This week’s guest is Jason Wojahn, co-founder and CEO of Thirdera, a global services consultancy specializing in ServiceNow digital transformation, workflow automation, cloud advisory, and adoption
Avanish and Jason discuss:
And much more!
Guest: Jason Wojahn
Jason Wojahn has more than 25 years of business, technology, and investment experience across start-ups, private and public companies. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Thirdera, a global services consultancy specializing in ServiceNow digital transformation, workflow automation, cloud advisory, and adoption. Thirdera brings together the power of the ServiceNow platform and its limitless potential across the world of work. Our architects, developers, consultants, designers, and project managers help our customers transform, get more from ServiceNow, and unlock hidden potential in their businesses and technology.
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 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: Fantastic. All right, everybody, welcome to one more edition of The Platform Journey. Today will be another fantastic conversation based on what I know about our guest, Jason Wojahn. Jason is the CEO of Thirdera—I’ll ask him to describe what Thirdera is, and why the name [is what it is]. I’ve known Jason for quite some time, and I think he’s one of the most insightful people in thinking about ecosystems and how to really make the most of it. Jason, welcome to The Platform Journey.
Jason: Avanish, thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.
Avanish: Fantastic. Let’s start with your background. You’ve got an amazing background, and you’ve done a number of pretty cool things. Maybe just give a bit of your personal background and overview, and then talk about Thirdera.
Jason: Yeah, no problem. I live in Colorado. Out of college, I started at IBM, and spent about 11 years working there in a variety of different roles. I worked primarily in business transformation and enterprise outsourcing sorts of roles in the 2009, 2010 time frame.
I was introduced to a product called ServiceNow, and I joined a really small company that not many people remember these days called Navigis, which was one of the first ServiceNow practices in the ecosystem. That company was acquired by a little bit larger company called Cloud Sherpas. I was the president of the ServiceNow business unit at Cloud Sherpas. A few years after that, Cloud Sherpas was acquired by Accenture, where I was ultimately the senior managing director responsible for the Accenture ServiceNow business.
I then took some time away and supported a little company called Lemongrass, which was an SAP-to-AWS value prop for clients, kind of working in different spaces there.
Ultimately, I always knew I was going to come back to the ServiceNow ecosystem. It’s a wonderful place to learn, challenge yourself, and really help clients. There’s so much opportunity in that space, I had to help them succeed in their next business endeavors and get the most value. So in 2021, we founded a company called Thirdera that was positioned to address a gap we saw in the market. We saw a massive value gap for customers, and some diminishment in getting their return on investment for those investments in cloud computing, and some of those next-generation technologies. We knew that we had a way of making some improvements there. We thought we had a good approach to that area, helping clients establish more value. We raised some capital and have been deploying that capital through not only M&A-based investments, but also organic investments.
Over the last 26 months, we’ve built Thirdera from a company of no resources in early 2021 to now a company of just under a thousand resources across 12 countries. We’ve acquired six companies that we have fully harmonized or integrated, and probably hired more people than we acquired in alignment to our customer journey and our growth. It’s really just been a delight to be a part of.
I like to say that I get to help customers achieve more value on their investments. We help them get future-ready in the way that they work, and we really transform the way their businesses operate. It’s just been a delight.
Avanish: That is awesome. I think, for those of you listening, what you’re hearing here is someone who really understands the business of leveraging, building an ecosystem, and how to scale. In three years, 26 months, zero to a thousand people in one of the most active platforms out there, ServiceNow.
Before we go forward—we chatted recently and you walked me through the reason it's called Thirdera: First Era, Second Era. Tell us your view of the evolution, particularly of ServiceNow (which all of us love as both a company and a platform). I think you have something really insightful there.
Jason: Yeah, thanks for that. Thirdera is a company name that I came up with. It’s really meant to be evocative not only of ServiceNow’s journey over the last 10-15 years, but also my own, and actually, many of the people that have joined Thirdera. The First Era for ServiceNow is 2003 to 2010, roughly. This was the emergence of ServiceNow as a platform, as well the specialization of that platform in the IT service management space—those applications, those workflows. That era culminated with ServiceNow as the market leader in IT on cloud.
