Three tech unicorn CEOs on how they scaled-up

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. This is exactly how we reimagine the no-code industry, using AI as the new, basically, developer who is building those apps and workflows and the knowledge workers tweaking and making changes in the application that have been built by AI. This is the first time we have technology that's more human-like than anything that we've ever done before in the past. With all the industrial revolutions we've had, this is by far the biggest. We've been working on AI and our product for a number of years and it's a key part now, truly a transformation in the industry.

1:23You just heard there from Catherine Costa Dureva, Chet Kapoor and Doug Winter. We're all CEOs of US tech companies. This week on the Business Leader Podcast, we're going to hear from three business leaders instead of just one. Why put them all together? They all lead SaaS companies, that's software as a service, the lifeblood of many businesses of all sizes. And these companies are all also very involved in the latest developments with artificial intelligence, thinking about how it can be applied to businesses. I spoke with all these leaders separately at different events.

2:01Every year, London hosts hundreds of tech events by software companies, huge roadshows that roll into town, a bit like the Rolling Stones on a global tour. But instead of playing new songs to fans, they are showing off the latest product launches and updates to clients, as well as trying to find new customers. Famous consumer companies like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon hold these mega events and you may well have seen the coverage. But similar smaller events are also being held by companies who are not household names, but are still significant B2B companies valued at billions of dollars. The people you'll hear from in this podcast are examples of this.

2:40Catherine Kostareva of Creatio, Chet Kapoor of Datastacks and Doug Winter of Seismic.

2:51The first person I caught up with was Catherine Kostareva, CEO and founder of Boston-based Creatio. I spoke with her just after she had delivered the keynote at her Creatio event at a fancy hotel in London.

3:08Catherine Kostareva founded Creatio in 2014 in Boston, a place she says is just as dynamic as Silicon Valley. Creatio is a no-code platform that lets employees design their own apps and workflows for things like CRM or marketing without knowing how to code. The tech that underpins the platform is powered by AI. Creatio is a tech unicorn that recently attracted$200 million in investment, valuing it at$1.2 billion. But it was largely bootstrapped in its early formative years. In the case of Creatio, we work with knowledge workers, people like yourself, who can do it without knowing any code at all.

3:48That's what no code is. I mean, they even say that in the future, the language of coding won't be JavaScript or Python or whatever. It will be English because you'll just write what you need. 100%. And this is absolutely right, especially right now with the development of AI. And this is exactly how we reimagine the no code industry using AI as the new, basically, developer who is building those apps and workflows and the knowledge workers tweaking and making changes in the application that have been built by AI. And you talk about an AI command center, and I heard one of your colleagues refer to citizen developers.

4:26How exactly does the AI help the citizen developer? So when we say AI command center in Croatia, AI command center covers three different types of AI. First is predictive AI, And this one existed for years. It's like machine ML models. And predictive AI is, for example, next best action for the user, next best offer for the seller. So if you think about the salesperson, sales rep, for example, the next best offer that he or she can make to a customer, that will be done by predictive AI. The second part of AI is generative AI. So generative AI is, chat GPT is an example of that. When you define in a few words what exactly needs to be done, and then AI does the work for you, like drafts the email, drafts the quote, the proposal for a client, for example, that's generative AI.

5:20And then the third part that covers Creatio AI Command Center is called agentic AI agents. So agents is the ability to run the full workflows thanks to AI. So they do multiple different actions in a row, basically commanding what needs to be done by the application. Just going to sort of zoom out here a little bit to look at your career. So you've done something interesting because you had a successful corporate job with IBM. and then 10 years ago you set up a startup. Did you always want to be an entrepreneur? Was it a difficult decision to do that? IBM was indeed my first job out of college.

6:03But then after that, I worked for a couple of software companies and then I built my first software company. And I was pretty young at that age. I wasn't even 30 years old. And then I sold this first company and then founded Creation in Boston where we are headquartered today. And Creatio over the course of 10 years has become a strong player on the market with 25 countries that we're covering with Creatio employees and 800 channel partners that represent Creatio all over the world. And you mentioned there that you're based in Boston. When we think of tech companies, American tech companies, we think of Silicon Valley.

