Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah

16:20Bhavin Shah:Yeah. So let's talk about the, so founded the company in 2016 for founder, But was it the idea of ITSM, autonomous ITSM, was this something that you were sort of thinking about? Like, how did this sort of manifest itself in practice? I mean, or was it like, hey, you're curious. You said you're exploring other ideas. Like, how did you kind of land on this? And out of curiosity, what were some other ideas you were actually considering?

16:46Somrat Niyogi:They were embarrassingly dumb. So, you know, we'll skip that part. But the other, well, I mean, there were some things in the, I guess what we do is we'd look at sort of larger shifts that were happening. I'll give you one example that's more in the kind of enterprise security space, which was at the time 4K was becoming a thing. And we're like, what can you do with 4K cameras that you couldn't do otherwise? And so we had some neat idea where, you know, if you built a security, you know, camera company that did this monitoring for companies, you could do interesting things, especially at retail.

17:25Somrat Niyogi:You could see what kind of watch someone's wearing. You could see what kind of keys they had on the counter when they're paying for their for their clothing and assess who was coming in in a way that, you know, you could not have otherwise. And at stadiums, you can see what bags people are carrying, what shoes they're wearing. I don't know how much that breaks into privacy law, so we never got that far. I'm like, does Ricotta do this? I'm not really sure. Yeah, exactly, right? So it was sort of an early version of thinking about how that could be used to enhance global brands. And if you see a bunch of people walk into a play with a certain brand, then maybe that could be used to retarget those people afterwards and so forth.

18:07Somrat Niyogi:So that was the kind of thinking that we did. and I think on the ITSM side was that we had seen service.

18:14Bhavin Shah:When you said we, was it all four of you kind of come together or was it you and Vaibov or Varun?

18:19Somrat Niyogi:It was an evolution. So probably Vaibov and I started on this idea space a bit. We were also working with VCs. So I think the good part of this was any idea that we had, we would sort of take to our friends who were capital allocators and just say, hey, what do you think of this? Are there companies already doing this? is this the right vintage, right? That's so much to do with your success. You may be the smartest founder. You may have the best tech. But if it's the wrong timing, your grapes don't grow. They don't taste good. And so I think for us, we were trying to assess, do we have the right vintage of idea based on where things were headed?

18:59Somrat Niyogi:And so the idea, the ideation, of course, started with Vaibov and myself, a little bit of myself with Lightspeed. So there was some collaboration underway with Arif, John Muhammad, who's one of their managing directors. And then, you know, expand that into Conversation with Rune and then to Jung. So it was sort of as we were exploring this, every founder sort of then started to shape what it meant and really what we were going to be doing about it. And so for us, the ITSM space was interesting because ServiceNow had gone public in, I think, 2012, 2013. So it had been a few years, and I think they were worth about$8 or$9 billion market cap.

19:43Somrat Niyogi:So they had already gone public at$3 billion or something. Fantastic kind of quarter over quarter over quarter over quarter growth. And I was like, wow, this space is interesting. No one talks about it. But they didn't really focus a lot on the AI aspects. They were focusing on, at that time, mobile and different interfaces. And they were just simply expanding their footprint. But very interesting company. So I said, hey, look, we like the space. There's clearly growth happening there. And I look for spaces in which there's companies with large market caps. Based on my analysis at the time, I was like, this company can be a$40 billion market cap company.

20:23Somrat Niyogi:Of course, it became much bigger than that. You know, it was clear to me that there was an opportunity, that there was a buying center in this category. So that's what gave us an increasing appreciation and appetite for wanting to go after not ServiceNow. In fact, that was never our goal to be a ticketing system, a workflow system, a system of record, all the things that they became and have expanded into. It was more about how do we solve these tickets at the top working across ServiceNow and Jira and all the other ITSM's, ShareWell and BMC and the likes that were out there. And so it was us just kind of poking around.

21:04Somrat Niyogi:I mean, it wasn't a, you know, one of those made-for-Hollywood stories where we go into, you know, can't find a cab in Paris and frustrated, so we start Uber. It was more systematic conversations with about, initially it was like five or ten CIOs. Hey, so what are you doing to solve your tickets? How do you solve them? All very manual in terms of what responses we got. And then we thought, well, what if we automated these? And what if we did it end to end? And that's where our collaboration with Lightspeed actually started. Because beyond a handful, we didn't know any other CIOs. So we were like, hey, can you introduce us to more?

