 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeffery Q here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE conversation. We're getting ready for this crazy tidal wave of conferences to hit fall 2018. We'll beat a lot of them, but there's a new one this year we want to highlight. It's called Smartsheet Engage. It's going to be in Bellevue, Washington first week of October. And we're excited as part of the prep for that to have the CEO and president of Smartsheet come down. He's Mark Mater. And Mark, thanks for taking a few minutes and coming down from Seattle. Thank you. So for folks that aren't familiar with Smartsheet, give us kind of the Smartsheet 101. It's instantly deployable software that people can use straight away with their teams or businesses to improve how they work. Now the power word there is work. What do we mean by that? And it's about how you capture information, how you organize, share it, automate it and report out on it. Now the key difference here is that we let everyday business people succeed on the platform and improve. It doesn't require technical know-how. It doesn't require coordinating with IT at every turn. It's really business user enabled, but also with an enterprise backbone. So it does conform to all those things that the IT group does care about. Right, right. So you see getting work done is a lot of conversations about the new way to work and getting work done. There's a ton of workflow process tools out there. There's JIRA and Slack and we hear new ones all the time. How are you guys different? Cause then I was trying to put you in those buckets and then I look at your website and you actually partner and integrate with Slack. You partner and integrate with JIRA. So how does your solution fit in with some of those ones that maybe people are more familiar with? We do. It's really easy to think about it almost as Lego blocks in the sense that you have a messaging Lego block. You have a storage Lego block. You have an authoring Lego block. And then you have an automate, manage and report Lego block. And those are all different. So how we communicate on things in Slack or Hangouts Chat or Workplace by Facebook. We're talking about things. We're messaging. Somewhat ephemeral, right? We have a conversation and it comes and goes. That thing that persists, whether it's a plan or a process or a customer list or a piece of feedback, that doesn't get marked as done and goes by the wayside. That stays. So that persistent work sits alongside authoring, writing, creative, totally unstructured and messaging. That's where we fit into that model. So a lot of exciting stuff going on. You guys, I peed earlier this year. Congratulations. Thank you. And the other thing that kind of jumped out at me doing some homework for this was you have 74,000 customers was the number. So you guys have been, you know, quietly, maybe not so quietly been at this for a while. And so the last company that you worked at, you're there for 20 years, ended up going through an acquisition. So you're in it for the long haul. You don't really jump around too much. So you saw a real opportunity here in Smartsheet. And I think in SaaS, especially Jeff, we have companies that reach great success, most of them not overnight. So it's this immediate success 10 years in the making. And I think what's changed from two decades ago is that the person who wins the category isn't necessarily the person, the kid who shouts the loudest. You know, you earn those 74,000 customers and you earn the right to serve some of the largest companies in the world. And today, business users are casting very strong vote. If you resonate with them and you deliver value and you deliver that at a price point in a manner that's secure, you're going to land and you're going to grow. Right, right. One of the folks, the folks that you guys have brought up time and time again is this concept of teams and people working in teams. Because that is how work gets done. It's generally relatively small teams and communications within those teams. And that's kind of the roots of the company. That said, an increasing enterprise focus as you go forward. So how are you kind of bringing those two things together? Where do they overlap? And then what are some of the unique challenges as you kind of move, I don't want to say up market, but kind of up market to these bigger deals in the enterprise opportunities? Yeah, teams really exist at all size companies. What changes in bigger companies is that the, sometimes the scale. I'll give you an example. If you and I work for a small organization that's renovating one hotel, it's pretty fixed. We're going to get that project done. We're going to share with eight people and our outside team and we're good. Let's say we're renovating 500 hotels and we have a model and we need to conform to that model and we're changing that model constantly. How do you manage that across 500 things working in parallel? That's a scale thing that has nothing to do with can you support your 75,000 customers? Can you support those mega caps who have very advanced needs in terms of keeping work consistent and secure? And again, very often what you see is you have team solutions in market that serve small teams beautifully and then when they start to get to a divisional level or enterprise, they have to tap out. And a big part of that, as you said, is really kind of this low code, no code kind of environment where the business user is enabled to actually implement, change, create new business processes without having to go in under the covers and get the seat prompt out. Exactly. Well, when you think about the majority of the workforce, the majority of the workforce isn't a coder. The majority of the workforce isn't a citizen developer. So how can you unlock the capacity of the majority of your workforce? And it's not about just serving them with technology, creating the form and serving them up the form, creating the process and enabling them to participate in it. How do you let them drive the definition and implementation of it? If you can pull that off, it is a very, very large market because many people have needs. Right. The other thing I found pretty interesting was the way you guys bucketize your solution. Obviously, you have a platform, you've talked about platform a number of times here, but nobody ever buys a platform, right? They buy an