 Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage ATG, brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and Bellevue, Washington. Our first time here, second annual Smartsheet Engage and we're very pleased to be joined. Welcoming back to theCUBE, Mark Bader, the CEO of Smartsheet. Mark, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, good to be with you. Great job on the keynote. Thank you, appreciate it. So you can see the buzz behind us. We just got out of the keynote where you guys kicked it out. There was a couple of things Jeff and I were talking about that were unique that I haven't seen very much of at all in all the keynotes that we go to. One, you started off with an explorer who had a very empowering, enlightening message all about communication. And then, something that you did that I thought was really cool that I don't think I've ever seen is you actually, during your keynote, went into the audience where you have about 2,000 customers here representing 1,100 companies across 20 countries and just ad-libbed, hey guys, tell me about your company. How is Smartsheet empowering you? And as you said, that was all natural. Yeah, and I think part of making it real for somebody is giving it something that's relatable. So we started off the conference, as you said, with Ed Viesters, arguably the most famous accomplished climber in the world today. And he talked about the importance of communication and preparation and teamwork and clear decision making in a context that was, I mean, spectacularly visual, right, this mountain and those climbing shots. So people relate to that. And then when you introduce those contexts in the business setting, it's like, oh yeah, this applies to me, it applies to all of us. So the notion of getting into the crowd in a non-rehearsed way is to really get people comfortable with, hey, I can share something. I can share an experience. And there's no one right answer. It's my experience. And that's why you're here. As you said in your keynote, we know this as well. If companies aren't designing technology for the users, what's the point? Yeah, you're right. And one of the things I tried to highlight was when you say for the user, it's not just for the user, the end user, like developed by a few people, spread to everybody, but it's empowering each and every person to say, hey, I want to do something more transformational. I want to manage, automate, scale it. I don't want to be given that solution by someone. I want to do it. And there are hundreds of millions of people who have the appetite and the interest and the need for it. So that's what we're trying to sell into. You know, Mark, we go to so many shows, right? And everyone's chasing innovation. How do we get more innovative, especially big companies, right? And you did share two really interesting messages. One was your kind of core message, empowering everyone to improve how they work. So like you said, not just the top level decision makers, not down in the developer weeds, but everybody up and down this stack. And then you shared a Steven Covey quote, really talking about how do people keep them engaged? And the way people are engaged is that they feel they're empowered to do something for their clients and their customers. So such an important piece. And I think it's easy to talk about harder to execute, but what is the answer to innovation? Giving more people the data, the tools, and the power to take all that and do something for their customers and thereby unlock all this tremendous value that you already have in your four doors. Absolutely, and I think the point of unlocking, so we have, you have 100% of your workforce. If you empower only 4.3% of them, for instance the developers of your group, you're leaving so much opportunity on the table. And again, you don't get that unlock or that innovative spirit by just using something. You have to live with it, you have to work with it, you have to wrestle with it. And through that, innovation occurs. Ideas get generated. So if you can get that ideation happening within them, at the midpoint of your company, not the top 5%, huge opportunity. I think you were even quoted in the press release, maybe around the IPO that happened a few months ago. Congratulations. Thank you. And saying that maybe naysayers in the beginning when you were a company of six, as you were talking about during your keynote, people thought, you're going to build this on a spreadsheet construct and you said, but 400 to 500 million people know that construct. So you're going into an audience of knowledge workers of which there's a massive percentage, designing something for business, lines of business, IT, finance, marketing, sales, who actually need to work with that. These are, we're not talking to us about APIs and developer and code speak. You're building this for a very large percentage of the population. We are. And I think when we talk about serving a large population, it's tempting to say, well, they can't handle much. Let's go lowest common denominator. Let's give this something super, super simple. The problem is with simple, you don't always get value. So how do you combine relevance and comfort and understanding with capability? And the product's changed a lot since the early days. It's no longer just a grid. We have dashboards, we have forms, we have card view, we have all these elements that are now brought forward. But one of the things that we've always respected from the beginning is don't throw away what somebody understands and is comfortable with. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the best, but they know it. And people are very nervous about just jettisoning the things they know. So like embrace it. And then what we had talked about earlier was, how do you really listen to that customer's signal and say, okay, I'm comfortable, I like this, but I want more? And that ability to respond to that request, I think, has really helped define who Smartsheet is today, 12 years later. The other piece you talked on is, and it kind of segues off of that, is people have systems already in place. They have tools that they use every day, right? There's this kind of competition for the top layer of the desktop. But the reality is we have many, many applications that we have to interact with every day. You guys are really taking a co-optition approach with all these existing stuff, where it fits, where it's working to your point, they're already using it, make it work, integrate with. Don't try to rip and replace all these other systems that are in there. Yeah, and I think you come across some people in life who want everything. I need total, complete presence. And you're really discounting what people appreciate. And I think when you take the view of, I'm going to listen to my client, I'm going to listen to what they love and understand. And I'm going to let them articulate how they want it to work. We are in a very diverse, multi-app world today. If you actually march in somewhere and say, yeah, all those decisions you made, those were the wrong decisions, you should trust me on everything, you'll be walked out of the building in about 4.2 seconds. So we're really living that philosophy. And I think in great partnerships with Google and Microsoft and Slack and Tableau and others, we're able to actually demonstrate that. Yeah, and then to take it from the concept to reality, a great demo. I'm sure you didn't have this plan a couple weeks ago was, you know, you talked about the state of North Carolina and the preparation and the response to the hurricane Florence and that they were very quickly able to build a super informative dashboard to let everybody know who needed to know what they needed to know. And how long did that take to put together? It's amazing. That was under 24 hours. 