 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios on this kind of continuing leadership series that we've put together, reaching out to the community for tips and tricks on kind of getting through, you know, what is this kind of ongoing COVID crisis and situation as it continues to go weeks and weeks and weeks. And I'm really excited to have one of my favorite members of our community is Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight had the real pleasure of interviewing him a couple of times and had to get him on. So Nick, thanks for taking some time out of your very busy day to join us. Jeff, honor to be here, thank you. Pleasure, so let's just jump into it. You know, one of the reasons I wanted to get you on is that Gainsight has been a distributed company from the beginning. And so, you know, I think the COVID, you know, suddenly everyone got this work from home order. There was no prep, there was no planning. It's like this light switch digital transformation moment. So I'm loved to hear from someone who's been doing it for a while. What are some of the lessons? How should people, you know, think about, you know, running a distributed company? Yeah, it's really interesting, Jeff, because you know, we are just by happenstance from the beginning, distributed where we have often our first two offices were St. Louis and Hyderabad, India. So two places you cannot get there through one flight. So you have to figure out how to collaborate asynchronously and then over time we have offices in the Bay Area with tons of people that work from home. And so we try to tell people we don't have a headquarters. The headquarters is wherever you are, wherever you live and wherever you want to work. And so we've always been super flexible about, you know, coming to the office if you want, don't come in, et cetera. So different than some companies in that respect. And because of that, you know, pre COVID, we always a very heavy video culture, lots of video conferencing, even if we were some people are in an office, there's always somebody else dialing in. One benefit we got from that is, you know, you never had to miss your kids stuff or your family things. Like you, I would go to, I would, you know, go to my daughter's, you know, performance in the middle of the day and no, I could just dial into a call on the way there. And so we've always had that. But what's amazing is now we're all on a level playing field, there's nobody in an office. And I got to say, this is in some ways even better. Cause I feel like when you're the person dialed in and a lot of people in a room, you probably have that experience. And it feels like you're kind of not on the same playing field, right? Hard to hear the jokes or the comments and you might not feel like you're totally in the in crowds, so to speak, right? But now everyone's just at their computer sitting there in a chair all day doing these zooms and it does feel like it's equalizing a little bit. And what it's caused us to do is say, hey, what are the ways we can all recreate that community from home? So as an example, every 7 45 a.m. every day, we have a zoom call that's just pure joy and fun. Trivia, pets, kids, the employees, kids announce people's birthdays and the weather. And so these ways we've been able to integrate our home and our work that we never could before. It's really powerful. It's a tough situation overall and we feel for all the people affected. But even in tough situations, there's silver linings that we're finding them. Yeah, it's funny. We just had Darren Murph on the other day. I don't know if you know, Darren, he is the head of remote work at GitLab. And he talked about kind of the social norms and one of the instances that he brought up was, back in the day when you had some people in the office, some people joining via remote that it is this kind of disharmony because they're very different situations. So one of its suggestions was, have everybody joined via their laptop even if they're sitting at their desk. So as you said, you get kind of this level playing field. And the other thing which dovetails off what you just said is he always wanted executives to have a forcing function to work from home for an extended period of time. So they got to understand what it's all about. And it's not only looking through a little laptop or this or that, but it's also the distractions of the kids and the dogs and whatever else is happening around the house. So it is wild how this forcing function has really driven it. And his kind of takeaway is, as we like say moved from, can we get it into cloud to cloud first? And it doesn't work on mobile to mobile first. Now it's really remote first. And if you remote first attitude about it and kind of turn it on its head is why shouldn't it be remote versus can it be remote? It really changes the conversation and the dynamic of the whole situation. I love that. And I just get a lot, by the way has been a true inspiration because they are the most remote company and they share so much. I love what you said. And as just two examples of reacting to what you said pre COVID, we always wanted to keep a level playing field. So we actually moved our all hands meetings to be instead of being broadcast from one room and you're kind of seeing this small screen with all these people. We all just, we're at computers presenting. And so everyone's in a way level playing field. So I thought what get lab set is great. And then the other point I think post COVID we've learned is the kids and the dogs aren't distractions. They're part of our life. And so embracing those and saying, hey, I see that kid in the background bring them onto the screen, even during work meetings, even customer meetings. And I'm seeing like, I'm on a customer meeting and the customer is bringing their kids onto the screen, right? And it's kind of breaking this artificial wall between who we are at home and who we are at work because we're human beings all throughout. Against that, we talk about a human first approach to business