During that same point in time, you had the emergence of small ecosystem partners that many people today haven’t heard of: Fruition Partners, Navigis, etc. Those were largely boutique service management consultancies that could see the potential with the ServiceNow platform, and could attract and develop skills in an ecosystem that wouldn’t have a standard certification until 2010. These were the early adopters. That’s First Era.
Then Second Era kind of picks up from 2010 to very late 2019, maybe early 2020. That was really the time of scale. This is when ServiceNow brought in Frank Slootman, and it was about getting IPO-ready. If you wanted to have a very valuable IPO, you needed to have apexed your market capitalization. You needed to have the champions, or premiere leagues of partners, to reinforce that the platform was in fact durable at that scale. You see the pivot from First Era to Second Era occurring.
That’s when our company, Navigis, got acquired by Cloud Sherpas. Others in the ecosystem saw VC or PE backing to keep doing what they were doing, but it was really a time of scale. You see the emergence of GSIs kind of around the same time as well. ServiceNow pivoted from an ITSM on-cloud platform company to a multiproduct on-cloud platform company. That was the larger market, and the better market capitalization point. You see ServiceNow making this pivot, and you see the ecosystem partners pivoting as well, to something that’s more scalable, and broader commercially. The Second Era was the era of scale.
Then, towards the end of 2019 and into 2020—and really carrying forward to date—you see ServiceNow making a pivot again to digital transformation across the enterprise. IDC says that’s a $6.2-6.8 trillion market opportunity over the next several years. It’s a vast, almost inconceivable opportunity. It’s taking the ways businesses work and digitizing and transforming them across their entire enterprise. ServiceNow is extraordinarily well-suited for that based on its ability to not only aggregate data but structure workflow. There are many other things that it does from experience too—intelligent platforms, and so on and so forth.
Partners, as well, needed to inflect in that era, but you didn’t really see the inflection occurring. I think that was the piece that we caught on to and thought, that’s an area that we can really be the catalyst for. We can be that additional partner that steps in and says, “We see this inflection occurring, we see customers, and we need you to attract more value.” We see them challenged across their businesses with the way they transform, the way they work, and we can come in and fit that unique need specifically in the space.
There were really two types of partners before we were founded. There were GSI-based partners, which are great. They’re tremendously scaled. They have industry skills and make tremendous investments. But they do sometimes miss the focus because they advocate for many different solutions out there.
Avanish: Right.
Jason: Particularly ServiceNow requires a great deal of focus to get the most out of the platform.
Then there were regional partners. Regional partners are great—I used to be one. [Laughs] They’re very focused at what they do, very purely aligned to ServiceNow. But you have to be quite a sizable company and have considerable investments to be able to be comprehensive across the platform.
There was really nothing in the middle. You could see, in other ecosystems that were a bit older, this notion of a global pure-play partner being really important, not only to the ecosystem—because it sparks innovation in the large enterprise and paves the way to the extra-large enterprise and commercial—but really as an alternative way of working. As we saw that, we said, “That’s the market. We’re going to go help ServiceNow inflect to their third era from a partner perspective. We’re going to go challenge ourselves to be that Third Era partner.” And so that’s where the name comes from.
Avanish: Love it. It’s so evocative of what the market is going through. You’ve already started opening the door to this, but let’s talk about recommitting to ServiceNow for effectively the third time, in different iterations. Obviously, I’ve been there and seen that evolution. Still, sometimes you step back and it’s mind-blowing. What are some of the elements of the ServiceNow platform, the platform plus the products, that make ServiceNow the platform of choice for someone like you, and particularly for clients? There’s something there that I think you’ve been very astute about identifying. Let’s talk about the platform strategy and business strategy that create this opportunity.
Jason: Yeah. I apologize if this is a little rough, but this is something that I’m codifying my thoughts on in real-time, as we talked about it a couple days ago. As I start to aggregate these very disparate points of view that I’m hearing—from any analyst I can talk to and the customers that I’m hearing—I see something very clearly. That is this notion of platform convergence. There’s plenty being written about it right now; that’s not anything I came up with.
