time. So we talked about all that. I talked about what my background I've been and how I've always worked with founders, with the exception of maybe my first job or two. I've always worked in a founder led company and why I like that. And that just led to a natural conversation about what are his longer term aspirations and long, why is he looking for someone like me in the role? And it wasn't anything near a promise, but there was the possibility that at some point he might want to do something else, and he was looking for someone to help him learn the business so that if he did decide that, then there would be someone there to lead the business.
(17:35):
The business I would say was challenged in that it was founded in India. Most of the people are in India, all the engineering is in India. Most of the product development is in India, but the customer base from day one was global. So even then 45% of our revenue was from the us, 40% from Europe. And I think that was hard for the company because you had a lot of newer people in the US who were trying to work with a bunch of people in India, connecting time zones. All those things were challenging. They're still challenging, but that's where the company was back then. And now today, we look at our business as really having three priorities. The one is in that IT business, we call it employee experience. That's our biggest business. It's about 420 million in a RR grew about 33% last quarter. So that's a great business.
(18:32):
That's the business that's really working in that upmarket. So customers like Nucor Steel, steel Dynamics, lamb Rover, a third of NFL teams, a third of the F1 teams all use our fresh service product to power their IT department. So think of AI enabled experiences for it. Where I have a question of password problem, need new software, I can handle all that through ai. Everything's in a system. So all of the manuals, FAQs, all that's in our system, and the IT department basically runs on fresh service. On the other side, we have customer support products. The Prime product there is Fresh Desk, and that's the older product. That's the product that Geer started with. And think of that as a product for any support organization like Klarna uses us, discover Cards, use us to manage their interaction with their customers. And that's where AI really plays a big role because that's where the volume of outbound queries is so large and AI can really, really help there. And then AI is the third pillar to the story, but that crosses both product lines. So that's where we are today.
Sameer (19:43):
Yeah, I'm going to come back to, there's a lot to talk about how the emergence of AI has really transformed this business. We didn't talk about it when we first started this company. It wasn't part of the discussion at that time, and you've had to incorporate that. But I think this India comment that you made is so important because the company started in Chennai. It basically ran everything out of Chennai for years because you could be a cloud company with a PLG type product and sit in Chennai and sell it to people all over the world. The same 180 companies you were talking about with Google. This is what FreshWorks did in the early
Dennis (20:22):
Days. Absolutely.
Sameer (20:23):
Today, when you look at it, how do you bring the history and the heritage and the importance of India as a center for this company, but really now operate as a public company on the global stage where you need to have people and talent in lots of different places. It's kind of a fine line to balance between the two things. How are you handling that right now?
Dennis (20:45):
Well, we have to do two things. We have to cultivate and grow our team and our leaders in particular in India, they're the people building our products. That's where all of our technical talent is. And one of the things that I am very passionate about is we need to get them in front of customers more. So we're having event next week in London. We're bringing a bunch of our engineers there to meet with our customers, and we're probably flying 30 or 40 people in from India who are the ones who are going to benefit the most from understanding at a deep level, what's the problem that the customer has, how can we actually improve our product? So connecting those leaders, developing those leaders in India is super important for us. At the same time, we need expertise closest to the customer, and those tend to be customer facing roles, sales, marketing and so forth, and some product roles as well. And then we need leaders who can bridge both. That's been really important for us.
Sameer (21:39):
And I think what you're talking about, it's really a more generalizable, right? We are using the India example here, but companies today are so distributed and they start in places, and that's not necessarily where the customers are, but when they become global companies, global tech companies. So you feel like some of these things are really the model for how companies evolve just in general?
Dennis (22:03):
Definitely. I mean, certainly at Google and even at Dropbox very quickly we had globally distributed operations. I think the unique thing for us is usually in a valley company, at least the engineering teams, the product teams are when you're starting the company in the same place as the commercial leadership usually. But I think in the future that doesn't need to be true because we see this in India, the talent is absolutely amazing. We have people who, one of the stats was we have 200 people in the company with more than 20 years experience in engineering. We've formalized an India leadership team that has the autonomy to make changes in the local office and is, I expect them to be perceived as leaders of our company in India broadly. So if there are events, they're the ones showing up at the events. So I think giving people real autonomy, real authority, and then supporting them as on their growth journeys, that's a big part of my job,
Sameer (23:06):
Really a path to develop their career regardless of not being, there's no concept of being the satellite office or the back office versus headquarters.
