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On the Right Stack is a podcast for business leaders, executives, and technology decision-makers who want to cut through the noise and build technology strategies that actually work. Each episode features candid conversations with seasoned operators, CTOs, CISOs, and CEOs sharing hard-won insights on tech strategy, transformation, and leadership. We don’t talk about technology for technology’s sake — we talk about the decisions that move businesses forward. Hosted by Right Stack Advisors, where smarter technology decisions start.
Speaker 1 00:00
On the Right Stack podcast is brought to you by Right Stack Advisors.
Speaker 2 00:14
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of On the Right Stack. Today is very exciting for me. I have the privilege of talking to Craig Walker, the CEO of Dialpad. And let me give a little context before I introduce Craig. I have been in the technology business for over 30 years. I have run projects the size of I don't know a little Toyota, and I've run them the size of Lincoln or Cadillac stretch wedding limousines, and using that analogy, in my last professional operation we rolled out Dial Pad, and we'll spend a few minutes on it a little bit later, but I have to say I consider myself lucky. Craig is here because he's not only a colleague but a friend, and the Dial Pad project that we worked on over the last 18 months was one of, if not the best project I worked on over my career, and as I said, I've built data centers, I've rolled out Cisco telephony, I've rolled out Avaya telephony, I've rolled out call center widgets, you name it, and we had tremendous success with Dialpad, and as I look back so well on the last couple of years, the Dialpad relationship sticks out, it sticks out because Craig has assembled a great product, a great team. They were always exceedingly reachable. I judge success based on customer service. In this example, myself, Roz, Jordan were customers, and we had second to none service. It was unbelievable. I worked with many partners, thought about who would I would invite to the podcast, and Craig was first on that list. So, Craig, welcome. So, welcome. We'll talk a little bit more about anyone in this space who doesn't consider dial pad is not syncing correctly, but before we get to that, Craig, why don't you introduce yourself?
Speaker 3 02:26
Hey, well, that was an awesome introduction. So, thank you very much. Yeah, great to see you all, Craig Walker. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Dialpad. Dialpad, we started about 15 years ago. My co-founder and I used to run the Google Voice product, and decided that we needed much better business communications than were available, and left Google to go make it happen, and so, yeah, decade and a half ago, we're now about 1400 people worldwide with 40 plus 1000 customers, and, and Jason, you were one of my favorites. It was great working with you during that whole time.
Speaker 2 03:06
Well, thank you. You're kind. So, let's jump right in. I mean, you talk about, you know, Google Voice, and I even think, were you involved with Yahoo Voice before Dialpad? I mean, what industry problem did you think was unsolved to begin your next journey,
Speaker 3 03:24
you know, it's interesting. So, I got into voice over IP in 1999 I was with a venture fund, and we made an investment in a company that was, that was moving phone calls over the internet, and allowed you to make free phone calls to any number in the world, basically from anywhere in the world, using the internet, it was a, at the time, super revolutionary, was a terrible business model, they were trying to make, they were trying to pay for those phone calls by showing ads on a client, but, but the technology was always fascinating to me, because it is an industry that's been controlled by traditional monopolists who don't have consumers at heart, so being able to democratize that and use the internet and not have to pay all these, you know, carriers along the way really kind of opened up, you know, my mind to what could be done here. So, when we were starting this version or this company, you know, I was running Google Voice, which was a really cool product, sitting in Mountain View in the headquarters there, and we had 10s of millions of users, and we gave you a phone number that would ring you on all your all your phones, home, work, mobile, what have you, and you'd have one number to have all of your voicemail in one place to be able to move everything to the web and text from the web, and things like that, things that are kind of like taken for granted now, but it was pretty revolutionary in 2008 but I was sitting there, and I had a, I had a Nortel desk phone on my desk at Google, like, what the hell is this? I'm running Google Voice, I don't know what this thing is, so then we, we really wanted to go after 10. Taking what we had built at Google, and go after every business in the world that would want to be freed from, you know, the tyranny of having to sit at a desk and pick up a desk phone in order to have a business call, so that was it, was the whole original idea.
Speaker 2 05:16
So you take this step, like I said, I experienced it is top notch. How has your leadership style changed from those early startup days to now leading a multi billion dollar company?
Speaker 3 05:30
Yeah, it was in the early days, you know, everyone's in the same room and you're there till as late as you need to be there to get it done. Oftentimes you'd sleep in the office and you'd have your engineers and your designers, and, and you were, you were a small band of like 30 people, you'd do your own QA, it's an impossible pace to keep up when you're 1400 people across seven countries, right, so, so I, as I've matured, I've tried to try to keep that startup spirit and that esprit de corps, and that work fast with small teams, and and give them a lot of autonomy, but I have, you know, as a just as a leader, you got to mature, and you got to realize, like, not everything can be like, you know, Def Con one, like every, you have to, you have to pick your priorities, got to make sure you get the right things done at the right time in the right order, and you have to delegate a lot more. In the early days, I never delegated, I did everything, like I be on top of everything, and you just can't do that at this size.
Speaker 2 06:33
And that's great feedback, I mean, for our audience, and for up and coming CIO, CTOs, CSOs, hearing Craig talk about managing your workload, talking about delegating, and not everything is an emergency, is a very key point from an experienced leader who literally has almost done it all. I mean, so if you play to that a little bit, Craig, what's your hardest scaling challenge right now?
Speaker 3 07:00
Geez, that's a good question. So, as you grow and you have big customers and large enterprises, and they all have somewhat unique environments, so they all ask for something to be a little customized. It's a.. I'd say one of the challenges is, how do you continue to be wildly innovative in creating things that no one's ever had before, while also being responsive to a large enterprise that may have been around for 75 years and has a particular way of doing things and needs something customized just for them, and so I always, you know, I'm always drawn toward the innovation side of that argument, and and you really just need to be able to, by friend, what we've ended up doing is saying, look, we're going to set x percentage of engineering time aside for customer commitments and things specifically to large enterprises that need them to be wildly happy, but the majority of the time is going to be sent spent on innovative things, things that will really move the ball forward, like real time artificial intelligence or agentic customer support, and things like that, so, so it's a, it's a little fine balance, and it's something that you know I used to be 100% innovation and kind of 0% legacy. Yeah, it's a, it's probably, you know, it's, I don't know, it's probably 7030 innovation at this point,
Speaker 2 08:20
you know, you hit the magic button, roll us right into AI, and I'll tell you how I was bragging about you and Dialpad yesterday. I was talking to someone about call centers and about how your vision is not for it to be press one and have the conversation be almost rote, if you will. You want the product to solve problems, and we'll get to that in a second, but that was a huge differentiator. Whenever I talk to you, a lot of AI today is obviously the Chat GPTs and the bots and everything else. Your mindset and innovation ideation is incredible. So, let's roll it back a little bit. I mean, you were early in embedding AI directly into communication workflows. I mean, what gave you the conviction before generative AI became mainstream?
