This season features conversations with key decision-makers who have shaped the evolution of today's leading technology platforms and ecosystems. We talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who have been instrumental in driving platform transformation at scale.
In this episode, Avanish and Dennis discuss:
About the Host
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Dennis Woodside
Dennis Woodside is the CEO and President of Freshworks. He joined Freshworks as President in 2022. Dennis has spent more than two decades at innovative companies in Silicon Valley. Previous roles include Chief Operating Officer of Dropbox and sales and strategy leadership roles at Google for more than 10 years, including CEO of Motorola Mobility after Google acquired the company.
Dennis serves on the board of the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula in California and previously served on the boards of the American Red Cross and ServiceNow. Dennis holds a B.S. in Industrial Relations from Cornell University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.
About Freshworks
Freshworks Inc. (NASDAQ: FRSH) provides people-first AI service software that organizations use to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences. More than 72,000 companies, including American Express, Bridgestone, Databricks, Fila, Nucor, and Sony choose Freshworks’ uncomplicated solutions to increase efficiency and loyalty. For the latest company news and customer stories, visit www.freshworks.com and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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00:00 Avanish: All right. Welcome, everybody. One more edition of The Platform Journey. Today, delighted to have a person who I think will be wowing us. He’s got a fantastic track record. This is Dennis Woodside, CEO of Freshworks. Dennis, welcome to The Platform Journey.
00:21 Dennis: Well thank you for having me, and really thrilled to be here.
00:24 Avanish: Awesome. Well, Dennis, you’ve had a pretty fantastic career across a number of different companies. A couple of places I’ve also worked at. Why don’t you just give us a bit of your personal career background, just to set context.
00:35 Dennis: Sure. So I’ve got to say this. I grew up in Philadelphia. We’re sitting here, a couple weeks before the Super Bowl, pretty excited about the Eagles making it. I went to school in Upstate New York, at Cornell. Wound up in California to go to grad school at Stanford, where I met my wife. And that was probably the most important part of that educational journey.
01:03 I’m a lawyer by training. I don’t know if you knew that. But I practiced law for a little bit, realized that I wasn’t amazing at law, but I loved what the business people were doing. And wound up joining my wife, who was at McKinsey at the time. And I thought of that as like a paid MBA.
01:26 So that’s actually how I first got exposed to tech. I started working – this is ’98, ’99 – so early internet. And we were doing work for a lot of media companies. What is the internet going to do to our business? What should we do? And a friend of mine named Shona Brown, who is now the chair of Atlassian – have you met Shona?
01:51 Avanish: I know Shona from my McKinsey days, yes.
01:53 Dennis: Oh, that’s right. You were McKinsey as well. So Shona went to Google. And I remember at the time I had two young kids. And you remember your McKinsey days. I was flying all over the country. I didn’t feel like I was seeing my family. And Shona said, well, you should check out Google. At least you won’t have to travel.
02:13 And so I went up and met her, and she introduced me to Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg. I got interviewed by Sergey Brin, who had a back problem, so he was lying down on his couch the entire time, staring at the ceiling, interviewing me. Which was quite interesting.
02:30 And I thought it was kind of, yeah, maybe this was going to work. This was way pre-IPO. And so they needed somebody to start a strategy team. And so that’s what I did. I joined Google. And the team I built was basically the catcher for any problem that didn’t neatly fall into a specific function.
02:51 So I’ll give you an example. At the time, we were starting to build our own data centers. And there was no concept of a supply chain team, or any supply chain management really. We had engineers that worked for Urs Holzle, who built out the infrastructure at Google, flying back from Asia with suitcases full of semiconductors and memory boards. It was crazy. And that’s how they were building their data center. So we figured out, okay, what’s the right way to actually create a supply chain that makes sense here, and helped him scale that.
03:24 Another project was, how do we globalize the company? And I worked on that with Sukhinder Singh, who’s now the CEO of Xero. And I remember, we did a typical MBA thing, where we said there’s like 20 countries that are going to matter. And we went and presented that to Larry Page. And just to give you a sense as to how big Larry would think, he said, “Hang on. We have searches in 196 countries. Come back with a plan to get into 196 countries, and then we can talk.”
[Laughter]
03:52 Dennis: But you look back, and all that actually happened. So that’s how I kind of got started in tech, and then wound up in sales roles in Europe. I wound up running the emerging markets group. And lots of interesting stories of Russia and Turkey and Israel, all places that we built teams out in. And that was my first sales role. And then I wound up running sales in the UK, which was the biggest market outside the US.
04:19 And then it was kind of a more – I don’t know if you’d say traditional – but then I was considered a sales exec, all of a sudden. [Laughs] It’s kind of funny how that happened. And I wound up running North and South America sales as well. So this is selling advertising to media, to marketers and agencies.
04:37 So I was doing that for a while, and then we bought a company – I had nothing to do with buying the company – called Motorola Mobility. And Larry asked me to run it. So I became the CEO of Motorola. Very long story there; I don’t know if you want to get into all that. But we wound up splitting the company and selling it, ultimately, about two and a half years later. Which led me to leave Google, finally, and go to Dropbox.
04:58 I was the COO of Dropbox, helped take that public. I was at Impossible Foods, which was a much smaller startup, for a while. And then I was introduced to Girish a couple of years ago, and really I just clicked with him. I agreed with his vision, and he was looking for someone to run the company day to day. And he was going to focus on product and engineering. And I joined about two and a half years ago and became the CEO in May.
05:23 Avanish: Fantastic. Well, again, what a fun journey, including things like Impossible Foods, which is not a tech company, but in some ways it is a tech company too, right? It’s a different kind of tech company.
05:32 Dennis: That’s exactly right, yeah.
05:33 Avanish: And in your description, I think I found one more thing in common. I also met my wife in grad school. And that was the best part of grad school.
05:43 Dennis: Exactly.
05:43 Avanish: So for whoever’s listening, go do an MBA, and you may find your spouse.
05:47 So you kind of connected the dots to Girish. And so, for those – most people know Freshworks, but just to recap, right? It’s a “founded in India, built for the world” kind of company. I think it’s been a stellar, stellar success. Somewhat of a benchmark. I’m involved with a number of VCs and others in India, and I think everybody looks to Freshworks and to Girish kind of really as a guiding light, the North Star, of how to do it.
06:16 Talk a bit about your joining the company and the evolution of the company, frankly, from being a single application, including a different name when it started, to now this journey to be a multi-product organization.
06:31 Dennis: Yeah. So Girish started Freshworks around 2012. And it doesn’t seem that long ago, but cloud was still somewhat new. Especially for smaller businesses. So you had… Salesforce had been around for a while, but there was nobody really focusing on things like a help desk for customer support in a smaller organization. Something that works right out of the box and allows me to handle my customer support load, automate responses, and so forth. So that’s what he built.
07:03 And he followed the path of a number of companies at that time, like Jira or Atlassian, like Slack, in making it super easy to buy at a departmental level and super easy to try. So try-to-buy. And it took off. The first customer was actually from Australia, so it was international from day one. And over time there were two paths that emerged that were quite interesting.
07:32 One was the product, Freshdesk, was pulled into larger and larger organizations. So very large organizations, like Carrefour in Belgium. The CIO found out about the product by trying it, just spinning up an instance, and then eventually deploying it at much greater scale. So that became pretty common for us. That’s still common to us today.
07:56 And secondly, more and more IT departments started using Freshdesk as their IT help desk. Which led Girish to build a product that’s much more specific and bespoke for the IT department, that’s ITIL compliant, eventually that offered IT operations management and IT asset management. And like Freshdesk, that product took off, and that product started getting pulled into larger and larger deployments.
08:22 So here you have this company with all the engineering, all the product development, being done in India. Which is very unique. There’s a lot of engineers in India for a lot of tech companies, but typically the core product is not being built in India. For us, it absolutely is. But the customer base is truly global.
08:42 So today we have 74,000 customers. We have about 45% of our revenue in the US, 40% in Europe, 15% rest of world. We serve companies as large as Nucor Steel that uses our IT products, and Airbus, which uses our customer support products, to a small business with 10 people. So that’s the business. We did over 700 million in revenue over the last year, and the company is doing quite well.
09:13 Avanish: Awesome. So this journey from single product to multi-product. You talked about going from the service desk, the Freshdesk product, to the IT product. You also have a sales product. Underlying that, there’s a thinking around, frankly, this notion of multi-product, meeting the needs, making it easy to buy, and so on.
09:35 You’ve been in the industry for a while. You’ve seen different kinds of companies. You’ve also been a management consultant. What are some of the signals that you would look for to say, hey, this is the right time to expand, or go find maybe another product area, another set of solutions, etc. Just talk a bit about your view of that.
09:58 Dennis: I think what I’ve seen everywhere, from Google to Dropbox to even Impossible Foods too, and Freshworks, there are signals in how customers who you don’t really think would want your product actually start buying your product. And that’s when you realize… Now they’re typically leading adopters. You can’t count on the entire market looking like them. But that’s when you realize you have something that’s kind of special and differentiated. And that’s when you kind of lean into that.
10:30 So the Carrefour example is a good one. There were lots of companies like that, that were surprisingly large. And I don’t think Girish initially thought those would be the customer. But once they became the customer, we started understanding what are their needs that are different than a smaller business. What do we need to do in the next iteration of the product to meet those needs? So I think it’s always better to be in a position where you’re getting pulled in a direction.
10:56 I know we’re going to talk about channel for a bit, but that’s another example, for us, where we’ve been pulled into a lot of sales situations by channel partners who come to us and say, “Our customers are looking for an alternative to the incumbents.” The incumbent products are older. They’re built on older tech stacks. They’re complicated, in many cases. If you look at our competitors, we compete with 600 billion in market cap, just between ServiceNow, Salesforce, Atlassian, and HubSpot.
11:29 And a number of those products really were built with huge organizations in mind. And complexity is at the heart of what those products are all about. Where our ethos, from the beginning, was to build a product that’s uncomplicated, where you can get up and running really quickly. So we realized that there is a market for that kind of a product, and that market is a lot bigger than what we initially had thought.
11:53 But I don’t think – and I haven’t seen companies – push and be really successful. It’s often the pull that gets the success rolling.
12:03 Avanish: So listen to your customer, I think, if I were to synthesize that to one line.
12:05 Dennis: Exactly.
12:05 Avanish: That’s kind of the… So with that, obviously to achieve that, there’s an element of what the team and the team composition/dynamics need to look like. What is your guidance or lessons around what does a team need to have to be able to achieve this at success, at scale, and how is that different from a single-product mindset.
12:32 Dennis: Yeah, I think it’s hard. Because when you have more than one product, those products are never going to be at the same level of maturity. And they’re never going to quite have the exact same ICP. No matter how hard you might try. Like, for us, our customer support product’s ICP is a little bit of a smaller organization than our IT product. And so the motion that you go through, and how you sell it, all that’s a little bit different.
12:58 So the people you hire… You know, people tend to think “I’m an enterprise person” or “I’m an inbound SMB or consumer person.” You need people who can flex across both. Or at least can understand the perspective of someone who’s not coming from the same background that they have.
13:19 Because for us, around half of our leads are coming in that inbound motion. Even for our accounts that are ultimately serviced by feel. So that inbound business has to continue to remain strong, and we have to be world class there. At the same time, going out and serving these large accounts, like a TaylorMade, or Bridgestone Tire, that requires a different skill set that typically is more enterprise focused.
13:47 So you have to hire for both, but you have to set expectations that each person, whatever they’re bringing, they have to respect the expertise of those who are doing something that is completely different from what they’ve known and what they do day to day.
14:06 Avanish: Yeah. And that’s a great segue into talking a bit more about ecosystems, right? Which is one of the big themes of this podcast, really. To think about this notion of a technology platform and business platform, but really also the ecosystem around that. And sometimes we say they can be two sides of the same coin. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.
14:26 Do you distinguish between a technology platform strategy and an ecosystem strategy?
