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Why Private Equity Paid $8.4 BILLION for Smartsheet | Prime Venture Partners Podcast

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đź’ˇ How do you scale a SaaS company from SMB customers to billion-dollar enterprise deals?

In this Prime Venture Partners Podcast episode, we sit down with Praerit Garg, President of Product & Innovation at Smartsheet, to uncover the secrets of scaling SaaS, AI’s role in work management, and the game-changing lessons from Smartsheet’s journey.

⏳ Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction 


01:28 - Praerit Garg’s Career Journey: From Microsoft → AWS → Smartsheet


04:46 - What is Smartsheet? How It Serves SMBs & Enterprises


07:11 - The Land & Expand Strategy: How Smartsheet Scaled Enterprise Deals


10:27 - Finding the "Magic Metric" That Drives SaaS Growth 


12:55 - Smartsheet’s IPO Journey & Why It Later Went Private Again


15:37 - AI’s Role in Work Automation & How Smartsheet Uses It 


21:03 - The Enterprise AI Trust Challenge – Why Big Companies Are Cautious


24:58 - What VCs Look for in AI SaaS Startups 🚀


36:30 - Why Learning from Non-Customers Unlocks New Market Opportunities


43:00 - Closing Thoughts 


🔥 Inside This Episode:
âś… How Smartsheet transitioned from PLG to enterprise sales
âś… The pricing strategy that maximized SaaS revenue
âś… Why AI is transforming work management & automation
âś… The #1 mistake SaaS founders make when scaling
âś… How learning from non-customers can drive new product innovation
âś… What VCs look for when investing in AI-driven SaaS startups

📢 This isn’t just a SaaS success story—it’s a must-listen masterclass on scaling, pricing, AI, and product innovation.

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Speaker 1:

If you're a SaaS business right, you earn your customer's business every day, every hour. I'm one of the three presidents of the company. Now, MomSheet is a work management platform. So think, projects, programs, processes yeah, I think the magic is in product. We organize the product org around the personas we have served. The job of product manager is to be the voice of the customer. Everybody, even the smallest of mom shop, wants to have an enterprise-grade experience right. Every morning you want to wake up thinking about okay, what do they need and how do I serve them? Technology exists ultimately to serve customers. Microsoft had lost its hunger.

Speaker 2:

I know you're setting up a brand new office in India for Smartsheet. Welcome to the Prime Venture Partners Podcast. I'm Amit Somani, your host, and I am delighted to have with us today Prerit Garg, a dear friend and president of innovation products and tech at Smartsheet. Welcome to the show, prerit. Thanks, amit, it's great to be here. So Prerit and I met each other many, many decades ago we won't say how many so as to not date either of us, but he's had a very illustrious career, you know, starting out with his grad school at Purdue, working at a variety of tech companies, then for a long stint at Amazon and now at Smartsheet. Maybe you can walk our listeners and our viewers through a little bit of your career, praveen.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that may take 45 minutes, no, but I think you kind of summarized it. We met when we were in grad school and I went to Microsoft right out of grad school and that was a long stint, for 12 years and I eventually decided that you know, it's a groundhog day, every day is a groundhog day. I better get out of there and do something. So that was fun. I did a startup for six years and then we sold that company and I thought I was going to do another startup, but then AWS came calling and so I ended up joining AWS for a few years and I thought I was going to retire after that. And then I met Mark Mader, who convinced me to join Smartsheet. So I've been six years now at.

Speaker 2:

Smartsheet, Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about the most recent two journeys One at Smartsheet. What is your role at Smartsheet? What does Smartsheet do? And then we'll go a little bit further back in history.

Speaker 1:

Sure sure, yeah. So I joined Smartsheet in 2019, february, after about eight months of quote-unquote retirement, and so I joined as the CTO. Initially, mark sort of came and said, hey, I'm running engineering myself. I need somebody who really knows how to run engineering. Can you help me out? So I, who really knows how to run engineering, can you help me out? So I ended up joining him to run engineering. That's where it started.

Speaker 1:

Of course, the company had just gone public and it was super interesting, right Like how you, where the team was, where the product was, like the entire service was in a data center. It was not in the cloud in 2019 when I joined Wow, and so one of the big things I did was to actually mobilize the team, sort of restructured them and then took the service into the cloud. So we moved everything to AWS and that was sort of the one first big thing. Then we created another region in Europe for Smartsheet and at that point, my partner in crime, who was running product at that time, decided to leave and go become a CEO of a startup, and so Mark and I had the conversation and I'd always run product and engineering and every other role, and so Mark's like should we bring somebody else, or do you want to just take over the whole thing? I said you get to make that decision, I don't get to make that decision, and so I took over both of them at that time.

Speaker 1:

And then my role evolved again last year where I took over many other functions, including corp dev strategy, digital marketing pieces as well on that. So that's sort of so. I'm one of the three presidents of the company. Now I'm responsible for everything that's product and digital. So as long as there is no direct human interaction, it sits with me. If there's direct human interaction, that sits with Max. So all our go-to-market functions like field marketing and sales and customer success, and then Mark's the CEO president.

Speaker 2:

Got it. So what is the core offering from Smartsheet and what are the? A lot of our listeners and viewers are like early stage entrepreneurs, right? And one of the things that we often think about when you're building companies cross border powerhouse out of India or dual homed in India and US is how do you sell to and how do you build for the mid market and enterprise, right? So maybe some lessons learned from Smartsheet and I'm not really sure. Is it only enterprise customers you guys have, or you have SMB as well, or just mid-market? Maybe a little bit on that would be helpful.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so Smartsheet is a work management platform, right? So think projects, programs, processes being managed in an organization, right? We have the smallest of customers, and I like giving my personal example. We were remodeling our house over COVID, oh, wow. And so the architect as well as the general contractor both happen to be Smartsheet customers, small boutique shops but they use Smartsheet to manage all of their projects, right, I did not know that. I found out when they shared the Smartsheet to manage all of their projects. I did not know that. I found out when they shared the Smartsheet with me as their client. Amazing, amazing moment. And then, on the other end, we have customers like Amazon. Many of the Amazon's divisions use Smartsheet for managing their projects and programs. So the largest of customers in the world use Smartsheet for.

Speaker 2:

So pretty. Very few companies have been able to scale both at the product and the GTM level, all the way from SMB, like the contractor that redid your home, to like somebody running a large division in Amazon or whatever Walmart or whichever enterprise customer you have. How has that really worked out, in the sense of both the product side and the go-to-market side? And do you consciously, when you are running the org, are you thinking like one customer persona, or you know? Because like scaling a PLG with like $20 a month for some contractor versus a million dollar account with a larger client, like it just seems like very different.

Speaker 1:

They are very different. I mean, there's no question about that or anything. And for a platform which serves the smallest of customers to the largest, you have to sort of be very intentional about how are you going to go to market, how are you going to serve customers at the different segments, and how much? Because it's very much a land expand product offering right. So you land with a customer for a specific use case and then, because of collaboration across the organization, new use cases get discovered right, and so small customers you can only go so far and the large customers there's a lot of opportunity to expand across division, across departments.

Speaker 1:

So SmartShare has gone on a very interesting journey. It originally started as a PLG offering right, there was a and Smartsheet always had the trial motion and so it started as that. But at some point Mark made the decision this was before I had joined them right that he started experimenting, hiring salespeople to go sell to larger mid-market and enterprise customers and those deals tended to be larger and there was a very different level of sophistication of what was being managed. So the business heavily grew because of the enterprise penetration, mid-market and enterprise. We kept our PLG DNA and that's why we continue to have a lot of SMB customers as well, and so you have to be very thoughtful about how do you run those two motions, and we've had our set of learnings along the way.

Speaker 2:

Can you talk about the product side of this? Because what a mom-and-pop SMB customer would demand versus a typical, you know a large enterprise customer? The five, nines availability, this failover, all that would not match. So how do you do the product and the tech org to match that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think there are some aspects which are consistent. Right, everybody, even the smallest of mom shop, wants to have an enterprise grade experience. If it's a work management product, they don't want the service going down their dependency on tracking work and being able to report on work. We often say that if you're a SaaS business, you earn your customer's business every day, every hour. Regardless of the smallest of customers to largest, the level of sophistication of what they're managing changes, right, like a large customer is managing a portfolio typically of hundreds, if not thousands, of projects. Right, like, if you're managing wind farms, you're probably hundreds of wind farms and you're trying to actually manage and maintain that. So the scale and the complexity changes right when you're a small business to a large business, and so a lot of our functionality is common, the end user functionality is common. But then we provide these high value, large scale portfolio management capabilities that essentially that are really targeted to our end price customers and to your product point.

Speaker 1:

Right, you have to when you're building a platform that is so horizontal in terms of serving, you have to be. You can't sort of purely do it by segmenting the market. You have to focus on the persona, right, and so product org, because I just restructured the product org and we can talk about that as well. So we organized the product org around the personas we are serving. So the three core personas that Smartsheet serves today is what I call a work manager. A core work manager Somebody who's managing a project or a program in the organization. To an enterprise work manager that's managing a portfolio of hundreds, if not thousands, of projects right. And then the collaborator, the stakeholder that's participating in the work right. It's a very important stakeholder that collaborates and they're doing the actual work, working with either the enterprise portfolio manager or the work manager right. So we're organized around the persona because it's all about how do you delight the persona, how do you serve them. Every morning you want to wake up thinking about okay, what do they need and how do I serve them?

Speaker 2:

So let's say I'm a SaaS entrepreneur right From anywhere really, but nominally, say, cross-border, based out of India and the US, and I'm serving SMB customers. I'm at a couple of million ARR and the US and I'm serving SMB customers. I'm at a couple of million ARR and now my VCs, unfortunately, are pushing me to go up market right, go mid-market, go enterprise, try to get 50K deals, try to get 250K deals. How do I make that transition If I'm already there, I've got real customers, I've got real traction, but I need to scale up Any thoughts or lessons or tips of what I might go through.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the magic is in product right. So the magic is do you have a product team that actually deeply understands the customer and the customer need right, like Smartsheet went through that journey as an example, I'll give you. Yes, I remember when I joined Smartsheet. One of the questions I asked Mark at that time was okay, what led to the IPO? What was that secret sauce that enabled you to scale and scale rapidly enough that you could?

Speaker 2:

actually go IPO and what stage were you at when you IPO'd revenue scale?

Speaker 1:

It was a couple of hundred million dollars.

Speaker 1:

So it was super interesting. He referenced a very specific capability in the product it's called the control center which was discovered essentially by the product managers talking to the actual customers. They saw this pattern over and over again, which is these portfolio managers. What they were doing is they were making copies of their standard Smartsheet templates to manage hundreds or thousands of these projects in a consistent way, and so they discovered this sort of little secret, which is, hey, what really, at scale, customers want to do is manage things consistently across large number of projects. So they built a specific capability to target that persona, and that was a high value capability, right? And so you have to continuously listen to the customer, right?

Speaker 1:

One of the things I often say about product management is it's actually really poorly named. Right, because the product management we think that, oh, it's about managing the product. It's actually not right. The job of a product manager is to be the voice of the customer, right? Like? One of the things I ask my product managers is how much time are you spending with customers in a given week? Right? I'm a big believer of weekly rhythms. Like how much time do you spend with customers If you're not spending 30 to 40% of your time talking to real customers or talking to your go-to-market team that talks to your customers. You're not doing product management, because product management often gets focused on features and functions and that's not the job of product managers, got it?

Speaker 2:

So talk to us a little bit, both about the IPO you were there before the IPO, or just about, just about.

Speaker 3:

Just after.

Speaker 2:

And then obviously you guys recently went private again, right with the private equity. So how was the journey post ipo, dealing with the public markets, delivering to a certain target every quarter, every year, etc yeah it's, it's super interesting.

Speaker 1:

I learned a lot right um this I was a section 16 officer of a public company for the first time in my career and so there's a lot to learn every quarter. The earnings statement that Mark had to say I was part of that journey of sort of creating that. I think there are lots of benefits of the public market but at the same time the dynamics and the expectations of the public market require a certain kind of consistency in results. So if you want to make pivots, if you want to restructure the company not great to be in public markets right Because it's very focused on quarterly outcomes and public market are not as involved in the company. They're sort of assessing the company from far away right.

Speaker 1:

And so it's very hard to make bets that are multi-year out bets, whereas working with private equity changes that equation. We're in this together now, right, Our investors and us. We are in this together to create more value so you can make longer bets. You can actually do the restructuring and changing some of the things you want to go change.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. We can't but not talk about AI and quite a bit. But before that, just one last thing on the SMB versus mid-market versus enterprise. How about packaging? How about pricing? Like you said, I love the thing about product managers spending a lot more time or 30 to 40% of their time with customers. How do you figure out price discovery? Another of my favorite topics.

Speaker 1:

Please go right ahead. We just changed Smartsheets, pricing and packaging. That was one of the restructuring things we did. I'm a big believer pricing is one of the strongest levers you have in the business, right, and especially once you figured the mousetrap out. In terms of what customers need, pricing is a big lever and I learned a lot about pricing and packaging at AWS when I was four years there. That company has the art and the science of pricing down. So the way I always talk about pricing and packaging especially if you have our kind of product offering, which is you want to land and then you want to expand, right. So AWS was very much like that as well. It was very much a land, expand right and client business, and so you have to price.

Speaker 1:

What you have to find is this magic, what I call the magic metric, the value metric. Like that, the customer clearly sees that they are getting that value right. And when you find that value metric, you have to price it such a way that it's easy to get on it right and then, as the adoption grows and scales, you get paid for the value the customer is actually getting. And that's the magic right. And there are lots of different metrics Like in AWS, right S3 storage price point, right On a unit price point. It was super small yeah Easy to get started. Right Easy to get started. Compute Easy to compute yeah Easy to get started. But the more you consumed, clearly, the more value you were getting and more you paid right. And so it has to be simple enough that the customer connects the dot on value being realized right, because customers don't really want to pay when they can connect the dot to the value they're getting. It's hard to argue against that.

Speaker 2:

So let me double click just on that one last second before we move on to a different topic. Let's say in enterprise you're doing a sale brand new first time and there's enterprise product manager or whatever right program manager persona. There is the collaborator persona, there's like a bunch of different like the wind, wind, windmills, farm kind of thing. There you don't have that luxury right of starting small and scaling up because you're going to land right off the bat with a much higher price point, potentially right. How would you do that? Or you'll just do the extrapolation from other clients actually.

Speaker 1:

no, it's super interesting. Each one one of those scenarios, right, like the wind farm scenario, as an example. Typically, what happened is for Smartsheet was one specific team that was managing just one wind farm started using Smartsheet. Right, we would see that in warehouses as well One team starts using Smartsheet.

Speaker 2:

This is like HubSpot or Dropbox or one of those, like it's the department level.

Speaker 1:

Department level person signs up because you, you know, typically they have been using something like spreadsheets and it's like they're struggling trying to keep up with and spreadsheets are not really designed for managing work. Yeah, right, and so what happens is that they switch, they start using it, see the power of it, and then they start talking to their colleagues about it, or typically start sharing the sheets with their colleagues, and then they sort of adopt it and at some point somebody says, okay, we're going to manage the whole thing with that. So a lot of our adoption, even in the enterprise, has been sort of this you land with specific people and then expand it through that.

Speaker 1:

Now that to your point. That's not necessarily true for every product, of course, right, there are some products you have to go in um with the, the full artillery. And that's sort of very much an enterprise sales-led motion. So we found kind of that balance. We do that enterprise selling as well as land and expand.

Speaker 2:

All right, Moving to the buzzword of the decade, maybe the century AI. So how does AI change what is happening at Smartsheet? How are you guys thinking about agentic AI? How are you thinking about everything AI with respect to Smartsheet?

Speaker 1:

I think we live in a very privileged time, right Like you and I. Multiple decades, that's right. I often tell people that you know, in my career, right, we've seen several such transformations. Right like the personal computer to client server computing, to the internet, to the cloud, to mobile and now the generative ai right like it's. It's incredible, right, it's like the.

Speaker 1:

The first neural network paper was 1983, right? Yeah, I think you and I were like, yeah, we probably read it Sixth grade maybe, right? So 40 years later, right, it's probably the best gift we've gotten, like at Smartsheet, we truly believe that it's like one of the best gifts we could have gotten from technology. Because, when you think about who we serve, we serve work managers and people who are actually doing the work. They're typically business users. They're not technologists, they're not developers, they don't want to write code, and so we pride ourselves in being that no-code work management system that you can configure. But still, there are some hard things in it Writing formulas people don't wake up every morning wanting to write formulas or analyzing which projects are at risk, which projects are over budget. They're not data analysts, typically, so they want a dashboard that tells them what's at risk and what's over budget. So we have capabilities in the product that up until generative AI were required a lot of what I call cognitive load.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but you have to engage with it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you have to become experts at writing formulas and you have to become experts at sort of building these charts and widgets. So we added capabilities with generative AI where you can, with natural language, now ask like calculate, give me the formula for calculating over budget projects. Right, literally generates the formula for you and plugs it into your sheet. Now I don't have to do that, right? Same thing with analyze data right, we have an analyze data capability with natural language. You can ask the question. It will analyze your sheets and create your chart that you can literally, with a click of a button, put it on your dashboard, so dramatically lowering the burden. We have customers like Collier, which is using these. They've created these personalized dashboards now for each of the agents simply because now they have these tools that make it super easy to set things up.

Speaker 2:

How about the role of automating the role of the work manager? Are you thinking one is the engaging you know helping the work manager do a smart sheet better. Are you doing things to automate that Absolutely? And maybe some examples of what are the? Kinds of things you guys are thinking about. I think it's introduction, right?

Speaker 1:

Well, I think you have to. Often technology comes around and people think that. So I think often technology comes around and people think that, oh, I can get users to adopt technology quickly. That doesn't actually happen, right, People have to go through a journey of getting comfortable with technology. Generative AI is a classic example where, if you start automating things because it's a stochastic system and not an algorithmic system it will make mistakes, Of course, and so that trust with your users is super critical to get right right. So I think we're on a journey. We're not at the place where we can turn things on and people are willing to let it automate and do that autonomously for you.

Speaker 2:

In fact, we've heard the opposite that the enterprise clients are very picky about ensuring that there is visibility into what the system is going to do Exactly right.

Speaker 1:

And when we added capabilities like analyze data and built a chart, the common question was how do I trust that it's there? So we had to add capabilities where you can actually say OK, show me how you came up with this chart so people could go read that stuff right. So I think we are on a journey. We are absolutely going to get to autonomous capabilities, but we're starting with hey, there are on-demand capabilities where I can ask for it to help me and it'll help me, right. And then there are what I call proactive capabilities, where it starts making suggestions. And then there will be the autonomous capabilities where you can just say okay, I trust you now enough that you can just do this for me, right? So we are on this journey of sort of enabling that for our customers. Over the next couple of years, I think you'll see a lot more autonomous capabilities being turned on as our users become comfortable with that.

Speaker 2:

Let's say, I'm an early stage SaaS or or you know whatever, software founder and I'm starting out now, circa 2025. What would you advise me to do in terms of my mvp or my 1.0, as it pertains to ai, as it pertains to sas? Of course you need to understand the customer. Is there a pain point, all of that? But in terms of actually building, would you go like AI first, right off the bat, and do you think there'll be customer adoption? Or, like you're saying, there's maybe a little bit of assist model where you're, you know, still leaving the human in the loop to build the conviction and trust? How do you think about it?

Speaker 1:

I think it's no different than any other technology. I mean, right, like when cloud came about, people were like, okay, well, am I ready to adopt, right? I think AI is. It's another technology like that. Now it's a tool in our toolbox to go serve customers, right? So the first technology exists ultimately to serve customers.

Speaker 1:

That's sort of so if you're a new founder, like you should absolutely be looking as like oh, here's another tool in my toolbox to serve my customers in an even better way. So I think it would be a mistake to not have that in your toolbox. Experiences that are just amazingly delightful and solve the customer problem and the customer pain in sort of incredible ways, in a differentiated way. You should absolutely go do that right? There's no reason to kind of think, but at the end of the day, you have to keep listening to your customers, right? So, yeah, trying to go too much faster than where your customer is also is not necessarily going to make you successful, right? Because you have to bring the customer on a journey with you. So work backwards from your customer.

Speaker 2:

Got it, since you also now head CoopDev and I know you used to do angel investing I don't know if you still do angel investing or not. Let's say, 10 different SaaS AI company founders are pitching you. What will attract your attention in terms of at least the initial laugh test, to say, ah, this is real value being created, versus you know everybody's, you know everythingai right Coffeeai.

