In this episode of 5G Talent Talk, Carrie Charles welcomes Ruby Koleski, CEO of Joyous, to discuss her inspiring professional career and the innovative work of Joyous. Ruby shares her journey from growing up in South Africa with dreams of becoming a comedian, to becoming a software engineer. After excelling in engineering and gaining international experience, Ruby joined Joyous, a company founded by brothers Mike and Phil Carden, aimed at revolutionizing employee feedback.
Ruby details how Joyous evolved from targeting the HR market to focusing on operational improvements for industries like telecommunications. She explains how Joyous enables companies to gather feedback not only from employees but also from contractors and customers. This real-time feedback accelerates problem-solving, increases operational efficiency, and improves customer satisfaction. Ruby also dives into the use of AI in Joyous’ platform, which analyzes feedback to deliver actionable insights at scale. She highlights the challenges of developing accurate AI tools and how Joyous overcame those to help companies cut costs, enhance productivity, and streamline product rollouts. Ruby greatly emphasizes the importance of psychological safety, collaboration, and innovation in driving workplace improvement.
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Let's Get Digital is your gateway to the innovators and ideas transforming the digital infrastructure industry. From wireless telecom to fiber networks and data centers, this podcast explores all things digital infrastructure—diving into the trends, technologies, and people shaping the future of connectivity.
Hosted by Broadstaff CEO Carrie Charles, each episode features candid conversations with top industry leaders, uncovering the intersection of technology, talent, and transformation. Discover the innovations, leadership strategies, and company cultures driving success in this rapidly evolving landscape.
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Previously known as 5G Talent Talk with Carrie Charles, the ‘Let’s Get Digital’ podcast is sponsored by Broadstaff in partnership with RCR Wireless News. Broadstaff is a full-service national staffing firm specializing in all areas of digital infrastructure. Since 1982, RCR Wireless News has been the leading media source for unparalleled news coverage, in-depth insights, and comprehensive analysis of the wireless and mobile technology industry.
5G Talent Talk with Carrie Charles (00:00)
Hi, I'm your host, Carrie Charles, 5G Talent Talk. You are here and it's gonna be an awesome show today. I have with me Ruby Koleski. She is the CEO of Joyous and we're gonna hear all about Joyous. And first of all, Ruby, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. I love the name of your company. We're gonna hear about Joyous a little bit more in a few minutes, but first.
I want to hear about you. How did you, you know, tell me about your, you know, your professional journey, how you got to where you are today. And you have something really cool in your background. So I'm excited to tell our audience about it. All right. Yeah. So, so I am actually originally from South Africa, although I live in New Zealand today, which is the furtherest into the future of all the countries in the world. So
I'm currently talking to you from the future. And I grew up in a single parent family actually in South Africa. So, and why that's relevant is it was probably quite a challenging upbringing and we faced a bit of hardship as a family early on. And in that kind of environment, I think I always had quite a big imagination and I became quite scrappy. So.
Initially, until my early 20s, my goal was actually to become a comedian, which I think is... love that. What you're talking about. So yes, I studied drama actually after school and I then did some musical theatre. And I basically got told off constantly for goofing off and making people laugh. Got pretty upset with all the lecturers and coaches and just decided one day that I was fed up. And at that point, of course, I had to...
change my tack and figure out what else to do. And so of course, what do do if you have a big imagination and you're very scrappy and you no longer want to be a comedian? So I did the next logical thing and I became a software engineer. That makes perfect sense. It's the obvious alternative career path. So look, I actually I traveled quite a bit, spent a few years in the United Kingdom, which is quite a common thing for a South African to do growing up. I worked at various dot coms.
At that time, you're talking the early 2000s, not to date myself. And then I went back home to South Africa, got a degree in engineering, finished top of my class, which I'm quite proud of, and then very quickly immigrated to New Zealand, where the rest of my family had already immigrated to in the 10 years prior. And I ended up working as the seventh engineer for a tech company who then went on to become a global market leader worldwide in cinema software, actually.
