Yuval Gonczarowski: 13:45
So the next evolution was to understand that the chart for the entire organization is good, but we also want this to be topic-based, right? So I want to know everything that’s happening with a specific customer project, topic person. To do that, we needed very strong mechanisms from the world of AI statistical modeling to identify topics and clusters of work within the organization. Right. So it’s not just, hey, here’s a document, but now it’s hey, here’s a document.
These are the five things that it discusses from customers, it’s mentioning people, etc.. And then we actually built a very, very flexible and lean knowledge graph of the digital footprint for anything from interactions, discussions, documents, people, Salesforce apps, everything we saw earlier, even comments on code. By the way, there’s treasure in these code comments between engineers that tell us about the business. Once we have that knowledge graph built, we can ask a hell of a lot more questions than the contract. I can say, hey, here’s my top most interesting projects for the year.
Eight of them I know rolled out very successfully. Nine number nine. And number ten didn’t Akooda engine y right find anomalies for those two projects? Maybe product team was overinvolved. Maybe response times were less right.
We had a customer saying, hey, this is great, I’m learning from this. The Akooda engine actually told me from this that I think I’m saving money by hiring offshore engineers, but the time from creating tickets to respond times because my folks creating these issues are in the States, my offshore engineers are on the other side of the world. I’m actually losing time and value because of the turnaround time. So once we have that cluster, digital footprint is entirely mapped understood, we can do a deep dive into the analytics that is, you know, year two of Akooda. And the biggest innovation is the whole concept of taking that into search.
Right. So now it’s really just ask a question. Get an answer. It starts with like asking, hey, do we have an NDA with whatever company. Just getting that NDA.
But also, you know, have there been any changes. And then maybe someone on slack has a question regarding this NDA and maybe this customer. Three weeks ago we mentioned there was a bug with them and then we solved it. Maybe it’s still open, right? Sorry about that.
So understanding everything around a specific topic, person, project. That’s to me what search is about.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:20
Talk about you know so I see that there’s the com chart then the knowledge graph as well. How are sales teams using it.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 16:31
So I imagine you’re a salesperson. How much control do salespeople actually have over their sales process. Right. You know, they make money. they live and die by the sword, right?
But especially in enterprise sales, there’s always something you need from engineering. There’s something you need from legal. There’s something you need from procurement. You’re like you’re sitting there. Your life depends on your ability to understand your company better than anyone else on the specific deal.
That’s one thing, but also it’s everything around. I need to be able to answer questions about the product, right? So if we release a new feature and you see this all the time, the salesperson is on the call scrambling, like, who can tell me if the green button will ever do this, right? And you can just ask Akooda. And not only are you dependent on structured documentation anymore, it’s enough that someone else has asked that question prior or engineers spoke about it wherever, and you’ll get the full set from the digital footprint.
As long as you have access to it somewhere, you’ll get that answer, and you’ll also get the exact person who will be able to give you the answer to that question on top. And so it just shortens insanely the amount of time you need to understand your own organization, your own product.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:49
Well, how did you decide? Maybe it was the customers, because right now you probably integrate with a lot of workflows, and it probably depends on the company and what they’re using. Like you have listed here, maybe someone’s using Salesforce, maybe they’re using HubSpot, maybe they’re using, you know. So where did you start? Because you had to build out all of these things to, to feed into Akooda.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 18:12
Yeah. Great question. The first one was slack. And by the way, it’s also one of the hardest ones because it’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:17
I could see slack.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 18:18
Because like, I mean a small organization, if someone needs something they put at. Yeah channel and everyone is like, hey, I need help with this. They add channel it. And if you have 15 people, it’s not a big deal. If you have 2000 people that be insane, right?
So I could see how a small organization like five people, okay, we can just all channel it, but it doesn’t work when you scale up with staff.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 18:45
Once you hit once you hit 100, it no longer works. And I’ve seen that with companies. Also the biggest challenge is to actually split conversations, right? If I go line by line or thread by thread. Understanding zero shot topic modeling, understanding when a conversation starts, when it ends, who the participants are, and what are the topics that I can extract from this.
That’s a big NLP challenge, and it’s one of the first challenges that we’ve tackled as an organization. But overall, we categorize the digital footprint into four main categories, right? The first one is communication. So think slack, but also Microsoft Teams, discord, zoom, right. These are all peer to peer chats.
