 Okay, good afternoon My name is Josh coin. I'm a partner at Kleiner Perkins We're a global venture capital firm that tries to find technology startup founders that we think have a shot at making history And I'm lucky enough to be on stage with one of them Bob and Shaw the CEO and co-founder of MoveWorks So today we have a great conversation plan for you all really around all things AI and company building We'll be talking about how MoveWorks incorporates LLMs into its platform How MoveWorks operates its scale as a generative AI company But before all of that I think it's really helpful context to talk about MoveWorks as a company So maybe Bob and I can turn it over to you. Can you tell the audience about what MoveWorks does? Sure, well Josh. Thanks for for being here with me and pleasure to meet everyone MoveWorks were a series C company raised about 300 million dollars in capital over the last seven years About 550 employees across the United States, Canada London and India In terms of you know what our product does so we're an enterprise copilot that employees use to get help to find Information to take action across a variety of different business systems So if you think about chat GPT and what it does in terms of you know finding information and reformatting that and answering questions Imagine something like that But for the enterprise that has all of the context of your business policy your rules Different systems of record that you use and take advantage of and it brings all those together So that employees have a single interface across all of the different business systems essentially a generative AI help desk across topics like IT HR facilities finance and and the like awesome So I thought a fun place to start for this conversation was to focus on what's become an increasingly Buzzy word and that word is co-pilot We have seen companies both large and small talk about launching some permutation of a generative AI co-pilot How do you from MoveWorks perspective? How do you think about differentiating in what is increasingly a noisy and crowded world of AI co-pilots? Yeah Well, look, I think we know that there have been a lot of announcements this year Microsoft has five different co-pilots Salesforce has five co-pilots and the world is slowly evolving to everyone providing a co-pilot as an extension to their core platform And I think our view of the world is that there will be a mass proliferation of these co-pilots all across these different applications in a sense you'll have the desktop version You may have a mobile version But you'll also have a co-pilot that you can leverage and use as a way to sort of extend that user experience and the product And so, you know as we see that world emerging You know we ourselves have been looking at how we play a role as this thing evolves Now if you think about your mobile phone You know you have lots of apps on there probably a hundred fifty maybe three hundred apps But there's only so many apps that sit on your home page and the job of any Organization the goal that we have is we want to be on that home page of your Essentially new set of co-pilots that you use so our product is is thought through in terms of it being a Independent co-pilot that sits across all of these different systems that employees can talk to employees can ask questions from and then we actually Then coordinate Getting that information through these systems of record sometimes talking to other co-pilots So one thing that you'll start to see is this world of co-pilots becomes quite noisy is Is the ability for co-pilots to talk to co-pilots now? We're not there yet because most of these co-pilots aren't very good and you'll still continue to see that some will be great Some will use on a daily basis some you'll use once and never use again But those that continue to persist and companies continue to invest in will see that sort of collaboration Across these ecosystems because ultimately we're all here to solve solve these different problems But to serve the same end user at the end of the day Awesome. I look forward to the slush co-pilot. Hopefully be launching next year You mentioned Microsoft and Salesforce launching co-pilots and there's been increasing rhetoric that we're hearing that co-pilots is for the incumbent It's a sustaining advantage. It is not a disruptive advantage for startups like what's your reaction when you hear that? I think that's like absolutely incorrect in sort of its premise because You do have this incredible Force of these incumbencies and especially in the last year in 2022 with rapid inflation Businesses were under tremendous pressure to reduce costs and one of the ways you reduce costs is you Essentially, you know consolidate on a single vendor or on fewer vendors than you had before and so there is there is that fact Which is these folks have their incumbency and they're protecting that but when it comes to the co-pilot One of the strategies that we've taken is to really be this Independent co-pilot. We don't have a bias right if you think about every other co-pilot It has a preference for you to use their system of record their tools As a basis for how you do business and that's great But when you have to do things across different systems those co-pilots become ineffective and essentially the role that a startup has Is you're not tied to the Microsoft ecosystem You're not tied to the workday ecosystem or the sales force or the Arriba or the SAP you can live across these and This is the role that I think this whole community can play which is to stitch all of these systems together to give these systems a Uniform interface that employees who really don't know where the information is. They just want the information They just want the action to be taken. They want access to something and you can sort of interoperate between these And I think that's what a lot of vendors and companies Are actually looking for startups to do is to sort of make sense of all of this madness that is sort of you know Coming at them. Yeah, I think that's a really great point bobbin And I actually go so far as to say I think there are a lot of problems out there that are just inherently Cross disciplinary and cross system or cross functions and really the only way to solve these problems Is to have this purview across these many