CRM is very good at tracking your customers. Revenue is a new category that is way bigger. It's a blue ocean. CRM, there are hundreds of companies doing CRM. Revenue, there may be like five, right? There will be more and it's way bigger. It's replacing people's work and helping them sell. So, it does the selling for you. It helps companies forecast. It helps companies make people better.
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're listening. Welcome back to AI in the future of work. I'm your host Dan Turchin, CEO of People Rain, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service. Our community is growing. If you haven't yet subscribed to the weekly newsletter, why haven't you? It's a great place to get to know some of the other listeners. The community is now over a million listeners, and each week we share some fun facts and tips that don't always make it into the main episode. You know, we're all in this together. I say that frequently. If you enjoy today's conversation or any other, it is your duty to share it with just one friend. They'll know you care about using AI to make humans better. And if someone you know shared this one with you, say thanks and pay it forward. If you leave a comment, I may share it in an upcoming episode like this one from Liam in Miami, who's the CIO of a company that sells jet fuel. Liam's favorite episode is number 314 with Mike Schuster. Great conversation. Two Sigma AI leader and legendary Google Translate pioneer on AI and finance data and the future of collaboration at work. We learn from AI thought leaders weekly. Of course, the added bonus you get one AI fun fact. Here it is for today. Atulkumar from the World Economic Forum writes about why AI is replacing some jobs faster than others. He says, 'Employees and job seekers must focus on opportunities that combine tech capabilities with human judgment and business needs. Data dependent industries are most likely to experience AI-driven job loss first, where data is easy to collect and analyze. Job elimination will happen rapidly. Jobs at risk that fit this pattern include software engineers, customer support agents, and finance analysts. Sectors which lack data or where it's difficult to collect will be impacted more slowly. Those include healthcare, construction, and education.' Of course, we will link to the full article in the show notes. My commentary, the internet obviously created far more jobs than it replaced. AI will be the same way. I did this analysis recently for human drivers. Despite the accelerating pace of self-driving cars, the industry of human passenger transportation will generate more than 100 million new jobs, that's net new jobs, in the next decade, even as it replaces some jobs for Uber, taxi, and bus drivers. As new regulations emerge, we need people to define, monitor, and enforce those laws. We need urban planners, construction workers, electricians, and designers to rearchitect systems that design how we live and commute. We need new technicians to program and manage these new fleets of vehicles and analyze and act on the data we'll generate. Every industry will be impacted by AI. And in every industry, ambitious humans on the right side of innovation will benefit from higher paying, safer, future-proof jobs. Of course, we'll continue that important conversation in future episodes. Now, shifting to this week's awesome conversation. Amit Bendov is the co-founder and CEO of Gong, the revenue intelligence platform he started in 2015. Since then, Gong has raised more than $580 million and was most recently valued at 7.4 billion. The vision for Gong came years back when Amit left his sales team at previous companies that weren't closing as many deals as they should be and deal reviews and CRM notes just weren't sufficient. He needed a better way to understand what customers are actually saying. Prior to Gong, Amit was CEO of business intelligence leader Cyisense and he held exec leadership roles at Panaya and Click Software. He received his BS in computer science from Tel Aviv University. He is well known and well-loved for leading with heart, humility, and humor. Without further ado, Amit, it really is my pleasure to welcome you to AI in the future of work. Let's get started by having you share a bit more about that illustrious background and how you got into the space.
Well, how much time do we have, Dan? This is a long story. As a teenager, I wasn't into tech at all. I didn't have a computer. I didn't like computers. I was an average student. I wanted to be in a rock band. That was the idea. Didn't quite work out. Maybe one day I'll still get that gig. But I was starting somewhat in the music industry and working a lot with a recording studio and then I saw that everything was getting computerized, audio and recording, and said that's pretty cool and that's how I signed up for computer science. Started as an engineering role but always had both sales roles and marketing roles. I was always curious and following my curiosity. The current company, Gong, I got the idea when having a really terrible quarter as a CEO of a software company here in New York City and I couldn't figure out what's going on. I'm a computer scientist and very much into data. As much as I was analyzing data, I couldn't pinpoint the problem and it dawned on me that our CRM system was telling us who bought and who didn't. So, it is built for tracking customers, but it's not telling us why are we winning or how to win. So, it's not built to help the sellers succeed. And if you're in sales, it's a pretty tough emotional roller coaster. It's very sad for people, the hit and miss is infamous, right? Half of the people don't make their numbers and then they could lose their job. They can't pay the bills. Some can make a lot of money and some are struggling. Very stressful. And it doesn't have to be that way. So it dawned on me, and this was like 2015. All right. This is the year where AlphaGo was already beating the world champion in chess or in Go. AI was starting to diagnose cancer better than doctors and this was still machine learning. It was pre-GenAI, machine learning, neural networks. And I thought, you know, you can't blame the sellers for everything that's going on and you can't expect them to collect the data. CRM was built that people are filling in forms and then a manager runs a report, you know, from 50,000 feet everything looks okay or not okay and they never really know why. So the idea was can we use AI to collect information from data that exists in conversations with customers, in emails, in meetings, in calls, and create a much better picture to both the leadership and the sellers without the effort that's required in the CRM. That was the idea that ultimately led to what is now Gong.