Once you have the data science, the statistical modeling engine behind one, it becomes an engineering challenge from a very early on in Akooda’s process, we abstract the specific tool away, which means we can actually develop more and more integrations, I think, faster than any other company. So the first one is communication, the second one is project management. So if we think Jira, Monday.com, asana, you know, these are tickets, you move from side to side. Of course, all these companies claim that they’re the best. And I have my own personal favorites, but you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:57
Which are your favorites? What do you use?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 19:58
I love them all. Especially all of them are partners of ours.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:01
So who.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 20:02
All of them are partners of ours.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:04
Oh, okay.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 20:05
You know, each one of them has their own benefits. But fundamentally, you know, these are tickets assigned to people that you move so, so understanding the abstracted model behind that is one. And then if you know if a new tool comes out then it can already be on top of that technology. The third one is knowledge management systems. So basically files right.
Think Dropbox, box, confluence, SharePoint etc.. And then the fourth one is customer relationship platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, intercom, ET cetera. Of course, all of these are, you know, bucketing them all doesn’t do them justice. But conceptually, from Akooda’s perspective, that’s how we look at it. Create the chart based on those, and then collecting the pieces together to give the customer, the end user, a full perspective of what’s going on in their organization.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:57
Yeah, it’s a lot going on. Like you said, just slack alone is not easy to pull in. Was there a certain order? Okay. We started because it sounds like slack, you know, was the start which is more the communication channels.
Did you follow? Okay. Next we’re going to pull in project management. Or do you just kind of tackle them as you got clients?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 21:19
Yeah, I really believe in building off of our own or eating our own dog food and then letting the customers dictate the connectors roadmap. Right. If I have a good customer, they’re saying, hey, to complete the puzzle, I really wouldn’t need you to do that. Then that’s what moves our engineering, you know, shout out to our CTO, Itamar, our head of product, Romney. These are phenomenal people that know how to listen to customers very, very well.
You know, even if we just look at slack, right. And now, you know, Akooda, of course, is a fully fledged product. We actually have this thing called the highlights Reel, which will show you things that the AI engine determines that are of interest to you. And you may have missed. Right.
So I can’t be in every single slack channel where, you know, 20 people company we have over a like it’s insane. It grows exponentially. Right? And if there’s a discussion in one slack channel that the AI engine thinks that it would be very interesting to me, then it flags that to me. And then I feel a little bit more in control, because then you get up in the morning, you’re like, all right, where do I look first?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:22
It’s impossible. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I just look at mentions and then if I have two things, that’s all I look at. I’m not look, I’m not like scrolling through even I’m a part of different like, mastermind groups. You know, Jason Swenk is a mastermind group for agency owners, and there’s a lot of slack.
And I only it’s like, where do I start? I don’t go channel by channel, but like you said, if it had Akooda, it’d be like, okay, here’s maybe what I’m interested in. And it just shows me that because if I go in, no one’s mentioned me. Like, I’m just kind of okay, I’m not I’m not like kind of digging in that much, you know?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 22:57
Yeah. But imagine that, I don’t know, you’re very much on top of the cloud budget. You’re like, all right, I need to approve or not approve every single expense that we have there. And then two engineers talk about something that’s budget-related. You’re like, guys like, let me weigh in on this.
If I join this too late, it’s going to hurt the business. Right. So the AI engine would be able to say, hey, you know, Jeremy, here’s something that may be of interest to you, even though you’re not part of it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:21
So I could see, you know, how people are using this. Yuval, I’m curious how companies roll it out. So I don’t know which example may be best. I know there was like a FinTech and electronics in a healthcare example about, you know, implementing it in a company, right, because they’re used to going into slack and they kind of have to get used to just something that’s a little bit quicker and easier, but they’re used to what they’re used to. Right.
So which company example should we talk about as far as like a rollout goes?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 23:57
Yeah, I think for rollout, one of the things that’s very important and this is again, kudos to our product team for highlighting this from day one, is I don’t want to fight over screen time. I think fighting over screen time is one of the hardest things product-driven companies can do. Very few have won this fight right? And you know you on your browser on your day to day. You’re probably on GitHub on you know, if you’re an engineer GitHub, Jira, confluence.
If you’re in sales, it’s going to be your CRM and 1 or 2 other like call recording tools or something like that. And then slack. Right.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 24:30
So of course you can log into Akooda for advanced users. watch analytics like double click on everything and anything. But we also integrate externally with other tools like on slack. You can just do /Akooda and ask the question. So even if you’re on slack, just like slash Akooda, who can help me with whatever question.