Dennis (23:16):
Right? Right. Certainly. And one thing I emphasize and a selling point for our teams, like in India when we're recruiting, you can come to FreshWorks in India and your product is going to ship globally. It's our prime product. You're not working on a side project or some small piece of a very large piece of software. It's our product. And I think that that is inspiring for people, exciting for people, and then they get to spend time with the customers. Because if you're an engineer, that's what you, and again, a lot of companies in India are not necessarily doing that. They're not flying their engineers out to actually talk to the customers and spend time with them. And that's very rewarding for the engineers.
Sameer (23:56):
One of the things, so when you started at FreshWorks, you joined as president
(23:59):
And Geish was our founder referenced before he was CEO, and you did that for 18 months, about 18, 18 months, and then became CEO. And that's one of the hardest things to get right in any company. Definitely a tech company where you have such centricity around the founder now Geish is executive chairman. What worked in that? What do you think are some lessons there about thinking about succession or when it's time to maybe go do something else and bring new talent in to take the company to the next phase? What are some of the things we did and maybe there's some things we could have done differently?
Dennis (24:39):
I think we actually did a lot of things. I think first of all, I think the board was very clear and supportive of making sure that we form the right relationship together. And I got a lot of counseling from you and Roxanne on ensuring that I'm investing the time that G'S investing, the time in that relationship. In the first month, Garris and I went to Chennai together and he showed me around the city, he showed me his football club. He has a football club there for young kids. He brings kids from all over India to Chennai and trains them in the hopes that someday they'll make it into the English Premier League or some of the other bigger soccer leagues. It's amazing, amazing what he's done there, but I just got to know him a lot and I got to know the things that he's passionate about.
(25:28):
So one of the things that FreshWorks does, which is very unique, we garish set this up. We educate kids who otherwise would not go to college in English language and in coding, and it completely transforms their lives. So I got to meet the class of the academy. I think we're on the fourth or fifth class, and each class is about 90, 90 kids. Applicants from all over the Shana area apply now. But I met this now young woman named Lakshmi Priya, and she was giving her project like synthesis at the end of her first year, which is what you need to do in order to graduate. And she was explaining where she came from. She came from a town in the outskirts of Chennai. She worked in a matchstick factory. Think about
Sameer (26:20):
This, imagine that,
Dennis (26:20):
Right? Her job was to fill 3000 Matchboxes a day and she made a couple dollars for that. Her mother was the foreperson of the Matchbox factory. So her life, if she had stayed on that same course, that was her life. And she now is a software developer, and her aspiration was to buy her mom a home. And garish is like, this is why I built the company. Having that experience with him and seeing him there, understanding him a little bit more, I thought that was super important. And it also created a tremendous sense of responsibility on what I'm here to actually do. And every time I go back to Chennai, I spend a little bit of time at the academy. It's like my dose of motivation a little bit
(27:17):
Connects me and there's all these stories of people and there's so many stories like that of technology knowledge and transforming people's lives and giving them a completely different trajectory than what they otherwise would have. So we did things like that. We spent a lot of time together, got to know what motivated him. We had a very unusual relationship where the team reported directly to both of us, and the team was great about that because that can be hard. Who do I listen to? We didn't really have that so much. We roughly divided things. So I spent more time on go-to-market and kind of the g and a functions. He spent more time on product and engineering. I spent more time with customers. He spent more time with the bigger partners and stuff. And that's how I learned the business. That's how I learned to work with him. And then eventually he decided, okay, I'm going to spend my time. He has had a fund that's investing in Indian entrepreneurs for some time called The Together Fund. He decided he was going to spend a little bit more time there. That's when he moved into the executive chairman role.
Sameer (28:25):
Id really have to point out that it was both of you invested so much into this. And so taking one of the hardest things to do, which is you founder and it's your company and you're the spiritual center of everything. And to have someone that has a sense of stewardship over it and you trust to take it over in a way, in the time we invested to do it a couple years basically, it's really well done. So now your CEO, and this happens in all the companies we work on, which is you're growing so fast and the people that got you to a certain place aren't always the people that can take you to the next place. And it's always a tough thing because you are so committed to that team and that group. But you've had to build the team, 400 million AR business and a billion, it's different. It's a different business and multiple product lines and selling motions are different. Talk to us about how you've built your leadership team because it's really, you've put together an amazing team and a lot of it had to be done when you became CEO.