Speaker 3 09:10
Yeah, so, so when we launched the company in 2011 our whole vision of what was going to be wildly differentiated was it was going to be entirely built in the cloud, so Google Cloud Platform was what they were familiar with. So build it entirely in the cloud software based, so you could work from anywhere at any time on any device. If you wanted a desk phone, great, but you could be on your mobile phone, you could be on your tablet, it could be on your laptop, and we really wanted to have this one modern unified platform that you could access from everywhere, because at the time, back in 2010 2011 the way you would access your, your work communications was to drive to work, and we used to have a, we used to have a saying of, like, work's a thing you do, not a place you go. So and so we really kind of built for this this modern productivity thing, we're going to have better design, better quality, better reliability, and more, you know, more flexibility for people to be productive from anywhere, and that was the pitch, and that was that was actually, and that was that was great, I think at the time that was like wildly, wildly innovative, 2018 so fast forward seven years, and I'm in a demo, and I was getting a lot of demos from, air quote, AI companies, but this is eight years ago, AI companies, and what they wanted to do was basically put a get a recording of your calls, transcribe them into text, and then give you some analysis after, after the conversation, of like, oh, on this sales call you should have said this or could have done that, which wasn't particularly interesting to me. And then I saw a demo from this company called Talk IQ, where in real time they had a, they had kind of like a fake sales call, and on the screen it said, you know, ask them about their budget, ask them about their timing, ask them why they're making this change, ask them who has the authority to make this decision, and as the conversation was happening, those questions were being checked off, like you did it, and so then you, you could really see in real time, as the conversations happening, that it was understanding the conversation, and kind of guiding the conversation, and I left that meeting. I'm like, okay, all that other stuff that differentiates is great, but the future has to be understanding this in real time, and once you understand it in real time, you can make the outcomes better. So it's funny, went from that demo, we then partnered with that company for about two months. Our engineers worked with their engineers and embedded it into the core of our product. Then we had a board meeting, and Mark Anderson's on our board, and I was telling the board about it, and then his comment was we should just go buy those guys. Left the board meeting in San Francisco, went and met the CEO of Talk IQ at a restaurant in downtown San Francisco, and literally by that evening we basically had a handshake deal to buy the company, so it was one of those things where, like, when you see it, you just know that's the future, right? Like, it was so impressive, and then that gave us a lot of, a lot of advantages over the newer folks or competitors who are like, oh my god, now it's 2025 we have to have AI in our product, and they're starting from a standing start. We have, you know, we've now been doing it for eight years and have billions and billions and billions of minutes that have gone through our AI engine. So I think we're, I think we're wildly ahead of them just on understanding the problem and being able to develop really unique solutions.
Speaker 2 12:46
So, I've seen you present, I've talked to you several times, and you are a really good speaker. So, you'll understand this question probably better than most CEOs, but I think CEOs have to hear it. What's your recommendation to balance automation with maintaining authentic human customer experiences. I think a lot of people are stuck in that right now.
Speaker 3 13:08
Yeah, I think you have to, you have to be able to do both really well, like no one, if you, if you're trying to front end humans, or one, if you're trying to just replace humans entirely with with AI, I think that's a very, very limited use case, like in virtually any business, there's complexity, there's issues that you don't want AI to be handling, or that you just have a customer base that doesn't want to talk to a robot, right, like, so you have to have a seamless ability to go from agentic to human, and even back to agentic, and back and forth, if you want, but the agentic part has to feel human, it has to feel emotive, it has to give you a sense that it's going to solve your problem for you, if it can't, it then has to hand it off to a human with all the context of everything you already discussed, so the conversation just continues. It's not a start over, and I think a lot of companies are are not great at doing that handoff, because it's not all on one unified platform, and so there's nothing more frustrating than spending five minutes trying to get a bot to solve your problem, it can't. You go to it, sends you to a human eventually, and then you start over. Like that's wildly frustrating. So, so that's one of the one of the benefits of having it all on a single platform and having it all effectively homegrown is that you can have that type of seamless agent to human, human to agent, back and forth, but it is, you know, you've been in the chair of a CIO, like you hear the pressure from the board and the executives saying, "Okay, go figure this out, because this is the future, you got to save us money while providing better support, and I think there's just a lot of CIOs who are in the spot of, like, "Okay, I know I have to do this, I know this has come. Mean, but I don't know where to start, and I don't know what the right answer is, and so, so that's kind of like the first inning of where we're at in this industry,
Speaker 2 15:09
and I think you know, Craig, if you go to the Dialpad site, you write some nice pieces in your own blogs where you talk about how you think agentic AI will change customer support and sales operations, and how those items come together. So, I would encourage everybody to visit the Dialpad website. Craig is identified as probably the top of bloggers, but he's got a blog channel there, and there's a lot of good information. So, let's let's dive a little bit deeper, and let's get into some competitive space. I mean, How do you differentiate yourself against the Zooms, the Microsoft Teams, the Ring Centrals? Why are you different?