What’s the green button do? When is this customer up for renewal? Everything and anything. Just like slash could ask the question, get the answer.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:56
So they’re already in Slack, let’s say. And then you know you’ve integrated you know Akooda. And they could just put /Akooda and then they’ll get the answer. So basically everyone just needs to be trained. All you have to do is do that from now on.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 25:11
And then we also have a Chrome extension that can take a look at things while you browse. And let’s say you’re on a JIRA ticket, can identify the other things in the digital footprint that are similar and can help you, which is even a little bit more push notification style than pull on the slash Akooda.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:27
Yeah, because it’s one thing, you know, the head, the head honcho in your case, Ganesha like says, yeah, let’s do this. But then rolling it out to like 2000 people is another story.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 25:42
Right. Yeah. Of course I, you know, stickiness inside the organizations is always something that has to be top of mind for every startup founder, right? It’s not just getting the deal, it’s getting folks to use it, getting it embedded into the day-to-day workflows. It’s a never-ending task.
It’s a never-ending task. You know, if you talk to a CEO and they say, we figured it out, they’re not thinking about the problem big enough.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:09
Talk about the evolution of the team. Right. It first started. It was you. You talked to Bob.
You’re like, I have this idea. Yeah. Talk about growing the team and hiring.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 26:21
Yeah. So very quickly, you know, I was. I was always looking and you know, we even had a couple folks we were chatting about opening this business because things moved so fast for my story earlier. I ended up speaking to a couple of great investors, Bob from argon, Micah from the Founder Collective, who ended up leading the round. And then they just said, Yuval, you know, we’ve seen you at other companies.
You know, here’s some money: Pre-seed money, build a team. And then we were very fortunate to land some of the greatest minds. So Itamar, our CTO, he’s, you know, an early member at Adallom sold to Microsoft. He brought some of his crew with him. So we’ve got a great set of folks with a lot of experience from Microsoft leading our difficult product.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:10
How’d you know Itamar?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 27:12
Well, we went to undergrad together. Okay. We go back 16 years.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:17
What’s the conversation look like? Because, you know, he could be doing a lot of things.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 27:22
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:23
What was the conversation like to be like? Yes. Let’s do this together.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 27:27
Yeah. I think I’ve chased him for a number of years. Even before I had an idea, I was like, hey, we’re going to work together at some point. And now, you know, he’s a partner along the way. He’s a great guy.
Ronnie, our chief strategy officer, she actually led product at Climacell when I led tech. Really? Also shout out to Climacell tomorrow. Great organization. Doing phenomenal things, by the way, for humanity launched satellites to space.
Great company. Definitely should look at it. So we’ve worked together in the past very easy to say, hey, you know, why don’t we take the wheel and do something big together? It’s, you know, just blessed to be working with these people overall.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:11
I sound like, you know, you put these key leaders in place, and then they kind of had a network of people that they’ve worked with. And the team was kind of built with the people who knew each other. It was not like you were necessarily hiring just totally foreign people that no one knew, at least in the beginning.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 28:32
Yeah, in the beginning it’s very much. And even now we put a very strong emphasis. You know, Ellie was lead engineering for Safe Base recently sold to Drata. You know, we were in touch. I know his former manager.
Strong recommendation. You know, great in marketing. Been in the industry for a long time. Our employees, like I said, have either worked with us or came recommended most of them. I think there’s just something about the high risk you have to take when you hire someone for key positions very early on, that you just want to collect as much information as you can.
And I’m also proud that when this is done right, we’ve got, I think, 40% female representatives in the organization overall. So it’s not it is it is something that once you get the right talent. I just think it solves itself. Right. I’m happy to have a very diverse group here from great people who are like-minded, know how to challenge me, I know how to challenge them and we’re trying to build great things together.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:37
So from the funding piece you originally bootstrapped, you get your first customer. What when do you first take and were you always looking for investment?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 29:49
I think it’s hand in hand. My first investors and I had had relationships prior to them writing the check. I think it’s always easier and I always recommend to, you know, it’s sometimes when people go to start a company and they’re like, I’m going to fundraise. They look at this in very transactionally, right, I’m going to go meet an investor, give a pitch deck. They’re going to fall in love giving me millions of dollars.
And I’m like, let’s play that back for a second, right? You think that a 15 slide deck, as good as it is, is going to convince someone to give you millions of dollars, right? It’s a high threshold, right? Building relationships, establishing rapport. Working on yourself.
Getting to know the right people. That’s a journey, right? And I think that the Akooda journey is exactly that, right. I knew our investors for months before they wrote the first check. And then also the folks that led later rounds, etc. these either came also from folks that I met and we went through a journey together.