Speaker 1:

I always sort of ask the customer question Okay, who have you talked to? Who's you ideally, who's using your stuff right? Are they able to pull out their wallet and want to pay you for it? Like those are the kinds of questions you want to ask. And if there is and then you know you are much more of an expert at this than I am so I'll ask what do you think is the size of the market that you can go penetrate? But at the same time I will also assess the founders themselves, because I think doing startups is extremely hard. You work with so many founders. Do you have that perseverance to go on that journey and do you have that ability to listen and adapt to the customers and sort of go on that journey? That takes a lot right, that takes a lot of conviction right to actually go do that. And so I think there's a lot that goes into what differentiates between success and failure in that particular case.

Speaker 2:

So I'm going to switch gears, Prate and talk a little bit about, you know, three amazing companies you worked at, right. What were some of the lessons learned from Microsoft, from Amazon and, of course, now still at Smartsheet right From Smartsheet that you would recommend, Because these are all ginormous companies, right? Certainly, the first two are multi-trillion dollar companies and hopefully Smartsheet also someday becomes an equally large company. So what were some of the lessons learned from each of those companies that might be helpful?

Speaker 1:

I think the lessons I learned I mean were the most brutal lessons I learned were actually doing a startup Okay we should include that Most relevant for our audience.

Speaker 1:

I thought that might be. Microsoft is already big and already had customers, and I often used to say that, hey, I'm very customer-centric product leader. And because I would go spend time in the executive briefing center a couple of times a month, when I started doing the startup, I realized one of one of the recent learnings was well, at Microsoft, customers came to us. Right, I never had to go to customers. Customers came to us and I would go present and feel like I'm very customer connected. You become a startup. Nobody comes to you.

Speaker 1:

I would give out business cards at Microsoft, people would call you. I would give out business cards at Microsoft. People would call you. I would give out business cards. Nobody calls you, right.

Speaker 1:

And so one of the biggest you have to go find your customers and, as a technologist, it's very easy to sit in your little office with your computer and imagine what the customers need. My biggest learning was one night. You know this is 2008. Economy had crashed, right. And so, as founders, you have that choice where are you going to go back to corporate jobs or are you going to actually make this company real? And I stayed up at night, built a list of customers in a 25-mile radius and I literally next day morning started cold calling them and then found time with them and over the next couple of weeks I actually drove around to go show them what we had and whether they would actually pay for that. And that's what it takes to actually right I mean, it was one of those hard learnings. Right Is that you have to go actually chase down your customers and to learn from them. So this is obviously extremely valuable you have to go actually chase down your customers if you're, and to learn from them.

Speaker 2:

So I'm going to. So this is obviously extremely valuable. Uh, I'm going to go back to the microsoft and uh and amazon thing. I mean mac microsoft, of course, very large, successful company, went from being a sleeper right to suddenly being, at least at one, of the kind of uh, you know, forefront kind of leaders in in ai. Right, how the heck did that happen? Right, and you know this is last 10 years. I know satya nadella is credited with a lot of it, but uh, that. And then, of course, amazon. I mean they keep expanding into a variety of different things. So so, maybe less about you know, just startup founders, but as they think of building scale, building scale. I worked at google, I worked at ibm and there were a lot of things I learned from those companies which someday would be very valuable to a startup founder maybe not the first hundred customers.

Speaker 1:

Right. I think so scaling a business are things you learn at companies like Microsoft and Amazon and, like I told you, the pricing and packaging. I had a lot of tremendous amount of learning at Amazon around pricing and packaging, how to price it to be able to scale the business right. As an example. Right, microsoft, I had some incredible learnings around go-to-market, for example. Right, like Microsoft, was heavily channel-driven business, right? Microsoft basically never really sold anything directly to customers. It was either through OEMs or through this large ecosystem of channel partners. And so how do you reach your customers, how do you deliver value to customers? Different companies have done that. Amazon is exactly the opposite. It's like directly selling to customers, all direct, right.

Speaker 1:

The key thing in those cultures you learn is are you hungry? You talked about how Microsoft sort of lost its way, and I think one of the things I used to say, one of the reasons I left Microsoft at that time, was Microsoft had lost its hunger and hunger to serve customers and so it sort of became very insular and inward facing as an organization. And that's the danger you run up. I think Satya a lot of credit to Satya and sort of turning that around and make the company hungry again, and I think that's why, whether it was chasing the cloud bet or getting ahead in the AI, it's like you have to constantly be hungry and be looking for what's the next thing. How are we going to almost commoditize our last thing and do the next best thing? And Amazon is inherently hungry. That culture is just mind-blowingly hungry, yeah absolutely so.

