Transforming Customer Support with AI | DevRev’s Co-founder & CEO Dheeraj Pandey

0:00And the way we dealt with not just making the product very easy to use, but also making customer service so delightful. We said, you've got to remake this into an opening system. And that's how it came. DevRev, obviously timing is everything. We figured the killer app for AI is customer support. And yet we couldn't be a bolt on top of existing systems. We had to really go and do this fundamentally differently with cloud native and AI native principles. Developer productivity can make or break whether companies deliver value to their customers. But are you tracking the right metrics that truly make a difference?

0:41Understanding the right productivity metrics can be the difference between hitting your goals and falling behind. To highlight how you can adjust your approach to both measure what matters and identify the right corrective strategies, Linear B just released the Engineering Leader's Guide to Accelerating Developer Productivity. Download the guide at the link in the show notes and take the steps you need to improve your organization's developer productivity today. Well, welcome back to Dev Interrupted, everyone. I'm your host, Conor Bronsden, and today I'm thrilled to be joined by D-Raj Pandey. D-Raj is the CEO and co-founder of DevRev, a unicorn, and he's the former CEO of Nutanix, which he led to a$16 billion valuation and a successful IPO.

1:21D-Raj's entrepreneurial journey goes from Tanix to DevRev, and it's marked by innovation and a deep understanding of how AI has transformed businesses already and how it can transform and business operations moving forward. Today, we're going to discuss his approach, the lessons he's learned, and how he's applying a design-led approach to AI at DevRev to build that unicorn company and challenge giants like Salesforce and Jira. Excited to talk about his counter-positioning and understand more about that. Dheeraj, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you, Connor. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on because it's always great to learn from entrepreneurs like yourself who've not only led one successful company, but now are doing it again because there are clearly repeatable lessons and things you've learned along your journey.

2:04But before we dive into some of those lessons and your approach, I do want to remind our listeners, I know they hate to hear it from me every week, but if you're enjoying this episode, if you like guests like D-Raj, if you want to learn more about these kind of topics, please take a moment to rate and review our podcast on your podcasting app of choice, whether that's Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, Apple Podcasts. These ratings and reviews are how people find the show, and they matter a lot. It's an immense help. We deeply appreciate hearing from you, our listeners. With that said, though, we're going to dive into the content.

2:36Dheeraj, you built Nutanix into a$16 billion company. And now you've founded DevRev and its valuation that sounds like is unicorn status. Not to mention, you've also been a board member at Adobe. You're a former VP of engineering and much more. What inspired you to pull away from all these other successes and build DevRev? Yeah, thank you for the introduction. I mean, that$16 billion has been a labor of love for a lot of people. Timing-wise, it just happened to be at the right time and right place. Subjectly, I had two other co-founders who also built great companies over time. And just the folks who've actually been doing it ever since I left about three and a half years ago.

3:13So it's taken a village to build that. You know, when I was doing my first company in 2009, the itch was there. I figured that there's a little bit of an intuition in the gut about going and building products that people like. There's a really good article in The Economist in 2015 when Satya was taking over Microsoft. And, you know, they talked a lot about humility and fierce resolve that really made Microsoft, Microsoft, you know, maybe 40 years into its journey. And one of the big things they talked about is how they said, look, we're going to have to build things that people like, as opposed to put this strategy tax on Windows and Windows Phone and like everything has to build here.

4:00We got to build apps that people might actually like on their operating systems. and to me that was telling because just spoke volumes about first of all what it takes to reinvent yourself but also how market is king the market is king you know there's nothing more powerful than the market it's like the ocean and you don't go and store from the ocean against the tide you need to actually be with the tide so in 2009 that journey was about building distributed systems for all for the masses because distributed systems were still confined to consumer cloud and in cloud companies were trying to do this within their own premises but it said if you have to really take this and democratize it what would it take and that's what Nutanix is all about like if you have to democratize distributed systems what it meant to have people not buy proprietary expensive hardware you know is there a way to do this and there was a killer app that killer app was virtualization.

5:01And, you know, we didn't know much about virtualization and we learned everything about virtualization and what it means to take physical machines into the world or into the realm of virtual and build great, delightful experiences on top of it. Now, the first five years in Nutanix, the product was very difficult, like really, really hard because we were embracing commodity servers, commodity hardware. The things that the public cloud folks were comfortable with because they didn't have to ship all this stuff to anybody else's premises. We had to ship all this stuff to somebody else's premises.

5:34And then we had to support this remotely as opposed to the way the public cloud companies or the consumer cloud companies were doing it with tons of people. I think that was the hard part. Of course, VMware as a layer of an operating system underneath us was also really hard because they had never seen as big an app as what we had actually come to build about data management and distributed systems on top of VMware. So the way we had to compensate for that difficulty, the fact that the product was actually fragile, was through customer support. We said, look, we've got to really bring in the human element to this technological breakthrough that we're trying to actually achieve in the market.

6:14And this yin and yang was great. You know, product with customers, you know, was this yin and yang and customer support was about being customer-centric. You know, leading with technology was about being product-led. And I just, you know, realized that we had to do this differently than what was about ticketing. Like, okay, customer support is not just about ticketing. It's really about an end-to-end collaboration between the market, the end users, the buyers, and, you know, the support people, but also product managers and developers. So what does it mean to create this real-time highway between the end users and the developers and everybody else in the middle?

6:53we used a lot of slack in 2014 we were one of the earliest users of saying okay let's do real-time collaboration you know we did almost seven eight billion dollars in those eight years of selling between 2012 and 2020 and almost half of it came from a handful of customers you know hundreds of customers you know and to really do that we had to build this uh you know sort of collaboration superhighway and way more than what support tools had ever done so we built this along the way our net promoter score was very high you know 90 plus for seven years and so as COVID hit I'm like okay uh this thing is here to stay this idea of digitization and making things more invisible is here to stay more and more things on trim will actually end up in the public cloud what is the one thing that all this will mean and I'm like okay we've learned so much about customer support in the last 11-12 years of when I was building Nutanix.

7:52Let's make this into an operating system. What does it mean for every company to be as customer-centric as we were? And remember, we were dealing with big behemoths, you know, and this was a$100 to$200 billion infrastructure market that had established competitors. And the way we dealt with not just making the product very easy to use, but also making customer service so delightful. We said, you've got to remake the central operating system. And that's how it came. DevRev, obviously timing is everything. We figured the killer app for AI is customer support. And yet we couldn't be a bolt-on on top of existing systems.

8:31We had to really go and do this fundamentally differently with cloud native and AI native principles. It's really interesting you mentioned that bolt-on principle because it seems like a lot of companies today are taking a bolt-on approach to AI instead of building from first principles and having AI embedded within the design from the ground up. And you very much have taken the opposite approach, it seems. Yeah, and look, I mean, when we were building our last company, we knew that if there's no friction, there's no market. I mean, you can be building a quick 30, 40, 50 million dollar company, but if you have to go above 100 million, You know, most of these companies become one of those, like now what?

9:16Like, where's the town? They're looking down the barrel and there's nothing to be found because they didn't go and displace something. I mean, you don't just create new categories and new markets which are accretive in terms of budget and overall everything. No, you've got to displace something and then make it better as well. So this idea of a system of record was very key to us. when we were doing this in around 2012, 2015, 2016, that whole era, this idea of hyper-convergence where we're trying to converge a lot of things into your software. There's lots of me too companies that were just saying, let's not take the big problem head on, which is displacing incumbents.

9:57We can't because it's too risky. And by the way, anyway, the exit that we are really pursuing is kind of being acquired by one of these bigger guys. And we said, no, no, we got to really take this And only two companies survived. We and Pure Storage were the two companies that survived this because we said we've got to go to this space incumbents. And this time around, we had to do the same thing. It's not just a system of intelligence that is a bolt-on on top of some system of engagement that's a bolt-on on top of a big system of record where the real money sinks in the system of record. It's kind of the hardware of business software.

10:33So we had to really take all these three layers, the system record layer. You have to go displace enough Zendesk, enough Salesforce service cloud, enough Atlassian service desk and so on. We have to go and displace these things and then bring engagement and intelligence to offer. That's the only way to build a billion-dollar revenue company. This is great stuff because it's really clear that your experience building a billion-dollar revenue company at Nutanix has really shaped your approach to DevRev. Not only did it inspire your journey there saying, hey, I think customer support is a huge opportunity.

11:08There's more opportunity for end to end experiences. We need to engage everyone with the customer. And also like, hey, let's integrate this incoming technology wave. But you've learned these other key lessons that I'm hearing from you as an entrepreneur, like that responsiveness to the markets, that deep focus on customers and on your product. Like as I'm sure we've heard the Jeff Bezos quote everywhere, you know, what are you doing to make your beer taste better? or I'm paraphrasing. What are some of the other key lessons you've learned along your entrepreneurial journey that folks who are listening in the audience who are maybe thinking about becoming entrepreneurs or are first-time entrepreneurs and are trying to level up, what can they learn from you?

