[00:00:07] Antony: Hey everyone. Welcome back to our new podcast episode, and, we have, Robb, Elias Jordan, also we have Joan in here. So, Joan, could, you please introduce yourself.
[00:00:22] Joan: Absolutely. Thanks for having me folks. Hi. I just joined on Monday, This is Friday. So day five. I am OneReach's new head of product research and figuring out exactly how I fit in product and research and sales client and, storytelling work. I'm well known as the founder of Women in Voice and I'm an influencer this space. I have a PhD and have previously worked at Nuance, so that's a little bit of background.
[00:00:52] Antony: Awesome. Could you please since I guess not might be aware, what's the women invoice? What it stands for?
[00:01:00] Joan: Yeah, sure thing. Women in Voice is very simple concept of supporting gender diversity in voice and conversational AI. So we, I launched it in 2018 and today it has over 20 chapters on six continents. Really, it's open to all genders, but it's really talking about how we, get new people in the field and retain people in the field and have diverse perspectives.
[00:01:25] Antony: Awesome.
So since you are so aware in what's happening kind of out there as Rob b says that we are echo chamber, meaning like we don't really even try to see what our competitors do since we have rather strong vision on, how to build this product, how to lead in conversational AI approach. But you should be aware of everything that's happening out there.
So the question I guess I have is how do you see the landscape in general? How do you see OneReach where it fits in the bigger picture and, how we compare to our competitors?
[00:02:09] Joan: Yeah. What a big question. When I think about the future of conversational AI, I see it everywhere. And I really see it in a multimodal perspective. Multimodal and integrated are the words I usually use of, you we have images, we have text, we have audio, and it depends on the right channel for the right thing. As I think the people in this room would know, OneReach is light years ahead of other products I know and have worked with. I think when I talked to Robb initially and Jordan, I was telling them like, I'm looking at apples and oranges, and then OneReach feels like a kumquat as compared in this fruit analogy to, what you all are.
So I think what I see is flexible, huge opportunity the way we leverage GPT-3 and really think about expansive of products that can be built with OneReach. I don't know if there's specific things you want me to cover on that, but that's when I think about the ecosystem, that's really what I think about.
[00:03:06] Antony: Okay. Yeah. Well, we always said we are interested in UX first of all, like how build great experience. Not to make just a quick party trick with several clicks, but rather ability to focus on what end users will be working with. So sounds fair. I agree.
[00:03:26] Joan: Well, And I think I also hear a lot of like design first, like try to think about the best user experience rather than defaulting to clunky bots. Is also something that I hear across the team. So, very very exciting.
[00:03:39] Jordan: Yeah. And Joan, I know that you are an Alexa champion. Is that right?
[00:03:44] Joan: I am indeed.
[00:03:46] Jordan: Yeah. Can you talk about what that means and I think one of the things that we looking at right now when we do talk about our competition which is not often, it's typically around the other platforms around Kore or Cognigy or Amelia, and that's really what people hear about. But, I think of the ecosystem that we have not paid as much attention to, but I think the coming months and year, we'll probably pay more attention to than those other platforms I just mentioned is AWS and Google and Microsoft and what's happening in that world. Do you mind just explaining your experience with Amazon and, kind of what their approach looks like and how that differs?
[00:04:21] Joan: Yeah, definitely. And I think when I think about what it means to be an Alexa champion, it's really seeing Amazon and Google's approach to conversational AI and how those things have changed since 2018.
I mean, on a fundamental level, what an Alexa champion means is that Amazon has deemed me knowledgeable enough, doing work in the space enough, be someone that they champion themselves in their marketing, bringing me in for podcasts, storytelling, talking about what you can do with Amazon Alexa and different things and. Like I've been a judge for their APL or different tooling. I think what's Amazon's approach has been like blast everywhere, tons of faces, talk about different storytelling with different projects that have been featured and they early put a ton of money into Amazon developer experiences, workshops, blah, blah, blah.
Google has had a slower approach, but far more a B2B premium experience like, the huge amount of money they spent on at CES 2020. Those are kind of opportunities, I think the kind of like certification styles that both of these companies have had in the past of people's knowledge of them and if you wanna be a premium partner with them, you're required to have devs or designers that are certified under their certification. So as OneReach thinks about uh, the future, or I was listening to one of the previous podcasts and think about, who is qualified and ready to be building things on OneReach, I think there are things to look at and compare and see if we'd be interested in doing similar or completely different. Does that answer your question, Jordan?
[00:06:06] Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think we've definitely, been interested in having those hackathon like sessions. I know we've, in the past, participated in the few, and we've had a great story of a non-developer that entered the Cisco competition and ended up winning against these teams that developers, which was really interesting. So, yeah, maybe we'll, we'll look to host more of those in the future.
[00:06:27] Joan: Absolutely. I find them super fun and I think you, as you mentioned, you don't necessarily have to be a coder. It's really the idea and the vertical and how impactful it can be. So I think there's really opportunities for growth on product and on storytelling for that one.
[00:06:42] Jordan: Great. Thanks so much for joining us, Joan and for introducing yourself. We're really excited to have you here.
[00:06:48] Joan: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:06:49] Antony: All right.
Yeah, so speaking about market, about competitors. So we went through submission to Gartner 2023. So thanks everyone for hard work, everyone put in for all those sleepless nights. I have personal kudos to Jordan pretty much living in European time zone and working in US time zone, so you're a tough person to pull stuff like that.
Um, I guess it's too early to say it's gonna unfold, but are there any predictions you guys know about or kinda expect to see with how this year would be different from, previous one?
[00:07:36] Robb: I could say that. Last year, it was really clear when we looked at the criteria that had influenced it quite a bit. We had talked a lot to Gartner. We had driven a lot of their thinking. It showed up.