Speaker 2:

let's move from companies to people, right? What, when you are hiring product leaders or tech leaders or grooming them, right? I mean, you already have them in a startup, your first product manager, whoever you could afford the right horsepower and hunger. What do you look for? How do you nurture them? You know, maybe talk a little bit about building the tech and product org, particularly at a leadership level.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I think hunger is definitely a key element, right, I always say attitude is 80% of the job, and so there are sort of core things like that.

Speaker 2:

And how do you assess hunger in an interview setting? Or whatever, especially in a startup. Think startup, not late stage company.

Speaker 1:

Tricky, tricky Interview like one hour conversation. How much can you actually glean somebody through that? So usually experiential learning is what I seek for. I look for those examples where you failed, why you failed, what you learned from that right, what bets you made and whether they succeeded or not. So you're constantly looking for is this person going to push themselves and push the organization to go do more and better? So I think that's one of the core things I look for. There are, of course, skills right, like as a product manager. If you are enamored with creating features versus enamored with actually talking to customers and reaching out to customers, you can tell the difference. Yes, that's one of those big things. It's like I need product managers who are going to be out there talking to customers, not in the kitchen as much. Right. I often say that you need to be in the dining hall, not in the kitchen. Oh, nice, got it.

Speaker 2:

How about just the roadmap of managing product, right, like you just said? Look, you sometimes have to kind of go out, not just be inward focus or even cannibalize your own products and so on. So do you have any frameworks in terms of you know what is new stuff that you launch, what is existing stuff that just needs to keep getting better, right and maybe something in between right? So how do you manage the kind of product kind of roadmap as it?

Speaker 1:

were yeah, another thing, that's art, a balance between art and science?

Speaker 2:

yes, hence asking you those questions so we can get clarity yeah again.

Speaker 1:

No, no, no magic. But there is a prioritization framework. Right, like taking care of your existing customers comes is paramount. Right, like as a SaaS business. Right, like I said earlier, we earn our customers' business every day, every hour. Right, it's a subscription business. It's not like they paid us some licenses and now they're stuck with us. No, they can walk away tomorrow, right, and so if our current customers are not happy, we have to prioritize that portion of that right. So now you have to be careful enough to not let all of your investment dollars essentially get sucked into just that piece. So you have to figure out, okay, what are the most painful set of things that you must go address to not risk losing customers. Right, because churn is super damaging.

Speaker 2:

That's the core right.

Speaker 1:

Service availability sits in that bucket. Right Like it's a SaaS business. So if the service is not available or there's a risk of scaling issues or service incidents, got to take care of that. Right Like it's pretty fundamental right, because if your customers don't trust you that you're going to be there, you're going to lose them, regardless of how fancy features you might have, and so that's pretty fundamental. And then, after that, your product team and the time they spend with customers to seeking those pain points that will create real value for your customers are the opportunities. I'm a big believer of the work backwards from your customers, right, amazon, so we use something equivalent and, like a PR FAQ, we call it them a customer problem definition documents. So I expect product managers to write a customer problem definition doc or a CPD, and CPD has to have real quotes from multiple customers that can tell us, okay, what are some of the challenges they are facing in managing work at scale, and those are the things that drive prioritization on the bets we'll make right.

Speaker 2:

