 Hello, everyone. This is Carlos, CEO at Product School. Today, I'm here with Alon Greshev, the Chief Product Officer at GOM. Hey, Alon. Hello there. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you for being on the show. I'm a proud customer of your product, and I love to learn more about the products that we are using. Most of the people who join the podcast are also avid product people, so always welcome an opportunity to get a little deeper. Let's start from the very beginning. I know that you are a serial entrepreneur, but how did you get into, how did you decide to start GOM? Yeah, so I decided to start GOM. I did have a previous company, which we had sold back in 2013. And after leaving that company, I took Sabatical, which I recommend to everybody if you get a chance. It's a good time. And I was exploring many options. I was learning a few markets, learning a little bit, like deep dive into AI, machine learning, and hoping to start a new company. And at some stage, I met Amit, who's now my co-founder and CEO, and he came up with this idea of, let's streamline a lot of the things that are happening within revenue organizations. And I was in the Sabatical for a year, and I was already a little bit bored, so that was a good opportunity to kick it off. Definitely. I'm taking some time off my sound counter in Twitter, but it gives you a new perspective of things. And I wonder, like this being deeper into this idea, what is so unique about it? Because maybe we can start with what it's gone about and what is the differentiator? Because we know there's been technology out there in the market that's been covering some of those use cases before. Yeah, so the notion behind Gong is that if you look at customer-facing people, salespeople, revenue, or professionals in general, most of what they do is could communicate with customers. And when organizations need to understand what's going on, usually the information is stuck in people's heads. Head is not a good place to run analytics on top of or to kind of just understand what's going on. So people invented this idea of a CRM, Customer Relationship Management System, and they were hoping people are just gonna punch data into that CRM. And maybe when we started Gong, that was still like a perception that that could work, but over time people realized it cannot just take ahead and put it inside fields in the CRM. So the idea in Gong, let's replace this with a system that's gonna autonomously collect the video calls, calls, email, text messages and whatnot, all of the communication with customers, using AI machine learning. Hey, we started in 2015, so it wasn't as obvious then. You know, transcribe, understand topics, sentiment, all of these things, and then help both reps, managers, and sort of like CXC level, understand how to coach people right, how to make the right decisions, what to do next, and so on. So there's something very interesting, especially as these platforms grow, which is picking the ideal customer profile. I've seen other companies that focus on support teams. I've seen the clear focus on Gong for the revenue teams. So how do you navigate creating a product that can serve multiple functions within an organization? So our thesis, it was a dilemma. I mean, it still is a dilemma, right? Gong could go either way. I think the dilemma has been all along, you know, do you go horizontal or vertical? My big belief is both from a go-to-market perspective, anybody who's read like Crossing the Chasm, he always talks about, you know, he starts more in sort of a blow-up, but also I think from a product value perspective, just the fact that the main screen is called deals, not, I don't know what it is, like Zoom calls, the fact that you have like deal warnings, like you can build a lot of value. As you go more vertical and more specialized, you can create more value. That's true product-wise, but it's also true AI-wise, right? Because you can have like a generic summary or you can have a revenue-sensitive summary and that's two different things, because kind of if you know what a domain is, you can do much more, much smarter stuff. Then the other dilemma that I've seen in similar companies that require an integration partner, by like Gong in itself is better used when integrated with Salesforce or Zoom or a platform like that. So how do you think about integrating with different platforms while still making sure that you are not just too dependent on one specific platform? It's a great question. I think there is no, almost there's no company who's going to start as the key platform for anything. I mean, when you start, typically there are already, there's some solutions, maybe they're out of, outdated, but they still exist. So usually the idea is like you create a product that is interesting enough that coincides with other businesses and over time you expand and expand and expand and hopefully you're gonna, at one stage, become a platform. Today, like Gong, we started with conversation intelligence, understanding conversations. Now we have a forecasting product. We have a sales engagement product. We have a deal management product. So over time it becomes more and more the central location, but obviously you cannot start with a very wide platform because you can raise the big round A, but you're still not gonna be able to build on the functionality in a year. So it takes time. Yeah, maybe for people who are not fully aware of the scale of your business, can you give us some high level numbers where you guys are at? Yeah, so the company itself is roughly 1,200 people. We serve over 3,500 customers all the way from very small companies.com for the five salespeople or even two salespeople all the way up to Fortune 50 companies with thousands or even tens of thousands of employees. This was arguably one of those Silicon Valley darlings that was turbocharged during the pandemic. You achieved a unicorn, multi-unicorn status and it's really, really impressive, especially trying to penetrate in a category that is relatively crowded, like in terms of the basic functionality, but obviously being able to carve your mission and grow way beyond that. Like I'm looking at your homepage right now, you have so many different solutions. So I want to ask you about that type of motion. How do you get into one of those companies? Classic product that grow, like who are your early champions, who are the people who start getting value first and then how do you ensure that those champions are bringing in other team members into your technology? Yeah, it's a good question. So our go-to market motion is top down because one of the things we do is we collect tons of sensitive information. So we've decided not to try to sort of convince individual sellers to sort of start recording calls because I don't know, legal might want it or not want it. So we sell pretty much top down, chief revenue officer, VP sales, sometimes VP customer success, depending on who the go-to-market person is. And then once they like the idea, that's the usual implementation, typically an ops team. I mean, if the company's big, it's going to be an ops team implementing, rolling it out to maybe one team, two teams, and then growing quite fast. The thing is pretty easy to use, like a few hours if you're up and running. So usually it's pretty easy to expand it beyond one team to the whole organization, but obviously kind of change management while it takes, you know, for a big org, it takes a while, for a small org, it might be within hours. Yeah, and you know, in the day of product and growth where every company, including B2B SaaS companies are trying to find ways for end users to get some value first. How are you thinking about combining that motion with the more classic top down sales approach? Yeah, well, first of all, we'll get to it one day. The company's only seven years in business, so maybe we'll get to it one day. But I think more, what we're trying to do is kind of product-led growth in the sense of like product-led adoption or deep utilization. So the system is going to tell you, how you do this, do that, you know, use that feature, you know, those kind of things. But we've decided to sort of sidestep the need of like try to sell somebody based on a free trial or a 30-day, like a 30-day or limited edition trial. I'm sure we'll get to it as one day, but it does require pretty much like a whole motion around it. And we just have so much on our plate that we decided to focus on, you know, providing more value for every organization and building more products. And it hasn't been a priority so far. And you know what? I think it's a great answer here because first of all, not every company needs to be PLG from the get-go. Like there are definitely examples like on where you can still have extreme success by using other type of motions. In this case, more of a top-down approach. Then the second point you mentioned using product-led, maybe not for initial growth, but for adoption. Think product-led in itself is more than product-led growth and can be applied to different stages of the final. So what I'm hearing here is that even though you might not have like a free trial per se, you still find ways to create expansion and adoption once you are inside the company. Yeah, that's the attempt. But most companies, by the way, the companies we hear about, like the mirrors of the world, the air tables and the Twilio's, eventually they are salespeople because you cannot sell to big organizations without supporting them, providing customer success and whatnot. So I think it's the order of things. But yes, I mean, once you're gonna start at a certain stage to, you know, we've been able to grow this way. So we didn't have, we didn't need to pivot. And the other thing is we sell to salespeople. We don't hate them. A lot of the founders who want to do PLGs because they don't like salespeople and they can't like, they don't want to hire them. So they delay their decision. You know, for us, it was, it's natural. We love those people. I mean, you better love them. You definitely build technology for sales teams. One thing I also want to ask you is about AI. Obviously now everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, although it's not really that new. I started computer science and I had an artificial intelligence class 13 years ago. So what's your take on how AI can be implemented into your portfolio? Yeah, for us, it's pretty natural. I heard there was, yeah, I heard there was something with chat and GPT. Somebody told me they're gonna send me a link. They didn't send it yet. So I don't know whoever. But sort of the, I mean, yes, AI has been around, but I think it's made a huge leap. When we started, part of our bet was it's gonna be much better. Because like recording video conferences, I can do it in Zoom, right? The idea is, can you understand them? And when we started transcription technology was pretty bad, like 30% water rate. Now at the gong, we can do less than 10. And then same with natural language understanding. Can you identify what the conversation is about? Can you summarize it? Can you provide the winning topics, whatever? When we started, it was hard. Now we are actually able to do this. So AI is part of our DNA. Our product is a commercial revenue-centric application of AI. And I think over time, there is a big guidance layer that really is gonna help many, many professionals. And like you're gonna take away them and name tasks, automate them, take away the hard tasks and replace them with advice. But still put the real professionals in control. So not like replacing them, but like guiding them through. In the gong example, we highlight like deals at risk for them. So it's like, yes, you can go through 100 deals or you can go through the 10 that the machine says these are ones you should pay attention to. You're still gonna have to win them. We're not gonna replace the sales rep, but making their work much more efficient. And I think efficiency is the key for many of those AI applications. So are you saying that AI alone is not going to close this for you? Not yet, not yet. I'm still waiting for AI to drive my car, which people have been telling me it's gonna happen in five years. And that was like 15 years ago, so still waiting. I'm joking, obviously. And I think that's a good reminder for sales, people for product people to realize that this is an amazing opportunity to augment our impact. I don't see these technologies replacing us by any means. But the thing is, you guys have been using AI before AI was pulled, right? And I use the product. One of the moments for my sales team was to be able to identify insights from conversations without having to listen to the entire call. So what are other use cases that can help users get to those aha moments? So I think each time you replace something that is, the way I would look at it is sort of like, if something can be done 10X faster using AI, it's a aha moment. It becomes from quantitative to qualitative. An example you kind of brought up is a good one. Like, instead of listening to a 30 minute call, you can get your answer in a minute. Yes, it's 30X faster, but that makes it from not doable to doable. So I think all of those aha moments, in our example, I mentioned the risky dealers example, it's like you can sift for 100 dealers, it's gonna take you two hours, the system's telling you in 20 seconds. Now we are launching a sales engagement product and what it does for you, it tells you what, like even communication, like you got this email, you didn't respond in two days, here's a template for you to use to respond to. And again, that replaces thrifting your inbox, you take a 10 minutes, makes it 10 seconds. So the way I look at it, when AI can kind of do the 10X factor or create a summary for you, like same idea, you don't need to sort of read five emails, you just like take three bullets. So whenever AI can make it 10X faster, of course, even more is better, and then it becomes a big aha moment. I mean, I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile and I see that when you started the company, your title was Chief Technology Officer and now it's Chief Product Officer. Can you guide me through the rationale behind that and how is your life different now that you are overseeing product? Oh, the life is much simpler. My team right now is about 70 people and we hired a Chief R&D Officer here. He has like 250. So his life is much more complex. So my life is simpler. And when we started, I mean, eventually you start a company, right? My partner and CEO is kind of did sense in marketing, ID technology and product. I've done both of my career. So I kind of was able to sort of like pretend to do both. And then at some stage, we've just became big enough so that we decided that you need to split it. I think it requires oftentimes a different skill of like managing a relatively large number of people which is typically the engineering play. Then kind of interfacing more with customers and vision and product roadmap, which is the product play. So that's how we split it up. And I hear you mention R&D. Is that part of technology or is that a separate function? So for us, it's like two different functions. So I run the product team and then my colleague, Ohadis kind of runs the engineering organization. We both reported a CEO. So Pierce, yeah. I'm not like a big fan of running like a 300 person organization myself, just not my cup of tea. And I think it's a good reminder like this went from literally two people to or a thousand people and their skills, the changes that are required. It's just very different. I think find removing ego from the equation and try to find the role that creates the most impact, keeping in mind the best interest of the company versus just overseeing more people or having a cooler title. I think it's so underrated and so critical in order for companies to really grow at their maximum potential. 