I think because we've been so busy this year with, fundraising and, all of the other things that we've been doing more internally. It occurred to me when I saw the questionnaire that this year we had not influenced it. And that the other parties were pretty influencing it themselves. And I think it, it, you could probably chalk it up to being a little bit of, our complacency. It's the classic, you get the number one spot and then you relax.
And so we weren't as hungry this year to influence it. And. So I think actually you know, as hard as we worked to submit the criteria doesn't favor us like it did last year. And so we'll see how that turns out. I think the takeaway will be if, if we lose our ranking this year, that'll be a good kick in the pants us to step it up next year and not get so comfortable uh, which, you know, it's a good lesson for anybody I think it, it can happen to anybody, but it's a good lesson to learn. So we'll see. I hope not I think no matter what, we've learned the lesson no matter what we've learned the lesson of getting complacent. We see that, it affected the questions and next year we'll, we'll put that hunger back in our attitude.
[00:09:06] Antony: Yeah. And when you are saying about the uh, losing, leading position are you talking about Magic Quadrant?
[00:09:13] Robb: Yeah, yeah.
I think, both the capabilities are the one I care about. Magic Quadrant is marketing and sales and how fast your company's growing. As everybody knows, our goal is not to grow as fast as we can. Our goal is to set the bar for the best experiences and the best companies to be our customers doing the best things in terms of the experiences that, that the people in the world have an opportunity to use that, that make them think that this whole space is a positive thing.
And I think we can see out there that there's a lot of talk about bots being annoying. I think I've heard one outtake or recorded message from somebody. I don't remember which they called into, but they said, I don't know how I feel about this whole bot thing. And I, I really wanna change that. I, I think it's our mission to make sure that this whole "bot thing", he's referring to be amazing done correctly and terrible when done badly. And that's the nature of any powerful technology like fire, for example, when pointed in the wrong direction, it's damaging, when pointed in the right direction it's powerful. And you can't have powerful things that don't also have a dark side.
And so our goal is not to grow as fast as we can have as many laying bots out there as we could possibly get. Our goal is to grow super careful, try to set the bar, and that's, that means a lot of our, focusing on our teams to grow and gain experience. And it also requires us internally to do a lot of cross pollination of ideas. If somebody learned something on one project, sharing it with another and you're just not gonna have that happen while you're just, bringing in hundreds of people at a time and setting them loose on clients that don't know what they're doing.
Uh, So when you look at all the things we're doing, like the book, it's not, the book wasn't designed to get customers. That's not why it exists. It will get customers, but that's not why we did it. We did it so that every employee can read it when they come in and understand our philosophy get a head start on creating these applications. It's so we can scale knowledge within our organization. It's so that our prospects and customers can read it and come to us and not order us around with bad ideas, but order us around with good ideas. And so there's a lot of things we're doing to just set the example for great experiences so that people fall in love with this technology not dreaded.
And I think that's how we'll measure ourselves over the next couple years is what are the best examples of conversational AI out there? And how much did we contribute to those?
[00:12:02] Antony: Yeah, that's definitely great metric to measure yourself against. Completely agree. And just to circle back to beginning of the question.
You said that you feel like we can slide in MQ and it's not like we do care about that a lot, that the same, it's with the capabilities as well. So do you really see that uh, there are, competitors out there who can present better capabilities than we do right now?
[00:12:31] Robb: It's all about the criteria, right? So one of the things that we saw this year that we didn't see last year show up in a pretty big way was can you deploy it on premise? Can you install this on your own server? And that clearly we didn't influence, and that's a major criteria It's one that if we got a zero on that criteria, an absolute zero, that alone could cause us to move our spot. The truth behind it that there is no GPT-3 on prem. That's just not you're, that's not gonna happen. Any other regressive model, large language model like GPT-3, you're pretty much signing up, resigned to not use among many other things that will not operate on prem.
And so company that wants a conversational AI solution that they can easily launch on prem is probably gonna create a bad experience with it, at least a very limited experience with it. And they're eventually going to have to replace all of that work with something that isn't on prem and any vendor that can deploy easily on prem already by this sheer fact that they can deploy on-prem, should go against their marks because it's a signal to what they can't do. It's a sign of what's not with their platform. It's, and analogy is can your airplane drive down the road regular street? And if the answer is yes, then it probably can't fly very well. And so the answer, the good answer should be no, but now, this year, that's gonna that's gonna be a big deal. So that, that's just an example like, yeah.
Next year, if we're successful at making that argument and showing how GPT-3 is really the future of NLU, or those, at least outta aggress models are, then we should see next year Gartner pulling that out as a major criteria And so that's one example I've seen a number of those in this year's questionnaire
[00:14:45] Antony: Oh, since you mentioned GPT-3 and like showing how big it is and how I impactful it is at least it seems like there was some confusion with Gartner regarding calling large. Like we are using term large language models heavily and pretty much in our case as a synonym to GPT-3, at least as of right now. And it seems like there was a confusion with what they call it and they assume that that everyone else is using that as well. Simple BERT would be, in their opinion, large language model. So also I guess the question I'm trying to ask, what are we doing about this?
[00:15:21] Robb: Yeah, that was us getting too com comfortable with language . Um, Ironically, I guess, but you know, BERT was a large language model, technically is a large, you know, large model is a, is a relational kind of statement. So there's this whole thing BERT is a large language model and then you're like, oh, GPT-3 comes out, and you're like, I'll show you a large model , and that this is a large model.
And, when we keep saying LLMs it really should like Gartner and a lot of people the broader version of it that would include things like BERT and those non auto-regressive models. so, yeah, we just need to be more specific that's like a lazy term. We started using internally. And yeah, I did confuse them. It's one of those things where you're trying to inform them and you're saying, Guys, you don't have on auto regressive like GPT-3 models in your criteria, like zero. Yet it's likely gonna replace all of the things that we see today in use. And we called it LLMs and they thought we were talking about BERT the things that already exist , and we're like, Oh crap. They now think we just discovered BERT . So we had, we have to correct that. Um, Which we have . It's just funny.
