 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in the studio. We're just about ready to hit the crazy wave that is the conference season. So it's great to still have some time to do some studio stuff before we hit the road. And we're excited to have a new guest, never been on theCUBE before. He's Daniel Hazarica, the CMO of Reflective. Daniel, great to meet you. Great to meet you. So you guys are working in a cool space, kind of the new age HR management for lack of a better term. We've had Patty McCord on before, who obviously was seminal in kind of the Netflix culture, which was, I think, pretty early days and kind of saying, you know, throw out, throw out traditional annual reviews, kind of throw out regulations around expense reports, you know, throw out kind of a lot of these traditional mechanisms to manage people and really say, you know, what are we managing people to? And we should be giving them feedback on a regular basis. And we really need to kind of bring this into the modern era. And that's smack in the middle of what you guys do. Absolutely. I mean, a big part of what we do is managing employees to be high performing. And that's, you know, the big tagline for her is high performance culture. I think it's critical to have as part of that and more active and ongoing role with your employees. That's why they can do things like remove expense report guidelines, because they know we're on the pulse of whether this person is actually performing or not. And by knowing that, we can have faith that they're, we trust them that they'll do the right thing when it comes to deciding on what they spend on. So I think we sit right at the center of this and we're really excited to be a part of it. So let's back up a little bit and just give everyone kind of the forward one on reflective, how many people are you, how long you've been around, some of the basics. Yeah, so we were founded in late 2014. We have three co-founders, Rajiv Bihara, Eric Tai, and Jimmy Tyrell. They more or less were actually people managers themselves. They realized that this was a gap in managing workforces and classic model of technical founder and then you have more of a product person and they got together and built this really cool tool. So what was the big hole? Because there's a ton of HR applications out there. There's big ones like Workday, who's done been very successful on the SaaS model. What did they see that was the big hole, even though there's all these huge, traditional kind of HR applications? Absolutely, yeah. So what happened was there's a five-ish year old person framework, they talk about this, systems of engagement and systems of record. And so these tools that you mentioned, they were great at helping catalog what happens in a business and do all the compliance processes required. But what happened was the world changed things in terms of social media, the way people were getting information, the pace of things accelerated quite a bit and these tools struggled to handle the day to day and didn't live where people worked and those are big gaps. So they saw this and said, okay, well there's something here where we can go and insert ourselves in the flow of people's work and help them actually get the information they need to be high performing. So was the entry point, the annual review, what was kind of the entry point to get people to think about HR in a different way and to adopt the technology? I think that ultimately there is some form of review that happens and they built that functionality. But what was really interesting to the market was actually the concept of real-time feedback and the mechanisms, building the mechanism by which you could actually bring that into that platform and actually factor that in when you're doing reviews, right? This eliminates things like recency bias, things that, hey, a review is happening at the end of the year. I'm going to remember what happened the last three months. I'm not going to remember that you killed it in March of that year. So we're helping solve for that and they saw great results doing that. So you've got all types of kind of little apps as the right word solutions or kind of activities that enable people both as the employee as well as the manager as well as the HR people to have kind of this ongoing back and forth relationship. So I wonder if you can dive into some of those applications and what's worked really well that's different than things used to be. So the modern kind of version of what we do because things have changed much over the past few years. We have a core kind of performance management offering. We also have an engagement offering and we also have a people intelligence offering. And these are the three pillars by which we kind of enable all those people that you just talked about. And so when we go back to the performance piece, there's many different components but we believe that employees need feedback in the moment. They need a way to also do annual reviews. They need a way to set goals and be clear with their manager and what those are and what progress is. And we also believe that those things have to exist in the flow of day-to-day work and that's why we do things like have a Slack integration, integrate with Gmail, Outlook, all these different kind of places where people actually live day-to-day. Then the other layers that I spoke about are engagement. We like to be able to do broad surveys to companies and get a pulse on high level. What is the emotion out there? How are people feeling about management? How are people feeling about even the snacks in the kitchen? Simple stuff like that. And then last but not least, all of that information has to feed into somewhere so that the management of an organization can get the insights they need to make decisions and that's where the people intelligence comes in. Okay, so there's a lot of different layers to the story. But the one, when I was first preparing for this interview, I was like, oh my goodness, another tool, right? Another desktop app. I forget what the statistics are of all the tabs that we have open with our Salesforce and Outlook and all these things are open. But you guys took an interesting approach because you actually integrated with some of the apps that you presume I have open like Slack, as opposed to kind of forcing me to have that one more tab. How does that work? And how has that kind of impacted adoption? Totally, yeah. I mean, this is where the foundations of our company kind of come into play. So our founders came from mobile applications. They knew and game specifically. So they know how to optimize for things like active users daily, monthly, all that, right? And taking that lens to it, they said, okay, we really do need to encourage adoption. How do we make that happen? To your point, too many tools are open. Some are required to do your job like email. Others are kind of optional. We're honest with ourselves. We say, hey, we're in the optional category. How do we solve for that? How do we still get people to use this? So we said, okay, we're gonna plug ourselves into Slack where people actually communicate day to day. We're gonna show up in Gmail. We're gonna show up in Outlook. We're gonna go to all these different places where people are already working. We actually even integrate with JIRA, the engineering tool. And we said, that's the way we'll actually get the information into our system that we need. And then we can serve us all those insights I talked about. Is it a pop-up? Is it some encouragement when I do some activity, say with you on a project, you know, OJEP, by the way, do you have any feedback for Daniel or OJEP, by the way? Or somebody's looking for feedback on Daniel? Or, I mean, how does the mechanics work? And then what have you seen in terms of adoption? What works, what doesn't work? Yeah, I mean, it definitely gets traction because I think specifically Slack, you know, we're a Silicon Valley company. A lot of our earlier customers were Silicon Valley companies and they all use Slack. It's pretty eager to leave here. There you go, right? So I