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 must be brought into the platform journey.
In this episode, Avanish and Mike discuss:
Host: Avanish Sahai
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 Mike Rich
Mike Rich is a highly accomplished technology sales professional with a career spanning more than 30 years.
During his tenure as President, Americas at ServiceNow from 2011–2023, Mike played a pivotal role in the company's success. Under his leadership, the AMS region experienced unprecedented revenue growth, catapulting from $500 million to $6 billion+.
Mike focused on initiatives like vertical industries that enabled customer-facing teams to partner closely with customers. During his time, the company's overall growth skyrocketed from $80 million to $8 billion. Throughout his career, Mike has kept customer satisfaction as the north star, ensuring that every business decision aligns with the goal of providing unparalleled value to clients and career advancement for employees.
Before ServiceNow, Mike held leadership roles at enterprise software companies Borland, Rational Software, and Kana.
Mike's leadership philosophy revolves around building diverse teams that prioritize achieving desired mutual outcomes. His passion is fostering environments where collaboration, mutual respect, and teamwork are paramount.
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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Avanish: All right. Welcome, everybody. One more edition of The Platform Journey. And today another fantastic and super experienced guest, Mike Rich, chief revenue officer of Zscaler. Mike, welcome to The Platform Journey.
Mike: Avanish, hey! My pleasure. Great to be here. Great to see you. I miss the days when we worked together. We did a lot of good work.
Avanish: Thank you. It’s been a while. Well, we’re going to talk a bit about that. So, Mike, you’ve had an extraordinary career. So maybe just start with a bit of your personal professional history, and then let’s also talk a bit about Zscaler. Zscaler is an amazing success story, but I’m not sure everybody knows Zscaler, so I’d love to get your take on Zscaler. So let’s talk a bit about your journey, and then we’ll talk a bit about Zscaler.
Mike: Well, let’s see. I’ve lived in the Bay Area, so kind of the center of the Silicone Valley, since my high school days. I came out here, middle school, and saw what was going on. I lived in Los Altos, and a lot of the folks that I went to school with ended up being the kids, the founders, of a lot of the companies that are brand names today, like Adobe, for one.
And just being in the middle of it all, I was like, okay, there’s something special going on here. You couldn’t really put your finger on it. Because when you’re inside of it, it’s different than looking outside-in. When you’re in the middle of it, sometimes you don’t realize what’s happening.
Avanish: Yeah, you just live it. Yeah, you’re living it.
Mike: You just live it. And having most of the parents of your friends in high school, they work for Intel or Apple or HP. Everybody was just centered around tech, for sure. So once I graduated, I moved back, and I ended up working for… The first job I got, I got it by looking at the want ads in the paper…
Avanish: As we did [Laughs]
Mike: That’s what you did back then, right? And I ended up at the largest… It was called the Apple Superstore, for lack of a better name, this was a retail shop that sold both Apple and DOS and Windows machines. I don’t know if people even know what DOS is anymore.
Half the store was Apple. Half the store was Windows and DOS. And then we had all the software on the other side of the store. And it was all in packages that were basically – they looked like DVDs – or not even DVDs. They looked like VHS cassettes. That’s the boxes they came in. And you’d sell people a computer, and then you’d sell them their Intuit TurboTax and their word processing and their Excel. And people always would make a choice – do I go with DOS? Do I go with Apple?
So I ended up getting a pretty broad spectrum of the market. And the folks that I ended up working with there all ventured off either to Oracle or to some startups. And I ended up going direct to Apple. But when I joined Apple after that, it was a phase when they were escorting people out of the office with boxes. This was like ‘92, ‘93. It was a very different time. Steve Jobs hadn’t come back yet.
But I went from there to my first software startup in 1994 called PureSoftware. And the founder – it was a little 50-person startup – and the founder was a guy by the name of Reed Hastings. That was his first startup. He went from that to founding Netflix. And this was all very normal. Because a lot of the other folks went on to Netscape and these other big brand-name companies today. Well, some are gone. They’ve been digested.
But I got a great exposure to tech in general at a very early age, and it got me super excited. And I knew software was a place I wanted to be. Sort of, where software and hardware, and I felt like software – there was so much innovation going on in productivity. That’s where I wanted to be. So that’s kind of where I started my journey.
Avanish: That’s awesome. What a great context for subsequently such a successful career. Let’s talk a bit about Zscaler. So you’ve been there…
Mike: A little bit over a year. Yeah, about a year and three months.
