 Okay, we're back live here at Stanford University. It's the Alumni Center. What a great day. Stanford love this place. A lot of brilliant minds here. And this is the Stanford XL 17th Annual Symposium called XL Enterprise. That's the hashtag, follow us on Twitter. Here with Jeff Kelly, the Silicon Angles. Exclusive coverage is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the silver from the noise. And our next guest is Amanda Richardson, the head of product at Prezi. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, awesome. Glad to be here. So, really amazing event. I also have a lot of big minds here. And we're also live in San Francisco at the AWS Summit where all the developers are geeking out with Amazon and all the new tools. You're the head of product from Prezi. So tell us what is Prezi and tell us what you're doing here. So Prezi is a collaborative presentation tool. So we look forward to helping our users create ideas, share ideas and really have a platform for putting their messages out there and better sharing with the audiences. So we're here because we love Excel. I'm here because I'm a GSB alum and any reason to get back to the farm is a good one. And we just think it's a great place to meet people, peers, and share ideas and hopefully learn from each other's mistakes. So what do you think of the new business school? That's pretty impressive, isn't it? So I graduated before the new business school. It's pretty awesome, but I kind of want to go back. I was joking with my husband this morning. I think it may be time for a PhD. Yeah, San Francisco, but as the head of product, you still get to geek out and look at also the market side. You got to look into engineering. You also look into the product. So in this whole enterprise 2.0 thing, it just never happened. It's still happening. It's like going and going. But now with the cloud, with mobile, it's all happening, right? So you've got that cloud mobile and social thing going on. We've been covering since 2009, it's looking at golf. What are you seeing now as the market drivers for those two forces, cloud and mobile? And is it social? Is all that coming together? It is all coming together. And I think, you know, we call it like the consumerization of enterprise, right? So people have one phone, one device, one presence. I think five years ago, you probably tried to keep your world separated between your enterprise professional life and your personal life. And now it really all comes together. So you've got to solve the problems for the enterprise users in the same way you solve problems for consumers, right? What are their big needs? What are their pain points? Where do they find value? Focus on those areas and make it easy to use. And I think that's what's finally accelerating and bringing really cool, sexy problems to the enterprise users. You just bring a consumer approach. What are the biggest barriers that you see in that adoption house? The consumerization of IT, consumerization of the enterprise has been talked about for many, many years. And finally we're seeing a ray of hope. Yeah. You know. I think it's a wave in me. The light at the end of the tunnel makes a train. It's a huge sunrise effect. So it's there. It's there. So what are the key drivers that are helping this go faster now versus the years before? Oh yeah, it's next year, it's next year. So I think mobile is actually a great point. So you can't keep pieces like Evernote Dropbox Prezi out of your user's hands. I mean I remember being in meetings, management meetings five, seven years ago talking about how we were gonna ban Facebook. And that just seems quaint now because it's all on your phone and you can't tell people not to bring their phones to work. So I think mobile's had a huge impact in getting more of these products and tools into the hands of the consumers and out of really this kind of big brother control type situation. The other thing I think that's happening is just worlds are blending together and the availability of tools on the internet. It sounds silly to say, but you can remember five, 10 years ago you couldn't access your, perhaps it's an ERP program or perhaps it's even productivity tools from home. There was a time when we all had to remote in. I don't know. VPNs and all kinds of. I mean I'm dating myself and showing why I color my hair but it really is, the world is changing and I think thank goodness for the internet, thank goodness for the web and thank goodness for mobile. It's interesting you mentioned the dating ourselves. I mean first of all you look fabulous. No thank you. We're old, I mean I'm old, I know how old I am and we just had the 27 year old kid on from Dropbox so that's young. But it's a lot of senior folks now, this enterprise market as it's shifting from consumers. You're seeing some of the leaders are those experienced managers because they've lived through the client's server, they've lived through that first wave. So is that just because there's more people that know that market more? I mean you see a lot more companies that are not the 27 against you. Over 35, over 40. Yeah so no comment on age but I think what excites me about this space I can just talk about myself is I have a consumer background so it was super fun to be in consumer 5, 10 years ago when internet was taking off you finally have a platform on which you have millions of users to test and learn and grow and now that you can apply that to enterprise I mean I think it's new challenges but similar challenges and I really think one of the more interesting things is that it's actually solving really compelling problems. One of the, you know I think