I believe that increasingly across the enterprise, post- this rapid expansion of cloud and cloud platforms over the last five to ten years, you’re going to start seeing this convergence, because customers need to get more value out of their spends, incrementally. They have real business challenges, be it risk, or being future-ready. There are all these different types of challenges that they need to address to remain competitive, to lead their industries, and to play offense and defense at the same time. The only way to get more is to aggregate, and this convergence is really the aggregation of those platforms. Now, which platforms win is certainly up for debate, but there’s one thing I’ve seen loud and clear that isn’t up for much debate: where there are the most contextual data models underneath platforms, those platforms are going to be best-placed to win.
We mentioned earlier the First Era. That closed with ServiceNow being the market leader in the IT service management space. They still are today. The world’s configuration management databases, its service data models—they really do sit within ServiceNow. You have this massive pool of structured data that you can use to help customers and businesses get more value, end-to-end, out of that enterprise.
I believe that, as we continue to see this platform convergence over the next three to five years, you’re going to see that data model become extraordinarily important. It is important today because it is a record, and the way you’re going to manage risk and, comprehensively across your organization, costs and all of those things that are quite operational. But as you’re starting to get future ready for AI, ML, RP, etc., that structured, contextual data becomes even more important. If you want the most leverage out of the future-ready state, you’re going to need a really great contextual data model.
What I see emerging, is this doubling-down of focus on a few platforms—ServiceNow being one. Then what you’ll see is greater and greater contextualization of the data. The data will continue to expand. Particularly as companies start expanding across the enterprise, and you start getting end-to-end contextual data models, you’ll be able to use all the future types of process forensics and those types of things to help you map your enterprise and gain even more efficiency.
My view is, we’ve got to follow the data model over the next several years. We’ve got to ruggedize that data model. We need to make it ever more contextual so the customers can get the most value out of it. I think ServiceNow is going to be a winner in this process, because not only is it a great future-ready platform that is moving quickly and is a modern solution to be working with—one that’s being highly invested in, and new features and functions are kind of pouring into it every year—but underneath all of that, it’s also got this layer of data that has the ability to be the central nervous system of a business. If you bring those things together, it’s extraordinarily powerful.
Avanish: Yeah. I really feel like you hit the nail on the head when we were chatting in prep for this, Jason. Obviously, those of us who have been following that story know that the First Era, IT service management, was back-office. But the evolution of digital transformation, as you were describing—both the size and the imperative of that—changes it from being something that just the CIO or somebody in IT is tracking, to being part of the core business. It’s no longer just managing IT resources, dependencies, and services. It’s how you treat your customer, how you address services issues, and how you address employee experience, which ServiceNow has expanded into. I think you’re on to something very powerful there. Adding on top of the data that you described, [it’s about] having the workflow capabilities, right? At the end of the day, technology helps us do things and do them better.
I do think that, like you said, there’ll be convergence. I’m a big advocate, obviously, for platform strategies—it’s what this whole podcast is about. There’ll be a few, and there’ll be maybe some front-office ones, maybe some productivity ones. But I do feel like ServiceNow is one that can glue a lot of them together, which I think is exactly where you’re headed.
Jason: Yeah. If you think about it, another factor that’s going to be increasingly important is speed.
Avanish: Yeah.
Jason: Technology is continuing to compound the capabilities. As you look at emerging capabilities in AI, they’re going to move so much faster than anything before it. Again, that contextual data model is the thing that’s going to make that most present and most relevant in your business. If you want to be extraordinarily future-ready, spend the time to get your contextual data model right across your business, and then use the most obvious technologies to solve your gaps. I think, again, ServiceNow ends up being a pretty significant option in that space. I’m picking it as a winner myself, which is why we’re here in the Thirdera, right?
Avanish: Exactly. I think that makes a lot of sense. One thing I always find very powerful is that you have a great way of sharing customer examples and customer stories of that kind of transformation. Could you share one or two examples of things that blow your mind, or instances where you thought, this is a pretty transformative example of actual customers using these scaled platforms?
Jason: Yeah, I can give you a few examples. One of the important things about digital transformation across the enterprise is that you really start pushing into industry, right? Something that I’ve been really pleased to see is that a lot of the disciplines and mentalities that IT has needed to become reasonably good at over the last couple decades… Those patterns of work, and working in digital ways, in that engineering mindset, really do apply to many different industries and many different aspects of business.