and we've never been more human as a world than we are right now. Love it, love it. So another get your thoughts on is this whole idea of measurement and productivity at home. And it's really, I have to say disturbing to see some of the new product announcements that are coming out in terms of people basically, snooping on people, whether it's tracking how many hours of Zoom calls they're on or how often are they in the VPN or having their camera flip on every so many minutes or something. We had Martin Mikosan who's now the CEO of Hacker One. He was CEO at MySQL years ago before it went to Sun. And he had the great line. He said it's so easy to fake it at the office. But when you're at home and your only delivery, your only output is your deliverable. It makes it a lot easier. So I wonder if you can share some of your thoughts in terms of kind of managing output, setting expectations to get people to get their work done. And then as you see some of these new tools for people that are just entering this thing, it's just not right. Yeah, I agree with you and Martin. I'm a huge fan of Martin as well. I totally agree with both of it. And I think there's an older approach to work, which is more like a factory. It's like you got to see how many widgets you're processing and you got to micromanage and you got to monitor and inspect and look, I don't run a factory. So maybe there are places where that model makes sense. So I'm not going to speak for every leader, but I could say if you're in a world where your job is information, services, software, where the value is the people and their knowledge, managing them that way is a losing battle. I go back to, you know, some folks probably know this famous TED talk by Dan Pancon, basically what motivates people. And in these knowledge worker jobs, it's autonomy, mastery, and purpose. So autonomy, we have the freedom to do what we want. Mastery, we feel like we're getting better at jobs and purpose, which is I have a why behind what I do. And I think take that time you spend on your micromanagement and your Zoom, analyzing the Zoom sessions and spend it on inspiring your team on the purpose. Spend it on enabling your team in terms of mastery. Spend it on taking away barriers so they have more autonomy. I think you'll get way more out of your team. Yeah, I agree. I think it's, as Darren said again, he's like, well, would you trust your people if you're on the fourth floor and they're on the sixth? So just- Yeah, exactly. If you don't trust your people, you got a bigger issue than worrying about how many hours they're on Zoom, which is not the most productive use of time. No, people waste so much time in the office and getting to the office. Like, and by the way, I'm not saying that's wrong. It's fine too, but it's not like the office is just unfettered productivity all the time. That's a total myth. Yes. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about events. So, you know, obviously the cubes in the event business, we've had to flip completely because all the events are, well, they're all going either, they're all to going digital for sure, or they're post, and or postponing and or canceling. So we've had to flip and do, you know, all dial-ins and there's a whole lot of stuff about asynchronous. But for you, I think it's interesting because as a distributed company, you know, you had Gainsight Pulse as that moment to bring people together physically. You're in the same boat as everybody else. Physical is not an option this year. So, you know, how are you approaching Gainsight Pulse both because it's a switch from what you've done in the past, but you at least have the benefit of being in a distributed, you know, world. So you probably have a lot of advantages over people that have never done this before. Yeah, that's a really interesting insight for observation. So just for a context, Pulse is an event we do every year to bring together the customer success community. Cause as you observed, there is value in coming together. And so this is not just for our employees. This is for all the customer success people and actually increasingly product management people out there coming together around this common goal of driving success for your customers. And it started in 2013 with 300 people. And last year we had 5,000 people at our event in San Francisco. We had similar events in London and Sydney. And so it's a big deal and there's a lot of value to coming together physically. But obviously that's not possible now nor is it advisable. And we said, okay, how do we convert this and not lose what's special about Pulse and leverage, like you said, Jeff, the fact that we're good at distributed stuff in general. And so we created what we call Pulse everywhere. We didn't want to call it Pulse Virtual or something like that Pulse webinar because we didn't want to set the bar as just like, oh, my virtual event, my webinar. This is something different and we call it everywhere because it's Pulse wherever you are. And we joke, you know, it's in your house, it's in your backyard, it's on the Peloton, it's walking the dog, you can be wherever you are and join Pulse this year, May 13th and 14th. And what's amazing is last year we had 5,000 people in person. This year we already have 13,000 people registered as of the end of April. And so we'll probably have more than three times the number of people at Pulse everywhere. And we're really bringing that physical event concept into the virtual, literally with instead of a puppy pit where you're in a physical event, you'll bring puppies often. We have a puppy cam where you can see the puppies. We're not giving up on all of our silly music videos and jokes and we actually ship cameras and high-end equipment to all the speakers' houses. So they're gonna have a very nice digital experience. Our attendees are, it's not gonna be like watching a video conference call. It's gonna be like watching a TV show and much like what you try to do here, right? And so we have this amazing experience for all of our