24 hours. And the difference here is the difference between building or developing something and configuring something. So and the difference there is when you actually build something from scratch, we have bare dirt. We need to put a foundation, we need to build the house, we need to shingle it, we need to insulate. That takes a long time. So how about we go to a house that exists, let's change the colors of the blinds, let's put it into certain sofa, let's furnish it and the configuration element versus construction that gives people velocity. Now what they also want is, they want to actually put their own texture to it, their own, they want to make it their own. So the Department of Transportation dashboard that they produced for FEMA and the Coast Guard in the state governor's office, it didn't look like anybody else's dashboard. It was tailored, but it was so quick to build. And the great thing there was so many people who accessed that site for information on runway status and power and fuel, they could focus on the citizens as opposed to what the heck is going on in the ground. Right. And that provides a lot of purpose to our team when we see our product used that way. And you talked about speed just a minute ago and speed obviously, every enterprise of whatever size needs to move incredibly quickly to gain competitive advantage to increase revenues, et cetera. You guys have some really very eye-catching statistics that you're enabling customers to achieve. I read enabling an average business leader to save 300 hours a year, 60,000 hours a year saved across an average organization. That's a big impact. How is speed a factor there? Yeah, I think speed I look at in a couple of dimensions. One is a time saved, but there's also an element which is speed of experimentation. So we go into an initiative and we say, we have this amazing idea and we're going to have all these returns we think. Well, not everyone in the Betsy place actually makes it or actually yields. So if you can empower a team to more quickly experiment, configure, try things, see what works and then double down behind those. If you can run five times as many plays as your competitor, you have five times as many chances to find that next winner. And so when we talk about speed, it's again velocity of decision making, saving time, but also organizationally, how can you unlock those possibilities? Part of that also was enabling cultural change, which is not easy. It's essential for digital transformation. We talk about that at every event and it's true, but how do you put that in action? You and I were chatting off camera about one of your customers that is a 125 year old oil and gas company. How do you enable them to kind of absorb and digest a culture of experimentation so that they can really move their business forward as quickly as they need to? Well, I think there's a great quote that one of my mentors early gave me, and it was, all hat, no cattle. And the hell had no cattle refers to the person who talks about how big their ranch is where's your herd? So you can talk a lot, but you have to demonstrate it. So when they go in and there was another gentleman who talked about this idea of transforming their implementations across 300 project managers. And the quote was, we're going to get you up and running in two to three weeks. And he goes, never, no chance. Now he ended up working with us and we proved it to him. And when you get a win like that and you can demonstrate speed and impact, those things carry a lot of weight in organizations, but you have to show evidence. And when you talk about why we're landing and expanding in some of the world's largest brands, it's not because we're just talking a big game, it's because you're able to demonstrate that those wins and those lead to further growth. Right, and then you've talked off another with the catalyst. But even more, I like the concept of a point guard. Good point guards make everybody else on the team better. They do a little bit on their own, they hit a couple key shots, but they make everybody else better. And you're seeing that in terms of the expansion and just in the way you go to market is, you don't come in that usually has a big enterprise deal that I don't think you come in, you come in small, you come in a group level, and then let the catalyst, let those point guards build success within their own team and then branch it out to a broader audience. Yeah, and I'm a big believer in, I don't think people can be classified into catalyst and non-catalyst. That's a very sort of blunt force approach. I view it as you have catalysts, you have catalysts who haven't been unlocked, and then you have people who aren't catalysts. But very often that point guard is going to activate the power forward, the center, and holy smokes, where did that come from? And what we see is, when we see this growth happen in companies, those players around that point guard get lit, get sparked, and once they're sparked, it's on. And then we see that growth happen for a long, long time. We saw some of that in those quotes. We did. I forget what you was talking about. The queen of the world? Keep out of her life. The queen of the world, please. That's a big statement. That's empowerment right there. It is empowerment. And the one where I tweeted this, one of the quotes, I won't share this product name, but it can actually, it seems smart, but she can help reduce workplace anxiety. Exactly, exactly. Which everybody needs. So it's been six months since the IPO. You have doubled your attendance in your second year only at Engage up here in Bellevue, Washington. What are some of the exciting things that you announced this morning that have been fueled by the momentum that the IPO is, I imagine, ignited? Yeah, a couple of big things is we, at every tech conference, you're going to hear about new capabilities. Here are new bells and whistles and features and capabilities we have. But what we're hearing from customers, they also want us to frame those capabilities and things that are consumable. So not everybody wants to configure or build as we talked about earlier. They say, I have a need, it's specific to this area, and do you have something forming? More turnkey. Like that gentleman I said, two to three weeks to turn around this whole implementation team. So those we refer to as accelerators. So we announced a few new accelerators today in the sales realm, in terms of being able to better manage engagement plans with prospects and clients. On sophisticated deals, it's a very common thing. And the other piece that I think is really important is not just talking about business users, which is a huge focus for us, but also how do we better support IT in their needs to regulate, control, have visibility into how smart sheet is used? So those were a couple of highlights. And then the ability to give people more controls over how they share their data. There have been some issues in the news recently where people have shared too broadly. They've led that side to issues. So we're hearing from our customers, give us more fine-gated controls and confidence over how our corporate information is shared with others. Well Mark Maynard, I wish we had more time, but we thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Jeff and me. Three momentum. We look forward to having a number of your execs and customers and analysts on the program today. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you. Thanks Mark, good to see you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick live from Smart Sheet Engaged 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest.