Piyush Mehta's Thoughts on Leadership

Every CEO in a growth company has that fork in the road every day in some form or another. What I will say is you make the best decision at that point in time with the knowledge you have. Right or wrong is something that comes in the rearview mirror after the fact, but you try to make the best decisions. In our case, we are led by a CEO in me that is not technical in terms of my education. I'm an accounting finance major by profession, quote unquote, even though this is my third tech company. As such, it's important to note that I'm driven by the customer use case as a key parameter to determine what we build next. Where are the customer pain points? I'm not building and saying they will come, because I don't have that mindset or luxury to have that smart level of thinking. So I go and talk to our customers. I think that's important because as we look at where we made decisions, we've always made the customer first in our decision-making power. We've had technologists who said we should do this, but when you go and say, 'Hey, where's the customer's head at and what are their pain points?' you end up usually at least getting far more practical solutions to market. You may not solve world peace overnight, but you're definitely addressing the pain points of today.

You do need more than one. Absolutely. We have been fortunate and privileged to have some of the largest enterprise customers in the world: 28 of the Fortune 100, six of the top 10 banks, two of the top five energy companies. What happens as a result is you see a common theme when you talk to enough of them. You see a common trend that many times may be vertical-based, but most of the time it's across verticals, agnostic to the ones and zeros you're touching. It's a common problem: data sovereignty is a common problem, public or private sector.

It's a combination. We work with analysts to understand how they're seeing trends, because they have a broader base they're looking at. We then take that back to our customers and say, 'Hey, how many of you are seeing this?' or 'How many of you are bringing this up?' and we use that as a yardstick. We also work a lot with our channel partners and say, 'Hey, can you go check how many of your customers are seeing this?' Then that becomes an ingestion into our product management strategy of what we're rolling out over the next 12 months. That's a continual loop that takes place.

We have a customer technology advisory board which allows us to get really good input and insights. We leverage forums where we go and speak to customers. We host very specific roundtables with just a limited number of folks, and it's not about us but about understanding the problem statements. Then we obviously leverage the analyst community and our customers overall, but that's a byproduct of these three things taking place. These three things, along with what I said earlier, allow us to get enough insight to be able to offer educated solutions that can bring value.

We make sure that the product management team is engaged in this process. Our chief strategy officer is engaged, our product management team is engaged, our lead architects and developers are engaged in this process. We have them sometimes be silent listeners on customer calls in terms of getting that feedback, because when you hear it from the horse's mouth, it's very different than the interpretation I may give or my colleagues may give internally. Then there's the 'oh my God' moment, a bulb that clicks that says, 'Yes, now I get it.' That allows us to make sure that what we're building really does address the problem statement rather than having an interpretive view of it and then there being a disconnect.

I'm in full agreement with you. I think the swivel chair and asking a question, the conversation around a pot of coffee or around the water cooler is priceless, and you can't do that over any kind of virtual media. It's hard though, because culturally, it's amazing how human beings in two years of working from home have gotten used to that becoming their habit. To some extent I get it, because productivity hasn't been impacted as much in the short run. They're working more hours in certain cases because you wake up and sit and then you don't move. But at the same time, what you miss and what you lose is the camaraderie, the feeling of 'We are one company,' the feeling that we all work under one organizational structure. Now we're all independent in terms of working in that isolation, and you don't build friendships. When you don't build friendships, it's hard to build trust in working relationships. So when Dev and QA go head-to-head, when you have that ability to say, 'Hey, are you out of your mind? You're nuts,' and be able to say it with the other person taking it with a sense of respect that he's just saying it in a jovial way, it's different than saying it when you've never met the person. We have deployed a hybrid model now where we're saying three days a week you should be back in the office, but it's still very hard to enforce, to be honest. It's hard because people have gotten used to not commuting.

I couldn't agree with you more. I have two sons who both graduated post-pandemic. One graduated the year after the pandemic and the other right after that, and they went into jobs that were completely remote. It really messed with them because they couldn't get a read on who they were working with. They would say, 'I think this person understands me, and I think they're getting what they want from me, but they haven't made a connection.' There's no soft relationship there beyond 'I want this from you, here's my deliverable back.' I've seen them struggle with it, and they both, when they had the opportunity to go in, both went in. The truth of the matter is, there's never been a more important time for you to be in the office as a young person, because you want to hear what's going on with the way organizations are changing. These organizations are all going to change; they're all being influenced, and new tools are coming. I think I just saw a number that said something along the lines of $3.7 billion have been invested in just the last year in AI startups. All those dollars are building products that are coming next year and the year after that. The sales people haven't arrived yet; they're just being hired. But when they start to arrive, the world is going to change. These organizations are going to have tools they never imagined having, and it is going to have a direct impact on departments of people and classifications of people. You're going to want to know what the guys on the 15th floor are doing to the guys on the ninth floor. You want to be in the elevator and hope you meet a senior executive and shake their hand and say hello, versus not even knowing who they are except a picture on the website.

Yeah, everywhere we have teams, once a quarter depending on India, UK, US, Europe, I get out there. Not only do I get out there, I end up taking them out for dinner and drinks. I end up doing lunches every day with a smaller group. There's never a more valuable and productive time for me than to spend time with them, because you get to learn so much about each other. They get to learn about me as well as more about the company, answer questions they may not be willing to ask in a broader forum, and I get to learn about them as a human being. I get to know who has what kids, who has what type of parents, where the health issues are, and all the things that allow me to be personally in touch. That's the part that I think is missing today in the hybrid world, because when you build that personal connection, you're able to go above and beyond to relate and to be able to make that call and say, 'Hey buddy, how's it going? Do you need anything?' whereas you're just a formal ID as an employee.

Thank you so much for the opportunity. It was great talking to you as well, Doug. As we drive our vision of data democratization into fruition, we look forward to keeping you guys updated.