Dennis (29:30):
Yeah, so we compete with the biggest companies in the world, the collective market cap,
Sameer (29:37):
Salesforce, ServiceNow,
Dennis (29:38):
Salesforce, ServiceNow, Atlassian, HubSpot are just four. Zendesk. There's five.
(29:44):
Those 500 billion in market cap just among those five. So I need to show up on the field with people who can fight and compete against those players. I can't be screwing around. And so if we want to be in that league, we have to start acting in that league right now. So that's been my imperative, and I've said that to Geris from the beginning that, and he has an amazing sense of urgency too, which I love. He's very much a Get it done now let's go, let's go. And I'm the same way. So I've been thoughtful about the sequencing and the kind of people that we bring in, bring those people in, helping them get up to speed. I write a five page document for everybody when they're coming in with, here's my assessment of your org, here's my assessment of what we need to do, but I could be wrong.
(30:37):
And then here's how to work with the team around you. What I expect in terms of norms, here's how to work with me. And that is intended to get them off to a good start because that's also really hard. I've definitely brought people in who haven't worked out because you're never going to hire a hundred percent, but I think it's been really important to invest the time in bringing those people in. I do the first interview myself. We have an interviewer do the very first screen, but I don't believe, oh, meet, come back five times, meet, start at the bottom and work your way up. Eventually you'll meet the ceo. If I'm going to hire them, I'm going to interview them from the beginning. So the first interview that people have is usually with me, and I think that's way faster and more efficient. And that way I get more reps too. So I'll see 10 people before making a decision as opposed to just seeing two or three that everybody else thinks are good. So those are some of the things that I've done to kind of build that team and to get it to where it's,
Sameer (31:33):
Let me ask you a couple of things. Just these are philosophies of being the leader of the company. So when you have, we do sort of a strong history and culture coming from India and the company means a lot more than maybe a lot of other companies because it's so visible in India, the first software company to go public on NASDAQ from India. So it carries a lot of extra weight and responsibility. So when you think about preserving that and being true to that, but then also we have to perform or company got to win, you got to win. So how do you balance the culture and preserving the things that are important there with a performance based orientation?
Dennis (32:18):
Part of this is you have to be willing to change some things that are symbolic that might ruffle some feathers, but ultimately the right things to do. So we've had this, the company has the same kumba, which probably I didn't say exactly right, but that means family, and that's kind of a word that would get used almost as a defensive mechanism when there was a hard change that people didn't necessarily want to do. Well, we wouldn't do that in the Kumba because that's not Kumba. And so I've introduced a new term venti ani, which means means team, team wins or winning team and trying to get people to think like we are a team and a team has to perform at a high level, support one another, be kind to one another, respect one another, but has to perform at a high level. And we did that, did that with G'S involvement.
(33:19):
We are just relaunching our values. We now have five values. The very first one is all about the customer. And so some changes like that I think are really necessary to signal that, okay, what's the intent? Where are we going? What's the future going to be like? We're much more rigorous in setting the right goals and then really being disciplined about holding our teams accountable for those goals. And we're seeing some amazing performance as a result from teams that, and leaders that have just thrived in that kind of performance oriented environment. So there's a lot of change that we've had to drive to continue to move up market to continue to be able to compete against these bigger players. And we've had to get focused in a lot of entrepreneurial companies. The instinct, because the first product was successful is to launch a second and a third and a fourth before the first product is fully anywhere near its potential.
(34:17):
And when you do that, you can do that. But when you do that, the risk is that you're going to lose focus on that first product and you're going to lose what made you great. And I think FreshWorks was a little bit of that risk. So we had to cut some products. We've a number of products in our portfolio. We're very much focused on CX and those are the products, getting the resources. Even within cx, we're focusing all of our investment in Freshdesk, which is the biggest product in that family going forward. And all that I think was a little traumatic at first for people. It used to a culture that's a little more, let a thousand flowers bloom. But I just keep coming back to the fact that we've got two amazing products with 73,000 customers. There are a lot more companies out there that could use our products.
