 Hello everyone, welcome to our Palo Alto studios in California, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is theCUBE Conversation with Jason Zintek, CEO of Six Sends, this is part of our next gen conversation series, we talk about the technologies and the news and the people making it happen for the next generation, technologies, clouds and solutions. Jason, welcome to theCUBE Conversation, thanks for coming on. Thanks, happy to be here. So you guys are, got some news, so you got a couple weeks ago, you announced $40 million in funding, which we'll talk about, I want to get that out right away, but I think more importantly, we're seeing a trend where this next gen blank is happening. You know, I'm watching just the Super Bowl, next gen status for NFL, you got next gen cloud, that next gen data, the world of the technology is kind of shifting to a new architecture, you're starting to see visibility into what this next gen looks like. Your company is squarely in the middle of this next gen sales and marketing platform solutions in the new model, cloud scale, data first, this is a core major shift and it's a huge market, and look at Salesforce, look at all these companies that have been around, they're in compance now, you're the new guard. Yeah, yeah. Tell us, what's going on with you guys? Sure, well you're right, we just raised $40 million, it's our series C from Insight Partners, went through a lengthy evaluation process and compete and happy to have announced that last month. And as far as next generation, you're correct. I mean, I grew up in a world of email platforms and then big data platforms, marketing automation and this is a data first strategy where we allow, we now have compute power, that allows us to process huge amounts of data sets. So it's our belief that it should all be data first and driven from AI and ML on top of data, that drives a next generation marketing tactic or a sales tactic, an email or a display ad. What's interesting is that you mentioned, you've worked in previous old school technology, you were a CEO of Responses, which was sold to Oracle. That was a great wave that brought in the marketing technology stack. We saw the sales and marketing solutions from salesforce.com obviously, that was the first wave that you were part of. Now the new wave is going to that next level. This is really the fundamental shift and it's not so much there being replaced but they're just being abstracted away with new capabilities, in some cases being replaced. What's the core problem that customers are having or the core problem that you're solving because some of these old solutions can't scale. Some of them are because they're big but what's the core problem in the industry? The core problem is that these systems were designed to be contact first or lead first. And as you know today, no one likes an abundance of emails in their inbox. And so companies have said, hey, I want to have a relationship with my customer or prospect. I want it to be a cycle of engagement and infinity loop, which means we don't blast emails, we monitor a relationship, what that's like, how we might engage and the data allows us to do that. We can see what's going on with the activity and based on that engagement, AI tells us what tactic might be the most appropriate which is actually send less but more effective and more targeted. So it's a data-driven approach. It's an account-based focus in B2B world as opposed to old generation which is lead and actually rule-based. So we used to write these, call them journey maps, these if-then statements, which were manual. And the second we got done doing weeks of if-then statements, they become stale. And so now data helps us and AI helps us understand real-time behavior with intent and then the tactic. Love the name Six Sends. Obviously you want to get a sense of what's going on around you. Six degrees of separation, you got network effect. We're seeing a new reality and that is organic kind of user experience is different happening outside the funnel, sometimes inside the funnel, as they talk about in the sales and marketing. But users at the end of the day, they're downloading Brave browser. They don't necessarily want the ads. And so they're making these decisions based on their experience that they want. So this is changing some of the tactics. Absolutely. So talk about that dynamic because the old way was based on, see an ad, click on it, go to a landing page, get a lead, throw it in the funnel, matriculate down, sell them something. And time's not on your side, it's not real time. Yeah. Slow, antiquated, inadequate. Exactly right. So if you look at Forester or Gartner, they'll give you stats that 80% of the B2B sales cycle is done anonymously today. Meaning they don't want to contact the vendor. There's an abundance of data on the web. And so we appreciate that. We want to actually enable an engagement through learning. We call it the actual dark funnel. I mean, this is all the research where it's happening without the vendor being contacted, without someone raising their hand and saying, I want a vendor message. Because of this activity that we're able to see and be patient with, we're allowed to engage when the prospect or customers as they want to, but in a nurture format. So it's more respectful of their time. And all the while, this engagement idea is we're giving them content when they want it, when it's on demand and when it's appropriate. And there's all kinds of new data laws coming. So you got to navigate that kind of regulatory environment. But you know, we've been sitting on