Avanish: So what brought you to Zscaler? What does the company do? And frankly, it is a platform, so talk a bit about how you define the Zscaler platform.
Mike: I was attracted to Zscaler for a number of reasons. One, having worked in the space and productivity, and user experience being so important, you need security. And at the end of the day, you’re trying to get your job done. And you’re trying to get it done securely. You don’t want to be a risk for the company.
And the experience that I had over the years, working with VPNs – the fact that I even knew what a VPN was… You know, we all knew what VPNs were, coming from all the different vendors out there – meant you had some sort of issue trying to connect to the VPN. And whether or not you were working from home or on the road, and in sales we’re always on the road, right?
But sometimes we’re at home. Sometimes we’re in the office. And you want to be able to work the same way and be just as productive no matter where you are. And Zscaler attracted me because they have this beautiful story that’s modern architected with cloud apps in mind first, and allowing people to work wherever they are. That’s what really got me excited about it. And the journey of working with another company.
As you know, you and I worked together at ServiceNow, and that was a platform. The platform story is super important. So you’ve got companies that have more point products, and you’ve got companies that are more of a platform. When you have the platform, it’s a journey. It’s a life cycle with the customer. And you end up developing really strong relationships, lasting relationships.
And you can actually see people’s careers blossom because of the decisions they made. And that was the type of environment that I wanted to be a part of. And I thought Zscaler was the most innovative in the space, so that’s how I ended up joining.
Avanish: I love that, connecting the platform story to the customer engagement and the success of the team. I mean, that is something that, those of use who’ve experienced that, we know it’s kind of magical. And the fact that you’re on another one of those journeys is pretty awesome.
So you started alluding to this, but I think it would be helpful to get into it a little bit more. What are the signals that you look for as a sales leader, to say hey, this is the time to think about a platform strategy? I mean, at the end of the day, customers start buying, like you said, point products. Maybe product one, product two. What do you look for, and what does, as a CRO, where does your mind go to say, hey, this is the right context, this is the right model, this is how I sit with my peers in the product organization, this is the right thing to do? What do you look for?
Mike: Well, number one, you always have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What’s it like to be a customer. And your job as a CISO or CIO or network leader, anybody in IT, the COO, that’s responsible for delivering results and delivering a great service to your own customers, how easily can you do that?
And when you have the laborious job of trying to tie together a bunch of point solutions from different companies versus having a single platform that you can work on where you don’t have to worry about… When upgrades happen, everything still works together, that’s a key indicator.
So, again, going back to the customer experience. What’s it like to deliver a great service to your company with a bunch of point products? What kind of pain points does that cause them? Does that inhibit them from delivering a great service to their employees and to their customers? At the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to do. Help our customers deliver a great experience to their employees, so they can get their job done, so they can deliver a great experience to their customers, and do that securely.
And essentially everything, for us, the way we think about it, it’s based on secure communications to the internet, to applications, to IOT devices, allowing workloads to speak to each other securely, and doing that all under what we call, the term we really pioneered, is the Zero Trust configuration.
And, Avanish, the only way I can really explain it that would make sense in my mind is, you have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What’s it like to try and tie all these things together? Are you spending more time making things work, or are you spending more time strategizing on the future of what else can we do now that we’re not inhibited by having to spend a lot of our time making all the individual products work together?
Avanish: Yeah. Mike, look, it’s a simple concept, right? But for those of us who have lived in this industry for so long, we know how hard that is. So kudos for thinking that way and obviously putting the customer at the center of it. Because we all know, and we’ve lived in the Valley long enough, that there are times where the company’s focus is just the product, product, product. And they sometimes, unfortunately, forget the customer, right?
Mike: Yeah. Product and innovation is key. You have to have that. You have to have that singular product. I mean, at the end of the day, features and functions are really important. But getting everything to work together is extremely important. Because it creates just a better experience.
And you have to manage that internally too. Avanish, I know you know this, but getting your company to behave that way as well, getting all the product managers to work together, getting all the cross-functional teams to work together, to think that way, is very important.
And when you get to think about what that user experience is like, versus your individual product… Because everybody’s got product managers. All the product managers have to talk to each other. And they have to realize, okay, we’re interconnected, and let’s always put, at the center of the circle, at the nucleus, the customer experience. You end up with a much stronger mindset.
Avanish: I feel like you’re reading my questions. [Laughter] That actually is one of the key things, right? And again, you’ve already touched on it, but I think it’s helpful to go a little bit deeper. Again, it’s not just product. It’s product, it’s marketing, it’s sales, it’s customer success, it’s the partnership team. When you come up with this approach, this strategy, everybody’s got to work in sync.
