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Thinking about going from Big Tech to startup?
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter sits down with Bhrighu Sareen, who took the leap from Microsoft to Highspot and has been leading AI-driven product innovation ever since. They talk about the realities of transitioning from a massive company to a high-growth startup, scaling AI-driven teams, and how Bhrighu’s helping transform sales enablement through automation and intelligence.
His insights on navigating change, working with founders, and executing at speed are a must-listen for any leader considering the leap from stability to startup chaos.
Tune in now for practical strategies and an inside look at how AI is reshaping go-to-market execution.
This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.
Bhrighu Sareen: Hi, Tim. Good to be here and thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. I’ll say if you’re thinking about making a switch, Tim’s a really good person to speak to. I remember the first time we met, I had spoken to Robert and the co-founders a few times, and on the fence, not sure, and then Tim met me at this coffee shop in Kirkland, Washington.
Tim Porter: Zoka.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly, yeah. He was only, I think, 20 minutes late, maybe more and gave me some excuse about it. He was trying to raise a lot of money for the next fund or something. Not that I could verify, but we’ll believe him. So, memorable, not just from that, but thank you for always being there in terms of providing guidance and how to think about it and also specific examples from your past.
Tim Porter: Thanks, Bhrighu. That is a true story. My only defense, I don’t remember why I was late, but at least I came to you. I drove across the lake and to a coffee shop in your neighborhood.
All right, Bhrighu, why don’t we start with your journey from Microsoft to Highspot? What were you doing at Microsoft? Say a little bit more about building Teams and what inspired you to make the switch from Big Tech to startups. This is definitely a very common thing. People who have had successful careers at Big Tech companies and “Hey, I want to do something earlier stage. How do I do it? Why do I do it?” You’ve done it super successfully. Tell us about that journey.
Bhrighu Sareen: Microsoft Teams was the last project I worked on, but prior to that, I had worked in Bing, MSN, and Windows. Microsoft is a phenomenal place because you can have multiple careers without leaving the company. I got an opportunity to learn a lot, started my career there and just worked up through the levels. Numerous challenges, great managers, great mentors, and a lot of very, very smart people that allowed me to grow and challenge myself.
Teams was a phenomenal experience. It was this small product. I joined before we even went to beta, and no one knew where it would land up, but the concept of redefining how information workers actually work, reduce friction, and having to use multiple tools to get the job done was appealing. It was a phenomenal challenge, and it gave me a chance to learn. When I joined, like I mentioned, we hadn’t even shipped the product or it wasn’t even in beta, but then went from there and took it from zero monthly active users to 300 million monthly active users when I left, so phenomenal growth.
I’d been there six and a half, seven-ish years and done a lot of different roles, taken on different aspects of the product, built in PM/ENG together, ecosystem, partnerships, customer growth, and I was looking for my next challenge. I think every product person has this thing in the back of their mind like you mentioned, which is like, “Huh, should I do a startup? Is the grass greener on the other side?” I had been in Big Tech for 17-ish years with Microsoft, and so I think in priority order for me it was that I wanted a challenge, and a place where I could learn. The two different aspects, could I have taken another job at Microsoft and learned? Absolutely. I would’ve taken on a new challenge, a new dimension to it, but the depth of learning that this change allowed me to take was drastic. I think the greater the challenge, the greater the learning.
The other end of the spectrum was going from a big company to a smaller company. I report directly to the CEO, and that provides a peer group like the CFO, CHRO, so learning in terms of what are the issues that are impacting the entire company. You’re not just focused on your product area and on your scope, and that’s the only thing I’m going to do, learning in terms of speed and agility. As a startup, you don’t have a billion dollars in cash sitting in the bank. You don’t have 25,000 developers that you could pivot into whatever area you want to go. It’s just speed and agility.
Tim Porter: Teams, zero to 300 million, it’s insane to think about that kind of growth.
Bhrighu Sareen: It is. It is.
Tim Porter: I remember our first conversation, and I was struck by a few things about you. One — that this point about agility is that you seemed very much about making decisions and cutting through broader group dynamics.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly.
Tim Porter: Sometimes part of the art of being a good executive at a big company is how you embrace big group dynamics, and you were more sort of cut through it and had lived through this hyper-growth, so that seemed like a great fit.
Even across our portfolio there were more than one company that were recruiting you. Why did you pick Highspot? I mentioned a little bit about the product and what Highspot did. You wanted the right scenario with founders and challenge, but you had ultimately different product areas to pick. Why build in this area?
Bhrighu Sareen: Another area of learning, in addition, was I mentioned all the teams I had worked in at Microsoft, and I’d never worked in Dynamics or in anything to do with sales or MarkTech (marketing technology.) It was another dimension where I could grow in terms of a new technology, a new space, and one that was evolving very rapidly. Then, coming back specifically to Highspot, I think there are a few dimensions why. One was the people. When you’re making such a drastic change, if it doesn’t feel right in terms of the people front, it could become very, very messy.