Yeah we, we've been talking to these guys for years, I mean, years before they even started covering conversational UI or AI, we were talking to the same guys who eventually ended up covering it, and it was shocking that this year one, one of the guys we've been talking to for years said, Oh, you guys have your own SBCs. Uh, Kevin in his head is like, How could you not know that by now? They were like, he was like, Yeah, I thought you guys were just using Twilio. And we met him at a Twilio conference. Maybe that's why he thought that. But when we met him, we're like, told him like, No. Our relationship with Twilio back then was that every time they got a customer that was too complicated for Twilio to do on telephony they would, instead of turning them away, they would hand it to OneReach to do and then take 50% of the deal . So they didn't lose money. We were the company they send it to when they couldn't do it. , like depending on them is, is laughable. And it's just crazy to think that over all these years he, he never got that , you know, we were using them.
Yeah. So it just shows, you know, we, we just assume a lot about what people can tell about us. And you know, that if there's anything I hear consistently on marketing, etc., it's that, you know, whenever people actually find out about OneReach and they get in and they actually see the things we're doing, they always say, Why don't you tell anybody about what you're doing?
There's something about what we're doing that, we're just and how we're telling our story. That's just not getting it out there.
[00:18:29] Jordan: Yeah. And it also goes back to what Joan said about us being a kumquat, which I very much like Joan. Sometimes when you tell someone you have your own SBCs they hear you, but don't really digest it because it's so different from everyone else. And something that we know now from the Gartner questions and then being influenced from our competitors is our competitors look so much alike when someone sees OneReach, they don't quite know how to, how to approach it, they don't quite understand or acknowledge the differences because they imagine that, that that we talk about things differently.
But know, really we're the same. Uh, And the reason is because they've seen the same thing from many different vendors over and over and over. And so it's not just communicating differently and, telling people we do all these things, but also. How do you get them to believe you? And that's, that's another question I think you know, Robb and Elias, you guys have been tackling for quite a while.
[00:19:28] Robb: Yeah. I was at Stanford. We're talking to... Elias, will probably her name. She kind of heads up NLU there and they're working on a new sort of language model approach that's intentless I think is the buzzword
[00:19:45] Elias: Uh, Michelle Lamb.
[00:19:46] Robb: Yeah. Yeah. Michelle Lamb. And we were sitting down, it was kind of funny cuz she wanted to talk about her research and what she was working on and I wanted to talk about what I was working on.
Eventually I realized, okay, I'm just gonna let her talk about what she's working on. but it became clear when she was showing demos when she was trying to take her approach and, and wrap it in something practical so people in the world could understand. What the power of that would be, whether it be in a phone call or in a chat bot. That, that was her problem is she had this great research project and she could show how powerful it was behind the scenes, then when it came to like showing it it to people in context of an experience, she had nobody on her team that had the time or the budget to actually build demos. So she's just relied on volunteers that would build these demos. And the demos were pretty lame. So she showcased her technology with a bad wrapper on it.
And it really became clear to me at that moment like, what we do, right? Is it, had she known about OneReach before she would've seen that, it would've been quite easy for her to wrap her technology into something practical by sequencing it with other things, she could have made really killer use cases that would've made her research more sexy to, to people in the audience that, you know, aren't so deep in the space that they can understand the algorithms behind it.
And it's so obvious to me also that she's one of so many people constantly adding new algorithms and approaches to the machine learning side of things. But at the end of the day, if it's not accessible to people, it's not going to, it's not gonna matter. And if the experiences that are created are bad because it's so hard to put all the scaffolding around these things and launch them and manage them and iterate on them and report on them, then, then none of these innovations are ever gonna actually make a difference in the world. And that's really what we do is everything around it.
If they're a electric motor, we're the rest of the car. And that, I don't know, I found that a helpful way to look at where, where GPT-3 and these other things fit in. I heard on the demo today, Jonathan's like what is OneReach if it just plugs in GPT-3? And the answer is a lot . It's probably most of the work. Um, That's one algorithm and, there's plenty of others that are gonna come out that are already coming out behind GPT-3. Then there's other tools that open AI launching like Dall-e and. and now there's whisper and, putting these together into an experience is most of the work. And just showing to this demo and seeing how that whole menu ordering system was done with, what looked like 10 or 15 steps. Like it's nuts. That's where we sit in the world, is helping the rest of the world leverage it in a way that they can create the kinds of experiences that don't make people and users dread it, but make them delighted by them.
[00:23:17] Antony: Yeah, I agree. Like just as an engineer I can say that seeing the demo that was presented with I dunno, handful of steps. Pretty much uh, in a good conversational manner was handling, order from a menu that was just specified as a bunch of text. That is amazing. Yes, of course. all know that GPT-3 has lots of weaknesses and it kinda lies and makes up stuff, but still like it, it's a matter of tweaking it and figuring out the ways to prime it better. But what you can achieve with kinda amount of work you would need to put in like days of building a good solution with a good user experience or just prime your model better to achieve the same result and maybe even better result. It's, It's a no brainer for me that's the future not, not the regression model that will be highly trained in customized.
And again, I'm not saying there are completely useless uh, there are lots of ways there when they would be like, when you want something to be precisely as you train it to be, then yeah, you don't want GPT-3. You don't want it to be kinda talking some nonsense, but still.
