[00:00:07] Antony: Hey everyone. Finally, we recording this episode, with huge delay. Sorry about that.
[00:00:15] Robb: Yeah, sorry guys
[00:00:17] Antony: So unfortunately Ukraine is still in war state, unfortunately, people are still dying and it's hard to tell how long it will be like that.
[00:00:31] Robb: Yes... Yeah, Putin is still an asshole and apparently not going to not be an asshole for a long time.
[00:00:42] Antony: Yeah, with what she did. I'm not sure he would be able to not to be an asshole
[00:00:47] Robb: Yeah. It's pretty much yeah. Is in the lifetime asshole club at this point.
[00:00:52] Daisy: think that's an understatement.
[00:00:54] Robb: Yeah.
[00:00:55] Antony: Can you guys, share how we are doing as a company? How war in Ukraine effected us?
I know lots of, uh, lots of, stories where many people, who were working in international companies in Ukraine for example, were fired because companies not being able to keep people employed or if company was more focused on Ukrainian market, they are pretty much just gone completely. Can you share some news about that?
[00:01:27] Robb: Yeah. I mean, in the, In the traditional OneReach fashion, where we tend to be more conservative than other companies are and we tend to be as a result, more loyal so far as we're concerned, we haven't really experienced, any significant impact. There has of course been productivity implications but we've positioned ourselves in such a way that We can handle that for a short period of time. And I think that short period of time, has been, month and a half now. And I think, we're going to have to start thinking about how to make things more normal over the next couple of months. Cause this is just kinda the way it is and the way it's going to be. The good news is that we're well-prepared and resilient as a company. We haven't had to lay anybody off and then we have no plans to at the moment. In fact, if anything, we're looking to pick people up that have been laid off. So yeah, we may not always be the fastest growing company. And that's by choice. Obviously we have people calling us on a regular basis to try to partner or invest or whatever. You know, we're very conservative and we take the idea of being more of a stable company more seriously, and we prefer stability over fast growth. So we're still growing. Things are still great.
We all product first and I think that's a big part of it from the moment when we started this company the thought was that many companies are great at sales and marketing and they have okay products and that, with great sales and marketing, you can make a lot of money with an okay product. I still believe that's true today, but I think there's two things that come along with that. One, it depends more on luck and raising money and so it's a little bit more of a good fortune scenario when you, win um, ala WeWork where they raise billions of dollars from SoftBank, that came down to a series of moments that may or may not have ever happened and it would have changed the whole course of that company. And the same thing goes with resiliency. You know, When you're growing and moving these companies come down to a series of moments that are make or break. And weWork again as an example of, they came close to bankruptcy several times, and then something happened to get them out of it.
We often don't hear about the companies that those good fortunes don't happen to that depend on luck and luck doesn't come through for them because they disappear without ever becoming known, but we've never taken the marketing and sales approach first. We've taken a product first approach where marketing and sales have trailed behind products significantly. And so now we're in the phase of having marketing and sales catch up to product. And I think as a result of being product first, the company's more resilient, more stable.
So over the course of the next year, what we're going to try to do is focus on that sales and marketing focus on growth, which is really just about helping our current employees reach some of their future growth goals by, not stagnating as a company I think. Meant to say that if you're not growing, you're shrinking. So we're going to have to hit that next phase of getting our product out to the world, which was the whole point we wanted to build a great product and now we want to get it out to everybody and that's why we raised this money. So that's really the next couple of years for us is going to be a focus on that while we continue to really innovate on the product.
And on that front, I'm actually today heading to Stanford to meet their team that works on NLU to discuss a collaboration between OneReach and the NLU team in Stanford that want to work with us potentially to come up with a better NLU system around improving upon intent recognition that can be open-sourced. So working with us and them together to come up with an open source NLU engine. I'll have hopefully have more information on that in further podcasts but exciting times for us.