different systems or record And I think that's just a unique advantage that the startups can take advantage of and I'm very powerful position as well That I think you can even start to parlay some really interesting products when you kind of slurping up all this data and to your own type of Model so maybe last question on the co-pilots There's a lot of talk about the future of software UX or user experience or user interfaces Do you think that's gonna be gonna change with AI and co-pilots? Well, I think large language models have shown us a new way to interact with computers But as we've seen over history, we keep adding to the different interfaces They don't necessarily go and replace other interfaces, right? So you may have had a desktop computer and then you bought a laptop and then from the laptop You may have gotten a mobile device and then you may have gotten an iPad and then you may have gotten a watch But these things continue to sort of be a part of your overall workflow and experience And so with large language models being what they are Our belief is that these things will coexist alongside all of the other great interfaces that you have so that what that means is if You're a CRO and you manage a large sales teams You're still gonna log into Salesforce or any CRM and basically do a lot of very sophisticated work there But they'll be use cases Well, you just want to ask a simple question and that might be where a large language model or a Conversational interface is most appropriate. Awesome. So changing topics Let's talk about the enterprise and get a little bit toward the title of our talk here Which is kind of moving from this AI demo to AI product So what's unique about Moveworks in our perspective is that it's one of the few companies that is really serving the largest Enterprises today as an AI company and I know you talked about some of these customers Toyota or Honeywell or Broadcom And the reason why I say that's unique is because when we talk to enterprise executive teams There's a healthy amount of skepticism around generative AI and LLMs and kind of using it in production and security concerns early Really how valuable is this for me? How have you kind of navigated what I'll call the POC chasm Which is that you see a lot of these really great demos on Twitter It's really exciting your mind starts to race but you rarely see that in production inside of these enterprise products How have you instilled the buyer trust amongst some of your enterprise customers? Yeah, it's a it's a deep investment that has to begin almost when you're at the early stages of building a company it starts with security and you know, I've got the former CEO of Symantec on our board and we've always really focused on Investing in that area one thing that customers will look at is they'll evaluate your business and the first thing they'll look for is Do you have a CISO? And maybe your organization is too small But at some point if you have 80 employees 100 employees and if you don't have a CISO I don't really believe that your commitment to security is really that strong And so you'll go through the different investments of getting the attest stations and the ISO Certifications and C star gold and all of these other different elements that will ensure that you are Doing the best that you can with how they're your handling data how you're processing information how you're securing things And so I think that's part of it. We on in our case also went one step further and in the United States There's something called Fed ramp and it's a certification that cloud companies need to have in order to sell to the federal government And so we've been on that journey and these are multi-million dollar investments that we've had to make but Ultimately, they're gonna give us access to whole new markets that we wouldn't have otherwise So I think that is kind of a core You know area that people need to really think about because especially with all of this new AI Talk and capabilities enterprises are very very concerned about what this will mean for their IP and for their data Now the second area I'd say is is customer success and for many organizations customer success feels like an afterthought It's it's something that you know, they do after they get to a certain scale and they under invest in that But we took that as a challenge very early on and we deployed a customer success team that works very closely with each Of these large enterprises to ensure that they're not only using our product in the best ways possible But that we're also delivering on the business case in the business value That was put in front of procurement in the CFO when they acquired our product And I think that's something that you have to be really mindful of because you know if you can sell into a large enterprise You know, it may be time to celebrate But what happens is a year later when you go up for renewal and the procurement person Looks at you and says so what value did you really deliver our business? Even if you have the greatest product that every employee is using which we have the data They will still sit there and grind you down until everything can be demonstrated and proven and so from a customer success standpoint We have, you know, you know Assigned CSM's to every account who manage several million dollars of ARR each And that allows them to really stay close to the customers and to keep nudging the customers and moving them Along this AI spectrum from being sort of, you know first first adopters to really mature organizations So you take a company like Broadcom They started working with us five years ago when we started our product was delivering about 8% of total Resolution meaning we were automatically resolving 8% of all their IT tickets today that number oscillates between 62 and 71% And a lot of that wasn't just the smarts of the AI It was actually being able to talk to more and more systems at Broadcom and be involved with their you know merger with VMware just last week where our system had a big role in Providing support to that massive new user base that came in on one day So the point is is I think it's an ongoing thing It's something you need to build into your into your margin into your business model and especially with AI I think it's going to become a clear differentiator for for