21:42Somrat Niyogi:Introduce us to a bunch more. We had another 10 conversations. We're at 20. And at that point, we're convinced that this is the direction we should go. Interesting story. We go to Lightspeed and say, hey, I think we got it. I think we figured this out. And then Arif was like, I think she's going to talk to, you know, another dozen more CIOs just to make sure. So we do that. We come back with like 32, 34 conversations. And then talking through it, we're like, let's start this thing. Let's get going. And then Arf's like, hey, why don't you talk to another like 20? Did they get best in you already?

22:17Somrat Niyogi:No. Oh, wow. So they're just like – and then I was like, you know what? No, we're done. Right. You're in or you're out. And so the joke between us was, you know, they were in, but they just wanted to keep seeing us kind of push and push and push to make sure that we weren't going to hit any sort of dead ends. And so long story short, they were the first money in.

22:37Bhavin Shah:Was it obvious to you when you had these CIO conversations that like were CIOs just jumping and being, oh, my God, this is what I want? Because I imagine there was skepticism. I imagine they're like, oh, I have an IT help desk. Like what really happened to give you that confidence? Because there's one thing to say, hey, I really – yeah, that sounds interesting. versus being like, okay, so are you going to buy? Like, how far did you push it?

23:06Somrat Niyogi:It is, you know, a lot of the problem with starting companies and if it's in the enterprise software space, you go have these meetings with folks, very rarely will they actually shut down your idea. Right. Right. And, you know, I think that's the challenge is you come away feeling good about anything. So we had to, you know, do our own, you know, reflection every day on like what we heard, what was similar across these conversations. And I think at the time, there was no understanding of how AI could really understand, you know, text and process that text. So I think that there was a little bit of like people shrugging their shoulders.

23:49Somrat Niyogi:Like, I think, yeah, if you automate this, clearly there's value to me and there's a business case around this. But they didn't have the intuition like we have today, which was like, yeah, No brainer. If you can do that, that would be amazing. So I think we had to kind of go off gut and, you know, hope that we were building something that these guys would, you know, ultimately pay money for. But that was also the business case, which is, look, they're already buying software. They're already paying agents. So if we can arbitrage the cost of labor, the cost of, you know, some of the software and the things of that nature, then we probably had a pretty, you know, pretty strong business potential.

24:31Somrat Niyogi:But no, unfortunately, I couldn't, like, get this thing completely figured out before funding the company. We just kind of had to jump in.

24:40Bhavin Shah:So let's talk about that first set of customers. A lot of the founders are kind of on that journey just the way you are. It's like, hey, I feel like this is something you have to do. Did you just say, hey, I'll do it for free? Were you like, all right, maybe is free going to turn into something? How did you go about that logical process of saying, hey, who are your first handful of early customers? Maybe their design partners. I'm not even sure how you refer to this first set.

25:11Somrat Niyogi:So there were a few customers who we talked to early on who didn't continue conversations with us because one reason or another, you know, what we were describing or articulating didn't make a lot of sense to them. But we never gave the software away for free. So no one actually got any code from us without paying. And so, look, I think to take a step back, getting these meetings themselves is hard. Right. getting to the right CIOs who actually are the ones that buy early. And there are a bunch of them, especially here in Silicon Valley, a place that I'm familiar with, but I'm sure in other areas.

25:46Somrat Niyogi:You need to find the ones who've bought a Series C or Series A company software. Like you really need to check for that because if you don't check for that, a lot of, you know, executives who play these roles at big companies, like they thump their chest and, yeah, I love startups. I work with startups all the time. and you have to ask them, so how many dollars have you put against startup software? Because if the answer is no, zero, then you know to run. And so identifying who those actors are, working with them. And then, you know, we did our first deal. I remember talking to our first customer.

26:21Somrat Niyogi:He's like, so after like an hour long session, he's like, so how much is it going to cost me? Well, like had to muster up a lot of courage because I'm like, I have no idea. And, you know, we could do this academic exercise, But I'm like, how about 50K? He writes a number on the board. He sort of breaks this down. We start talking more about it. He's like, okay, fine. Let's go. I was like, oh, okay. I've got a good story to tell my co-founders now that I've, you know, walked out of this meeting.

26:47Bhavin Shah:50K, was there like a logic that you had that joined?