So what are some of those attributes? You talked about the mindset. What are the attributes that you think make for a successful platform strategy and execution of that? Versus, you could say, you know, it’s not quite the right time, or we don’t quite have the right team. What do you look for to say, yeah, I can bet on this horse?
Mike: You mean in terms of when I’m looking at other companies that I’m working with?
Avanish: Or even internally.
Mike: Internally, again, it goes back to the customer. I hate to sound like a broken record.
Avanish: No, but it’s key.
Mike: But it’s super important. Because there’s always going to be that tendency… When you think about – Engineering loves to build things that they know how to build. And they love to innovate. And that’s key. That’s really important that they do that. But you’ve got to get Engineering, Product, Sales, and that alignment with the customer, in sync, so that their priorities match the priorities of what’s best for your customers.
And that requires great cross-functional alignment. Cross-functional alignment, it’s not talked about a lot, but it’s so important. You can’t be operating in silos. You have to have a team. Think about the team being you and all your peers across the organization. That includes services and support. Everybody who interacts with building the product, designing the product, servicing the customer, and even marketing as well – the messaging that you get out to the field – has to be in alignment with that experience.
So once you get people operating in different silos, you can get out of sync pretty quickly. And if you’re out of sync internally, imagine what it’s like for a customer that’s trying to work with you.
Avanish: Engage with you. That’s right.
Mike: And there’s that concept of “better together.” And you’ve always got to think about, okay, how are we better together, versus operating separately? That is true for the platform and the product, and that’s true for people as well. Inside of the company. And you’ve got to always be testing that alignment. Always be pushing the boundaries. Are we really aligned? And do you have enough alignment to say, okay, now we can go to the customer with an offering that we know we can deliver on. And deliver not just the product works, but the product works, and the outcomes get realized by the customer.
Avanish: Yeah. And again, it’s a simple concept, but not the easiest thing to execute, right? And as the customer adds another product from yourself or from potentially a partner, do they have confidence that these things are actually going to work together, rather than… And now I’ve got to spend tons of time and energy making them sync up. So, totally.
Mike: I’m glad you brought that up. Because when you think about, what’s it like through the lens of the customer, they have a whole set of technologies. And everything is moving so fast with the public cloud, and what partners are doing. You’ve got to have that knowledge of what it’s like to be that customer, that person, that persona. It’s not just customer, one person. It’s what’s it like to be the CIO? What’s it like to be the CISO? What’s it’s like to be the network services team? You’ve got to be in touch with their challenges.
Because half the time what we have to do really well is help our customers work well together as a team. Inside their own company. And we can help them by providing examples of where it’s worked really well. If people are organized, and it’s very, very siloed, you’ve actually got to break down the silos within the customer to make a platform work. And that’s another challenge of a platform. Because you end up touching so many people within an organization.
Avanish: You know, Mike, I’ve done a bunch of these. That might be the first time that that particular issue has been surfaced so clearly. Which is, it’s not just you working together within your organization to deliver the platform. But often you’re the orchestrator of the customer’s alignment. Because they’ve got their own set of challenges and technologies and people and incentives and priorities and so on. And how do you make them come together? I love it. That’s awesome.
Mike: Yeah. It’s a transformational sell. When it’s a transformational sell, it means you’re probably getting a bit part of the company you’re selling to. You have to get them aligned.
Avanish: Yeah. And this is the kind of stuff that they’re not going to buy different versions of what Zscaler does for each location, each group, right? You want a consistency to make it all come together.
Mike: Exactly.
Avanish: So we talked about the platform. We talked about the alignment. One of the things that I know you’re very supportive of and passionate about, and to me it’s the other side of the coin, which is when you have a platform, you often will also build an ecosystem around it. And the ecosystem will have technology partners, will have resellers, will have distributors, will have regional SIs, will have global SIs.
I think you’ve brought that mindset, if I can say so, to Zscaler. Tell me a bit about how you think about the platform strategy and the ecosystem strategy. Do you see them tightly coupled? And then talk a bit about how you’ve brought that into the Zscaler vision and strategy.
Mike: Thanks for bringing that up. Because that is super important to our strategy. And again, it all goes back to delivering the best service possible to our customers. And the best service possible includes partners.