presenters and then for the audience. And we're really trying to say how do we make it so it feels like you're in this really connected community. You just happen to not be able to shake people's hands. So it's coming up in a few weeks. It's a big experiment, but we're excited about it. You know, there's so many conversations and we jumped in right away, right? When this was all going down. Okay, what defines a digital event? And like you, I don't like the word virtual. There's nothing fake or virtual. To me, virtual is second life and kind of video game world. But like you, it can't be a webinar, right? And so if you really kind of get into the attributes, what is a webinar? It's generally a one-way communication for a significant portion of the allocated time and you kind of get your questions in and hopefully they take them, right? It's not a truly kind of engaged process. That said, as you said, to have the opportunity to separate creation, distribution, and consumption of the content now opens up all types of opportunity. And that's before you get into the benefits of the democratization, as you said. And we're seeing that with a lot of the clients we work with, you know, their registration numbers are giant because now I'm not. You don't have to travel, you don't have to spend money. Yeah. It'll be curious to see what the conversion is. And I don't know, we have a lot of data there, but you know, it's such a democratizing opportunity. And then, you know, you have people that are trying to force, you know, as Ben Nelson said, you know, Ben from Minerva, right? A car is not a mechanical horse, right? They're trying to force this new thing into this old paradigm and have people sit for, I saw one today, 24 hours in front of their laptop is like a challenge. And it's like, no, no, no, you know, have your rally moment, have your fun stuff, have your, you know, kind of your one to many, but really there's so much opportunity for many, you know, many, too many. And to make all the content out there, yeah. We created this concept in this false everywhere event called tribes. And the idea is that when you go to an event, the goal is actually partially content, but a lot of times it's connection. And so in any given big event, there's lots of little communities out there, right? And you want to meet people like you, right? Might be people in a similar phase of their career, a similar type of company. In our case, it could be companies in certain industries. And so these tribes in our kind of pulse everywhere experience, let people break out into their own tribes and then kind of basically chat with each other throughout the event. And so it's not the exact same thing as having a drink with people, but at least a little bit more of that serendipitous conversation. Right, no, it's different. And I think that's really the message, right? It's different. It's not the same, but there's a lot of stuff you can do that you can't do in the next phase. So quit focusing on what you can't do and embrace what you can. So that's great and good luck on the event. Again, Wint, give the plug for it. Yeah, it's May 13th and 14th. If you go to gainsightulse.com, you can sign up and it's basically anything related to driving better success for your customers, better retention, less churn and better product experience. It's a great event to learn. Awesome. So I want to shift gears one more time and really talk about leadership. That's really kind of the focus of the series that we've been doing in tough times. Call for great leadership and it's really an opportunity for great leaders to show their stuff and let the rest of us learn. You have a really fantastic style. You know, I'm a huge fan. We're social media buddies, but you're very personable and you're very kind of human. I guess is really the best word in your communications. You've got ton of frequency, ton of variety, but really most of it has kind of this human thread. And I wonder if you can share kind of your philosophy behind social because I think a lot of leaders are afraid of it. I think they're afraid that the risk reward for saying something stupid is not worth the benefit of saying okay things. And I think also a lot of leaders are afraid of showing some frailty, showing some emotion. Maybe you're a little bit scared. Maybe we don't have all the answers. And yet you've really, you're not afraid at all. And I think it's really shines in the leadership activities and behaviors and things you do day in and day out. So how do you think about it? What's your strategy? Yeah, it's really interesting you asked Jeff because I'm in a group of CEOs that get together on a regular basis. And I'm going to be leading a session on social media for CEOs. And honestly, when I was putting together, I was like, it's 2020. Does that still need to exist? But somehow there is this barrier. And I think it's, I'll talk more about it. I think the barrier isn't just about social media. It's just about how a CEO wants to present herself or himself into the world. And I think to me that the three things to ask yourself are first of all, why? Like, why do you want to be on social media? Why do you want to communicate to the outside, right? That you should have a why you should have, hopefully you enjoy it, but also you're connecting from a business perspective with your customers. And for us, it's been a huge benefit to really be able to connect with our customers. And then kind of who are you targeting, right? So I actually think an important thing to think about is it's okay to have a micro audience. You know, I don't have millions of Twitter followers like Lady Gaga, but within the world of SaaS and customer success and retention, you know, I probably have a decent number. And that means that I can really connect with my own specific audience. And then what? So the what is really interesting because I think there's a lot of non-obvious things about it's not just about your business. So, you know, I can tweet about customer success and retention and I do, but also