And then of course, there's longly anticipated capabilities that finally came out where we've been selected as the best product in the market, really in the world. And so that's going to open a lot of doors. You can tell Stanford being an example. They're going to want to collaborate with somebody who is recognized in the space and who better than us at this moment. We should be able to see a lot of unique doors and opportunities open. I've definitely gotten to the place, Daisy, I don't know if you can speak to this as well, but I've gotten to the place where anybody that pretty much is open to a new job, will come to OneReach we've become a very exciting place to work. Pretty much if I want an employee, I get them at this point. Everybody wants to work for us that I've talked to. So we've already gone from, fairly unknown to well achieved and to the degree that, many folks wanna come and work with us and our team. So that's super exciting to see that, that beginning to happen. And I think we're going to see more and more of that as we go forward, where people are super excited to come and work with us. But Daisy you're at the frontline.
[00:07:08] Daisy: Yeah. Yeah. We're getting a lot of people that are reaching out to us. Looking for opportunities. We're also getting a lot of kids that are looking for internships which is really great because internships turn into, full-time employees. So I think you're right, Robb, we're seeing the exact same thing.
And this is all over the world. We're getting people from Argentina and Columbia and Dominican Republic and Africa and Mexico. So people are coming out of the woodwork looking to see if they can somehow figure out how to team up with us in one way or another. And so it's really exciting times. I think.
To your point, Robb, we've all of a sudden made our mark on the map publicly instead of privately. And that leads to really positive things when it comes to recruitment or trying to find people in certain talent pools that maybe we're less interested in us previously are much more interested in us now there's no more talking people into working with us.
It's we have the pick anytime we've gone. After somebody as Rupp stated, we've been able to get them really excited and And almost have options where we didn't have options before, which is always fantastic news from our side. So we're definitely hiring and we're definitely looking at all places.
Now it's not necessarily where they're located, but what their talent level is. And so we'll really be able to get pick of the litter folks that we haven't had access to always in the past from other locations outside of Ukraine. So that's really positive and we'll also able to, get a lot of team members in the Ukraine as we're still hiring there as well. So I think this is our first step into a global company is making sure that we have marks and multiple places across the globe. So that's really exciting news and gives us all a great opportunity of places to go visit. So it's fun all the way around.
[00:09:14] Antony: Yeah, that's sounds great. I guess Definitely something new for OneReach.
[00:09:20] Robb: Yeah, we went from unknown to on our way to famously known and that that brings with it some problems, but it brings with it a lot more opportunities to pick and choose. Yeah, we're entering the era of being smart at what not to do. There's so much opportunity being thrown at us that if we tried to do it all, we'll probably fail out at all. So this is a new phase for us in what things we should focus on and what things we should say no to.
[00:09:48] Daisy: Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. I think that prioritization is going to become critical, whether it's prioritization of what we work on, prioritization of customers, prioritization of recruitment strategy prioritization of marketing because our company really can do it all in the platform really can do it all. It's going to be critical for us to target in on the kind of the strategies that we want to pursue for second and third so that we don't get too broad in the scope because that will be easy to do, if if we don't continue to prioritize. So I think that's a really important thing for us to focus on in the upcoming year.
[00:10:27] Robb: Yeah. There's two things that Gardner said. One, no one was really good news. Gardner said that when they were doing the capabilities, they delayed, there was a lot of people going back and forth upset about their position. We weren't one of them, of course, cause we got number one and four out of the five categories and number two in the fifth category that we didn't really care about.
So they didn't hear it from us, but everybody else was complaining about their position. But something they said to us, which was interesting is although they all complained that they should be above each other, nobody complained about OneReach being number one. It was as if everybody understood that of course OneReach is number one and they didn't argue for their position to be above OneReach, but only above each other. And that was kind of interesting. It's where we're sort of developing a relationship and reputation among our competitors, that we are the best product and to the point where people don't really argue about it. But they do argue amongst themselves. Over the next year, however we have one year in this spot and I think it's easy to get complacent when you're in the number one spot. And I think that next year we wanna be number one again, Gartner filled us in a little bit as to what that's gonna look like.
And although features are going to be a big part of this the areas we're going to have to really focus in on are NLU and human in the loop. These two areas are going to be very key to the next positioning time machine is going to be absolutely mandatory or we'll lose our position almost for sure.
[00:12:09] Antony: Can you please elaborate when you say time machine? Because I guess not everyone's aware.
[00:12:14] Robb: Yeah, we needed, we don't have a demo of our product and action. We have a demo of using our product, but we don't have a great example of a bot that we've created as a company that represents the best bot that our platform can produce. Uh, So that customers could experience the possibility of what they can do with OneReach, which is almost crazy that we got this far.
So everybody bought the product without knowing the potential of what it can build. All of our competitors showed a lot of demos about what their product is capable of building ours could blow them out of the water if we just sit down and create this fake company and build bots for it. So it's really going to be something critical to us, especially cause we lost two months of the year to disputes on the capabilities.
And from what I understand, Google, Microsoft and Amazon were just upset. Completely upset with Gardner, how could they not be number one? And we lost two months as a result. The other thing that really sucks in my opinion, but it doesn't matter because it's, there's nothing we can do about it is that Gartner says that company growth is going to be more important next year than this year.
So they're going to be looking at our growth. So it's going to be very important for us to onboard customers successfully and really get out in the world. I think that this will be one of the toughest areas for us. We don't tend to be wired towards growing really fast and making a lot of money.
We tend to be focused on quality and delivering a quality product. So we're going to have to be very careful with that.
[00:13:58] Antony: I have a question then. Some time ago we were discussing possibilities that we are interested in developing a product but not building solutions for customers using our product and we were looking at partners that can fill that gap so we can support them. We can consult, but they would be focused on actually working with customers, analyzing their problems and building solutions using our platform and we can focus mostly on the product, and then we hit the kind of, it was not that easy for our partners to. Use the tool to get to know it. And we kind of leaned back to, okay, we need to beef up, we need to create delivery team who can use the product and kind of make our customers successful as well.
So do you see any changes there? Do you see that we might want to try that again or for now we just want to stick with internal delivery.
[00:14:59] Robb: Yeah, we will keep trying to get partners up and running. It's been very difficult and challenging our growth. If we're gonna hit growth all of our competitors have moved towards implementation. I think partners have just really struggled to deliver. And so we too have focused on being able to deliver as well as provide a product. And I think that long-term we'll, we will swing back to being more product as partners start to get it. But in the meantime it's very fortunate that we all have experience with building world-class services. So, we do have a great chance of outperforming our competitors in this area, but yeah, we have moved now to just helping with implementation as well as providing a product.
But I do hope in the future that we will focus internally only on strategic projects and that partners will step up. And that we'll be able to focus on our product and the strategic clients moving forward.
[00:16:03] Daisy: But we are also looking at really being strategic on what pieces of the business we're trying to deliver on. So like the discount tire product is a perfect example where we could provide IVR and telephony services throughout their organization. Once we complete that big implementation, that we're perfectly structured for. We could repeat that again for the next business. And so I think that what we struggled with in the past is that everybody coming to us has been accustomed, unique, difficult, complex solution that doesn't allow us to do a lot of reusability or past learning or anything can help that customer get up to speed faster.
And I think we're starting to see a replication of some of those services, which will help in getting people onboarded quicker or having solutions that can be reused partially for the next implementation. And I think that will help in speeding up delivery.
[00:17:09] Robb: Yeah, for sure. And the product's only getting more complicated as time is going on. So next year, with the goal towards better NLU focus on voice micro components in rich web chat. So micro UIs and having a really wide selection of those with the option, of content builder. And we need to dive deeper into mobile. We need to dive deeper into the areas around iMessage and native Android messaging. There's really a bunch we got to do this year. And so hopefully within the next few weeks, we can get organized and create an attack plan for everybody and share that so that we can get after this, because I really want to be number one, two years running. I know that seems greedy, but I think we can completely pull it off.
[00:17:56] Antony: Yeah, I really hope that we would be able to. What do you think if we are talking about being number one again, so at least how I see that before Gardner did this review, there was almost no market. There were companies doing stuff. We were one of them, but no one ever tried to analyze the market and try to compare what is important, what is more important, what is less important? And, in my opinion, this first report they created, they defined rules of the game, at least for short term. And so don't you think that right now many companies will readjust or just adjust to rules that Gartner defined.
So how they affiliated like even capabilities matrix, right? So they define five use cases they think are important in this area. So what's my question is don't you think it would become way harder to compete going on because before rules of the game were kinda secret, and now, they are, everyone knows them. What do you think about that?
[00:19:12] Robb: Yeah, I can see that. Here's my guess, we predicted the things very accurately that were going to be important for the first one. And you're right. We got those right. And other people didn't get them as right. I have a prediction. I think that next year with our help, we are going to influence Gartner to value different features and different things for next years and that most of our competition are going to focus on last year's criteria and try to bolster that. So they're going to come into next year feeling like they're prepared for what was this years, and they're going to find that there's a whole bunch of other features Gartner's looking for, that they don't have again and they're going to be really frustrated because they're just, they're going to be a year behind us. So our huge advantage is that we checked all the boxes this year. There's nothing to build. We checked every single box. It's a near perfect score so we can spend this year, if we can get our productivity back, we can, this year spend the entire year just creating a gap between us and everybody else increasing that gap while they're just still catching up to the 2022 one, we'll be setting a new bar for 2023. So it's not about looking at what they ask for, we already checked those boxes. It's about figuring out what they should be asking for in 2023, which I feel like I have a good idea for, as I did in 2022, and then building that out and also influencing them, showing them it early. So if we can not wait till the last minute.
So I feel like it's right now, we have a good plan. We have a good roadmap. We can totally do this. We just gotta write it down and get our team organized to get after it.
And if we are the company two years running, working for OneReach, being a part of this story will be meaningful for everybody for the rest of their lives, potentially for careers to come, you know. Everybody will want to know about, what the secret OneReach sauce was. And that's exciting I think. When we first talked about how we run engineering to people with, we don't have a lot of administration. We don't have a lot of deadlines. We don't have project management and press people on this stuff. And that seems really crazy to everybody. And they felt like we were doing things wrong now that we are the number one product everyone's like, oh man, they're doing something different. They're doing something right. Everybody else is doing something wrong. Now everybody wants to know what we're doing and how we're doing it, which is kinda cool. I think we gotta, we just gotta keep pressing on what we do. Keep doing that and also figure out, where we could improve and not get comfortable here.
[00:22:06] Daisy: Yeah, I think the other thing that's starting to happen is we're getting people. This is a different type of partnership but we're getting people like AutomationAnywhere who are coming to us and wanting to utilize our platform to subsidize theirs. So what could be seen as competition is now integrating our services into their services so that they can leapfrog their competition, utilizing our platform on top of their own offerings. So I think that we're seeing some of that already as well. It definitely puts a target on our back so it makes us become, where people were like, where did they come from? Now we're the hunted. So I think that there is a little bit of extra pressure as far as that stuff goes, but I do agree, Robb saying that we got lucky, we hit on all those categories. We didn't get lucky. Robb's great at reading the tea leaves of the future. But also I think that Gartner made the rules based on what they saw and I think they will continue to do that until the market gets busy enough that customers start leading what they want versus what the technology is leading of, what it can do.
So I think that we do have to keep an eye on both sides of that of how customers are utilizing it and trying to move the customer in the direction of not just what they want to do, but what they should be wanting to do versus what the technical capabilities are to move forward. So I think that there is a path moving forward in both of those directions and I think that Robb has it a hundred percent covered from the kind of the roadmap that you guys have already put together as far as forward thinking goes. And now getting the use cases of being very consistent and being able to offer what that world-class of what the customers are utilizing or even what they should be utilizing a lot of those conversations I know are happening with the team right now, and they're doing a fantastic job of leading the customer in the direction versus, being order takers on the solutions that were being presented. So I think both of those are going to be critical in our keeping our position moving forward.