(35:05):
There's a lot more problems we could solve with just those two areas. It's service software across customer support and beyond. That's a huge category. We can build a huge company there. And ultimately people in every culture they want to win. And so if they believe they're going to win, they believe that's the right strategy. I think we've gotten people to the point where they understand and believe that that's how we're going to win. Then people get on board and you have to also accept that some people aren't going to get on board, and that's okay. We got to
Sameer (35:38):
Come back to AI because it was not really something we talked about in this company. We talked about great design, product led growth, moving from SMB to mid-market, but if you think about the categories you're in with it, service management basically help desk for ITS or customer service. The two software categories that are the most are being transformed the most by the corporation of AI technologies. And so you've had to retool everything, but we've been thinking about on the fly, how is that going and what is your vision for how we become an AI native
Dennis (36:15):
Company? Yeah. Well, again, I think Geris got it before anybody in the company, and I remember him following open ai, anthropic and all the rest way before they were in the media every day. And we had invested in and had some early AI functionality in the product. I think our first product, AI product was launched in 2018, kind of more of a natural language processing type of development and then some machine learning functionality that was embedded in the product. But things got very serious about 18 months ago with chat GPT being released and G, he called the alarm. It was like, Hey, we got to get on this. We got to get on this now. This was the benefit of this structure where he didn't have to do all the CEO things. He could just jump on ai. And he spent a lot of time in India, got the teams rallied, came up with a strategy, and we had a three-part strategy which we're driving to this day, which is the first persona is the actual employee or end customer.
(37:24):
The second persona we designed for is the agent himself, make the agent more productive and the third is the manager and make the manager more productive through AI driven insights. We didn't go out and hire a bunch of AI experts. We actually trained our own people in AI and they trained themselves. And to this day, most of our people that are doing ai, our self-taught, self-trained, but of course we have very experienced people who can learn new things, and that's been really fun to see as well. So it was very much, okay, now we're all in and then we need to figure out, okay, can we monetize this? So that was a whole nother set of learnings for how do you position a new AI product, how do you price it, how do you sell it? We're still working. I think the industry as a whole is still working out pricing, but today we have over 3000 customers that are paying us for AI functionality.
(38:15):
We see deflection rates for our L one agent product that are as high as 80%. I think the average is somewhere around 55%, but as high as 80% of previous inbound tickets being handled entirely by the ai. We're launching next week a complete suite of AgTech AI functionality that's going to enable our customers to do things like change a ticket for an airline or a hotel reservation or return an item all without touching a human. But if a human needs to get involved, we can escalate and the human will have all the case from the interaction with the ai. So it's all happening right now, and I would say that we've made a lot of progress in going from a company that wasn't focused on ai. Now it's not a hundred percent of what we do. There's a lot of other stuff we need to do to build and maintain our products, but it's a huge focus for us. Now,
Sameer (39:11):
Dennis, let's talk a little bit as much as you can as a public company, CEO, about things in front of us at FreshWorks. What are the big things you want to accomplish?
Dennis (39:21):
Well, I would bring it back to ai. We see a world where AI completely transforms both the customer support department and the IT department and beyond. And for us, that means that we're going to need to move our software from really being kind of a passive tool that someone uses to the frontline agent that most employees and most customers interact with. As that happens, those agents will need to take on the persona and the brand of the companies that they're representing. So I was mentioning some of the customers, if I am at Sony Music, the agent that Sony Music deploys is going to have to reflect their brand ethos, not just their visual identity, but how do they want to interact with their customers? That might be very different than New Balance shoes, which is also a customer. We are going to rely on these software agents to do everything that a human agent ever did, which is going to require a ton of integration with other systems of record, and it's going to require us to move incredibly fast.
(40:35):
Now, that's a huge opportunity for us because what's different about what we do, our software and the reason where we are, our software is easy to use. The time to value is much faster than old legacy software like a ServiceNow or Salesforce. We hear that all the time. It doesn't require specialists to manage. So you can manage the software yourself. So our AI has to follow that ethos, and a lot of AI today is not that way. It requires the customer to do a ton of work to get it to work. So our ai, the whole intent is out of the box, easy to use, but the range of capability is going to be so much broader in the future that most interaction of employees and of customers with brands will be through these agents. It's a really different world.
Sameer (41:22):
Well, thank you Dennis. It's great having you on Spotlight on, and I appreciate that you shared all these things about your background and these wonderful lessons for our audience.
Dennis (41:31):
Thank you. And thank you for being such a big part of my personal story and for the connection at Dropbox and the connection at FreshWorks. It absolutely life-changing for me.
Sameer (41:41):
It's a pleasure. Thank