the queue which is our 10th year. And you know the old way and now we got a new way that you're on with your company is that people are connected. Everything can be instrumented. This is the big data revelation that started about 10 years ago when the big data movement when people said, hey, data is going to be a big part of it. But with the internet, everyone's kind of connected. So you can technically measure everything. So as a company, how do you look at data? I mean, data is fundamental to your vision and your execution. How is that ingrained into the culture and your product? Good question. And first I'd like to say we respect privacy and the data and personal and company. So we are GDPR compliant, SOC2, CCPA, the new California laws as you know. And that is part and parcel to our strategy, respect it. But at the same time, today's consumers generally want to be known in some way, shape or form because they understand the experience of engagement whether it's an account or an individual customer. The experience is that much richer if it's personalized and done with taste. Meaning it's not spam. It's not a thousand emails. It's a meaningful purposeful time-based engagement. Contents relative to when they want to know something. Well, I like what you guys are doing. I like this next-gen architecture. It's definitely been validated. You see in the rise of Amazon, Microsoft shifted their business model to the cloud and you're starting to see other people shifting, IBM shifting to the cloud. So they're all shifting to this new business model. So for you guys, sixth sense, talk about and tell me about your target market. What market are you going after? Is it the marketing automation? Is it like the sales platform? What's the market that you're in now and what market are you expanding into? I want to introduce you to say that. So we're classically B2B. We obviously have a bunch of tech customers as are in the account universe, but also manufacturers, service businesses. We are going after the entire B2B organization because the world as you know it relative to marketing sales is changing. And so it's not just marketing automation that we're replacing or a next generation of, it's customer success. It's the sellers. Our customers, sales organizations use it with their sales people to understand insights of their accounts and how to engage. So I'd say it's that whole universe and it's that infinity loop across customer sellers, marketers. You know, I want to, just before I get into some of the business model questions and target audience, the buyer, you mentioned customer success. We're seeing a lot of energy around what that is. It used to be customer success is like customer satisfaction support organization. You're seeing companies bring customer success much further forward into the sales and marketing process for pre-sales and or ongoing engagement as some of these SaaS environments evolve. Are you seeing that and what's going on with this customer success? I'm seeing a lot more than lip service. It's like it's pretty integral in companies organizations these days. What's your thoughts on that? I think all of us strive to be customer first, customer happiness, loyalty. Sure, why not? I mean that's what we should do as organizations. Our software actually, interesting enough, allows customers to monitor how their customers are engaging with the vendor. And for instance, they may be, if we see a spike in looking at a competitor, the customer say, hey, are you happy? Or product telemetry and usage. We help companies track that usage and see spikes and based on that intent, you might engage with your customer differently, you know, high or low propensity to actually churn. We help with churn mitigation and churn management. Okay, just getting into the product and we're kind of talking and teasing around the product. What is the product? What's the core jewels? What's the IP? What's the main platform look like? What's the product? So as mentioned, we're a big data customer company first, pardon me, meaning we believe it all starts with the data. Because of the compute power available, we're analyzing data, which is your first party data. So all your historical sales and marketing outbound, maybe your CRM system, your marketing automation system, some of the systems that will continue to evolve. And we'll match that data with behavioral data. So what's happening on the web? What's happening through, you know, maybe it's cookies, email hashes, display account ID, advertising ID. And we've patented an approach called a company ID graph. And this ID graph is essentially this marriage of people, personas and accounts. And what's going on? And based on the insight that comes from this monitoring, you can create audiences or segments to market to, so the insights would be on the marketing side, relative to how do I parse my total addressable market, or on the seller side, oh, I can understand what my account or prospect might be doing today. Therefore, I want to execute XYZ tactic and all led by AI. And so I got to do, you've got a good point there about sales and marketing. In the old way, you had a marketing tech and you had sales tech. The lines have blurred, almost seem to be fully integrated now. They're one and the same now. It seems like that's the way you guys look at it. Is that true? Absolutely, I grew up in sales and marketing and the old world, they didn't talk to each other. Today this is absolutely the glue, the connective tissue for sales and marketing so you can start with, whether it's marketing or sales ops, you start with a