[00:24:33] Robb: Yeah, I agree. I think it's um, we're kind of in this world where, it's, there's a huge double standard for ai. People will talk about, Tesla's self-driving capability and they'll say, Yeah if it can only get you from point A to point B with 95% accuracy that means you, you crash once and everyone's Well, then it's not gonna work. I just, it's, it is one of these like black and white scenarios where it's either perfect or it's broken. There's no points for being close in people's minds, but to engineers you start seeing that gap narrowing and narrowing, and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like it's almost there guys. Is not broken or working. This is a progression towards uh, working. And when you apply this technology outside of something that's so mission critical as driving like one crash, obviously that doesn't fly. But in things like conversation, being close is still useful.
There's ways to manage the gap of understanding. There's ways to manage GPT-3 around those things that we can help people understand so that they can get a lot of usefulness out of, it being close. Instead of people thinking it has to be perfect in order to be useful.
[00:26:01] Jordan: Yeah. And I think, Robb, that points me into this, the mindset of the market at the moment and, and where it might be going uh, into the future. There are times where the market is willing to take the risk uh, spend the additional money in the investment and the time into building new innovative products. When, the market's going up and everything is uh, is sunny days uh, but that of course always comes to an end. And so the question is when the party's over, are people still willing to invest in these new technologies and, and take the chances uh, and, and have a couple of, of stumbles and failures and still push through to adopt this uh, new technology with conversationally ai?
I don't know if you wanted to talk about what that looks like and what we're heading towards in the future.
[00:26:45] Robb: Well, I think the is to understand where we are today is, gonna change. You know, when we, when people are comparing a smart machine, which that's all this is, it's just smarter machines, right? It's not ai, it's just, Oh, we need our machines to be smarter and they're getting smarter and you know, why would we care about dumb machines? Like we want smarter machines, of course we do. Dumb machines are more dangerous than smarter machines But we often find ourselves, comparing this artificial intelligence because of the name artificial intelligence. And I think this might just be a language problem. The moment we start calling it artificial intelligence, we immediately shift comparing the technology to humans and, funny enough, not the average human, not the below average human, the best example of human.
People will, break the bot and say, Ah, look, it got this wrong and, you know, I'll always kind of say, Oh, you've never the call center and had an agent get something wrong before, that's, never happen to you. I mean, I sort of imagine the perfect example of, the best case scenario in call center instead of the average case scenario. And comparing it to the human, instead of comparing this technology to the dumber machines of yesterday, like we shouldn't be comparing smarter machines to humans, we should be comparing our smarter machines today to the machines of yesterday. Doesn't make sense to compare to humans.
It makes more sense to say, Wow, look at how much smarter this machine is compared to the machine before it. Look how much better a Tesla is with self-driving technology to the cars before it. Why do we keep comparing it to a drive, person and a human driving a car? It's so obvious that a smarter car is better. You have two sets. You have eight eyeballs on the road, plus your two. That's 10 now. Not Instead of your two, you have four hands on the steering wheel. Instead of two hands on the steering wheel, you have two feet on the brake pedal instead of one. You have something else watching the road while you got distracted with an important text message.
It's so clear. so clear, that smarter machines are better than dumber machines and that this stuff is improving machines incredibly and And it's so weird
[00:29:27] Daisy: Well, And it's not, Oh, sorry Rob. I was just gonna say, and it's not even comparing to humans because humans aren't as good as the 95%. It's comparing it to perfection which isn't a valid comparison in any way. And I think it's because it's new. It's scary. People believe that computers or technology can't be better than humans, and In many ways they can't But there're they don't they don't look at the data of how poor drivers are human drivers are
[00:29:57] Robb: I know.
[00:29:59] Daisy: Uh, they are not beating 95% accuracy not even close.
[00:30:03] Robb: Totally I mean, it's very relevant today, but you're like, what would you rather have a human's finger on the nukes, like Putin or a machine right now? Arguably like the machine he presses. I hope it's smart. I hope it's smart enough to ask somebody else to collaborate. I hope there's a system beneath that button that's smart enough to not just end the world as we know it. This idea that we're in a better place today. Because there's a person with their finger on a dumb machine instead of there's a smart machine between that person and the end of the world. It's ludicrous.
[00:30:44] Daisy: Yeah, it's kinda like that article that you posted, Robb, where they were talking about different ways of thinking and how you fix our thinking Right? This ties directly into that article that posted. You know, bloodletting used to be the main form of medical treatment. isn't the way of the future or what we've realized is the the way to treat all illness today, but that was a point that was very much followed because that how it always been done.
And so I think changing that thinking and this goes back even to what we were talking before around how do we get people to believe us, part of it is that we have a lot of education at the depth of how technology works and we have lot of examples of really pure ways that it's been implemented but we don't have middle anything in middle showcasing not only not only new ways of using it uh other ways that people can experience it that does add viability and value to what we bring to the table and I think that for us, especially in training and education, we really need to focus on that middle ground to make sure that people can experience these new things, so that's not unknown they've never thought about it before, and now they can, but its also that they can experience for themselves and realize like, Oh, this actually is better, even if it's not perfect it's better than what I have today, whether it's being done by a human or a different machine.
[00:32:16] Robb: Yeah. I totally agree. it's funny like this whole idea of entertainment versus productivity, like if you just get that wrong, right? If you design an interface for gaming, of course, it's, you know, frustrate the user, get them to throw the controller across the room and see how long you can keep them using the machine. It was like our thing we did a while ago, the deec is like where you would call in and talk to the most world's most interesting man. Our whole goal to see how long we could keep people on the phone. Seven minutes we were like, Oh my God, let's go to eight minutes.
And productivity is like, no, the opposite. You measure success by how you know, how you can shorten the time they're interacting with it. And it's kind of a good example because another thing Gardner slipped in this year that we didn't influence was like avatars Like, does your system support avatars? And it's so clear to me that the avatars are entertainment based and it's very hard for me to imagine how an avatar is gonna speed up the productivity of any task.