You hear these stories about people working, and oh, man, it didn’t work out. In three to five months, they’re looking for their next opportunity, so the people was one very important part. Highspot is super lucky. The three founders, Robert, Oliver, David, are good human beings to begin with, and they care.
Second, was the space was new, and then third was Highspot, when I joined, was known for content and guidance, and that was the key thing. How do you equip salespeople with the right content at the right time? They had all the right ingredients. A lot of companies never make the switch from being a single-product company to a two-product company to a multi-product company. With our release in October 2024, what’s happened is Highspot has made that transition from a single-product company to a multi-product company.
When I saw these different ingredients, I remember after the first meeting with Robert … I got a cool story. Should I digress a little?
Tim Porter: Let’s hear it.
Bhrighu Sareen: I remember I wasn’t actively saying, “Hey, I want to leave Microsoft,” because I really enjoyed working there. Somebody mutually connected us, and it was a meeting from 4:00 to 5:00 P.M. It was 4:00 to 5:00 P.M. on a Thursday, and our offices are downtown Seattle by Pike Place Market. So, I drive up and go and meet Robert 4:00 to 5:00 P.M. One thing leads to another. When I got back into my car, it was 7:15 P.M. I called the person that mutually connected us, and this person’s like, “How’d it go?” I said, “I think it went well, but I think Robert was just being nice because we were supposed to be done at 5:00. We finished at 7:15.” And he’s like, “No, no, no, no. Robert’s met other people. Usually, it doesn’t go this long.”
You feel that connection, and so when I went back the next time to meet Robert, I was like, “Hey, you’ve built an LMS. You have a CMS. You’ve got all these different pieces. If we stitch this together, Highspot’s time can be significantly greater than what it is right now based on the product offering you have.” So, when you take all those three or four things combined together, it felt like it was a good place to be.
Tim Porter: Fantastic. I want to come back to how you’ve worked with these founders. When you joined Highspot, there were, and there still are, three founders who are super active in the company: Robert, Oliver, and David. We did a podcast, Oliver and I, five years ago about Highspot. That’s one of my favorites ever. You and Oliver work super closely together now on product?
Bhrighu Sareen: Yes.
Tim Porter: All three are really involved, which has been such an amazing part of this company, but also, in theory, not easy coming in and having this big role. You’re running half the company, product engineering, yet there are these three founders who are all very opinionated around product and engineering. Yet, it’s worked out. What has it been like coming in in your role and working effectively with founders?
Bhrighu Sareen: I’m super grateful to Robert, Oliver, and David. One, for giving me the opportunity and two, how they welcomed and included me into Highspot. A bunch of friends of mine gave me advice that this was going to be a really bad idea because they’re actively, actively involved. Like you said, they have opinions. They have more contacts than I can ever have because they’ve been doing this for a decade.
Tim Porter: Absolutely.
Bhrighu Sareen: They have more knowledge. They have more connections. They have more foresight, because I had never worked in this space. David was doing the show before I joined, and I’ve said this to David. I would not have been even half as successful or delivered even one-tenth the impact for Highspot if it weren’t for David. David has been this voice in my ear all the time, selflessly giving me advice, giving me guidance, whether it was people, product, process, or strategy. Hey, Bhrighu, here’s the pitfalls. Watch out for this. Watch out for that. He does it in a super humble way. He’s not being arrogant. He’s not trying to show me down. You could have said, “Okay, hey, great job. We got someone, good luck. If you have questions, let me know.” But being proactive about helping me and helping us move forward, so super grateful to David for that.
Tim Porter: I think there’s a question I framed around how you navigated it, but there’s a great message to founders here around how you onboard a new exec, empower them, get them ready, work together with them, and I think that’s super critical. I was going to ask how did you get comfortable with that, if that was going to be the case? Unfortunately, I’ve seen some cases where, “yeah, I talked it through with the founders. They said they wanted me to be there, and then it turned out they didn’t.” On some level, it’s a human thing, and you build trust. Was there anything on how you got confidence that they were serious about not just saying that we’re ready to bring somebody else in and do all the things you mentioned that David has done to help make you successful?
Bhrighu Sareen: Two things. One is — if you remind yourself that we’re all going to win together, it isn’t as if David or Oliver are going to have a different outcome than I’m going to have. So, I tell myself, “Okay, are they coming from the right place? And wherever we’re going, whatever decision we’re making, is it going to take Highspot to the next level?” If you think about Highspot first — is it the right decision? Then it becomes easy. Then it’s not about ego. Is your idea right, or is my idea right? It doesn’t matter. Is it the right idea for Highspot?