central plan around your account universe and then parse from there and segment from there. And so marketers and sellers will come up with the annual strategy, but allows the conversation. So it's no longer, is my lead any good? We've got data around the lead. Is the customer responding to an ad campaign? We've got data that is true. It's not, you know, maybe. Yeah, it's always, the sales guy's always chirping about the leads, these are the good leads. Yeah, exactly. The leads are, from Glen Gary, Glen Ross, always great quote that in there. All kidding aside, you know, the end of the day it's about customer satisfaction. No one wants to be marketed to, so there's a wave of personalization coming. And we're starting to see that now with big data, kind of set the tone on that. How are you seeing this new account-based marketing and account-based selling platform to deliver this kind of personalization that adds value? Because how do you orchestrate all that? So this is the big challenge. How do you bring that all together? What's your thoughts? Sure, so actually our platform allows for that. So as you might imagine, you mentioned the sales funnel. Start with, you know, customer having initial curiosity or maybe down at the bottom of the funnel, they're an actual buying stage through procurement. Based on where we detect someone is in the funnel, you would personalize the content. So if we detect through our ID graph that the company or person might be interested in general awareness, awareness content. If they're down in the buying cycle, far down into the funnel, then it's more related to transactional meaningful clips that would be more relevant. And that is the personalization. So it's stage appropriate as someone would want to consume it as they're engaging with us. Jason, give us some of the top use cases that you guys are seeing as you start to see visibility allow. So you got $40 million in funding, third round venture. You got customer growth, good growth. What's the visibility? What are you seeing in front of you? What are the use cases? Great, so for the capital, I assume you mean. We've had two great years. We've doubled the company two years in a row. We're expanding. So it's actually going to be sort of broad brush. I mean, we're expanding our field organization. We're expanding the engineering. We're looking for acquisitions that are strategic. And so our growth will be both organic and inorganic, but it's because of the success and the growth, we want to build the product better to make the customer happier. And that is the general use, some international expansion. So I'm a customer, sell me on this. What's the pitch? So, John. I'm a big tech company. I got five tons of data. People's internal knife fights going on. I got this platform. We got to get the ROI out of it. How do you, I mean, what's in it for me? Pitch me. Yeah, I'd say so, John, is your sales organization happy with the leads? Do they think it's quality? The leads are shit, the leads are shit. We can help you there. We actually have AI helping us understand your account prospects of high propensity to buy. We help your sellers. Does marketing talk to sales, John? They have meetings. No one wants to attend them. I mean, this is the kind of thing that goes on. We're talking about new kind of role playing here, but in real time, you know, hey, no, we're good. It's the sales guy's fault. They're not good enough. Exactly. The leads are terrible. So, you know, there's obviously, again, this is the kind of thing that the tension that goes on. Yeah, so that from the marketer's perspective, they're looking for a more data-driven approach to, and again, data helps, data doesn't lie. You know, it's sort of math. And so it's no longer speculative. It's we can see the engagement if we run a campaign, whether it be email, ad, social posts, chat bots. All of this is collecting data and showing data relative to efficacy. And that is actually what the marketer wants. And candidly, the CEO wants to see the result of those joint selling and marketing efforts. All right, so you got me hooked. Let's do something. How do your clients engage with you? What do they do? A POC? Do they just have a sandbox? Is there kind of a freemium tier? Can you explain some of the business model and engagement? Sure. Yeah, we do POCs. We do sandbox, but initially enough, we can turn the data on in an hour and actually a prospect can see what's happening in their universe, their competitive universe or their own website, for instance. And so that's a very easy way and telltale sign to see data at work. We have low entry points where companies can come in at 30K, 20K in start, or we have million dollar plus contracts that span the breadth of sales marketing and customer success. So it's an easy entry point. You can grow with data. You can grow with users. You can grow with models. So Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, mainly but mainly Facebook and LinkedIn are showing micro targeting is highly valuable. I mean, the election train wreck that's happened this past few years. And even this year, obviously on Facebook have their own issues. But LinkedIn, a lot of people from a B2B standpoint like LinkedIn, it's a network effect kind of distribution. You got targeting, got a lot of metadata in there. So it's kind of brought up the conversation around micro targeting. Why can't you just go at the people? You guys do an account based marketing and sales orchestration platform. And you got these little walled garden organizations out there like LinkedIn. I'm not sure they're selling the