And if you think about one of the values of conversation as an interface, it's the fact that multitasking is on the table. You can talk to your car while you're driving so you can keep your eyes on the road. So one of the huge values is the fact that you can do other things while using the operating the interface. Then someone throws in an avatar and you're like, you just took out one of the biggest value propositions. Now I gotta stare at this thing in case it does something. Ludacris.
[00:33:50] Jordan: Yeah and, and just to add on top of that, I, before we jump off the Gartner topic I really want to give a big shout out everyone who contributed to the Gartner submissions, including the avatars and the facial recognition the gesture control and omni data and synchronizer and all the other crazy things that were developed.
Something around maybe 30% of what we showed was built within the three weeks we were given for the submission. And a hundred percent of the flows were built within those three weeks as well on top of the uh, capabilities we already had. So I just wanna give a big shout out and thank you for everyone for those sleepless nights they were maybe 50 plus contributors on those demos.
It was a massive effort to coordinate. Massive effort to build and the team really came together in a big way, to showcase the best in breed. Even if it is things like avatars, that, that may not have the most use for what we're doing. We were still able to check all, all those boxes and do it in a really interesting way and give our OneReach spin to it.
I want to thank everyone for, for sticking with us and and showcasing all those different capabilities.
[00:34:55] Elias: I wanna add to that
[00:34:57] Robb: Yeah, it was definitely a rally. I know Joan you were like, I think it was like day two when you were starting to watch those videos. You like, What's happening?
[00:35:06] Joan: It was awesome to see in real time. You all killed it.
[00:35:09] Elias: I was just gonna add to it that last year was, was nuts. It was a really hard backbreaking effort and there was a group and everyone got after it and it, and we did good. And this year was crazy. It was amazing the way that people dove in and the stuff that people pulled off and what came out of it. It's beyond like it's awesome. Like it was so inspiring way to go to everybody that, that contributed ,really.
[00:35:38] Robb: Yeah. The bar was pretty high. , everybody sets it for themselves. But we're definitely a group that likes to set that bar way up there.
[00:35:46] Elias: the, the, The level of one upping that happened from last year to this year was incredible. Like just decimated. It was unbelievable guys, way to go.
[00:35:55] Robb: Yeah. Super cool.
Yeah, on that note.
[00:35:59] Jordan: Yeah so, So Robb, on on that note I think, I know we wanted to talk about not the most happy of notes, but the upcoming financial changes of the winds. do you wanna tackle that?
[00:36:10] Robb: Yeah, I think everybody, everybody by this point's, hearing all the douma gloom about the economy and It's coming down the pike and the layoffs and some of the most, successful companies in tech just doing massive layoffs and and, you know, been through this before as a company faced the downturn.
And this is the moment you guys can all be glad you have Daisy because she is the um, person who loves to build financial bunkers, to protect all of our employees from unexpected negative consequence to things like this. And so once again, OneReach goes into this place with. A very strong balance sheet, with no debt and we'll be able to hopefully keep up our record of never doing layoffs in our careers.
Our goal is to provide a place, first and foremost that's, secure for everybody to work and although, you know, nobody knows what's gonna happen and what adjustments will need to be made I think we're looking at this as a way our competitors burning a lot, they're losing a lot of money. They really count on fundraising to keep them going. That's not us. We got here without raising anything. So, we're super strong. We know our way around this space. . And I think what we should do as a company is use this as an opportunity to actually um, double down.
Uh, I think, the Warren Buffets of the world say you buy when the market's down and everybody's scared. So I think that's, that's where our mind is going. let's get out there and hire some of the best people uh, while they're out there. Let's, Let's grow. And let's take advantage of this as an opportunity to make ground while others are looking at ways they can cut ground.
[00:38:06] Daisy: Yeah. And I think to just add to that, since I always have to add to a statement like that, . Um, It's. Uh, Yeah. We absolutely wanna take advantage of market. We we have the ability because of how we've been able to keep funds in alignment when things are going well and having kind of strategic growth versus just explosive growth.
But I think that we also in this year have also taken some, you know, extra steps where we didn't necessarily need them always. it's also a time to assess, to say, do we have have things, Um, as efficient as possible if not, does it make sense to make those more efficient Uh, look at cost savings in areas that make sense so are we spending too much for certain area? We've added a lot of systems we've added a lot of costs in place and when we're growing, sometimes we don't think that we have to be as efficient with those the costs and with those purchases in times of lush, but now that now this this market it really time. Yes we wanna take advantage of being responsible and having extra money in our pockets when nobody else does so that we could take advantage of, you know, buying low or getting great people uh, when nobody else can afford them. But we also wanna continue to be diligent against some of the things that maybe we weren't as diligent on earlier we didn't have to be. I think it's both taking advantage but also continuing to play the smart game so that we have the ability to take advantage the future as as well.
And not only just take advantage of growth in the time when nobody else is growing but making sure that we are doing that it in a smart way, That we're taking advantage of everyone's talents, making sure that they're in the right positions, making sure that they have enough things to do and work on so that we're not losing good people because they're bored. You know, Just all going back to basics on some of those. It's also the time for that as well.
[00:40:19] Robb: I was just gonna say there's a lot of people misunderstand the concept of investment versus delusion. And it's, it's, it's a really critical concept for everybody to understand clearly. And it's one where OneReach understands and has, and it's what got us here. Um, Delusion is the idea that you end up spending more money as a company or laying out more money, but you don't get more back.
And there's a number of things that fall under the category of, dilution, right? You go out and buy a tool to make things easier for people, but it doesn't actually save money. It just makes things easier for people. That's a delusion, now maybe it's justified and maybe it makes sense but you're not going to make money, it's not an investment. It's just a delusion.
