 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, talking to you out of our Boston area studio. And we've been doing a CXO leadership series, talking with leaders across the IT industry about how they're managing during this global pandemic. I'm really happy to welcome back to the program. He's a CUBE alumni. He was a Racker and he is now with Stacker. We'll get into the company in a bit, but Prashant Chandra Sankar, the CEO of Stack Overflows. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you for having me again, Stu. Really a pleasure and always a fan of the CUBE. So great to be here. All right. And we note that you're sporting the quarantine beard, grown since the last time we had you on the program. Prashant, you were named CEO of Stack Overflow at the end of 2019. Obviously, certain plans that you have, you're a Harvard Business School alum. You've worked in the enterprise and in the cloud communities for a while. Take us back to what your team has been doing really to react and lead in this global pandemic. Yeah, I know, happy to Stu. And obviously this is a very trying time for just the world in general, right? So companies, small and large, I've been to kind of grapple with the reality, but I would say in general, I started October 1st, 2019 at this amazing company. And it's just been a real joy to see us really adapt very quickly based on just this kind of challenging environment that we're in. And primarily, if you think about Stack Overflow, we were blessed that our company as an ethos, from an ethos perspective, we've been highly remote in nature for years over a decade. So 80% of our team, product engineering team has been remote. 60% of our marketing team was remote. And then 40% of our company was remote all around the world. So moving from that 40% to 100%, which we did very proactively in early March of 2020, has been a huge boon for our company and just our stackers, as you pointed out. And they've just been very, I would say, grateful that we've done that very, very quickly. Secondly, I would say just the notion of being able to think about our business and our community and how do we help each other? We've done a lot. We meet, we've come together as a team three times a week and we've really had sort of this COVID standup as a leadership team, as a newly reformed leadership team, mind you, which I've helped form over the past six months. And we've all really gone really to the extreme to make sure that our stackers are the health and safety are taken care of. How do we serve our community in this environment? How do we make sure our customers are being, really getting the maximum value of our products, which are all focused on collaboration. So very relevant in this remote world. So it's really been, I would say, all around people have really rallied. Just, and we had sort of a, I would say somewhat of an advantage just having adopted remote work history. But Prashant, maybe it makes sense if we actually step back for a second. I'm sure most people are familiar with Stack Overflow, but give us the kind of the high level view of what the company is and what drew you into the leadership role there. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think Stack Overflow extremely well known, obviously with every developer and technologist in the world. So in a nutshell, we are the world's most trusted and largest community for developers and technologists. We have something like 120 million unique visitors that come from websites every month and something like 180,000 signups on a monthly basis. So just say, a dramatic amount of impact to help ultimately these folks solve their most complex problems on a kind of variety of topics, whether that is cloud related topics, security related topics, full stack engineering topics like Python or Rust or you name it. All those areas are covered in very much in a lot of detail for our community effectively share solutions to common questions and code and really be able to accelerate the development of software around the world. So ultimately comes out to our mission, which our mission, what we like to say is, we help write the script of the future by serving developers and technologists. And so that's our company in a nutshell, on top of that ecosystem of communities that we've built, we have a great set of products, SaaS products that we've also built to help with real time collaboration within companies in a very, very similar format to our public community format. So that's been very compelling. So the two reasons why I joined the company beyond obviously the mission, number one is just the global impact. There are only a few companies that have the level of impact that this company has around the world and helping everybody sort of accelerate their software development or whatever apps they're building. And obviously we know that we're sort of in this beautiful Goldilocks zone of digital transformation where everything is accelerating, even given the current environment. That's the first reason just given the vast reach of this company. And then secondly is the fact that we are really trying to transform the company and accelerate the transformation into a SaaS company. So our Stack Overflow for Teams product, which is again the knowledge sharing SaaS product that we have internally is really a really phenomenal way to share evergreen knowledge and non ephemeral type information within companies so that your most important questions are answered, answered once and you're not constantly having to tap people on the shoulder to answer common questions. So those are the two primary reasons. One is the impact of the community and secondly acceleration of our SaaS business. Excellent Prashant. So I wonder if you could help us drill in and understand the business a little bit. There's private repository, there's teams there. It's interesting if you look on the outside that you say, wait, is this kind of like a Reddit? Or when I hear you describe it, it sure reminds me a little bit of say GitHub who obviously got taken off the table for a rather large number. So I'll let you bring us inside a little bit of, how does the company make money and what are the plans that both support those broad communities and diverse things but also build that business? Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, we really believe it's a common, our mission statement, like I mentioned is really our kind of our four driver for us. And so the ecosystem of communities that we have built for developers as well as technologists. Again, just a very, very vast number and we create developers on a daily basis to our community. So it's very powerful in that people are learning about new technologies or frameworks or cloud technologies through our websites. And so that's kind of a huge accelerant to just creation of jobs and people's capabilities. And the foundation of that, which is obviously accessible to everybody and it's free in fact, we had this ecosystem of products and the first one in the primary SaaS product is Stack Overflow for Teams, which is this knowledge sharing and collaboration product that allows companies within, or teams within companies to use the same format that they absolutely love in the public community that they use to learn up on all the subjects that I mentioned, but to now share internal proprietary information to accelerate their development intonity and to break down walls between teams like product and engineering and developers and operations and also go-to-market teams like product marketing teams and sales teams. And so we have just a tremendous number of enterprises that have joined our program over the past several quarters, including Microsoft, who is a very happy customer that uses, they have something like 70,000 developers and technologists and go-to-market folks within Microsoft that are using our product platform to break down walls and to be able to move very quickly with launching their products and staying collaborative internally. In addition to that, we have what we call our Reach and Relevance business which is all around helping, just based on the fact that we have such massive reach and 120 million people from around the world showing up on our websites, being able to help companies showcase their capabilities and products on our platform and also engage with the community and for obviously the community to then learn about many of the latest and greatest of what's being launched by these phenomenal companies that are innovating very rapidly too. Yeah, so Prashanth, we started off the conversation. You talked a little bit about the impact of the global pandemic. I'm curious, are you seeing any changes in trends? Are there new things that are trending on your site? Are there things that either on the website or they're coming to your team to learn more about? Yeah, definitely. I think there are two places I can point to. One would be on the community side. We've definitely seen a spike in traffic in places like our Metaacademia website. As an example, online learning became a huge topic of interest when people went remote and obviously you have families around the world that are trying to figure out not only how to school their kids, but we have teachers all around in schools trying to figure out what are the best set of resources. So we have all sorts of, like I said, about 40 million questions and answers across all sorts of topics, including next generation e-learning sort of capabilities in our communities. And so we've seen a spike in traffic in places like that. We've seen a spike in our medical communities and our biology communities, obviously, because of people's curiosity. And these are fairly advanced academics and people that are in the scientific community that spend a lot of time thinking about what's really behind COVID-19, what are the details of, when we think about all sorts of topics around genetics and obviously the pharmaceutical implications. So we've seen a tremendous uptake in those sites. In addition, of course, overall to our overall websites because people are spending time just at home. In addition, we've seen a very material uptake in our Stack Overflow for Teams product where we just closed our companies largest deal in our company's history this past week for about 30,000 seats at a very large financial services institution, a global financial services institution. With more and more companies, I think about business continuity. They're thinking about how do they stay, how do they collaborate across their distributed teams and remote teams? And we have a very, obviously a very significant solution in that space. Excellent. Well, congratulations on that and that deal. It brings up, I guess, what are some of the key KPIs that you're tracking for to really assure the growth and the health of your business? Yeah, I think both in terms of, if you think about two sides of the point, from a community standpoint, obviously we care about our active users and our engaged users and the number of signups. And on that front, the first part of that, we've seen just a dramatic increase in all those stats, including this year just a result of COVID on average last year in 2019, the number of signups per month was something like 150,000 signups per month, unique signups from around the world, people signing up for Stackhold for accounts. This year on average, it's gone up and March was our highest signup month ever with 180,000 signups for the month. So we're seeing, so that's important. In addition to signups, of course, when they come onto our websites, we want them to get the answers to their most pressing questions, to be able to engage them with content that's useful to them. So engagement, in terms of monthly engaged users, very important monthly active users, very important for us and obviously our signup numbers. So those are the kind of the community oriented stats that we and KPIs that we really track and those look very promising. And then finally on the business side, which is the other side of the coin, in our teams business primarily and our reach and relevance business, teams business, it's all about our customers getting value from the collaboration SaaS platform that we have that they've signed up for, right? So are they using the various features? We've integrated that team's product with all the other popular tools that people use for things like real-time collaboration. So we integrate with Slack. We integrate with Microsoft Teams. We've integrated with Octa. We've integrated even with GitHub Enterprise. It is really the ideas to be part of that developer and technologist workflow so folks can really look to Stack Over for Teams as the place where they get common answers, get great answers to their common questions that are constantly being asked within companies, but it's not very effective to ask the same questions again and again. So the idea is to integrate with these tools to make sure that you're able to have a nevergreen place where you can keep that knowledge. And so that's, we track usage of those integrations. We talk about how many questions and answers are being exchanged within companies and how much ultimately the outcome of saving time and money for our clients so that they're being very effective in their product development cycles and people are not being tapped on the shoulder for every single item that might come across for an individual company. So that's really, there's an economic study that we performed with Forrester that captures a lot of this. So that's, and then region relevance is all around engagement on our websites. People are really looking and seeing finding value in the content that our companies are posting and those companies to be able to be effectively translating that knowledge to the audience. Awesome. Well Prashant, congratulations on the progress and definitely look forward to tracking how the Stackover flow team's doing going forward. Thanks so much to really appreciate the chat and great to see you again as usual. All right, be sure to check out the cube.net for all the coverage. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching.