Welcome to We Built It Because We Had To. Conversations with early stage tech founders about the spark, the struggle, and the story behind building something that they had to make exist. I'm Jonathan Buckley of the Artesian Network where we've helped founders scale companies and have seen more than half of our clients ultimately reach IPO or acquisition. Today I'm joined by Nick Mehta. He was the CEO of Gainsight. He's written a book on the topic of customer success. And let's get into the story behind what they built and why they had to build it. Now, a personal note. Over the years, I first met Nick back in the 2000s when he was with Symantec. And we did some business together. I later came across Nick when he was at LiveOffice, a company in which he ultimately sold. And then, of course, I've interacted with him during his tenure, his 12-year tenure plus at Gainsight. I remember meeting Nick within the first month of him taking the job at a company called Jibaroo, which he and the other two founders of Jibaroo metamorphosized it into what is Gainsight today. Ultimately writing the textbook on customer success. I've gotten to know Nick personally and I have to say out of all the things to admire about Nick is his dedication to the human side of business, developing culture, and touch with people. With that, Nick, welcome to the podcast.
It is so awesome to be here. Thank you for the far too kind introduction. Except for the fact that you outed us as both having worked in the early 2000s because now people can guess our age and things like that. So I don't know, I work in Silicon Valley and so I meet all these founders who are like, you know, 21 years old, amazing people. And of course they have no idea what any of what we just talked about is, which I think is what's awesome about tech. It's always new.
Yes. And you get away with it, too, because you have bitching hair, basically.
Yeah, you do not look the age that you must be and, you know, it's great that way in Silicon Valley, for sure.
I'll take all the compliments I can get, so thank you. Thanks for that.
Yeah. So, listen, Gainsight has... there's so many parts of your career we could talk about and I do want to get to that career arc, but Gainsight was a particularly great case study because you literally created a category for it with the industry-leading conference, creating a category that had many followers and, you know, a whole industry. So, it wasn't just a business, but it was a philosophy of customer success. I remember you co-authored a book on it. I think it was 2016 or so. And so I followed you right through the acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2020. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about the background that led up to meeting the founders of Jibaroo and joining them to create this category.
Yeah, it's a very unique story and I was telling you in the pre-show it's a little bit like one of those only in Silicon Valley stories, so it's pretty cool to see what can happen. You know, so I had run this other SaaS company called LiveOffice as you alluded to. And it was an early SaaS company. Kind of originally was like a hosting company, moved into SaaS. So, in that business I didn't start, but I ran, kind of took over as an investor came in. And in learning about that business I was like, "Wow, like this is the first time where my customers can vote with their feet every month, every year, and leave, you know?" And I actually genuinely didn't understand that. I remember my CFO and I talking and I was like, "How come our revenue didn't go up last quarter because we brought on these new customers?" And the CFO was like, "There's this thing called churn, right?" Which is hilarious that now I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. But I saw in running LiveOffice that there was this whole new paradigm you needed, which was it wasn't just, you know, market, sell, build products, but also you had to kind of make sure the customers stay and grow. And that was just as important as the rest of it. But there was a lack of software to do it, but bigger thing was there was a lack of a discipline, right? You spent your whole career on disciplines like sales, marketing, go-to-market, etc. And there's always new stuff, but honestly there's a lot of history. There's a lot of institutional knowledge. There's a lot of people that can do it, right? And so that didn't exist. In fact, there wasn't even coalescence around this term customer success. You know, you would go to different companies, some of them called them account managers, technical account managers, service managers, service support managers, and some called them customer success. And the company that pioneered the term customer success actually is Salesforce. So, back when they got started, Marc Benioff famously observed, "Okay, we have this churn problem." Because they started very much as like a self-service credit card kind of business. And he's like, "We need these customer success managers to make sure customers get value. Make sure they're using the product. Make sure they're liking it, they're getting value so that they stay and grow." Right? That was the principle. We didn't create that. Salesforce created that. But, it hadn't really percolated into the wild yet. You know, SaaS was just starting to grow from the early days of like Salesforce and Workday and Okta and stuff to then, you know, being the tens of thousands of companies you and I know today, right?
And so, fast forward then, I sold my company LiveOffice in 2011. And I was an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Venture Partners in like 2012.
Top tier VC. Yeah, great firm.
Top tier VC. Right. And so, I was thinking about starting a company around customer success and like software around it. I didn't really have a specific idea, but just something I'd written up a whole thing about why it mattered. And then a friend of mine, Roger Lee, who's at Battery Ventures, he called me and he said, "Hey, I just met these two people and they're working on this thing, they're thinking about this thing around retention, churn, etc." And Jim Eberlin, Shreedhar Padmanabhan, and the two other guys, we basically decided to team up and launch kind of this new thing, Gainsight. They'd been exploring some other ideas in like online communities, surveys, things like that. Shreedhar was this incredible technologist, Jim was this great business person, and then the three of us basically launched this new company. And eventually Jim stepped down and then, you know, six, seven years later Shreedhar stepped down. But, like this kind of random thing where I got the call from Roger Lee when I was at Battery, I'll never forget when I was at Battery. I am literally at the 24-Hour Fitness gym in Sunnyvale in the parking lot. And I get this call from Roger and he's like, "Hey, I just met these two guys and they're thinking about retention, churn, whatever." And I was like, "Oh my god, that's exactly what I'm thinking about. That's so random." And then we basically teamed up. And then, you know, we can talk about the story of Gainsight, but really as you already summarized it well, before we get to building a software business, we needed people to think that number one, this is an important problem to be solved. You know, they should dedicate resources to it. Number two, they need to build their team to solve the problem. And how should they build their team? What's the title? What's the compensation? What's the org structure? Do they report to sales? Are they separate? And so we spent so much time kind of creating this category, not just of software, but actually this job. And so to your point, we wrote a book on customer success. Really the credit goes to Dan Steinman, one of our early executives who was a head of customer success at Marketo. So he was like an early SaaS guy. And Dan joined us as evangelist and also chief customer officer. And he had this just great perspective and he was just an incredible human. And he and I basically wrote this book on customer success, which actually sold something like 100,000 copies, which is like way more than like business books sell. And we were getting like royalty checks, which were like unfortunately the investors did not value that revenue, right? But gave us cash. Most importantly, it educated like 100,000 CSMs. Future CSMs.
Amazing. Yeah. And that's what's incredible then is because of that, people started building this profession.
Then we wrote a second book, me and Allison Pickens, our COO, on the business of customer success. And then there was a third book and there was a fourth book, literally five books that we wrote collectively on customer success. You know, four of them I was involved in. And it just shows you this thing of like what do you need to do to create a category? And then of course that was on the heels of thousands of blog posts and research papers and partnerships with BCG, our huge Pulse conference, which became the industry event on CS, thousands of people every year, you know, executive events, dinners in hundreds of cities. Yeah. So it was like one of these things where it took like in hindsight it's like, "Oh, yeah, create a category, build some software, becomes a leader." But actually was tons and tons of little things. This was the ground warfare to the extreme.
Yeah, so I think your original book literally defined the space. It was called Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue. Right. I believe it was 2016. I remember picking it up actually. I was one of the 100,000. Yeah, I always saw customer success as a close adjacency to a well-run marketing division.
Yeah. And one thing that, you know, I've worked for very large companies in the past before starting Artesian Network. And one of the challenges in serving customers is that companies traditionally are siloed. And here comes, you know, when it comes to software, you do have this churn problem. You acknowledged it. And the CS managers themselves were becoming empowered to reach across the silos to solve first and foremost the customer issues and develop loyalty. Right. And that's how I found it to be, you know, a close adjacency. Sometimes they're more directly connected, other times they're, you know, independent divisions.
We had so much, you know, cross-pollination. CMOs asking about CS, you know, where does advocacy go? How does that fit with customer success? Yeah, it's a big connectivity.
Yeah. Yeah. So, Gainsight grew to be fairly large. What was your peak employee number?
Yeah, I mean, we shared our revenue share. I think we were like when I left in August of 2025, we were about 235 million of revenue. And also proud to say extremely profitable, which means it's a durable business. And I had the incredible fortune of hiring a president, Chuck Konopaski, who I'd known forever. He was at Salesforce early, he was at Siebel, he started his own company, and he joined us as president in I guess 3 years ago now or something. And then I was so lucky that when I needed, I chose to step down really mainly for tough personal stuff. I had Chuck there and Chuck took over and he's doing an incredible job because now the job of every software company is to become an agentic company. And Chuck is amazing at that. So Gainsight will have a lot of cool stuff in the future.
Yeah, speaking about that, this trend, you know, AI seems to be taking its foothold in the enterprise first and foremost as customer interfacing technology.
Like customer support, yeah, for example. Like customer support specifically, which is different than customer success, but I'm seeing companies now push it to almost relationship building bots. And of course this annoys me immensely.
Yeah, I know. I'm not resisting the change, but bots still don't pick up on emotional cues. I know they're working on that, and increasingly there's new iterations of AI that can afford that, but boy, I can't tell you how many fights with AIs I get into.
Man, I think all of us have that experience now, right? Seriously.
Yeah. Yeah, of course it all started with Siri.
The funny thing is I very early on had to change Siri's voice from that of a female to a male. I did not feel comfortable yelling at a woman. I started seeing my bot as, you know, a personal assistant and that's it. So the psychology is so fascinating.
That's so cool. It is. It is. It is. So, in what ways do you see now the full embrace of AI technologies changing customer success specifically and then, you know, for our interest in seeing it live, you mentioned that Gainsight itself has been adopting it and becoming an agentic company. Yeah, tell us what those mechanics look like as change management is a big part of this, right?