And when you have capital, the whole point of capital is to put it towards things that grow the business, that add more fuel to the fire. Not things that just make the firewood more expensive that you're burning. And that's so, so important.
It's really what you see when companies go out of business. When you see large companies fail, it's because what they've done is they've increased their costs through a lot of things that are dilutive. And they didn't actually get value from those things. They just paid more for the things. Um, It's kind of like inflation, right? It's a great example. Peoples are spending the same amount of money per month that they did the month before, but they're getting less for it. They're buying less at the supermarket, there's less product. You don't want that. That's why inflation is so bad. What you want is people to get more for their money. And that's, that's what we focus on. We don't focus on cutting, we focus on getting more. And you know, that diligence may be painful and when times are good cause everybody's like, Why We can afford it.
And there's Daisy taking the hits when things are good trying to keep us in a place of trying to not dilute, but what happens then is when things go bad, which they always do in the market, you don't have all these things you have to cut. You don't have a ton of people that aren't doing that you have to cut. you, You're lean.
And so there's just something to be said being a grown up and making sure that you're fiscally responsible when times are good, so that when times go bad, you don't have this pendulum swing of having to disrupt the whole business by, by having to make all these cuts to things you should have never bought in the first place.
[00:43:00] Antony: Then my question would be, so like I learned from from you Robb, that it's easier to make money than to save money. Is at least you, you keep saying that.
[00:43:11] Robb: Yeah.
[00:43:11] Antony: uh, The question I guess I have is, do you see any ways in how OneReach as a company can make money, like some alternative, sources of income or uh, that would be kind of of on one hand still aligned with our goal, but at the same time provide us with more kind of flexibility, more room to, uh, handle this, upcoming and economical crisis?
[00:43:36] Robb: Yeah, I'd say that for us, it, is true, It's always easier to make more money than, at least for me in my life, it's been easier, make more money than to try to save. And that's partly just because, I don't, not frivolous person. um, kind of Goes back to my earlier point.
If you're, you try to be responsible in your spending, saving money is a lot harder than if you're frivolous. So in, in my case, and I think, thanks to Daisy, in OneReach's case, it's mostly true that it's easier to make money than save money. and, And that's definitely true. I think right now, at this moment, because we have a lot of technology, a lot of great technology that we've put together, we know we have a, a lot to offer and that we can save a lot.
I think the discount tire story as I heard it was they sent out an email just recently talking about what the cost savings to DT during the rollout of what we've built so far, which is only a fraction of what we will be building. And it's 150 million year in cost saving.
On top of that the
[00:44:45] Antony: So, sorry to interrupt. You said billion or million?
[00:44:48] Robb: Million
[00:44:49] Antony: okay. Because that was a lot. Still a lot. I agree. But just like billion. That was way too much
[00:44:56] Robb: yeah. That's more than they make. Yeah. And that's just what we've rolled out, which is like the very beginning. The next project will make them at their estimations an additional a hundred million. And obviously these stories will get us more customers that want to do the same thing. And you can see that our portion that they pay us is, is nothing in comparison.
I think for us as we look at trying to do the right thing for our company and our employees to make sure that everybody's got a safe, reliable, Secure income and a home in a family they don't have to worry about, as a company, then we have to tell our story. We have to wrap our technology better than we have. we're, We're great. We've created a lot of great stuff. We have a lot of polishing to do right now, a lot of the finishing work. And I, I that's where we can all focus is we do all the hard stuff. We're so good at the hard stuff at OneReach, we solve really badass problems.
And then when it gets to like the little stuff, the trim that we gotta put on it move on thinking Well, that's the easy stuff. I'm gonna move on to the next hard problem. And if we could just. Step back, do some of that polishing on the stuff we have. It will be e much easier for our customers to adopt the technology.
That's what will allow us to gain more customers and, what you said is, is is let's grow uh, during this time.
So you know me, with everything, I always want to raise the bar with OneReach. It's raise the bar. So while everybody else is shrinking, we're gonna grow. The game plan. Just like our book. We don't wanna write a book, we wanna write the bestselling book.
[00:46:43] Jordan: Yeah. Uh, Elias actually, do you wanna jump on in here and, and start talking about the news or the book?
[00:46:49] Elias: I'm jumping. I've worked up a sweat. I'll keep
Um, This, so this is a really interesting moment. I am, I'm not great at this, but I'm trying to like really take pause and realize the moment. It takes a lot for me to calm down. And I'm working on that a lot right now cause there's a lot of crazy stuff happening.
I personally don't believe that I will get a front row to many moments, like what we're experiencing as a company right now. Like in my lifetime, I don't know, I can't speak for others. But this is this is one of those moments where like, I believe this that, this, what we're experiencing as a company right, types of wins people will end up asking us like, how did you pull this off? Like, In awe. And whether we realize it or not, I think, you know, we do here and there. But we just sort of let these things pass us by sometimes, whether we realize it or not. Everyone that works in this company right now is getting cooler and cooler like by the hour,
[00:47:51] Jordan: Hey, Elias. Maybe for those that, are living under a rock and do not know the news about the
[00:47:58] Elias: Hey, Oh,
Yeah
[00:47:59] Jordan: Shout from the rooftops.
[00:48:02] Elias: It's, I'm gonna shout it. I just, I don't want, I don't want people to miss what this stuff means. And, And it just be another piece of, of news not, not just the book, but all these types of wins that we're experiencing right now. Let tell a little story, Jordan. It's gonna take a minute.
[00:48:16] Jordan: Yeah. We weave that story
[00:48:19] Robb: Okay, especially with all those pauses,
[00:48:23] Elias: Yeah, there's pause.