14:36 Dennis: I think what we’ve been focused on very much is ensuring that when we are brought into an organization we can operate with whatever technology they currently have in place. That’s very important for us. Whether on the IT side or the customer support side. And so that means that we need to have first-class integrations with a whole host of solutions. From HRIS, like a workday type of thing, order management systems, for both small businesses and large businesses. And that’s where the ecosystem really comes into play.
15:10 And it’s absolutely differentiating to have built up thousands of partners who have built onto your product or built you into their product. It’s one of the top criteria that buyers use when they’re selecting a product.
15:26 So for us, it’s been a must-have to build all of that out, to build a marketplace out, for our products and for our customers. That’s one side of it. The other side of it – and I think of this as ecosystem too – is the supporting infrastructure that you need in services to both source new customers and service existing customers. And that’s super important for us. And that’s where we’ve really been leaning in over the last 18 months or so.
15:56 That’s another example of us kind of being pulled more and more into that world. We, up until recently, didn’t have relationships with the GSIs, for example. In this next earning cycle, we’re going to announce a relationship with a large GSI whose customers were looking for an alternative, frankly, to one of those five players that I was talking about.
16:24 And, look, they went out, and the GSI looked at every single solution out there and chose us. And they’re going to build a practice around us. That’s new for us. But that’s very exciting for us. And I think that’s what is going to be required for us to continue to grow and build into the company that we aspire to.
16:44 Avanish: Yeah. You mentioned some household names, Airbus, Bridgestone, TaylorMade. Those are large, multi-billion-dollar organizations. And frankly, to engage with them, the notion of having that ecosystem of both technology integrations, the GSIs, or other boutique SIs, that’s kind of a must-have, right?
17:03 Dennis: It’s a must-have. And you know one thing, as a newer company, the brand and what the brand stands for is evolving. And also clearly isn’t as well known as a company that’s got 10 years’ head start on us. So that again, that’s where the validation of a partner can make a huge difference. Lots of people don’t know that a third of the NFL teams are using Freshservice. A third of the major league baseball teams are using Freshservice. We have three F1 teams. And F1 teams are really sophisticated. I was at one a couple weeks ago. They’re really sophisticated organizations.
17:41 And technology is at the heart of what they do. They have to put on 20 races a year. The IT department has to set up an entire network and everything else in far-flung places every single week. The tech needs to work. And they need to have a system that automates any kind of issues that come up. So those are the kinds of sophisticated customers that are on our platform. And yet I still talk to CIOs and decision-makers who say, “I thought you were SMB,” or “I thought you were just customer support,” or “I had never heard of you.”
18:12 So the partner ecosystem is going to be really important for us. Because partners are talking to customers and prospects all the time, and they can tell these stories. They can amplify what we’re trying to do. And I think what’s been pretty cool for me is that these partners are really excited to do business with us. Because there is a gap in the market.
18:34 I mean, we talk about our core ICP as a company of up to 20,000 employees. Kind of mid-market to low enterprise. There absolutely is a market for customers that are looking for something that’s less complicated, that they can run themselves, they can configure themselves, they can get up and running faster, than a typical heavyweight solution. So that’s what we’ve been able to prove, in a direct way, and now recently through partners.
19:03 Avanish: Love it. So speaking of which, you recently hired someone who’s a good friend of mine, Laura Padilla, to be the head of your ecosystem and partner motions. Talk a bit about what that organization’s charter is going forward, what their priorities are, kind of a bit of how you see that evolving and interacting with the rest of the business.
19:27 Dennis: Yeah. So Laura’s got a big role in that we’re managing… We have nine countries that we are focused on from a direct-sales standpoint, where we have sellers on the ground. The rest of the world is with Laura.
[Laughter]
19:42 Dennis: So we’re servicing everything else through a partner going forward. And that’s a bit of a change in strategy over the last year. So one of Laura’s jobs is to build up a partner network – she’s starting at market 10 and going down the list – but build a partner network that can both source and then implement our products. And that’s hard.
20:02 Because each country has a different ecosystem, different set of partners. We have multiple products. We have to train the partners on those multiple products. Some partners are good in certain industries and not in others. I was talking to a big partner in the UK that’s very focused on education. But they’re not focused on manufacturing. So you have to build a network that supports the whole business.