Amit, I would argue that you achieved your goal of becoming the head of a rock band. You're the lead singer of a rock band called Gong. And I want to know, I mentioned, you know, you lead with heart and humility and also humor. Talk about the culture that you've intentionally built at Gong and maybe, you know, what are some of the attributes of the culture?
Well, a culture you can't design. Culture is what you are, right? We could say, you know, we're humble, we're sweet talking, like whatever it is. If you're not, people just follow you. They follow your body language. They follow what you say, what you don't say. They read your body language to see what gets praised, what doesn't, right? So, you can't fake it, right? Some companies have their posters in their lobby or front desk, right? These are values. So it's pretty much the personality of the founders, right? They combined and at Gong we recognized that and when we started to grow, I think we were about 70 people, and we knew that we're going to be growing. We're growing pretty quickly and there is this magic number of like at 120 people stop knowing each other. So let's write and document our operating principles, right? What does it mean to work at Gong? We didn't put things like integrity and humility and being nice. Those are obvious to us, right? I mean they shouldn't be stated. So there's things that are unique to Gong and aren't necessarily right or wrong, right? So for example, we have one of the favorite operating principles, people, they're all on our website by the way you can read them. They're 'no sugar', right? If there's a problem we want to know about it, right? Just like sugar coating doesn't help solve problems. So just tell us what it is quickly so we can solve the problem. You could build a perfectly good company with a lot of sugar, right? So it's not right or wrong, but these are unique. And there's 'raving fans'. So if you talk about the rock bands, we want people to rave about Gong, you know. I kid you not. I was working in New York City last week and within 48 hours four customers stopped me. 'Oh, you work for Gong? I love Gong.' They didn't know who I am, right? But they just saw the brand and a logo. So raving fans, we don't want just happy customers. We want people that are actually raving. That's a culture. No sugar. And you ask about humility. We have something called 'enjoy the ride'. Now what it means is that we're dead serious about our work. We're extremely competitive, ambitious, don't get me wrong, but we don't take ourselves too seriously, right? Just keep it real. We're very flat. We also have an operating principle called 'no royalty'. So, you'll see me in our office. I often, when I don't have private calls, I sit with the SDRs in the same desk. Everybody can approach everybody. You don't need to go through three managers to talk to anyone. So I hope that everybody is very approachable. So these are just some, but it's not the only way to run a company. There are companies in the world in a different way. They're leaders in tech companies that aren't super nice, right? And they're equally successful if not more. But this is our choice. So culture is how you act.
It's working for you and like you said the team looks to you, right? They look to who's being praised. They look to your body language and just being intentional knowing that those are the signals that dictate the culture is important. I remember back to the time probably shortly after 2015 when it was Gong and Chorus and there was a variety of other kind of early entrants in this kind of sales coaching or sales note-taking space. I think you'd agree there was a sense of apprehension about using them. It maybe even seemed a little creepy. Am I going to get blamed? Is this just a management control technique? And now you would argue just the opposite. I mean, I want to be better as a seller, right? I want the coaching. I, you know, increasingly I think we're aware that there's rich context that AI can come up with. But talk me through the transition from it feeling foreign and even maybe creepy to where we are today.
Yeah, I mean it is still present. Obviously today there are a lot more that say I would not work at a place that doesn't have Gong or something like Gong, right? Those that have gotten used to it. But it's still sometimes an acquired taste for people. Once people taste it, it's very addictive and hard to go back. But we remember the vision of the company was to give visibility to the leadership like why are people successful or why are they not successful but also to the seller. So CRM was built for the leaders where if I'm a seller I need to fill in here are my opportunities, what happened, the meeting notes, I need to update my manager all the time, this doesn't help me in any way, right? So I do it so the leadership can roll up the reporting and forecasts, right? Just inherently it was designed to track customers not to help the sellers. So we've built quite a bit for the sellers themselves. So it prepares them for meetings, they don't need to take notes. Remember those yellow pads, right, that you had to write notes all the time, so you can't really focus on a conversation. That's gone, right? So we built quite a bit since the early days. So it outweighs the little discomfort that they feel initially and they do feel a bit like it feels a little weird, right? Oh, now everybody can see what I'm doing, right? Today it's not everybody. It's not the entire company. There's departments, but within your team, for example, your manager, they can know. But that's the whole idea. It saves the collaboration. It creates an open space, right? That everybody can learn from each other and there's so much value. Today, Gong will write your emails, it does your follow-ups, it prepares you for meetings, it updates your managers, you don't need to do your forecast, you don't need to update the CRM. Who would want to go back to the old ways? There is so much value and now there are hundreds of thousands of people using it. The word spreads and people see, oh, it'll be foolish not to use it.
For the one Gong that exists, there have probably been, you know, there are the carcasses of a thousand other companies that claimed the end of CRM and, you know, were out to spell the death of Salesforce that failed. What have you done differently?