26:50Somrat Niyogi:I mean, we had done some work to say, hey, look, what's meaningful to where they pay attention versus what was so insignificant that they would sort of just miss meetings and not call us back and so forth. And 50K in 2016, 2017 was a good number. I don't know what that number is today, but it may be 100K.

27:13Bhavin Shah:How much have you built at that time? What was real in terms of you can be live next week?

27:19Somrat Niyogi:We had a demo. That was it. It was a vision demo that used some basic, rough, kind of off-the-shelf tech. but it gave the CIO kind of an understanding of what we were trying to do. And within six months, we had like a first version that we could put in his environment. And we actually deliberately made sure our offices were down the street so we could walk over. We even got contractor badges and walked in. We would hold a lot of our meetings there. It was a nice setup because we could really focus on one problem solution and work with that customer. And then that customer led us to the second, led us to the third.

28:05Bhavin Shah:Oh, so you decided to just work with one versus being like, I'd like to get five in the same place and kind of like just, how did you think about that?

28:13Somrat Niyogi:I think you learn so much from every meeting. Like you walk out of there saying, oh my God, that idea we had yesterday makes no sense now that we've thought through it a little bit more, right? And it's sort of like putting a mirror up in front of you. Like as you start to see what things look like, there's obvious changes that aren't controversial that like anyone looks at and be like, yeah, given this situation, of course, you got to build that use case out before you deploy or you got to handle this kind of thing before you deploy. And so then that was the first one. The second one came within three months.

28:45Somrat Niyogi:So it wasn't a full six months that we waited, but we did start to get input from two and then three and then four and then beyond.

28:56Bhavin Shah:You mentioned this idea of like creating a vision demo. What is your take on vision? I mean, like you had to kind of paint the picture of the possibility. I'm curious, will that even work now anymore? Like, you know, it seems like that's sort of an older way of sort of going about sort of selling. But the idea of painting a picture is still very real of like, hey, work at the school. If your founders are thinking about selling their first customers, can they get away with the vision demo?

29:26Somrat Niyogi:I think less so today. I think, well, it depends on, again, who you are. If you have a lot of street cred, if you're a Brett Taylor, I'm sure you can paint a verbal picture and describe what you're looking to build. and you'll get people ready to go. But I think depending on who you are, depending on what your background is, a vision demo is a lot harder today. I think because the tools now are so easy to leverage and you can still build something that feels real. It still could be empty on the back end, but does give the person a feeling for what the product will do, how it'll come to be. And I think that's probably something that's expected whereas you're sort of looking at a usable demo, like an actual, not just a hands-off, but let me try this, and there might be a way to simulate it.

30:23Somrat Niyogi:But I'll take things even further. I think in this market, because of where we are, I think you almost have to build product and show someone that it's actually usable today and deployable tomorrow if you really want to get their attention. So I think the script has evolved to where there has to be a lot of work done even prior to the funding or meaningful investment in the business by showing that you can actually build and code this stuff up yourself.

30:58Bhavin Shah:I know you were stealth for a period of time, right? What's your take on stealth now? Reflect on that time where you were in stealth. How long were you in stealth? What was the trade-off between building in public, which is kind of a concept a lot of founders are playing with? Was that the right choice when you reflect back at that time?

31:18Somrat Niyogi:At the time, so here's exactly what happened. We had actually incorporated using what you call a throwaway kind of name and so forth, right? just like Amazon was abracadabra or something like that, right? Right, right. So we started it off with BannerTech, and that was our original name. And we knew it was a name that wasn't meant to be put on a billboard or a fancy website. A banner, you know, that would have worked, right? Yeah, that would have worked. But ultimately, we named it that way because we knew we needed to evolve it. But we were operating largely in the open. It's just we didn't have a website.

31:53Somrat Niyogi:We worked with customers. I would go to a lot of these CIO events and they would say, Bob and Shaw, Banner Tech would present. And I'd present this idea that we were building and talk about the products and the customers we were amassing. But we didn't have like a proper name. And it was until 2018 that we went through the naming process and then came up with a name and then launched a proper website with a full explanation of what our product does and how it works. And, you know, who are our early customers and testimonials and all that. So it was more just we were waiting for the right moment to have all the pieces of a comprehensive story rather than coming out with bits and pieces over time.

32:33Somrat Niyogi:So that was it. It wasn't that we were afraid to talk about it. I would openly discuss it with anyone that asked me. But we weren't doing PR.