20:25 And the sourcing partners often are different than the partners that are really going to help you implement. Especially when you get into larger organizations. So that’s her job. And then controlling the quality of the output. So how do we know that the partner is implementing in a way that we believe is the right way and delivering a world-class experience for the customer.
20:46 So that’s her role. That’s her remit. And I think it’s a pretty exciting place to be for her team, because that opportunity, it’s like raw clay. There’s so much that she can do with all those countries and that big of a remit. So we’re excited to have her, and I’m excited to see what she does.
21:06 Avanish: Well, again, I’ve known her for a while, and she’s a rock star. So I’m thrilled that she gets this opportunity, and I think she’ll crush it. So that’s awesome.
21:16 So, obviously, we’re in 2025. And there cannot be any conversation without bringing up AI. So you folks have been doing AI for a little while, but I think, as of the last couple of years, everybody’s making it more front and center. Talk a bit about the investment and how that’s changing your perception, both of the… You started to talk about, obviously, the customer needs, but also how does it maybe shape your ecosystem and partner strategy as you go forward?
21:48 Dennis: So Girish first launched functionality that was, I would say, early AI around machine learning and some smaller language models, in 2018. So we’ve had some AI capability in the product for a while. We’ve had what we call Freddy Self-Serve, which is a frontline agent, for a couple of years now. That automates interactions between typically consumers and companies.
22:15 An example there is PhonePe. They manage millions of interactions in India through our product and through our Freddy Self-Serve product in particular. So we’ve been investing for a while. G, he’s been following OpenAI for some time and has been pushing the teams to make sure that we’re staying ahead of things. And actually, that resulted in us being able to launch product, first into beta and then into GA, pretty rapidly.
22:42 We launched our Freddy Copilot product, which is a supporting tool for a human agent, doing things like suggesting answers based on everything it knows about a product set or everything it knows about a service set. We launched that into GA last February. Which was among the earlier launches that you saw from our peers. So at this point we have around 1,800 technical employees in the company. Nearly all of them are in India. A handful are in California. So when we decided to go all-in on AI, we were able to resource that effort quite aggressively.
23:25 And today we have three sets of products. We have an AI agent. That’s the frontline agent that really, we see deflection of 50% to 60% of first queries for many of our customers that have deployed the agents. We have Freddy Copilot, which makes the human agent more effective. We’ve seen 30% productivity improvements there. And then we have a product in beta called Freddy Insights. That’s for the manager. So that helps the manager, first of all, know what to do when they show up in the morning, but also it’s a conversational interface. They can ask any question about the business and get an answer.
24:01 Now we’re bringing those to market. They’re in about half of our sales. So half of our new deals have some AI element to them. Our upsell conversations are dominated by AI at this point. And now, okay, how do we bring that to the ecosystem? And I think there are two sides of it.
24:21 What’s the ecosystem that we’re thinking about in the future that’s going to allow our customers to get value out of AI generally? That’s one set. And then how do we create an ecosystem of partners who can help customers go on the journey? Because that’s, today, harder than just turning the AI on.
24:43 I was on a panel, or we hosted a panel, of 10 of our larger customers. And I asked them, “How many of you have fully deployed AI anywhere in your org?” And only three said yes. So I asked why, and the answer is there are a lot of internal legal questions about where’s my data going to go. There are questions about I don’t want to expose my customers to hallucinations, and how do we make sure that doesn’t happen? There are questions about data residency and all kinds of things that need to get sorted out. There’s a real change management task in a larger organization.
25:25 Then, okay, if I deploy to my agents, and I actually generate 30% productivity improvement, what do I do with it? [Laughs] So all these things are real problems that the customers face. That’s what partners can really help them with. And so that’s what we’re trying to rely more and more on partners to do. How do you help customers get value out of AI?
25:47 On the ecosystem side, who do you partner with is a question. We’ve built our model so that we can plug in any large language model, depending on the specific use case. And when we say AI, like Copilot, Copilot is actually a constellation of about 20 specific features. And each feature can, in theory, call upon a different LLM. So if we are doing something like image recognition, the best in class today is actually a Google product. We can send that query to Google.