any business that has that awesome So when we think about enterprises like enterprise sales is never easy I'm sure for all the folks working at enterprise software companies you get that especially now in the macro environment Has the excitement around AI Change buying patterns or behavior at all in your perspective. Yeah, so There's two things that are kind of diametrically opposed You know chat GPT had such a profound impact on the world in a way that other Technology shifts haven't right the internet slowly emerged, you know cloud slowly emerged But what you had is every CEO in the world Get pinged by their friend or their child that they were using chat GPT And so it rose very quickly to the office of the CEO and when technology rises to the office of the CEO It's really a massive thing that is quite different than when a CMO or a CRO or a CIO is sort of You know working with you on a various technology initiative or project and so From there, obviously if you watch the news and you watch the business articles, right CEOs every day are making promises To the street that they're gonna reduce costs that they're gonna make their business more efficient and that they're gonna grow Using these new tools furthermore with generative AI a lot of companies see this as a clear differentiator Because if their competitors are using generative AI and they are not There's a problem if their competitors are using AI to eke out another three points of margin and they don't Well, guess what the analysts, you know on the public markets will downgrade their stock or will provide a lower multiple Or they won't be as valued as much and so given all of this backdrop CEOs have been really excited about generative AI. They've been engaging large consulting firms And the numbers I've been hearing are just mind-boggling. They're paying these consulting firms a million dollars a month For basic generative AI advice advice that I think everyone here could probably give them You know for for free But it's helping them think through where they want to apply this and what they want to do that trickles down To the CIO the CMO the CTO and all these other, you know Department heads as an initiative that they then have to take on and do okay So all is good, right? It's it's easy, you know business should just you know happen while you're sleeping But no, there's this other countervailing force and that is what we're seeing especially in organizations with 5,000 employees and greater Called the generative AI Council and this is a new phenomenon. This is just shown up in the last seven eight months And these these are groups of people that don't necessarily have a background in AI They've just raised their hand They say we'd like to be part of the J&I Council and their job is to regulate the acquisition of any tool that claims to be AI Into the company and they're looking for things like safety and security and they're they want to make sure that it's it's gonna do The right thing, but they're also looking at this from a larger lens, which is if we're gonna bring this tool in How is that going to impact? You know the business and can it be a tool used by all departments? So there is a greater perspective or need that your product needs to also be applicable not just to one team But to many teams As a result these AI councils, you know can will slow down the selling process We've had to go through extensive efforts with our sales team to give them special Presentations that they can give to AI councils. We've done thought leadership with AI councils We've helped newly formed AI councils learn the playbook of existing AI councils from other companies and essentially you have to pitch them in addition to the department head in addition to the Economic buyer that you might have so it you know while you have an accelerant here You have a decelerant here Hopefully, you know, you can make it work so that the net is is positive for your business Awesome. So maybe as a follow-up to that let's assume I'm an enterprise CIO and my CEO and my board members are telling me you got to adopt gen AI in some capacity Whether it's new tools or something and I look around and I see some pretty cool developer tools I see a vector database and I see some reg or retrieval systems I see a bunch of really cool LMS that I feel like there's a new one popping up every month or two both open source And close source across different modalities like voice and text How do I think about whether I should be building this internally versus buying a third-party AI solution? So I think it's like, you know a kid in the candy store right now Every CIO thinks they can build everything that you know is is out there And I think that's where you're seeing a rush towards a lot of these developer tools and things that nature So that's got to work its way through the cycle people have to go through that emotional journey now What happens though is they start to build these things and especially in our world of Employee support They're like, oh we can go bring this rag tool and we go bring this one piece of automation and look at this demo It's great. We're like great. Well now talk to a hundred systems now deal with this issue How do you deal with this factuality issue? Do you have a fact-checking model on top of these other models? No, we don't do that Well, how do you deal with this hallucination and you start to run through all the things that you've been building in your product and this yeah, I was like, okay Maybe maybe this isn't a build situation now where they should build is for things that are proprietary to their business You know, honey was the customer if they're going to use JNA I to advance, you know some of the you know industrial Products that they create great, but if it comes to something that is Undifferentiated a tool that's being used to support their employees in our case Well, then in that in that scenario It's just much better off for them to partner and to buy than it is to build but it is a journey and I would encourage you to talk to lots of people because there's CIOs who've definitely seen it and Now understand the value of partnering and those that are still kind of Tinkering around and seeing what what can come of these various tools that they're that they're purchasing and maybe if I can Perspective to