Also, there’s such a big risk at bringing the wrong folks on board, right? I call my investors my friends. Right. NFP two led my last round. He runs the board.
He’s on the board with me. You know, if I didn’t have any like 100% trust, then we wouldn’t be able to build great things together. And I think that’s fundamental in establishing a business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:12
At what point from the customer side, it sounds like. Did you get your first investment? Because obviously, you know, you’ve proven people want this. They’re paying for it. And that’s helpful in going to the investor and saying, hey, you know, I have people who are interested in this.
They’re paying me already. At what point do you start to raise money from like your customer? The customer side?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 31:43
Yeah, I think it was at a point where I said I think I have a pretty good path of what I need to do next, and these two hands aren’t going to be enough to do it. And then first of all, I convinced myself, right. And once you convince yourself that you have a plan, it’s no longer just a slide or just a spreadsheet of the business plan. It is like this. This is really what I need to do today or tomorrow or next week.
If I had the opportunity, I think if I had gotten funding earlier, I would have done wrong things with it. So it would have opened up too many opportunities for me that I wouldn’t know what to do and how to get started.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:24
Talk about the first enterprise client like early on, obviously there were smaller clients and the questions they were asking, and I watched one of your webinars and there was a large discussion on privacy and the larger type enterprise clients. Really, they’re looking at this. Right. And we can see right here on your page and you go into, you know, a great deal, you know, detail on the webinar and how you protect private information. When was the first enterprise client?
Yeah.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 32:54
We got yeah I think it was the start of year two. We had to go, of course. Like there’s certain building blocks any organization needs to be able to work with enterprise Soc2 compliance is one of them. Right. Getting the papers in check, getting it to a level of maturity, knowing how to walk through a security-related discussion with the CISO teams.
Of course, Itamar brought a ton of experience on that. Our team is very oriented towards security, so we knew how to build these building blocks. Of course, spoke with friends who have done the same thing. Like life’s a learning journey. I.
- I love saying, I don’t know, it’s also one of my core values. So when I don’t know I just say I don’t know. And then enterprise deals have two things that I think you’re not prepared for until you really see them. One is the long sales cycle.
So an email a couple of days, a couple weeks, then another email. Right. It’s like there is a sense of urgency, but also you’re not the first thing on mind for these people. So embracing that mentality like, hey, this deal is moving forward. It’s just going to take a few months to close it.
And then also the similar aspects between enterprise deal and really small deals at the end business is always done between people, right? Not between companies. So creating the relationships with understanding the buyer, the champion. Showing them company updates. Right.
We are very meticulous about sending our product updates to everyone, including folks in our pipeline, including partners, current customers, former customers. Everyone wants to see things that are moving forward. So yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:34
Talk about the sales cycle for a second. I notice one thing and maybe what has helped from a messaging perspective from the sales cycle and what I noticed on the page here. You can see I imagine coming up with this helps speed up the sales cycle and other things like this. And you could see when people are listening to the audio says ROI in 30 days. And it has like a measurement reclaim at least two hours per week per employee currently lost to information hunting.
Right. And so I’m sure it’s like a team this lights a little bit of a fire. Be like oh okay. So we have 900 people. That total annual savings could be $1 million.
Maybe we should.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 35:15
Not made-up numbers. This is like full-backed research by leading organizations Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey. They claim 20% percent of our time in a given day is spent looking for things. It goes back to my earlier point, right? Search is a broken word.
We look for things all the time, not just where’s my pen or where’s the file? But like, hey, when’s my next meeting? What am I doing? Who can help me with something? Right?
These are things. If I always say my challenge is start a meeting. Every time we start a meeting in the office, we run a search until we’re about 5 or 10 minutes into the meeting, and then we’re in decision time. But it always starts with running a search. Do we have everyone here?
Is everyone should be here? What are we going to talk about today? Like every, the first 5 or 10 minutes in every meeting are actually search. And so taking that all in and saying, hey, you know, if you run a company of about a thousand people and you use Akooda, you do actually save $1 million per year on execution costs.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:13
I’d love to see your SOP on before meeting. So do people that do you go in and you’re like okay is every like those type of searches to start the meeting. Like, is everyone here? Will you repeat them again just for the listeners sake.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 36:34
Just my challenge. I’ll throw it as a challenge, not even as a textbook. Like just if you’re listening to the podcast, think about your next business meeting and think about how you start the meeting. It’s gathering information. When do we move from gathering information to deciding?