Speaker 3 15:54
Yeah, I think we're different because we were built with this kind of unified vision from the beginning, you know, a lot of those folks existed before the cloud existed, and so they have, you know, they've, they kind of have an older architecture that then they try to modernize, but it's kind of siloed, so I'm not going to name names, but I think in each of the ones you mentioned, you're like, they're the conferencing products, different from the phone product, which is different from the support product, and they've all just kind of been been built over time as different silos. So, yeah, sure, you, you pay one bill, but you are managing three different platforms effectively, and you don't get the benefit of this seamless capability to be able to say, hey, here's the entire customer journey, regardless of how they interact with us. So, we've always attacked it from, look, everything's going to be modern, everything's going to be microservices, everything's going to be on a single unified platform, and then that allows us to give you, the customer of Dialpad, really interesting insights of what's going on with your customers, and that also gives us a better solution for our artificial intelligence to be able to understand the whole customer experience, and so the other piece is since we acquired that AI company eight eight years ago, like we own a lot of that stack, it will use a generative model, or we'll use a large language model for conversational type things, but when it comes to decision making, and it comes to really understanding what's happening in a support call, or a sales call, or even an industry-specific support or sales call, that's all running off our own proprietary data that allows us to be more accurate, lower cost, faster, even safer, because everything stays on one platform.
Speaker 2 17:47
Talking about my personal experience, you just amplified something that I experience, which is if I'm looking at communications and AI, it has to be dial pad. The other products are good, but am I going to get a conversation or a realistic dialog with some of those siloed partners, maybe on a topic here or there, but what we found when we worked with Dialpad is any conversation was entertained, it may have taken some time, it may have been Jason Wait for a version, but it was always very interesting how Dialpad kind of always jumped in, which you know, Craig, what decision at Dialpad turned out much better than you thought it would.
Speaker 3 18:30
That's a good question. The, you know, we have a really good partnership with T-Mobile and a really good partnership with Google and a really good partnership with SoftBank, all three of which effectively reselled the All Pad. The T-Mobile one, like that, was like we decided to go all in, you know. We had some relationships up there, had some great meetings, and they really, as the most disruptive company in the carrier space and mobile operator space, they, they totally aligned on the same vision, so we went all in there, and that turned out to be even better than than I wildly expected. Buying the AI company in 2018 you know, we spent 50 million on them, and we were only worth 200 million at the time, like that was a pretty big bet that we just knew it was going to be great, and then you know, like, frankly, we've done some interesting things of when Covid hit, that kind of played right into our hands of work from anywhere and enabling people to be productive from their homes. We started hiring great teams in Bangalore and in Buenos Aires, and in Canada, we bought the company, we bought was out of Kitchener Waterloo, so we were able to really like use our own products to go find the best talent in the world, and so now fast forward to 2016 we have a big team in Buenos Aires that is fantastic, we got a big team. In Bangalore, that's fantastic. Big team in Vancouver, big team in Kitchener. They're all great. And so I think, like, these.. it would have been easy just to say we're a Bay Area company, we're just going to hire people in the Bay Area, we're just going to hang out and all do this, but we really wanted to be a little bit different. We really wanted to leverage our own technology too. So I don't know our partnerships, our AI bet, and how we, how we built the company, and where we hire from. Probably three things have turned out way better than I thought they would.
Speaker 2 20:29
And that's great to hear about more cities, more countries playing in the partnership space. I think a lot of times when we talk about partnership, we're talking about India, or we're talking about the well-knowns. I'm sure the folks in Argentina would love for us to highlight how you've partnered in Buenos Aires, because that's probably not something that comes to mind first with most CIOs, you know. And if you kind of, you kind of talked a little bit about building internally versus acquiring using that first example, you know. Two quick questions on products to close that part out. Anything any customers consistently ask you for that surprised you?
Speaker 3 21:18
That's a, that's a great question. The what does surprise me that customers ask for? It always surprises me when a customer asks for some, some feature that feels like it should be, it should be extinct by now, like, like, you know, like, like really, really traditional legacy. legacy telco PDX arcane feature, like it's when you like sometimes you run into a CIO who's like, look, I've been on Avaya for, you know, 40 years on, not like if I'm gonna move off of IA, it's got to do every single thing that Savia has ever done great points. It's like it, but the flip side is like, or you can move to a modern thing and be three times more productive, and maybe you lose this one feature. Shouldn't you do that? But it is interesting. It's funny, particularly the telecom space, and you've, you know, as a CIO, you know it. There's there's some CIOs who are wildly forward thinking, there's some that are like very, very comfortable with the things they've done before. I will tell you one of the most surprising, interesting, and coolest CIO stories I've ever seen was so this guy, Greg Myers, he was the CIO of Motorola Solutions, and Motorola Solutions is this great company, Schomburg, Illinois, headquartered, but you know, an older company, right? You know, they've been around for decades, and he was this breath of fresh air, you know, young early 40s. He said, "moving everything to the cloud, and it came down to, like, they're going to go entirely Google, they're going to go entirely Microsoft, and the Google solution was Google brought in dial pad, as okay. Well, these guys used to run Google Voice. It's built on Google Cloud. It integrates perfectly with Google. Let's go together, go try to win this. And Greg chose us over over Microsoft, which was awesome. But the interesting part of the story is we hadn't even launched our product publicly yet, like our very first customer for Delpad was this worldwide enterprise that, that really had, you know, a ton of legacy experience with on-premise PBXs and phone systems and stuff, and it was just his bold vision to move the whole thing to the cloud, and it turned out, man, I think we ended up saving them 4 million a year for the next years. It was, it was just this great thing. He's now the CIO at Bristol Myers Squibb. Like, it's been.. it's.. it's really, really encouraging when you find those CIOs who are, who are willing to, willing to really kind of embrace new technology. And with AI now, you don't have, you don't have the ability not to embrace it, you know what I mean, like whereas in the past big decisions like the CIO could wait a decade before moving on prep to the cloud, if you, if you wait a decade to see if AI is real, like it's, it's, it's going to be devastating,
Speaker 2 24:16
that's an amazing point, and Craig speaks truth, I will tell you, Ros, and I spent a better part of 18 months moving to Dialpad from a legacy PBX solution, and I will tell you, maybe 50 conversations happened every month when we were talking to the Dialpad team. Well, we'd like to phone on the left a little bit and push the button, and they'd be like, "Come on, folks, let's enter today. And they were able to walk us through breaking our bad habits, and our bad habits were simply not embracing the future. I lived it with Dialpad. There were tons of conversations. They weren't always easy. We didn't all walk away smiling and saying, 'Wow, this is Nirvana.' What we did say is, my gosh, my team and myself need to think differently, but the dial pad people hurt us. They weren't perfect all the time. It took a little bit of time, but I think that's an amazing point, Craig. At the end of the day, the new technology needs to be embraced, but not embraced in how we think about it. It has to be embraced about how we think about it, but with a forward mindset,
Speaker 3 25:22
right? Right. And you were great. Just hats off to you guys. You guys were..
Speaker 2 25:27
we had a.. I had a great team, and you know, you know, as we kind of look at, you know, culture and management, obviously we spent a good amount of time together. I've met with Elena and the rest of your team, I mean, you're moving at startup speed, you're well beyond a startup, but how do you maintain the culture and the excitement of the team while dealing with startup issues?
Speaker 3 25:53
Yeah, it's a constant effort to keep people, you know, with that mindset, you know what I mean, like it's, and the thing that gets people excited is building the excitement about what you know, the art of the possible, like, and when I talk about what we're doing with the Gen Tech, and how this can transform support, and how this can transform sales, how this can transform recruiting, and why we have the right to win in that space, because we, you know, we have the team to do it, we have the training data to do it, we have the, we have the history to do it, we have the platform to do it. People get pretty excited, and, like, I think it's, you know, there's some people don't, I think people self-select, some people who don't like a crazy pace probably won't stick around a long time, and there's, you know, we.. it's interesting when we started the company, you know, our first five hires were from Microsoft and Google, and one was like a Caltech, you know, like leader of the Bin project at Microsoft, and they came and joined us, like when we literally had only raised $3 million We had no products to speak of. We're just in three months, three founders or four founders. But you do find these people who are even in these big companies, they want to do something more impactful. Like, do you want to be the 200th engineer on Google Maps, or do you want to be the guy building, you know, doll pays like I don't know, like, dude, like, what, what do you, some people will pick the others, some people will pick this, you just got to find the right ones, and then totally nurture them when they get
Speaker 2 27:30
it's mostly safety, right, it's what your mind thinks is probably first and foremost the safest, and that's what defines entrepreneurs versus you could argue operators, and that's pretty important, because entrepreneurs, obviously, in a lot of ways, like yourself, change the world, break silos, and do things that might not be done if you kind of get stuck. So you mentioned having a legendary person, and Mark Anderson, on your board, would he ever share with you, what would you think your most underrated skill is as the CEO of Dialpad?