32:42Bhavin Shah:When were you officially Moveworks?

32:44Somrat Niyogi:In 2018.

32:45Bhavin Shah:Oh, wow. So like two years later. And so you were like just selling. and how many customers did you have before you kind of said, we're here?

32:54Somrat Niyogi:Yeah, probably 20, 20 plus. Okay, so you're like business - And these are large enterprises, so, you know, deals were$150K at that point,$200K. You know, we were starting to see real, you know, commitment to our business. And the customers would say, so are you going to change your name? And we're like, yeah, at some point.

33:15Bhavin Shah:Oh, wow. You mean because you're still BannerTech?

33:17Somrat Niyogi:Yeah, because you're still BannerTech. Like they were also pretty aware that this wasn't a long-term name. But so I think it's more of that. I think obviously people are doing that now, not necessarily out of strategy, which, you know, Claude Code to OpenClaw to, you know, whatever variations, MaltBook, you know, that keeps evolving because somehow they get into conflict with another party or they want to change it. But for us, it wasn't some arbitrary thing. It was like, let's start here. Also, if you think about it, you're putting your team together. You don't have consensus on what you're building.

33:56Somrat Niyogi:Sometimes it can take time. And so just use a throwaway name.

34:01Bhavin Shah:Is this your name, Moveworks? Or was it like a consensus process?

34:04Somrat Niyogi:It was a bit of a consensus process, yeah.

34:07Bhavin Shah:I always find a consensus process for names can be kind of scary. It's tough. Well, it landed well, and here we are. You talk about fundraising, specifically finding the right capital partners. It sounds like Lightspeed created a lot of value in the early days, connecting you to potential design partners, opening up their network and so forth. A lot of founders come and ask me all the time, hey, what do you think of this VC? What do you think of that VC? Who should I raise from? How do you advise founders on thinking about how to decide who to partner with? And how do you go about working to determine whether they're really fit or not?

34:49Somrat Niyogi:Yeah. So we spent a lot of time with Lightspeed, as I mentioned at the beginning. And one of the reasons for it is they were quite astute and had a lot of awareness of this category that we were pursuing. Very few VCs up and down Sand Hill were talking about ServiceNow. We're talking about ITSM. We're talking about ITIL. We're talking about all these frameworks that existed. And part of what my discovery was that ServiceNow was founded in San Diego by a guy named Fred Luddy. And then it was only Doug Leone from Sequoia that put money in, and then they moved their HQ to Santa Clara. So it was sort of off the beaten path, and very few VCs were sort of tracking it.

35:29Somrat Niyogi:So I think for me, it was about competency and what they really know about the space. And Lightspeed at the time was really enterprise-focused, and they'd seen these playbooks, and they'd seen sort of what works. So I really loved that part of it. As we started to meet other investors, and there's a lot of the great ones out there for sure, I think we got connected to Bain Capital Ventures, and Enrique Salem was someone that personally was keen on what we were doing, had a lot of context for it, understood the space because he was former CEO of Symantec, had sold his own company to Symantec. So been a founder, been the CEO of a public company, was on the board of DocuSign at the time, board of Atlassian at the time, you know, board of FireEye at the time.

36:15Somrat Niyogi:I mean, he just, he knew so much. For me, it was interesting because he could really serve as a mentor and would go on to serve as one of my key mentors for the next, you know eight years and then of course we met uh the folks at iconic bull griffith and aditya and all these folks they're just phenomenal um in terms of their understanding and that was sort of our series b um that we brought them and then mamoon from kleiner who's you know one of the greatest stock pickers in the world and and mamoon started to really understand what we were pursuing and got involved in the series b as well so we just had a fantastic group and then it sort of To round it out, our Series C was done by Tiger and then Abiyat Alkeon, who also knew so much about the space.

37:00Somrat Niyogi:They'd actually been a big investor in ServiceNow and on the public markets and just really understood the space. So I've surrounded myself and the company's cap table with sort of deep enterprise infrastructure geeks, people who knew this stuff really well, who got it. And Mamoun is probably the one exception where he actually comes at this from multiple angles, from the consumer angle, having, you know, worked with Slack and others, but also understood the enterprise angle of those whole businesses. Like, how do you bring all this together? So we were like, I think, very lucky to have that. And, you know, when you talk about people asking you, so who do I work with?