What continues to impress me, particularly in the way we’re supporting our customers, is how hungry customers are for some of these capabilities. The ability to adapt, move, and continually evolve in alignment to their business is a really important one. The speed, the contextual data model, all of these things coming together—customers don’t necessarily think about it at that level. They’re just thinking, I need something that can help me address X, Y, or Z. In the ServiceNow space, particularly by industry, we’re increasingly seeing customers making big bets on ServiceNow across their B2B and B2C relationships. That’s not something I would have seen as a possibility in the First Era. It’s really delighted me to see ServiceNow becoming increasingly more relevant there, which really allows us to test our hypotheses around these data models and execution.
Avanish: Right, right.
Jason: We’ve found that [hypothesis] to be extraordinarily true. We’ll sit down with a client and we will have just re-platformed the way they work with their clients entirely, end to end. They’ll be saying, “Okay, that’s done. Now we need to get some sort of blockchain moved into this, because we see this other segment here.” It’s wonderful when your customers talk about emergent technologies that aren’t necessarily textbook for use in business, and are finally presented the opportunity to explore that because we solved their basic needs. I think of it as kind of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We’ve gotten them out of the safety space. They feel safe, and now they can get up to higher-order needs.
Avanish: Right.
Jason: It’s just a wonderful place for us to be. What we get to do a lot of is help customers solve problems they couldn’t solve on their own, and in that process, make the problems look easier than the customer thought they would be, and more sustainable than they thought they would be, and just less of a lift.
The other interesting thing is that we’re still in early days on what experience really is. I mean, a lot of people talk experience, and certainly platforms come with experience layers and engines that allow you to articulate an experience. But where we’ve been the last 10-15 years, has just been about pretty portals. Pretty portals just don’t get it done—experiences need to be intuitive. If you can create an intuitive experience, you reduce friction in an employee’s day. You allow them to focus on the important thing, which is not how they articulate their work in a system, but how they get that work done and fulfill that need for a client.
Those types of things lower the bar for training. It may sound a little cliché, but, Amazon? Not a beautiful website by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s terribly intuitive. The world never got trained on it, but the world felt comfortable to put their address and their PCI information in there. It almost sounds crazy when you say it at that level, but that’s what the world’s done, because Amazon presents one of the best, most friction-free places to get what you need, traverse all this complexity, and get that thing to your door.
That mentality is really important to make sure that we’re bringing the business. Because while it’s important for the consumer to get that, it’s just as important, if not more, for the operator to get that. You want your employees focusing on their highest-value thing, which is servicing their clients—not trying to figure out how to update this form and still do this function in the system. That’s another area we’re putting a lot of time and effort into, and I think it’s really paying some results.
Customers are really making that mindset change, that it’s not about a pretty portal; it’s more about intuitiveness. That comes in a lot of different forms, but there are some very predictable ways to get there.
Avanish: I love that. And I think, as I hear you talking about it, in addition to experience, the other term that’s often used or misused is innovation. Right?
Jason: Yeah.
Avanish: Here, it does start to feel like we can truly innovate, not just automate things that have been done a certain way (and often not super well). That’s one of the fallacies of automation, right? If you automate a bad process, you still have a bad process. Here, I think the chance to, as you’re describing it, think through that hierarchy of needs, and be more creative and open-minded about how to innovate, is something quite powerful. I think that you are just at the beginning of that type of experience.
Jason: Yeah. I think we spend probably more time than we should thinking about value. What’s interesting about value is that it’s very fungible. I don’t get to define value; the customer gets to define value, and they define value differently than I might. And oh, by the way, that’s a very fungible definition for them, because maybe some sort of macroeconomic event occurred and the values suddenly changed. I think of value as a very fungible, ever-evolving state.
Innovation is the exact same thing. If you sit down with a client and talk to them about innovation, you have to follow their definition of innovation, not yours, right? That’s why we’ve flipped the script. Say you have the smart person show up in a room and hear all the innovative things, but you never contextualize that for the client. Maybe it’s a divide that’s too far for them to cross. You’ve got to flip innovation. You’ve got to flip value to being something that’s customer-centric. Understand that it’s something that’s going to be very, again, fungible and change over time. The only way to really help a client in those spaces is to be as contextual with them as possible. There are things that they’ve done that worked or didn’t work, or things that they’re doing that are working and not working, or things they would like to achieve, and things that are going to be problematic or challenging. Keeping on that flywheel is incredibly important. That doesn’t sound like something you just do, right? [Laughs] You don’t do innovation; you don’t do value. You accrete value; you accrete innovation. That’s the mindset we try to bring to our clients.