Tim Porter: Clearly, these folks wanted to win.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly, and so if you come in with an attitude to win, with an insane bias for action, and are humble enough to say, “okay, we learned” because not all decisions will be positive, “We learned from that, and now we’re going to go back and fix it,” I think it’s hard. Even the human nature part I think because founders in general have a different mindset, but these three things should align with every founder out there.
Tim Porter: So, having a great partner on the engineering and product side in David and Oliver.
Bhrighu Sareen: Yes.
Tim Porter: Robert is probably the best strategic product vision exec I’ve ever worked with. I remember seeing that way back at Microsoft and now, in the last 12 years at Highspot, but it can also be hard for you. He’s always the head of product in some ways, and that’s made the company so successful. How has that dynamic been?
Bhrighu Sareen: One other suggestion I’d make to the folks listening is communication is key, and building relationships is key. Yes, all three founders are Microsoft, and so was I, but our paths never crossed. I had never spoken to these folks. A lot of people say, “Oh, yeah, this was easy. You picked Highspot because they were Microsoft. You probably interacted with each other, and then they pulled you over.” I’m like, “I did not know the individuals by first name, last name or even existed.” We had never crossed paths, whether in social circles or at work. When you’re starting new, commit to frequent communication and building trust.
One of the things that we put in place was every Tuesday, Robert and I have lunch. The second thing we do is the three founders, and I would meet every Tuesday as well. Initially, they committed to actually sharing context, helping me grow. We said, “Hey, we’ll do this for three months-ish. I’ll be ramped up. Four months, you’ll have enough context, and we’ll cancel the meeting. We don’t need it.” Fast forward two-plus years, we still meet every Tuesday, all the three founders and myself.
Tim Porter: It’s often simple, smart mechanisms that are persistently applied.
Bhrighu Sareen: Yeah, there’s no shortcuts.
Tim Porter: There’s no substitute.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly. There’s no substitute, absolutely. There’s no shortcut in building trust. You have to put in the time. I think, animosity builds up when you are making stories up in your mind. He said this, so he actually means that, or she said that, so this is what’s going to happen. Why don’t you ask them what they mean? But you’re so busy in your day-to-day life that you don’t. So, my lunch with Robert every Tuesday forces us to discuss a whole bunch of things.
Tim Porter: Maybe mention some of the initiatives or structural things that you’ve done at Highspot. As someone on the board, I’ve been struck overall by how the company’s gotten more efficient, but also shipping even more things, the velocity of things. Your shipping is amazing. You’ve done some things around team and offshore but talk about some of the things that you put in place, building on the great foundation that the founders and others had built and how that’s gone. Has it all been easy? Has it been challenging? What’s it been like?
Bhrighu Sareen: A super complicated question. I’m not sure where to go because you’ve thrown in “puting structural things in place, how do you increase product velocity, how did you get our costs into control.”
Tim Porter: We can throw you a softball. You can take it in any direction. Specifically, how would you describe the major initiatives that you had to put in place when you got to Highspot from a product and engineering standpoint?
Bhrighu Sareen: I lived it the last two-plus years now, and when I joined, I have to start by saying everyone’s heart was in the right place. The clarity of where we were going was always there, and that’s super important because if your founders, the exec team, the VPs, senior directors, directors, and so on and so forth aren’t clear on where we’re going, that’s a big problem. At least those two parts where everyone’s heart is in the right place.
So, then coming back to the question you asked with that context is we realized that the company was growth at all costs. Before I joined, the previous 18 months or two years was phenomenal. We’ve been hiring people all over North America, and so now that you have clarity of where you want to go, how do we make sure that we maintain the velocity by removing roadblocks for the crews. We identified that our smallest unit of impact is actually a crew, and one of the things we put in place was something we called an edge meeting because your ICs are the edge.
Tim Porter: How big are crews, roughly?
Bhrighu Sareen: Eight to 10 with a product manager, an engineering manager, a bunch of IC engineers, and a designer. So, the crew is your unit of work, and they’re the ones that get stuck because it could be cross-team dependency, it could be because the designer is working on some other project, they aren’t clear on the architecture, or they’ve taken a decision that three months later you got to rework. The product leadership team decided that every two weeks we’re going to meet every single crew. Every week we do crews one, two, let’s say 12, and then 13 to 24 will be next week.
We were spending about 15 hours a week, and initially, the teams were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is micromanagement. It’s a bad idea, or it’s a waste of our time.” And I said, “One second. Except for the product leadership team who’s going to be in all the meetings, for a crew, you’re only spending one hour every two weeks.” But what it allowed the crews to do, when you look back everyone’s like, “Oh, this was great.” The uber concept around that was enable every discipline to have a voice to raise any issue in an open and transparent manner that is predictable.