37:39Somrat Niyogi:Who do I pick? You know, the interesting thing is I don't see that happen as much as I think it should. I think people go for the highest bidder and the highest price because I get a lot of calls from VCs saying, hey, can you do a reference for us? You know, we're trying to win this deal. And I'm like, yeah, sure. Happy to do the reference. But like, why do you think you won't win the deal if you spend a lot of time and you kind of work things out? Well, the founder said, well, it doesn't matter. You know, really, all it's going to come down to is who gives them the best term sheet or whatever.

38:10Somrat Niyogi:They're going to make a decision tomorrow morning. I need you to just, you know, put in a call. And I was like, wow, that seems so like an auction that's being played out. Whereas for me, it was about who can I trust? Who can I look at and be like, hey, are you going to be here for the long haul? I think there's a lot of folks who get into venture investing who disappear. Three years later, they're like, ah, it's not for me. I'm going to go do something else. And you don't want that as a founder. You want someone who's either going to join your board or whether they do or not, like be in the business for decades to come.

38:45Somrat Niyogi:So it was about, you know, sort of figuring that out and then making sure that we had folks that really we could kind of trust to give us the best input. In fact, I remember our series, it was our series B, we got another offer from a VC who I couldn't quite trust, meaning that it wasn't that he was necessarily a bad actor, but I didn't have enough of that like gut feeling that he was going to be great and we hadn't spent a lot of time and he came in and he made the best offer of all the offers we got for a series b but i didn't take his money so it gives gives the highest valuation but i went with the folks that i could really look at and be like hey i think it'd be a ton of fun uh to build a company together and i could trust their judgment so you know some people go for the highest bidder i definitely don't recommend end it.

39:39Somrat Niyogi:What you want is someone who's got the commitment to you as a founder, to your company, for the long haul.

39:47Bhavin Shah:It seems to me that a lot of, you know, there's a lot of competition among the VCs to find like these best founders. Like if a founder gets an inbound from a VC, should they take it? How do you, because you're always like, oh, ignore it, focus on the business. Like what advice do you have for founders that are just constantly getting bombarded to like, hey, I'd I like what you're doing. Hey, I'd love to chat with you and see how it can be helpful. Like, do you take the meeting or not?

40:14Somrat Niyogi:I generally do not. If I'm not really, you know, kind of in that phase where I need to think about capital, I generally don't. What I would do often, though, is as time went on, you would sort of open it up a little bit, especially if you had a lot of new things to talk about or show. I would always do the meetings off-site. I wouldn't bring them to our office. I would always do it at a coffee shop just to sort of keep things neutral. What you don't want is someone to say they looked at your deal and they passed. So I'd be like, look, there's no official meeting. We're meeting at a coffee shop.

40:48Somrat Niyogi:I'm not presenting a slide deck to you. I'm not. None of this is is considered official. And so that always kept things neutral. And I would sort of wait until and this was definitely true for, you know, when Bain came in, when Kleiner and Iconic came in. And I waited for them to really give me a reason to call back. And one of those reasons that became very useful was they would send us notes from their calls with customers and prospects. Like, hey, I know you've ignored like six of my emails, but maybe this one we'll get through. And here are some notes from seven customer calls we did or prospect calls we did.

41:28Somrat Niyogi:You might find it useful. Okay. And then I would wait and they would sort of keep sending me stuff. And then in a few cases, they sent us like, you know, 10 page kind of conviction letters around what they were seeing, why they were interested. And then to me, that felt like, hey, look, now we're on the same page. You put in some work without any commitment for reward. You've done it because you actually just really think the space is interesting. So then I knew we were all on the same playing field. It wasn't just for the sake of pursuit. You were actually putting in some resources to go learn about the space.

42:05Somrat Niyogi:And after learning, you still found that what I was doing was the right approach or had the right direction.

42:12Bhavin Shah:So taking that from a different angle, congrats on ServiceNow. It feels like it's officially closed. I'm sure a lot of people pinged you on the acquisition side. I mean, like, you know, I've worked with my fellow corp dev folks in various places.

42:32Bhavin Shah:how let's talk about the journey of the founder journey, you and the four found, you know, three founders that kind of came together to sort of say, hey, service now makes sense for us. And I know you talked about, you know, distribution, you know, you talked about how, you know, where that was in the market, but you had a choice of like, hey, do I keep this thing going, which you had, you had momentum, you had the right partners, you had the right capital partners. You had an amazing sort of, you know, employee base, which still is strong today. How did you go about making this tradeoff of keeping on going or let's find a place where we can keep on doing what we're doing that's part of something larger?