Avanish: Love that. So, we’ve talked about all the goodness. We’ve talked about the platform evolution, and how you see the future, and the Third Era of experiences, innovation, etc. But it’s not all easy—we all know that. What were some of the biggest roadblocks or challenges? What were two or three things that you’d go back and say, “Man, in those days, I felt like this might not be a hill that we could climb”?
Jason: Avanish, would you like me to answer that from the standpoint of building out Thirdera or helping our customer?
Avanish: I would say, building out Thirdera. Building what’s now become a very successful, very scaled business. But for you, as a CEO and a founder, what are some of those challenges?
Jason: Well, first and foremost, we’re in a rapidly emerging ecosystem. In fact, you can see evidence of this through ServiceNow and the RiseUp initiative. There’s an acknowledgement that there are just not enough trained and experienced professionals in the ecosystem across the world.
Saying you’re going to start a company in an ecosystem that’s under-sourced in resources starts with its own implicit challenges. We’ve done well there because we really stayed grounded on the most important thing, which is that we’re a people business. That means we need to be good to each other in the process. We need to make sure that we’re doing things to establish and maintain trust. I once heard Bill McDermott say—and he probably got it from somebody else—that you gain trust in drops and you lose it in buckets. You’ve got to be thoughtful and mindful about that exchange.
There were also some things we needed to build to ensure that we would be able to affect customer value in the most significant way. We actually have the largest training organization in the world for ServiceNow. Now, why did we go build a training organization? We’re not a training company, but we do an awful lot of it. We are going to do a third of ServiceNow’s training this year. We do hundreds of classes for customers and hundreds of classes for our own internal team. The importance of what we call Thirdera University is this: it represents a foundational pillar so that we can help meet our team where they’re at. Maybe they’re just learning how to spell ServiceNow correctly. We need to get them on that journey, bring them forward, and get them productive. Or maybe they’re very senior, and they’re ready to go to more of those architect-level skills. We need to go meet them there and help them incubate their way to that destination as well.
It’s not just technical skills that make great consultants. There are other aspects that we have to bring together. You end up having to major in a lot of other things when you build a company, in an effort to achieve the thing you want. One example of that is Thirdera University, which we had to build from ground one. But it’s a key enabler for our team and a core factor for our success.
In addition, we had six acquisitions. Harmonizing those businesses together in a meaningful way that was respectful of the things that they had done so well, but presented opportunities for us to do things at even bigger scale, was not an easy thing to do. Fortunately, we’ve got a very experienced team that has the scars on their back to show things that work well and things that work less well. I think we’ve done a good job doing more of the things that work well and less of the things that work less well.
We still have those moments that you’d expect across any business, where things don’t go quite the way we had planned. But largely, I think we’ve done a good job in an ecosystem where I’ve heard you could be upwards of a hundred thousand resources short globally right now. We’ve been carving out our space and focusing on our premise of being the best enabler of value for ServiceNow for our clients. We’re building a company we all want to get up every day and work for. Those are the things we’re off to.
Avanish: That’s awesome. Jason, as expected, this has been a fantastic chat. Very insightful, and very passionate. That’s something I’ve always admired about you—you really wear your passion on your sleeves.
Congratulations on the success. Any final thoughts, just to wrap up?
Jason: Yeah. [Laughs] I’m not sure what to say to that, short of, I appreciate the opportunity today to chat with you about this. This was fun for me too, and it’s a great way for us to reconnect. I’ve been a fan of your career over the years, as you know, and it’s been nice to see you coming full circle here and focusing on some higher-order things that have less to do with working at an individual company, and more to do with spreading your experience in others. I think that’s a really powerful thing.
As I look to Thirdera, that’s something that I hope we’re known for in time, as creating something that was durable beyond, and creating its own ripples in our ecosystems.
Avanish: Thank you. I really and truly appreciate that. With that, Jason Wojahn of Thirdera, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Jason: Thanks, Avanish. I appreciate it. Bye-bye.