26:24 But most of our other workload today is handled by Azure OpenAI. Because you get data residency and a bunch of security features around that. So that’s an interesting aspect to the ecosystem as well, which is how do you think about that constellation of LLM partners over time, how does that change?
26:41 And even in the last nine months, there have been massive changes in how all that works. So it’s always changing. But that’s a little bit of a sense as to how we think about it.
26:58 Avanish: Candidly, even in the last week.
[Laughter]
27:00 Dennis: That’s right.
27:00 Avanish: No, that’s great. Thank you for walking us through that and the consequences of that. Let’s switch gears a little bit. Because, in addition to being a very successful executive, you’ve also been a board member at a few different companies. So one of the goals for the podcast, for the sessions this year, really is to bring the perspective from C-level executives like yourself and your peers, but also board members, investors. People need to make these decisions or help support those decisions.
27:32 Because, as we know, these are pretty long term. They don’t happen with the flip of a switch. They are high-investment periods. And there are a whole slew of things that come with that. So help us – put your board-member hat on – and let’s talk a bit about how you engage with other board members or peers on the boards on this topic of expansion. Single product, multi-product, platform. How do we go to market with a different set of motions, with partners and so on? Help us put some color into that.
28:08 Dennis: Yeah. So I’ll give you a couple of things that we’ve started doing that I think are helpful to the team and helpful to the board. One of the things about being at this stage of a company’s development is, the velocity is very high. Quarter to quarter, the business changes really rapidly. The competitive environment is changing very rapidly. The AI environment. Everything.
28:32 So for a board member to kind of keep up to speed, the normal quarterly cadence doesn’t cut it in the same way. Board members don’t want to have eight meetings a year, but they want to engage. So what we’ve done is, we’ve created a couple of what we call working groups. Which are completely voluntary for the board members, but they get a chance to work directly with our executives on topics that matter.
28:56 So an example is, we have a go-to-market working group that meets with my head of field sales and my chief customer officer and talks through, in much greater detail than you could at the board meeting, what’s going on. We have great board members, including a former chief commercial officer of Stripe, former CMO of CrowdStrike. So people who have gone on this journey and really can provide some real perspective.
29:26 And so we’re using that forum, which is less formal, to get guidance from experienced board members on real problems that we’re facing right now. It also gives them a much deeper understanding of what our lives are like and what the challenges are that we’re facing. We have one for strategy. We have one for go-to-market. Those are the two areas that we’ve created.
29:50 I find that to be quite helpful for me, as the CEO. Because I’ll get different perspectives than I could get in a board meeting. You can also be much more candid when it’s a smaller group. Simple things like that matter. So I’ve found that that works quite well.
30:06 And then I am always going to pick up the phone if I am… We’re thinking a lot about brand. We’re thinking a lot about how do we build the brand. Johanna Flower on our board built the CrowdStrike brand. That’s a great person to call if you’ve got questions. And she’s got a great network.
30:25 So I am always trying to take advantage of the skills that those board members have outside the boardroom.
30:31 Avanish: Love it. So, again, these are complex moves. These are long-term moves. What are some of the biggest organizational challenges that people should be aware of, thinking about, prepared for?
30:46 Dennis: So I think that’s the hardest part. So if you think about our business, we had tremendous success for a long time as primarily an inbound business. And now a lot of our growth is coming from that field team. So the people who were kind of driving the entire business a couple years ago, they’re now driving a part of the business. And it feels different to them.
31:12 I mean, you kind of hear, “Well, we’re not important anymore.” People go to that, so you have to constantly reinforce the fact that the entire business is important. There is not a part of the business that’s not important. But different parts of the business require different levels of investment at different times, and the growth profile of these businesses is going to be different.
31:31 We have the same thing between products on the engineering and product side. Our CX set of products, because the customer support market is different and our position is different, it’s growing at a different rate than our EX product, which is lighting the world on fire. And so it’s very important for me to be clear that both are critical. Both can grow at very high rates over time. That growth comes in waves. And it’s our job to kind of find the next wave if we’re at a little bit of a lull and drive acceleration.