think from that perspective, it's really easy to use. Like you just, you can see all the active recognition, for example, happening in your company, in a channel, you can also go and input recognition for other people right there just at mentioned and kind of invoke that. So are they kind of channels then within Slack around? Recognition can be a channel, but the actual input of feedback, you can do that right from there. So interesting to talk about kind of feedback versus recognition, how does that play out in the real world? Cause those are two very different words and two different, very different motivations. You bring up a great, great point and it's an ongoing debate, like how do you kind of name these two different things? Frankly, recognition to the broader market ends up being more or less positive feedback, right? That you feel like you want to put a public stamp on. But there's an important distinction here because there's also negative feedback and there's also just feedback that people want to give that's positive, but they don't necessarily want to share that with the entire world or with the broader organization. So we wanted to create a safe space for them to be able to do that in every single use case. And so that's where the delineation between recognition and feedback comes in, is that you can go public, private, public and also broadcast to the whole company and we wanted to give people the avenue to do all those things. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about goals and goal management and how does that kind of module work and or how does that tie back to kind of some of the corporate goals and corporate initiatives? Can you tie it back to your JIRA project and are these things integrated or is it kind of a stand alone and does it operate like an annual goal or a quarterly goal or how does that piece of it work? Yeah, so the way we find the highest performance culture is doing this, they do kind of adjust goals on an ongoing basis, ideally quarterly, I think that's probably the favored kind of happy medium right now. And that does start with company level goals, then it goes to departmental, then it goes to individual or sub team goals and all of these people have, we can call it, you can do smart goals, you can do objectives and key results, you can do whatever format you want and it's pretty flexible as a platform, but all of that cascades down and you can go work, coordinate between people and get visibility and have public goals, private goals and that's part of our whole commitment to transparency in the platform. And in terms of your customers and their adoption at a corporate level, not necessarily the individual, is it more of a stick or is it more of a carrot? Are people figuring out that they need to change and yours is a tool to give them an avenue to the new way or is it kind of new and provocative and we've been doing annual reviews since my dad's dad's dad, I'm not quite sure about this ongoing thing, what's kind of the reception and how's the market changing? Totally, like with anything, you've your tech adoption life cycle, a lot of our early adopters have just picked up on the fact that the market for talent is extremely competitive now and some have gotten to different maturity levels and understanding what they need to do to deal with that, right? Our earliest adopters, they just got it right away, they said our workforce is asking for more in-the-moment feedback, they want to know what their goals are clearly and be able to measure against them and be able to go and point back, hey, I actually achieved that or I did not. And so that has helped us a lot with the earlier adopters, just saying like we built something that's ideally suited to what you need to, the way you need to evolve. Part of the task of any kind of innovative technology is we have to go educate the market too. We know that universally, people are struggling to retain talent. What we do to educate them is inform them of here's actually what the workforce is looking for, we've done a ton of research, HBR articles, we've seen Gallup research, we've seen all sorts of stuff that tells you the world has changed, the workforce is expecting certain things and we've built something around those needs. And so the more we do our job as marketing to make sure the market understands that, I think the more reflective we'll see success. It's funny, in one of Patty's recent, medium posts, she talks about who's ball tables and bill your tables. That's not what drives employee happiness and satisfaction. I mean they look good I guess on the tour before you take the job, but I don't know, there's a lot of other things that drive happiness and retention in the super competitive market, that's not the ping pong table. Absolutely, especially in the case of Patty McCord, I mean she's indexing everything around, you want to have the highest performing people stay and you don't necessarily care to actively manage the ones who are not. And what she has espoused many times is that the highest performing people actually love this. They love that there's transparency around the business value they're driving. They love to know exactly where they stand. They love to have feedback so they can improve and be better. And so you can see how there's a lot of parallels here between what she's talking about that high performing cultures do and what the platform that we've built enables. Right, what about the pesky lawyers that are saying there's all these compliance issues and we're still operating off of laws that were established before and this is a little bit funky and we're not really sure how to deal with it. Yeah, I mean what we've actually found is so there's specific customers, even of the size of Airbnb, who will highlight that we help them combat bias and the way we do this and evidence that they are not biased in the way they do reviews. And the way we do this is I think is ultimately the concept of real time feedback because this stuff is being logged as it's happening. No one can say, oh, it's the end of the year now and you just remember what happened in the past few months. You're ignoring all my great work that happened before that. This is not fair. That recency bias they call is eliminated and that actually in the end helps with the lawyers because we can say this was all catalogued in the moment as opposed to way later. Right, we have to train them on contract to your concept. You're supposed to turn it up the last month. They forget about the crappy stuff that you did earlier and do well. So, Dan, before I let you go, just you've been around a little while, you've been in the valley, you've been at a number of startups, you've been here for about a year. I'm just curious, kind of, as you've come to Reflective and been there now, what was the biggest surprise, kind of entering the space, entering this company that you didn't necessarily expect now that you've been there for a little bit? Yeah, I think what was most interesting and actually kind of exciting was to observe how similar the transformation that HR is going through right now is to the transformation that marketing went through 10 years ago. I'm seeing the movement to being more data driven, to getting active information on how campaigns are running, all this stuff. That evolution is happening in HR right now. I'm seeing more and more people scientists. I'm seeing more and more people who are turning people management into a science. And I think a lot of that has to do with record low unemployment. The market for labor got so competitive that people have started really paying attention to this as a problem and trying to understand better. Outside of just simple compliance things, how can we actually actively manage our workforce into being high performing and happier? And that's really interesting for me. Awesome. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing the story. Absolutely. All right. He's Daniel. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation on our Palo Alto studios. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.