43:14Somrat Niyogi:Yeah. So to get to where we were at the time that ServiceNow and us started talking, you have to remember that, you know, we had to say no to so many people at so many different junctures. If you're doing something right, you're going to get the call. And we were very dogged about pursuing our vision, continuing forward. At each capital fundraising round, you have to make that choice too. Do we continue fundraising? Do we dilute? Or do we exit? And this was my third company I was founding. And I really wanted to take this all away to an IPO. That was sort of my mindset. Same thing with my co-founders.

43:57Somrat Niyogi:We were all pretty locked in. And so I think that when you go throughout this journey, I mean, my board would also bring this up. People would ask, you know, hey, such and such company has reached out to me. Bhavan, do you want to have a call? I'd say no, no thank you. So I've said no a lot. And so I was sort of conditioned to just knee-jerk reaction. I would just say no to everything because I think we just kept wanting to see where it could go. And I think the one thing about enterprise software, at least if you look at the long-term horizon, if you stick with it, there is value. There is value to be created, there's value to be had.

44:40Somrat Niyogi:it's amazing how when you look at like private equity firms they they buy these enterprise software companies they wouldn't do what they do with them and then they spit them back out and these things are thrown off cash and i'm like wow it just tells you that if you play the long game you always win in enterprise s or enterprise software so to to us it was like look it doesn't matter what comes across our table or our you know uh our plate like we're just going to keep keep building. I think that the market after ChatGPT came out, the asteroid that hit the earth, so to speak, changed a lot of dynamics.

45:17Somrat Niyogi:And here we were in this kind of small niche market, if you will, selling this assistant, we called it a chat bot, to enterprises to be used across multiple departments. And it was very good. People were very happy with it. But all of a sudden, overnight, the world wanted something like that. And there was a new format to do it with, which was these large language models. We were using transformer models actually going back to 2019. So we were already kind of doing it, but we weren't doing it in the generative way. We were using it as discriminative models to kind of make decisions behind the scenes.

45:54Somrat Niyogi:And so once that happened, it required us to kind of go through a big transformation of our own code base. We had to throw away easily half of our code base to kind of build this new agentic reasoner, which we spent the next 12 months kind of retooling our architecture to be this multi-step, multi-hop reasoner. Anyways, long story short, we got there. And thank goodness, right? Because it was a bit existential as to like, this all could be over in a hot minute if we don't actually reinvent this. We started to roll this out. We started to see huge migration from our old platform to the new one.

46:28Somrat Niyogi:And that's where the growth really started to show in terms of people saying, yes, this is the right approach. So it was during that transition that, you know, we started to see the markets, you know, were sky high and were quite frothy and people were very bullish. You know, as we know, after ChatGPT, everyone's market cap started to go through the roof. And that's when the ServiceNow conversation happened. So we were just come out of this sort of dark tunnel. We finally saw the light of day. Valuations were, you know, at a premium. And so we thought, well, at the right time, maybe this would make sense.

47:12Somrat Niyogi:But we were actually actively pursuing a fundraise when that conversation began. So it was a bit of a surprise when it started. Did it, just to kind of understand the movie a little bit, because a lot of folks have not experienced this before and you've experienced it with, you know, Refresh. Yeah.

47:33Bhavin Shah:Is there something that you approach differently because you've seen, you've kind of gone through this once already. I don't know if I have personally gone through this as well, but like it sounds like, you know, did they just reach out to you? Did like some corp dev guy say, hey, Bob, and like, you know, we'd love to, we're huge fans, which is probably a common email from our phone.

47:53Somrat Niyogi:I'm sure you can go to Chachi Petit and say, write me a corp dev email. Right, right. We're huge fans.

47:57Bhavin Shah:We're huge fans.

47:57Somrat Niyogi:Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure, and there were some cases where I, you know, they reached out to members of our board and others earlier. But I largely have, only until recently have I kind of rediscovered some of the patterns that were there. which I just sort of did not register in my brain. For me, the conversation began really when Bill McDermott himself reached out. And I think that was, you know, important for me. I think as a founder, especially if you're going to take what you built and join forces with someone else, you want to know that what you're building and what you've done and what you've created is of the utmost importance to the acquirer, especially if the idea is that you're going to continue, you know, on this journey together, which we very much are and super excited about.