How would that work, pradeep, for new products or new companies, right. So I'm going to go talk to prospects. This is like the Henry Ford thing. If I'd asked customers, they would have said faster horses or more horses right. How would you do that for new products? Like you're launching something new from Smartsheet from scratch?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think so. Sometimes new product journeys, amit, start actually walking away from your product and thinking, okay, right product and thinking okay, right. And and often startups are a great place to go learn right, because the disruption is happening when you are, when you're not looking right, and so you're absolutely right about that. So one of the things having CorpDev as a function is that we are constantly looking at what's happening in the market right. How is somebody doing it better and differently from us? Because there is, there's a lot of learning that can happen that just looking at your existing customers is not going to give you. It's like all those people who are not your customers are also the places to go learn from, and so we have a CorpDev team that is sort of adjunct to our product team that creates other learnings that are happening and one of the ways and you can do through that learning you can identify new opportunities of adjacent offerings that you can go create.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes it's actually better to do an acquisition right. So, because there is a set of founders and a team that has spent several years that are, you know, wallowing in that particular domain and that particular need, and that's a faster path to bringing them on. So we've done a couple of acquisitions. Like, resource management was an area we were deep in managing work and we said, hey, managing work and managing people that are doing the work is an equally important adjacent domain. We did an acquisition in that. We learned that, oh, managing content a lot of work generates content. Or, like in marketing, generating video and images and things like that. So content was highly associated. So we went and did an acquisition in that area as well. So you have to look at whether you are going to make an investment internally or you can do an acquisition and bring an adjacent offering through that. So many ways to go innovate and move that forward.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. I know you're setting up a brand new office in India for Smartsheet, but maybe expanding a little bit more. What is your view of startups from India, talent from India? In your past companies perhaps Amazon and Microsoft you probably hired people from here. And what would you recommend that we do to get India on the global kind of product map? India has a good global product map Awesome. How do we get a larger share of that?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. I think India has, like what 1.4 billion people. Right, like the talent is here, like by all statistical measures, right, there's a domination in talent in the country, right? So I think Freshworks is an example of a company that I look up to Girish, I know, and you know was started here and had a highly PLG motion. His customers took him to various parts of the world and and the company has done extremely well, right. So.

Speaker 1:

So I don't think the beautiful thing about the internet is that you know, as long as your customers can discover and get started and use you, you'll find your customers and it can be global. Right, my, my daughter, you know, she, she has a business of her own and it's completely online, selling clothes, and her customers are everywhere. So, the, so, the nothing is stopping you. I think the world is now an oyster in terms of reaching your customers and going global, absolutely, but I will also say that I think the indian market itself is massive, so there's like you have a massive market that you can serve right here. You don't even need to worry about global like you can. Actually serving that market can teach you so much and set you up for going and serving the rest of the world does part sheet have a lot of revenue from india?

Speaker 1:

not a lot of revenue not not a lot but we do sell through a couple of channel partners here and um, and so we, we would love to grow our market in India. Right, but that's. I often tell people that growing into international markets you have to understand cultural aspects of those markets and how to best serve customers. Right, japan's very different than Australia, is very different from India, and so growing internationally requires that connection with the local culture. Got it?

Speaker 2:

So, preet, as we come to a wrap here, just maybe talk a little bit about yourself and your personal journey, right, in terms of what lessons have you learned as you evolved into these various roles? What has inspired you, whether it's people or books, or frameworks or whatever that, if somebody was listening in who is 20-something, two, three, five years out of college, that might benefit them over the next 20 years.

Speaker 1:

So a lot of things, Amit. I think we've gone through. We have time Books. One of my favorite books is Sapiens, I don't know if you've read Noam.

Speaker 3:

Harari's book Sapiens.

Speaker 1:

It was one of those transformational books for me and as a leader. There's another book that I learned a lot from. It's called Leadership on the Line. That's a great book. I highly recommend it. Lots of amazing stories in that book about what leadership is about, and often people associate leadership with corporate environments.

Speaker 1:

Leadership is any individual can be a leader, right. It's about having a mission and going pursuing that mission and bringing people along on that mission. So there's a lot that you can learn right through those things. I think, as I've evolved in my career and become much more of a people leader, it's been fascinating, right.

Speaker 1:

I used to say that when I started my career, when you and I were sort of coming out of college, it was all about hey, what's the technology that we're working on, what's the business context in which we're working on? And people were like the distance third and I became, I think a few years later got married and became a dad and I didn't learn this thing. My priorities flipped completely. It's all about the people. If you have the right people and you can create the right culture, magic happens and technology is, like now, a distant third. It's the people, the business context and technology. We'll figure the technology out. If you have the right people and the right business, problem we're going after and so Well, awesome, thank, right people and the right business problem we're going after, and so Well, awesome.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much, prit. It has been delightful to talk to you. I know we can go on for a while, but thanks for being on the podcast, of course.

Speaker 1:

It was fun, thank you for having me.

Speaker 3:

Dear listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast app for free and you'll be the first one to know when new episodes are available. Just search for Prime Venture Partners Podcast in Apple Podcast, Spotify, CastBox or however. You get your podcasts, Then hit subscribe and, if you have enjoyed the show, we would be really grateful if you leave us a review on Apple Podcast. To read the full transcript, find the link in the show notes.