application for a specific problem that they're trying to solve at that time, hopefully for you, is the platform grows like a mushroom in a dark wet place. And really focusing on the roles of individuals. And so some of the ones you highlight, you know, whether it's a sales product manager, obviously if they're working, you know, something like a Microsoft project, but, you know, marketing, software development, HR, IT and ops. So you guys have really taken a role-based approach to the way that you've built, I presume, pre-configured workflows, pre-configured bundles, pre-configured things based on best practices that you've learned across the 74,000 customers. Correct. And when we think about how the solution is brought to market, we do have a platform that is configurable. So if you want to come in and build something, you may do that. We have many people, as you said, who come in with no needs. So whether it's on ITPMO, M&A, client on boarding, retail store openings, these are all workloads that we have solved for in a solution base. And, you know, the first thing when we have a need, most people don't say, I'm going to go out and build something for three months. They go, I need to fix my issue. So that's why the solution orientation is so important to us. And when you have as many customers as we have, you have tremendous customer signals. So when we build a solution, we have very good intel on whether there's a need for it in market. Right, right. And again, you guys are a SaaS-based solution, right? Everything is in the cloud. It is. Okay, excellent. So let's talk a little bit about the big event engagement. Things the second year before we turned on the cameras. 1,200 people last year expecting you to double that number. Is there still any registration open? Or is it just a five? Yeah, but for the people who waited last year to the end, don't be disappointed. I would go out and register. So what should people expect? What are some of the highlights? What are you excited about engaged this year? I often talk about take-home value. So if I'm gonna take myself out of rotation and go to an event, there better be significant take-home value, like similar to maybe the take-home value from the best 10 books I last read. And when I think about having a really high compression across two days where you are inundated with understanding what is possible with the platform, I still think that is the biggest takeaway for people. They come in with a known need. They bought our product. They delivered it. They're very satisfied. And then they say, holy smokes, I can deploy this now for three other things. Those are the types of things that we were able to get done last year. And it's not about just sitting in a presentation and listening to smartsheeters. It's about working with the fellow companies, but also working with experts side by side. You come in with your machine, with your need, we will work with you. And that is a very interactive model. Now we go to so many conferences, Mark, we do over a hundred a year. And it's really, we do the big ones with a couple hundred people to the giant ones with a couple hundred thousand. And there's nothing quite like those first couple of years of a new conference, because everyone is so vested, everyone is so much into sharing information, you know, kind of the vendor overlay and then becomes too much overlay. Doesn't really happen for those first several years because everyone is so into the sharing, to the learning and seeing kind of best practices from their peers. Such a valuable piece of a conference I can gauge. It is. And one big thing last year that we did was we made it a hundred percent employee driven. When you went to register at the front desk, employee checked you in. When you went for instruction on where to go, employee guided you. When you went to give feedback, it was employee who took that. We outsourced nothing other than some of the audio visual. So it's incredible when a customer shows up and they're meeting smart cheaters at every turn and you get a sense for what makes the company tick and whether you support that company and its mission. And when you leave, hopefully you leave energized, believing and trusting in our organization. And that's very hard to replicate online. Well, and then the closing note, I've read some of the stuff that you've published in terms of culture and talking about culture and hiring practices. And there's a lot of that stuff that's out there now as we try to learn from some best practices. And you have a very kind of strong opinion about some of the cultural norms and the way that you hire, retain and keep people. I would imagine for the smart cheaters that all of them be sitting and interacting with real clients, not just numbers on a page or names on a page, but faces who are asking them questions that have a voice. It's got to be a super powerful part of their direct engagement. They're really feeling that they're not just making software. Yeah, and the feeling you have, I'm looking forward to a few people who I know are coming back this year who participated in feedback last year. So the highlight for me this year will be sitting with a number of people who gave us feedback on our new design that we're launching at Engage this year and showing them that is your fingerprint in our new product. When you close the loop for someone like that, that is extraordinarily powerful. And if you're an engineer for us or a designer, that reaction that you see in the prep person's face when you hit the mark, it's a lot more than a paycheck. Right, right, that's great. And it builds that engagement, it builds that relationship. And I think that's one of the least understood aspects of a SaaS business is that it forces you to be engaged with your customer every single month because they're paying you every single month. You're not taking the check. Every day of the year. 15% maintenance fee, you got to be engaged and they help you grow and evolve the company, the product that's a great setup. All right, Mark, well, thanks for taking a few minutes. We're looking forward to the event our first time. It's October 1 through 4 in Bellevue, Washington. So we'll be there, thanks for coming by. All right, he's Mark, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Let's keep conversation in our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. Take care.