there are a lot of opportunities out there around photo sharing and geolocation and you know putting together your social graph but you know where I find passion and energy is actually providing value and solving problems and really being a key part of someone's life. So that's what gets me here. I hope that keeps others here. So let's talk about solving really interesting problems. What is the, I mean what is your why? What is Presley all about? Why are you doing what you're doing? Is it simply, we hear a lot about the concerns around PowerPoint and death by PowerPoint slide and that kind of thing. Is that really the issue you set out to overcome or tell us a little bit about what you do and why you do it? So we certainly get compared to PowerPoint a lot but where we, the problem we really like to solve on a more grand scale is that we believe ideas are best shared and best collaborated about. So if you think of ideas like jeans they can come together, they can be built on each other. I'm a great example of Presley use as there was an organization in Syria, rebel organization that used Presley to really be the platform to explain their ideas and what the issues really were in a quick, meaningful, impactful way. I think having a platform by which you can share ideas and better understand each other can apply to making the world a better place but can also apply to helping scientists share their information around the globe, building on ideas and I know even within Presley we use the tool to better communicate product roadmaps to engineering so that we can better align. I think it's all about communication, helping ideas grow faster and helping the world to be a more understanding place. I mean it's a little peace, love and happiness but it is why we get out of bed every morning. We really think Presley is a great tool for people to be the platform for them to share their ideas and evolve. So I'm actually a Presley user. I've been, I've been started using it recently. I'm actually, I downloaded, you can see here I've got the icon, I downloaded the desktop version and I was working on the plane as I was coming out here from Boston. But you know it's certainly a very interesting platform. It's very different from PowerPoint. It certainly creates a much more compelling type of way to present information. What are some of the design principles instead of product? What are some of the things that you, that are really kind of core to your philosophy in terms of designing and implementing or I should say creating the kind of user interface and the way people interact with information. Yeah so I'm really proud of Presley. The co-founders have really doubled down if you will on our design efforts. So we have a full-time user research staff. We have a full-time data research staff. We have a full-time design staff. All three different roles, all three big teams. I'm really focused on understanding our users. So we solve for key user problems in terms of design principles specifically that we focus on. We like to help users understand structure of their ideas. So one of the challenges of Presley for those who come from a PowerPoint model is everything should be linear. And one of our principles is that not all ideas are linear. There may be areas where we can zoom into different pieces. So helping to communicate that, that is particularly important for us and how to provide simple structure. I think the other ideas helping to make it beautiful. We believe that words are a better way, or excuse me, pictures are a better way to communicate than words. You know, death by bullet point is a common affliction. So how can you say something with a picture that would have taken 100 words and that's what we try to do. So, you know, your product is both kind of a software as a service, but also you can download the desktop version as I mentioned. But you know, with the software as a service model, you're able, I assume, to collect data on the way people are using your product. Right. How does kind of that type of information, do you incorporate that into the design process and making changes to the product? Can you talk about how you use data in analysis to really inform your product design? Yeah, so you know, I believe the role of product managers to understand the user intimately, have a point of view on a strategy, but then really validate through data. So not to creep you out, we do have data about your desktop usage as well. No, no, no, it's okay. I've covered big data for Wikibon, I have no problem with that myself. So we focus a lot on what our users do, what makes them successful. We try to have like measurable outcomes for all of our initiatives, whether it's user behavior or defining what a good Prezi is or really helping users to solve their problems. We use data to, on the small level, optimize, and on a big level, really define an objective and a goal. So how can we really push things through the funnel to get to the user to their success point, which we measure as giving a presentation. So both find kind of tactical issues, but also kind of inform your larger product. Yeah, our big company KPIs are all based on data. Okay, Amanda, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We got a break with our next guest coming in, lining up, all of the crowd's going to be breaking up. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of the Stanford, Excel, 17-annual symposium hashtag, Excel Enterprise, where Excel's doing a lot of great work at the Enterprise. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's coverage of Stanford, Excel symposium. We're right back with our next guest after the short break.