And we have this concept of one team. And the one team, it’s a three-legged stool. I think you’re probably familiar with that, right? You’ve got the customer as one leg, the vendor – the technology provider – is one leg, and the partner is the other leg. And if any one of those legs falls down, the stool falls down.
But that really is the one team concept. And partners are so mission critical because they know the customer well. Especially when you start to focus on industries. The partner has insights that you don’t have and you can never have. Over time, you’re going to build strong relationships direct with your customers. But you can’t be there all the time. And you want to make sure you have somebody that’s there all the time.
So for us, extremely important. We have partners involved in everything that we’re doing when we’re servicing our customers so that they can help get the product and implement it, help get outcomes realized, and be a part of that long-term strategy for delivering the best possible service. They’re tightly aligned, and they have a history with that customer, so they have insights that we’ll never have. And that’s important.
There’s this element of doing the transaction on partner paper. That’s big. And the space in cyber. But that’s only one small piece of the puzzle. The actual value delivery component of that is mission critical. That means whatever we’re selling them, we make sure it gets utilized and outcomes get realized. And the partner has a very important role to play in that, and that partnership has to be super, super strong.
Avanish: Oh, that is obviously music to my ears. Because that’s what I’ve lived and loved for a long time. You brought in my buddy, Anthony Torsiello, to lead your ecosystem strategy and ecosystem execution. What are some of the priorities for that part of the business? How do they align with where Zscaler is headed at a pretty rapid growth clip?
Mike: Partners are such a critical part. But when you’re building out these relationships with partners, there’s got to be an element of mutual success. Meaning, what are the key drivers for the partner? And where can you align on those? Where can you co-innovate with them?
So your relationship with this partner, maybe it’s overused, but the whole one plus one equals five equation, it’s true. You have to have that. You have to figure out what that is. And the earlier that you can get involved with partners in the selling cycle, usually the better. Where I see things break down is where you’re doing all the interaction with the customer, and then at the last minute a partner comes in. It ends up being more of a tackle relationship versus earlier on…
Avanish: Kind of throw it over the fence, and…
Mike: Exactly. Exactly. When you can really work closely with a partner at the early phase of sales, to build out a vision with the customer, and to have roles to play for each of you, you end up… The customer’s going to view that as, okay, they truly are better together. Sometimes they don’t even… They can interchange between who they call. They’re going to call the vendor, they’re going to call the partner, and they’re going to get a similar result.
Having tech support and sort of detailed product issues, I don’t expect partners to really drive a whole lot of that. Support side, they can do level 1, level 2. When it comes to detailed product issues and how we prioritize features and functionality, that’s always going to be the company. But they could be a huge part of even collecting that information and helping us drive prioritization on the roadmap. Because they’re so embedded in the customer and know where they need to go.
So getting involved early and understanding the drivers for the customer, what’s important to them for their growth goals as a company and where they’re trying to become more relevant, that’s important. And you can help each other succeed. And when you help each other succeed, you build trust. And when you have trust, beautiful things happen.
Avanish: Love it. And trust. Trust tied up with security, it has to be, right? The customers are looking to their set of vendors or platform providers and their partners to help them be as secure as possible. So that kind of comes with the game.
So, Mike, one thing that – we’re in 2025. You cannot have a conversation like this without talking about AI. And you guys have done a lot of investment yourselves. I’m sure you’re seeing your customers asking you to help them think it through. Talk a bit about the AI strategy for Zscaler, and how does that impact both the platform we talked about and the ecosystem, from how you bring success and security to your clients.
Mike: So we always think of ourselves, we’ve got to be the best Customer Zero. So when we start to think about how we leverage gen AI internally, and how we do that safely, making sure we have the right level of data protection, we don’t have key IP information going out – or any information that we don’t want going out, we have that protection in place. That’s mission critical.
So all these use cases that we have that we use internally with gen AI, leveraging how we safely use gen AI, we translate that into what we’re delivering to customers. And I think that’s the biggest issue today. Every executive wants to know, how can you help them leverage gen AI at scale in a safe manner. So that’s our story, really. It’s how well we help you leverage gen AI internally, safely, and it all revolves around our platform’s inline crowd protection.
So we see everything going over the wire. So we already know what data should come in and come out. And developing those policies with our customers is mission critical. We’re in a unique spot in the industry to be able to see all that information flow and have all that telemetry. And how to leverage that to get more predictive too, on how we solve these problems.