[00:48:24] Jordan: So dramatic, I'm, I'm, I'm ready. I'm, I'm, I'm gonna
[00:48:27] Elias: Well, You guys can you can tell. Everybody that knows me well knows that I speak too fast. I get too excited, so I'm not just gonna ramble here. So here's what made things click for me is my son Zeev, his birthday party this summer uh, he, I watched him completely ignore a gift that he had wanted for a really long time, and that his grandfather, who he loves very much, was handing to him.
It wasn't even wrapped. He could see that it was this thing he wanted for months and he completely ignored it. It didn't capture his attention in the slightest. And I could see that's basically what I've been doing. Zeev, my son, he'd grown numb in that moment. He was in the middle of a flurry of gifts.
Friends and family are like handing him stuff. He's had way too much cake. He's on outta sugar high. And that, that additional gift, even it being one he'd wanted desperately for so long, it was just like too much. It was lost. It was too much information. And he was like, all his chemicals in his body, dopamine and endorphins and everything, like he was about to have a crash. And like, it just, it wasn't recognized, he took it for granted. He didn't even realize it.
And so that, that's what's been happening for me and I think for a lot of us where like there, there are these incredible moments that this team and company is experiencing and so often and we can get desensitized, right?
as I was thinking about that story, I realized that I missed. A raving review that an industry expert gave about age of invisible machines on LinkedIn, unprovoked. Like they just posted this book is amazing. Anyone in this industry should read this book five times. And I missed it. Like I didn't catch it for like two days.
Cause there was so much stuff like that happening that I missed it. So the why I'm missing all the point is if you work here, you're, whether you're directly connected to this bit of news or that piece of news or not you are enabling it and you're getting cooler basically by the day or hour at this point.
And winds are often the, and they're really crazy. They're not always gonna be like every day or whatever, but like best customer service companies in the world are using our platform and benefiting like immensely from using it. Highest ranking platform in the world. Influencers and experts and like industry leaders are leaving their jobs to come work here.
This is cra this is crazy stuff. And this is what we're working on, I don't know if this is apparent to people, is a, as a company, our marketing and branding efforts are succeeding. When the responses that you get out there in the world to people finding out that you work at OneReach.ai, the responses are like, Wow, that is so cool. Like, you must be a really incredible person.
That's essentially what we're aiming for. We know we're succeeding when doubts types of things are happening, and that's happening more and more. Okay. So on that note, talk too long. Jordan told me to hurry up. Here I am. So the h invisible machines, within an hour of me sharing news with the company that like sales are going really crazy, we're actually getting concerned about running out of books. Within an hour of having that discussion with our publisher. We got listed in the Wall Street Journal best selling business books. The number five best selling business book in the world was Age of Invisible Machines last week. Only four books in the business category in the world sold more than a conversational AI book. is unbelievable what that means for this space and everybody working in it, like never mind OneReach, like elevates everything everybody's working on in conversational ai massive victory for everybody that works here.
Cool factor goes up tremendously. Everybody that works in this industry is like, The feedback we're getting is incredible. So there's the news though, that's the headline Jordan.
[00:52:29] Jordan: Oh no, I didn't want you to speed up Elias at all. I want, I wanna savor this moment with you, keep going, please
[00:52:36] Elias: I think I'm done. I've really talked a lot, even I try to talk slower than I usually do
[00:52:41] Jordan: though, as well, right? I think we were number one in, what was it? Information systems on Amazon
[00:52:46] Elias: Information management. Yeah.
Yeah, number one new release. The book has already also sold out at Target, which is one of the largest retailers in the United States. And tons of people buy books from that's gonna start happening. More like they're gonna be people waiting for the book on back order because the, even one, one of the top 10 largest publishers in the world that is our publisher, Wiley, can't do a re-print faster than like a month or two and that, that, that moment's coming really faster. Like people are gonna be back ordering it cause it's flying off the shelves
[00:53:23] Jordan: Yeah. And maybe one thing we can, we can hit on that with Elias is, is this is the number one book or the number five book in business the Wall Street Journal. Not, number five in technology or
[00:53:34] Elias: No,
[00:53:34] Jordan: AI or AI in
[00:53:38] Elias: yeah
[00:53:39] Jordan: give some perspective, Atomic Habits was number two, I believe.
So we're, three spots away from Atomic Habits, one of the most popular books ever.
[00:53:50] Elias: listening to this podcast right now, your cousin, your sister, uncle, mom, dad is in business and they're reading this book right now. If they don't work in ai, they're not a technologist, they're not a designer. They're just they're doing their work to stay ahead and help their company succeed. And this isn't one of the five most important books in the world for them to read right now.
[00:54:17] Jordan: yeah that's exactly right. And Robb, I know we were talking about this last night the significance of being in the business section as opposed to just the AI section and conversation I section. Do you want to talk to what that means and the value of having it outside of the just AI space, but in the business space?
[00:54:34] Robb: Yeah, I think it's easy to get caught up in your little chamber, as we call it. And in this case, in our bubble. And that's the bubble of somebody, somebody wants a com to choose a conversational AI platform. They bring in the usual suspects. We may or may not be one of them, and we compete against each other for this finite number of potential customers and when you look at the conversational, AI space, like the investors out there will say, Oh, it's growing at, a rate of 70% per year. , blah, blah, blah and they, and then they predict it to grow at rate they think it will grow over the next two or three years. And it's how they make decisions on what space to invest in, how much to invest.