And then after that I started my own feedback company. I worked for another CX feedback company And Joyous of course as a feedback company as well. And at some point I came across these two brothers Mike and Phil Carden who started Joyous so the founders of Joyous And I just thought it was a really interesting Concept they wanted to make life better for people at work And they were basically trying to disrupt at that time the HR market
And the idea was that anonymous feedback is broken and that if the message that you're sending to the world to employees Is that like the only time you can tell us what you really think is when we protect your identity? That fundamentally you're sending a message that giving your feedback in this company is unsafe So they had this idea to go to open feedback instead of anonymous to actually increase psychological safety and that rather than it being this horrific long-form survey
Instead, wouldn't it be better if it was just a weekly chat that was initiated between a person and their direct leader about a topic that would be important to that individual and just helping the leader to remember to have those conversations and then putting analytics behind that with insights about actual actions the company can take rather than measuring things basically for board reporting. And I really love that because of course when I was an engineer,
I'd had a couple of challenging experiences. I'd become a mother during that time. And there were a lot of things in my own work experience where I would have loved to have had a tool like Joyous. And so, yeah, I stalked the brothers. It took me two months. It took me two months to land a coffee with Phil. And Phil, incidentally, is an ex-SVP from Alcatel Lucent, Nokia. So at one point he had 35,000 people reporting to him globally and managed services. And so he's one side of...
the Joyous finding relationships. You can see how this eventually is going to relate to your audience. And the other brother, Mike, has successfully sold an HR tech startup to Cornerstone on Demand being Sonar Sonar 6. And so between the two of them as brothers, they'd always wanted to work together, hadn't. Came together and started Joyous, which is a different way to do employee feedback. And I got that coffee and two coffees later, I got a job.
I had the first day of my job, I remember going to lunch with Phil and I said to him, so what is the job? And he said, I wouldn't want to limit you by defining what it is that you do. It was just like such a novel way to start a job. I went, so now I'm the CEO. So that went well. And I guess the rest is history. So what, let's talk a little bit more about Joyous and
I guess a couple of things. Number one, I'd love to know where the name came from. And also you do serve telecom. So who is it that you serve and go into a little bit more about the platform, please. So Mike Carden knew that he wanted to start a company called Joyous before he knew what the company would do.
And his idea was, wouldn't it be great one day if we had a really remarkable company with a massive sign, Joyous, on the rooftops and wouldn't that be somewhere that you would want to work? And so he set out an intention probably a year before the company was formed. And so I thought that was really great. I actually met one of his friends who said, you know, he told her about that years before Joyous started over dinner one night. So that was really cool, I thought.
And what a wonderful intention. You compare it to some of the, I'm gonna throw shade at some of the other companies in the world, but you look at some of the other company names like Workday. That doesn't inspire you. No it doesn't. Sorry. We'll give you friends. yeah, Joyous is an enterprise, enterprise SaaS feedback company, but it's interesting because we're no longer in HR. And so we've done what most
most good startups do and we've pivoted. And really what we are now is we're designed specifically for operational improvement. So we double the speed of execution by involving all key stakeholders in co-designing meaningful change for organizations. So more specifically, I guess, to draw a line on how we do that as we bring not just employees and frontline employees, but we also now can bring
consumers and customers and contractors closer to the decision making process and give particularly service providers like Telco, Cable and Carriers an ability to have all their most important conversations in one place. And it's really interesting. And so what we do with Joyous is we basically pick a problem, pick a challenge.
Ideally something that the company is already actively working on and trying to solve for. And we help accelerate that by starting solution focused one-on-one chats. So one-on-one chats at scale with thousands of people at once that goes from starting the conversation to a very detailed action plan in five days with zero effort. So that's what we do. my goodness. So.
I was going to ask you more about what makes you different, but it sounds like you are very different than anything that's out there, right? Yeah, and it's interesting. It started with one of the largest telcos in the world, who unfortunately I'm not allowed to name, but they're in North America. And the funny thing about Phil, who came from Alcatel-Lucent, is he actually just met an executive at this other company one day, which wasn't Alcatel-Lucent, to be clear.
forgot to mention that we did HR feedback. And so the executive who he met at the time was across field operations. So, you know, all the technicians out across North America installing the fiber infrastructure and fiber to the home. And they saw what we could do and immediately thought, well, this will be a meaningful way for me to go out to these, you know, 35,000 strong workforce and
actually find out what's getting in the way of them getting the job done right the first time, reducing repeat visits and all these really like quite improving the tools that they use and helping to you know get job specs improved and all sorts of really quite tangible practical things. And it was really interesting watching that unfold while over here in Australia, New Zealand we were down this sort of like HR path and at some point we kind of looked at them and we were like
that that's actually how you make life better for people at work. don't have you don't like I think it is important to have HR conversations and talk about people at a really personal level but fundamentally you can take a piece of frustration out of someone's job and make it easier for actually for them to physically get their job done. That's how you make life better for people at work and it turns out that not only does that make life better for people at work it actually creates a more efficient business that is also
a much nicer experience as a customer to be a part of. So now 80 % of our customer base at this stage is actually service providers across the telco cable carrier market. we do have some of the world's largest operators, not just across North America, but also Europe and especially New Zealand as customers. So let's go deeper into how you help companies operate more efficiently. Can you give more details on that?
Yeah, so we used to speed up, like I said, the rollout of new infrastructure. And we kind of went viral in that large company. So it's gone on to like we're part of, you know, the customer experience. We're part of sales. We're right across the business helping roll out new digital tools. And a nice way to think of us is we're like a rapid response tool. So when you're rolling out a new initiative, a product or a service,
You can very quickly go out to the workforce for example and find out what's What what are the problems with that? What are the issues and very quickly fine-tune it so I can remember one of the very early success stories for us was actually when this company was rolling out a new modem and Historically that company would take something between five to seven months to iron out all the issues when they release
a new product like that to the market and what they did within two weeks of releasing it is they ran a really large, we call it a campaign, out to the front line about what the issues were with that modem and they fine-tuned it within 45 days, which historically they'd never been able to achieve before. And that was as a result of the actions they identified from the workforce directly, which our tool very quickly prioritized for them.
that customer estimated at the end of year one, conservatively, that they saw about $67.5 million, in their case, USD in cost savings, just from taking action from the things that the frontline could then meaningfully tell them were getting in the way of them doing the work. It's pretty Isn't that interesting communication? Yeah. It's all about communication, right? Efficient communication. You use AI, it's part of your technology.
What is your unique approach to AI? So getting to something that was quite substantial in the AI space was quite a big challenge. And it's really for us in the last couple of years become like the most significant part of our offer is like, can you do like, why do you use AI in the world today? I guess if you think about it, usually you'd use technology in general because your ability to do something manually is outstripped by scale.
And so we've really used AI to help make scaled feedback possible. And one of the interesting things that I set out to help us achieve, because I also look after product and data science on top of being the CEO, and that's where I originated, was I wanted to find a way to highlight the actionable phrases, the actionable things people were saying in their feedback. So...
Not to sound cavalier, but I don't really want to talk about people's feelings. I want to know what it is we can do to fix the problem. And so if you take that rather like, I guess, provocative statement, then like, and you understand that we're trying to apply this to novel feedback. In other words, we're not like on some generic topic where there's these well-trained models out there on public information that we can just plug into, and it's going to know what the themes are. We wanted this to work.
on any topic, no matter how custom it was to the industry, no matter how specific the problem was, no matter how much in-house sort of jargon and lingo was being used, we wanted you to be able to point us at a workforce and a problem and have our AI just work. And so that's something that's quite unique for us and it's been extremely painful. But three years down the track, like you can use our AI without any training.
and it just works. And that's pretty phenomenal for quite a few reasons. And I don't know that some of the other things we do are unique, but our approach altogether, I think, stands out from others because we've got a flex six or seven key. Like we've had to define some AI principles because there's just so much use of AI throughout our entire product now. We use it in all sorts of ways.
But the main thing for us is that we really want to build AI that's fit for purpose. So we're not one of those companies that's adding AI for the sake of it. We're actually working with our customers, identifying what the problems are that humans have to solve for that they can't feasibly solve for at scale. And then we're applying AI to like take the effort away from solving each of those problems. Because it's like, you've got to go from like, knowing what questions to ask.
to asking those questions, to having a meaningful conversation, to understanding what's actionable about that, to analyzing that, then to go here's the action plan for that. And we've got AI in play for each of those. And I think probably the biggest differentiator now with our AI versus any of the other big companies you look at, for example, Qualtrics or Perceptyx, and what differentiates us is there's no mystery.
If look at our dashboard, can see exactly how our AI works. You'll hear a lot of other companies using AI saying, our trusted AI. You can trust our AI because we tell you that you can trust it. Well, with our AI, you can trust it because if you look at our dashboards, you can see the actionable phrases that are associated with actionable themes that have suggested action items and you can literally click a button and go straight to the audience chats that like...
related to that action in such a way that it's extremely, I guess, verifiable or ratifiable, totally transparent. And I think that that's just something that's really unique about how we are approaching this. You you mentioned the word painful, and I know that anytime that we innovate and create, there's challenges, right? And you mentioned something about three years as well. Tell me about some challenges that you faced while building Joyous.
and how did you overcome them? Like maybe a little bit of a step by step. Yeah, so I mean, well, firstly with AI, it's just like everyone talks a big game these days with AI, right? And I do think, by the way, that like you can't lead anymore with being an AI company, because like whether you're a consultant or a tech company or, like you're not even an AI company or tech company, everybody's using AI now. So that's not a differentiator anymore.