48:52Somrat Niyogi:And, you know, it couldn't have been a better kind of, you know, setup, I think. But, yeah, Bill reached out. And I remember, you know, it was January of 25. So a year, just a little over a year ago. And my first meeting was actually, you know, with him on my wife's birthday. And I told my wife, I said, well, we can't go to dinner tonight because I've got this meeting in the evening with Bill. But we kind of knew like, hey, you wouldn't be meeting with a public company CEO of that magnitude unless it was serious. And it took a few conversations to kind of get to a place where I think everyone was excited to move forward.

49:32Somrat Niyogi:But that deal was done in two weeks. It was very, very fast, meaning done in the sense of conceptual like signing a basic LOI. And then it took, of course, a few months to get all the rest of the paperwork done. So let's talk about the IT department. And you've obviously been

49:54Bhavin Shah:selling to CIOs for the last 10 years. Let's talk about what the next five, 10 years looks like. Like, you know, clearly AI is making a huge splash. There's like, you know, coding agents that can like, I don't know, there's people talking about, hey, you can build a, you know, a Salesforce with like cloud code now. What is going on? Like, what do you think is going to happen for these large, you know, IT teams? Like, are they going to be, here's one point of view, which is like applications are, people are talking about SaaS is kind of, you know, is kind of on a downfall. What do you think is going to happen?

50:30Bhavin Shah:I mean, you're talking to the CIOs who are making the decisions. They have amazing, talented teams. They can go build things themselves. They can go buy applications. What do you think the tradeoffs are going to be in the next 5, 10 years?

50:44Somrat Niyogi:Yeah. So I hear all these narratives and I'm well aware of where the market's at today in terms of the big correction that we've seen. And, you know, a lot of that is just people worried about, you know, the future cash flows of these businesses and how that sort of trades 30 years from now, 15 years from now, whatever the multiple is. Right. And I think we're going to see that these tools are still very intrinsic with how the business gets run. ServiceNow has some 80 billion workflows that run some of the biggest companies in the world. and I think the idea that that becomes disrupted by agents is an oversimplification, I think, of what happens.

51:26Somrat Niyogi:I think agents do come in and do automate a lot of the tasks at hand, but they're not ones in which you go about replacing the underlying system of record, the software that sort of coordinates everything, the approval systems and the likes, because even though these CIOs have great teams, they're subject to the same dynamics that we all are. Employees will stay on average three years. They'll turn over. You'll have CIOs themselves only stick in their job. I think it's the average is three and a half years. So when you have companies that last decades and some cases centuries, they need software that's going to be there that outlasts and outlives the people who are coming and going.

52:12Somrat Niyogi:And so we see that every day. Just in my own eight years of building MoveWorks, nine years, I've seen so many CIO turnovers. I've seen so many, and now we're seeing a big thrust of CHROs kind of play a key role in deciding what kind of new employee experience later should come in, which MoveWorks fits into. And now the larger ServiceNow offering fits into. But the reality is these folks are also not going to come in, replace everything without there being a way for it to be maintained, for it to be, you know, debugged, fixed. Who's going to patch the security bugs when it comes into, you know, when it comes into frame?

52:54Somrat Niyogi:All that stuff is why we need SaaS vendors and why SaaS vendors will continue to be very, very relevant. I think you can try and build something that equates to a CRM, but it's usually always a demo. And it doesn't go to that, you know, extent that you need it to, to capture all the use cases reliably every single day. It's not, it's not that, you know, a lot of this is deterministic functionality that you can't just like whip up through a chat conversation. So I think that what we're seeing is, what's really interesting is you put this layer of conversation on top of these workflows, and you make it very seamless for the users to navigate all these systems, that's an interesting new opportunity, growth opportunity for companies like ServiceNow.

53:42Somrat Niyogi:And that's why we felt like, hey, we could come together and get wide distribution of this new front door while at the same time, you know, leveraging these 80 billion workflows from ServiceNow, but also the workflows from Workday and from Salesforce and SAP and Ariba and SuccessFactors and you name it, to be able to sort of, you know, unify that experience. But I think it's a little bit of, it's a convenient way to describe and oversimplify the market that, hey, enterprise software is going away. But where I think the opportunity is, is how do you capture the growth? The incremental dollar that's getting spent by every customer, is it going to these companies or is it not?

54:28Somrat Niyogi:And that's what I think people are worried about right now.