100% agree, yeah. So within your current product org, how are you guys structured? I've seen so many different flavors. I always love to learn more about your own org chart. Yeah, it's kind of funny because I typically, I speak with like my peers, like the industry of course, like every couple of weeks. And then I kind of, we obviously compare notes and it tends to be pretty similar. So I have an analytics team. I have UX team. I have Ops team, which is pretty standard and I have kind of the product groups. Right now, all of them report to me. So I don't have like a VP product management. So I'm also the acting VP product management. And then there is a go to market, product go to market team, which is kind of owns all of the, taking products to markets, kind of working in conjunction with the sales product marketing and customer success to actually make kind of product successful. So these are the kind of the main functions there's a couple of more, but these are the main ones. So for your products and see you have obviously a portfolio of different products. So do you have a PM or product leader overseeing each of the products or how are those products being integrated with each other? Exactly. So it's pretty much, you know, again, it's never a hundred percent. There's always exceptions, but in general, there's a group product manager for each one of the products. And there's one for the more data left platform one. And each one of them owns a product pretty much. And again, it doesn't have to be a skew because there's a little bit more skews than products, but just generally speaking a product. So now you have a portfolio which makes it even more interesting. This is obviously I can remind them would be different roadmaps per product, but ultimately you are overseeing the entire roadmap for the company. So what levers or frameworks do you use to make your own decisions in terms of what features of products to prioritize? Yeah. I think I one posted like a LinkedIn posted that my best decision decision tool is a coin. You flip it and it always gives you an answer very fast. And I think it is underrated in the same way that you said other things were underrated. I mean, truthfully, I think a lot of it is actually, I mean, at the product level, a lot of it is delegation. If you trust the people they're going to make the right decisions. So I don't tend to get involved with making decisions for those products. Obviously in the loop, but they're kind of not as involved. I think the strategy is kind of the more, like you spend some time on, you figure out where the market is heading, if relevant where competition is heading, of course where customers want you to head and sort of blend all of it together. And you kind of understand how does the portfolio look like? And then once you figure out you will invest in this area, then I tend to kind of have like, if possible, like have a strong leader kind of drive the more specific roadmap. And the size we're in, I can unfortunately, very unfortunate. I love it, but I cannot be in the detail of like the specific functionality of each product. I miss it, but I still can't. I miss it too. And I think this is something I struggled with, especially at the early stages, as I realized, I'm not the only PM in the room anymore and I'm supposed to be doing other things. So for you also, especially as you have many, many PMs how do you allow yourself to obviously have an influence when you believe that it's important versus empowering product leaders so they can also call their own shots? Yeah, so I think first of all, the decision criteria is the customer. And I think that's like obviously a cliche, but it is true. So if you're not sure, just go to talk to a few customers and get their opinion. In our case, we also use gong. So we have all of the sales conversation there. So you can always like pick after the fact you don't even have to necessarily every single conversation to yourself. So if the idea is like empowerment comes first, the PM, not even a group PM is gonna make most of the decisions. The group product manager is gonna fine tune them. And then sometimes there is like very blurry and maybe areas with a lot of ambiguity. And that's where I typically step in a little bit more, try to help create clarity. Hopefully I'm not doing it the other way sometimes, maybe that too. And we're not sure that there's a debate like the PM is gonna think this, I might strongly think otherwise, they're probably gonna know better than me, but we're gonna talk to a few customers and figure out like where is the misunderstanding. Usually if you speak enough with customers, the solution becomes pretty clear. One thing that I learned as we grew our business and the whole product management industry grew is that now there's a career ladder. It wasn't that clear back in the day. Like a lot of people want to become a product manager. And that's it. And now we're seeing an evolution from PM all the way up to Chief Product Officer. The Chief Product Officer is at the table at the C-suite. In many cases we're seeing companies whose former CEO is now the CEO, which I think it's great. So in your case, what would you say are the things that you do as a C-P-O that maybe a group product manager doesn't do? I think there's a couple of things. First of all, it's kind of managing people at scale is its own like trade or needs. So just like my team is over 70. Just like making sure that the team is kind of collaborating and works kind of together and stuff. This is something I do as an executive, not just as Chief Product Officer. In terms of Chief Product Officer, it's a lot about kind of working with, as you said, the kind of seat at the table. It's sort of working with the executive team to understand like, what are the key things that are holding us as a company, not just as a product. So for example, in this economy, some of our customers who might be technology companies are not doing as well as they did the year ago. So what do we need to do at the product level to kind of help them out? Is there something we need to do? So just as an example, when the economy started going south, we created a feature in the product that