It isn’t because some PM and engineer had a meeting with our VP of engineering, and they took a decision, so the design team was like, “Hey, you left us out.” It wasn’t as if they were doing this out of bad intent. It was just because the speed at which we wanted to move, if you met someone, and you got on a Zoom call, you took a decision, you moved on. It wasn’t because I’m purposely leaving the engineer out, I’m leaving the PM out. So, whoever got to the decision makers, took a decision, got a roadblock moved, and they will move forward.
That edge meeting thing was initially hard for people to say if it was worth it, but now, when you look back, engineers bring in architecture documents. PMs bring in specs. We look at Figmas, and we’ve just been able to remove so many blocks.
Tim Porter: Making sure everyone has a voice, smaller teams where everyone can be heard, and then also the frequency increased. So, instead of every other week, how often do you have this now?
Bhrighu Sareen: No, it is still every two weeks.
Tim Porter: Okay, got it. They get much more out of those times together.
Bhrighu Sareen: Correct, but if they need additional time, they can always ask for it. But it’s predictable, as in everybody in the company knows, “Oh, this particular crew is going to have a review at this particular time.”
Tim Porter: That’s fantastic.
Bhrighu Sareen: Then one more thing that I did because you asked, “Hey, what are the structural things,” one other thing I did was cross-team dependencies, usually for companies, depending on the size, whether you’re mid-size or larger, even Big Tech, one crew can never ship an entire thing. They’re dependent on some infrastructure pieces, a cross-team, or UX, or whatever it might be. One interesting thing happened six months after we put this thing in place. A particular crew comes up and says, “Hey, we are unable to ship this.” We’re like, “Why is that the case?” “Oh, because we have a dependency on this other crew, and they’re unable to do it.”
So, we evolved the edge meeting to say any crew can summon any other crew, or any crew can join any other crew because it’s transparent. Everyone knows the schedule, which crew’s presenting when, and they can come in. It did a phenomenal thing. 90% of cross-team dependencies get resolved before they ever show up to the PLT. You have a crew. I have a crew. We’re PMs. Each of the crews are like, “Hey Tim, I really need you to show up to the product leadership team, our edge meeting. We want you in there because there’s dependency.” Tim’s like, “Oh.” You’re like, “Hey, hey, can we just resolve this right here?”
Tim Porter: Absolutely. Create an environment where teams can work it out amongst themselves and not have to bring everything up and bubble it up at a much faster pace. That’s fantastic. Maybe talk a little bit about how you’ve organized around offshore and a few centers of excellence. I know a big topic of conversation for lots of companies is back to office and being together, but then there’s also a need to be able to have engineering groups in other geographies for various reasons. I think you’ve done a nice job of finding a great way to do that. Maybe describe how you’ve done that.
Bhrighu Sareen: I started in September 2022, and if there are folks listening to this that are considering this move and you’ve always been like, “I was always in product and never in other kinds of roles,” if you’re thinking of joining or once you join, I would recommend sitting down with a CFO, VP of finance to understand how the numbers work. Chris Larson, our CFO was super gracious with his time, and after I started in September ’22, showed me the numbers. ’22 was this interesting year where, in the second half of ’22, things had started slowing down, and people weren’t sure what was going to happen to the economy. Are we going to enter a recession? Is it going to be soft landing? It could go any which way.
I look at the numbers, and I’m like, “Hmm, if our goal is to hit profitability, it doesn’t feel like we’re going to, this glide path isn’t moving in the right direction.” After getting educated, I realized we’ve got to make a few changes. One of the things we looked at was, we want access to a lot more talent, and can we do it, where can we do it, and how would it work out? The first thing we did was in November of ’22 with my direct reports, and through a connection at the Canadian Consulate in Seattle, we actually went up and met the government of British Columbia. From Seattle to Vancouver, it’s only a three, two and a half, three-hour, depending how fast you drive, Tim, two and a half drive or a three-hour train ride, and it’s super convenient. You could do a day trip if you needed to where you can meet the team, spend time.
We got a lot of good support from the government of BC, and we decided to open up an office in Vancouver, Canada. When we started, we said, “Hey, over a two-year period, we’ll put about 50 people in Canada in Vancouver.” Actually, in 18 months, we had already hit 50 people, and that provided us the ability to have our first distributed beyond remote. We were already doing remote before I joined Highspot, but it allowed us to have a center of excellence, access to a lot of talent, and allowed our engineers and leaders to see could we do a remote center and practice before we do something big.
Then after we saw that working, we decided to start a development center in India. Now, that was a lot of debate internally. A lot. You can imagine all the different reasons why we should not do it and maybe a couple of reasons why we should, but we moved forward. Again, this is about agility, speed, let’s try things out, and India offered Highspot access to an insane amount of talent. Over the last two and a half decades, talent in India has evolved. You could always get really good college hires. Over the last two and a half decades, so many companies have opened up offices there. What that has allowed us is middle management, and typically having the right managers will help you because they can coach, mentor, grow the early-in-career talent. That matters. Then senior leadership, there’s actually a decent population of team leadership who could run your development center in India.
Tim Porter: That’s been key for you. You have a great leader on the ground.
Bhrighu Sareen: Gurpreet.
Tim Porter: He’s been an awesome partner in making this work and growing it.
Bhrighu Sareen: That brings me to the other point I was going to make, which is the Indian population outside of India who have lived here, who have worked for these companies, a lot of them are actually moving back. Gurpreet actually spent, I think, 30-plus years in the United States, and then for family reasons, he wanted to move back. So, he moves back, and all of that knowledge on how to work with an American company, how to work cross-geo, how to work cross-time zone, how to actually have conversations with customers because when you’re building product, end-to-end ownership, there will be moments when they’re going to talk to your customers, and you want to feel comfortable that they can handle that situation.
Gurpreet is a great example of having a leader who can take an office of zero, and real stats, July of ’23 is when he signed his employment offer. Fast forward to September of ’23, we had four employees, Gurpreet, two engineers, and a designer. Fast forward right now, we have 125 people there and lots of open positions.
Tim Porter: Fantastic. We’ve been talking about things that have gone well, and coming to an earlier-stage company from a big company, I’m sure it’s not always that way. There’ve been challenges. We’ve managed through them really well. Just for the listeners, what was a surprise? You had a good sense with this team and everything, but there’s still surprises. Was there something that was a surprise that like, “Hey, this was a big transition to go from the big company, lots of resources to something smaller,” and how did you deal with that?
Bhrighu Sareen: I think if I were to prioritize all the challenges, I think the number one was how drastically the economy changed.
Tim Porter:
Yeah, there was a big externality that came about that wasn’t really expected to the extent that it hit.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly. I’m changing jobs, changing scale, changing employer, changing manager, changing technology, changing all these different dimensions, and then the last thing you expect is we tried coming from the middle of nowhere you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, what’s going to happen now?” But if you ask me how do you think about it, I actually look at it from another perspective, which is like I said earlier, my number one goal was learning a number of different dimensions. Guess what? That learning just got accelerated, and when you come out the other end, you’re going to be, “Huh, I did all of the things I was trying to go learn but then did it in an environment that might not show up.”
It gets cyclical, so it will show up at some point, but maybe not for another five years, four years, 10 years. Who knows what the exact timeline is? But that, I think, was the biggest challenge. You’re on our board, so those board meetings were interesting where, okay, burn. Your burn rate is crazy, but hey, can we just raise money like we have been every single round previously before. Somehow money dries up. The goals that the market is expecting you to hit change, and the company had never done layoffs before. Brutal. I think it’s just super hard.
Tim Porter: It was a hard period. The biggest thing is that a company like Highspot that had been growing meteorically in a large part as existing accounts were just hiring lots more go-to-market people, seat-based, and so the renewal rates just kept going up and up and up, and all of a sudden, all our customers budgets didn’t just get frozen, they got slashed.
Bhrighu Sareen: Correct.
Tim Porter: But we managed to keep innovating through that, find more things that give them an add-value while also getting efficient ourselves through some of the things we’ve been talking about.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly. So, the second thing I’d say on that topic, the previous question you asked, which was you touched on a really good point because we’ve all heard stories that x amount of companies during the dot-com bust actually decided not to do product innovation and just ride it, or through the financial crisis, not do product innovation and just ride through it and save money and conserve cash. But thanks to the folks on the board and the leadership team, we decided to just say, “No, we’re going to make this transition,” and now we’re seeing the fruits of that investment decision actually start paying off.
Tim Porter: That’s perfect. Let’s talk about that. Highspot’s always been an ML-based company. I think of the very early days, and how do you find all the sales content. Well, if you get the right signals and you put those into an ML system, you can find the right things more effectively, but it wasn’t AI in the way it is now. Talk about some of those. Give some examples. What are the things that you’re shipping? How do you use AI today? We can dig into that a little bit. Every company’s becoming an AI company, but Highspot is really there and has it in production with customers.
Bhrighu Sareen: You’re absolutely right. There’s patents with our co-founder’s names on it and other folks on there around ML technology and things of that. One of the interesting things, because also the stage we’re in right now, there’s the hype cycle where the trough of disillusionment, I think, is where we are right now. A number of our customers asked us, saying, “Hey, is any of this thing real, or is it all just hype?” What I had to land with them is if you’re Big Tech and you’re trying to reason over the significant amount of data you have for an individual, it could be across their emails and meetings and calendar and everything else, there’s three dimensions. It’s like how much compute do you want to put against it, or what’s the latency because if you give the large language models or your algorithm enough time, it will actually give you the right answer, or three is the cost. How many dollars do you want to throw at this problem, or every time there’s a query that’s sent?
I was talking to some of our customers saying in relation to that, the amount of data Highspot has to reason over for a particular individual or across an entire domain or entire customer is tiny. It’s super tiny in comparison to what the technology allows us to do today. It’s tiny. Two, there’s a number of dimensions that we could put together offline, so process it once a night, so the latency part gets taken care of, and there are real scenarios with real value.
As an example, most companies do a sales kickoff once a year. You bring your sales people together, you have a conversation, and you share the new products you’re launching. In some cases, they’ll ask them to do a golden pitch deck, which is marketing’s created the pitch deck. Let’s say we’re colleagues sitting around a table at the sales kickoff or you’re my manager. What I’ll do is I will read up, learn about it, and then I’m going to pitch it to you. You’ve got a rubric. You will score me on those things, and then I’ll do the same back for you. That’s expensive because you have to take people offline out of their day jobs, go get them to do this, or you have sales people record it, then the managers have to take time out and score.
A lot of managed sales managers are like, “I need to hit quota this month. I don’t have time for this.” So, we built a feature as part of our training and coaching product where the person creating the learning and development, the training has the training, has a rubric, verbal and nonverbal skills that they’re looking for for the salesperson to be successful, and saying the right words or how the pitch should come out. A fintech company used this and sent it around and got 800 responses back. Then the manager gets to see the video recording, the rubric. The AI uses the rubric that was provided to grade all 800 of these.
What we saw was in 55% of the cases, the manager left the AI-graded feedback as is. In another whatever 91% minus 55 is, in those cases, they either added or deleted one sentence, and only 9% of cases did managers actually delete what AI recommended as feedback and rewrite it.
Tim Porter: Wow.
Bhrighu Sareen: This financial services company, not fintech, huge financial service company, super impressed, and they’re actually now rolling it out. There’s a few hundred people, 800 or so that had access to it. Now, they’re talking about thousands of licenses for this one feature because the value and the time they’re getting back is significant.
The focus on features that will save salespeople, marketing people, support services, learning and development people that are creating it time and showing the right ROI. I can go on feature after feature after feature that’s been resonating.
Tim Porter: That’s awesome. This is this AI, real-time coaching in that the AI is really working both, and the feedback is accurate in that the manager doesn’t have to rewrite it. Then you see the impact with the end users.
There are a bunch of features. You talk about the Highspot AI Copilot. There’s the ways you do score carding. There’s ways you do content summarization, auto document generation. I think people are interested that maybe don’t know Highspot. Yes, they can go read the website, but maybe just rattle off a couple of these other new features in how you use AI for customers.
Bhrighu Sareen: Yeah, perfect. One other one that I’ll talk about is a lot of organizations have a system of record for their CRM, like for the customers. They have a system of record for, let’s say, that’s the ERP, but today, they don’t have a system of record for their go-to-market initiatives. It’s super interesting because you have so many different disciplines that have come together to actually take an initiative.
One of the initiatives as an example, and I’ll use that to just outline the capabilities we’re talking about, which is in during 2022, 2023, the CFO or the VP of finance inserted themselves in the buying process. We saw more and more sales cycles were getting elongated, and it wasn’t just procurement being able to, once the solution owner says, “I want to buy this particular product,” the procurement does the paperwork and is able to negotiate and get the deal done, but finance was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We need to make sure this spend is happening. Is it correct? Is it worth it?”
There were initiatives that a lot of our customers wanted to roll out, which were: how do we train our salespeople to talk to the finance people? They do it with all our training. Now, if one of your initiatives was to increase expansion on product line ABC, there are so many pieces that have to come together for that to be successful. One is what content will get used, and is it being used? Is it created? Is it effective? How do we provide training? For example, one of the training could be financials, like how to talk to people in finance, and then product training on whatever the product line it is that you’re talking about. What’s the right sales play to use? Here’s a digital room. All these are capabilities that Highspot has, but you include it in your initiative.
Then, you want the ability to say, “Okay, all this training that I’m providing, the keywords I want to use, are they being used?” So, how do you check that? The really cool thing is today, a lot of meetings are getting recorded, and so Highspot’s conversational intelligence capabilities, again using AI and other aspects is not only able to draw out who said what, but then understand the intent behind that, so now you can have a single scorecard, a system of record for here’s all the initiatives that we care about. Here’s the cohorts because it could be a mid-market initiative, it could be an enterprise targeting enterprise customers or mid-market customers or commercial customers.
Then, in a single view, if you can have a conversation with your CRO and say, “All right, this is the content being used. Here’s how it’s being used.” Your CMO can look at how it’s performing and decide if they need to make changes. You can see the impact of all the training in real time and look at your salespeople. Are they saying the right thing? How are customers responding back to it? Again, it shows up in your initiative, and you can look at individuals, like I said in the case of the other previous example, where you can see, hey, this rep, for example, on these 12 metrics, on eight of them, you’re doing really well, nine of them you’re doing well, but on these three of them you could actually do a little better.
Highspot is that one unified platform that you go from content to guidance to understanding what’s happening with the salespeople, what skills and competencies they need to get better and then recommend the training because a lot of platforms out there today can tell you, “Hey, this meeting went well. Here’s the agenda. Here’s the topics that we discussed. Here’s aspects of the intelligence around the meeting.” That aspect is now a commodity. But when you have to take action on that, “Oh, they could have used the meetings over now. Send a digital room with this aspect. Highspot can do that. You want to take another action around, here’s a set of skills that you could do better in. Highspot can do that. Now, recommend a training based on the skills they need to improve in. Highspot can do that.
You want to now be able to follow a sales play because we’ve combined data with CRM to then say, “Okay, this is a pre-sales opportunity in the financial services business. Marketing has created this template. Let’s automatically generate a document, the presentation that will go for this particular thing, and bring in pricing if you choose to do that.”
Tim Porter: It’s so cool and illustrative that it’s such an integrative story from purely the customer’s perspective who doesn’t necessarily care about technology. They want outcomes. I see this across so many of the companies, even the very early startups, all this time and effort on we’re going to do this initiative, we’re going to do this campaign, we’re going to launch this thing, and so we have to get everybody ready. We have to train them. Then, at the end, or as it’s going, you see results like is revenue going up or down, and you can see individual reps are hitting quota or they’re not. But the why within that is so hard to tease apart.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly.
Tim Porter: So, you can go from all the way from the how do we train folks to what were the actions to what ultimately is working, and that way drive more revenue, more efficiency, the two golden things. Every company is like, “How do we get more revenue? How do we get it more efficiently?” So, not only is it an integrative experience for the customer, but you’re using AI in so many different ways.
Bhrighu Sareen: Exactly.
Tim Porter: Call recording and insights, automatically generating content, analyzing it, so that’s pretty neat, too.
Bhrighu Sareen: Recommending content.
Tim Porter: Recommending content.
Bhrighu Sareen: A lot of different aspects.
Tim Porter: Putting it together. What does that mean? We invest in new startups. There’s lots of innovation happening in AI, and one of the exciting things about it is you can build things really fast that have an impact. There’s a lot in your space. There’s a lot of cool things happening around the AI SDR or all the different pieces across sales even. How are you thinking about all of those startups and the opportunity for them to innovate versus what Highspot’s doing?
Bhrighu Sareen: Tim, I’m going to go back to something you said to me in ’22.
Tim Porter: Uh-oh.
Bhrighu Sareen: It was something interesting you said that there was a realization in the startup world that a lot of companies that got funding prior to ’22, it was a feature, but it could grow up to become a standalone company. I don’t remember your exact words, but my takeaway was that there was a number of startups that could have very, very good outcomes, but as opposed to being standalone, their outcome will be as a capability as part of a bigger product, something like that.
Tim Porter: Yep.
Bhrighu Sareen: That stuck with me because when I look at a startup, especially early stage, if you have a great idea, that’s awesome. Keep going, but know when it is time to be part of a bigger thing. You think it’s a really cool idea, it’s growing well, you’ve found product market fit. Either you have to start expanding into verticals or areas or product spaces that are adjacent, or you have to figure out when’s the right time to say, “Okay, I got to just be part of a bigger product.”
Tim Porter: It also, to connect back to something you referenced earlier, it often comes back to data too, doesn’t it?
Bhrighu Sareen: Oh, yeah.
Tim Porter: Access to data.
Bhrighu Sareen: Yeah, that’s another good point. Super good point, yes.
Tim Porter: You mentioned the big Co’s, like your former employer, they just have so much data across everything.
Bhrighu Sareen: Insane.
Tim Porter: Yes, it’s almost always better to have more data than less data, but it also creates challenges around, it’s just super expensive to process all of that. Then you have new companies — where it’s like, do you have enough of a data set? In your case, you said you don’t have that big of data relative to someone like Microsoft, but yet, I’m thinking through some of our biggest customers, some of the biggest technology companies, the biggest logistics companies, financial services companies, medical device companies, you have their whole corpus of sales, marketing, content docs, decks, white papers, et cetera. Is there something about having the right amount of data for these feeds? Say more about that.