Avanish: Yeah. And you mentioned a word there that I think, again, triggered something. So you mentioned policy. And I think one of the challenges right now, my sense is a lot of customers, large or small, it doesn’t matter size or industry, are trying to figure out their policy. I mean, they have this framing of, hey, it’s got to be secure. But the exact policy, without getting in the way of productivity and helping their employees do more and do better and so on. So is that another area where your ecosystem partners start to collaborate and help perhaps design those policy frameworks by industry, by regulatory environment, etc.? And one more touch point beyond the implementation.
Mike: Yeah. The notion of “better together” also applies to the combined knowledge of your customer base and being able to share best practices in a secure way. The bad guys are getting much more sophisticated. AI is becoming much more sophisticated, and how the bad actors leverage AI. So continually updating those policies. Utilizing AI capabilities internally, as well as leveraging what the partner knows and what they’re seeing, and incorporating that into a company’s policies in a proactive manner is really, really important.
So the GSIs especially, Avanish, have a key role to play in this. They all have their different AI skillsets. Everybody’s trying to mature as fast as they possibly can. How do you develop the most impactful LLMs safely and at scale and get the right information in there, and then course correct as fast as you possibly can, is really important. And how you do that securely.
So we look at the typical names. Your Accentures, your Deloittes, your Wise, all your ISIs out there, Cognizant, HCL, Wipro. These are all very, very important partners for us on this mission. And we’re tightly aligned in how we co-innovate with them as well. We lean in with them in areas that they’ve got more expertise to make sure we can take advantage of that as quickly as possible and incorporate that into our “better together” story with how we’re co-delivering with them. You have to stay tight. That’s the key.
Avanish: Well, and I think there’s one other factor. Look, you and I have been in this business for a long time. I have to say, I have never seen something scale and become top-of-mind so quickly – at the board level, the C-level, the whole organization – as what’s happened over the last two years with AI. I mean, everybody is trying to figure it out.
And let’s be honest – not everybody has all the answers yet. So if you don’t figure it out together, you’re not going to be able to figure it out. So, like you said, customers, partners, yourselves. It’s an evolution.
Mike: It’s an evolution. Constant learning. And you have to stay one step ahead. And you can’t stay one step ahead unless you’re sharing the knowledge across all the learnings, all the telemetry that’s coming in. And you do that in a very, very safe way. I’m very proud of the partnerships that we’ve developed. But we have a long way to go, too, to make sure we stay one step, two steps ahead of what’s going on out there.
Avanish: Love it.
Mike: You can’t do it on your own. You want to be able to, but you can’t.
[Laughter]
Avanish: Those days are over. We do know companies that operate that way, but let’s not go down that rathole.
Mike: We do. Yes.
[Laughter]
Avanish: So, Mike, again, you’ve been part of this transformation at amazing, amazing companies, like ServiceNow, like Zscaler. Let’s step back a little bit. And these are companies that have obviously pulled it off and done very, very well in this transition from being a single product to multiproduct to platform to build a very, very rich and productive ecosystem, and deliver just phenomenal customer outcomes, and frankly financial outcomes.
What are the challenges? When you sit back and say here’s three, four, five things that could have gone wrong, or that we knew we had to work around, what are some of those challenges? What are some of the things that you would say, hey, if I had to do it again, these are things I would maybe do differently or think differently about?
Mike: Listen, I think I’ve done everything wrong at least once. [Laughs] And you do learn a lot more from when you do things wrong. And I would go back to what we talked about earlier, around cross-collaboration, cross-functional alignment. Don’t fall in love with your idea. Fall in love with the outcome that you want to achieve.
And get input and ideas from – you’re going to get great ideas from all over your company, up and down. It doesn’t have to be just executives. And it shouldn’t be, actually. You’re going to get probably better ideas from the folks that are closest to the customers on the ground floor. Because they’re having those direct interactions. So never lose that connection, and create an environment where people are very open and honest. And bring their ideas to the table.
And it’s the same thing with partners. Comparing notes on how we’re doing against our goals and the outcomes that we want to achieve. It’s not just, hey, did we meet a financial metric? It’s like, okay, did we meet a financial metric that’s sustainable and we can grow from? Because we know we’re making customers ultimately successful. And we know when we’re making them successful when their outcomes get realized.
And so I just think, in my past, I’ve seen instances where we’ve focused more on delivering financial outcomes. And we didn’t look at, long term, is that sustainable? Is it the right thing for the customer? You always have to make sure it’s the right thing for the customer. Because in the long run, that’ll always lead to more growth and more trust and delivering better services.