54:30Bhavin Shah:You've been involved with AI transformation since you started this company. How are these large enterprises, these departments kind of changing the way that they operate, the size of the teams? And I know IT has a, but you're looking at, you're solving lots of different types of workflows across ServiceNow specifically. There's a lot of talk about smaller departments, you know, AI agents kind of doing the work of, you know, knowledge workers. Like, what do you believe is to be true in the way AI actually will transform since you actually have experienced the success of it?

55:05Somrat Niyogi:So there is a shift left that's happening, which means essentially AI is doing some of the most mundane and routine work. And then that moves people up to more higher touch complexity or even just, you know, good bedside manner type of interactions with other members of the team that need help or need things done. But I think that's where, you know, we're seeing the AI be able to really have the most immediate impact on the business is doing some of that. It's starting to move quickly into more advanced functions where people can, you know, ask it complex questions, the deep research capabilities, be able to, you know, make core business decisions.

55:43Somrat Niyogi:But I think for what we're seeing in terms of the transformation, what's also happening as we go on this curve, and this curve is going very steep and very fast in terms of what it can do, is that a lot of the agency is moving down to the individual ICs. So you used to have this centralized IT phenomenon where everything was decided by some central group or these different chief data officer, et cetera. And then anything outside of that was called shadow IT. It was like a bad word. But now what we're seeing, and we've done some studies as well, where a large growing number of new capabilities introduced in companies are actually being imagined and created by individuals on various teams because they're empowered by these great new tools that make it super easy.

56:35Somrat Niyogi:So the citizen developers, the sort of the individuals who are responsible, who are closest to the business process or close to the business problem are actually affecting change. So what we're seeing is that no longer are the best ideas coming from the person at the top. It's actually the best ideas are coming from non-technical business owners. And that's exciting because now we're really starting to proliferate the power of this technology. and they're incorporated into their own workflows, but they're also incorporating it into what is used by the company going forward. So someone in talent, in the TA team, a talent acquisition team might create a new way for people to submit referrals.

57:17Somrat Niyogi:And that sort of then becomes part of how the whole business can submit referrals or how referrals are updated or how they're treated or how certain use edge cases are handled. That doesn't have to be thought about from some central organization that can be done and instantiated by that individual, that non-technical sort of individual contributor.

57:38Bhavin Shah:I know we're out of time here. Maybe you can talk about, so, you know, transaction is all closed, done. What's next for Moveworks? What's kind of top of mind for you in 2026?

57:47Somrat Niyogi:Yeah, so Moveworks is, I think, it's probably the most exciting time for us because while we had a vision to really kind of be this single entry point for employees across so many large enterprises, and we have hundreds of them, ServiceNow gives us that scale to really make this the front door across the whole world. And, you know, ServiceNow has got one of their taglines that I see on marketing ads and billboards, you know, the world works on ServiceNow. And it's so true. And so being able to take that, build MoveWorks on top of all of that, plus seamlessly work across the enterprise, I think I couldn't be more excited.

58:28Somrat Niyogi:I was at the recent sales kickoff and, you know, stood on stage in front of 8 ,000 of their go-to-market sellers and teams and partners. And they wouldn't stop applauding. You know, they were just so excited to bring what we brought to the entire world that my team has been working so fast and furious. We have a lot of announcements this year about what we can do that wasn't possible before. So I think, you know, in our case, we've been very fortunate that the vision that we've had aligns perfectly with ServiceNow's vision for what they want to become, which is a workflow orchestration layer, but also now this front door for so many enterprises around the world that we all get to do what we love to do.

59:16Somrat Niyogi:And there's no compromise.

59:18Bhavin Shah:Well, I want to say thank you for being with us today. I think the stories that you shared about what it meant to build Moveworks from the early days are stories I don't think a lot of people have heard about. And congrats to you. Congrats to your founders. And congrats to the amazing, what do you call your Moveworks teammates?

59:35Somrat Niyogi:Internally, we call ourselves Movesters. Movesters.

59:38Bhavin Shah:Congrats to the massive team of Movesters that has built this business and category. So thank you for your time.

59:44Somrat Niyogi:Thank you so much. Cheers.

59:45Bhavin Shah:All right.

59:49Somrat Niyogi:Hey, this is Ben Kazinoka, co-founder of Village Global. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Village Global podcast, where we go deep on all of the biggest topics in tech. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can check us out on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to see you for the next one.