[00:24:18] Robb: Yeah. And that brings up a really good point. For everybody out there as OneReach now is the target and everybody wants in on OneReach. We also are one of the few companies that don't make our product available to everyone online to just come and see it. And so everybody wants a piece of OneReach. They want to know what we're working on, what we're going to be doing, what we have done, how it works, they're going to be coming at you through LinkedIn through different means. Some directly, some deceptively. Start unpacking what it is that we do. And so if we want to, keep surprising them and keep frustrating our competition, we gotta keep our mouth closed and our ears open to the fact that they're going to come at us in a number of ways, whether it's through, fake interview processes or you name it. They're gonna, they're going to try to get to our folks and try to kind of unpack what we've done and what we're doing. So, Yeah, just be vigilant guys. Keep an eye out. We were a nobody company now we're the company. And at first, that could catch some of you guys off guard.
[00:25:30] Antony: Yeah, I can imagine. I can see that, how that might be again, something new that we not really used to.
[00:25:38] Robb: Yeah. All right. Did we hit everything on the list there?
[00:25:42] Antony: I guess . So let's imagine, like we want to, I don't know, like call a bucket list, I guess is definition of a bucket list is a bit vague. It's like stuff you want to do, but maybe you'll never do so let's call it hit-list. So imagine to the end of the year, what is on our hit-list?
[00:26:02] Robb: Um, yeah so, like I said, we want to define the products of the future, the features that are going to lead the path for next year 2023. And we want to get those out early so we can demonstrate them to Gartner before they create the criteria. So that's before, October of next year or this. So we got to get busy there. Even if it's just demonstrating it that will have a huge effect. We want to focus on marky customers that want to do really cool creative things. Great examples of applications of our platform are going to be critical and that's going to require a lot of customer care. So that's why we've got all these folks that have come on board from Deloitte and various other places where we're focusing really hard now on customer experience. And and it's going well so far.
Then. As I mentioned, demo's time machine, that's going to be critical, having great examples of our product in action that we've created going to be key.
Our services we need a lot of product folks around the flow builders and pods. We need our pod teams to, to gain experience. It's really tough to carve out a new space and they really need to work closely together as a team to create a consistent process. The goal should be that if a customer worked with one pod and then suddenly got switched to a different pod, that it would feel very similar to them almost going to, one McDonald's and then going to a different McDonald's and not experiencing dramatic difference in how we work. That's going to be a really important piece. I think a lot of times people just operate in their own little bubble and they do things the way they want to do them, but understanding that consistency across pods is going to be really key. Customers should easily be able to move across them and not feel like they have to change how they work or that the deliverable will be different. So that can be frustrating for people cause we're gonna ask them to do things that they may not agree with on the basis of consistency, not on the basis of what works best for that particular pod.
And I think if we do all those things we'll reach a point where our product is so well known in the world and our team is so well known in the world. We'll be able to drive more of the relationship with partners and that will allow us to rely more on partners for the delivery and allow us to rely on just the really cool projects for companies like SpaceX and Tesla and the companies in the world that we admire and want to do work for. And then for the other companies that are less impressive in what they do. We can let partners tackle that where it's just about the money.
[00:28:58] Daisy: Yeah, I think the other thing is thought leadership and education. And I just don't want to not mention mentioned that big piece of it too
[00:29:08] Robb: Yeah. We need to become a world-class training company. World-class. If we don't want to be building everybody's stuff around the world. We have to be a world class training organization so that within two weeks, somebody could come into OneReach and become proficient in conversational AI design and build. And that means doing it internally first. We have to get our own pods and new people up to speed, really fast with a formula in an as automated away as possible. So that we can then do that for customers in the world. I totally agree. Daisy world-class training needs to be at the forefront weaving across all of the things we do.