data. Do they do that? Do you work with LinkedIn? So will there be more LinkedIn's where I'm, nope, we got our data. We're going to keep it. Data becomes the key, but if they're going to hoard the data, it's a problem. How do you address that? First of all, do they hoard the data or not? If so, how do you guys get around that? Well, you know, LinkedIn's got a wonderful business and they degree some of its walled. They are a partner of ours and they're working with us and actually we'll have some announcements pending. So I'll save that for later, but- So they are engaging with platforms, LinkedIn, from a data standpoint? Very much so. And we're in active talks with LinkedIn. I think we all want to share for the benefit of the ultimate customer experience and we believe that because we have the big data and we also allow for that micro-segmenting, LinkedIn's another channel and we want to activate every channel through our platform and that is our strategy. So we allow you, as mentioned before, to be email, display, social sites. Do you guys have a program or approach or posture to the marketplace in terms of if I have a platform, do I engage with you? Can I be a partner or am I a customer? How do you look at the biz-deb or the partner side of it? You know, part of the 40 million funding is going to allow us to build out the partner ecosystem that's already in play. We work with agencies, ad agencies. We work with professional service organizations. We work with complimentary software products. We want it to be an open system. We want it to be able to bring your own data and we'll curate it for you to make the AI that much smarter. Awesome. Great stuff. Give a quick plug of the company where you guys at in terms of headcount. What are some of your goals this year and what are you guys looking for? I'll see you hiring. You said you mentioned earlier. Give a quick plug for the company. Yeah, thank you for that. As I mentioned, we've doubled the company two years in a row. We've tripled our headcount. We're hiring every day in every single segment looking for people. We'd love to talk to you. We've also tripled our customer base in that same period. So things are going well and we're happy and I think the big challenge is just keep doing it and deliver a delightful experience for customers. It's interesting. Companies can be very successful, Jason, if they have a certain view. You guys are data-first. You've got a horizontal view of the data, but yet providing a specific unique solution differentiated off that. We're video-first. That's our angle. A lot of people having virtual firsts. You're starting to see this new kind of scale with companies. So I want to ask you about your vision for the next few years. As you look out, as the wave is coming in, it's very clear, cloud scale, the role of data, machine learning and AI is going to build this application layer that has to be horizontally scalable, but yet vertically specialized for the use cases, which requires a very dynamic data intensive environment. What's your vision of the next few years? How do you see the world evolving? Because there's a lot of big companies or in startups that have been around doing a lot of these point solutions, their features. How do you see this next wave going in the next five years? I had a thesis three years ago, joining the company that these point solutions would go away because they weren't data-driven. The hard work is in the large data, the applying the ML and AI on top of that and then doing something. We surfaced that in applications. So for the last two years, we've been building the apps that allow a marketer, a seller, a customer success organization to prosecute that data, understand the data and let AI recommend a tactic. So I think it'll just be more of the same but specialized by use case. So where some of our applicability is generic use cases, we'll get specific to telecom on that use case. We'll get more specific in customer success enabling churn mitigation as opposed to just sellers and marketers. That's awesome. And you look at the current events, I got to get your expert opinion. Donald Trump, the Democrats, they've been using social platforms, political ads are being kicked off but there's a lot of more innovation that they're actually doing. So with all that bad actors out there, there's actually an innovation story that's going on under the covers. What's your view of that? I mean, the bad stuff's out there but they're leveraging the new architecture. I think Donald Trump ran the best campaign ever. That's why he's winning. That's the story and backstory is sort of history unfolds when we understand it is that the election cycles have leveraged data to run their campaigns and it's the new world. And so while there may be bad actors, I think hopefully the world is a majority good. And much like our stories, we're trying to bring a data solution that helps just decisioning. Obviously the political campaigns are leveraging it too. Yeah, and it's disastrous to see the applications fail like they did in Iowa, but the data's there. I mean, it's about time. I always say it's going to be on blockchain and Andrew Yang has just recently came out and said, oh, the voting should be on blockchain. Maybe that's going to happen someday. We'll see. Jason, thanks for coming. I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, John. Jason Zintek here, the CEO of Six Sense, industry veteran, big pedigree, big company with $40 million in fresh funding, talking about the next generation platforms. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.