Speaker 3 28:07
Oh, geez, I have no idea. I think at this point it's probably, it's probably my persistence, you know, 15 years, 15 years in, he invested back in 2012 and then they invested again along the way, but, but you know, there's, there's a great, there's great quote, I like, I think it's Calvin Coolidge or something, about, um, about persistence being the most important thing, and I do think, particularly in a, in a space like this, communications is so broad, it's so vast, the market's so big, there's something like five, there's like a half a billion desk phones in the world that like that was the market that I was looking at when we were starting the company, like this is not going to be an overnight success, this is going to be a lot of hard work, and no one's heard of you, you're the little upstart, you have to be 10 times better than the rest, you have to be super innovative, and now fast forward 15 years, and you know you're, you're a big company, and you're still trying to be as fast or better than these, these new startups. So, so I think one of my probably underrated skills, probably willingness to, willingness to not, willingness to continue to embrace change. Like, I don't think the innovator's dilemma is ever going to bother Dialpad. We're always trying to out innovate ourselves. When Gen Tech AI came out, I started a startup inside of Dialpad called Dart, Dialpad AI in real time, and their job was to literally cannibalize our traditional subscription seat business, and turn it into AI consumption-based business, and so, like, as long as, like, you'd have one being persistent, but not being stuck in your ways, you got to have a growth mindset, and then two, being willing to continue to risk everything to stay on the forefront of innovation, those, those are kind of the, if I had two. Things that he might say, I'm good at those. Might be that. Was
Speaker 2 30:02
there ever a moment you wanted to give up?
Speaker 3 30:06
Um, being a founder and being a CEO of a company is a pretty lonely job at times, because every decision ultimately rests with you. And there's there have certainly been times where I'd lie in bed, stare at the city, like, why did I leave Google, man? I was Google, was the greatest company in the world, I could have just hung out there and done cool stuff, but those pass pretty freak pretty quickly, and that doesn't happen that frequently. What I've always found is like when things go negative for whatever reason, you just kind of keep grinding through it, and before you know it, it turns positive, like it always, it always does, even when I'm at my lowest, and always turns positive, and there's like a what's that, Winston Churchill quote, like when you're going through hell, keep going, like you just got, like there's keep going, man, and that's just part of that's just part of startup life, not everything's gonna work great, but when it does, it's match.
Speaker 2 31:02
Every CIO, CSO, product person has a failure. Is there anything you're willing to share that taught you the most?
Speaker 3 31:14
You know, I'd say, like, the things that I've learned about. So, when you're, when you're the founder and the CEO of a company, and it turns out to be a bigger company than any company you've ever run before. It's interesting, because you don't know what you don't know, you know, like when we got to 300 people, and we were 1000 people, and we're like 1400 people today, like the challenges and the changes, like they.. it's.. it's a little new to you every single day. So the thing that I learned that that has been a great unlock is to hire people who have more experience than you, people who've seen it, and like we now have this fantastic chief operating officer that we hired from Zoom, we have this CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, that came from Zoom and Cisco before that, and they've just, they've seen a bigger, you know, a bigger world than I have, and so it's being able to lean on that, whereas in the past it's like you had people that kind of like had grown with you, and you kind of like were all, but but in that scenario you're all learning, you know, things every day, it's nice to be able to lean on people who are, and that's
Speaker 2 32:20
an amazing point. I had my mentor, my CEO at Omnicom, who was like a second father to me, would consistently tell me to hire better, work better than we were. We would learn, we would be better. But let's be honest, it takes a little bit of a bite out of your ego, it kind of scares a lot of people. I think it's a control issue, but hearing it from people like you and my former CEO, Dale Adams, taught me a lot, because it actually made me better. A lot of the exciting projects I talked about earlier were because I had such great people working with me, the Dial Pad project in my former company that you know was based on an amazing team I had, you know, most of them you brought together an amazing team, and I would say thinking about the infrastructure leader, he was much smarter than I was, and the security lead was much smarter, and those are, you know, key points that I think everyone needs to hear, so you know, we go to 2055 You and I are grabbing a drink in Boca Raton, Florida, to talk about the old days. What are you hoping the legacy of Dialpad is known as?