But like I said, most companies in a similar space to us, even those really big players, if you look behind the velvet curtain, like what they're doing appears to be super complicated and I can guarantee you it's pretty superficial, like at best. And I think for us, it just took so many years of pain to get to the bottom of using AI to actually do a really good job of that very basic thing I said, like identifying actionable phrases. Took us a year and a half.
It took us a year and a half to be 50 % as good as a human analyst. And we ended up having to go like really, really like, I can remember the day I was like, that's what we're doing. We're not doing general themes. We're doing actionable themes. And I told the data science team, just go find the models that do that and we'll just productionize that. And then three months later, I was like, wow.
Nothing can do this. Nothing can do this. Like really? Like surely something can do this. And remember this is before generative AI came out. So we're talking like 2021, 22 sort of timeframe. And we actually had to take a really like grassroots approach. We had to like figure it out. We had to go back to the basics of like scientific experiment, experimentation. We had to like build data sets, create our own sort of models that could go, well, here's a really short.
How do you identify it in a short comment? How do you identify it in a medium comment? Because we didn't have structure across this data, right? And people speak in different ways. Some people are a verbose some people are really concise. Some people don't even have English as a first language. you know, and then there's foreign language, which is interesting and we've solved for as well. And it was extremely painful. But what we became really clear at is we became really clear about what it is we were trying to do.
and we became really clear on what good looked like. Like we went back to like in data science terms, true positive, true negative, precision, recall, F1, and we built these like human data sets that we could test all these new models as we were building them against to get to that 50%. And then what changed the game for us was actually generative AI. So very few people at the point that we did, which was early in 2023, not long after I think it was GPT 3.0,
came out actually at that time from OpenAI. We were at this beautiful time and a place where we knew exactly what the problem was that we were trying to solve and it was very constrained and we had all the data sets to prove what's good look like and yeah off the bat that came out at 80 % of the quality of a human analyst which was just insane for us and so we did the brave thing and we took a big bet and we pivoted really fast.
And so one of the earliest companies to like productionize generative AI in a meaningful way in the enterprise market. we've just like, it basically blew my mind and it opened up my imagination as our product leader to all the ways that we could theoretically apply, you know, not traditional algorithms or traditional NLP and models, but also generative AI to like these really constrained jobs within our kind of like.
life cycle of a campaign and it's just been absolutely epic. It's like we got that one thing right and it's just been insane for us and just like really capitalizing on it but in quite a deliberate way. So yeah, it was one of those examples of like years of struggle and then like time and a place and just feeling like it was a rocket ship from there. Wow. And there's so much more that goes into that. I mean in those years when you were...
you know, were going through those challenges and creating and everything you just mentioned, but were there any, I don't know, I guess anything that was guiding you along the way that you just held tight to that allowed you to, you know, get from point A to that, you know, point Z, let's say maybe guiding principles, if you will. Well, I think a lot of that for me as a person came back to like, I have this almost like
juvenile belief that if I work hard enough anything is possible and so like my whole life has just been about like Brute forcing things into being so like that I know that earlier company I worked for the cinema software company like I developed a bit of a reputation for like if there was a mission Impossible just give it to Ruby because like that's how it would happen and I think like most people who are successful in tech startups its persistence and it's almost like it's like a
unusual belief that like no matter how hard something is, there's going to be a way to do it. And like if you just keep going, assuming you've got all the other characteristics, like you've got a good group of people who are really smart, who are willing to pivot and experiment. Like I just, I feel, I believe pretty much anything is possible. So just keep going. And also like, don't be afraid to pivot as long as like you pivot as a group. So I think it's just that determination at the end of the day. Yes. Yes. I would agree with that.
How does Joyous help leaders strengthen their company's culture? Well, of course, one of the, like, if we put the consumer and customer lens to one side, like, fundamentally what Joyous does is we help turn, like, I guess employees and frontline contractors from, like, change consumers into creators. And I think what we've done through this tool
and this approach that we've built is we've created this mechanism to continuously improve, involve the frontline in the most important decisions in the company. And so, you know, everyone is just so cynical about surveys, right? Like everyone's conditioned to believe that nobody's listening, nothing's ever gonna change. And I think like we were the antidote to that, but not in a way that overwhelms leaders. So I feel very,
empathetic towards leaders in companies like leaders just like their teams pretty overwhelmed by the amount of things that are piled onto their shoulders the amount of things they need to be pushing through the business at any given time and I often say the only constant at the moment in the working world is change and leaders just don't actually have time they don't have time to take on more work what they need to do is they need a meaningful way to make more happen
Faster with less effort and so that's what we do is we help leaders make the work that they're already doing go Faster and we make it really easy for them to take people on that journey at scale With without adding more work to their workload. So whatever they're working on You know whether it's BAU or whether it's some new initiative. It's some form of change all the time, right? And so we can help them
right at the beginning when they're assessing something to preparing for it, to launching it, to continuously improving it, we can make it really easy for them to keep the front line and their employees in a loop in a way that just removes that resistance that eventually people get over time when so much is happening because they get to feel like they're part of that and they really are in a meaningful way. So that's what I think we do is like help that. Interestingly, actually that large first customer I was talking about.