6:43So do you stand out there? Are there any advantages? Do you miss out on some of the networking opportunities? I will respectfully disagree because we call... So first of all, I'm the biggest fan of Boston. Like Boston is my most favorite city in the world. And I can tell you that we call Boston and Massachusetts in general as an east coast Silicon Valley. There are multiple enterprise software companies that were built and emerged from Boston. Many of them are publicly traded companies like, for example, Klaviyo or, for example, Pegasystem. So Boston actually is the capital of tech, but mostly in this enterprise software space, while Silicon Valley is more like a consumer-focused center of IT and tech.

7:33Does it have a different culture there? Because Silicon Valley, we think of the kind of swashbuckling entrepreneur, the Elon Musk, the fail-fast philosophy. Is it a bit more sober on the East Coast? It is. It is. It is. And that's such a brilliant question. It is. And I love discussing it with my network and friends how different Massachusetts and Boston is from Silicon Valley. We have a lot of business in Europe, here in London, in France. I just arrived from Paris. And I can tell you that Boston, for me, is literally in the middle between Silicon Valley mentality and kind of a little bit conservative, a little bit slower mentality here in Europe.

8:13So Boston is right in the middle. We are definitely, we don't have this temper of fail fast. We have, the culture we have is more like push through it in order to get to the result rather than do it doesn't work, fail fast. It's a different mentality in Boston in comparison to Silicon Valley. And as you grew your company, for many years you were bootstrapped. And then after quite a few years, you did get quite a bit of venture capital funding, which valued the company at more than$1.2 billion. So in the UK, we're very interested in how we can be a bit more American and grow large companies. So tell me a bit about your growth strategy.

8:55You're right. We bootstrapped for a long time, basically, because I wanted to make sure that not only we found the product market fit, but we also have the traction with scale and we are able to scale very, very fast. My advice to entrepreneurs is always make sure that not only you have the idea in mind, but you have a brilliant product. You can truly deliver the value to your clients, but most importantly, not just to a few clients, but you know how to scale the business before you start taking a lot of capital to scale. Because, for example, this$200 million that we raised, we raised to scale the company even further into 100 countries where we currently have clients.

9:38And the second part is obviously AI. So a lot of investment will be going into AI. And how much time do you spend on the hiring process, if you can spend any at all now as CEO? Because that's crucial to making sure the business grows. If you define my priorities, culture and building the team is absolutely number one priority for me without any exception. So to your point, I do interview a lot. And I will interview not only for the executive level positions, but also for the middle manager's position. because keeping the culture, which is very strong at creation, is one of the key pillars of success, I believe, for any entrepreneur.

10:18Everybody's trying to sell themselves in interviews. And I know you go a lot on gut feelings in interviews, although you're also looking at the data, the CV. But are there any kind of red flags you look out for? I thought that might be useful for people who are hiring. During the interviews? Listen, when we hire for any role, we have a very clear scorecard. It consists of our values. It's five values, genuine care, strive for excellence, grow every day. It's passion and it's operate as one team because we have employees in 25 countries of the world. Values, then hard skills. For example, for a customer success manager, exactly what are the hard skills that you need to know in order to be successful in your job.

11:03And then soft skills like communication, for example, or your written skills or any soft skill that you might need to have for this particular role. So we have this scorecard. Think about it like a spreadsheet with a scorecard. And we assess each and every hard skill, soft skill, and values. If the candidate that we have right now in the pipeline, it matches all these requirements and we do not compromise. So if there are some skills where the candidate is not strong enough, we probably will not proceed with the job offer. So this is kind of high level framework how we hire at CreateShare. Can you use AI at all to help filter the process a bit?

11:46Absolutely. Yes, 100 percent, especially during the screening process when you look into the background, into the profile requirements to make sure that the candidate is not a job hopper, to make sure that the candidate has experience in the industry and in the companies that could be good feeders for creation. When we think about the different stages of AI affecting society, maybe at the moment we're looking at efficiency at work, AI being a kind of co-pilot and your company's involved in that. But what do you think things might be like in a decade's time? Oh, it's going to be a completely new world.

12:24Even during this presentation that I heard in the morning, you remember I gave these examples of things that have been unsinkable even 50 or 60 years ago, right? And right now, you can't imagine your life without the technology that appeared 50 or 60 years ago. You just don't understand how you live without that. So in 5, 10 years, right now, the pace of innovations is much higher than it used to be. So basically, even in five years, not in 10, in five years from now, the workflow automation systems, the enterprise software is going to look completely different than it is right now. AI is going to be in the middle of that.