helped them understand their own customer sentiment around the economic kind of risk and we created this pulse thing that gives you indication. So it's more like at a strategic level be able to align both inbound and outbound product with the rest of the org and then orchestrate the whole org around the same goals, just be able to collaboratively define them and orchestrate everybody around them. So otherwise it's just, that's pretty much it. It feels the day though, unfortunately. That's for sure. Well, let's talk about recruiting for a second. There's so many philosophies about that. I've seen great PMs come from different backgrounds. So I want to know more about how you go about recruiting product leaders. Yeah, so we have a good mix. We have, I think probably four or five who have been CEOs in the past. We probably have four or five who have been engineers. We have people who have kind of background more like industrial engineering and other things. I don't think there's a recipe around background. We have gone to hire senior people and experienced people. It's very, very hard for us to sort of like grow at a pace we operate to kind of grow inexperienced people. We do it, but very, very, not a lot. What I found was more telling than others even like more than a resume or not. We, I'm a big believer in just giving people like a real life assignment. It's like, hey, take a look at this issue. Just tell me, kind of present to me like you would if you were an employee of the company. It's going to be crap because they don't know the business of course. So it's like make any assumption you want to just like tell me how you'd think about it. And of course the specific questions are going to depend on the role. And what I found is that like a simulating a real situation or product decision or debate that we have in the company gives a lot of indication around how that person operate in real life. And of course there's many other things around, you know people management, reference checks and other things. But that to me is the, oftentimes the deciding criteria. Then when you are trying to, to hire maybe more entry level folks, what type of internal mobility opportunities do you have or how do you think about testing people who might not have the product experience or background but do you still believe that they have the potential to become great? So in the product organization like kind of the ops team there's entry level things like, you know even things like, you know coordinate customer interviews. So that's maybe entry level. And then there's like aggregate and arrange customer research because more product research kind of role. So there are kind of various roles and then you can transition to sort of an entry level product management role. Typically it might not even be like a customer facing application might be an internal application or a part of the application. And the idea is that with the right mentorship over time you can grow and become more senior. But I don't think there's like a panacea or magic bullet you just have to go through the motion enough with enough strong people around you and see how it's being done. Cause there is no, you know you obviously kind of do products schools but you know, you don't just get to do like a three year college degree in products. This doesn't happen, right? So you have to sort of coach people quite a lot. Totally. It doesn't happen. And I believe it's also not necessary. I think with the right experience in other areas and the right drive and the right opportunity in an environment that fosters your growth you can definitely acquire the specific skills faster. And that's been our thesis since the beginning. Now I want to talk to you about the future. Obviously Gongru quickly and I'm looking at the different solutions you have for product teams for sales teams or marketing teams. What's next for you? What is that grand vision for Gong? So there's two grand visions. One is for revenue teams become the one stop shop where they're going to do everything using Gong. And it is the big reason why I do do this is because the system understands what's happening and can give you advice based on real life versus on some database or CRM fields or whatnot. So that's maybe the two, three year vision and then automate a lot of the stuff, right? So whatever can be automated. I think beyond that is kind of thinking how you can apply this to different industries. So we are running like a pilot right now with recruiting turns out there's lots of similarities in selling and recruiting. And the idea is there are many other applications that can be automated or streamlined using the fact that a lot of the best practices and knowledge comes from the conversations. And then you can kind of rethink how things are being done versus punching data into a computer having autonomous applications that understand and kind of guide you through the next steps. Yeah, I mean, are you saying that conversations are not just between salespeople and customers or recruiters and candidates? That might happen one day as well. I think, obviously I think most of us would still prefer to talk to a person but maybe the next generation might feel otherwise, who knows? Maybe we can have two chat bots talking to each other one day. Yeah, sometimes when we talk with customers there's two bots on the call and I'm waiting for them to start negotiating. Well, Adrian, it's been awesome to talk with you. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for inviting me. Have a great day.