Speaker 3 33:34
Yeah, I mean, I think our entire mission is to make business communications great, right? And it's, and to me, it's always been this, like, you know, like, you have an iPhone for your personal life, and then you'd have a crappy desk phone for your work life, and it's.. I'm still the same person, so my.. so my vision, and what I'd love Dal Pad to be known at, is just kind of the standard of excellence for all sorts of business communications, getting like continuing to care about, and I think this comes from kind of a consumer background at Google Voice and at Yahoo Voice, is continue to care about the end user experience, like it should be a delightful experience. It should make you better at your job, it should make you happier, and give you more time. And so, like, I don't, I do think we have the right DNA to deliver that we have the right team to deliver that, and you know, over time, like hopefully we continue to keep that innovative cutting edge, so we continue to deliver that stuff, because you know this isn't about, we're not doing this to make money, I mean, I'm sure that's part of it, but we're not doing this, like the goal isn't let's get rich and cash out. The goal is, let's build something that's totally cool and is the best thing in the market, and will stay the best thing in the market,
Speaker 2 34:49
and that's great. And we have about five minutes left. So, what I'd like to do is do kind of a game show type of thing, give you five questions pretty quickly to get some quick answers on, and then. And what I'm hoping we'll do is I'm going to point people again towards the Dialpad website and your blog, and as we prepare to launch this podcast, put together a white paper, is too small a word for someone like you, but put together a collection of kind of the things that you worked on and continue to work on, but first question, if you were not in this business, and you were to start a business today, what excites you?
Speaker 3 35:27
You know, it's funny, I've always been super interested in the restaurant space, and okay, my dad was in restaurants, and, like, I always worked in restaurants, and you saw how it's such a low-margin business, and they're so poorly run, there's so much waste. I always felt technology could totally innovate the restaurant space, so I'd be wildly interested in that.
Speaker 2 35:50
You and I have a very strong shared passion. We've talked about it. I've talked to your chief customer officer. We share that same passion about the importance of customers, but you know what metrics matter most to you to evaluate product success and customer happiness.
Speaker 3 36:11
Good question. I think that one anecdotally, like you can just tell, like I'll go to a conference, I'll talk to customers, I'll run into people on the street, I'll wear a doll bed shirt, and, and you feel the sentiment one, you get better known and improving, so there is kind of like this just kind of anecdotal, hey, I feel like we're doing well on the real metrics, though, we look at, we look at CSAT net promoter score are the are the customers growing, are they expanding? What's the what's the net revenue retention rates, all those things that indicate whether you have a great business or not. But so it's a little bit, little bit of art and a little bit of science, but I really do care, like, and by the way, like, I'll check in on our customer support channels, just kind of see what's going on. Back when we started the company, for the first five years, we used to require, and then it got too big and too complex, but we used to require every employee spend two weeks a year as a customer support rep, and that meant every employee CEO to the engineers. It was great, because everyone knew, could hear directly from the customer what was going on, and having engineers taking support calls was great, because they just fixed stuff. Like, okay, yeah, that's totally frustrating. Let me just go fix that for you. It's way too big to be able to do that now, but like that, that type of empathetic mindset really, really matters, and we want people to really care about the experience for the entity, and
Speaker 2 37:47
I love that, you know, one of the things on this podcast is supporting our new entity, Right Stack Advisors, and one of the goals I have is really to change the customer face from technologists in my 35 year career, we haven't met that goal yet. So one of the things that I'm very passionate about is working with people, whether they're the actual technologists or other folks or companies, to help technology be more communicative, more open, be part of the stack, because it's critical. It's really important, you know. Not everyone is able to look, they don't ask the right questions, so you know, you're raising, you know, a very key point, and something I think is, you know, very lacking in our business. And again, kudos to you and the team. Again, I could probably name the vendors in 1000s that I've worked with in my career, and you know, 99.4% of them I spent banging my head on the table. So I didn't have that, you know, with you. So, you know, obviously two last questions. I mean, obviously, you know, one of your key points, which I think everyone has to hear, is you know you want to stay focused on product innovation versus reacting to what Microsoft's doing this afternoon or Zoom is doing tomorrow. I think you've used the term magnum opus, and so tell us a little bit about how you drive that forward. I think there's a rat race in everybody's mind. How do you get out of that?