13:05And a lot of routine job that is still being done by people today will be done by AI. So what we're doing at Creatio, we are completely reimagining the future of enterprise software and can be more excited about that. So will it make new roles for humans then who don't necessarily have to have coding skills, yet they'll have this new technological power? 100%. And that is why I'll tell you that I'm very skeptical about all these conversations about jobs being lost and the people who will lose their job and won't be able to find a new one. Because again, in the world that we're living in, you have to be learning new skills every single day.

13:48Otherwise, you will become irrelevant one way or the other. It is due to AI or due to other technology. It just inevitably will happen. So learning new skills and growing every day and adapting to the new environment, this is what every professional human needs to do.

14:12To meet our next tech leader, we're heading to a different roadshow event in central London. I'm heading to the Frameless Gallery, which specializes in immersive digital shows, to meet Chet Kapoor. He was born and raised in India. In 1985, he moved to the US to study at Arizona State University, and shortly after joined Next, the company Steve Jobs set up after leaving Apple. After a career at IBM and Google, Kapoor became CEO of Datastacks in 2019. Datastacks specializes in an open-source cloud-based data storage and retrieval system known as Cassandra that was developed by Facebook but then spun out.

14:50It is used in applications like Netflix's recommendation system and Apple's iMessage. Data Stacks was set up to use Cassandra for enterprise applications. Under Kapoor's leadership, the company is specialized in generative AI. Its customers include Audi, Bud Financial and Capital One. I caught up with him after his keynote. Tell me a bit about growing up in Polkota and finding your interest in computing. In 1983, British Council Library. My mother used to drop me off. I used to read a lot of books there. Read a book called The Little Kingdom by a gentleman by the name of Mike Moritz. And Mike was a Times reporter then, and he was covering Apple and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

15:36I was fascinated by that book, fascinated by the book. And so I read the book, decided to go off and learn computers, and went off and took some computer classes and came to the States in 85. And with only one goal, I wanted to come and work for Steve Jobs. And went to Arizona State, actually managed to start working for Next, which was the company that Steve founded after he left Apple. And so I was working for Next while I was still in school in 87. So that's where the journey started. And when you were young and impressionable, and you're only an intern, but you must be going to some of the same meetings as Steve Jobs, what kind of things could you pick up and learn from him?

16:21Steve is very interesting, right? I mean, I was the person that got coffee for the person that made coffee at Max. So I was very low on the totem pole, but it didn't matter. There were a bunch of us that were, we were called campus consultants. And we were all over the country, even some in Europe. I got a chance to actually watch him design products and build products. And so what are the two or three things you learned from Steve? And then I went off, by the way, I graduated and then started working for Next. So my learnings from Steve are give people what they need, not what they want. And this goes back to Henry Ford, right?

17:02If he asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, right? And so Steve always figured out a way to give people what they needed, not what they wanted. So that was one. So deeply think about how a behavior of an individual changes. The second thing is hire the best people possible, the very best people possible. And then more importantly than the hiring part is you have to inspire them to be better than they ever thought they could be themselves. And so do something important, hire great people and inspire them. I think he did a phenomenal job of those three things. And it was just because he hired great people, it was not just Steve.

17:47There was a bunch of other people as well around him that there was a lot to learn from. I was reading in Ed Catmull's book, Creativity Inc., about what it was like working with Steve. And he could also be a very intimidating figure who would say controversial things to stir up a room. Did you see that as well? Less so, because I was a junior member of the next team. But I did see him rip people, right? Because he had very high standards on how he wanted to change the world. And when people didn't meet them, he actually was very brutal on how he communicated it. that's the part uh i didn't pick up right just to be clear because there's always a better way to to uh to to get things going there's always a better way and sometimes you have to you have to use fear but mostly you can get away by actually just using love do you have a separate team within your company that's working on new ideas or is it just everybody should be thinking of new possibilities um we believe there's there should be innovation in execution so you should be able to innovate anything and everything and sometimes by the way that brings gets us into trouble right because why would why would you want to innovate an accounting principle right because that's the law so you just leave it there right but but uh we don't have um there are two things we don't do one is we don't have uh people who are working on boring stuff and people are working on exciting stuff.

19:15Everybody works on boring stuff and exciting stuff. Like I say, everybody carries water and does dishes. And the second thing is we don't have people who do operations and strategy. We have people who do both. You should be able to go, you should be able to change your altitude when you talk about company strategy, as well as get down and be able to do things on your calendar and have action items and things like that. And moving on a bit to AI, and obviously we're still digesting as a society where it's going to take us, what's going to be possible. A lot of people in the kind of SaaS space have talked about the first wave, which was about AI's discovery, kind of sophisticated research tool.