This is silly. Our goal is not to end CRM. Even if you wanted to, I mean, this is a massive category, highly valuable. So, we're not looking to replace it. You know there are 200 companies trying to do that, like why would Gong be successful? So this is silly. CRM is very good at tracking your customers. Revenue is a new category that is way bigger. It's a blue ocean. CRM, there are hundreds of companies doing CRM. Revenue AI, there may be like five, right? There will be more, but it's way bigger. It's replacing people's work and helping them sell. So it does the selling for you. It helps companies forecast. It helps companies make people better. So this is a new category just like CRM did not replace ERP. SAP is still a massive business, right? Doesn't matter how old they are, right? They're not going away. CRM isn't going away. And people underestimate how much value and complexity is in a CRM. It's not easy to build and our forte is AI. And we build a system that automatically monitors what's going on and creates value for both the sellers and helps companies sell more. That's the... So yeah, anybody trying to unseat Salesforce, like good luck.
So 10 years ago, I got to imagine the vision for an AI-first product was very different. Now, nobody would dispute the value of AI and incorporating it into a solution like Gong. But I got to imagine that 10 years ago, it either took a lot of vision to think about how to use AI or, you know, maybe it wasn't as central to the product design. How has your thinking about where and how to use AI changed?
It was at the core. The core vision was an autonomous application that is situationally aware. It sees what's going on with the customer. It monitors your conversation and the data that comes from the CRM. Always come up with advice and helps you achieve your goal. So it knows your goal. Let's say if I'm a seller, my goal is like $200,000 this quarter. Okay, you're here, here are the opportunities. It'll come up with advice. So even the concept of a co-pilot, we called it like... I have sketches from like 2016 and 2017. So we foresaw it before the technology even existed. We felt that this will be bigger, AI will be bigger than SaaS, that people will pay for consumption and not 'I have it all in records'. It was so out there that we struggled to raise money. People didn't see it. We had to hide AI, not totally secretive about it, but it was like if you go to our website it'll be like a third click because we sell to non-technical users and if you spoke about AI too much going in that vision 2016, 2017, revenue management system that uses both prediction, analysis of interaction, and assistance to sellers. Before the technology, generative AI did not exist. Even the famous Google paper that started the transformer things was I think written like 2017 or around that time. So we're using machine learning, we're using neural networks, other predictive models. We're thrilled now that first the world wants AI, is excited, and the technology is much better that we can complete our vision.
So on one hand, I'd imagine the prevalence, the maturity of AI accelerates your ability to innovate, but it also makes everyone a competitor. Every cloud, you know, wants to build apps and everyone, you know, your use case is so obvious. And so on one hand, you had an unfair advantage when you had a vision for AI when it was harder to build an AI-first business. But do you see it as, is it getting harder or easier to maintain your lead given the state of AI?
Neither harder nor easier. So my assumption is that we'll always have competition and competition will always get harder. So we have to progress and innovate, right? Or we'll be dead, right? So, we're not invulnerable and we're not different than any other company. We just have to be ahead. You know, there are so many people that predicted our death, right? Oh, there's now there's like some of the companies that you named or all these companies now of the future, all these note takers, right? And CRM will do that. Now, when GPT came out, okay, everybody can do that, right? So the rumors have been somewhat exaggerated. We're doing extremely well. Gong is one of the fastest growing company at our size, like not in a category, like in technology in general. And you just have to keep innovating. So we have over 10 years built a substantial moat, right? And this is our platform that has like three layers. The revenue graph, this is the data that you collect, the data from accounts, interactions, outcomes, right? And that provides the foundation for proper AI. On top of that there are models, some we use obviously for tasks that they're good at, we use some of the public LLMs. But we also have a small language model, we have predictive models, we have machine learning for some of the other things. So we have about 40 models of our own and we use each for whatever they're good at. And then there's the application or tailored workflows both for agents and humans that are tuned to the user. So anybody can build something. It'll take an insane effort to build all this and just the revenue graph, the applications, the workflows, there's a lot of details that we've been building over 10 years and we're doubling down. So you remember people asking what's your ideal company, right? To me it's the Beatles, right? Remember my background. I always tell the team that what's great about them, obviously they're extremely successful, right? But if you listen to the music, almost like every two years it was like a new band, just the music from like '63 to like '70, totally different. And I said what I wish is that every two years we'll be a new company that will reinvent ourselves and if we stand still we're done. So we have to keep moving and pushing and we're investing in engineering pretty heavily and customers and so no, there will be more competition and we have to keep innovating but it's not harder or easier. It's always like you always have to compete.
It's a good analogy because you're the spitting image of John Lennon.
Really? Oh, that's the best thing I've heard in 10 years.
You could tell your wife that.
I won't insult her. I'm sure she's not like Yoko. I'm sure.
So much of what you do I would imagine is predicated on building trust with sellers and the data that they're willingly sharing with, storing in Gong. They need to trust you as a partner, as a vendor. We all are painfully aware that AI makes mistakes. How do you think about building trust with sellers and being good stewards of their data and not making them feel like maybe whatever Gong learns, you know, could be used to outsource them later or used to fire them? How do you think about that obligation?
