Venture with Grace
00:24:43 · Austin Spiegel
[00:24:43] S1: Yeah, good question. So I think certainly earlier in the history of the business, we kind of came in post having some hardware stood up or some software stood up, right? Like, it's very difficult. You know, a lot of these businesses, they maybe spend their first year just, you know, designing, right? So clean sheet, let's design, let's define requirements. Worked with customers, we have active customers now who we engaged with a couple of years ago. They were creating megabytes of telemetry, and now they're creating hundreds of terabytes of telemetry per month. So, that kind of shows you how quickly businesses can scale, but also that there is a time where maybe it is a little too early. But now that we've built our edge application, which is not cloud, so we have like a full up telemetry database and visualization tool that can run on a Raspberry Pi, for example, collect telemetry with really high rate telemetry with minimal latency, I think that's actually really great for super early customers where they maybe don't need the power of storing all this telemetry in the cloud, but they just want the ability to run a test, visualize the telemetry, look for deviations and then potentially store it for the long term. So that has actually brought us earlier in the cycle. I mean, to answer your question, think better to get started sooner rather than later, right? Might as well use the best in class tools as long we can meet them where they are too, right? I acknowledge, I think I'm a big fan of startups. I love working with startups. They push us to be better. Also, understand that you can't sign up for an enterprise SaaS agreement or an enterprise agreement when you've got five employees and you've raised a couple million dollars. And I think it's really important for us be not only it's not only about making money, right? It's about being stewards of the ecosystem and helping us realize the kind of science fiction future that we thought we were gonna have. So it's important for us to meet the customers with a price point that's acceptable at those early stages and help them grow.
00:26:57 · Grace Gong
[00:26:57] S0: So I wonder, maybe we could talk about the building of the company part. Was like, you were the CTO before becoming the CEO lately. And I fact tracked, you did hire someone from Palantir as well. So it's like, you have hired exactly from and to worry, like Palantir, Applied Intuition, Meta and like, you know, SpaceX and like among others. So maybe we could talk about like, you know, when you were thinking about ensembling your own team, like, what's the difference between like at the beginning stage of, like, you guys were just building to nowadays, like, scaling, like, you know, for... You know, when you're hiring the executives from these large companies, like, what are... What is the core theme that's or core business milestone that you're trying to achieve for, let's say, between now to CRC?
00:27:51 · Austin Spiegel
[00:27:51] S1: Yeah, good question. So I think to kind of like answer your question for, I do think that kind of each org is special in its own way, right? So engineering and product are inherently, R and D are inherently the largest organization in the business. So the skill set that's necessary to lead that organization and bring more rigor is different than what's necessary for sales, which is a smaller organization and very different from typical SaaS sales, which is what's different from deployment, which is kind of Palantir flavored, but I think our tool is like less customizable, right? So there's, people buy our software, then they can use it and they don't need a team of people to be successful on it. So, I'll talk about engineering first, is we needed someone who was really going to be able to scale from he joined Mike, our VP of Engineering. When he joined, it was around 20 to 30 engineers, and our expectation as we were growing the business was that we would probably get around to like, the end this year, I think it's going be close to 50, and then next year, you know, potentially anywhere between, you know, fifty and one hundred. So, I knew that we needed someone who had been on that growth curve before understood how to, you know, bring maturity to engineering organization. And Mike had seen that at his previous company. So, actually worked in games but he was at a startup had when he joined 20 engineers, they got acquired by Meta and then he scaled that organization from 20 to 80. And I think being able to scale that and maintain the culture while also improving things is a really difficult skill set. So that's why Mike made a lot of sense for us. On the sales side, it's really about high touch sales cycle, extremely technical buyer, long sales cycles, high ACVs as well. And when we met Ben, who was head of North America Sales and Applied Intuition, I think we instantly realized like, okay, the Applied Intuition motion is very similar, like Sales Motion is very similar to our Sales Motion here at Sift. And he's going to be a great person to come in and help not only build the organization, but I think Ben's really unique in that he is an organizational builder and he's also an incredible account executive and an incredible salesperson. And you can put him in the sale, like in the kind of really high stakes sales and he can close.
00:30:29 · Austin Spiegel, Grace Gong
And then, fortunately, Sim was Ben's colleague at Applied Intuition, he ran what they call the Application Engineering Organization, but effectively applied for deployed engineering motion. And I think what I felt we really needed on for deployed engineering was a mix between being extremely technical, which is what we had actually. We had great engineers who were super passionate about solving customer problems, but what we were lacking, and I think what Sim bought, was also a commercial mindset, right? So, we can continue. We want to solve problems for our customers all the time. But, you know, when a relatively lean team, you have limited resources, you really need to pick the things that are going to provide the most ROI as well for us, right? And I think it's easy in this type of software to kind of go down rabbit holes and optimizing the software for various use cases. But we need to think broadly about how do we use our resources to build something that is going to benefit all of our customers and all of our future customers? And I think that's where Sim has brought that rigor to the Ford deployed engineering team. [00:31:45] S0: I guess one of the things that you mentioned about commercialization and I guess selling to aerospace or defense contractors is like, it's probably going to take forever. And then what does the go to market motion kind of look like? Would it be like, you you guys go after like the engineers or the procurement and like, what is it like of the average sales cycle kind of look like in the... In in this particular sector?
00:32:14 · Austin Spiegel
[00:32:14] S1: Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so, you know, it's definitely there's a couple of motions, right? I mean, now that we've the product is much more established and the sales process is much more established for the kind of early to mid stage startups, the motion is much simpler. So it's typically either outbound, inbound, the first call is a demo. I think it's really important in this industry that you show your software, your product to the buyer almost immediately. A lot of these people are no nonsense, they know what they're looking for, and they just want to see if the tool does what it says on the box, right? And if you kind of have this open ended or very structured deck with the hardware engineers, it just doesn't really go well. Then you don't get a second call. So I think it's really important to show people the tool on the first call. Then typically, where we go from there is we do what we call a custom demo. So that's actually taking the customer's data and then crafting a demo around their use case. And then from there, it's typically... It could be maybe additional hands on sessions, typically that's where we kind of look to move to closing the deal. But that's for kind of early stage and mid stage startups. Would say, and then that's very much an bottoms up motion, right? Like, go and win the engineers because they're the ones who are going to be selecting the tool. For the larger companies like the primes that we work with, it's a two pronged motion, right? So, it is top down and bottoms up. Bottoms up, you really need to get... It's the same kind of principles apply, is you need the engineers who are using the tool to sign off on it. I think one of the other challenges with this type of software, especially at larger companies, is the person who's procuring the software is not the one using it. So typically we're selling to like a VP of software and they're looking at like a build versus buy analysis. So should they buy Sift or should they build their own application? And there's many, many motives involved in that decision, whether that's like, they believe they need to kind of own their destiny or have control of the tool long term. And then the other part of it is like whether they're trying to ensure that their team has kind of the work to do.
00:34:53 · Austin Spiegel, Grace Gong
So, that makes it more challenging, but I'd say like there it's still, you know, the top down motion is really like partnering with the executives and showing them that we have this ability to really transform the pace at which their team is moving and also solve some of the hardest problems that they're encountering. [00:35:16] S0: One of our LinkedIn user is having a question. He said, From a practical engineer doing test connections are often rooted because of many issue sensor actuators, RF contacts. Sadly, the subject doesn't come from service until it happens and doesn't work. It's the first indication, do you have a phase in your test plan that uses automated validation and verification of sensor and actuators so that we can at the drop of a hat if we have a suspicion of data stream test or, my god, what is happening? Sorry. I think