the what about you as an individual, what's happening to your family, what's happening in the broader industry, in my case of SaaS, what's happening in the world of, you know, leading through COVID-19, all the questions you've asked, Jeff, are in this lens. And then that gets you to the final, which is the how. And I think the how is the most important. It's basically whether you can embrace the idea of being vulnerable. It's, you know, there's a famous Ted talk by Bernay Brown. She talks about vulnerability is the greatest superpower for leaders. I think the reason a lot of people have a hard time in social media is they have a hard time really being vulnerable and just saying, well, I'm just a human being just like all of you. I'm a privileged human being. I've a lot of things that luckily kind of came my way, but I'm just a human being. I get scared, I get anxious, I get lonely, all those things just like all of you, you know, and really being able to take off your armor of, oh, I'm a CEO. And then when you do that, you are more human, right? And it's like, this goes back to this concept of human first business. There's no work persona and home persona that's just you. And I think it's surprising when you start doing it and I started maybe seven, eight, nine years ago, it's like, wow, the world wants more human leaders. They want you to just be yourself to talk about your challenges that I had the kids when we got to 13,000 registrations for Pulse everywhere, they pied me in the face and the world wants to see CEOs being pied in the face. Probably that one for sure. That's a guaranteed crowd pleaser. CEOs being pied in the face. But, you know, they want to see what you're into outside of work and the pop culture you're into and they want to see the silly things that you're doing. They want you to be human, right? And so I think if you're willing to be vulnerable, which takes some bravery, it can really, really pay off for your business. But I think also for you as a person. Yeah. I think it's so insightful and I think, you know, people are afraid of it for the wrong reasons because it is actually going to help people. It's going to help your own employees as well. Get them to know you better. And you touched on another concept that I think is so important that I think a lot of people miss as we go from kind of the old broadcast world to more narrow casting, which is touching your audience and developing a relationship with your audience. So we have a concept here at theCUBE that one is greater than 1% of a hundred. You know, why go with the old broadcast model and just spray and you know, you hope you have these really ridiculously low conversion rates to get to that person that you're trying to get to versus just identifying that person and reaching out directly to those people and having a direct engagement and a relative conversation within the people that care. And it's not everybody, but as you said, within the population that cares about it, you know, it's meaningful and they get some value out of it. So it's a really kind of different strategy. So you, you're not only prolif, I mean, you don't always get lost about, but you are super prolific. So you got a bunch of projects that are just hitting today. So I've just, as we're getting ready to sit down, I see you just have a book came out. So tell us a little bit about the book that just came out. Sure, yeah, it's funny. I need to get my physical copy too at my home. I've got, so a few just for context, five years ago, we released this first book on customer success, which you can kind of see here. It's actually become, it's surprisingly really, really popular in this world of SaaS and customer success. And it ties Jeff to what you just said, which is you don't need to be the book that everyone in the world reads. You need to be the book that everyone in your world reads, right? And so this book turned out to be that, you know, thousands of company management teams and CEOs and software and SaaS Reddit. And so we originally, when this came out, it was just kind of an introduction to what we call customer success. Basically, how do you retain your customers for the long-term? How do you get the more value and how do you get them to use more of what you've, they've bought and eventually spend more money with you. And that's a mega trend that's happening. We decided that we needed an update. So the second book is called Customer Success Economy, just came out literally today. And it's about, it's available on Amazon. And it's about the idea that customer success started in tech companies, but it's now gone into many, many industries like healthcare, manufacturing, services. And it started with a specific team called the Customer Success Management Team. But now it's affecting how companies build products, how they sell, how they market. So it's sort of this book is kind of a handbook for management teams on how to apply customer success to your whole business. And we call it Customer Success Economy because we do think the future of the economy isn't about marketing and selling transactional products, but it's about making sure what your customers are buying is actually delivering value for them, right? That's better for the world, but it's also just like necessary because your customers have the power now. You and I have the power to decide how we're going to transport ourselves, whether it's buying a car or ride share and in the old world when we can leave our house. And we have the power to decide how we're going to stay in a city, whether it's a hotel or Airbnb or whatever. And so customers have the power now. And if you're not driving success, you're not going to be able to keep those customers. And so customer success economy is all about that. Yeah. And for people that are familiar with Gainsight, obviously there's lots of resources that they can go. They should go to the show in a couple of weeks, but also I think the interview that we did at PagerDuty, I think you really laid out kind of a great definition of what customer success is. And it's not CRM, it has nothing to do with CRM. CRM is tracking leads and tracking ops. It's not customer success. So people can also check that. I want to shift gears again a little bit because you also have your blog Metaphysical that came out and you just came out again recently with a new post. I don't know when you must have an army of helper writers, but you talk about something that is really top of mind right now and everyone that we get on theCUBE, especially big companies that have the benefit of a balance sheet with a few bucks in it, say we want to help our customers. You want to help our people be safe, obviously that's first, but we also want to help our customers. Nobody ever really says what exactly does that mean? And it's pretty interesting, you lay out a bunch of things that are happening in the SaaS world, but I jumped on, I think it's number 10 of your list, which is how to think about helping your customers. And you give some real specific kind of guidance and guidelines and definitions, if you will, of how do you help our customers through these tough times? Yeah, it's a great, I'll summarize for the folks listening, that one of the things we observed is in this terrible tough times right now, your customers are in very different situations. And first, simply, we thought about three categories, right? So the companies that we call category one, which are unfortunately adversely affected by this terrible crisis, but also by the shutdown itself. And that's hotels, restaurants, airlines, and you can put other folks in that example. What do those customers need? Well, they probably need some financial relief and you have to figure out what you're going to do there and that's a hard decision. And they also just need empathy, right? It's not easy in the stress level that they have as massive. Then you've got on the other extremes, a small number of your customers might be doing great despite this crisis or maybe even because of it because they make video conferencing technology or remote work technology or they make stuff for virtual or telemedicine. And those folks actually are likely to be super busy because they're just trying to keep up with the demand. So what they need from you is time and help. And then you have the people in between. Most companies, right? Where they're maybe a mix of, you know, some things going well, some don't. And so what we recommended is think about your strategy not just inside out what you want but outside in what those clients need. And so as an example, you might think about in that first category, financial relief, the second category, the companies in the middle, they may need like, they may not be willing to spend more money but they may want to do more stuff. So maybe you unlock your product, make it available so they can use everything in your suite for a while. And maybe in that third category, they're willing to spend money but they're just really busy. So maybe you offer services for them or things to help them as they scale. Yeah. So before I let you go, I just want to get your reaction to one more, you know, a great leader. And as you can tell, I love, I love great leaders and studying great leaders is back when I was in business school, we had Dave Potrick who at that time was the CEO of Schwab come and speak. And he's a phenomenal speaker. If you ever get a chance to see him speak. And at that point in time, Schwab had to reinvent their business with online trading and basically kill, you know, their, their, their call in brokerage for online brokerage. And I think that they had a fixed price in 1999, whatever it was this back in the late 90s, but he was a phenomenal speaker. And we finished and he had a dinner, a small dinner with a group of people. And we just said, David, you are a phenomenal speaker. Why? How? Why are you so good? And he goes, you know, it's really pretty simple. As a CEO, I have one job is to communicate. And I have three constituencies. I kind of have the street and the market. I have my internal people. And then I have my customers and my ecosystem. And so he said, you know, I, and he's a wrestler. He said, you know, I treated it like wrestling. I hired a coach. I practiced my moves. I did it over and over. And I, and I embraced it as a skill. And, and it just showed so brightly. And it's such a contrast to people that get wrapped around the axle with their ego or, or whatever. And, and I think you're such a shiny example of someone who, you know, over communicates arguably, you know, in terms of getting the message out, getting people on board and letting people know what you're all about, what the priorities are and where you're going. And it's such a, it's such a sheer or such a bright contrast to the people that don't do that that I think it's so refreshing. And you do it in a fun and novel and in your own personal, personal way. That's so, that's awesome to hear that story. He's an inspirational leader and I've studied him for sure. And I, but I hadn't heard the specific story and I totally agree with you. And communication is not something you're born with. Honestly, you might know this, Jeff or not. I, as a kid, I was super lonely. I didn't really have any friends that I was one of those kids just didn't fit in. So I was not the one they would pick to be on stage in front of thousands of people or anything else, but you just do it over and over again and you try to get better and you find, I think a big thing is finding your own voice, your own style. I'm not a super formal style. I try to be very human and authentic. And so finding your style that works for you, I agree. It's completely learnable. Yeah. Well, Nick, thank you. Thanks for taking a few minutes. I'm sure you're super, super busy getting ready for the show in a couple of weeks, but it's always great to catch up and really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and insights with us. Thank you, Jeff. It's an honor. All right. He's Nick, Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.