11:41Well, I think a big piece of this is people. You know, how do you really don't shortchange people along the way? Because, you know, the people you employ, they're also the market. And the market knows more than you think they know, you know. This is equally true for product quality, authentic customer service all this stuff is about realizing that you know you can just go twist market in your direction you can just go and short change them and people employees are like that as well you have to be very authentic with them you need to know how to let go of things you know letting go of things is one of the hardest things that entrepreneurs are front of us i mean i struggled with this too you know one thing we did well was hire we could leaders and create new leaders uh also young leaders they didn't have to be focused who are just with immense amounts of experience because sometimes it's very hard for them to reset themselves to roll up their sleeves and really you know work on a new brand build a new brand it takes a lot to build a new brand from scratch so knowing what it means to balance the fountain of youth with the excellence of experience you know all this stuff needs to come together i think the most important thing though is how do you weave work and life together because many times i see entrepreneurs really swing the pendulum too much to one side or sometimes it's just a lifestyle business you know both of these don't work out any long haul it is a marathon you've got to really deal with a lot of paradoxes and work in life with just one such paradox but you know in the short term versus long term that's people that you drink from outside world leaders, but they come from different biases.

13:23Some of them really are about daughter-in, smaller items, the other ones are longer items and you need to really make them work together with each other. I think the most important thing though is people have to realize that at the end of the day, whether you build a small company or build a large company, it's equally hard. It just takes as much time to build a small company as it takes to build a large company. So my bias is go work on something that's big enough. And you might think that you don't have the technological prowess and the talent that you need, but if you don't have that ambition, you'll probably never build anything that really is really market-defining.

14:04I think we learned a lot about systems. I mean, I can tell you that as a CEO myself, I was personally involved in so many decisions in systems. And systems to me is culture. Not just Slack, not just VBail, and not just GitHub, but there's a lot more to it than just that. You know, I mean, I was very involved in choosing our ERP system. For example, NetSuite was our system of choice for us. And within a couple of years, SAP came knocking the door saying, hey, you'll run out of steam with NetSuite because it was not built for anything above$100 billion. And we have made it work. It's still running at$2.4 billion annual revenue of Nutanix.

14:47NetSuite is still running because we actually put a system of engagement of Slack and bots on top of it that manages and everyone log in. Same thing with customer support. We said we got to really build our own. We didn't use Endesk as service cloud. We built our own because data mattered, telemetry mattered, search mattered, analytics mattered. If anything, I think one of the things that we've done at DevRel is to really think about, okay, so what's the operating system on top of which we'll build these next generation apps? before it is one of them. We build product management, we build software development, we're going to build sales, relationship management with customers and buyers and sellers, all this stuff.

15:29But if the underlying operating system is not capable of delivering great search, great analytics, great workflows, I think you're building a cheaper, faster mousetrap, which the market is very little patient for. I mean, honestly, you can build a cheaper, faster something for the S &B, but at the moment, go to mid-market and the enterprise. I think the bar is really, really high. So the one last thing I'll say on building, you know, the hard things about hard things is how do you really go upmarket and get out deeper into the mid-market enterprise and the requirements that actually comes from that?

16:00Because it probably just is hard to build an SME company and it means to build a mid-market enterprise company. It's interesting you bring up this idea of is your problem big enough and are you solving enough? Because I think there are plenty of folks who are listening who are saying, hey, look, you know, I have a small app that are on the side. It makes me a bit of money and I'm happy with it. I don't I don't need to scale it out. But there is such a difference in approach when you do want to scale to a Nutanix level, to a DevRef level. And so there's like philosophical piece of it that you're kind of alluding to here is really important.

16:33And I know this also correlates to how you think about designing for scale and designing for AI driven scale. Can you dive a bit more into how you have approached that from your product philosophy side of things and how you and your co-founders are approaching scaling up to that next level? Yeah, you know, scaling is a really interesting topic. And if you didn't weave architecturally armed, then it's really hard to scale. You know, Manoj and I, you know, I've known Manoj for 30 years. He was with me at Nutanix for about seven and a half years as well. and he and I we talk a lot about this. Obviously people is a part of it.

17:13Process is a part of it. But product equally so. You know, SaaS 2.0 as we call it doesn't have to take sides between the enterprise and the SMB or the startup. You know, there's a false dichotomy between PLG and SLG. At the end of the day, even when you're doing sales-led distribution, the fact that you have a zero-touch product will be great because now In the large enterprise, there are lots of small teams as well who want to do shadow IT, who want to go and make autonomous decisions under the radar of what IT is. So thinking about an architecture that could equally scale for the Xenium as much as it actually scales for the large companies is what very important was.

17:58And the way we build this cloud-native solution was at the core of this. We said, look, we have to have a budget for every small tenant. We can't spend more than tens of cents on AWS for these small tenants. And that meant the way we carved out our multi-tenant architecture for the tenant, whether it's a big tenant or a small tenant, we had to do it in a way that was not lackadaisical. Because sometimes you can actually make these major decisions about architecture that eventually go on to have you make this false choice that, look, now my product is only built for the large segment of the market.

18:34because the underlying cost of goods shipped, the cogs, is so high that I can't really go and cater to the incinerary market. And by the way, that setting is important because that's how the world's mouth grows. So if you want an efficient go-to-market over time, I mean, look at Snowflake, look at AWS, look at Slack, all these companies, they had to build both ends of the market well. If anything, the product-led motion delivers warm seats that eventually salespeople can go and call into and say, hey, I heard that you've been using our product. It's been great. You've been spending all this money on a credit card.

19:12Let's go and show you the enterprise way as well, because now you're big enough for a salesperson to actually call you. That architecture where you're really looking at the two ends in the spectrum and saying, can I build a next generation company, which is a SaaS 2.0 company that caters to both ends in the market. And that's why design matters in all of this. And the way you design a product is the way your go-to-market will actually be executed as well. I think in many ways, the last 20 years of SaaS, they didn't have to worry about knowledge discovery, for example. Search was not their problem because Google had not built something good enough for SaaS companies to deliver search.

19:52Analytics was not their problem. It's like, no, well, now IT will take care of it. and you know building a great workflow engine was not their problem because integration was not their cup of tea integrating was IT's problem the search was an IT problem analytics was an IT's problem and workflows i.e. integration were IT problems you know and we just said look in the next 20 years of SaaS it better do more it has to do more just like SaaS 1.0 did a lot for the market. You know, they had to less shift a lot of the complexity and said, look, IT is struggling with just building hardware, data centers, you know, upgrade cycles, software patching, all this stuff.

20:34We will do all that for you. And you know what? We deliver APIs that you can now use where you don't have to worry about the mundaneness of doing all this stuff. SAS 2.0 has a very similar problem. It has to do more than what SAS 1.0 delivered. word not the least of which is integrating everything together because now we have all these different SaaS things they're all fragments they're not come you know they've not come together so we felt there was a big opportunity for really integrating one more time and I think AI is a great catalyst for that it's an amazing catalyst to bring things together because the only way you can go deliver on you know great chain of thought reasoning and an amazing self-deflection and reasoning and all this stuff where people don't have to disturb other people to get simple answers is if you actually brought the customer side of things the product side of things the people and work side of things the users and their session side of things so we make a case for our knowledge graphs and without this knowledge graphs we don't feel there's real ai and i think those are some of the lessons that i took away from my uh nitanix experience that look i mean as a ceo i was acting like a knowledge graph.

21:49I was like, hey, I think I know what this function leader does, that that function leader does, and what's going on at the project in this department. And I would just try to be the thing that integrates everything. But if anything, I think AI could be a great leveler where any CEO can actually say, look, I can use this co-pilot that integrates all my functions into one. So I want to ask you about a concept that's been coming up a lot recently after Paul Graham wrote about it, this idea of founder mode. And you're kind of alluding to your philosophy around this. What do you think of this kind of push for a different mindset for founders?

22:26Do you think that maybe it's taking it too far? You know, I think the more things change, the more they remain the same. I look at Larry Elson today and he has been in the founder mode for the last 40 years or more, right? I mean, 1977 till now, he's been in the founder mode. I just realized at the end of yesterday that he's richer than Mark Zuckerberg. because of how he's always spread come from behind and win markets. So I don't think much has changed. Not a new definition. Of course, when Paul Graham writes something, it becomes news. But at the end of the day, I think the fact that you have to be extremely ownership mindset, you know, the founder mentality, the founder's mentality is an idea that more and more people in a company need to have.

23:11You know, being in company, they're really good work on this almost 10 years ago, et cetera. it's an 18 minute video on youtube the founding mentality and it talks about how as you try to let go of the company you know you fail and then how do you get back to having those people who actually have the founders more to grow so i think this discussion has been going on for a while and i don't think much has changed that i i feel like this is where uh ice formula every day uh is like have we found the next inner circle and have we found the next three to five to seven people who are the next set of founders in this company.