Speaker 3 39:27
You know, it's funny that there's a.. and I talked to the team about it in the early days. There's an old movie called Gumball Rally, where it's like teams of teams of two get in the car in New York, and they race to Los Angeles. I think it was like a, like, Dom DeLuise, and there's some kind of Disney movie. Anyway, so the Italian racer, he and his partner hop in this Ferrari, and the first thing does he rips off the rearview mirror, and he goes, "First rule of Italian driving: what's behind you is not important. And so, like, that's kind of the mindset. Try to tell our team, like, look, I don't care, like, if you spend too much time following what everyone else is doing, and listen to their press releases, and reading, you know, reading how they're talking about themselves, you can never get your head right as to what you want to do, like, I think you have to have a real point of view of, like, we're gonna go this way, we're gonna do it this way, we're gonna do it better and faster and cheaper and smarter than the others, and we're going to do that because we're going to work harder, and we think we're, we just think we have a better vision, focus, and, and priority, you know, focus to make that happen. A lot, I've had, I've had executives, I've had leaders who like bring to me all the time, hey, what are we going to do about this? Here's what Zoom's doing. Hey, what are we going to do about this? And I legitimately don't buy into it at all, ever. I know what we want to do, I know what we can do, and I think if we just execute and keep our heads down and do that, we're going to be fine. So it is, it's, it's tempting, but I don't, don't get caught up in it.
Speaker 2 41:00
Last question, you're, you know, from my lips to God's ears, going to be addressing a lot of technology executives, operation executives. What would your message be to them based on your experience? What would you want them to know from you directly?
Speaker 3 41:19
Well, I think, like, at the end of the day, I think we're at a time right now that's that's more transformative than any in our lives, and I'm 60 years old, right? So I saw the internet, I saw the cloud, I saw the mobile revolution, I saw all those things. This is this AI revolution is not stopping, and it's not running out of gas, it's not fake, it's not overhyped, it's under hyped, if anything. So, the thing I think everyone's got to get their mind around is, okay, how do we actually take all this hype and all this possibility and turn it into something that's going to make our business better? And there's guys like us, companies like Dialpad, that are working day and night to try to give you the tools to make that easy for you to do, like the fact that we can just build it into your contact center or build it into your phone system, that you just get it makes it so much easier on you, and you know, Jason, you're, you know, you're in New York City, you're pretty cutting edge on what's going on, think of all the CIOs around the world who aren't on one of the two coasts, the United States, who were don't have like a constant stream of here's all the new stuff coming, being able to bring that to them in a digestible, easy to consume manner, and show them that it's making their businesses better clearly and easily, that's, you know, that's like, we're absolutely,
Speaker 2 42:41
and you know what, you know, I certainly am not at the scale of Dialpad, but that's the exact message I'm hoping our podcast and our partners and our attendees share a ton of information like you have today to benefit them to your point outside of the East Coast, the West Coast, in those places where these this type of information is not always present. Craig, thank you very much for a very smart, intuitive conversation. It has been a pleasure talking with you, and hope to speak to you again soon.
Speaker 4 43:16
Sounds great, Jason. Good luck with everything. I loved
Speaker 2 43:19
it. Thank you very much.