That typically happens, from my experience, 5 or 10 minutes in already. And of course, let’s not talk about the time when we talk about the weather. Everyone does that anyways. But like once we get to the meat and potatoes, it’s the first 5 or 10 minutes in a meeting or trying to figure out why we’re here. Do we have everything we need to make a decision?
Let’s collect information from everyone in the room, and then let’s talk about what we’re doing next. Using Akooda to do that to build pre-read materials right can be a drastic time saver.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:20
Yeah. I’m interested. I want to see another chart here. You of all of meeting time. Well, this is like finding things.
I bet there’s, like, some stat about how much time is wasted on meetings and what the ROI would be there. What else are the benefits? Like when people are thinking to like, say, decrease the, you know, the time, the sales cycle? This is one maybe statistic and information that you share. What are some others that kind of make people, you know, that digs into the pain of what’s going on.
Because like you said, they have a million things going on in the organization.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 37:58
Yeah. Actually, one thing I do want to share is there’s a large FinTech company publicly traded that we have. They had a meeting last week and we helped them understand what that meant for the business like. All right. We had a meeting a week without meetings.
What does this mean? And we have a use case on that also online. We can take a look at that later. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:18
Talk about that.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 38:19
Yeah Yeah. Another interesting thing maybe on the sales side is right. Let’s say we have an existing customer and we need renewals. Right. We need to reach out to that customer renewal time.
So now what Akooda can do is we can actually put the entire thing on a time series right from the moment we started conversations with them, which may or may not have leftovers on Salesforce, but calendar, zoom, emails, everything. We imagine everything on the company in a timeline. Now we’re up for renewal. And when do I reach out for renewal? So this is something we did actually with a healthcare company that we explored when we poke a customer about renewal in the last three months prior to renewal, it’s actually too late because they’ve already decided.
But when I reach out to a company -6 to -3 months before renewal, I can actually still impact their decision, right? If they’re saying no, I can convert it to a yes. If they’re saying yes, I can actually maybe increase the price or see how I can push them a little bit more, right. So this is, again, the nerdy mindset of let’s put everything on a time series and have that as a story. It’s looking at business and business processes the same way you would look at changes in weather or changes in heart rate.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:38
Talk about the meeting last week.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 39:41
Yeah, so big company decided they’re going to do a meeting this week right. It’s an HR ops decision. And then how do I measure it. Right. Like is well first I guess I’d like to ask what’s my KPI.
Do we want a meeting this week just because we want people to have some peace and quiet? Okay, maybe. But then did we lose speed? Did we gain speed? What did it do to us?
Right. So one first naive thing we can do is we can actually take all meetings and figure out how much a single meeting costs us. But we can also see our cadence. Right? Like, we’ve got projects going on, we’ve got customers, we’re closing.
We’ve got things that need to be developed. How is our meaningless week impacting those? Right. And maybe we did have some meetings this week. So what does it tell us about you know, let’s say we did have meetings.
What does it tell us about the meetings that we didn’t have? Do we actually need them? Right. There’s a lot to learn from that. And the great thing about Akooda is that it’s an engine that can just look at things through anomaly detection eyes and tell us interesting things that have happened during this week compared to others.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:54
So what did you find? I don’t know for that. Yeah.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 40:58
Yeah. No I think overall great. And also, you know, redundant meetings that we actually don’t need to return to the table.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:05
Do you remember? Like what? How much time they were spending in like a regular week in meetings versus.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 41:13
I don’t remember the specific numbers. I think there’s a use case on the website. If not, I can share that PDF with you later. The anonymous PDF. I’ll take a look at it later.
I just don’t want to.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:22
Yeah, no, I’ll pull it up while we’re talking to see if because I do want to talk about some of these use cases, but or any of these ones that we have, the healthcare, the biotech.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 41:35
I’ll take a look.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:37
The Acutus enterprise. But I do want to talk about a use case like how are companies using it and maybe talk about a healthcare company, how are they using Akooda?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 41:50
I think that I gave that example on the renewal. I think -6 to -3 company. I got it. Take a look at I think this is so this is from our dashboard screen. It’s not a specific use case but so basically on Akooda we’ve got I sent this out on the zoom chat.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:07
Oh cool I’ll pull it up.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 42:09
Yeah basically. So the Akooda AI engine we’ve got all these use cases right. So if you want to run your no-meeting experiment. We have a dashboard that’s ready for you. That you can just understand.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:21
Oh, here it is.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 42:22
All right. You’ve got tickets, work, effort and done right. Like, how did it impact your individual contributor work? Conciseness, collaboration rates of discussions. Right.