19:54Then maybe at the moment it's generative AI, but the next one is autonomous chatbots that we're going to be dealing with a lot more. Is that what you see coming next or is it something else? This is my fifth technology wave. I was there for client server, for the web, for mobile, for cloud and now Gen.AI. It'll be the biggest wave that I will see in my lifetime. This is the first time we have technology that's more human-like than anything that we've ever done before in the past. With all the industrial revolutions we've had, this is by far the biggest and it'll continue to be. I don't think we know what's coming.

20:32I don't, you know, when people did the web, did they think Amazon was going to be around? did when when mobile came around did we know uber was going to be invented um no right we did we just didn't when cloud came around did we know that netflix was going to be the biggest cloud customer and and and help aws grow its business um we didn't and so i think i personally think when gen ai were in the angry birds era where there's a lot of really cool stuff that's happening with cool technology, with chat GPT, with agents, a lot of things that are happening on chatbots, a lot of things that are happening with assistants.

21:13So many of those things are awesome. But I don't think we know where this is going to take us. I mean, the Amazon, the Netflixes, the Googles of Gen.AI have probably been born, but they have not showed up yet. So I think the one thing for sure, this I have conviction on, is that I don't think it is AI versus people. I think it is definitely about people with AI versus just people without. And I think that has to be a founding principle for almost anybody who wants to shape the future. I guess there will be some companies that completely reinvent themselves when they see the possibilities of the technology.

22:01But in the here and now for kind of medium-sized businesses, what ways can you advise that they can use AI just to improve things a bit? marketing in a massive way, right? Content generation, anything that's got to do with content generation, LLMs are awesome at, right? We use it internally. We actually challenge ourselves. We've been using Gen AI tools for the last close to two years now. And so we take our, I talked about weekly meetings. We take all our trends and give it to an LLM and it spits out nice graphs for us and we take a look at it. And we also ask for insights because now there's a 40 page document that gets created for the entire company about every little detail metric every week.

22:45And now we have one for, you know, for five years that that is now in a store and we can analyze it and get insights. And so anything to do with content generation, number one, number two, anything to do with insights. So I think the insights piece is really, really important. And the third thing is, I think most of our use cases will be customer oriented. And I think the more people do that, the better off they'll be. If you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice, business advice to help them in their journey to come, can you think what that would be? I would say I would just think about time differently.

23:27And because when you're young, you want to do everything yesterday. and let the experience happen, soak it in. Failures and successes will just make you a better person and because of that, it'll make you a better leader. Next up, it's time to hear from Doug Winter. He founded San Diego-based Seismic in 2010 and leads it as CEO. Seismic has developed technology to help sales teams work more efficiently. The digital platform helps employees with everything from sales insights to onboarding, with artificial intelligence helping everything to run more smoothly. The company has annual recurring revenues of more than$300 million and is valued at$3 billion, a triple unicorn.

24:15I met up with Doug Winter when he was paying a visit to his London offices. There's so many SaaS companies these days. I've met a lot of them interviewing people on this podcast, a business leader. What makes your SaaS proposition stand out? Well, we're the leader in the sales enablement space. And what that means is we help take sales strategies and turn them into the actual actions of sellers in the field. All the things that they need to do that they need in order to be ready for the next meeting, the next customer interaction that they're going to have. Whether that's the content that they need to share and present, which is highly personalized and customized.

24:54or whether it's the training that they might need specific to a particular conversation. We're there to kind of help with that just-in-time enablement of the field teams. And a lot of the SaaS companies right now are kind of pumped up by AI. Is that something you got into early? Yes, absolutely. We've been working on AI and our product for a number of years, and it's a key part now. It's quickly becoming the way that you build products. You know, not just an add-on or enhanced capability, but core and fundamental to the way products are being built. Really and truly a transformation in the industry.

25:33Some companies have done that by, I'm thinking of DocuSign, who I met, by acquiring an AI specialist. Did you go down that route or did you develop your own in-house talent through hiring? A combination. We have had had some people that have been working on AI internally for a number of years, but we also went outside and brought in a leader that she has an extensive background from the outside. And we've taken an approach that I think is a little unique as well. We have an internal lab that is constantly working on and trying new things, you know, very quick turnaround time as this technology is changing so fast.

26:12And not everything will work, but it's better to go and try it as quickly as possible. And then once we find ideas that we think are really viable and are going to not just add value for our customers, but also be achievable with the technology where it is today or maybe just around the corner, then we'll move those over into the product team to have them actually develop it and bring them into the product. That's interesting. How do you test the ideas? Do you put them straight before the customer, some A-B testing, or do you keep it kind of practice with tests before the market? Yeah, incrementally.

26:44So we'll try it internally. You know, first whoever's in the lab working on it, and then they'll bring it out to a larger group. I'd like to be included in that myself, so I'm hands-on trying out a lot of the new things. And then as that, you know, gets positive feedback, then we'll put it in front of a small group of customers and expand that group of customers over time and before we bring it into the full product. Was that sort of test customers or paying customers and say, do you want to try out this new feature we've got? That's right. So I think we've been very successful over the years building a loyal group of advocates and we'll be quick to go back to those that have interests in particular areas or that we know are just great at giving us feedback.

27:23They usually love doing it, enjoy being on the cutting edge, and love giving us feedback straight away on how we're doing. I know people in SaaS love metrics and statistics, and they think about that when they talk about how they grow their companies. So I've heard people say, you know, you have to focus on the net promoter score, which is how likely a customer is to recommend you. Or you maybe focus on how much a customer is actually using the features on a weekly basis. There's all these different metrics to measure in order to focus on that and grow. Do you have any that you focus on? Yeah, you mentioned a couple of good ones.

27:59I think it's dangerous to become too fixated on any one metric. You know, net promoter score is an excellent one, but tends to be broad based. Our system also, you know, carries a lot of content or relies heavily on content in it. So whether it's the sales content or the training content that's developed by our customer themselves, if that content isn't of good quality, sometimes that reflects in the NPS score. So you have to go beyond the score and read the comments and understand like what they're really talking about. Usage is also important, but we look for specific usage patterns. patterns.

28:35So logging in, how many times did someone log in is not a particularly good indicator. Obviously, if they're not logging in, they're not using your system at all. But logging in isn't really sufficient. You need to look for the patterns of behavior that you expect, the usage patterns to support kind of the activities that the customers are going to derive value from. That's what creates the recurring revenue, the customer that stays with you year on year. That's right. And I think that's the single most important metric in a SaaS business is that gross retention. I always like to tell our teams, the best way to grow is never to shrink.

29:09And I think it's really important that you're taking care of the customers that you have and building upon them with new customers, but also new capabilities to your existing customers. Tell me how the not shrinking strategy kind of ties into what you've done with Seismic. Yeah, so I think it's a critical and important distinction to make early in a business's career is who are your customers and who are you going to be? And when you're focused on larger enterprises, as Seismic has from the beginning, you really have to make sure that each customer is well taken care of and you have to put in place the correct customer support infrastructure, customer success infrastructure to make that happen.

29:49If you're servicing smaller businesses where you may have 10 times or even 100 times the number of logos, you really have to have your own stronger sense of this is what we're going to do and kind of block out a lot of the customers and be willing to let some of them go if they're not aligned with your direction. So it's a very important distinction. It may seem like a subtle one, but it's a very important distinction that you need to make clearly and explicitly to your team members. So that means you have members of staff who are dedicated to retention, basically. That's right. We have quite a significant customer success organization.

30:23We partner with our customers on delivering value to them. So we sell them value, a certain set of value stories and use cases, then we onboard them with those stories in mind. And then we continue to check up on them on a periodic basis, also with those in mind. And, you know, you're listening constantly to the enhancements and things that those customers need. and are asking for. You can't just do everything that your customers ask, but when they're large customers paying you, you know, millions of dollars or pounds, for example, you need to pay attention and be willing to do a little bit extra in order to keep them happy.

30:58If you could look back on and speak to your younger self when you were starting out on the business journey, is there any kind of personal advice that you would pass on? Yeah, I think I would just reinforce that it's a marathon, not a sprint, that you're going to have the ups and you're going to have the downs. But if you continue to put great people around you and encourage them to take chances and try new things, that you can be successful. But you can't get too caught up either in the short-term successes or near-term failures.

31:35You've been listening to me, Dougal Shaw, speaking to Catherine Kostareva of Creatio, Chet Kapoor of Datastacks and Doug Winter of Seismic for the Business Leader podcast. Please do rate and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.

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