32:05 So that’s really hard when you’re multi-product, multi-channel, you’re trying to globalize. For us, a unique aspect is, of our 4,500 employees, 3,500 are in India. So there’s a time gap between people, and, add to that, our employee base is quite young. The average age of our employees in India is probably around 28 years old.
32:30 So there are some great things in there. It’s amazing to have that kind of core of engineering talent and sales talent in India. It’s amazing to have the energy of that kind of a workforce. But, at the same time, that presents challenges that you have to manage through.
32:46 Avanish: Yeah. And I think it’s and, not or. Right?
32:50 Dennis: Exactly.
32:50 Avanish: You’re adding more to it. You’re not taking something away. But how do you keep the ship sailing? Totally makes sense.
32:58 You’re an ex McKinsey guy. There cannot be a conversation like this without asking about key success factors or success metrics. How do you measure success of a motion like this? How do you, for yourself, for your board, for your team, how do you think about that?
33:15 Dennis: I think there’s… So I would say… You know, I could give you the whole list of all the standard stuff that we look at to make sure that we understand what’s the business doing. I find that that’s all really important to take a look at. But I think it’s really also important to just spend a lot of time with the customers. And to listen to see if they’re saying the same things about us as we believe about us.
33:39 Because it’s very easy to get disconnected. So we say we have uncomplicated solutions, fast time to value, that our total cost of ownership is lower than the competition, and that we’re an enterprise-grade solution. And, by and large, when I talk to customers, that’s what you hear back. Which is great.
33:59 But you do hear, well, yes, and here’s three things you could do better. Right? Here’s three things, if you really, really want to be enterprise grade, I need you to do. If you really, really want to build a powerful ecosystem, here’s three products you don’t integrate with, and you need to. Or the integration you have isn’t where it needs to be.
34:15 So I think the metrics are super important, but to some degree they’re trailing indicators. And the qualitative feedback that you get… So I spent the first three weeks of this year in India, London, and Paris. And I spoke with about 30 customers and partners. And to me, I came back super energized. Because I heard a lot of positivity, a lot of optimism, about the market, about our solutions, about where we’re headed.
34:43 I also wrote my team a list of, here’s three things we need to do better, from every interaction I had. So I think that that qualitative side has to be matched with all the typical metrics that you’re driving the business by in order to make good decisions. And that’s why I spend so much time with customers.
35:00 Avanish: That’s awesome. Again, that customer-centricity, I think, trumps everything else.
35:05 Dennis: Absolutely.
35:05 Avanish: Dennis, as we wrap up, you’ve already had a lot of, I think, great guidance and some great insights. Any final thoughts of guidance or traps to avoid, perhaps, to fellow executives and board members and others?
35:23 Dennis: I think that… Look, all these software businesses get big. They can get complicated if you don’t watch it. I think being really simple is really critical. And I had the chance to meet with one of our F1 customers when I was in London. And this is a company with 2,000 people. So you’re talking to a marketing person, you’re talking to a sales engineer, you’re talking to the head of strategy for like race strategy.
35:55 And you ask, like, I asked the head of IT, who is our customer, “What’s really your job?” How do you define the job in the context of an F1 racing organization? And he said, “My job is to make the car go faster.” [Laughs] And I was like, really? How is that? And he’s like, “Well look, before we bought your product, our mobile interaction sucked. And I had some of our mechanics having to call with an IT problem,” which is not the…you know, there’s on real mobile interaction.
36:32 And he’s like, “By deploying you, I have a much better mobile app, they’re able to solve their problems themselves, on their app. And that makes the car go faster.” And then you would meet the head of sales engineering, and they say the same thing.
36:51 So I think simplicity really matters. And I said this to our team. Our job is to make the car go faster. How do you do that? If you don’t do anything, just go talk to a customer. That’s all you need to do. My football coach used to say, “When in doubt, hit someone.” [Laughs] And I think that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying to the team, “When in doubt, go talk to a customer.”
37:17 Avanish: Yep. Yep. On that note, what a great note to wrap on. When in doubt, hit someone. Dennis Woodside, thank you for joining us on this leg of The Platform Journey. Absolutely fantastic conversation.
37:32 Dennis: Thanks, Avanish. Really appreciate it.