23:48So technically, they might not mention that raising up leadership. Yeah, I know. And I think and that's the hardest piece. And remember, if it goes from two of us, like Manoj and I to the next seven, 10 of us, all of a sudden, the company probably has four to five times a higher chance of scaling and succeeding as well, you know. Well, so let me ask you really directly here then. So like, how do you and Manoj go about getting those folks to buy in at that level and become these kind of instruments of like almost co-founders themselves a big part of it is how they feel like it's their company which is about um you know i mean a lot of it is about letting go of how you are always right because you're a founder right i mean the mother has to go and let go of it far all because the teachers know a little bit more right and over time maybe their girlfriend and their fiance knows a little bit more and so on so i think you know this is something that is extremely natural done well or not because tensions get created along the way you know parents fight with teachers about how whether teachers know about things and so on and uh i think this is the core of said uh i have a pareto on this like there's 80 percent of stuff that you let them make mistakes don't try to you know be right and everything on that 80 because they also have to learn from their mistakes.

25:11And on the 20, you need to have another 80-20, which is like maybe 16 % of that 100. You go and argue, you spend time and negotiate, you try to tell them why what you're saying probably also needs to have weight, but eventually that rumble will create good decisions. And it's only in the last 4%, which is the 20 of the training, that you really throw your bag and say look i'm telling you just follow the gut i have a gut on these things and what founders fail to realize is that if they don't have this kind of from mindset then everything in the market showing a badge that look because of my founder i can tell you what is right i think that primogeniture this thing that look i seeded this i created this therefore i know the most is what really resolves an unscalable company and if you can actually create this thing that look people can come from behind and still win and still feel like they're the owner that's the way you also create ownership in these people right you know in my last company we had somebody who had never done sales before and he became the president of the company over seven eight years for Deesh he also went on to become a CEO of ThoughtSpark from where he started as a senior director to where he ended I had to really even build as second founder in the company because I'd lost two of my founders between 2010 and 2012.

26:35And I think it mattered that he actually said that, look, I can make a lot of these decisions now and so on. So how do you nurture people to become founders again, even though technically they're not? Is it the core of this? And you know, those things that Brené Brown talks about being vulnerable, you know, what does it mean to actually show that vulnerability that look, let them go make some mistakes along the way is probably the core of this too. I've got a couple of her books over my bookshelf behind me. So I'm with you. She's amazing. And, you know, she talked about some acronyms that I keep in my head about what WGLL, what good looks like.

27:10And WGLL can be applied to anything in life, you know, people, process, product, i.e. design, and, you know, all sorts of things, you know, what good looks like with respect to relationships, what good looks like with respect to processes and product. Just amazing. I've maybe been under applying that one. I haven't really thought about it in that perspective. So let's focus in on that product perspective a bit more, because we've talked a lot about people and the importance there. And obviously that's integral to scaling a company. But as you pointed out earlier, there is not this clear dichotomy between product-led growth and sales-led growth, which is really, in a lot of ways, people-led growth.

27:48Both of these concepts are needed to have a company succeed at the highest levels, and they both work closely together. I've read some work by you on Minaj. Minaj wrote earlier this year a great blog about designing for moments of serendipity within the product and enabling those, letting users make these like deep connections in their brain through like happy magic they experience. And then obviously you've talked already today about built-in AI and building for that scale versus kind of the bolt-on AI that some other companies are experiencing. What's your perspective on how you think through AI-driven design and how DevRip is designing for the future.

28:29You know, when TikTok came out, it took the world by storm. And the reason was simple. It was not syntactic or semantic. It was really understanding what your case looked like. I think the fact that it was a great recommendation engine, without you having to even ask it a question, was at the core of its virality. I mean, obviously, everybody else copied after that. Now, whether or not their neural networks were as powerful as TikTok, I think time will tell. But I think that's the core of software going forward. Can it really be serendipitous? Can it really go and be the best recommendation? And can it know more about me than I think I do about myself?

29:15Many of these things surface up from the subconscious. And software, I mean, it does get creepy sometimes because it's trying to collect everything. about you but you know if you keep that privacy guard aside especially if you're willing to actually let it know everything about you i think in b2b there's a big opportunity for serendipity for recommendations for letting it tell you like you know we're dealing with analytics for now and analytics has been a great struggle you know in terms of what insights mean and up Until now, there have been big teams of people who actually do data pipelining and massaging work, then warehousing work, which is going and summarizing and aggregating and putting jobs around it and finally going and creating visualization, i.e.