three months into them using Joyous for operational improvement, right? They didn't use us, but they did a standard employee engagement measurement style survey where they ENPS their workforce. And remember, we're dealing in large unionized cynical workforces, right? So shifting the dial in engagement is nigh on impossible. And they actually told us that they saw a material shift in their engagement score.
which they could only attribute to the fact that they had brought Joyous in. And without even meaning to, because of course their focus was on cost reduction, they realized that they were creating this much more meaningful work experience for techs. So yeah, I think it's amazing. so these techs and the field workers, they feel safe to just share whatever they need to share. Like you haven't run into any issues around like the...
people not being able to fully express themselves. mean, psychological safety is such a big topic for us. And we even have Amy Edmondson who coined that term. She's a Harvard professor. She's one of our advisors. And I actually just chatted to her yesterday. what was really interesting about that chat, by the way, is we're using AI to facilitate the chats, right? So there's an AI facilitator who, if you give your feedback,
will come back to you and what's really interesting is our AI facilitator is conditioned to focus on the actionable thing you said and in the event that it's vague maybe ask you for more information about that and Just yesterday we were chatting to Amy saying it's actually probably more psychologically safe to talk to AI than it is to talk to a real person because You don't have to have any fear of like judgment. You don't have any risk of them coming back
defensively or negatively towards anything you're saying because the AI will filter out all the other stuff and just focus on getting the insight it needs from you. interestingly we've created, originally we did that because of resource constraints like how can you actually have a human chat to thousands of people at once but it turns out actually that's better psychological safety for the workforce because their leaders aren't seeing their feedback, their leaders are just seeing their insights at the other end. Well they could if they wanted to.
But yeah, very, very interesting. Yeah. And one other question. you know, on the going along the lines of anything is possible, right? Because I believe that I'm I so believe that I'm right there with you. So anything is possible. No limits. Then where what's the vision for Joyous? Well, so obviously we started started life and frontline feedback, I guess, in an HR and ICS. Now, you know, like we're edging into all all the stakeholders.
But yeah, we why I joined them after meeting full was I Really wanted to have a shot at building a company with a hundred people That gets to a hundred million in ARR. So a hundred like a billion dollar business And we're thinking with a hundred logos. So we're going after the world's largest telco cable carriers first and then we're gonna
do the same thing in energy, which we've started now, and then go on to OEMs, big tech, insurance and so on, and see how quickly can we do that. Because at those numbers, probably the most meaningful thing is at that point is we'll be making more than a million lives better at work. And I think that's just the goal of everybody and why most of us are at Joyous is we just want to make meaningful change happen rather than, I guess, just build another
product to sell to people. it's like such a crowded world. Yes, yes. So really, really make an impact with people. Yeah. Wonderful. I love it. So I will end there. Ruby, this has just been fantastic. I think you could be a comedian with what you're doing now, right? At Joyous You could like mix the two. I think you can do it. Do you want a joke? I can give you a joke. Yes, please. Let's do it. So interestingly, like there's
There isn't a lot of comedy tailored to like the 5G audience. I think there could be a whole market for comedians just, you know, focused on this market space. let's be honest with the rate at which they've built new infrastructure is sometimes a bit of a joke. But let's go for, I love like walking into bar jokes. I don't know about you. Yes, let's do it. Okay. A Scottish piece of copper wire walks into a bar.
and the bartender challenges him to drink a pint of beer in under two seconds. And the copper wire responds, I can't do it. The copper, the copper geeks out there will get that one. love it. Ruby, thank you so much. We got to think of your website. How do we find out more about Joyous? How do we reach you? So we're at joyoushq.com.
And there is a button right on the top right. If there are any like leaders out there who are keen to do something different, like there's a button right at the top, get in touch with us. We can show you how it works in two minutes. It's pretty easy to get and then we can just take it from there. But yeah, we'd love to hear from people who want to give it a go. I love it. I love it. was wonderful having you on the show. Thank you so, so much. I know the audience is just.
going to love this episode. I believe you're going to reach your goal. I truly do. Thank you so much. Lovely to meet you, Koi. You too. Take care. Bye.