So that’s the thing that I wish, all throughout my career, I’d learned even earlier. You’ve got to put the outcomes delivered for customers at the center and constantly fight that battle internally to make sure everybody’s aligned to that.
Avanish: Love it. And, by the way, that quote, “do not fall in love with the ideas, fall in love with the outcomes,” that is, again, very succinct but very profound. So thank you for sharing that.
You talked a bit about outcomes. So, relatively quickly, how about the internal metrics. How do you know if things are working? How do you know where you need some course correction? Just talk a bit about what you look for, again particularly around the ecosystem, on how things are working.
Mike: So I talked a little bit about these mutual success plans that you build out with your partners. And in that mutual success plan, you’ve got to have some KPIs or measurements that you’re using to check along the way. Are we hitting all these milestones that we need to hit? And usually with partners, everybody wants to kind of leverage each other for contacts or relationships.
Avanish: Leads. [Laughs]
Mike: Leads. And it’s got to be a mutual thing, where there’s give and get. You’ve got to be willing to give, sometimes, to get. You’ve got to be willing to kind of put that trust out there and give people the opportunity to pay it back.
And in my experience, you always get paid back when you develop the right relationships, and you have that as a metric. Don’t use that as the only way to keep score. But keep each other honest around the expectations of what we’re going to do, what you’re going to do, what we’re going to do together. And have those regular cycles of meetings.
The concept of QBRs can’t just be what you do internally. You should be doing these quarterly reviews with your key partners. How are we doing against hitting these key metrics together? And it can’t just be pipeline. Pipeline is the outcome of having a great relationship where you’re actually delivering that one plus one equals five value to customers. The pipeline will take care of itself if you’re doing that.
And that’s what customers are looking for. They’re like, don’t let me fail. Don’t let me fail. Make me successful. Take your combined knowledge of what’s going on out there in the real world and apply that to me. And that’s when you have the best relationships.
Avanish: Yeah. Again, you talked about the concept of one team. And showing up as one team to the customer is very critical. But I think, underlying that, you implied something – I even called it out – which I think is super critical, which is the relationship with the partners is also a long-term relationship. It shouldn’t be transactional. It shouldn’t be just once and done, or hey, you didn’t deliver any pipeline last quarter; therefore, you’re out. It’s like, how can we do this together? Which I think is, again, very simple but profound.
Mike: Yeah. You’ve got to play the long game. There’s going to be ins and outs, ups and downs. We’re all just people, at the end of the day, trying to help each other and deliver a beautiful experience, right? And there’s going to be challenges.
And really the test of a great partnership – and you know this – it’s not how you behave when things are going great. It’s how you behave with each other when things…the proverbial stuff hits the fan. That’s how you test a great partnership. That’s right.
Avanish: Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. Mike, fantastic. Again, no surprise, fantastic insights. Any final words… I always ask this question because I think it’s a good test of a conversation like this, which is, you’re sitting on a plane next to a peer of yours at another company who’s thinking about this potential journey. They want to invest in a platform. They may build an ecosystem. And usually what I hear is, we tried it once. It took six months and nothing worked out, so we kind of gave up. What advice would you give to someone like that? What would you say?
You talked about alignment. We talked about the long-term play. Any other advice that you would say is important for someone to be thinking about if they are embarking on this kind of journey?
Mike: Well, I think strategy. People kind of get consumed with weekly, monthly, quarterly goals. Those are very important. You have to have those in place. But you’ve got to have a long-term goal in place and then a strategy to get there. And if your strategy to get there means you need to engage with partners at scale – because you can’t be everywhere all at once, and you want to be able to grow as fast as possible, and you want to be able to provide the best possible service – it becomes pretty apparent that you need to engage with partners.
And then look at what type of partners you want to engage with. Because each partner has different things that they focus on. Sometimes their messaging seems very similar, but when you get under the covers, they have unique skillsets and strengths by industry. So you can kind of start to look by industry, what’s most important, who do we want to work with, who has best alignment with delivering outcomes for this set of customers that we know we’re best suited to go after?
Especially if you’re in a startup. And you really want to get with them. Because they’re looking for a unique differentiator too. It’s competitive out there. And so always look at what’s in it for them. Understand what’s in it for them, what’s in it for you, and then align on those two things together. And you can fast-track a relationship with partners.
Avanish: Love it. What a terrific set of points to end on. Mike, delighted to have you on this leg of The Platform Journey. Thank you so, so much.
Mike: It was my absolute pleasure. Anytime, Avanish. Thank you for having me. It was my honor.