Bhrighu Sareen: You’re absolutely right. People always say, “Hey, get all the data. Get all the data. Get all the data,” but you’ve got to figure out the right sweet spot for the scenario you’re trying to deliver. I think that’s something we’ve been very disciplined about internally is getting the data, cleaning the data, attaching it, and getting the right insights around the data. Then I think just as important, switching tracks as I agree with the point you made, is the user experience. I think as startups you have to decide, “I want to be the single pane of glass where everybody shows up.” But guess what? I think Teams, Slack, Zoom, Outlook, and Gmail are the horizontal applications where regardless of whether you’re a sales, marketing, finance, procurement, engineer, PM, or designer, you’re going to spend your time. That’s where you’re spending your time. Those are the tools you’re spending your time in.
Then you have role-specific. If you’re a designer, it could be Figma. It could be Adobe. If you’re a finance person, you have your own application. If you’re a salesperson, it’s CRM. So, there’s a set of horizontal applications that people spend their time in. The UX part, I think, is another aspect which a lot of companies need to make a decision is are you going to say that your data and your insights or the AI experiences that you’ve generated should only stay in your own and operated properties, or is it okay to show up inside Zoom, Slack, Teams, Outlook, Gmail where users are today?
Then there’s another question you’ve got to ask yourself is the new user experiences around these agents and co-pilots, do you surface your data, your insights there or not? Then, once you figure out the data, insights, user experience, once you figure out that stack, what do you do about the business model? Let’s say I’m a customer, and you’re here to sell me. And I said, “Hey, I’ve built my own internal copilot, like that’s our company-wide thing. I love this insight around content recommendation,” That’s a great example, “and our salesperson is sending out an email. Our co-pilot sits inside our email platform whether it’s Outlook or Gmail, and we want you to plug into that. So, we don’t really need to buy this other whole thing because we’re not using the product. We’re not using the scenario inside your product. We just want API access, so we’ll just pay for a data transfer fee, and that’s good enough.”
But you’re like, “Wait a second. I ran all the analysis, and I’m delivering you an insight. I’m not just delivering you something over an API for access to data.” These are interesting conversations that we’re going to have to have.
Tim Porter: Let’s put our future hats on here. So much continues to happen in this space with AI. Agents are a big topic of conversation. Salesforce is certainly talking about those a lot and lots of new startups. If you think a year or two ahead, maybe pick a year ahead, what are some of the things in AI you’re most excited about that Highspot will maybe be going to in that timeframe?
Bhrighu Sareen: Last year, you would’ve asked this question — you would not have used the word agent. You would’ve used the word co-pilot if we had recorded it. This year, you’re calling it agent. Two years from now, I have no idea what is going to get called, but the one thing that I am confident about is that month over month just because the speed of innovation is amazing. It’s such an amazing time to be in tech. I think every decade we say this is an amazing time to be in tech.
Tim Porter: It keeps being right.
Bhrighu Sareen: Yeah. It continues to be an amazing time to be in tech because every month, it doesn’t matter what you’re working with, whether it’s a big company or a small company or a medium-sized company or you’re thinking of starting something new, if you ask yourself, and we ask ourselves this thing is, how do we take advantage of the technology that we have access to provide value to that task in a day, to that user. So, regardless of what it’s called, if we focus on that and our list of capabilities where we can have measurable return back to our customers and delight, I think that’s the two things.
A lot of times it’s like, “Oh, the ROI is huge or not, but can you also have delight?” A lot of companies focus on ROI. Very few focus on the delight, and we have this unique opportunity where I have a 200-slide deck, which is actually a library that I have to then customize before I go present. I’m a salesperson before I present to the customer, and then they would spend, I don’t know, an hour, two hours to do that, putting in the right logo. The logo is not the right size. Making it smaller, making it bigger, all kinds of things. The delight of being able to complete that by answering four questions and getting it done in six minutes — mind blowing. The look on the reps’ faces is priceless.
So, Tim, I’m not sure what we’re going to call it, but I would say focusing on return and delighting the customers. I think that will be.
Tim Porter: What I hear you saying is there’s going to be ongoing radical productivity gains and being able to do tasks so much faster, maybe more accurately. Just so you’re not the only one putting yourself out there, I think there is a huge thing to this agent notion, and yes, it’s a newer naming, but where people will be able to interact with Highspot through natural language, through voice, and the system will complete tasks for them. So, to your point about reducing steps, et cetera, it might be the same outcomes, but getting there faster and the system does more of it autonomously, my guess is we’ll be talking about that in your user conference in the year or two to come.
Well, Bhrighu, thank you so much. Thanks for all you’re doing at Highspot. Thanks for this great advice on innovating in AI and thinking about making the jump from a big company to an earlier-stage company and super excited to see what we’re going to go build in years to come.
Bhrighu Sareen: Perfect. Thank you very much.
Tim Porter: Thanks so much for being here.
Bhrighu Sareen: Tim, thank you for having me. Thank you very much.
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