And so it's a calculation that companies like McKenzie will run to figure out, that particular space and that bubble. But when a, when something like this happens, it has the potential, It hasn't done it yet, but it has the potential to change all of those calculations because gets outside the bubble and it starts talking to business people that are the people with the money that make decisions and it can affect it in a positive way. It now can grow. The trajectory increased the trajectory of growth of the space. Because now you've got the CEO company Y saying their CTO, Hey, we need to go all in on conversational AI. And so they're dealing with big numbers, you know, billion dollar companies and they read a book that says, Hey, this could be the difference between success and failure for you guys, they don't have to agree with it. They don't have to say, I wholeheartedly agree with with what Robb's saying here. They just have to think it's plausible. And if there's a slight chance that it's true, if there's a 5% chance that they agree then why wouldn't they put a 1% of their profit towards backstopping it, right? Because risk management is their job. So why wouldn't you take million, which is pennies to them say, Yeah, this conversational ai. I wanna make sure that at least put chips on the table on this thing. So we're just speaking know, up at the top the food chain here, where we're, big dollars to us are small dollars to them, and it should grow the space for everybody.
Those to budget more this technology will benefit everybody in the space. And that's fantastic.
[00:57:20] Elias: And if that's not enough for you. The, one of the authors in this same list that their book was not purchased as much as Age of Invisible Machines last week. They're the, their professor and multiple best selling author and lecturer. And they have a famous TED Talk that I personally have, this Ted Talk has been sent to me by at least five people that work in this company independently. They sent me this TED Talk, Brene Brown. Age of invisible machines sold more than Brene Brown's book last week. It's insanity that is changing the way people orient to the space that we in, that we are in is changing. It is becoming mainstream.
[00:58:04] Antony: It is surreal. On one hand I heard about these like a read General channel, but for some reason it never sunk in that deep, that how big the impact is
[00:58:18] Elias: Part of my point, the story I was told about my son. Like we become desensitized to these things, especially as we get cooler and cooler as a company and achieve more and more. We're just gonna like, grow, numb to it. And I caught myself and I wanna help others catch themselves and not do it that way. Sorry to interrupt.
[00:58:35] Antony: Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. And that's, yeah. The point I was making as well, this is amazing. It's, Yeah I cannot even imagine the amount of work that was put into this.
[00:58:47] Elias: It was definitely the hardest thing I've ever done.
[00:58:49] Jordan: let's, Let's give a big shout as well. The Josh Tyson all the work that was done and, and, you know, the writing of the book and all the words and making it, sound as good as it does, is it's not a small task. I wanna make sure we, we shout him out on this podcast as well, for all the work he's done
[00:59:08] Elias: Yeah he's a professional writer, guys, so that in case it's lost that, you know, he's for in a piece for New York Times and Some famous skateboarding magazines that, that aren't around anymore and, and was editor for UX Magazine, but he is a professional writer, so we can think of it this way.
Like he, he just went to the Olympics and he got a gold medal in his sport. Thank you for saying that, Jordan. Congratulations, Josh.
[00:59:32] Robb: Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, lots of good things happening. We're running outta good things to do. I think now it's focusing on the little wins, , which we overlook. , we gotta for example Petro's team launched some the new color scheme into the flow builder. I like it, I hope you guys like it. I love that stuff.
[00:59:57] Elias: Yeah.
[00:59:57] Robb: I'm so glad to see that. And I think that's, those are some of the moments I like the most. The new LMS design I think is amazing. I love what they did with that. I can't wait to see the badges and everything when it fully comes to fruition.
I know that Petro is looking at how to link what people have trained to learn with steps we suggest next So how cool is that, that part of the whole algorithm of suggesting the next step will actually include the training of the individual that's using the flow builder at that moment.
Like just cool stuff.
[01:00:36] Antony: All right. guess we are hitting our time limit, so unless there is something someone wants to talk real quick about.
[01:00:48] Elias: Remind yourselves to not miss it. Guys. We're getting cooler all the time. All of these things we were talking about today and so many more things that didn't make it. Don't sleep at the wheel. Don't miss it.
[01:01:00] Daisy: Well, I think the bigger one too is if you haven't read the book, read it, you'll definitely gain a lot of great insight. And so I know that we all have a hard time finding time. But it's definitely you hear experts in the industry getting value out of it, everybody in our company should have read it at least once.
I just also don't want anyone to overlook that fact either.
[01:01:25] Elias: I also don't want people to get embarrassed. Someone is gonna ask you about something in the book at a conference. It's not gonna be as fun if you haven't read it.
[01:01:33] Robb: Or just appear or whatever. Yeah. mean, Why we wrote it, right? It's, it is to help employees first and foremost, get a head start and be experts. The experts in the industry, else is gonna expect them to be when they see their resume.
[01:01:51] Jordan: And as a reminder, if you do read the book and you do love the book, definitely leave a review on Amazon. For sure. Of course. It helps get all the knowledge out there. And the last thing I'd like to say on this podcast is if anyone has questions about the company or anything that we're not hitting on here, definitely uh, reach out to any of us and we'll try to do as best we can to tackle those subjects on the next podcast.
[01:02:16] Robb: Yeah.
And also know that the proceeds of the book go to Ukraine. So, This wild success, if we can further it, you guys can help by doing those ratings. You don't need to write anything. Just a rating.
[01:02:29] Elias: Yeah, just a star rating
[01:02:31] Robb: Just know that this success Uh, all the proceeds is are going to Ukraine
[01:02:36] Elias: Yeah. And we've said a few things about if you like it, give a star rating or Yes, please do. But also it shouldn't be missed if you don't, if you find something that's missing, if you wanna argue about something that's in. Absolutely welcome. We haven't stopped writing the book, even though it's printed.
The conversation continues and the thoughts and data are gonna continue to evolve. So you don't have to like it. But definitely read it and if you do like it, share it with people. Give it a star writing.
[01:03:06] Antony: All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope everyone is doing good and you'll be able to hear us soon.
[01:03:18] Elias: you
stop jumping now?
[01:03:20] Antony: Yeah, you can start jumping.
[01:03:22] Elias: Thank
[01:03:23] Antony: Okay. Bye everyone.
[01:03:25] Robb: See you guys
[01:03:26] Jordan: Thanks everyone