If you dropped your meetings and then all you’re doing on slack is explaining yourself, you actually lost time, right? So we’re giving you full visibility into that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:39
So how they used it instead of doing a meeting, would they just ask Akooda.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 42:46
Yeah of course. Like and then you can do a no-meetings week with Akooda. No meetings without Akooda and Akooda will just speed things up for you regardless. Right. But this is more like, you know, people want to ask themselves the question, how do I run as an organization?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:01
Interesting. Yeah. What did Akooda? Did you guys suggest that or was that something that they wanted to do, like we want to do a week without meetings, I think.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 43:13
They wanted to do a meeting without a week, without meetings. We were like, what if we could tell you exactly what it does to your business? Exactly what it does. And then we can figure out if we want to do more of these, less of these, or if there’s just a lesson learned that we can improve cadence because all companies need meetings, right? And also all companies complain that they have too many meetings.
Those are like both like axioms. But maybe we can just like take a look after this. No meeting. We can actually improve everything other than just — it’s not just putting a band-aid. It’s also fixing the broken bone.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:44
Yep. I don’t think we talked about healthcare. You mentioned I don’t know if we talked about the FinTech security company and how they use Akooda.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 43:57
Yeah. So this is a fun story. I mentioned that to come to work with public companies you need to talk to compliance. Right. And so we had Akooda.
We went through a Soc2 compliance. And this is actually about how I messed up as a CEO Is, I was too cheap to bring in an external solution to help us become compliant. And then what Akooda told me is that I’m overworking my engineering team on compliance things other than features, so I’m actually losing time because my engineers are not building features. They’re working on compliance. And that’s where I’m losing company.
That’s exactly how the kind of insights that Akooda could provide. Once I saw that, I actually told myself, hey, look, it makes no sense. We got to the point where, like 80% of our engineers time is spent on compliance, and I brought on board a third-party tool, Secure Frame to help us become Soc2 compliant. I think that that use case is actually on the secure Frame website, because when they saw it, they became customers.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:52
Yeah. You used it for yourself in this situation.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 44:55
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we ate our own dog food.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:58
You know, I have one last question. First of all, thanks for sharing this super interesting journey. You know, people can, you know, check out Akooda. I just love to hear some of your favorite resources. It could be software tools.
I mean, I know you’ve experienced just by integrating them in for companies, but some of your favorite software tools and things that you use as a company.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 45:28
Yeah. Yeah. Big fan, like I said, of all productivity-related tools. One tool that I really like and admire is DocSend by Dropbox, actually recently acquired by Dropbox. I think it’s a great way to understand and collect analytics, to know what your documents do when they’re out there in the field, rather than just attaching it as an email.
So I’m a big fan. And then of course, other products rolled out that are very similar, but DocSend is near and dear to my heart. I think it’s a phenomenal tool. And then, of course, there’s just a new age of AI related tools that are just mind-blowing. You know, cursor as an engineering tool is changing, really changing the way we write code.
Also very risky, right? Writing code at scale. Letting an AI agent do what they want. It can also be risky. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:18
I think because you grew up in a household where your parents were. Yeah. Professors. Right. So you’ve been on the cutting edge before?
It was cool. Any other cool AI tools that people can should experiment with? I remember I just tested out, like, you know, I don’t know if you’ve tested sooner where you could put someone’s information in. It spits out like a song about them, just like interesting tools. Any that you’ve been playing around with?
Yuval Gonczarowski: 46:46
Yeah, I think so. I’m, I, we, we always use interchangeably all LLMs, you know, from, from the big companies. Because again, you know, we’re trying to always test them all. Of course, everything around the office is now memes of pictures like people’s faces and comic style and everything. Great, great humor there.
All over. I am, I’d say I am very impressed. Very, very impressed with cursor as a tool that helps people write code faster. That is one thing I still like. I just love it.
Everything is just becoming an enabler for writing faster code, building products quicker. I’ve always been proud of the fact that I can sort of like play both sides, write, write code, and talk to people. I think that genre no longer requires people to get an engineering degree, and it’s going to change the world. It’s absolutely astonishing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:39
Yuval I want to be the first one to thank you, everyone. Check out Akooda to learn more and more episodes of the podcast. We’ll see you next time. Yuval, thanks so much.
Yuval Gonczarowski: 47:48
Thanks, Jeremy. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