that just from like the venture capital perspective if you look at most of the technological type of cycles mobile internet AI now What has happened historically is that you've seen this proliferation of applications first and the reason for that is that you need some Type of buyers to help standardize the underlying infrastructure after which these really great infrastructure tools will pop up So today if you talk to a lot of enterprise CIOs, which you do pretty often They'll tell you it feels like building a on quicksand because things just keep changing and some some assumptions You have going in six months ago or 12 months ago that you staffed a team of 20 people on becomes obsolete You know six or 12 months later So you have to be very careful where you're spending your time and where you're making your investments and instead Why not just shoulder that that that labor to a third-party entity like move works to do that for you Because they'll keep up with with all the new kind of applications and an AI models coming out yeah, actually I could make a further comment on that because you know after the last few weeks of Things we've all read in the news, you know a lot of customers came to us and said we're so glad that you work across many different LLM providers and we use of you know roughly in the range of in a hundred to 200 different large language models just to power our application, you know, we use them for different purposes for different reasons, but that sort of you know Ability to be across different providers is a real like value Whereas in theory people knew that that would be a good thing before But after the last few weeks people are like oh, this is actually a really important feature of your application Because if something is not available, you can switch over without there being any downtime Within within our experience of your product And I think that's that's again what enterprise are looking for is simplicity But with also the ability to keep keep the systems up and running no matter what great point So we don't have much time left. Let's maybe transition to you as a founder and a person Can you just talk about so move works as a pretty incredible seven-year journey? Starting in 2016 and today operating with hundreds of employees across the world Like how has that transformation been for you as a CEO to go from a four-person startup to you know hundreds of employees today? I think you know probably nothing is is been I think probably every aspect of my life has changed since since those early days in terms of how I spend my Time where I think about you know what I think about and you know how I perform You know, I think it does change a lot You know, I remember the early days you'd go to lunch with everyone and you'd have time Now with my three other co-founders we barely see each other because we're flying all over the world We're going to different places. We're presenting. We're we're pitching. We're getting involved with with customer Needs and so I think that's been a big change I think also, you know for those of you that are CEOs There's a lot of skills that I've had to learn Skills that I didn't have when I was a when we were for a person startup, you know part of being in this AI space also means being a thought leader and CIOs don't like enterprises don't buy software From from vendors they buy from people and and so they need to know who you are. They need to see you Do presentations they need to have you come in and and talk to their executive team So personally, you know, I had to go through a lot of like personal development early in my in my life when I was a In K-12, you know, I had a hard time speaking I had a lot of stuttering and I didn't raise my hand I didn't talk because I was just afraid that I would sort of stutter and do that and it wasn't until I was about 30 some odd years old that that went away But as a result public speaking was so scary for me so I ended up hiring a speaking coach and then you know to the suggestion of your other partner Mamoon, you know One of our board meetings I also brought in a CEO coach, which I didn't really I've never seen a therapist in my life But it was a really important step in terms of seeing yourself from a different lens thinking about your strategy With someone who isn't in the team Someone who is somewhat disattached from the team And I think these are all kind of exciting, you know changes that one goes through But but they are ones that that if you want to grow with your business If you want to aspire to build an organization like Tony's like we just saw with doordash, right? It requires you to completely You know grow and overhaul who you are as the company grows and overhauls who it is and what it means and what it does So it's it's it's exciting, but it's it's a continuous You know journey of growth mindset Great. So maybe final question to wrap things up. There's a lot of founders in the audience and there's sure there's a lot of employees at startups What advice would you have reflecting back on kind of the last seven years at move works for those that are just getting Started at a startup or maybe even hitting a point of inflection Look, I think You know, it's important that if you if you're on this journey That you recognize that Things will continue to change. I think a lot of people talk about well I don't want the culture to change. No, the culture will change and your survival is going to be based on how rapidly you can accommodate and adapt And so it comes down to how you take care of yourself How you sort of think about your own personal health and and your ability to deal with incredible amounts of stress and stamina But also how you think about you know relegating decisions to other people and how you need to let go So there's there's a lot of different facets there But I would say that you know the personal journey. I think is one of the greatest enablers of startup success It's also one of the biggest reasons why startups end up not going on or not continuing Because it's the people behind it that sort of end up running out of steam running out of energy or really don't Evolve themselves to sort of accommodate the needs of the business terrific with that. I think that is it for us Bob And thank you for the insights and perspectives Josh. Thank you slush