[00:29:51] Daisy: Yep. And that's not just on our tool that includes industry that includes...
[00:29:57] Robb: Design.
[00:29:58] Daisy: Yep. Everything above the line is as well as below it. I think that's going to be another huge push that we're going to have to really focus. And then recruitment is another one that we will have to be world-class at making sure that we get people that we want to work at our organization.
And again, we've already talked about this where that's not exceptionally difficult today, but what could be harder is finding the right people. So I think that again, being first in Gartner has helped in that situation, but we still have a ways to go and making sure that we can have the people that we want in the positions that we want them to build, kind of world-class across the board. We already have a lot of high bars within our organization. And so it's just continuing to grow that and continuing to make sure that we have systems in place to support that as well.
[00:30:57] Robb: Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of people in the world that want to be a part of this and have a passion for what we're doing. For those who don't which is absolutely fine. There's people that just, this isn't their thing and they're not interested in this that might think they want to come here for the money or, for convenience. It's important that, those people should chase their passion. They shouldn't choose us or any other place just for the money or, to put it on their resume like Google. And so I think trying to weed out the people that are not here for the right reasons and to make space for the people who want to be here for the right reasons It's going to be really important because that's how we're going to continue to enjoy working here and continue to enjoy working with the people that we work with and continue being a leader in this space. And yeah, a lot of people are going to come at us that just want to be a part of something special, but don't really have an interest in what we do.
[00:31:56] Antony: Alright, sounds like a plan.
[00:31:59] Robb: Yeah, go, go, go everybody.
[00:32:03] Antony: Cool. Do we have anything else we wanna cover? Because that's all on my list today.
[00:32:12] Robb: I think that's great. I don't know. Daisy, do you have anything?
[00:32:15] Daisy: No, I don't have anything else on my study either.
[00:32:18] Antony: All right. I guess then that's it everyone
[00:32:22] Daisy: Oh, on, hold Sorry. Sorry. Do we want to mention I know that Marie has done a good job of putting out the employee newsletter and I think we should probably mention that actually.
[00:32:35] Robb: Yeah, shout out to Marie for that. That was awesome. I can't wait to start iterating on that. There's so many cool things we can do with that. Other ways to find out about us and what's going on. I'm so glad and grateful she did that. And I can't wait to start making it better.
[00:32:53] Daisy: Yeah, I think it's a huge step forward for really trying to put a focus on communication internally so that everybody understands how our company is doing ongoing. It's just another piece of trying to be better at communication within our organization and Marie and team have done a fantastic job of getting that started and I think that it was very well received, so congratulations to the team for pulling that off. And and now if there's anything additional that anybody wants to know about or add, let us know, we'll continue to iterate forward on that. But I think it was. A great step forward to be able to release company communication internally. know it's something that's been requested for awhile, so it's really great to see it happening now.
[00:33:41] Antony: Yeah, I agree.
[00:33:42] Robb: Well, to everyone in Ukraine, stay safe.
[00:33:45] Daisy: Yes, definitely. Our thoughts are with everyone. We hope this ends quicker than any of us expect it to, but definitely want to make sure that everybody is, is safe and as healthy as possible.
[00:33:59] Antony: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks guys.
[00:34:02] Robb: Alright, thanks.
[00:34:03] Antony: Thanks everyone for listening. Sorry that there was a gap. We'll try our best to stay on schedule from now.
[00:34:10] Robb: Yeah.
[00:34:11] Antony: Alright, bye everyone. Have a great time and talk to you in a month or maybe even less.
[00:34:18] Daisy: Happy April, happy Easter. Everything else that's coming up this month. Thanks everyone.
[00:34:25] Antony: Yay.
[00:34:25] Robb: See you guys.
[00:34:26] Daisy: Bye.
[00:34:27] Antony: See you guys, bye.